Archive for the ‘self-concern’ Category
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011
In the last chapter of Being No One, Thomas Metzinger addresses the questions with which he introduced the book, a list that includes:
What is phenomenal selfhood? What, precisely, is the nonconceptual sense of ownership going along with the phenomenal experience of selfhood, or of “being someone”?
In the discussion, he makes a striking comment related to the reality of the self. If the phenomenal self-model (PSM) is “of a nonhallucinatory kind”:
…the system then represents certain aspects of reality as being parts of itself, and it does so correctly. What it achieves is not only self-experience but self-knowledge. (Metzinger 2004, p 607)
In reading this passage, I wondered how Metzinger can reconcile it with his claim that ‘no such things as selves exist in the world.’ Here he says that the system represents itself to itself by means of its PSM, and that it does so “correctly.” Metzinger certainly admits that systems exist. Are we not, then, such systems? (more…)
Posted in dissolution of self, Metzinger, morality, phantom limb, phenomenal self-model, PSM, Ramachandran, rubber hand illusion, self interest, self-concern, Self-Model Theory | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
O
ur brains represent ourselves, to ourselves, by means of a Phenomenal Self-Model (PSM). According to Thomas Metzinger, the PSM is characterized by transparency, and a phenomenal quality of ‘mineness.’ Its transparency consists in our unawareness of it as a model. We look and act ‘right through it’ – we take our models for our real selves. ‘Mineness’ is a quality that infuses all of our experience which we take to be experience of ourselves. Although Metzinger uses the terms “mineness” and “ownership,” it is more than an experience of ownership. I think “me-ness” aptly captures what Metzinger is after. (more…)
Posted in anarchic hand, blindsight, consciousness, Cotard's, Dennett, dissolution of self, evolution, Hume, Metzinger, neuroscience, personal identity, phenomenal self-model, PMIR, PSM, Ramachandran, rubber hand illusion, self-concern | 5 Comments »
Monday, October 18th, 2010
Our investments in the future do not stop paying dividends when we die. Other beneficiaries may cash the cheques, but that does not represent a loss to ourselves, because our connections to them are not fundamentally different from our connections to ourselves during our remainder of our lifetimes. In that way, it’s as though someone else always cashes the cheques.
In practice, this means we need not hold all our future eggs in one basket. We have no reason to invest only in ourselves. It is no less rational to work towards goals that benefit other people, or the non-human world, than it is to work for our own benefit. They may be goals for places far outside our homes, and for times following our personal deaths. We can commit ourselves to goals at future times when there will be no one alive for whom we now feel full-blown self-concern. Like Terry Fox, we can engage with a future in which we will no longer exist. (more…)
Posted in death, morality, motivation, Parfit, psychology, self, self interest, self-concern, unselfishness | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
I am always skeptical of claims that humans are unique. The facts that we use tools, and clothes, and language, have failed to differentiate us from other species. The more we learn about nature, the less well defined seem to be the boundaries between natural domains.
Avoiding sweeping generalizations, I will still say that the human species has gone further than others in some directions, including preoccupation with the future and awareness of death. I doubt my cat Charlie thinks further ahead than his next meal, and not even that far when his belly is full. Charlie lives in the day, and in the hour: he hunts with ferocious intensity, and sleeps soundly afterwards. I, in contrast, devote most of my energy to projects which may not yield results for weeks or years, results which in some cases (like the Phantom Self project) are highly uncertain. Charlie lives mainly in the scene of his immediate experience; I concern myself mainly with the future portrayed in my imagination. Charlie’s experience is, by and large, an accurate representation of the world he lives in; but the future events I imagine are often very different from events in the real future, as it finally turns out.
As early as young adulthood, some people feel a need to plan their entire lives. Our society encourages them: to choose a career path, for example, that will finance a mortgage. Before young people have paid off their student loans, ads exhort them to start saving for retirement. Careful planning for the future is praised as prudent behaviour.
Such prudent planning allowed our ancestors to make the transition from roving bands of hunter-gatherers to settled agrarian societies – a transition that presaged a population explosion and the beginning of human dominance of this planet. Success in farming required thinking about next year. Migration to colder climates would have been impossible without the ability to think things through: to preserve and tan the hides of slaughtered animals with the intention of making clothes and footwear; to collect stones and sods in summer in order to build shelters for the coming winter. Natural selection favoured the species – ours – with the greatest ability to plan for the long term. And so it has continued to this day: our powerful imaginations allow us to coordinate our efforts, invent, design, and build, anticipate potential disasters and sometimes successfully avoid them. Being so preoccupied with our futures leads inevitably to thinking about our deaths. (more…)
Posted in afterlife, anticipation, death, Hazlitt, human replication, motivation, Parfit, personal identity, religion, self interest, self-concern, Williams | 1 Comment »
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. – William Hazlitt
As early as 1796, when he was just eighteen, the English essayist William Hazlitt may have become the first Westerner to see that self-concern is not rationally required.
Hazlitt published his insight in 1805, in his Essays on the Principles of Human Action. Introducing the 1990 edition, John Price informs us that “The reading public and the reviewing journals regarded it, for the most part, with indifference or hostility.” Hazlitt’s Essays and the idea they contain fell into obscurity for the best part of two centuries, after which the idea re-emerged independently as part of a new wave of thought about personal identity (more…)
Posted in anticipation, Barresi, Hazlitt, human replication, morality, motivation, Nozick, Parfit, personal identity, Raymond Martin, self interest, self-concern | No Comments »
Friday, August 27th, 2010
In the previous post, I asked what is the difference between having a painful experience myself and feeling sympathy for someone else’s pain. The answer seems pretty clear. My experience of my own pain is neurologically ‘hard-wired’, but there is no direct neural connection between other persons and myself which exposes me to their pain. Things could have been different. If we, like the Na’vi of the movie Avatar, had the physiological equivalent of USB-ports which allowed us to connect our nervous systems at will, then we could experience the pains, pleasures, and other sensations of other people while we were connected to them. The ‘privacy’ of our minds is an anatomical limitation, not a metaphysical necessity.
A parallel question can be asked about future experience. What is the difference between anticipating my own pain and having sympathy for a friend whose pain I can foresee? As in the case of present pain, there is a vivid difference in my experience between anticipating having pain, and expecting you to have pain. There is nothing resembling a direct neural connection between myself, now, and myself in the future, to explain this difference. Nevertheless, neuroscience can help us understand it: why it is so vivid, why expectation of my own pain makes me anxious rather than just sympathetically concerned, why foreseeing pain in my own future feels like an unavoidable problem for me in a way that foreseeing your pain does not.
Another difference is that sympathy for others, unlike self-concern, seems at least partially under conscious control. When we feel we cannot afford it, we tend to dial it down or switch it off altogether. It feels optional, in contrast to the sense of unavoidability that clings to self-concern.
In his book, Hardwired Behaviour, Laurence Tancredi of the New York University School of Medicine offers some clues to an answer from a neurological perspective. The engine of self-concern is a cyclical interaction between the limbic system, which generates our emotions (giving emotional ‘meaning’ to experience), and the prefrontal cortex, which makes plans and decisions. (more…)
Posted in anticipation, Avatar, Bechara, Damasio, Elizabeth Phelps, human fusion, life insurance, motivation, neuroscience, personal identity, Picard, Raymond Martin, self, self interest, self-concern, Tancredi, teleportation | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
We are strongly motivated to promote the interests of anyone for whom we feel self-concern. We are moved to prevent that person’s suffering, to work towards his or her well-being. Motivation seems part of self-concern’s essential core.
A focus on motivation suggests that self-concern is primarily future-directed. We know we cannot change the past, and do not normally try. But of course, our attitudes towards the past, as well as the future, are infected with self-concern. Most events I remember in my own past are coloured by pride or shame, personal joy or pain. Most of my memories of my own life have associated emotions which are qualitatively distinct from my memories of other people’s lives, and of events to which I had no personal connection.
Our mental models of reality include both past and future. We imagine both (not always accurately). But the imagined past is labelled, in our models, as fixed, beyond help. The imagined future (and there are many) is flagged as possible. The past is manifest, fixed, immutable. The future is unmanifest, mutable, a realm of possibilities not actualities. The ‘flow of time’ might be described as the production of the actual from the possible. (more…)
Posted in anticipation, Avatar, morality, motivation, personal identity, philosophy, Raymond Martin, self interest, self-concern | No Comments »
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
The story of Jerry and May (“Coed”) should give pause to anyone who invests all his or her self-concern in psychological continuity and connectedness.
To summarize the plot: Jerry, a 40-year-old neuroscientist, is diagnosed with devastating rapid-onset dementia, a prospect which he regards as equivalent to death. To save himself, he hits on the plan of copying his psychological attributes to the brain of a graduate student, a young woman named May. The copying process ‘reads’ his brain-states and ‘writes’ them to her brain, effectively reproducing his memories, abilities, personality, and other psychological dispositions.
Sticklers would regard this as a breach of academic ethics. But Jerry, although manifestly self-centred, is not without a conscience. The process he employs does not damage May’s psychology; instead, it takes advantage of redundant capacity in her brain to add his psychological attributes to her own.
Before the mental merger takes place, Jerry sees transference of his psychological attributes to May as a way to escape the fate of his disease. He anticipates having a future in May’s body, which he expects to share with May herself.
The procedure works according to plan. When they wake up, the personalities of both May and Jerry are recognizably present in May’s body. All is not smooth sailing – May and Jerry find themselves in competition for motor control of a single body. In order to act effectively, they must cooperate. Sometimes the best way is for one to sit back passively and ‘let the other drive.’
But it is not an equal relationship – Jerry is at a distinct disadvantage. May is at home in her body, and perfectly competent to manage it, but Jerry finds it foreign and difficult. When he planned his transformation, he failed to anticipate the full impact of the physical dissimilarity it entailed: the sex change, the reduced physical stature, the girlish voice, loss of the gravitas that society concedes to the mature. With May’s body, Jerry is more awkward than a pubescent teen. (more…)
Posted in death, human fusion, mind transplant, personal identity, philosophy fiction, self interest, self-concern, thought experiment | No Comments »
Monday, June 14th, 2010
This is episode 2 of a short story about fusion – two persons coming together to share one body. If you haven’t yet read episode 1, start here.
When consciousness returns, May finds it cluttered, like a room in which she can’t find something she’s looking for. Adrift in the jumble, she clutches at anything familiar. She knows she’s in the lab – she remembers the looming, blinking machines. Other, more important things are hidden. She can’t recall her age.
She used to sail with her dad up and down Ghost Lake, in strong winds. If she was scared, she only needed to look at his face. He grinned at the sun and wind, embracing any weather. He worked in forestry. The memory of a year ago chills her, like a snow cloud blown over the sun. A sudden headache at breakfast, her mother said. Then he doubled over and vomited on the floor. How could that happen?
The enormous prickly helmet, she notices with relief, has been removed. Stretching, wriggling her toes, she grows annoyed that no one is there to attend to her. She cranes her neck, looking for her clothes. She can’t remember what she wore to the lab.
I am now familiar with the entire literature on hemispheric specialization, she thinks, to comfort herself. Or most of it anyway. I’m a leading expert in computational neuroscience. Now I know descriptive and inferential statistics, and ASL. She pictures Nina and Tina going through their intricate routines. But the meanings are as dark as ever. I don’t know ASL! she realizes in astonishment. Didn’t Jerry know it?
There was never enough time, she answers herself defensively.
Nervous, she wishes Sam would come with her clothes – whatever they were. She vaguely recollects a purple departmental T-shirt, which needed washing, with a picture of a nerve cell. But that wasn’t mine! She even remembers its sour smell as she pulled it over her head. It must have been mine. And down, over her flat, sparsely-haired chest…. (more…)
Tags: fusion
Posted in death, fiction, mind transplant, neural programming, neuroscience, personal identity, philosophy fiction, self, self interest, self-concern, thought experiment | No Comments »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Published in 1998, Raymond Martin’s Self-Concern set a new direction for the philosophical discussion of personal identity by shifting the focus from “the normative question of whether this or that should matter in survival to the largely descriptive question of what…actually does…matter.” Martin questions the philosophical goal of trying to show that we all should (rationally) respond in the same way to the puzzle cases – a goal shared by Parfit and his opponents – calling the attempt “survival-value imperialism.” In examining how people actually value their own survival, his book goes a long way towards characterizing the conditions that make it difficult or easy for people to self-identify across time. It is largely about the psychology of self-concern. (more…)
Posted in anticipation, death, fission rejuvenation, human replication, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, psychology, Raymond Martin, Reasons and Persons, religion, self, self interest, self-concern, teleportation | No Comments »
