I find that the best argument against a “self” is that it’s simply unnecessary for any reductionist theory: it doesn’t add any explanatory power, and seems mostly like a folk-psychological construct that Occam’s Razor cuts away neatly, and afterwards our models are much clearer. I take it that you disagree?
Part of the difficulty with tabooing “self” is that tabooing it would require replacing it with a clear definition, but I’m not sure that the concept is coherent enough to have a clear definition. Also, different people mean different things by it.
Anyway, the point isn’t that you wouldn’t exist as a physical entity. You certainly do. Some possible meanings of the no-self claim are:
No-self as the lack of a homunculus: there’s no self in the sense of a unitary “master controller” in the brain that would be active all the time. Rather there are just a variety of modules, with some set of them being active at one time, another set of them at another. E.g. Kurzban & Aktipis in Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-Ish?:
What if there were no unitary self to be “interested,”
“deceived,” “regarded,” “evaluated,” “enhanced,” “verified,”
“protected,” “affirmed,” “controlled,” or even
“esteemed”? If there were no such self, what should we
do with theories such as those that make reference to
self-affirmation (Steele, 1988), self-evaluation (Tesser,
1988), or self-verification (Swann, 1983, 1985)? If there
is no singular “self” that is meaningful in the context of
theories that use this term, it might be time to rethink the
areas of inquiry these theories address (Kurzban &
Aktipis, 2006; Rorty, 1996; Tesser, 2001; see also Katzko,
2003, for a recent discussion).
Here we propose that the ontology of the self is deeply
connected to the issue of the extent to which the mind
is modular, consisting of a large number of functionally
specialized information-processing devices, each of which
processes only a narrow, delimited set of inputs (Barrett
& Kurzban, 2006; Coltheart, 1999; Cosmides & Tooby,
1994; Sperber, 1994). Modular architectures result in
systems that are potentially computationally isolated
from one another. This makes statements about “the”
self problematic—what, precisely, is the referent (Leary,
2004a)?
No-self as the lack of continuity: the teletransportation thought experiment is possibly the best illustration. Suppose that your brain and body are scanned into a computer with perfect resolution and detail (presume, for the sake of argument, that this would be possible). Your original brain and body are then destroyed, with a duplicate being manufactured somewhere else. Were you transported to some other location, or was the original you murdered with a copy manufactured in its place?
The “no-self” view says that if all of your data was perfectly copied and the replica is indeed perfect, then there’s no meaningful way by which you can claim to be different than the “original”, and have no reason not to consent to the operation. The “self view” would say that you should never consent to such an operation, because you get murdered in it, and although an identical copy of you does get constructed, it isn’t you but merely a perfect copy of you. The “no-self” view mutters under its breath that the “self view” seems to be postulating some kind of an intangible soul or something.
The “no-self” view might also claim that even now, the you who is reading these words is a different person than the one who hadn’t yet started reading this comment. Very similar, yes, but your brain now isn’t in the exact same state as it was before: it has changed, and therefore become another person. Even if the teletransporter did kill you, that doesn’t matter, since you get killed and reborn all the time anyway.
The phenomenological no-self. We generally think that experiences are experienced by some specific person. If you could choose between your loved one or a total stranger experiencing some amount of suffering, and your choice would have no other consequences, then all else being even, you would probably prefer that it was somebody else than your loved one who had to suffer. Though maybe if you knew that the stranger had already suffered a lot in their life, you might decide to spare them the suffering, because they’d had enough of it already.
The “no-self as the lack of continuity” view might say that this choice is meaningless, because neither your lover nor the stranger are continuous people—even if the stranger had already suffered a lot, that suffering had been experienced by a huge number of other people, not the one who will suffer the consequences of this decision. But even if your lover wasn’t a single person, but a collection of many closely related ones, you might still choose to care about that collection of closely related people not suffering, in which case the “no-self as a lack of continuity” view wouldn’t be relevant for your decision.
The phenomenological no-self view, however, takes things one step further, and asks what it even means for something to be experienced “by” someone. Yes, an experience is clearly the result of some kind of information-processing happening within an organism, and that information-processing is (in a functional and a physical sense) happening within some particular organism. But what about the phenomenological experience, the qualia of sensory experience—what does it mean that that’s experienced by someone? It would seem to imply that there is a specific observer who observes, for example, sensations of pain. But what, exactly, is that observer? The simplest answer is that there isn’t one—sensory experiences aren’t experienced by anyone in particular, they just happen. Ken Wilber, in No Boundary:
Begin with the sense of hearing. Close your eyes and attend
to the actual process of hearing. Notice all the odd sounds floating
around—birds singing, cars rumbling, crickets chirping, kids laughing,
TV blaring. But with all those sounds, notice that there is one thing
which you cannot hear, no matter how carefully you attend to every
sound. You cannot hear the hearer. That is, in addition to those sounds,
you cannot hear a hearer of those sounds.
You cannot hear a hearer because there isn’t one. What you have
been taught to call a “hearer” is actually just the experience of hearing
itself, and you don’t hear hearing. In reality, there is just a stream of
sounds, and that stream is not split into a subject and an object. There is
no boundary here.
If you let the sensation of being a “hearer” inside the skull dissolve
into hearing itself, you might find your “self” merging with the entire
world of “outside sounds.” As one Zen Master exclaimed upon his enlightenment,
“When I heard the temple hell ring, suddenly there was no
bell and no I, just the ringing.” It was through such an experiment that
Avalokiteshvara is said to have gained his enlightenment, for in
giving awareness to the process of hearing, he realized that there was no
separate self, no hearer, apart from the stream of hearing itself. When
you try to hear the subjective hearer, all you find are objective sounds.
And that means that you do not hear sounds, you are those sounds. The
hearer is every sound which is heard. It is not a separate entity which
stands back and hears hearing.
The same is true of the process of seeing. [...] The more I try to see the seer, the more its absence begins to puzzle
me. For years it seemed perfectly natural to assume that I was the seer
which saw sights. But the moment I go in search of the seer, I find no
trace of it. In fact, if I persist in trying to see the seer, all I find are things
which are seen. This simply means that I, the “seer,” do not see sights—rather I, the “seer,” am identical to all those sights now present. The so-called
seer is nothing other than everything which is seen. If I look at a
tree, there is not one experience called “tree” and another experience
called “seeing the tree.” There is just the single experience of seeing-thetree.
I do not see this seeing any more than I smell smelling or taste
tasting.
It seems that whenever we look for a self apart from experience, it
vanishes into experience. [...] As you are now thinking about this, can you also find a
thinker who is thinking about this?
That is, is there a thinker who thinks the thought, “I am confused,” or
is there just the thought, “I am confused”? Surely there is just the present
thought, because if there were also a thinker of the thought, would you
then think about the thinker who is thinking the thought? It seems
obvious that what we mistakenly believe to be a thinker is really nothing
other than the stream of present thoughts.
Thus, when the present thought was “I am confused,” you were not
at the same time aware of a thinker who was thinking, “I am confused.”
There was just the present thought alone—”I am confused.” When
you then looked for the thinker of that thought, all you found was
another present thought, namely “I am thinking I am confused.” Never
did you find a thinker apart from the present thought, which is only to
say that the two are identical. (More.)
My reading of the meaning of “no-self” is quite like yours. Personally I came to these conclusions through the phenomenological frame you summarize here. A phenomenological understanding of the phenomena described by the term “no-self” is crucial in getting to the true meaning of that term, in my opinion. The mediated understanding we can glean through conversation on this topic, though valuable, does not really get us closer to the meaning of that phrase. This is probably due to the structure of our language and it’s assumption of a self/actor, that has and does things.
I don’t really think it’s possible to grasp the concept outside of phenomenological investigation.
I’d like to add also something you braced with the “lack of continuity” of self. Lack of essential nature to self. When we consider all the things we think of as constituting “self” as relative phenomena devoid of essential nature, the argument for self is harder to buttress.
(Posting this as a separate comment, since adding it to my other one would make it too long)
Note that in each case, the “no-self” view is really more of an antiprediction than a prediction—it only says that some postulated “self” (either in the form of a central controller, some mysterious immaterial essence that you have but a copy of you doesn’t have, or some observer entity that is separate from what is observed) doesn’t exist, because we have no reason to presume that it exists. People tend to assume a self by default, and ask for evidence for why one wouldn’t exist, but to do so is to privilege the hypothesis. A supporter of a “self view” should provide some coherent definition of a self first, and then some evidence for postulating one in the first place.
I think I was able to understand the first two, but the third one just seems to be asserting (unconvincingly: why should a hearer, if it exists, be able to hear itself?) that we are all p-zombies. I’m pretty damn sure that I, as a conscious, introspective, qualia-having, thinking entity, exist, and that is because I have an awareness of myself, and I do not accept that things that don’t exist could have properties such as ‘awareness of self’.
I obviously and definitely exist, because nonexistent entities can’t do the things that I do.
To assert that we are p-zombies was not the intention. You could shoot a p-zombie without causing any suffering, but you will certainly (even under the third theory) cause suffering if you shoot somebody.
Let me try to condense the third one into a few short sentences, and see if that helps convey the underlying intuition better: “Brains implement cognitive algorithms, which upon being run, produce qualia. But these qualia are not observed by any particular person—to the extent that they can be said to be observed in the first place, they ‘observe themselves’ and then vanish.”
To elaborate a little on that: if a qualia was observed by somebody, that implies that that person would experience the qualia of observing a qualia. And since qualias were presumed to be observed by someone, somebody would then have to observe the qualia of observing a qualia of observing a qualia… leading to an infinite regress. The only way (it seems to me) for that regress to bottom out is by positing that qualia aren’t observed by anyone—they just are.
That makes a bit more sense, but I still disagree. We don’t have any problems with infinite regresses elsewhere that require such drastic denials of our own existence. I can think about a thing, and then I can think about thinking about the thing, and then I can think about doing that, and so on. But we don’t feel compelled to say “actually the thinking is happening without anything doing it” to rectify this. The infinite regress doesn’t seem to cause any problems, and in that case it’s an actual infinite regress occurring in my brain, not just a semantic infinite regress occurring in our definitions of ‘qualia’.
It seems like the problem can be just as easily solved by saying that the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself. Why should they need to be separate? You experience the sensation of redness, and the experience of experiencing that sensation of redness is precisely the experience of the sensation of redness.
I can think about a thing, and then I can think about thinking about the thing, and then I can think about doing that, and so on.
But that’s not an actual infinite regress—you can go up however many levels you like, but it’s still a finite number.
It seems like the problem can be just as easily solved by saying that the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself. Why should they need to be separate? You experience the sensation of redness, and the experience of experiencing that sensation of redness is precisely the experience of the sensation of redness.
I’m not sure how your “the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself” is different from my “a qualia observes itself”.
I’m not sure how your “the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself” is different from my “a qualia observes itself”.
The difference, I think, is that there is an observer having the qualia, rather than just a qualia happening by itself without a qualia-haver to have it.
This is starting to feel very nebulous and free-floaty. I feel like the words we are using are not locking on very strongly to robust concepts in my mind. It may not be a productive line of discussion.
This is starting to feel very nebulous and free-floaty. I feel like the words we are using are not locking on very strongly to robust concepts in my mind. It may not be a productive line of discussion.
Agreed—I’m not even sure whether we actually disagree or are just using different terminology.
I find that the best argument against a “self” is that it’s simply unnecessary for any reductionist theory: it doesn’t add any explanatory power, and seems mostly like a folk-psychological construct that Occam’s Razor cuts away neatly, and afterwards our models are much clearer. I take it that you disagree?
Can we taboo ‘self’? I think I might be working with an incorrect model of what it is, exactly, that you are asserting.
I’m finding it difficult, without positing the existence of myself, to explain some of my observations. For example: all of them.
Part of the difficulty with tabooing “self” is that tabooing it would require replacing it with a clear definition, but I’m not sure that the concept is coherent enough to have a clear definition. Also, different people mean different things by it.
Anyway, the point isn’t that you wouldn’t exist as a physical entity. You certainly do. Some possible meanings of the no-self claim are:
No-self as the lack of a homunculus: there’s no self in the sense of a unitary “master controller” in the brain that would be active all the time. Rather there are just a variety of modules, with some set of them being active at one time, another set of them at another. E.g. Kurzban & Aktipis in Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-Ish?:
See also TEDxYouth@Manchester 2011 - Julian Baggini—Is There A Real You? for a related view.
No-self as the lack of continuity: the teletransportation thought experiment is possibly the best illustration. Suppose that your brain and body are scanned into a computer with perfect resolution and detail (presume, for the sake of argument, that this would be possible). Your original brain and body are then destroyed, with a duplicate being manufactured somewhere else. Were you transported to some other location, or was the original you murdered with a copy manufactured in its place?
The “no-self” view says that if all of your data was perfectly copied and the replica is indeed perfect, then there’s no meaningful way by which you can claim to be different than the “original”, and have no reason not to consent to the operation. The “self view” would say that you should never consent to such an operation, because you get murdered in it, and although an identical copy of you does get constructed, it isn’t you but merely a perfect copy of you. The “no-self” view mutters under its breath that the “self view” seems to be postulating some kind of an intangible soul or something.
The “no-self” view might also claim that even now, the you who is reading these words is a different person than the one who hadn’t yet started reading this comment. Very similar, yes, but your brain now isn’t in the exact same state as it was before: it has changed, and therefore become another person. Even if the teletransporter did kill you, that doesn’t matter, since you get killed and reborn all the time anyway.
The phenomenological no-self. We generally think that experiences are experienced by some specific person. If you could choose between your loved one or a total stranger experiencing some amount of suffering, and your choice would have no other consequences, then all else being even, you would probably prefer that it was somebody else than your loved one who had to suffer. Though maybe if you knew that the stranger had already suffered a lot in their life, you might decide to spare them the suffering, because they’d had enough of it already.
The “no-self as the lack of continuity” view might say that this choice is meaningless, because neither your lover nor the stranger are continuous people—even if the stranger had already suffered a lot, that suffering had been experienced by a huge number of other people, not the one who will suffer the consequences of this decision. But even if your lover wasn’t a single person, but a collection of many closely related ones, you might still choose to care about that collection of closely related people not suffering, in which case the “no-self as a lack of continuity” view wouldn’t be relevant for your decision.
The phenomenological no-self view, however, takes things one step further, and asks what it even means for something to be experienced “by” someone. Yes, an experience is clearly the result of some kind of information-processing happening within an organism, and that information-processing is (in a functional and a physical sense) happening within some particular organism. But what about the phenomenological experience, the qualia of sensory experience—what does it mean that that’s experienced by someone? It would seem to imply that there is a specific observer who observes, for example, sensations of pain. But what, exactly, is that observer? The simplest answer is that there isn’t one—sensory experiences aren’t experienced by anyone in particular, they just happen. Ken Wilber, in No Boundary:
(I subscribe to all of these no-self views.)
Kaj_Sotala
My reading of the meaning of “no-self” is quite like yours. Personally I came to these conclusions through the phenomenological frame you summarize here. A phenomenological understanding of the phenomena described by the term “no-self” is crucial in getting to the true meaning of that term, in my opinion. The mediated understanding we can glean through conversation on this topic, though valuable, does not really get us closer to the meaning of that phrase. This is probably due to the structure of our language and it’s assumption of a self/actor, that has and does things. I don’t really think it’s possible to grasp the concept outside of phenomenological investigation.
I’d like to add also something you braced with the “lack of continuity” of self. Lack of essential nature to self. When we consider all the things we think of as constituting “self” as relative phenomena devoid of essential nature, the argument for self is harder to buttress.
(Posting this as a separate comment, since adding it to my other one would make it too long)
Note that in each case, the “no-self” view is really more of an antiprediction than a prediction—it only says that some postulated “self” (either in the form of a central controller, some mysterious immaterial essence that you have but a copy of you doesn’t have, or some observer entity that is separate from what is observed) doesn’t exist, because we have no reason to presume that it exists. People tend to assume a self by default, and ask for evidence for why one wouldn’t exist, but to do so is to privilege the hypothesis. A supporter of a “self view” should provide some coherent definition of a self first, and then some evidence for postulating one in the first place.
I think I was able to understand the first two, but the third one just seems to be asserting (unconvincingly: why should a hearer, if it exists, be able to hear itself?) that we are all p-zombies. I’m pretty damn sure that I, as a conscious, introspective, qualia-having, thinking entity, exist, and that is because I have an awareness of myself, and I do not accept that things that don’t exist could have properties such as ‘awareness of self’.
I obviously and definitely exist, because nonexistent entities can’t do the things that I do.
To assert that we are p-zombies was not the intention. You could shoot a p-zombie without causing any suffering, but you will certainly (even under the third theory) cause suffering if you shoot somebody.
Let me try to condense the third one into a few short sentences, and see if that helps convey the underlying intuition better: “Brains implement cognitive algorithms, which upon being run, produce qualia. But these qualia are not observed by any particular person—to the extent that they can be said to be observed in the first place, they ‘observe themselves’ and then vanish.”
To elaborate a little on that: if a qualia was observed by somebody, that implies that that person would experience the qualia of observing a qualia. And since qualias were presumed to be observed by someone, somebody would then have to observe the qualia of observing a qualia of observing a qualia… leading to an infinite regress. The only way (it seems to me) for that regress to bottom out is by positing that qualia aren’t observed by anyone—they just are.
That makes a bit more sense, but I still disagree. We don’t have any problems with infinite regresses elsewhere that require such drastic denials of our own existence. I can think about a thing, and then I can think about thinking about the thing, and then I can think about doing that, and so on. But we don’t feel compelled to say “actually the thinking is happening without anything doing it” to rectify this. The infinite regress doesn’t seem to cause any problems, and in that case it’s an actual infinite regress occurring in my brain, not just a semantic infinite regress occurring in our definitions of ‘qualia’.
It seems like the problem can be just as easily solved by saying that the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself. Why should they need to be separate? You experience the sensation of redness, and the experience of experiencing that sensation of redness is precisely the experience of the sensation of redness.
experience[experience[redness]] = experience[redness]
But that’s not an actual infinite regress—you can go up however many levels you like, but it’s still a finite number.
I’m not sure how your “the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself” is different from my “a qualia observes itself”.
The difference, I think, is that there is an observer having the qualia, rather than just a qualia happening by itself without a qualia-haver to have it.
This is starting to feel very nebulous and free-floaty. I feel like the words we are using are not locking on very strongly to robust concepts in my mind. It may not be a productive line of discussion.
Agreed—I’m not even sure whether we actually disagree or are just using different terminology.