I think that’s closer to what I was trying to get across. Does that edit change anything in your response?
No.
Overall, I would say that my self-concept is closer to what a physicalist ontology implies is mundanely happening—a neural network, lacking a singular ‘self’ entity inside it, receiving sense data from sensors and able to output commands to this strange, alien vessel (body). (And also I only identify myself with some parts of the non-mechanistic-level description of what the neural network is doing).
I write in a lot more detail below. This isn’t necessarily written at you in particular, or with the expectation of you reading through all of it.
1. Non-belief in self-as-body (A)
I see two kinds of self-as-body belief. The first is looking in a mirror, or at a photo, and thinking, “that [body] is me.” The second is controlling the body, and having a sense that you’re the one moving it, or more strongly, that it is moving because it is you (and you are choosing to move).
I’ll write about my experiences with the second kind first.
The way a finger automatically withdraws from heat does not feel like a part of me in any sense. Yesterday, I accidentally dropped a utensil and my hands automatically snapped into place around it somehow, and I thought something like, “woah, I didn’t intend to do that. I guess it’s a highly optimized narrow heuristic, from times where reacting so quickly was helpful to survival”.
I experimented a bit between writing this, and I noticed one intuitive view I can have of the body is that it’s some kind of machine that automatically follows such simple intents about the physical world (including intents that I don’t consider ‘me’, like high fear of spiders). For example, if I have motivation and intent to open a window, then the body just automatically moves to it and opens it without me really noticing that the body itself (or more precisely, the body plus the non-me nervous/neural structure controlling it) is the thing doing that—it’s kind of like I’m a ghost (or abstract mind) with telekinesis powers (over nearby objects), but then we apply reductive physics and find that actually there’s a causal chain beneath the telekinesis involving a moving body (which I always know and can see, I just don’t usually think about it).
The way my hands are moving on the keyboard as I write this also doesn’t particularly feel like it’s me doing that; in my mind, I’m just willing the text to be written, and then the movement happens on its own, in a way that feels kind of alien if I actually focus on it (as if the hands are their own life form).
That said, this isn’t always true. I do have an ‘embodied self-sense’ sometimes. For example, I usually fall asleep cuddling stuffies because this makes me happy. At least some purposeful form of sense-of-embodiment seems present there, because the concept of cuddling has embodiment as an assumption.[1]
(As I read over the above, I wonder how different it really is from normal human experience. I’m guessing there’s a subtle difference between “being so embodied it becomes a basic implicit assumption that you don’t notice” and “being so nonembodied that noticing it feels like [reductive physics metaphor]”)
As for the first kind mentioned of locating oneself in the body’s appearance, which informs typical humans perception of others and themself—I don’t experience this with regard to myself (and try to avoid being biased about others this way), instead I just feel pretty dissociated when I see my body reflected and mostly ignore it.
In the past, it instead felt actively stressful/impossible/horrifying, because I had (and to an extent still do have) a deep intuition that I am already a ‘particular kind of being’, and, under the self-as-body ontology, this is expected to correspond to a particular kind of body, one which I did not observe reflected back. As this basic sense-of-self violation happened repeatedly, it gradually eroded away this aspect of sense-of-self / the embodied ontology.
I’d also feel alienated if I had to pilot an adult body to interact with others, so I’ve set up my life such that I only minimally need to do that (e.g for doctors appointments) and can otherwise just interact with the world through text.
2. What parts of the mind-brain are me, and what am I? (B)
I think there’s an extent to which I self-model as an ‘inner homunculus’, or a ‘singular-self inside’. I think it’s lesser and not as robust in me as it is in typical humans, though. For example, when I reflect on this word ‘I’ that I keep using, I notice it has a meaning that doesn’t feel very true of me: the meaning of a singular, unified entity, rather than multiple inner cognitive processes, or no self in particular.
I often notice my thoughts are coming from different parts of the mind. In one case, I was feeling bad about not having been productive enough in learning/generating insights and I thought to myself, “I need to do better”, and then felt aware that it was just one lone part thinking this while the rest doesn’t feel moved; the rest instead culminates into a different inner-monologue-thought: something like, “but we always need to do better. tsuyoku naratai is a universal impetus.” (to be clear, this is not from a different identity or character, but from different neural processes causally prior to what is thought (or written).)
And when I’m writing (which forces us to ‘collapse’ our subverbal understanding into one text), it’s noticeable how much a potential statement is endorsed by different present influences[2].
I tend to use words like ‘I’ and ‘me’ in writing to not confuse others (internally, ‘we’ can feel more fitting, referring again to multiple inner processes[2], and not to multiple high-level selves as some humans experience. ‘we’ is often naturally present in our inner monologue). We’ll use this language for most of the rest of the text[3].
There are times where this is less true. Our mind can return to acting as a human-singular-identity-player in some contexts. For example, if we’re interacting with someone or multiple others, that can push us towards performing a ‘self’ (but unless it’s someone we intuitively-trust and relatively private, we tend to feel alienated/stressed from this). Or if we’re, for example, playing a game with a friend, then in those moments we’ll probably be drawn back into a more childlike humanistic self-ontology rather than the dissociated posthumanism we describe here.
Also, we want to answer “what inner processes?”—there’s some division between parts of the mind-brain we refer to here, and parts that are the ‘structure’ we’re embedded in. We’re not quite sure how to write down the line, and it might be fuzzy or e.g contextual.[4]
3. Tracing the intuitive-ontology shift
“Why are you this way, and have you always been this way?” – We haven’t always. We think this is the result of a gradual erosion of the ‘default’ human ontology, mentioned once above.
We think this mostly did not come from something like ‘believing in physicalism’. Most physicalists aren’t like this. Ontological crises may have been part of it, though—independently synthesizing determinism as a child and realizing it made naive free will impossible sure did make past-child-quila depressed.
We think the strongest sources came from ‘intuitive-ontological’[5] incompatibilities, ways the observations seemed to sadly-contradict the platonicself-ontology we started with. Another term for these would be ‘survival updates’. This can also include ways one’s starting ontology was inadequate to explain certain important observations.
Also, I think that existing so often in a digital-informational context[6], and only infrequently in an analog/physical context, also contributed to eroding the self-as-body belief.
Also, eventually, it wasn’t just erosion/survival updates; at some point, I think I slowly started to embrace this posthumanist ontology, too. It feels narratively fitting that I’m now thinking about artificial intelligence and reading LessWrong.
(There is some sense in which maybe, my proclaimed ontology has its source in constant dissociation, which I only don’t experience when feeling especially comfortable/safe. I’m only speculating, though—this is the kind of thing that I’d consider leaving out, since I’m really unsure about it, it’s at the level of just one of many passing thoughts I’d consider.)
This ‘inner proccesses’ phrasing I keep using doesn’t feel quite right. Other words that come to mind: considerations? currently-active neural subnetworks? subagents? some kind of neural council metaphor?
(sometimes ‘we’ feels unfitting too, it’s weird, maybe ‘I’ is for when a self is being more-performed, or when text is less representative of the whole, hard to say)
We tried to point to some rough differences, but realized that the level we mean is somewhere between high-level concepts with words (like ‘general/narrow cognition’ and ‘altruism’ and ‘biases’) and the lowest-level description (i.e how actual neurons are interacting physically), and that we don’t know how to write about this.
We can differentiate between an endorsed ‘whole-world ontology’ like physicalism, and smaller-scale intuitive ontologies that are more like intuitive frames we seem to believe in, even if when asked we’ll say they’re not fundamental truths.
The intuitive ontology of the self is particularly central to humans.
Note this was mostly downstream of other factors, not causally prior to them. I don’t want anyone to read this and think internet use itself causes body-self incongruence, though it might avoid certain related feedback loops.
No.
Overall, I would say that my self-concept is closer to what a physicalist ontology implies is mundanely happening—a neural network, lacking a singular ‘self’ entity inside it, receiving sense data from sensors and able to output commands to this strange, alien vessel (body). (And also I only identify myself with some parts of the non-mechanistic-level description of what the neural network is doing).
I write in a lot more detail below. This isn’t necessarily written at you in particular, or with the expectation of you reading through all of it.
1. Non-belief in self-as-body (A)
I see two kinds of self-as-body belief. The first is looking in a mirror, or at a photo, and thinking, “that [body] is me.” The second is controlling the body, and having a sense that you’re the one moving it, or more strongly, that it is moving because it is you (and you are choosing to move).
I’ll write about my experiences with the second kind first.
The way a finger automatically withdraws from heat does not feel like a part of me in any sense. Yesterday, I accidentally dropped a utensil and my hands automatically snapped into place around it somehow, and I thought something like, “woah, I didn’t intend to do that. I guess it’s a highly optimized narrow heuristic, from times where reacting so quickly was helpful to survival”.
I experimented a bit between writing this, and I noticed one intuitive view I can have of the body is that it’s some kind of machine that automatically follows such simple intents about the physical world (including intents that I don’t consider ‘me’, like high fear of spiders). For example, if I have motivation and intent to open a window, then the body just automatically moves to it and opens it without me really noticing that the body itself (or more precisely, the body plus the non-me nervous/neural structure controlling it) is the thing doing that—it’s kind of like I’m a ghost (or abstract mind) with telekinesis powers (over nearby objects), but then we apply reductive physics and find that actually there’s a causal chain beneath the telekinesis involving a moving body (which I always know and can see, I just don’t usually think about it).
The way my hands are moving on the keyboard as I write this also doesn’t particularly feel like it’s me doing that; in my mind, I’m just willing the text to be written, and then the movement happens on its own, in a way that feels kind of alien if I actually focus on it (as if the hands are their own life form).
That said, this isn’t always true. I do have an ‘embodied self-sense’ sometimes. For example, I usually fall asleep cuddling stuffies because this makes me happy. At least some purposeful form of sense-of-embodiment seems present there, because the concept of cuddling has embodiment as an assumption.[1]
(As I read over the above, I wonder how different it really is from normal human experience. I’m guessing there’s a subtle difference between “being so embodied it becomes a basic implicit assumption that you don’t notice” and “being so nonembodied that noticing it feels like [reductive physics metaphor]”)
As for the first kind mentioned of locating oneself in the body’s appearance, which informs typical humans perception of others and themself—I don’t experience this with regard to myself (and try to avoid being biased about others this way), instead I just feel pretty dissociated when I see my body reflected and mostly ignore it.
In the past, it instead felt actively stressful/impossible/horrifying, because I had (and to an extent still do have) a deep intuition that I am already a ‘particular kind of being’, and, under the self-as-body ontology, this is expected to correspond to a particular kind of body, one which I did not observe reflected back. As this basic sense-of-self violation happened repeatedly, it gradually eroded away this aspect of sense-of-self / the embodied ontology.
I’d also feel alienated if I had to pilot an adult body to interact with others, so I’ve set up my life such that I only minimally need to do that (e.g for doctors appointments) and can otherwise just interact with the world through text.
2. What parts of the mind-brain are me, and what am I? (B)
I think there’s an extent to which I self-model as an ‘inner homunculus’, or a ‘singular-self inside’. I think it’s lesser and not as robust in me as it is in typical humans, though. For example, when I reflect on this word ‘I’ that I keep using, I notice it has a meaning that doesn’t feel very true of me: the meaning of a singular, unified entity, rather than multiple inner cognitive processes, or no self in particular.
I often notice my thoughts are coming from different parts of the mind. In one case, I was feeling bad about not having been productive enough in learning/generating insights and I thought to myself, “I need to do better”, and then felt aware that it was just one lone part thinking this while the rest doesn’t feel moved; the rest instead culminates into a different inner-monologue-thought: something like, “but we always need to do better. tsuyoku naratai is a universal impetus.” (to be clear, this is not from a different identity or character, but from different neural processes causally prior to what is thought (or written).)
And when I’m writing (which forces us to ‘collapse’ our subverbal understanding into one text), it’s noticeable how much a potential statement is endorsed by different present influences[2].
I tend to use words like ‘I’ and ‘me’ in writing to not confuse others (internally, ‘we’ can feel more fitting, referring again to multiple inner processes[2], and not to multiple high-level selves as some humans experience. ‘we’ is often naturally present in our inner monologue). We’ll use this language for most of the rest of the text[3].
There are times where this is less true. Our mind can return to acting as a human-singular-identity-player in some contexts. For example, if we’re interacting with someone or multiple others, that can push us towards performing a ‘self’ (but unless it’s someone we intuitively-trust and relatively private, we tend to feel alienated/stressed from this). Or if we’re, for example, playing a game with a friend, then in those moments we’ll probably be drawn back into a more childlike humanistic self-ontology rather than the dissociated posthumanism we describe here.
Also, we want to answer “what inner processes?”—there’s some division between parts of the mind-brain we refer to here, and parts that are the ‘structure’ we’re embedded in. We’re not quite sure how to write down the line, and it might be fuzzy or e.g contextual.[4]
3. Tracing the intuitive-ontology shift
“Why are you this way, and have you always been this way?” – We haven’t always. We think this is the result of a gradual erosion of the ‘default’ human ontology, mentioned once above.
We think this mostly did not come from something like ‘believing in physicalism’. Most physicalists aren’t like this. Ontological crises may have been part of it, though—independently synthesizing determinism as a child and realizing it made naive free will impossible sure did make past-child-quila depressed.
We think the strongest sources came from ‘intuitive-ontological’[5] incompatibilities, ways the observations seemed to sadly-contradict the platonic self-ontology we started with. Another term for these would be ‘survival updates’. This can also include ways one’s starting ontology was inadequate to explain certain important observations.
Also, I think that existing so often in a digital-informational context[6], and only infrequently in an analog/physical context, also contributed to eroding the self-as-body belief.
Also, eventually, it wasn’t just erosion/survival updates; at some point, I think I slowly started to embrace this posthumanist ontology, too. It feels narratively fitting that I’m now thinking about artificial intelligence and reading LessWrong.
(There is some sense in which maybe, my proclaimed ontology has its source in constant dissociation, which I only don’t experience when feeling especially comfortable/safe. I’m only speculating, though—this is the kind of thing that I’d consider leaving out, since I’m really unsure about it, it’s at the level of just one of many passing thoughts I’d consider.)
This ‘inner proccesses’ phrasing I keep using doesn’t feel quite right. Other words that come to mind: considerations? currently-active neural subnetworks? subagents? some kind of neural council metaphor?
(sometimes ‘we’ feels unfitting too, it’s weird, maybe ‘I’ is for when a self is being more-performed, or when text is less representative of the whole, hard to say)
We tried to point to some rough differences, but realized that the level we mean is somewhere between high-level concepts with words (like ‘general/narrow cognition’ and ‘altruism’ and ‘biases’) and the lowest-level description (i.e how actual neurons are interacting physically), and that we don’t know how to write about this.
We can differentiate between an endorsed ‘whole-world ontology’ like physicalism, and smaller-scale intuitive ontologies that are more like intuitive frames we seem to believe in, even if when asked we’ll say they’re not fundamental truths.
The intuitive ontology of the self is particularly central to humans.
Note this was mostly downstream of other factors, not causally prior to them. I don’t want anyone to read this and think internet use itself causes body-self incongruence, though it might avoid certain related feedback loops.