Yesterday someone asked about the reality of the self. Here's a piece I found on the subject that's worth thinking about.
Quote from Bruce Hood -- Psychologist:
It seems almost redundant to call for the retirement of the free willing self, as the idea is neither scientific nor is this the first time the concept has been dismissed for lack of empirical support. The self did not have to be discovered; it’s the default assumption most of us experience, so it wasn’t really revealed by methods of scientific inquiry.
[...]
Yet the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die. It crops up again and again in recent theories of decision making, as an entity with free will which can be depleted. It reappears as an interpreter in cognitive neuroscience, as able to integrate parallel streams of information arising from separable neural substrates. Even if these appearances of the self are understood to be convenient ways of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes, students of the mind continue to implicitly endorse the idea that there’s a decision maker, an experiencer, a point of origin.
We know the self is constructed because it can be so easily deconstructed – through damage, disease, and drugs. It must be an emergent property of a parallel system processing input, output, and internal representations. It’s an illusion because it feels so real, but that experience is not what it seems. The same is true for free will. Although we can experience the mental anguish of making a decision... the choices and decisions we make are based on situations that impose on us. We don’t have the free will to choose the experiences that have shaped our decisions.
[...]
By abandoning the free willing self, we’re forced to reexamine the factors that are truly behind our thoughts and behavior and the way they interact, balance, override, and cancel out. Only then will we begin to make progress in understanding how we really operate.
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6 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.I need to re read that, but my first run through I agree.
I’ve been working on a book based on the concept that hallucination is the mechanism used by the brain to display a persons perception of reality, and is the same mechanism that lends to the believe of self.
We really do take “ourself” too seriously.
The image of the world around you is in fact made of real matter. But your brain doesn’t actually see anything. It interprets the data from your external sensors, and hallucinates through the vision processes a living image based on all the different sensor information so it can navigate the environment. Yes that is over simplified, but this is a post on a blog.
The perception of self comes only from an incomplete understanding as to how the brain understands its own hallucinations.
It has to be a difficult to answer this from the outside of the head. The brain is the one doing this crap, and it doesn’t understand how it understands we’ll enough to tell itself. Now that’s a conundrum ! We do understand an enormous amount about the brain, but we aren’t going to get board with this pond of ponders for quite sum time.
Foggy
Level 4
Apr 30, 2018
2
100% checks out with what I am learning through my Dharma center: e.g. interdependent co-arising, composite nature of all things, conditioned mind, no "Self", etc.
stinkeye_a
Level 8
Apr 30, 2018
1
I think commenters here are sometimes conflating free will with freedom of choice. They are not the same thing.
We have freedom of choice and the responsibility that goes with it. That freedom of choice is within certain imposed constraints, and those constraints sometimes make the "right" choices difficult to make. But we are still free to, e.g., obey the speed limit or not to. And while some of us find it harder to comply than others for various reasons, we all get tickets when we get caught violating the limit.
The notion that we lack free will is a theoretical philosophical construct that is mostly irrelevant to everyday decision-making and morality.
mordant
Level 8
Apr 30, 2018
2
Empty all the prisons then. For no one is guilty or capable of reform. Ban democracy for no one decides anything. Did Bruce Hood write that guff himself or did it just appear out of nowhere, on the screen with no decisions involved? No I will not abandon god for some other form of scapegoat
273kelvin
Level 8
Apr 30, 2018
1
That's not what it implies. It doesn't mean that no decisions are made, it means that there is no unified "decider." Everything still works in the same way, it's just that our perception of what's happening isn't accurate. I'm not sure I believe what he's saying either, but I understand the logic behind it.
@tnorman1236 Who decides then? Is it all pre-programed? Are we amoeba like merely reacting to our environment (except Dr Hood). How does that explain a good chess game from a poor one?
@273kelvin "How does that explain a good chess game from a poor one?"
By the sheer number of factors goig into the equation, most of which we are rather ignorant of.
How much stress is the game, how much does the other player intimidate you, how experienced are you, how well have you eaten, are uyou on some chemical which alters your brain chem and on and on
What we experience as "Thinking, processing and deciding" are actually a slew of sub processes all runnning at the same time, many of which are reactive and not active.
The decisions arise from us, but it's a combination of processes in our brains that are not unified into one "person" though that's what it feels like.
@atheist Correct, and all of those are components of the decision process, much of which is unconcious.
If my neural synapses actuallt decide what words I should type before my sense of self comprehends what I am typing, is it I that is typing, or my set neural pathways on autopilot?
That is where the science is leading us.
@Davesnothere "Factors we are ignorant of?" How much do intimidate my opponent? I used to play wearing highly patterned shirts and a wide brimmed hat. This was a, give a confusing view when my opponent looked up from the board and b, to give no facial clues as to my stress levels. Both these were well thought out and conscious decisions on my part.
Okay some may may be reactive or tramlines of thought but not all. Science for example is a series of qualitative decisions. Which theory to explore, what methodology, which data is significant, whether to publish?
When or if you reply to this you will make all kinds of qualitative choices. Don`t tell me it is all reactive.
@atheist I am saying the full story is still out, we are infants in this feild.
However what we are finding out so far indicates that our sub-routines run so fast they far outpace our cognition of them. So much so that according to some specialists, I did not choose a single word written here, I just "feel" like I did.
In reality my lifetimes programing patterns of writting chose what I would write before I wrote it.
That we think and process data so fast, we often do not have time to actually consider that data at all, even though we feel like we do. That feeling is itself a post hoc condition similar to the way our sight is re-constructed by the brain, removing the veiny obstructions and blind spots.
Some folks find this idea disconcerting.
HUH!
Sticks48
Level 9
Apr 30, 2018
1
I guess you had "TO BE" there!
@fishline79 ?
I’ve never accepted the position that there is no “free will.” Free will to me means choosing something instead of something else after considering all options. For instance, if a restaurant offers potatoes or rice, I believe that in picking one of the two, both, or neither I am exercising my free will.
I accept that deconstructing the things that combine into the self is healthy. But I also understand that the same methodology can be used with everything else. The possibilities are endless. For this reason, we can’t really examine any other equally ephemeral concepts that may explain our thoughts or behavior unless we agree that they actually stand for something.
ArturoS
Level 6
Apr 30, 2018
2
I'll buy that! (I think I'll have the rice, today.)
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