It’s illustrating the thing from psychology where your conscious self (the “you” in “you are” here) often seems to be more about making up narratives about why you do things you somewhat unconsciously decide to do, rather than fully consciously deciding to do what you do.
It’s not terribly obvious normally, but scary stuff happens when you get a suitable type of brain damage. Instead of necessarily going “hm, my introspective faculties seem to be damaged and I’m doing weird stuff for no reason I can ascertain”, people often start happily explaining why it is an excellent idea for the king of the brain who has been replaced with a zombie robot during the brain damage to start lumbering around moaning loudly and smashing things at random.
Yvain’s post The Apologist and the Revolutionary from a couple of years ago had some fascinating and mind-boggling discussion of other bizarre things that result from particular brain damage.
FWIW I find the quote kind of weird, as well. I don’t think it’s referring to dualism, but I can’t figure out what it does mean.
It’s illustrating the thing from psychology where your conscious self (the “you” in “you are” here) often seems to be more about making up narratives about why you do things you somewhat unconsciously decide to do, rather than fully consciously deciding to do what you do.
It’s not terribly obvious normally, but scary stuff happens when you get a suitable type of brain damage. Instead of necessarily going “hm, my introspective faculties seem to be damaged and I’m doing weird stuff for no reason I can ascertain”, people often start happily explaining why it is an excellent idea for the king of the brain who has been replaced with a zombie robot during the brain damage to start lumbering around moaning loudly and smashing things at random.
Yvain’s post The Apologist and the Revolutionary from a couple of years ago had some fascinating and mind-boggling discussion of other bizarre things that result from particular brain damage.