Gertie wrote: ↑May 27th, 2020, 5:25 pmIf we go back to the substrate's physical correlates (I tend to use 'brains' as a shorthand), we see as I mentioned before, there doesn't seem to be a Self correlate, no central Cartesian Theatre, no command and control centre, where my 'I System' neurons somehow assess what's going on and decide what to do. No-one knew that before we had the instruments to look, there might have been some physical 'Self' correlate like that, but it's not what we've found.
What we've found in the brain are clusters of neuronal networks, and the many neurons constituting the material substrate of the cerebral mechanism of consciousness can be regarded as its (collective) subject.
This is basically
the brain view of (
cerebralism about) subjects or "selves" (egos or persons), according to which they are brains (or parts of brains). Interpreted materialistically, Tim Bayne's substrate phenomenalism correponds to subject cerebralism.
QUOTE>
"If we are neither animals nor material things constituted by animals, we might be parts of animals. … The only spatial parts of animals that I can think of any reason to suppose we might be are brains, or something like brains—parts of brains or perhaps entire central nervous systems. Call the view that we are something like brains the
brain view.
The brain view says that we are identical with brains, not that we 'are' brains in some looser sense. It is not the view that our brains are important to our being in a way that none of our other parts are. (That is not an account of what we are.) Nor is it that our brains constitute us, or that we are temporal parts of brains (…). The brain view is that we are literally brains. So it implies that you are about four inches tall and weigh less than three pounds. You are located entirely within your cranium and made up mostly of soft, yellowish-pink tissue. In normal circumstances we never strictly see ourselves or each other. (Most of us would not want to.) This might sound like something out of a comic book. Some readers will already be thinking of jokes. Is it really a serious view?"
(Olson, Eric T.
What are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 76)
<QUOTE
QUOTE>
"Each person is the subject of the relevant PF [psychological framework] or psychological bundle. We who are materialists hold that in actual fact the thing that thinks, feels, and so on is a certain material thing, most plausibly a brain. So, in actual fact each person is a brain. ...On my proposal, then, persons are neither egos nor bundles. They are the subjects of appropriately complex psychological bundles. In actual fact, I claim, these subjects are brains insofar as those brains are in the appropriate physical states (states sufficient for psychological states making up a single PF)."
(Tye, Michael.
Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. pp. 142-3)
<QUOTE
QUOTE>
"Naive phenomenalism turns out to be too naive, but perhaps the basic approach can be salvaged. Rather than identify the self with the stream of consciousness perhaps we should identify it with the underlying substrate that is responsible for generating the stream of consciousness—the
machinery in which consciousness is grounded. Mackie seems to have something like this position in mind in suggesting that ‘unity of consciousness is, as it were, the nominal essence of personal identity . . . But the real essence of personal identity will be whatever underlies and makes possible the unity of consciousness’ (Mackie 1976 [
Problems from Locke]: 200). Let us call this view
substrate phenomenalism."
(Bayne, Tim.
The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 287)
<QUOTE
Gertie wrote: ↑May 27th, 2020, 5:25 pmRather there are dedicated (but plastic) subsystems interacting via unimaginably complex neural electro-chemical exchanges. Somehow, this results in an experiential discrete, unified, coherent sense of self in humans. The incredible thing isn't that this sometimes goes wrong, but that it happens at all.
The evolved functional benefit of a sense of self as a coherent, unified, discrete entity, located in a correlated body, with a first person pov navigating an 'external world' which we can make coherent models of, is clear. When it goes significantly wrong, we see people still often create internally coherent narratives, or even a variety of 'selves' as in DID, so it all somehow hangs together for them. Same with split brain experiments.
It seems reasonable to assume this necessity to create coherence and unity arises from the complexity of lots of different types of systems interacting. Avoiding a confusing cacophany of sensory experiences, emotions, sensations, memories, thoughts, etc. That kind of complexity is fine for purely physical systems, but for mental experience it wouldn't be functional. So we have this useful discrete, unified experiential sense of self, which we note is correlated to a specific body located in space and time, we can focus attention and create models of the external world and ourselves, have beliefs which we reason from, use 'thinky internal narratives', imagine, make predictions, etc. That's useful.
If say a moth for example, only has one experiential state - light/dark, there wouldn't be a need for this kind of unifying integration, and I'd guess a sense of self might not manifest. Just the experience. And the more complex the critter, the more subsystems and neural interactions, the closer to a human sense of self it might have.
The unity of (phenomenal) consciousness has different aspects, with two of them being
content unity and
subject unity: Two or more experiences occurring at the same time are
content-united iff they are integrated into one and the same field of consciousness; and they are
subject-united iff they are all had or undergone by one and the same subject.
According to the global workspace theory of consciousness, its content unity is part of its function as a global workspace in the mind/brain.
Again, the phrase "sense of self" is ambiguous. I think even moths have a primitive body-centered "sense of self", i.e. bodily self-awareness, in the sense of a holistic mental representation of themselves, their bodies in the form of a unitary body image or body schema.
QUOTE>
"Body Schema: General term for the personal awareness of one’s body, including the location and orientation of its various parts and their relative motion in space and time, as well as its functional integrity."
Source:
https://link.springer.com/referencework ... 9948-3_713
<QUOTE
What is incorrect is that having a body schema or body image requires the mental status of personhood, because minds/brains can create and use ones on a subpersonal level of self-awareness. For example, what a moth surely doesn't have is an "autobiographical self", i.e. mental self-representations in the form of a self-referential "life story", which requires the capacity for linguistic thought.
Galen Strawson uses the following concepts of a self and self-experience, with an important aspect of the latter being that the occurrence of self-experience is said to be independent of the existence of selves. For fictionalist or "virtualist" views of selves or subjects, see e.g. the quotes below!
QUOTE>
"There's a distinctive kind of experience which I'll call 'self-experience'. …Self-experience is not just experience of what is in fact oneself. Nor is it just expressly self-conscious experience of what is in fact oneself, i.e. experience of oneself conceived of specifically as oneself. In the ordinary human case it's experience of oneself as being an 'inner' subject of experience or locus of consciousness—inner relative to the human being that one is considered as a whole. More generally, it's experience of oneself as something which is not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole; experience of oneself as a specifically mental presence of some sort, a mental someone or something. One might say that it's experience of oneself as having nothing more than mental being, inasmuch as it doesn't involve any positive or express figuration of oneself as something that has any existence beyond one's mental being; but it certainly needn't positively exclude the idea that one has existence that goes beyond one's mental being. …Self-experience, then, is experience informed or shaped by—involving the deployment of—a certain complex experience-determining mental element: the idea or sense or feeling of the self. Self-experience can exist whether or not selves do, just as pink-elephant-experience can exist whether or not pink elephants do.
Let me repeat this: self-experience exists, as a form of experience, whether or not selves do. 'Self-experience' is a strictly phenomenological term. It's a name for an aspect of our existence of how things are that exists whether or not things are that way in fact. Self-experience may turn out to be illusory in so far as it purports to be experience of an existing entity properly called a self, but its phenomenological reality—its reality as a form of experience, a way of conceiving or apprehending things—is not in doubt."
(Strawson, Galen.
Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 1-2)
"A self is certainly—essentially—a subject of experience, and it’s certainly—essentially—not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole. I take these two claims to be true by definition. Some say that the only thing that is legitimately called ‘the subject of experience’ is the human being considered as a whole. One must reject this view if one holds that there are such things as selves. A self is some sort of inner conscious presence that is not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole, if it is anything at all. It’s the kind of thing human beings have had in mind, over thousands of years, in talking of ‘my inmost self’; ‘my self, my inward self I mean’; the ‘living, central,…inmost I’; the ‘secret self…enclosed within’. It’s part of what Hindus have argued about for at least three millennia, and Buddhists for almost as long: ‘my self, that which I most intimately am’.
Self-experience is experience of there being such a thing as this. It’s experience
as of there being there being such a thing as the self, whether or not there are such things. Self-experience exists on a view like Dennett’s, for example, according to which selves don’t really exist in the straightforward sense I’ve committed myself to defending, but are, rather, useful fictions or abstractions that help us to organize our experience when we think about ourselves and our lives.
It’s a mistake to think that this form of experience, this sense of self, is a peculiarly modern or ‘Western’ phenomenon, or a product of the Romantic movement or of an unusually leisured or intellectual life. It is, for one thing, and as just remarked, something that has been explicitly discussed in the Eastern tradition of thought for thousands of years. But that is a vanishingly small point next to the point that self-experience, as understood here, is as old as humanity, fundamental to the daily experience of all normal human beings.
If you doubt this, I haven’t yet managed to convey what I have in mind. Self-experience
is something extremely basic. It begins in early childhood. It’s vivid in one’s coming to consciousness of the fact that one’s thoughts are unobservable by others and of the fundamental respect in which one is ‘alone in one’s head’. It’s universal in ordinary human beings, in the sense in which I’m concerned with it. It’s not subject to significant cultural variation. There is, furthermore, no conflict between the fact that self-experience presents the self as a specifically mental presence or entity and the fact that self-experience is fundamentally grounded, in all ordinary human beings, in the experience of embodiment.
Self-experience is not something that is less available or natural in (say) traditional African societies. Mbiti considers the replacement, in such societies, of the Cartesian ‘I think, therefore I am’ with ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am’ (1969: 106). Senghor suggests replacing or complementing ‘I think, therefore I am’ with ‘I think, I dance the other; I am’. These proposals have a clear and vivid point, but the sense in which they’re accurate doesn’t conflict with the present claim that self-experience is universal in ordinary human beings. To think that it might be somehow less prevalent or less strong in such societies is to show that one hasn’t understood what I have in mind when I talk of self-experience. One is thinking instead in terms of some more theoretically and culturally encumbered notion of self-experience.
When Henry James writes, of an early book, ‘I think of…the masterpiece in question…as the work of quite another person than myself…a rich relation, say, who…suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship’ (1915: 562–3), he knows perfectly well that he’s the same human being as the author of that book, but he doesn’t feel he’s the same person or self as the author of that book. This feeling is common when people consider their past, and perhaps also their future: one of the ways in which people tend to figure themselves to themselves, quite independently of whether or not they have any religious beliefs, is as something whose persistence conditions—identity conditions, existence conditions—are not necessarily the same as the persistence conditions of the whole human being that they are. This way of figuring oneself presupposes—involves—the fundamental phenomenon of self-experience."
(Strawson, Galen.
Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 8-9)
"Some philosophers deny that they have any self-experience, any sense of themselves as a subject of experience or locus of consciousness that isn’t the same thing as the human being considered as a whole. This isn’t because they’ve engaged in meditative practices of the kind that are designed to eliminate a sense of the self but rather, it seems, because they subscribe to deeply entrenched doctrines in philosophical metaphysics and philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and in philosophical psychology—doctrines about personal identity, about the reference of the word ‘I’, about the fundamental importance of the body in shaping our experience, and so on—that they take to provide powerful grounds for resistance not only to the claim that there’s such a thing as the self, the subject conceived of as something distinct from the human being considered as a whole, but also to the claim that self-experience exists. Trefil, though, is right about the phenomenology: ‘no matter how my brain works …, one single fact remains…I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from somewhere inside my skull…this is…the central datum with which every theory of consciousness has to grapple’ (1997: 181), as is Dawkins: ‘each of us humans knows that the illusion of a single agent sitting somewhere in the middle of the brain is a powerful one’ (1998: 283–4)—even as he says that this experience is illusory.
It’s wrong to think that self-experience automatically incorporates some sort of belief in an immaterial soul, or in life after bodily death. It doesn’t, even if it’s often the basis of such a belief. Philosophical materialists who believe as I do that we’re wholly physical beings who don’t survive bodily death, and that complicated conscious experience of the sort with which we are familiar evolved by purely physical natural processes on a planet where no such experience previously existed, have self-experience as strongly as anyone else."
(Strawson, Galen.
Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 37)
"The cognitive core of self-experience is simply a sense of oneself specifically as a mental presence or mental someone, and this doesn’t require any sort of self-concern. There’s no logical difficulty in the idea of a fully self-conscious being that has self-experience although it is entirely affectless."
(Strawson, Galen.
Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 96)
"[S]elf-experience has in fact only one truly fundamental element: subject. On this approach, self-experience is simply
a certain way of experiencing oneself as a subject of experience. More particularly, it’s a way of experiencing oneself as being a subject of experience specifically in so far as one has mental being (= is mentally propertied), and not, say, in so far as one is a human being considered as a whole. That is, it’s experience of oneself as subject-as-mental."
(Strawson, Galen.
Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 205)
<QUOTE
QUOTE>
"Dennett's center of narrative gravity:
Human beings are constantly engaged in presenting themselves, both to others and to themselves. We create autobiographical narratives about who we are. The self, according to Dennett (1991), is not the source of these narratives but, rather, a by-product of the brain's propensity to produce them. The self is a sort of story. By speaking of a center of narrative gravity, Dennett is describing an act of public self-representating. We are at some level trying to present a collection of facts about ourselves as a unity. We are doing this both for other people and for ourselves. We are endeavoring to create a clear and stable concept of ourselves, in ourselves and others, despite a fundamental lack of unity. Dennett thus argues that the self is a fiction, an abstract object, like the engineer's notion of a center of gravity. The self is the center of narrative gravity within the biographies our brains compose about ourselves and each other. Selves, like centers of gravity, are useful organizing concepts but they are not real. There is not a
part of you called 'the self' any more than there is a
part of you which is your center of gravity. Dennett sees this narrative self as a sort of virtual self, in the sense that one human person might produce several quite different centers of narrative gravity over time, just as a computer might run several different programs. In our parlance, Dennett is denying the existence of an executive self and attempting to replace it instead with a type of representational self."
(Hirstein, William.
Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 141)
<QUOTE
QUOTE>
"What might we be looking for in looking for an account of the self ? …I will focus on three roles that ‘the self ’ or ‘subject of experience’ (I use these terms interchangeably) ought to play. These roles are not the only ones that are associated with the self, but taken together they are clearly central to the notion of the self. Anything that might hope to qualify as a bone fide self ought to play all three roles, and anything that does play all three roles will thereby qualify as a self.
Firstly, experiences don’t occur as self-standing entities, but are ‘had by’ selves. Selves are the things to which we ascribe conscious states. Call this the
ownership component of the self-role. Secondly, selves are the objects of first-person reflection—‘I’-thoughts. What one thinks about when one thinks in the first-person is a self—indeed, it is oneself. Call this the
referential component of the self-role. Thirdly, selves have a perspective or point of view on the world. A self is not merely an entity
in the world, it is also something
for which the world itself is an entity. Call this the
perspectival component of the self-role."
(Bayne, Tim.
The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. pp. 269-70)
"
Virtual phenomenalism
We need to take a step back and reconsider the ‘logical space’ in which we have operated thus far. The two versions of phenomenalism that I have examined each identify selves with concrete particulars: streams of consciousness in the case of naive phenomenalism and the mechanisms underlying those streams in the case of substrate phenomenalism. But there is another way in which we might hope to forge a constitutive link between streams of consciousness and selves. Rather than looking for something onto which we might map representations of the self, we might think of selves as merely intentional entities—entities whose identity is determined by the cognitive architecture underlying a stream of consciousness. Appropriating Dennett’s (1992) notion of the self as a centre of narrative gravity, I suggest that we should think of the self as a merely virtual centre of ‘phenomenal gravity’.
The central notion in this approach to the self is that of
de se representation (Lewis 1979). In
de se representation the subject represents themselves as themselves.
De se representation isn’t the exclusive provenance of explicitly self-conscious thought, but permeates consciousness through and through. As Pollock (1988) has argued, the conscious states evoked by the presentations of one’s senses are automatically
de se. In effect, this means that streams of consciousness—at least the kinds of streams of consciousness that we enjoy— are constructed ‘around’ a single intentional object. The cognitive architecture underlying your stream of consciousness represents that stream as had by a single self—the virtual object that is brought into being by
de se representation.
This account forges an essential tie between the self and the unity of consciousness, for the cognitive architecture underlying consciousness ensures that any
de se representations that occur within a single phenomenal field will be co-referential. For phenomenal selves, the rule is one subjective perspective at a time. No self can have more than one experiential perspective at a time, for
de se thought cannot bridge the gaps between phenomenal fields. The functional role of
de se representation guarantees that the boundaries of the virtual self are limned by the boundaries of the phenomenal field (at least, at a time).
How deep does this link between
de se thought and the unity of consciousness run? Is
de se structure an essential feature of consciousness as such, or is it merely a feature of our cognitive architecture—indeed, perhaps not even a particularly deep feature of our cognitive architecture? I’m not convinced that
de se representation must structure the experiences of any possible subject of experience, but I do think that a case can be made on broadly Kantian grounds for the view that
de se content must inform the representations of any creature whose experiences purport to represent an objective world. (I won’t, however, try to make that case here). Leaving to one side the question of whether there might be a necessary link between consciousness and
de se representation, it is certainly very plausible to suppose that
de se structure is an essential feature of our cognitive architecture. A case can be made for thinking that it is retained even in those pathologies of self-consciousness—such as the schizophrenic phenomenon of thought insertion and the dissociative phenomenon of inter-alter access (…)—in which individuals experience aspects of their own mental life as alien in some way. I suggest that what has been lost in such conditions is only the subject’s ability to keep track of their own thoughts and experiences.
We can now see where other approaches to the self go wrong: they assume that there must be some ‘real’ entity that plays the role of the self. The only thing that plays the self role—indeed, perhaps the only thing that
could play the role of the self—is a merely intentional entity. Experiences do indeed have ‘owners’ or ‘bearers’, but the owner of an experience is nothing ‘over and above’ a virtual object—indeed, the very same virtual object around which that experience is structured. ‘I’-thoughts do have referents, but the referent of an I-thought is nothing other than an intentional object. And of course selves have experiential perspectives, but such perspectives are nothing more than the perspectives of intentional objects. Both the naive phenomenalist and the substrate phenomenalist are right to think that selves depend on streams of consciousness, but they conceive of this relationship in overly concrete terms. To identify the self with a stream of consciousness or its underlying substrate is a bit like identifying Hercule Poirot with the novels in which he figures."
(Bayne, Tim.
The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. pp. 289-90)
"Virtual phenomenalism can also account for many of the modal intuitions associated with the self. In the same way that we can make sense of the thought that Poirot might have retired after solving his first crime, so too we can make sense of the thought that one could have had experiences that were very different from those that one has actually had. It should also be clear that virtual phenomenalism can meet the initial objection to phenomenalism—namely, that streams of consciousness are not identical to selves but are ‘had by’ or ‘owned’ by them. In generating a virtual self the cognitive architecture underlying the stream of consciousness also ensures that the self is represented as the owner or bearer of those experiences that are responsible for its very existence. The intentional structure of the phenomenal field leads us to experience ourselves as entities that stand over and against our experiences—as inhabiting the ‘centre’ of a phenomenal field."
(Bayne, Tim.
The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 292)
"A final objection is unique to virtual phenomenalism. The worry is this: if the self is a ‘merely intentional entity’ then doesn’t it follow that it is unreal—that selves don’t
really exist. And not only is the denial of the self of dubious coherence—it is certainly not how virtual phenomenalism was advertised. I said I was going to provide an account of the self, not an account that explained the self
away.
Whether or not this account explains what selves are or whether it instead explains them away depends on just what one is looking for. Although selves are merely intentional there is nonetheless a sense in which self talk is perfectly legitimate. It needn’t be rejected (indeed, I doubt whether it could be rejected), nor need it be legitimized by finding something in consciousness or its underlying substrate that might qualify as its referent, for it needs no such referent. It should not be thought that the self is fictional in the way that Hercule Poirot and other creatures of fiction are. Although Hercule Poirot is a Belgian detective, his name would not appear on a list of Belgian detectives. (And if by chance the name ‘Hercule Poirot’ did appear on such a list it wouldn’t refer to the Hercule Poirot that features in the writings of Agatha Christie.) Hercule Poirot is a fictional Belgian detective, and his mode of existence is to be contrasted with that of real (non-fictional, actual, existent) Belgian detectives. But there is no kind of real self with which our kinds of selves could be contrasted, for it is in the very nature of selves to be virtual. The kinds of selves that we possess are as real as selves get. This kind of reality might not be enough for some, but I think it provides all the reality that we might have reasonably hoped for here. Perhaps more importantly, it provides all the reality that we need."
(Bayne, Tim.
The Unity of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. pp. 292-3)
<QUOTE
QUOTE>
"
Virtual Phenomenalism: For [Tim] Bayne, the “self” is merely an intentional entity, one whose identity is determined by the cognitive architecture underlying the stream of consciousness; a sort of brain architecture that generates a fictitious entity like a character in a novel. So, the “self” is a virtual center of phenomenal gravity. In
de se reference, the “subject” represents itself as itself; conscious states are automatically
de se. Streams of consciousness are constructed around a single intentional object like a narrative is unified around the novel’s main character. So the cognitive architecture underlying your stream of consciousness represents that stream as if it were had by a single self – the virtual object that is “brought into being” by
de se representation.
The cognitive architecture underlying consciousness creates a unifying single subject/center of consciousness as a projected, virtual reality due to the
de se nature of the constructed conscious states. A unified field projects one and only one virtual self. Other approaches go wrong in thinking that there must be a real entity that plays the role of the self, but the self is a mere intentional object (like Zeus?). The self isn’t really real, but self-talk is still “legitimate” like we talk of a character in a novel."
(Moreland, J. P. "Substance Dualism and the Unity of Consciousness." In
The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge, and J. P. Moreland, 184-207. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. pp. 197-8)
<QUOTE
- By Papus79
- By Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
- By iamstephanieejike
- By LuckyR