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The Illusion of Self

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Re: The Illusion of Self

#11

Post by ambler0 »

powertower wrote: post #2

> We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. This is very true. It's been said that our minds create the whole of our reality at every moment, everything is a thought (an action), from the color, to the shape, to the relationship, to the idea. It's also been said that if…

The mind doesn't create the whole reality. Most of the time, it's operating on stuff that comes from out there in The World (hallucinations, dreams, etc are exceptions). The position that the mind creates the whole reality in Western Philosophy is called Idealism and is associated perhaps most famously with Bishop Berkeley.

Re: The Illusion of Self

#12

Post by cristianpascu »

The illusion of self as well as, for instance, illusion of free will, only work best for book titles.

Mind can sometime be tricked by illusions, or it can, sometimes, not be free, but that does make it a rule. It doesn't mean all we experience, self included, is an illusion, or that we don't have a free will. Drawing conclusions from particular examples, and particular persons is, well...

Re: The Illusion of Self

#13

Post by powertower »

ambler0 wrote: post #11
powertower wrote: post #2

> We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. This is very true. It's been said that our minds create the whole of our reality at every moment, everything is a thought (an action), from the color, to the shape, to the relationship, to the idea. It's also been said that if…

The mind doesn't create the whole reality. Most of the time, it's operating on stuff that comes from out there in The World (hallucinations, dreams, etc are exceptions). The position that the mind creates the whole reality in Western Philosophy is called Idealism and is associated perhaps most famously with Bishop Berkeley.

> The mind doesn't create the whole reality.

Reality as it is created internally, not externally. I believe that the Universe exists regardless of someone observing it.

I'm also referring to the fact that we experience the "outside" only through our senses and our mind. Both fallible. And nothing else. Hence we create the whole of our own reality, where everything is projected inside the mind.

Re: The Illusion of Self

#14

Post by snowwrestler »

powertower wrote: post #2

> We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. This is very true. It's been said that our minds create the whole of our reality at every moment, everything is a thought (an action), from the color, to the shape, to the relationship, to the idea. It's also been said that if…

I get what you're saying although I personally would not put it so "mystically."

I would start by saying that the quoted sentence perpetuates the Cartesian mind/body dualism, where "my body" is not "my self." But that dualism is outdated. It arose from a philosophical approach to understanding natural phenomena that we have since discarded in favor of the scientific method.

So now we know a few things that Descartes did not know:

1) We--human beings--are entirely natural phenomena. We're not special or distinct in any physically measurable way. We are as subject to the scientific method as anything else.

2) We have never observed a human self separate from the human body. The vast preponderance of the evidence (i.e. all of it) is that what we call "mind" is simply one aspect of a physical human body.

So I would say that if we consider mind and body as simply different aspects of a unified concept of a human being, then in fact we do experience direct contact with reality. When I touch water with my fingertips, my fingertips are part of me--so I am in direct physical contact with reality. My brain also performs processing on the fingertip signal to store and match it against my mental model of the universe. But that is not any more inherent to my self than my fingertip is.

Re: The Illusion of Self

#15

Post by FreakLegion »

Think of the self as a function, not any particular return value. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out; the self remains.

(Of course this doesn't do justice to how inputs transform the self at runtime, but it's just an analogy. If we want to push it further, we could say that the self is a recursive first-class function.)

Re: The Illusion of Self

#16

Post by cpeterso »

dansingerman wrote: post #3
powertower wrote: post #2

> We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. This is very true. It's been said that our minds create the whole of our reality at every moment, everything is a thought (an action), from the color, to the shape, to the relationship, to the idea. It's also been said that if…

"It's also been said that if you drop that reality and simply exist in the now, a point where you stop "doing" (action) and start "being" (no action), you'll remove that separation of the "self" from the rest of the Universe." With all due respect, that sounds like bollocks.

"Ego death is said to be characterized as the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of the loss of "control", the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a "personal agent", and loose "cognitive-association binding".

This "perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment" is said to be experienced through a sensation that one is the whole universe (and therefore there is no need to differentiate the "I" from the "universe") or by simply acknowledging the "I" does not exist."

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

Re: The Illusion of Self

#18

Post by d2vid »

> in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hrs of the day. This is why you cannot see your own eyes moving when you look in a mirror!

False! Stare into your own eyes in a mirror and turn your head left and right while continuing to look at your eyes. You can see your eyes moving left to right in their sockets.

Saccades may blind you, but the only reason you can't see your eyes in the mirror is because changing your gaze means you're not looking at your own eyes anymore. What silly "evidence"...

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