![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
On the Self
I've gone through a variety of theories about the self and continuity of consciousness. Here they are.
1: The self as something arbitrary. Essentially the view I held at the time of writing this post from 2007. I thought that there is no inherent reason to think that the consciousness that now inhabits my brain will be the same one as the one inhabiting my brain tomorrow. Our minds and bodies change all the time: what's the thing that makes the me of today the same as the me of 20 years ago? Certainly one can come up with all sorts of definitions, but from a scientific point of view they're all unnecessary. One simply doesn't need to postulate a specific consciousness, a soul of sorts, in order to explain human behavior or thought. Noting that our memories create an illusion of continuity, and that this illusion is useful for maintaining useful things such as the self-preservation instinct, is more than enough as an explanation.
A thought experiment in philosophy asks: if you stepped into a Star Trek-style transporter, that disassembled you into your component parts and reassembled you somewhere else (possibly from different raw materials), would it still be you or would you it be killing you and creating a copy of you? Another: if the neurons in your brain would be gradually replaced with ones running in a computer, and the original brain was then shut down, would it still be you? Yet another: if you had been translated into software, and then fifteen copies of that mindfile were made and run, would they all be you?
To all of these questions, "the self as something arbitrary" replies: there's no inherent reason why they wouldn't be you. The difference between them would be less than that between you now, and you tomorrow. Of course, for psychological reasons, it is necessary for us to still believe to some degree that we're still the same person tomorrow as we are today. For this purpose, we're free to use pretty much any criteria we prefer: it's not like one of them would be wrong. One such criteria, suggested by Derek Parfit, is Relation R: psychological connectedness (namely, of memory and character) and continuity (overlapping chains of strong connectedness). This works fine for most purposes.
In practice, while I had this view, I tended to forget about the whole thing a lot. The illusion is built into us quite strongly, and the intellectual understanding of it is easy to forget.
2: The self as lack of personal boundaries. Upon reading Ken Wilber's No Boundary, I realized the following. Suppose that I choose to reject any criteria creating a relation between the me of now and the me of tomorrow, seeing them all as arbitrary. It follows that all consciousness-moments are separate beings. But symmetrically, one can take this to imply that all consciousness-moments are the same being. In other words: there is only one consciousness which experiences everything, instantiated in a wide variety of information-processing systems.
This point of view also gains support from noting that to a large degree, our behavior is determined by our environment. The people you hang around with have an immense impact on what you do and what you are. I might define myself using the word "student", which signifies a certain role within society - studying at a university ran by other people, from books written by others, my studies funded by money which the state gets by taxing my country's inhabitants. Or I might say that a defining aspect of myself is that I want to help avert existential risk. This is so because I happened to encounter writings about it at an appropriate point in my life, and it is a motivation which is constantly reinforced by being in contact with like-minded folks. On the other hand, it is a drive which is also constantly weakened by the lures of hedonism and affiliating with people who don't think such things are truly that important.
I'm only exaggarating a little if I say that basically everything in our personality is defined by our environment, and particularly the people within our environment. Change the environment I'm in, and you quite literally change what I am. Certainly I have lots of relatively stable personality traits that affect my behavior, but my environment defines the meaning those traits take. If I change my environment, I'll also change my own behavior. Looked at in this light, the self/non-self boundary becomes rather arbitrary and somewhat meaningless.
So now I was presuming that there was only one consciousness, instantiated in every possible body. All of these bodies and instantiations, taken together, make up a vast system that is me. I (in the sense of the specific brain-body now writing this) am part of the system in the same way that individual cells are parts of my body, or individual subprocesses in my brain are parts of my psyche. My personal accomplishments or my personal pride don't really matter that much: what matters is how I contribute to the overall system, and whether parts of the system are harmonious or conflicted between each other. Doing things like befriending new people means forging new connections between parts of myself. Learning to know people better means strengthening such connections.
Thinking like this felt good, and it worked for a while. But I had difficulty keeping up that line of thought. Again, the illusion of separateness is built strongly into us. On an intellectual level, I could easily think of myself as part of a vast system, with only a loose boundary between me and not-me. But since each brain can only access memories of being itself, and is strongly biased towards thinking itself separate, this was hard to really believe in on an emotional level. Frequently, I found myself thinking of myself as separate again.
3: The self as how the algorithm feels from the inside. The next step came when I realized that the notion of a consciousness experiencing things is an unnecessary element as well. Instead of saying that there are lots of different consciousnesses, or one consciousness instantiated in a lot of bodies, we can just note that we don't really need to presume any specific entity which observes various sensations. Instead, there are only the sensations themselves. A "consciousness" is simply a collection of sensations that are being observed within an organism at a specific time.
Putting this another way: there are a variety of processes running within our brains. As a side-effect of their functioning, they produce a stream of sensations (qualia, to use the technical term). There is no observer which observes or experiences these qualia: they simply occur. To the extent that there can be said to be an observer or a watcher, each sensation observes itself and then ceases to exist.
Of necessity, all of the qualia-producing algorithms we know of are located within information-processing systems which have a memory and are in some way capable of reporting that they have subjective experiences. Humans can verbalize or otherwise communicate being in pain; dogs can likewise behave in ways that sufficiently resemble our is-in-pain behaviors that we presume them to have qualia. As an animal's resemblance to a human grows smaller, we become more unsure of whether they have qualia. In principle, my computer could also have qualia, but if so it would have no way of reporting it, and I would have no way of knowing it. Because an entity needs to be able to somehow communicate having qualia in order for us to know about it, we've mistakenly began thinking that all qualia must by nature be observed by a consciousness. But the qualia observe themselves, which is enough. There is no Cartesian Theater, but rather something like multiple drafts.
So there is no "me" in the continuity of consciousness sense, nor is there any unified consciousness which experiences everything. Instead there are only ephemeral sensations, which vanish as soon as they've come to existence (though if eternalism is right, every moment may exist forever, and there may be an infinite number of copies of each "unique" sensation if multiverses are real). This may seem like a very unsettling theory from a psychological point of view, as it would seem like it'd make it harder to e.g. care about the next day. While both "the self as something arbitrary" and "the self as a lack of personal boundaries" allowed one to construct a definition of self extending in time - even if one acknowledged to be arbitrary - this view makes that rather impossible.
And at first, it was rather unsettling. After a while, however, I managed to come to grips with it. The important point to note is that even if there is continuity of consciousness, the concept of "me" still makes sense. It's simply referring to the information-processing system in which all of these algorithms are running. I can still meaningfully talk about my experience or about making plans. I'm simply referring to the experiences which will be produced by the algorithms running within this brain, and the plans which that brain will make. And there is no reason why I shouldn't feel pleasure from anticipation of future experiences, if those are good experiences to have.
I desire to reduce the number of negative qualia in the world and increase the number of positive ones. Positive qualia are correlated with positive feedback within the information-processing system; negative qualia, with negative feedback. In other words, the system/organism will tend to repeat the things it felt good about, as it gets wired to repeat those behaviors. (Though one should note here that the circuits for "wanting" and "liking" are actually different.) It is good for me to feel good about doing and behaving in ways which will make me more likely to achieve these goals. It is good for me to feel pleasure from the anticipation of doing good things, for this will cause me to actually do them. It is also good for me to feel happy: not only does feeling happy instead of unhappy make me more capable of doing things, it also directly serves my goal of increasing the amount of positive qualia in the world. This line of thought seems like a very successful way of fitting together utilitarianism and virtue ethics, the process of which I began a year ago and which has considerably contributed to my increased happiness of late.
Again, this is easy to think about on an intellectual level, but we're wired to think differently. I've been having more success consistently training myself to think like this than I had with the previous theories, however. Of course, I still frequently forget, but I'm making progress. Various meditation traditions seem to be aimed at helping grok something like this at an emotional level, and I'm dedicating an hour a day to meditation practice aimed at following the progression described in this book. I haven't really gotten any results so far, though.
I was going to also write more about the nature of suffering and how these shifts in thought have helped me become happier and suffer less. However, looking at how long this post got, I think I'll do that in a separate post.
1: The self as something arbitrary. Essentially the view I held at the time of writing this post from 2007. I thought that there is no inherent reason to think that the consciousness that now inhabits my brain will be the same one as the one inhabiting my brain tomorrow. Our minds and bodies change all the time: what's the thing that makes the me of today the same as the me of 20 years ago? Certainly one can come up with all sorts of definitions, but from a scientific point of view they're all unnecessary. One simply doesn't need to postulate a specific consciousness, a soul of sorts, in order to explain human behavior or thought. Noting that our memories create an illusion of continuity, and that this illusion is useful for maintaining useful things such as the self-preservation instinct, is more than enough as an explanation.
A thought experiment in philosophy asks: if you stepped into a Star Trek-style transporter, that disassembled you into your component parts and reassembled you somewhere else (possibly from different raw materials), would it still be you or would you it be killing you and creating a copy of you? Another: if the neurons in your brain would be gradually replaced with ones running in a computer, and the original brain was then shut down, would it still be you? Yet another: if you had been translated into software, and then fifteen copies of that mindfile were made and run, would they all be you?
To all of these questions, "the self as something arbitrary" replies: there's no inherent reason why they wouldn't be you. The difference between them would be less than that between you now, and you tomorrow. Of course, for psychological reasons, it is necessary for us to still believe to some degree that we're still the same person tomorrow as we are today. For this purpose, we're free to use pretty much any criteria we prefer: it's not like one of them would be wrong. One such criteria, suggested by Derek Parfit, is Relation R: psychological connectedness (namely, of memory and character) and continuity (overlapping chains of strong connectedness). This works fine for most purposes.
In practice, while I had this view, I tended to forget about the whole thing a lot. The illusion is built into us quite strongly, and the intellectual understanding of it is easy to forget.
2: The self as lack of personal boundaries. Upon reading Ken Wilber's No Boundary, I realized the following. Suppose that I choose to reject any criteria creating a relation between the me of now and the me of tomorrow, seeing them all as arbitrary. It follows that all consciousness-moments are separate beings. But symmetrically, one can take this to imply that all consciousness-moments are the same being. In other words: there is only one consciousness which experiences everything, instantiated in a wide variety of information-processing systems.
This point of view also gains support from noting that to a large degree, our behavior is determined by our environment. The people you hang around with have an immense impact on what you do and what you are. I might define myself using the word "student", which signifies a certain role within society - studying at a university ran by other people, from books written by others, my studies funded by money which the state gets by taxing my country's inhabitants. Or I might say that a defining aspect of myself is that I want to help avert existential risk. This is so because I happened to encounter writings about it at an appropriate point in my life, and it is a motivation which is constantly reinforced by being in contact with like-minded folks. On the other hand, it is a drive which is also constantly weakened by the lures of hedonism and affiliating with people who don't think such things are truly that important.
I'm only exaggarating a little if I say that basically everything in our personality is defined by our environment, and particularly the people within our environment. Change the environment I'm in, and you quite literally change what I am. Certainly I have lots of relatively stable personality traits that affect my behavior, but my environment defines the meaning those traits take. If I change my environment, I'll also change my own behavior. Looked at in this light, the self/non-self boundary becomes rather arbitrary and somewhat meaningless.
So now I was presuming that there was only one consciousness, instantiated in every possible body. All of these bodies and instantiations, taken together, make up a vast system that is me. I (in the sense of the specific brain-body now writing this) am part of the system in the same way that individual cells are parts of my body, or individual subprocesses in my brain are parts of my psyche. My personal accomplishments or my personal pride don't really matter that much: what matters is how I contribute to the overall system, and whether parts of the system are harmonious or conflicted between each other. Doing things like befriending new people means forging new connections between parts of myself. Learning to know people better means strengthening such connections.
Thinking like this felt good, and it worked for a while. But I had difficulty keeping up that line of thought. Again, the illusion of separateness is built strongly into us. On an intellectual level, I could easily think of myself as part of a vast system, with only a loose boundary between me and not-me. But since each brain can only access memories of being itself, and is strongly biased towards thinking itself separate, this was hard to really believe in on an emotional level. Frequently, I found myself thinking of myself as separate again.
3: The self as how the algorithm feels from the inside. The next step came when I realized that the notion of a consciousness experiencing things is an unnecessary element as well. Instead of saying that there are lots of different consciousnesses, or one consciousness instantiated in a lot of bodies, we can just note that we don't really need to presume any specific entity which observes various sensations. Instead, there are only the sensations themselves. A "consciousness" is simply a collection of sensations that are being observed within an organism at a specific time.
Putting this another way: there are a variety of processes running within our brains. As a side-effect of their functioning, they produce a stream of sensations (qualia, to use the technical term). There is no observer which observes or experiences these qualia: they simply occur. To the extent that there can be said to be an observer or a watcher, each sensation observes itself and then ceases to exist.
Of necessity, all of the qualia-producing algorithms we know of are located within information-processing systems which have a memory and are in some way capable of reporting that they have subjective experiences. Humans can verbalize or otherwise communicate being in pain; dogs can likewise behave in ways that sufficiently resemble our is-in-pain behaviors that we presume them to have qualia. As an animal's resemblance to a human grows smaller, we become more unsure of whether they have qualia. In principle, my computer could also have qualia, but if so it would have no way of reporting it, and I would have no way of knowing it. Because an entity needs to be able to somehow communicate having qualia in order for us to know about it, we've mistakenly began thinking that all qualia must by nature be observed by a consciousness. But the qualia observe themselves, which is enough. There is no Cartesian Theater, but rather something like multiple drafts.
So there is no "me" in the continuity of consciousness sense, nor is there any unified consciousness which experiences everything. Instead there are only ephemeral sensations, which vanish as soon as they've come to existence (though if eternalism is right, every moment may exist forever, and there may be an infinite number of copies of each "unique" sensation if multiverses are real). This may seem like a very unsettling theory from a psychological point of view, as it would seem like it'd make it harder to e.g. care about the next day. While both "the self as something arbitrary" and "the self as a lack of personal boundaries" allowed one to construct a definition of self extending in time - even if one acknowledged to be arbitrary - this view makes that rather impossible.
And at first, it was rather unsettling. After a while, however, I managed to come to grips with it. The important point to note is that even if there is continuity of consciousness, the concept of "me" still makes sense. It's simply referring to the information-processing system in which all of these algorithms are running. I can still meaningfully talk about my experience or about making plans. I'm simply referring to the experiences which will be produced by the algorithms running within this brain, and the plans which that brain will make. And there is no reason why I shouldn't feel pleasure from anticipation of future experiences, if those are good experiences to have.
I desire to reduce the number of negative qualia in the world and increase the number of positive ones. Positive qualia are correlated with positive feedback within the information-processing system; negative qualia, with negative feedback. In other words, the system/organism will tend to repeat the things it felt good about, as it gets wired to repeat those behaviors. (Though one should note here that the circuits for "wanting" and "liking" are actually different.) It is good for me to feel good about doing and behaving in ways which will make me more likely to achieve these goals. It is good for me to feel pleasure from the anticipation of doing good things, for this will cause me to actually do them. It is also good for me to feel happy: not only does feeling happy instead of unhappy make me more capable of doing things, it also directly serves my goal of increasing the amount of positive qualia in the world. This line of thought seems like a very successful way of fitting together utilitarianism and virtue ethics, the process of which I began a year ago and which has considerably contributed to my increased happiness of late.
Again, this is easy to think about on an intellectual level, but we're wired to think differently. I've been having more success consistently training myself to think like this than I had with the previous theories, however. Of course, I still frequently forget, but I'm making progress. Various meditation traditions seem to be aimed at helping grok something like this at an emotional level, and I'm dedicating an hour a day to meditation practice aimed at following the progression described in this book. I haven't really gotten any results so far, though.
I was going to also write more about the nature of suffering and how these shifts in thought have helped me become happier and suffer less. However, looking at how long this post got, I think I'll do that in a separate post.