“Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought": In the animic ontology, beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it,and in so doing — in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to its ever-evolving weave.
Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, in his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life.
Just as love does not live inside the heart, consciousness is not contained in a finite space -- it's something that arises, something that occurs: a verb rather than a noun. And since the publication of Francis Crick's influential "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul," scientists have been looking for it in all the wrong places.
THE problem of the self - what it is that makes you you - has exercised philosophers and theologians for millennia. Today it is also a hotly contested scientific question, and the science is confirming what the Buddha, Scottish philosopher David Hume and many other thinkers maintained: that there is no concrete identity at the core of our being, and that our sense of self is an illusion spun from narratives we construct about our lives.
Why think about the self being optional then? When we focus too heavily on the self, our life often gets worse not better. Think of how you feel when you’re focusing on yourself more than others. You typically feel selfish. Your world grows smaller. How do you feel when you focus on others? You often feel generous. Your world gets bigger. Humans have a fundamental need for social connections. When we feed that social beast, we feel more human. The world makes sense. When we focus inward, we shrink a bit of our humanity.
The question I wish to raise here is whether we can teleport our soul, and, specifically, how best we might do it. I’ll suggest that we may be able to get near-complete soul teleportation into the movie (or video game) experience, and we can do so with some fairly simple upgrades to the 3D-glasses we already wear in movies.
The secret to excelling in a job interview may not hinge on how much your interviewers like you, but in how much you like yourself. Narcissists scored much higher in simulated job interviews than non-narcissists, researchers found.
Brain science is everywhere. The ‘neuro-’ prefix has been used to jazz up approaches to self-help, ethics, aesthetics, marketing, economics, even parenting.
For decades researchers have used mirrors to study self-recognition. However, attempts to identify neural processes underlying this ability have used photographs instead. Here we used event related potentials (ERPs) to compare self-face recognition in photographs versus mirrors and found distinct neural signatures. Measures of visual self-recognition are therefore not independent of the medium employed.
With the help of a hammer-wielding scientist, Jennifer Aniston and a general anaesthetic, Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science's greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are? While the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience, they are notoriously difficult to explain. So, in order to find out where they come from, Marcus subjects himself to a series of probing experiments.
Students rated their emotional states before and after reading each of the eight passages. Response times and error rates to comprehension questions showed that when individuals read stories written from the “you” perspective, they were not only more likely to connect emotionally with the passage, but they were also better able to remember spatial details about the physical environment described in the story.
Because our views, preferences, ideas and desires inevitably change over time, the existence-across-time that I call "myself" isn't a unitary, eternal and changeless individual. It's more like a chain of people, each one very similar to the ones before and after him, somewhat more different from the ones that are further away, although there are probably some major commonalities that last over a significant portion of my life.
Inspiration and interpretation are inevitable. As metaphor is basic to what we do, so emerging results in neuroscience will be taken well beyond the intentions and even meanings of their authors. Much caution and critique will be needed. Yet at the same time, I want to preserve a space for this other mantle, from science to art and humanism. To creation and design and expression.
A revolution based on neuroscience? No. A recognition of our bodies and experiences and senses? Yes. And thus much closer to metaphors that inspire us every day. Like HOME or WARMTH. And maybe even a tree or two.
Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves.
The self is a disruptive, false, and, as such, unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing: when we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is a flow of “thoughts without a thinker.”
According to a recent wave of books on developments in neuroscience, just about everything we thought we knew about ourselves is wrong. From the actions and reactions of chemicals in our brains to the decisions we tell ourselves are made rationally, the influence of "cognitive bias" goes deep.
Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 for his work on decision-making, has elegantly demonstrated how our brain is designed in such a way that we often cannot trust our preferences to reflect our interests. His work vividly shows how this is a consequence of having two mental operating systems, an experiencing self and a remembering self.
In fact, when we think about ourselves in the future we actually use the same part of our brain that we use when we think about a stranger. Hershfield and a group of researchers wanted to help young people vividly imagine their own old age, so they recruited college-age men and women, gave them goggles and sent them into a virtual reality laboratory where they encountered a kind of mirror.
Where are we? In three experiments, we explore preschoolers’ and adults’ intuitions about the location of the self using a novel method that asks when an object is closet to a person. Children and adults judge objects near a person’s eyes to be closer to her than objects near other parts of her body. This holds even when considering an alien character whose eyes are located on its chest. Objects located near the eyes but out of sight are also judged to be close, suggesting that participants are not using what a person can see as a proxy for what is close to her. These findings suggest that children and adults intuitively think of the self as occupying a precise location within the body, at or near the eyes.
Mystics in all ages and cultures describe the self as infinite, stable and ever-present phenomena. Modern physics describe the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness, a dance. We, as a society, relate to the self mostly as an individual, unique, time bound form. Our common sense, as individuals and society, hasn't caught up with this picture and it still based on long-held biases and stories. The Earth is clearly round but we still act as if it was flat...
We live at the dawn of a scientific revolution, every day brings new findings from a wide range of scientific disciplines about what it means to be human. Modern science now gives us the detailed descriptions of the mechanisms our brain needs to construct what we call the self.
Could it be this illusionary image of ourselves as separate beings that is keeping us in this perpetual state of anxiety, scarcity, fear, dissatisfaction and leading us, as a society, at this very delicate point in evolution?
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories, personality and even mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day – but I like the idea that personal and neurological change and inconsistency does imply an illusion of identity. In this age of cognitive science it’s easy to subscribe to Whitman’s doctrine – that we are constituted by multitudes; it takes a brave intellect, on the other hand, to hang on to what Freud called our “naïve self-love.”
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