what is the self

Personally I would say it is more suited to the philosophy forum. But you might need to be more specific.

In reductionalist terms the self is an experience, it is a collection of perceptions we have that our existence is continuous and matched to a meta-awareness (seeing that we see, knowing that we know). All this causes us to not only have a point of view, but be aware that we have it in the way some other animals are not.

I honestly do not see how perception of selfhood relates to religious belief or the lack thereof. If you have religious belief you might leap for their to assuming the self has a soul that is separate from the body--but even an atheist will often leap to the assumption the the self has a mind that is separate from the body--which seems much the same thing.

Hmmm.

The self is the memory sorting apparatus of the brain.

(not a factual statement, so no asking for references)

I know what I think, but what I think is not representative in any way of what other atheists think because there is no athiest doctrine or recognised mainstream appraoch to the notion of the self (or on much of anything else). There is no fundamental reason for the way self is conceptualised to relate to the lack of belief in deity (there is a reason to relate it to beleif in deity, but that is a whole different paradigm and I assume you are asking my paradigm not my place in someone else's).

The connection between notions of self and deity are religious. For the religious the self/homunculus is related to the soul and so to God. For atheists it need not relate to anything. The notion of the self has not particularly significant in relation to atheist belief as far as I know.

For myself, I am a reductionalist, specifically a radical behaviorist. Within this approach there is no self (noun, entity, item), this is however self awareness (perception, cognition, action). The 'self' is a reification/category mistake relating to what we do, never something we have or are.

But I would mention that radicial behaviourists are as likely to be Christian as atheist (Sikh, Muslim or whatever)--this philosophical position is neutral in regards to religion.

From my point of view beleifs about the self are unrelated to the belief there is no/lack of belief in deity.

I think of self as a story told in an individual's mind that explains the difference between that which an individual can direct easily and perceive constantly (Self), and that which an individual can direct only with difficulty or not at all - and perceives only intermittently (Other). It's also the difference between that through which perceptions arrive and are held (my senses, feelings and understanding), and that which generates the perceptions (the objects I sense, feel about, learn about).

Self isn't an object but a construction around an asymmetric relationship between objects. The asymmetry is in perception and direction.

The 'I' is the Self referring to its own story. It is by its very nature, Self-interested.

The spiritual element of Self arises from questions like:

• Since I can direct Self, how shall I choose to direct it?
• Since I can perceive Other and affect it, how shall I shape the relationships between Self and Other?
• Since it is apparent that Others can perceive Self, how would it be best to be perceived?
• Since Others and Self have so much in common, what does my perception of Others teach me about Self? What does my perception of Self teach me of Others?
• Since Self and Other change, how do these changes affect my perception of the story that emerges, and how does that perception affect how I exert influence on that story?

The story that the Self forms can create very different perceptions of 'I'. While behaviourally, one Self might be very similar to another, perceptually their sense of 'I' can be very different indeed.

AMCrenshaw said:

Is there an atheist view on the construction of the self? Is it a construct? Is there a self beyond identity? If these questions are more geared to a philosophy forum, let me know. But I'm still doing research for Kommein.

AMC

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There are medical and psychological views of the constructs of "self." A-theist means without religion, so I expect any explanation that is not religious is atheist, in other words, secular, or even humanist.

I would definitely check out "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Nietzsche. Maybe it's redundant to say here on this forum, given the topic and the caliber of the participants (!), but in the "First Part" of this work, in the section titled "On the Despisers of the Body", he posits that the soul / spirit is one with the body, an interesting Eastern idea (I don't know if it's intended to be, but I say Eastern because Western religion separates the soul/body/spirit in a way that Eastern religions don't).

A quote to get you thinking, and interested in exploring this work further: "... the awakened one, the knowing one, says: 'Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and the soul is only the name of something about the body.'" I personally think this is the most enlightened/ modern/ current view, and the one still espoused by modern atheistic thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens.

A few more thoughts: from the section before that, "Yes, this 'I', with its contradiction and perplexity, speaks most honestly of its being - this creating, willing, valuiing 'I', which is the measure and value of all things." For myself, as a "recovering fundamentalist" (someone who just left the Christian church for atheism), I think this is the best part of an atheistic view of the self: to look back and realize that all the "Strengths" attributed to religion or the "holy spirit" (god-breathed version of the self, if you will) are really found within the person themself. All the goodness, all the messages of peace, love, morality, all the "transcendance" and spirituality - the self, without God, is capable of all this glory. It's pretty cool.

I would definitely read these sections - this entire work, really! - for a truly thorough investigation of this question: much better than I could do trying to sum it up!!

A parting thought: "Always the self listens and seeks; it compares, masters, conquers, and destroys. It rules, and is in control of the 'I' too. Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage - his name is self; he dwells in your body, he is your body."

You are right Jill. Mind body dualism is one thing I get really worked up about. I doubt any of the atheists here will disagree with you and Nietzsche, though we might think there are better proponents of the idea.

I am not a dualist but am more aligned with simpler ways of saying that (like Wottgenstein). So myself is my body *and* what it does/has done in the past (including what it thinks, feels and perceived).

Do you mean Wittgenstein? or is this a different person?

And Crenshaw, if it is not contained in the body, where is it?

Oops, typo. Yes, Wittgenstein.

If the self is the body, the body is clearly alive. So it is a body, not a corpse. How would this effect what creativity is. That is to say it is the capacity to perform creative acts and it comes from genotype and phenotype doing their magical dance.

I don't know why people make a connection between not using magical/spiritual/god/homoculus explanations for what we doing and being dead or dull. Phsical live is gloroiusly active, generative and exiting without getting some kind of intangible ghost involved.

It's a bit like this, whether you think the platypus is made by God or evolution, the platypus is equally nifty. Whether I think my novel was written by my "self", my "soul", channeling my "Muse", inspiration by my "god" or an artful combination of my genotype and my environment--the book is the same.

Yes, I would say the attribution of self to some in tangible spirit world is an artifact--but the experience of self is real. (I think therefore I am=I "am" the ability to think).

AMCrenshaw said:

If the self is the body, it is a corpse and nothing more. If it is the mind and the body then the self is a robot. But it's not, is it?

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I see mind as the configuration of our cognition - it's just the way that we go about producing and processing the information we call 'thoughts'. The mind is not the self, but produces Self as part of the story it uses to operate.

Self is a story; it can change but not arbitrarily. It has some impact on the way that Mind operates so it's not a meaningless story. Mind produces Self and Self helps to direct Mind.

So then...what? Where does this "creativity" come from that everyone talks about?

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Creativity is just the Mind rearranging and recombining throughts to produce novelty. If the novelty is useful then we call it innovation. There's strong evidence in nature that you don't need much Mind to produce some innovation. A large number of animals from insects through to birds are tool-users - it's just that their rate of innovation is comparably slower than a human animal's.

What is valuing, but the citation of an-other's system of valuation?

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Valuing is just Mind assessing potential against purpose. Purpose arises largely from the artifact of Mind called Self, but some of it arises from intrinsic species imperatives that we don't always recognise. Since Self is a story it can borrow from the stories of others to create purpose and values, but also it can innovate its own. I think that we see evidence of both in the world.

Why do I need to get my thoughts from somewhere? Thoughts are not objects, they are actions. Where does an apple get its falling? I haven't answered that question because in my world it is like saying that I haven't explained why the sea smells of strawberries. I am in a paradigm where thoughts are something you do, probably mainly an action of the brain on an electrochemical level.

The rest of that paragraphs I really didn't understand at all. I have spelled out my position. To even understand your questions I might need to know yours. Are you assuming the self and thoughts are objects that exist either on or off the physical plane? If that is assumed I have nothing to contribute--I don't see it that way.

Yes there is a self, it is the actions of my body that contribute to or are percived by me. In specific terms it is a genotype, series of experiences and some life processes. I am now repeating myself so I probably don't have much more to add.

p.s. This is pretty seriously off topic for the subforum now, I think?

I don't think so. I've been thinking about writing a piece where a guy dies, and gets his personality put onto a machine. Its not an original idea of course, but I think my take on it is. So its not as if this stuff isn't relevant to the world of writing, science, and atheism in general.

Im finding this very interesting, though I'm not participating much.

veinglory said:

p.s. This is pretty seriously off topic for the subforum now, I think?

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It feels more like philosophy than writing to me but I have a nontheistic writing angle on it, and here it is:

If there's no soul then the question of 'who am I' may be answerable only partially and from multiple viewpoints, because the Self is just a subjective, self-interested story. The so-called 'Johari Window' captures this idea:



I personally find the moral narratives of many characters in fiction quite frustrating because they tend to show a limited number of panes in the window. A classic fantasy, crime, or romance character, say, is typically portrayed as either 'good' or 'bad'. If it's portrayed as good then we look through what the Johari model calls the 'Arena' pane and see lots of good things happening there. If it's painted evil then we often see the Arena and Facade windows contrasted. If it's painted tragic then we'll often see contrasts between the Arena and Blind Spot windows...

From a NT writing perspective, I believe that we need to look at the character from at least three panes to get a sense of a character's morality - and that the fourth pane (the unknown) is likely to be of keen interest too.

With that said, I'm trying to think of some writing that plays well with these issues and offhand I'm drawing a blank. Does anyone have some suggestions?

AMCrenshaw said:

"I am my ability to think" ? But where do you get "your" thoughts?

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That's the eternal writer's question, isn't it? But I think that all writers know the answer to this. Here's my version of it, anyway:

Many of our thoughts derive from the thoughts of others. What we consider 'original' are often just reflections on our experiences, or perhaps implications, counterpositions, examples, exceptions, compositions of or holes in someone else's ideas. It's often said that there are no new ideas under the sun - and perhaps this confirms that much of our creative thinking is not original so much as simply recomposed or reinterpreted.

Theists may see their writing as divinely inspired, but I see mine as inspired simply by my experience and trying to make sense of that. If I had no experiences then I'd probably have no thoughts to write about - and no will to write it either.

Just as the book isn't the author, so my thoughts aren't me; they're an artifact of my mind, just as my Self/narrative is. Put my mind in a different situation and it would probably have different thoughts and perhaps over time, become a different Self. (Have you ever wondered what you'd be like if you'd grown up 600 years ago? When I ponder that I quickly conclude that I wouldn't be 'me' at all.)

'I think therefore I am' might be true, but that does not imply 'I am just my thoughts'.

Does all this make Self illusory? I don't think so; it just makes Self impermanent (since it's situational) and unreliable (as self-interested narratives typically are). The extent to which Self is illusory is just the extent to which we deceive in our narrative, and then uphold the deception in our beliefs - including the deception of our omniscience about ourselves. That may vary from person to person.

I don't know of that helps or not - but I hope it does, and I hope it's sufficiently writingy not to bother anyone else.

In terms of my writerly interest in the 'NT Self' question here it is unpacked a bit more...

A lot of fiction presents characters with either no self-deceit - or when the self-deceit occurs it's usually immediately obvious. When the characters are self-deceiving it alienates many audiences - diminishing both trust and character sympathy. Is that because we readers want to believe our own self-deceits, or is it just that we want stories to be easy to understand? Maybe it's a combination but I think a lot of the time it might simply be the latter.

As a sometime writer of NT fiction I have a lot of interest in presenting moral ambiguity and uncertainty - but I want to keep it interesting and engaging. I'm still not terribly sure how to do that.

Thanks for the book recommendation by the way. I dug into some reviews and it seems like a very unusual story.

Sarpedon said:

I've been thinking about writing a piece where a guy dies, and gets his personality put onto a machine.

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Greg Egan has written a few shorts on this in the last ten to fifteen years - especially on our appreciation of Self vs the reality of Self. You can find a couple of them in his anthology Axiomatic.

It can be quite easy to think about mind transfer from a theistic perspective. The 'mind' is merely an expression of the 'soul' - which is typically eternal and indivisible (except if you're ancient Egyptian maybe). If you relocate the soul (e.g. put it in a bottle or a computer) then you've clearly relocated mind and conversely in many of these stories if you relocate mind then the original body loses its soul.

From a nontheistic perspective though, it gets tricky. In Egan's stories for example, mind-duplicates ('duals' or 'jewels') are 'trained' to record the same events and produce the same responses as their hosts. From a purely behaviouristic perspective one can argue that if you have the same responses to the same inputs then you have the same Mind and hence (arguably) the same Self - since (arguably) Self is just an artifact of Mind. Egan argues just this in a couple of his stories.

But I question that strongly! It's not hard to craft two 'black boxes' that produce the same results by very different means (many of us were taught more than one way to do long division in school, for example). If Self is our inner narrative, then it will surely include some story about how we solve problems, not simply the results of the problems solved. So you could produce an effect where two behaviourally identical minds are actually two very distinct Selves. In an extreme case, the two minds could do exactly the same things and one could be highly benign while the other is highly malign (see the Johari window I posted earlier for why this can occur).

(There has to be an interesting SF story in this... I'm just not sure what it is....)

This whole question, by the way, underpins a theistic schism on salvation through thoughts vs salvation through deeds... In some religions it doesn't matter what you think - as long as you do what they tell you. (That's the behaviourist view. ) In other religions, it doesn't matter what you did as long as you believe what they tell you. In some religions, it's important to both think and do as they prescribe. In other religions they duck the question entirely.

Personally, I think that the what and why are important. I don't believe that sustainable good arises from a malignant or deluded Self; I think that it arises from a benign but self-questioning Self. (This is also a reason that I don't believe that Self is illusory or unimportant either...)

There are some good stories you can tell about Selves self-questioning, but there are some utterly fascinating stories you can write about self-delusion.

I don't think I wil ever get across, thoughts don't comes from the brain, they are something the brain does. Just like squints don't come from the eyes and smiling doesn't come from the mouth. Just like the color grey doesn't come from the brain. Thoughts are an attribute of the brain.

The elimination fallacy is common in biomedical science. It goes, 'I took out the bobbsie organ and the rats don't fight, there from the bobbsie organ must be where aggression is'. 99 times out of 100 something else has happened like a neuron happened to go through that area and got cut, or removing the bobbsie organ makes rats go blind.

But I get it, you want to talk about where thoughts as some kind of physical object are. All i can say is thoughts aren;t any kind of physical object--they are an action, a process. They can only be described in the way we describe other actions. the fact we 'noun' them in language is simply a mistake.

So how about we continue this with no further use of the word 'thought' only 'think'