After a Long Absence – The Phantom Self

Here I am again.

I say “I” hesitantly, given the context. Anyway, this self-same bundle of attributes, having lost and gained more than a few (attributes) over the years, persists with enough continuity to be recognized as the same person.

I did not die of melanoma. With the help of state-of-the-art immunotherapy, my immune system made short work of the cancer. But my ramped-up, unleashed immune system also destroyed my thyroid, and my thyroxine levels fell to levels that are clinically rare. Thyroxine controls the body’s metabolic rate, and therefore everything. I was treated for hypothyroidism, but not before falling into a deep depression, which left me unable to write, or think, or even compose a simple email without revising it for hours. Here is a fragment of writing from that time I found this morning in an old file:

Yesterday I thought I could perhaps write again, another blog post. But the attempt seems to have cast me into the pit of despair. I wanted to do something simple and clear, something I could be proud of.

Anyway, that explains my absence. The road to recovery was long, involving physically-demanding tasks far removed from the philosophy of personal identity. This past summer, I finally began to think about taking up this project again. Then I got an email out of the blue (or whatever colour cyberspace is). It started out

Hi Gordon,
I want to thank you for so clearly and plainly 
explaining this idea of self-concern in your 
illusion of survival post. Before I found it 
I had been searching for a way to positively 
conceptualize the possibility that Parfit's 
extreme claim was real. I've now read that post 
many times and a number of your other posts from
the blog. I've shared the illusion of survival 
post with many of my friends but it seems it 
doesn't fascinate them as it does me.

That hooked me. I have friends like that too. The email was from Scott Emerson. Scott said he wanted to “somehow make the illusion of survival post into a video for people who aren’t interested enough to read very much.” We started corresponding, met on Zoom. Scott’s video went through several drafts. This week he published it on YouTube.

It’s interesting and rewarding to see someone else’s sympathetic take on ideas you have worked with a long time. Scott’s lens is not my lens; he says things I wouldn’t say, and says things I would say in ways I wouldn’t think of saying them. That is to be expected. We are different people, with different backgrounds. Variation adds depth to the topic, and broadens its appeal. Scott’s video grew from seeds planted by Parfit, by William Hazlitt, by Nagarjuna, seeds of the same lineage that sprouted as the Phantom Self blog. The existence of Scott’s video proves that the seeds remain viable; this is a life form that can survive and thrive in the competition of ideas. I invite you to watch it. It is also in text form here. As always, both Scott and I welcome your comments.

Hi,

I too was fascinated by that post and read it a few times, and i think that i’ll read it a few times more until my intuition builds sturdy enough to last more than a brief spell. I was curious about the long hiatus and now that i found out the reason i am very sorry for the ordeal. I hope everything goes well from now on.

I am fairly convinced that my self is an illusion, it just remains to be seen (by future generations) to what degree. I think that everything i perceive, sense (of my body) and feel are very much hallucinations recruited and refined through evolution and personal development to keep “me” going about and making babies. And off course, overlaid on that sit the many “unintended” creative interactions that happen when a system gets too complex (similar to the spaghetti-codes in programming), as well as the consequences of it developing and living within an insanely complex socio-cultural system.

And yet, i still think there’s a way in which it could be said that i exist as a separate entity. If you throw a boundary at random within the universe the things that will fall within that boundary will have a more or less independent evolution. But if you throw a boundary around my body, intimately covering my skin and the inside of my digestive tube, the things that will fall within will have a tightly correlated evolution. If i burn my hand then almost instantly there will be significant change at the level of the brain, and very quickly after there will be changes in the heart activity, endocrine glands, blood, liver, kidneys, etc. The human being really is an individual—there’s an integration within oneself that’s not present between the self and the environment. Like so called “Kantian wholes”, within selves like us: “the parts exist for and by means of the whole, and the whole exists for and by means of the parts”. I am the universe and i am the society in certain respects, but this doesn’t mean that i’m not still an individual, separated in meaningful ways from its environment. All my feelings, thoughts, actions, good and bad, are an aspect of my physical self!

With that said, i don’t know how my physical body goes with my “soul” (the internal hallucination which includes my phenomenal self). Are they continuous? Is there some fundamental break between two different natures, via strong emergence? Is the soul just an epiphenomenon that isn’t contributing to the physical self’s actions? Are these even the right questions to ask, or are they just irrelevant artifacts aiming towards nonsense and pointlessness?

I want to mention two people, which came up with two different ways of looking at things, that make sense for me.

One thing that i like, although i don’t know if it’s true or not, is Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory. In its current form it only tries to say what are the necessary conditions for something to be conscious. However, it doesn’t say how the various manifestations of consciousness (qualia) come about, and what makes “red” different from “cold”. A brief explanation of IIT would go like this:

Things exists only so far as they have causal power—either affecting stuff, or being affected by stuff themselves. A “thing” that can’t be affected by anything and isn’t affecting anything in its turn is not a thing to start with—it’s nothing! A rock, the sun, quarks, carrots, gravity, water, laws, etc they can and are affecting stuff, and in turn, they can be affected by stuff. Hence they exist, but they exist for other stuff! They exist as far as other things are concerned. So, from the start: for consciousness to exist it must meet this requirement of having some kind of causal power. But a rock, the sun, quarks, carrots, gravity, water, laws, etc aren’t considered conscious. And if these things aren’t conscious, then for brains to be conscious they must require something extra. Consciousness must posses some property besides mere causal power. IIT says that this “something extra” manifested by conscious systems (like brains) is: causal power upon itself . When something has causal power upon itself , being able to constrain it’s future states (and possible past states in which it could’ve been), then it exists for itself! “Existing for itself” in the eyes of IIT is the same thing with “being conscious”. The brain has this property in virtue of its phenomenal degree of integration through feedback loops—but it’s only present at a very particular spatio-temporal grain (NOT all the brain and at all time-frame lengths). IIT has a mathematical framework that models the degree of integration (which is the same thing with the degree of “existing for itself” or “consciousness”) in various systems and it ascribes them a number called “phi”. A system having 6.78 phi is vastly less conscious than a system having a phi of 368. A system having a phi = 0 is unconscious. IIT says that computers with a feed forward architecture of information processing have a phi = 0; meaning that they’re not conscious. Irrespective how intelligent they are they’re just separated bits hanging together, forming a mere functional unity. But if you make a silicon computer that has a phi greater than 0 then that computer will have a feeling. What kind of feeling? Again, IIT in its current form, doesn’t say.
In the past the proponents of IIT we’re willing to accept that the underlying “stuff” of nature might be conscious in some primitive way—particles (quantum field excitations) might actually be very rudimentary “glimpses”/”sparks of qualia”. In which case IIT takes a weak form where it only describes how these primordial “sparks” can come together to form a higher order entity (otherwise, by simply putting them together you’d only form “piles” or “ensembles”, like chairs, buildings, cars and planets, not entities like our conscious mind). I don’t know if they’re still willing to accept weak IIT, but i’m liking both the weak and strong versions. If either one is true, then my being is “tide up” at the level of the brain with a special degree of integration described by IIT. This (always changing) spatio-temporal bit of my brain that “exists for itself” is what our ancestors called “soul”. Although in this modern understanding it’s not fundamentally different to the body, it’s dependent on the body and it’s mortal.

This means that what you and i and all other people and animals and aliens, all have in common is being a soul—an integrated activity in which the activity of the individual bits is overridden by the emergent activity of the entity. You’re doing your stuff, i do mine, we’re very different from one another, and we’re different from what we culturally consider to be our earlier and future selves, but what we’re feeling at our most fundamental core is the exact same thing: phi or “existing for itself”. At my most fundamental core i’m you.

Another person who’s ideas made sense to me is Rob Burbea. He was a teacher which hinted at something that in my opinion is the future of buddhism. Through many years of eastern thought, ethical conduct and practice he claimed to have reached the experience of emptiness (sunyata) which according to many (perhaps most) branches of buddhism is the state that’s most in accord/alignment with the nature of reality. This experience is described by a few different parameters, among which the important ones are: a) seeing that nothing is itself by itself and all things are contingent, disappearing in a cloud of relationships with other things, having no meaning and no intrinsic existence (this is also true for who/what we are); b) realizing that you’re moved from a source outside yourself, “you” are not something “you’re doing”; c) having an allocentric experience instead of an egocentric one, you become a “field” that makes up everything rather then a “point of view” that’s separated from everything else; d) seeing that there’s no effort in anything, not even in the unfolding of states that feel effortful, everything just happens/evolves without “struggle”; e) feeling that there’s no absolute reason and meaning for all this, everything is spontaneous play happening against a background described by nihilism (there’s perceived meaning in life but there’s no grand meaning of life); f) there’s a sense of permanent awe, an exhilarating (even terrifying) feeling of freedom; g) absurdity becomes something positive, something that’s different but in the same time related with the sense of humor, existence is absurd; h) a sense of the eternity of existence; i) a deep non-verbal knowledge that, if translated into words would go something like “I’m IT! The mystery is not somewhere out-there but here affirming this very thing. Eternity is not something going on in some future, but here, this moment!”. Of course, there’s an endless historical dialectic process that interprets and refines the meaning of what i’ve just enumerated (and then there are eastern schools which would downright reject a few points).

While in this state Burbea discovered it to be the most fertile ground. In apprehending emptiness everywhere the mind unlocks another degree of association-making, which means greater creativity and ability for meaning-making (relative meaning, not absolute). A science oriented person could see this in terms of a phase transition, where our being (especially the brain) has more degrees of freedom, less constrained by higher order patterns. I imagine the difference from a fascist or communist societal body, with their top-down laws and bureaucracy, mores and architecture, to one where these higher-order constraints broke down into some form of liberalism. Someone like Bourbea isn’t free from the deterministic laws of nature, it’s just that this “pattern in the rug” has unlocked the ability to play with its own threads in just such a way that it doesn’t unravel itself in psychotic noise (which is incompatible with the requirements of staying alive). Dynamic equilibrium pushed into a new dimension.

Perhaps this is what poets did all along, only there weren’t any means to teach this to the rest of us. Burbea is deffinitely a poet at heart, and he aspires to be a teacher. He recounted experiencing the unbearable ethereal beauty of things, from the smallest stuff of quotidian life to unexpected one-of-a-time insights and imagery. He suffered from pancreatic cancer and this contributed to his intuition about the fragility of experiences, which ultimately helped him appreciate everything more deeply.

In the last few years he uploaded a massive audio archive which is easy to find. Unfortunately he died this year. If anyone is interested in this kind of “seeing things”, i’d start with his podcast interviews for a general grasp—this link should send you to a page showing all his podcast appearances: https://tunein.com/search/?query=rob%20burbea

One Reply to “After a Long Absence”

Rares Mircea says:

December 18, 2020 at 3:16 pm

Hi,

I too was fascinated by that post and read it a few times, and i think that i’ll read it a few times more until my intuition builds sturdy enough to last more than a brief spell. I was curious about the long hiatus and now that i found out the reason i am very sorry for the ordeal. I hope everything goes well from now on.

I am fairly convinced that my self is an illusion, it just remains to be seen (by future generations) to what degree. I think that everything i perceive, sense (of my body) and feel are very much hallucinations recruited and refined through evolution and personal development to keep “me” going about and making babies. And off course, overlaid on that sit the many “unintended” creative interactions that happen when a system gets too complex (similar to the spaghetti-codes in programming), as well as the consequences of it developing and living within an insanely complex socio-cultural system.

And yet, i still think there’s a way in which it could be said that i exist as a separate entity. If you throw a boundary at random within the universe the things that will fall within that boundary will have a more or less independent evolution. But if you throw a boundary around my body, intimately covering my skin and the inside of my digestive tube, the things that will fall within will have a tightly correlated evolution. If i burn my hand then almost instantly there will be significant change at the level of the brain, and very quickly after there will be changes in the heart activity, endocrine glands, blood, liver, kidneys, etc. The human being really is an individual—there’s an integration within oneself that’s not present between the self and the environment. Like so called “Kantian wholes”, within selves like us: “the parts exist for and by means of the whole, and the whole exists for and by means of the parts”. I am the universe and i am the society in certain respects, but this doesn’t mean that i’m not still an individual, separated in meaningful ways from its environment. All my feelings, thoughts, actions, good and bad, are an aspect of my physical self!

With that said, i don’t know how my physical body goes with my “soul” (the internal hallucination which includes my phenomenal self). Are they continuous? Is there some fundamental break between two different natures, via strong emergence? Is the soul just an epiphenomenon that isn’t contributing to the physical self’s actions? Are these even the right questions to ask, or are they just irrelevant artifacts aiming towards nonsense and pointlessness?

I want to mention two people, which came up with two different ways of looking at things, that make sense for me.

One thing that i like, although i don’t know if it’s true or not, is Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory. In its current form it only tries to say what are the necessary conditions for something to be conscious. However, it doesn’t say how the various manifestations of consciousness (qualia) come about, and what makes “red” different from “cold”. A brief explanation of IIT would go like this:

Things exists only so far as they have causal power—either affecting stuff, or being affected by stuff themselves. A “thing” that can’t be affected by anything and isn’t affecting anything in its turn is not a thing to start with—it’s nothing! A rock, the sun, quarks, carrots, gravity, water, laws, etc they can and are affecting stuff, and in turn, they can be affected by stuff. Hence they exist, but they exist for other stuff! They exist as far as other things are concerned. So, from the start: for consciousness to exist it must meet this requirement of having some kind of causal power. But a rock, the sun, quarks, carrots, gravity, water, laws, etc aren’t considered conscious. And if these things aren’t conscious, then for brains to be conscious they must require something extra. Consciousness must posses some property besides mere causal power. IIT says that this “something extra” manifested by conscious systems (like brains) is: causal power upon itself . When something has causal power upon itself , being able to constrain it’s future states (and possible past states in which it could’ve been), then it exists for itself! “Existing for itself” in the eyes of IIT is the same thing with “being conscious”. The brain has this property in virtue of its phenomenal degree of integration through feedback loops—but it’s only present at a very particular spatio-temporal grain (NOT all the brain and at all time-frame lengths). IIT has a mathematical framework that models the degree of integration (which is the same thing with the degree of “existing for itself” or “consciousness”) in various systems and it ascribes them a number called “phi”. A system having 6.78 phi is vastly less conscious than a system having a phi of 368. A system having a phi = 0 is unconscious. IIT says that computers with a feed forward architecture of information processing have a phi = 0; meaning that they’re not conscious. Irrespective how intelligent they are they’re just separated bits hanging together, forming a mere functional unity. But if you make a silicon computer that has a phi greater than 0 then that computer will have a feeling. What kind of feeling? Again, IIT in its current form, doesn’t say.
In the past the proponents of IIT we’re willing to accept that the underlying “stuff” of nature might be conscious in some primitive way—particles (quantum field excitations) might actually be very rudimentary “glimpses”/”sparks of qualia”. In which case IIT takes a weak form where it only describes how these primordial “sparks” can come together to form a higher order entity (otherwise, by simply putting them together you’d only form “piles” or “ensembles”, like chairs, buildings, cars and planets, not entities like our conscious mind). I don’t know if they’re still willing to accept weak IIT, but i’m liking both the weak and strong versions. If either one is true, then my being is “tide up” at the level of the brain with a special degree of integration described by IIT. This (always changing) spatio-temporal bit of my brain that “exists for itself” is what our ancestors called “soul”. Although in this modern understanding it’s not fundamentally different to the body, it’s dependent on the body and it’s mortal.

This means that what you and i and all other people and animals and aliens, all have in common is being a soul—an integrated activity in which the activity of the individual bits is overridden by the emergent activity of the entity. You’re doing your stuff, i do mine, we’re very different from one another, and we’re different from what we culturally consider to be our earlier and future selves, but what we’re feeling at our most fundamental core is the exact same thing: phi or “existing for itself”. At my most fundamental core i’m you.

Another person who’s ideas made sense to me is Rob Burbea. He was a teacher which hinted at something that in my opinion is the future of buddhism. Through many years of eastern thought, ethical conduct and practice he claimed to have reached the experience of emptiness (sunyata) which according to many (perhaps most) branches of buddhism is the state that’s most in accord/alignment with the nature of reality. This experience is described by a few different parameters, among which the important ones are: a) seeing that nothing is itself by itself and all things are contingent, disappearing in a cloud of relationships with other things, having no meaning and no intrinsic existence (this is also true for who/what we are); b) realizing that you’re moved from a source outside yourself, “you” are not something “you’re doing”; c) having an allocentric experience instead of an egocentric one, you become a “field” that makes up everything rather then a “point of view” that’s separated from everything else; d) seeing that there’s no effort in anything, not even in the unfolding of states that feel effortful, everything just happens/evolves without “struggle”; e) feeling that there’s no absolute reason and meaning for all this, everything is spontaneous play happening against a background described by nihilism (there’s perceived meaning in life but there’s no grand meaning of life); f) there’s a sense of permanent awe, an exhilarating (even terrifying) feeling of freedom; g) absurdity becomes something positive, something that’s different but in the same time related with the sense of humor, existence is absurd; h) a sense of the eternity of existence; i) a deep non-verbal knowledge that, if translated into words would go something like “I’m IT! The mystery is not somewhere out-there but here affirming this very thing. Eternity is not something going on in some future, but here, this moment!”. Of course, there’s an endless historical dialectic process that interprets and refines the meaning of what i’ve just enumerated (and then there are eastern schools which would downright reject a few points).

While in this state Burbea discovered it to be the most fertile ground. In apprehending emptiness everywhere the mind unlocks another degree of association-making, which means greater creativity and ability for meaning-making (relative meaning, not absolute). A science oriented person could see this in terms of a phase transition, where our being (especially the brain) has more degrees of freedom, less constrained by higher order patterns. I imagine the difference from a fascist or communist societal body, with their top-down laws and bureaucracy, mores and architecture, to one where these higher-order constraints broke down into some form of liberalism. Someone like Bourbea isn’t free from the deterministic laws of nature, it’s just that this “pattern in the rug” has unlocked the ability to play with its own threads in just such a way that it doesn’t unravel itself in psychotic noise (which is incompatible with the requirements of staying alive). Dynamic equilibrium pushed into a new dimension.

Perhaps this is what poets did all along, only there weren’t any means to teach this to the rest of us. Burbea is deffinitely a poet at heart, and he aspires to be a teacher. He recounted experiencing the unbearable ethereal beauty of things, from the smallest stuff of quotidian life to unexpected one-of-a-time insights and imagery. He suffered from pancreatic cancer and this contributed to his intuition about the fragility of experiences, which ultimately helped him appreciate everything more deeply.

In the last few years he uploaded a massive audio archive which is easy to find. Unfortunately he died this year. If anyone is interested in this kind of “seeing things”, i’d start with his podcast interviews for a general grasp—this link should send you to a page showing all his podcast appearances: https://tunein.com/search/?query=rob%20burbea

One Reply to “After a Long Absence”

Leave a Reply