Humans have an insistent need for illusions. We need to think we have selves, that there is a point to existence, and that we are being watched over by a benevolent and powerful being (who, nevertheless, will beat eleven kinds of crap out of us if we don’t do what it says).
The most interesting illusion to me is that we have selves. It is quite obvious to me that selves are dynamic, fractured, transitory things that occur largely in a single head, which is why we think they are unitary. Our memories are generated from hints and episodic traces, our thoughts are the consensus of many partial circuits of neurons, the shared or loudest “voices” that result in our gross behaviours. Err, by “gross” I mean the large and bodily ones, not gross as in disgusting, although that might be the case.
Why we seem to need to think we have selves is a little bit of a mystery. The marvellous Jack Scanlan, a student at Melbourne Uni, whose tweets I follow, pointed out that the Intelligent Design movement has dualism as a necessary posit, and that what is wrong with Darwinism (their all-purpose evil demon) is that it is “materialistic”, which in other words means it doesn’t privilege human mentation above all else. [What they are really objecting to is naturalism, the view that we can know the nature of the world. That's their issue, not mine.]
But while listening to a song about self, it occurred to me that there is no unitary self for nearly all human beings, except for one class. If Schizophrenics are those whose sense of self is so fractured that the partial voices in their heads are not identified as originating within their own heads, there is a class of person who has so strong a sense of self they are unable to connect with others: Autistics.
Now I do not intend to suggest that all those who fall into the vague and often contradictory “Autism Spectrum Disorder” category of the DSM are like this: Asperger’s folk are able to connect, with effort. But “true” autistics have a self so strong they are unable to communicate. I think they are so closely integrated that external thoughts are blocked. Just a conjecture after a day’s work…
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Your iPhone was the first one I had seen and touched in RL. So it is also part of my memory.
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What’s the problem with the notion of “consciousness”? It is a necessary device for cognition.
If we didn’t have consciousness then we would be unconscious or worse. Conscious provides the ability to make executive decisions. How else could it be possible to make a global decision .. get up … walk … stop … turn right …
Global decisions become impossible problems when too many variables are introduced into the decision making ‘equation’. Too many variables introduce noise as if it were thermal heat melting a solid or causing state change from liquid to gas. The ‘executive’ or consciousness reduces the awareness to a space where a global bifurcation involving the whole body can be induced. When we are unconscious we don’t have that global bifurcation executive function available. … which leads to the interesting situation of sleep walking (… just thought of that!)