How the Myth of the Self Endures

Reply to frank Quoting frank

The Self is just a ghost in the hive mind of society until it appears out of the fog of history in a cloak of righteousness, defying a world that's become evil.

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self. In their place we can substitute the perspectival consistency of a point of view. Point of view is itself a multiplicity of selves that are produced within the collective called a person. The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective.

Quoting frank

To the extent that these images become naturalized in the collective psyche, the Self endures, and will endure any assault on it.

:up:

"In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from being false that he is willing to preserve them at all costs.

Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust. To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing. Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well.

But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice—even though he says nothing but "no"—he begins to desire and to judge. The rebel, in the etymological sense, does a complete turnabout. He acted under the lash of his master's whip. Suddenly he turns and faces him. He opposes what is preferable to what is not. Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value. Or is it really a question of values?

Camus "The Rebel".

I think it really is a question of values. Values form the self and if the values of the self just are the values of the self's environment, the self is effaced.

Reply to Baden
Wow! That quote says it all!

Quoting Joshs

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self. In their place we can substitute the perspectival consistency of a point of view. Point of view is itself a multiplicity of selves that are produced within the collective called a person. The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective.

I'm not sure what this means. A point of view without a viewer makes no sense.

Quoting frank

The Self is just a ghost in the hive mind of society until it appears out of the fog of history in a cloak of righteousness, defying a world that's become evil.

:up:

The self only is to the degree that it opposes the Anyone. Some member of the chorus has to step forward and become the doomed hero.

Quoting frank

She claims the right to ignore the rules of her society for the sake of a higher law. Nothing creates a more stark outline around the individual as the role of the reformer, the abolitionist, the revolutionary. Society calls them criminals. History calls them heroes.

:up:

I think (?) this is deeply Hegelian. Time 'is' this endless emergence of new norms through which old norms are evaluated, challenged, and modified.

And what of those who didn't get their higher law taken seriously ? They are like failed artist who could not forge a conscience for their people.

Quoting frank

The Self is Moses, leading his people out of evil Egypt. It's Martin Luther, breaking away from the mother church. It's Marx: the social critic. To the extent that these images become naturalized in the collective psyche, the Self endures, and will endure any assault on it.

We can also contemplate how conspicuous deviation offers a high potential payoff, balancing the risk. We can consider both the advantage for genes and memes. Increased conformity might increase this potential payoff. The balance of males and females comes to mind.

Reply to frank Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being, a unique identity in the movements and eyes and responses and 'personality' that soon merges: if this were true, the self would be no myth, at least, not to others. 'Why is he acting that way?' 'He's just being himself.'

Quoting Joshs

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self.

This autonomous self is the essence of the humanism and enlightenment. The self is identical, singular, possesses a voice unified by consistency norms. To drop this is to drop rationality itself, to go mad.

Quoting Joshs

The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective.

I agree with complex internals, but the self is a singular avatar, the central social convention. Think of an organism in the real world that needs a coherent strategy which does not sabotage itself. It needs a plan that works, with pieces that work together.

Quoting plaque flag

The self only is to the degree that it opposes the Anyone.

I am what's left when you subtract out the Other, yes.

Quoting plaque flag

Some member of the chorus has to step forward and become the doomed hero.

Right. Antigone hangs herself. The point is that this devotion to the higher good (higher than society's understanding, anyway) is worth dying for.

The Self appears along with such fierce devotion to the Good that the Self can be sacrificed for it.

Quoting mcdoodle

Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being, a unique identity in the movements and eyes and responses and 'personality' that soon merges: if this were true, the self would be no myth, at least, not to others. 'Why is he acting that way?' 'He's just being himself.'

That's a good mother who realizes the baby isn't part of her. She's willing to let it be free. That's healthy. :up:

Nothing makes sense without the self really.

Who is experiencing pain? Who is hearing a tune? Who is having a memory?

Even if you think the self is just the brain. The brain has the necessary unity for a self identity and receives input from one individuals sensory organs and perceptual mechanisms.

The self is the ground of experience, but it has no objective reality.

Buddhist philosophy is well known for denying the reality of self, which is the principle of anatta (literally, 'no-self'). But if you drill down on it, the Buddha doesn't deny that the self exists - when asked whether it exists, he declines to answer, later explaining that both the positive and negative responses to the question are misleading. Beyond that, wondering about the self - who am I, where did I come from, what will happen to me, and so on - are discouraged as forms of self-seeking or egocentrism.

Quoting frank

I am what's left when you subtract out the Other, yes.

:up:

You, sir, are the icing on the cake.

Quoting Wayfarer

The self is the ground of experience, but it has no objective reality.

There's a case to be made for that kind of self (pure witness, the thereness of what's there), but I don't think it's the revolutionary/heroic self discussed in the OP.

Quoting Wayfarer

Beyond that, wondering about the self - who am I, where did I come from, what will happen to me, and so on - are discouraged as forms of self-seeking or egocentrism.

To this I must object, for how did the clever blokes figure out they were illusions in the first place if they weren't so curious about themselves ?

Quoting frank

Antigone hangs herself. The point is that this devotion to the higher good (higher than society's understanding, anyway) is worth dying for.

The Self appears along with such fierce devotion to the Good that the Self can be sacrificed for it.

Yes. You are touching on 'the' issue maybe. As you probably know, Hegel obsessed over Antigone. His master/slave relationship foregrounds a willingness to die to prove one's transcendence of the given.


***
The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life. ... And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment — that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phba.htm

Quoting plaque flag

To this I must object, for how did the clever blokes figure out they were illusions in the first place if they weren't so curious about themselves ?

I read somewhere that the idea of the illusory self was designed as a coping strategy for societies where the individual had little control.

And that seems to still apply today because people who are in touch with themselves are skeptical of society and more likely to protest.

I distrust the motive for claiming the self is illusory.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I read somewhere that the idea of the illusory self was designed as a coping strategy for societies where the individual had little control.

This is a deep issue. Kojeve talks about stoics and skeptics focusing on what they could control, digging little bunkers in themselves. The world could go to hell. They were fine. This maximizes interiority. It can also look escapist.

Then denying the self is removing the thing that can be harmed altogether. Personally I can very much relate to the self melting into 'spirit' or science or philosophy. I can forget myself in my work. I can put the best part of me in the symbolic realm. I can realize that 'my' best thoughts were just stuff I found in books --- and that they are the best thoughts of pretty much anyone.

So it's a messy issue, right ?

Reply to frank You seem to be painting a picture of an individual conscience that compels one to stand up against oppressors, even at great personal risk. This seems to consist in an overriding sense of personal sovereignty, and a refusal to accept transgressions against it. The self stands up for itself and in doing so sees itself as standing up for oppressed others as well.

The dynamic is the same regardless of whether the oppression is real or imagined. just or unjust. Is this the self as "myth", though or rather the self as sense, that is an expression of a sense of self, a sense, however distinct it might be of boundaries, of lines which shall not be crossed? The idea of a myth of self seems more apt in the context of belief in a soul. Animals too will, if they can rise up against their oppressors because they also have a sense of self and of self-preservation.

You speak of the myth of the self being perpetuated by the canonization of heroic rebels, but I think this is more thought of as the myth of the hero, because as I said such heroes (if they really are heroes as opposed to disaffected troublemakers) do not stand up just for themselves, but for others, and symbolically, for the whole of humanity.

I think the story of self (I'm using another term now because the term 'myth' may carry pejorative associations these days) begins with consciousness; consciousness makes things stand out and divides the world up into parts and wholes, entities and identities, all of which becomes all the more binary, self-reflexive and seemingly rigid with the advent of language.

On a very simple view the self of a person is just the character of that person, each one being unique, But again it is like the leaves of any particular species of tree, each one is different from all the others and yet the same. Pattern and individuation.

Reply to plaque flag It seems you have to address someone's self in order to get them to reassess the issue of self otherwise who is being addressed? So we seem to be talking about degrees of self.

It does seem that too much or to little focus on the self could be harmful.

I don't mind my own company so I can be fine on my own in the middle of nowhere and not feel lonely. I don't see the chronic need for other people as desirable. But then I have had bad experiences with other people from childhood and am on the autism spectrum.

Dysfunctional relationships, neurodiversity and dysfunctional societies are all going to have some input into our self analysis I suppose.

I can't imagine being anyone else so we may all be fundamentally different.

I raised this issue in my last thread about how can we compare mental states and what are we referring to.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I distrust the motive for claiming the self is illusory.

The idea that the self is illusory is itself illusory, or at least elusive, ambiguous. The claim that it is illusory seems to stem from the fact that precisely what the self is cannot be determined. This is as much so when it comes to the imagined identities of objects as it is with the imagined identity of the self.

Add to that the fact that the self cannot be imagined as any kind of object of the senses other than the body. And yet we don't think of ourselves as "being bodies" but rather as "having bodies". This is sometimes referred to as a "cartesian error" or the myth of the "ghost in the machine", but I would say it is deeper than that and is bound up with the ineradicable dualism of language itself. The machine is as much a myth as the ghost is. (Or perhaps I should have written "story" instead of "myth" since it is not so much that such perspectives are wrong as that they are limited).

Quoting frank

The Self is Moses, leading his people out of evil Egypt. It's Martin Luther, breaking away from the mother church. It's Marx: the social critic. To the extent that these images become naturalized in the collective psyche, the Self endures, and will endure any assault on it.

All this high sounding stuff is baloney. The self is regular old everyday reality. Real as a lug nut. We all have one. Health people feel at home with it. I recognize and sympathize with the idea that the self is an illusion, but only in the sense that everything is an illusion. Maybe the difference is that the self is the first illusion. The one that makes all the rest possible.

Quoting mcdoodle

Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being, a unique identity in the movements and eyes and responses and 'personality' that soon merges: if this were true, the self would be no myth, at least, not to others. 'Why is he acting that way?' 'He's just being himself.'

I like the way you've put this.

I think the idea of "looking" for the self (Which is what Hume did) is a mistake.

Because we can't see everything. Life is not just a visual experience. The world does not seem to disappear when you close your eyes. You "feel" pain and "hear" music have ideas and "understand" the meaning of words.

The issue of qualia seems arise from the idea that everything has to be described as physical objects.Spatial dimensions seem inappropriate for things like thoughts, dreams, sounds, colours and word meaning.

It do not know to what extent we can liberate ourselves from how we experience the world or if new language and perspectives could change how we experience things.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

It seems you have to address someone's self in order to get them to reassess the issue of self otherwise who is being addressed?

Yes. This is the normative, discursive self. The one that is ashamed or gets a trophy. This self identifies with this or that virtue or hero myth. So one appeals to such a self in terms of its current investments. What is takes for sacred is also a handle on this self. So Stirner tries to have no identity, nothing for an opponent to grab onto (an outermost skepticism).

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I can't imagine being anyone else so we may all be fundamentally different.

Yes, but we can still talk. We are still 'in' the same language.

Reply to plaque flag And I can talk to myself via my thoughts.

I don't think talking to people proves that they have minds like some kind of Turing test. But I find that my language relates to my experiences.

So pain refers to my experience of pain sensations and self refers to my unique personal identity and when other people use the same language I assume by analogy that they have experiences and minds that are similar.

I have never been in a situation where I have felt I have lost my sense of self and become more at one with others or just without self.
I have been in a few situations where verbal interactions with others have made me feel weakened because their language was tailored to control my self identity and self worth or projected something on me.

This is all a bit vague though. We have sophisticated interactions with others on which copious amounts has been written, to try and analyse them from psychoanalysis to social psychology. We may even be described as always working on our self and self perception. Running from our self, finding our self, losing our self and so on

But one thing I believe is we should be true to our self not led by others. Not to feel pushed and pulled but with some kind of self contained integrity.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

We may even be described as always working on our self and self perception. Running from our self, finding our self, losing our self and so on

But one thing I believe is we should be true to our self not led by others. Not to feel pushed and pulled but with some kind of self contained integrity.

:up:

We need stability. We cling to terror management strategies, orienting myths. To me we get this 'software' from the culture, picking and choosing what fits our life, sometimes even inventing stuff that others can copy and use.

.Quoting Andrew4Handel

The brain has the necessary unity for a self identity and receives input from one individuals sensory organs and perceptual mechanisms.

I think the unity is software rather than hardware. We learn to take responsibility for our bodies. We learn to talk about what we see and what we think. Before long we think that nothing is more real than this convention. This isn't crazy, though, for it's the normative self that makes a case. So Descartes was right but not complete or careful. Perhaps thoughts have extension. 'Of course' thoughts have extension, are material in some sense.

Every skull wears an acquired face and calls it "self". I suspect that language – word-fetishizing – is why "the myth of self endures".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model

Quoting 180 Proof

Every skull wears an acquired face and calls it "self". I suspect that language – word-fetishizing – is why "the myth of self endures".

Granted that it's an invention, does it persist because it accomplishes something ? What is it to be a discursive self, the kind Descartes took for granted? Why did Descartes take it as obvious that his voice was unified ? Why not we think therefore we are ? Brandom is good on this.
***
Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them.
...
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.
***

Quoting plaque flag

Granted that it's an invention, does it persist because it accomplishes something ?

"It persists", it seems to me, because "self" might be a kind of cognitive (memory) bias related to emotion-enabled scenario-planning and judgmemt (Damasio).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

update:
Quoting apokrisis

Brains model worlds. In order to construct an “objective” view - an Umwelt - the organism must successfully “other” itself as the “subjective” part of that viewing.

[ .... ]

A classic example from ecological perception is landing a plane on a runway. The pilot fixes on a landing spot and just maintains a steady optic flow. So a sense of self emerges from the process of becoming the still centre of a world in smooth predictable motion. You and your target are one. Two halves of the psychological equation. The wider world is likewise reduced to a continuous flow. The brain is modelling reality in a cleanly divided fashion which is not a model of the world, but a model of us in the world as the world’s still and purposeful centre, with the world then passing by in a smooth and predictable manner.

:fire: :100:

Reply to 180 Proof
I like the marker hypothesis. It seems to model a 'deep' subrational self. Great quote from apo too. The brain as hardware, with the help of cultural software, models the relationship of an avatar and its world. Memes on top of genes that were built to host them ?

Quoting plaque flag

Memes on top of genes that were built to host them ?

So the 'biosemiotic story' goes ...

Quoting 180 Proof

So the 'biosemiotic story' goes ...

What do you think ? And do you have a view on Dennett's later work ( From Bacteria to Bach... )

Reply to plaque flag I'm not persuaded that 'memetics' explains much. And Dennett's later work seems to mostly be earlier work rehashed / reformulated. I've barely skimmed his last few books.

Quoting 180 Proof

I'm not persuaded that 'memetics' explains much.

It does seem vague.Yet language is our killer app. So perhaps it's a matter of finding the right grip. Timebinding looks central to me, and it's not just infrastructure. It's knowhow compacted into symbols, an extension of our nervous system, Popper's World 3 or something.

Quoting plaque flag

Yet language is our killer app.

Sure.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/799982
However, memetics ain't language any more than shapes are clouds or events are time.

Reply to 180 Proof

Right. So what I mean is finding the right grip on our language. We 'are' language in the sense that we often take our 'host' for granted. Philosophers and scientists are machine elves working on the blockchain, stacking insight cubes in the noosphere. It's all 'material,' just to be clear. There's not mind but minding. Brain's the legs, mind's the dancing. A dance is not unphysical because time is involved.

That might be what confuses people, an insistence on something frozen. God is frozen, unmoved, can't have the bastard wiggling.

Quoting T Clark

I recognize and sympathize with the idea that the self is an illusion, but only in the sense that everything is an illusion.

Okey dokey.

Quoting frank

I am what's left when you subtract out the Other, yes.

Indeed!

Quoting 180 Proof

However, memetics ain't language any more than shapes are clouds or events are time.

Indeed.

I am not sure what people are saying doesn't exist.

Reply to plaque flag You seem to saying language is necessary for somethings existence.

I didn't start thinking about consciousness until my twenties. And I don't remember anyone using the term or discussing it with me before then.

But I was clearly conscious before then. A word makes sense to me when it matches or describes my experiences. As someone who left religion which saturated my childhood I have experience of rejecting ideas that don't make sense or have no evidence.

I am not sure what you are referring to by software and hardware. There are lots of continuous things in our life to reinforce our identity. But what ties them together is memory. Memory seems to play a role in self and is part of the reason we can attribute an array of events and sensations to ourselves.

But other people can also witness we are the same person through time. Like you can differentiate your cat from the neighbours.

I can tell myself or someone else that the self is a myth but the myth may be that the self is a myth.

Who or what is it tells me this and who or what is it being told to when I hear and think about this? Is "I" and "me" and "myself" something other than my self?

If the self is a myth then what remains when the myth of the self is rejected?

Quoting Andrew4Handel

You seem to saying language is necessary for somethings existence.

I don't see how you are getting that. Perhaps you can quote and I will explain.

Reply to plaque flag Quoting plaque flag

Before long we think that nothing is more real than this convention

I thought you were saying we bring something into existence (or you might say reify it) with language.

I was also referring to comments like this:

Quoting plaque flag

I agree. I think I was not right to call it a metaphor. I like the idea that language discloses or unveils phenomena. Adorno did that.

I may have been conflating you with this:

Quoting 180 Proof

I suspect that language – word-fetishizing – is why "the myth of self endures".

I am not sure what your theory of language is but I don't think we can talk about things that don't exist.

So for example I don't think we could talk about gods if they don't have characteristics of things that exist to attach the definition to. I think experience is so rich we can make robust concepts from experience.

I suppose my theory of language is that is must start by referring to things before we can abstract to concepts. It is hard to describe mental entities but we can use analogy and metaphor I suppose. Or we can assume mentalistic terms are being used in a similar way by most people.

This was my issue in a previous thread about the subjective. We can't actually compare what we are referring to with subjective mentalistic terms. So we may just be stuck in our inner world in one sense immune to other peoples skepticism about our mental states..

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I thought you were saying we bring something into existence (or you might say reify it) with language.

Thanks ! What I meant was that the self (not the body) is a learned performance, a piece of training, something like software that runs on the body's hardware. Descartes takes this discursive self for granted as the thing that just cannot be doubted. He took the unity of his voice for granted. He took semantic and inferential norms (a public self-transcending language) for granted. If you look at my 'normative crowbar' thread, I talk about how a philosopher, as a philosopher, always assumes a social world, because philosophy is always directed beyond the self. Philosophy moralizes. It says : Thou ought.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I suppose my theory of language is that is must start by referring to things before we can abstract to concepts.

I also think it starts pretty simple, maybe with worldly objects, but then we can make lots of metaphors which drift into literal concepts as we use them enough.

Quoting plaque flag

I also think it starts pretty simple, maybe with worldly objects, but then we can make lots of metaphors which drift into literal concepts as we use them enough.

Can you give examples?

My idea of reification is when things like moral and social terms and norms get treated as law like or given.

When they are just possibly inventions to justify actions and societal trends and I would apply this to ideas like "It is wrong to kill" which either I think states a preference or does not refer to a natural law.

So I am nihilistic about those kind of meanings but I think words do tend to refer to things. I people need to agree on what the self is referring to in these kind of discussions.

Who has the power to have the final say in what words mean or refer to? We could become nihilistic and see no foundation for meaning or solipsistic and resort to the individual as final arbiter of meaning.

It seems to me that generations of humans have dealt with being a self. It has been framed in different ways, but I am pretty sure we all are in the same pool, treading water. The recognition of isolation is interwoven with different ideas about connection.

The situation is not self-explanatory. Very different kinds of investigation, philosophical and psychological, have and are being pursued.

The tiny boat is not close to any shore.

It does not seem to me that having a No Self doctrine makes for better people or a better society. I use Japan in World War Two as an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_at_War

"The book meticulously documents Zen Buddhism's support of Japanese militarism from the time of the Meiji Restoration through the World War II and the post-War period"

"Hakugen points to twelve characteristics of Japanese Zen which have contributed to its support for Japanese militarism:[6]

4. Emphasis on ??nyat? and selflessness, "leaving no room for the independence of the individual".[8]

7. The belief in mutual dependency, which "led in modern Japan to an organic view of the state coupled with a feeling of intimacy towards it"

Almost all Japanese Buddhists temples strongly supported Japan's militarization

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I am not sure what your theory of language is but I don't think we can talk about things that don't exist.

The word "self" (like "god") exists and we use – "talk about" – it meaningfully and incessantly (re: Meinong's Jungle, Witty's language games, etc).

Reply to 180 Proof I don't think you can replace self-referential talk.

So I don't think it is a game,

I went to the shop
I had a nightmare
I hallucinated
I am 46
I got a mortgage

Are we supposed to say "My brain is 46" "My brain had a dream" "My body got it's first mortgage."

The reason I defend the notion of god and now call myself an agnostic is because I don't associate the word "god" with a particular religion but with the human based concepts of intelligence, creation and meaning and so on.
So this is my method of deriving meaning or concepts from other things. I think conceptualising is probably essential for us. We learn about consistency between types.

My idea of the self is not entirely conceptual though but is extracted from my experience as the subject of conscious experiences but it is stronger than that. It is me that is in pain. Strong sensations are happening to me that reinforce my perception of a self. It is closely tied to consciousness which is all about experience for me. I consider both an essential mystery that needs explaining.

Reply to Andrew4Handel What?

Quoting frank

The Self is just a ghost in the hive mind of society until it appears out of the fog of history in a cloak of righteousness, defying a world that's become evil.

A most eloquent quote Frank and a great summary of Sophocles - Antigone.

Indeed the two deceased brothers Polynices and Eteocles could almost be twins and if the concept of self was to be divided they are a division of self.

Both dead of course and so Antigone doing rightly wants to bury both not just Eteocles as the king ordered.

Quoting invicta

A most eloquent quote Frank and a great summary of Sophocles - Antigone.

Thank you!

Quoting invicta

Indeed the two deceased brothers Polynices and Eteocles could almost be twins and if the concept of self was to be divided they are a division of self.

Both dead of course and so Antigone doing rightly wants to bury both not just Eteocles as the king ordered.

Makes sense.

I think telling people that the self is a fiction could be harmful and this could apply to telling people they don't have free will and a range of related issues. Leading to hopelessness or nihilism or reducing horizons.

I think people should be exposed to the issues raised in philosophy of mind so they can decide what they find compelling. Some people, as happened with the Matrix film's influence, may draw radical conclusions or be influenced by preexisting mental health problems to questionable actions.

But I feel that studying the Philosophy of mind may have had a positive impact on my mental health but I can't say for sure. It certainly expanded my concept base.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

Who has the power to have the final say in what words mean or refer to?

In my view, we as a community do this. We always inherit cultural software from previous generations (down to the meanings of the words we use), and then we modify this heritage (adapting to life today ) and finally pass it on.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

Can you give examples?

Sure. A law is something set down on the ground in a certain place, a marker. The original metaphor is mostly forgotten, though we still talk of laying down the law.


https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=law


Old English lagu (plural laga, combining form lah-) "ordinance, rule prescribed by authority, regulation; district governed by the same laws;" also sometimes "right, legal privilege," from Old Norse *lagu "law," collective plural of lag "layer, measure, stroke," literally "something laid down, that which is fixed or set."

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I don't think you can replace self-referential talk.

He was saying that we do use such talk, that 'I' has a use in our language.

Quoting 180 Proof

The word "self" (like "god") exists and we use – "talk about" – it meaningfully and incessantly (re: Meinong's Jungle, Witty's language games, etc).

Quoting plaque flag

In my view, we as a community do this. We always inherit cultural software from previous generations (down to the meanings of the words we use), and then we modify this heritage (adapting to life today ) and finally pass it on.

So how does someone have the final say on what we mean by "self" or "free will"

I personally think the extension of a word can be related to somebody's' personal web of experience and words can combine to make new meanings for the individual.

I don't know whether you or anyone else is saying that words are deterministic and meanings inflexible.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I personally think the extension of a word can be related to somebody's' personal web of experience and words can combine to make new meanings for the individual.

I suspect that is how new poetry / philosophy is born. Someone feels differently, 'abuses' language, uses a tool the 'wrong' way --- but it feels good / right also to others and catches on.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I don't know whether you or anyone else is saying that words are deterministic and meanings inflexible.

Concepts / semantic rules are like hot metal that can be bent. We can all push on the norms, but only by mostly obeying them. If you talk totally crazy stuff, no one can understand you. No one will be persuaded to do things a little differently from now on.

Reply to plaque flag I feel like you have to be the arbiter of what you mean because how else can you decide what to say and know what you mean and want to convey?

You intend to convey some kind of meaning but who is to blame when meaning fails to be transmitted?

If I understand what I mean that could be enough. To create shared mean we then seek to influence others in an almost physical act of persuasion even coercion.

I am going to try and get my view of the self across and may try various means to so determined to transmit my meaning and so on.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I feel like you have to be the arbiter of what you mean because how else can you decide what to say and know what you mean and want to convey?

If only life were like that !

It's true that you can often provide elaboration. But you can't use slurs or cry fire or decide that words mean whatever you want them to mean. You can twist things a little bit if you are careful and charismatic.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

You intend to convey some kind of meaning but who is to blame when meaning fails to be transmitted?

The metaphor of words 'containing' or 'transmitting' meaningstuff is popular but maybe misleading. The typical picture is that we know what we mean in some intimate way. That may be assuming too much. We find out who we are as we listen to what we say.

Quoting plaque flag

It's true that you can often provide elaboration. But you can't use slurs or cry fire or decide that words mean whatever you want them to mean. You can twist things a little bit if you are careful and charismatic.

I think what someone means to say is contextual and will derive meaning from their intentions as well.

There are thousands of words which means in combination a vast amount of possible sentences can be created. So it seems very easy to create a unique but meaningful sentence.

And because we can combine words in numerous ways I cannot see why we cannot create new ideas and mental images.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

So it seems very easy to create a unique but meaningful sentence.

:up:

Yes. The point is that the building blocks of such sentences are relatively stable.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I think what someone means to say is contextual and will derive meaning from their intentions as well.

Strictly spreaking, I wouldn't include intentions inasmuch as they are hidden. Context and gesture and everything manifest would count though, in my opinion.

It's not a big deal, but I like to focus on meaning as between people.

Quoting plaque flag

Strictly speaking, I wouldn't include intentions inasmuch as they are hidden. Context and gesture and everything manifest would count though, in my opinion.

It's not a big deal, but I like to focus on meaning as between people.

There is no reason not to include people's intentions and private mental states in a speech act.

When I am talking about myself I am talking about my experiences not just attempting to clarify whether we are using publically arbitrated meanings.

I think making mental states to be something that can be arbitrated about by the group is setting up for failure or exclusion of the phenomena.

I don't mean to sound to sound dramatic but I will never let anyone tell me what my self is or dictate how I assess my mental states.

I think we should investigate mental states in a public forum but not with a goal to diminish the phenomena by seeking public approval on what is acceptable as phenomena.

I am saying this general now to this thread topic and my thread on the privacy of subjective states. I don't believe mental states can be publically arbitrated meaningfully. It would seem to lead to denying one's own reality and being subservient to the mob.

Reply to Andrew4Handel
I think you are misunderstanding me (pretty much completely) and taking a fairly technical and dry discussion way too personally.

I'm not offended, but maybe we should drop it for now.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I am saying this general now to this thread topic and my thread on the privacy of subjective states. I don't believe mental states can be publically arbitrated meaningfully. It would seem to lead to denying one's own reality and being subservient to the mob.

I'm guessing that some features of human cognition are innate, but triggered by socialization. Humans are different from other large apes in that we spend a lot of time looking directly into one another's eyes. I'm thinking this may be the beginnings of a sense of self:

Who am I?
I'm part of this group, and I'm this individual.

I agree that trying to have selfhood be some sort of linguistic appendage doesn't make much sense.

Reply to frank
In regard to the relationship between language and the organic beings we are, the range of developmental psychology is worth considering. There is Behaviorism at one end of the scale where the experience of self is an epiphenomenon of other processes while the other end is like Jung who sees the evolution of instincts being incorporated into the architecture of symbols.

The range brings forward the question of what can be accepted as a given on the mater.

Reply to Paine
Yes. How do you picture it?

Quoting frank

Who am I?
I'm part of this group, and I'm this individual.

I think there is something profound happening behind the self.

It positions us in a unique body/brain and space and time. I am a 46 year old mixed race gay, autistic male from Bristol UK who grew up in a religious cult etc. (I could write an autobiography to illustrate the diversity of my experiences and life events.)

Nobody else is me or has been me. I have this unique subjective standpoint and I can only have this unique subjective standpoint. I can't be anyone else or experience anyone else's mental states.

But How do I come to be me and aware of being this person over the billions of other human living or dead?

It is a mystery but I think this is the only correct approach to exploring the self perspective not describing as a sense of self or a brain state or a concept.

I reside in my self space with this identity which is my only access and filter to a reality and I am fighting for my values. I am not just a number or another chunk of matter. I am sentient. I am not another tree in the forest. I can think about consciousness and infinity.

It is why I value other people because I believe they probably are in a similar position.

I think we can only fight for things, for reality by asserting the truth of our identity not by trying to fit in with some kind of groupthink accepted paradigm.

Reply to frank
I am attracted to Vygotsky's model of the self as coming about from structures that are not given in personal experience but make it possible. We have to treat the self as an object but that does not mean the quality is preconfigured by the restriction. Vygotsky says that reports from persons do not produce sufficient information. That view is sharply different from making it different than what it seems to be.

.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

I think we can only fight for things, for reality by asserting the truth of our identity not by trying to fit in with some kind of groupthink accepted paradigm.

I see what you're saying, but maybe the dynamism we find in selfhood comes from multiple oppositions.

Consider if you woke up in an emergency room with no memory of who you are. Someone could show you your ID and you could read your name and address, but it wouldn't mean anything to you. You could meet your girlfriend, but you don't know her, so she's a stranger.

Your identity is bound up in your history, but even without that, you can think about infinity. You would still know you are someone. You just don't know who. The structure of selfhood is there, but nothing is filled in. Maybe you were born with this blueprint?

The fight for your values pits you against Das Man. A person can live their whole life and never find the will to face that. It's dangerous to do that. You lose the protection afforded those who conform. If you do it and survive, the world around you becomes beloved. It's self love.

I think I started rambling there.

Quoting Paine

I am attracted to Vygotsky's model of the self as coming about from structures that are not given in personal experience but make it possible.

Like a blueprint?

Quoting frank

Consider if you woke up in an emergency room with no memory of who you are.

I think memory loss is relevant to this issue.

On the one hand we all seem to lose most of our memories. So that we live for thousands of days but could not probably recall the most of what happened.

But we seem to keep a core skeleton of memories that gives us our identity.
Some theorists think everything we experience is stored in the brain but not retrieved. An example here might be the thousands of words in our vocabulary that we can retrieve from without having at the forefront of our mind.

I would not say identity is self though. To me self is the individual subjective perspective. I have not had drastic memory loss that causes me to forget people I am close to or any other profound memory problems and I would have to speak to someone in that situation to work out what is constituting their identity.

We could call certain things self identity like memories and preferences. But I feel that self is literally who we are. Us as a distinct entity and having a consciousness attached to this body. So even in cases of profound memory loss other people can identify the unique individual.

I think as I may have said earlier we require individual conscious perspectives even to have the notion of individual things because they may just be concepts in a person's head as we divide up the world into perceived individual things.

It is a complex, difficult topic though where we could end up each referring to different phenomena and concepts.

Reply to frank
That is a good question. I think Jung would say yes, the pattern is there. Vygotsky is more circumspect. A pattern is underway. We do not know what it means.

Quoting frank

The structure of selfhood is there, but nothing is filled in. Maybe you were born with this blueprint?

It seems every individual distinct thing like each snowflake has a unique identity but most of them do not appear to have a self or a conscious perspective.

I think that no amount of difference or complexity in brain structure seems to explain or lead to a personal perspective, a conscious portal, the consciousness through which we receive information and are now communicating.

So in a facile way we can identify differences that we could call a person's identity but these don't differentiate between our listing of traits and someone's felt experience.

What would make some differences constitute a self as opposed to other differences that are just inanimate physical differences?

Quoting Andrew4Handel

So how does someone have the final say on what we mean by "self" or "free will"

The self is a sense; I think we are imbued with a sense of self, as are animals. It is a sense of continuity and grows to become an idea of unity and identity. We impute continuity, unity and identity to phenomena just as do to ourselves. "The tree itself,,,"

Years ago when I first started thinking about this only thing I found reflecting my thoughts was "Why am I me" by Scott Bidstrup who seems to have died now. He was an engineer among other things.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020402181037/http://www.bidstrup.com/why.htm

"In a strictly material sense, it may be true that the matter that makes up me could have made up a tree, or a lizard or a rock or anything else. But what we're talking about here is consciousness; in particular, the consciousness which is unique to me, and not shared by anyone else. The matter that makes up my body has little relevance to the fact of my consciousness. It doesn't do one bit about explaining why I am me in terms of my consciousness. It just explains the fact of the carrier of my consciousness, my physical body. The body should not be confused with the consciousness. It's like confusing a program running on a computer with the computer itself."


"The personal distinction, which I experience as a personal consciousness, is quite independent of the matter that makes up my physical body, as when, for example, if a chunk of me is removed in surgery, I do not continue to experience what is happening to the removed chunk; it simply becomes a part of the world I experience and is no longer "me."

If that chunk includes living cells that are cloned into another complete, living, breathing, human being, that human being still isn't me, even though it had its beginnings in my body. "

He then goes on to like Julian Barbour's theory relating to multiverses saying roughly that each moment of our self is a trajectory through another multiverse. I am not convinced by that idea but it does make the point about the uniqueness of the personal perspective.

Reply to Andrew4Handel Reply to Paine Reply to frank

I found a great source that seems relevant here. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229403462.pdf
*********************
Further the process of acculturation that we undergo is a process of orientating us to the norms of our life-world; acculturation is a process of internalising values and meanings. This is something that happens socially. It requires others; it is an intersubjective process. The normative life of our community helps to form us, but we are not so embedded in that form of life that we cannot register tensions and inconsistencies within its norms. In so far as we can do this we can help in the process of reforming our
norms. In so far as we see certain norms as good, or correct, we acquiesce in their goodness or correctness, they pass over into customary life. Yet, this does not mean that we cannot assess certain norms negatively; as pejorative, or ineffectual and so on. In so far as we can negatively assess our own normative life we can challenge the norms by which we live; but whether our challenge to such norms is effective, whether it is sufficient to bring about normative revision, is not up to us but is rather up to the community in which we live.

If our challenge is effective then we help to reorientate our community on that value. If our challenge is not successful than the norm holds firm and we are seen as perverse for challenging it. We are both the authors of and authored by our norms. An influential feature of Hegelian thought is that it breaks down
the distinction between norm and nature. They become two sides of one coin. The normative is second nature; arising out of, but not reducible to, first nature. Culture is natural; it has the natural as its precondition. But the normative transcends the natural because the normative cannot be reduced to a description of states of affairs. Thus, as Pinkard points out, the mature Hegel tells us, in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 'For us, spirit has nature as its presupposition, and it is thereby its truth and its antecedent.'

But, if there is continuity between the natural and the normative, then this implies that for Hegel the
distinction between the normative and the natural is a normative one, a product of human culture, and being a normative distinction, it is one that we are not compelled to make, one that we can revise.
...
If we understand Geist correctly then we will understand that all human institutions, written and unwritten, all laws, all customs, all duties, all systems of meaning, all language is normative. Now if
Geist is just a way of referring to the normative then it seems as if, to borrow from Pippin, we have left nature behind and are entering a world of pure thought. For on Pippin’s reading the
Hegelian trajectory is away from nature and towards Spirit or Geist. But the very locution 'away from "nature" and "towards" "Spirit," Geist…' seems to indicate that there is something nonnatural about Spirit. It seems to suggest that Spirit ‘transcends’ nature and such transcendence of nature seems to imply a break with nature. Of course, as is well known, Hegel sees Geist as a sublation or Aufhebung of nature. But the term sublation implies that what is sublated, nature, is preserved within that which
sublates it, Geist. The term sublation never implies a breach. Thus Geist develops out of nature, whilst preserving nature, and does not leave it behind. Geist is a modification of nature.

Quoting Andrew4Handel

It just explains the fact of the carrier of my consciousness, my physical body. The body should not be confused with the consciousness. It's like confusing a program running on a computer with the computer itself."

I don't find thinking from computer analogies at all convincing. Why can we not say I am the body and the (living) body is conscious?

Reply to Janus I am conscious of my body. But I can lose substantial parts of my body and remain fully conscious.

You can lose one hemisphere of your brain and remain conscious.

The notion of a neural correlate is to find one part of the brain essential for consciousness or self.

But at the same time no aspect of the physical body exhibits the properties of mental states. (Although the whole body seems to be subject of a mental state).

I just think it is the wrong paradigm. I don't think we are going to find anything unique about bodies to explain our consciousness and self identity.

Reply to Andrew4Handel All I'm saying is that the body is conscious. You can lose parts of the body and it will be conscious. Lose an indispensable part of the brain and the body will no longer be conscious.

All of this we know from common knowledge derived from the experiences of others or perhaps your own experience if you are somehow involved in medicine or witnessed the demise of an unfortunate family member or whatever.

It doesn't follow that we can therefore exhaustively explain how it is that the body is conscious. That would be like explaining how it is that fundamental particle or energy fields can produce a world of incredible complexity and diversity of life.

Can you think of any other lines of investigation down which we might proceed to find such explanations?

Quoting plaque flag

But the very locution 'away from "nature" and "towards" "Spirit," Geist…' seems to indicate that there is something nonnatural about Spirit. It seems to suggest that Spirit ‘transcends’ nature and such transcendence of nature seems to imply a break with nature. Of course, as is well known, Hegel sees Geist as a sublation or Aufhebung of nature. But the term sublation implies that what is sublated, nature, is preserved within that which
sublates it, Geist. The term sublation never implies a breach. Thus Geist develops out of nature, whilst preserving nature, and does not leave it behind. Geist is a modification of nature.

That still affirms Geist as part of our world, it just recalls that it's a partial truth like everything else. Thanks for the source, btw. Pretty cool.

Think about what we mean by "voluntary" or "volition." How do you know a creature is moving by its own volition? Because it doesn't sway in the breeze. Because it gets up and moves to the bird feeder in a way a rock never will. In other words, volition is fundamentally identified by the way that it's counter to nature.

Normativity is also something we wouldn't expect to see in the natural world, isn't it?

Quoting Janus

All I'm saying is that the body is conscious. You can lose parts of the body and it will be conscious. Lose an indispensable part of the brain and the body will no longer be conscious.

All of this we know from common knowledge derived from the experiences of others or perhaps your own experience if you are somehow involved in medicine or witnessed the demise of an unfortunate family member or whatever.

If you didn't know how a computer works, you might likewise assume that the software is somehow part of the hardware. "If the behavior of the computer doesn't reduce to the hardware, then what is it? A ghost in the machine?"

No, it's not a ghost in the machine. It's freakin' software.

:roll:

The self is the personal perspective of thought. If someone says "The self is a myth," they are actively perpetuating the myth, while simultaneously claiming to deny it. In other words, acting in bad faith and inconsistently with respect to the transcendental conditions of the production of the idea.

Quoting Pantagruel

The self is the personal perspective of thought. If someone says "The self is a myth," they are actively perpetuating the myth, while simultaneously claiming to deny it. In other words, acting in bad faith and inconsistently with respect to the transcendental conditions of the production of the idea.

What are the transcendental conditions of the production of the idea?

Reply to frank The conditions of the possibility of there being an argument. In this case, the perspective of the self that is actually offering the idea and is engaged in a dialogic process with an "other self" or other.

Quoting Pantagruel

The conditions of the possibility of there being an argument. In this case, the perspective of the self that is actually offering the idea and is engaged in a dialogic process with an "other self" or other.

Good point. :up:

Quoting frank

That still affirms Geist as part of our world, it just recalls that it's a partial truth like everything else.

:up:

I agree: Geist is just natural stuff that moves in a special way. We make noises and marks and skyscrapers and religions.

Quoting frank

Think about what we mean by "voluntary" or "volition." How do you know a creature is moving by its own volition? Because it doesn't sway in the breeze. Because it gets up and moves to the bird feeder in a way a rock never will. In other words, volition is fundamentally identified by the way that it's counter to nature.

I like that approach, because volition is not hidden away in some secret compartment. It's right there in the swimming upstream to breed, the climbing of a tree for safety.

We can attribute volition to all of life in your terms, I think. But only humans bind time. That's our pseudodivinity: we've got a species-soul that's thousands of years old.

Quoting Pantagruel

The conditions of the possibility of there being an argument. In this case, the perspective of the self that is actually offering the idea and is engaged in a dialogic process with an "other self" or other.

:up:

Very close to my view. The rule is : I can disagree with you but not with me.

Quoting plaque flag

That's our pseudodivinity: we've got a species-soul that's thousands of years old.

Thanks to story telling and writing, yes.

Quoting frank

Thanks to story telling and writing, yes

:up:

Exactly. [ As you seemed to notice, I didn't mean anything supernatural -- just culture..] And now we have crazy electronic devices for recording everything. The historians of the future are going to be swamped.

Quoting frank

Thoughts?

A few.

The brain. Amazing piece of machinery. In humans, the irreducible source of knowledge, except the knowledge of how it is that the brain is the irreducible source of knowledge.

The brain. Amazing piece of machinery. In the absence of knowledge of itself, it is still sufficient as the irreducible source of speculation regarding itself, in which case, the brain is really no more than the perfect source for mystifying its own operation, by disguising itself as that which contains a speculator, and from which arises that the brain is mystifying itself by containing a spectator which says so.

What is actually 3.5lbs or so of specialized meat, has the innate capacity to manifest itself as having the capacity to suggest specialized meat has the capacity to mystify itself.

WTF is a self/spectator supposed to do with that?!?!

Be thankful, insofar as he only validates himself….endures….as long as does the brain containing him.

Be pissed, insofar as the brain makes all this knowledge, like natural law and whatnot, possible, but then mocks him by making it impossible to use his knowledge on the scale where the brain operates.

Be suspicious, insofar as should he somehow find out how the brain makes it possible for him to find out how the brain works…..will he find out he was, at best, a mere accident, or, at worst, he never was?

Be audacious, insofar as if he can’t explain himself as conditioned by the brain, then he’ll just go ahead and explain himself as conditioned by that about which he knows even less.

Be sardonic, and instead direct his explanatory power to language and social constructs and such stuff as needs other selves by which to justify his superficial sagacity.

That’s how the myth of the self endures. Cuz the brain won’t let it not. Which is something I couldn’t possibly know, so….

(Sigh)

Quoting plaque flag

Exactly. [ As you seemed to notice, I didn't mean anything supernatural -- just culture..] And now we have crazy electronic devices for recording everything. The historians of the future are going to be swamped.

I've wondered about that. I read a history of a famous American guy once, written by a historian who was afraid the opposite would be true: that future historians wouldn't have much to go on because nobody writes letters anymore. So he went around collecting first hand accounts. What's funny is that the accounts conflict and the author had to explain what really happened. :grin:

Quoting Mww

That’s how the myth of the self endures. Cuz the brain won’t let it not. Which is something I couldn’t possibly know, so….

Philosophy has made you into a pretzel.

Reply to frank

Ha!! Oh, what a tangled web we weave….

Quoting Mww

Ha!! Oh, what a tangled web we weave….

We need a brain explosion emoji.

Reply to frank

Ironic, innit? The human thinks in images, but cannot express himself by them. So he invents language to represent his thoughts, but finds words sometimes inadequate, or, he doesn’t know how to use them properly. So what does he do? By his imagination he reproduces similes of the very representations he started with, but this time, he thinks himself communicating by means of them.

Reply to Mww
:chin:

Reply to frank

Yep. Just like that.

Reply to Mww
A picture is worth a thousand words, though. Some have theorized that writing may have preceded speech, but I doubt it. We can pin point the genes that are associated with the ability to speak.

Reply to Pantagruel

That was my thought when seeing the thread title. I thought it was going to be a thread about all the experimental evidence against the idea of a unified "self," Hume's "bundle of sensations", Buddhist Anatta, Nietzsche's "congress of souls," etc.

I think we find such results so fascinating precisely because they clash with our everyday experience and intuition. However, there is a definite tendency for people to overplay counter intuitive findings. I'm not totally sure where this instinct comes from, but you see it everywhere, from serious philosophy to silly stuff e.g., "swords were just status symbols, rarely used in warfare, a Hollywood myth!

But for all the interesting facts about people with split brains, blind sight, etc., the fact is that most studies of conscious awareness show exactly what we expect, a fairly unified stream of conscious. IMO, the fact that many of the more interesting phenomena where the self seems to split or unravel occur due to serious malfunctioning in the brain, generally severe brain damage or exogenous chemicals flooding synapses, should only reinforce the view that there is some essential, if not absolute unity of consciousness, i.e. the self.

But of course that didn't end up being what the thread was about.

Reply to frank

But do the higher order entities in the "hive mind," have selfhood as well? Does the state for example?

The great advocate of geist, GWF Hegel seemed to think so, at least in some ways. The ideal state being one that "wills what it does and knows what it wills."

I can see states or other organizations having a sense of self. I am not sure how they could have qualia except as insofar as they are made up of things with qualia. Then again, the question "where does qualia come from," doesn't have a good answer, so this is more intuition on my part than anything else.

Quoting frank

Some have theorized that writing may have preceded speech, but I doubt it.

Yeah….what would a written grunt or bellow look like?

Quoting frank

No, it's not a ghost in the machine. It's freakin' software.

The reason I don't think it is a good analogy is that software is installed, can be replaced holus bolus and a particular software yields exactly the same results in different machines.

What exactly does it mean to say the behavior of humans does not reduce to neuronal activity? Obviously observable behavior of the whole organism is not itself neuronal activity, so in that sense the former is not reducible to the latter, does it follow that behavior, including thinking and feeling, is not a result of neuronal activity?

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

But do the higher order entities in the "hive mind," have selfhood as well? Does the state for example?

I think the state is part of your identity. It's part of who you are that you belong to this particular group. In some cultures that state identity is very potent. In others it's weak. Where it's potent, the group can mobilize more easily because everyone is responding to the same voice, so to speak. Or dancing to the same music? I think of selfhood as being like music with themes, particular scales and rhythms, and like music, one is always progressing through an arc, and it's arcs within arcs like days within weeks, weeks within years, and years within a life.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

The ideal state being one that "wills what it does and knows what it wills."

Sounds like a monarch. A monarch is like a super-identity. He is the state. Everyone else has a position relative to him like branches on a tree and root is the divine.

Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus

Then again, the question "where does qualia come from," doesn't have a good answer, so this is more intuition on my part than anything else.

Qualia doesn't seem to care which self it's attached to. That's how we picture it anyway. I think selfhood has more to do with history and one's role in the big social drama.

Quoting Janus

he reason I don't think it is a good analogy is that software is installed, can be replaced holus bolus and a particular software yields exactly the same results in different machines.

I wasn't presenting an analogy. I was pointing out that a reductionist would draw the wrong conclusion about a computer. If you don't know how it works, hold off on stating what must be the case.

Anyway, a thousand science fiction stories show that it's easily conceivable that human personality could be uploaded and downloaded. Again, if you don't know how it works, lighten up on the dogma.

Quoting Janus

What exactly does it mean to say the behavior of humans does not reduce to neuronal activity?

I don't know. I'm preaching forbearance, not more dogma.

Quoting frank

I wasn't presenting an analogy.

When you said it's not a ghost in the machine its freakin' software, I thought you were making an analogy between humans and computers. If not, then I misunderstood.

Quoting frank

If you don't know how it works, hold off on stating what must be the case.

I haven't stated anything to be the case.

Quoting frank

Again, if you don't know how it works, lighten up on the dogma.

I haven't presented any dogma, I was merely questioning what I took to be your (bad) analogy.

I don't support the "ghost in the machine" idea, but as I said earlier the machine analogy is as much a dogma as the ghost analogy is. And for that matter the denigration of the whole idea of consciousness being a ghost in the machine is itself a dogma.

Reply to Janus I appreciate you reading what I actually wrote, thanks.

I think the self perspective is invoked when it comes to things like taste and sound.

We can both eat the same cake and one thinks it tastes nice the other think it tastes horrible. We can both listen to a piece of music and one person thinks it sounds horrible while the other likes it.

There is no objective fact of the matter about the desirability of a phenomena (cake or sound). It is how we interact with it.

It isn't clear how many properties rely on subjective perception like this but there is no objective way to experience reality. (The view from nowhere, Thomas Nagel)

I think things like colour, tastes, sounds, opinions and beliefs require a self (perspective) to exist and we can't see them in the brain or body. The subjective is the private self realm and it is a perspective.

It is not clear where the self perspective is though or consciousness. We don't see, self, consciousness, sounds, dreams and tastes etc in the brain. We just have a concept of correlating them with brain states but only the individual can access them and then we use language to transmit ideas about our conscious states.

Quoting frank

I think of selfhood as being like music with themes, particular scales and rhythms, and like music, one is always progressing through an arc, and it's arcs within arcs like days within weeks, weeks within years, and years within a life.

:up:

Reply to Mww
Your description is one of the interpretations of Aristotle's view of phantasia.

Reply to frank
Speaking of the software metaphor and timebinding spirit, I think it's worth adding that it's not just quantity of cultural memory that matters. It's also the quality in the efficiency and compactness of our models. From another angle, when we grow philosophically we integrate more and more tightly what we know. It's somewhat like a finite amount of memory (what the individual stores in 'RAM' versus what's externalized in libraries) being given a more and more efficient algorithm within the same space/memory constraints.

Reply to frank :ok:

Quoting Andrew4Handel

The subjective is the private self realm and it is a perspective.

It's a weird situation. We see the same world from different places. I can see you seeing the world from across the room, but I can't see the world as you do ( as if from across the room. )

What gets called consciousness looks to me like the being of the world for a person. We think of the world from a certain perspective as if it were an unreal dream. But what is the real world ? A world from no perspective ?

This might be Wittgenstein said that the world is all that is case. It's the totality of what true claims mean. It's something that we articulate together, a kind of infinite project.

This is what I think has to happen with consciousness and self.

There are billions of humans but becoming conscious makes you become aware of being only one of them. But why and how?

Imagine a billion people are unconscious then become conscious why should you become aware of being *person 1* as opposed to *person 2* or person *a billion*? I cannot see a lawful reason.

What becoming conscious does is situate you as a unique person in a unique location at a unique time.

To me reincarnation would be less mysterious because you could have one spirit travelling through bodies and time rather than a randomly appearing conscious location. And I think to make a robot conscious you would have to create a subjective centre of experiences and perceiver.

The best I can explain it is as if a chinese woman in Hong Kong woke in the morning to be Black man in Nigeria. That would seem mysterious (body hopping) but it is actually no less mysterious to become conscious of being a random person in the first place.

If you can understand this post then you have passed the Turing Test.

To say brain X leads to consciousness X I think you would have to be able to distinguish two separate entities and give an explicit causal link with no explanatory gap.
But currently the brain is correlated with private self reports.

It could be the conscious entity was on another planet using this body as an avatar/vehicle to give responses. I don't think verbal reports logically situate us in our body. Just like reading a post here or listening to someone on the phone doesn't situate them anywhere.

Quoting Paine

Your description is one of the interpretations of Aristotle's view of phantasia.

You mean as in De Anima, or something else?

Reply to Mww
Yes, De Anima along with On Memory.

Reply to Paine

Cool.