What is the essence of selfhood?

When I am being most aware of myself, what exactly does that feel like? Is it possible to experience the self as something separate from one's one sensory perceptions? Is there a sense of selfness that is independent of social experience? But what would consciousness be if it was only an awareness of itself? A mere dream of a self? A pantomime in a staged play? How do you define yourself? By how you are the SAME as others, or by how you are DIFFERENT from others?

"While he was imprisoned in a castle, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantiality of the soul. His "Floating Man" thought experiment tells its readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argues that, in this scenario, one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by René Descartes in epistemic terms when he stated: "I can abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness."

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This is what Siddhartha Gautama taught: (top shelf answer) I urge you to red it through carefully.

 

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I suppose if you take that to its logical conclusion, then death is equivalent to that state as well, and I don't think that one would still have self-consciousness! Consciousness results from the physical brain and can't be separated from it.

 

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I really like that. But I fear that the sense of being universally compassionate and selfless relies on the self as much as selfishness does. You are still elevating yourself as having seen thru the illusion--the self now being the enlightened ascetic instead of the grappling materialist. So while I agree with Buddha that he is essentially right, I disagree that we should make a religion or "way" out of it. We NEED to be involved and attached to the ten thousand things of this life. Only consciously so. "Man is a hybrid of plant and ghost."--Nietzsche

 

I am pleased you appreciated it. Find more at Reluctant Messenger, 'The Gospel of Buddha'. Buddha never said we ought to make a religion out of anything. And you are not still elevating anything if you understand that there is no self to elevate.

 

We can't even escape a physically sensible world during dreams, wherein we still represent ourselves as a body embedded in a spatiotemporal environment. Doubtless there are some unusual incorporeal experiences that inspire mystical claims / revelations, but those apparently require a return to the memories and individuality of "self-ness" just to understand and note that they took place.

There's the awareness or pondering of one's being as linguistic thoughts, if the perceptual and somatosensory input of still periods can be fully ignored. But that is yet manifested as a pseudo-auditory, internal speaking voice rather than a pure intelligibility devoid of empirical content / appearances.

Helen Keller still conceived herself as roving perspective that enabled objects to have an "outside" manner of existing as felt surfaces, and of their being differentiated from each other by spatial locations. Those same non-living things themselves, OTOH, utterly lacked their own "subjective-ness" to provide them with evidence of their existence as either material phenomena or less immediate thought-generated conclusions.

 

I can think about my body and its parts, such as my foot. I can think about psychological events that seem to be mine, such as how I arrived at choices that I made yesterday. But can I really think about my 'self' in such a way that this 'self' becomes an object of awareness? Or is this 'self' something that's never actually present for inspection at all, but is instead inferred somehow in our subject-object way of thinking and in the structure of our languages?

If a baby's brain was severed from his/her body at birth and kept alive in a nutrient bath somehow, with no nerve inputs from any of the senses, could that brain generate a conscious mind? I'm inclined to say 'no'.

While there may be a social aspect to humans' idea of self, I don't think that babies are born as blank slates and then generate everything from nothing by interacting with other people. Human beings seem to be born with many social instincts already built in. We come pre-optimized by our evolutionary history to interact with other human beings. Part of that may well include having an innate hard-wired 'theory of mind' that allows us to make sense of the people around us. Even small babies seem to be able to read their parents in terms of emotions and intentions. And significantly, I suspect that we apply the same innate theory to modeling our'selves'.

I think that it might be the case that consciousness requires an object. If there's no object of consciousness, there's no consciousness. The Indian meditative traditions might want to argue with that though, since at least some of them believe very strongly in the possibility of consciousness without an object. That's their goal, pure awareness with all of the phenomenal stuff removed.

That's interesting. I was unaware that Descartes might have been influenced by Avicenna. I just learned something. Thanks.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to suspect that Avicenna was wrong.

 

Avicenna's Floating Man reminds me of these snippets from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience:

"I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up... I saw that...my townsmen... plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."

 

Mathematics results from the physical brain. Can it be separated from it? Logic results from the physical brain. Can it be separated from it? In fact everything in our experience results from the physical brain. Yet we have no problem acknowledging its separate existence. At least as long as we are conscious and alive. That's why nothing will be anywhere when we die. Because consciousness is precisely that which makes what results from the brain separate and objective and real.

 

No.

I'm not sure what you mean here. The world exists beyond our brains, so its existence is not dependent upon our experience.

That...sounds like gibberish. Could you speak a little more plainly?

 

If the world exists independently of our own brain generated consciousness of it, then try to describe what it is like WITHOUT assuming any of those brain generated qualities. What possible sense does it make to refer to the world as independent of our brains when everything we experience of the world is a sensation or pattern generated INSIDE our brains?

No..that was a really deep thought. It escapes translation into monosyllabic everyday speech.

 

MR is asking the age old question: if a trees falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a noise?

I would say, yes, but who am "I"?

 

I don't know if you're prepared for the implications of what you're saying here. Essentially, if the world is generated by the mind, rather than a source of stimulus for it, then you believe nothing else outside of you is real. I'm not real, this forum isn't real--it's all a fabrication of your mind.

Is that really what you want to say?

LOL! I'd hardly call it a deep thought. At any rate, I never asked for monosyllabic speech. I asked you to speak more plainly, instead of trying to sound more sophisticated than you actually are. Surely you can explain the principle behind your words.

 

I'm merely following the consequences of what neuroscience already assumes to be true. So this isn't just some New Agey idealist claptrap. For the record though I only deny the exist of a world independent of our consciousness. I still like to believe that somehow, thru the interaction of consciousness AND matter, reality DOES manage to emerge. But it makes no sense to refer to one without the other. They each twist together into one seamless Moebius strip.

Well, lets see. When you die, I assume you believe you and your consciousness will no longer exist. For you that means there will be nothing. No reality whatsoever. And yet there will still be a reality going on, in that same mysterious sense that it did when you were conscious. Now how does it occur that there will be these two states happening at once--nothing existing to you, and reality existing all by itself without you--if there is in fact only one reality--the physical one? That can't be, unless there are essentially TWO realities, or dualism. This is all I am saying..That consciousness and physical matter are BOTH necessary for reality to emerge. HOW that happens is mystery to me.

 

I think that you're just using words there. You cease to exist but that doesn't change reality. There is only one reality, and you were part of it and now you're not. There is just the one reality - don't call it a state, that's different.

 

Reality will not exist in any way to you when you die. Or so the extinctionist physicalist assumes. What that posits is essentially an absolute nonreality--an eternal abyss of infinite blankness parallel somehow to physical reality. If there was only one reality, this should not be. There would never be anything BUT reality. And this reality would not change in any sense whether we existed or not. But in fact it changes enormously, and splits into. Almost like how a superposition of two opposite states exists by the act of being unconscious it. Hmm.

 

I suppose we are into the quantum-mechanical observer issue here, and will probably end up with cats.

Reality continues whether someone dies or not. People die every day but the universe carries on. You are just using fanciful words imho. Hey, words are free so go ahead.

 

Reality..The world..The universe..All just generalizations inside our own heads. As if we ever really encounter such grand and noble fictions in our visceral everyday experience. You don't actually think these things exist out there on their own do you? Without thought or word to define them?

 

You're going to have to elaborate on that.

So we all just showed up here one day? How do you explain the existence of the world before you were born? Before humanity, for that matter?

How does the world exist while you're asleep? Other people have lives that do not adhere to your sleep schedule. Do we all just disappear? Are we all just illusions created by you?

There's nothing mysterious about the world going on after your death. When you die, you simply stop perceiving the world. Your brain shuts down, so you do not process stimuli. There is no "you" any longer. It is not a state of being, since you are no longer "being" at all.

There is no blankness. There is nothing. You are no longer experiencing anything. You've been removed from the equation. In the same way you shut your computer off, yet the world beyond it continues on, the world around you continues on after your death. That computer hasn't "gone someplace," it simply no longer processes stimuli. There are no new realities required.

 

Yes.