Yohan J. John, PhD

Are Selves Illusory? Emergent? Ubiquitous?

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I was asked this question on Quora recently:

Is the self an illusion or an emergent phenomenon? I’ve read people who use neuroscience to argue for one, the other, or both simultaneously.

Here’s how I responded.

No one knows what the self is. Least of all my fellow neuroscientists! 😉

Personally, I think the idea that the self is an illusion is meaningless. I suspect it’s just a (highly misleading) shorthand for saying that people’s notions of a permanent, unchanging self are incorrect. In other words, it means that the self is not an eternal soul with permanent, intrinsic, essential properties. Instead it is a process that changes on various timescales.

We might as well call this allegedly neuroscientific idea “neurobuddhism”, since the Buddha should probably get credit for the original argument. His concept of anatta or anatman means “no-self”, and it seems to mean the idea I just explained: that the self has no permanent essence. This is a useful lesson for people who making themselves miserable by clinging to some notion of stability and constantly fighting change. There is no doubt that the brain is constantly changing — as is the rest of the body.

But being subject to change does not mean that the self doesn’t exist in some form. My response to the misleading shorthand mantra (“the self is an illusion”) is to ask the following:

To what is the self an illusion?

Anything that is capable of experiencing things, including illusions, is conscious. And that’s as good a working definition of selfhood as any. So from this perspective, the capacity to experience is what a self is.

This too has a precedent in Indian philosophy: a key idea in Advaita Vedanta philosophy is that the higher Self is pure awareness. This Self isn’t a phenomenon, but the precondition for the appearance of phenomena.

As far as emergence is concerned, I think the self clearly is an emergent phenomenon — but only among people who ascribe selfhood to a whole organism and not to its parts. This doesn’t cover everyone, however. The jury is out when it comes to the metaphysics of mind, since (1) we don’t actually have a neuroscientific theory of selfhood or subjective experience yet, and (2) some thinkers are going in the opposite direction from emergence, towards panpsychism, which is the idea that every physical thing is capable of experience. Panpsychism is one of the implications of Integrated Information Theory, a theory of consciousness proposed by some well-known neuroscientists. (I am not a subscriber to this theory.)

If we combine the panpsychist worldview with an experience-centric definition of the self, it would follow that selves populate the entire physical world — becoming the exact opposite of emergent phenomena by virtue of relentless ubiquity. But I suppose you could argue with the panspychists that the specific type of selfhood an organism possesses is still emergent: the whole Self being greater than the sum of little subatomic selves. 🙂

I think the real lesson here is that the debate about self and consciousness will probably be with us for a very long time, so don’t get too invested in a resolution — and most definitely don’t expect neuroscientists to provide one!

Resources for self (!) exploration

The Times Literary Supplement recently published an essay on the Upanishads, where the idea of selfhood as pure awareness was first clearly expressed, starting around 2500 years ago:

Philosophy without a philosopher in sight – Essay – Footnotes to Plato – TLS

I discuss emergence and non-reductionism in the context of the neuroscience of thought here:

Are thoughts just a bunch of electrical and chemical signals being tossed around inside the brain, or is there more to it than that?

This essay I wrote gets into why some neuroscientists (including yours truly) think the problem of subjective experience may be unsolvable by science:

Why some neuroscientists call consciousness “the c-word” | 3 Quarks Daily

These somewhat more abstract essays I wrote may also be relevant:

What is emergence, and why should we care about it?

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so Hard? Intentionality.

5 responses to “Are Selves Illusory? Emergent? Ubiquitous?”

  1. ombhurbhuva Avatar
    ombhurbhuva

    Interesting question and answer. Have you ever read Henri Bergson’s ‘Matter and Memory’? His interpretations of aphasias and their relvance for the mind/body problem is very original and questions the assumed physicalism of a lot of neuro-science.

    The Self is known with every state of consciousness. The problem arises when we attempt to identify the self with any particular state or attribute of the person. The Self in that sense is an illusion. The word maya is used by the Advaitins. It has the connotation of a magic show and like all magical illusions is the result of misdirection. We look at the contents of consciousness rather than consciousness itself. It is the consistent reality through all its manifestations. Mind is the individual colocation of all those psycho-physical components. It is what makes us the person we are. However in the advaitin theory mind/body is a unity and is inert and not conscious by nature only becoming so when pervaded by Consciousness/Cit.

    What the Buddhists deny in their anatman doctrine is not asserted by the Vedantin. It is consciousness as such that is the Self and not any particular psycho-physical configuration. That theory is what in Kantian terms would be called a transcendental hypothesis or an account of how things must fundamentally be for things to appear as they do.

    Emergence and Panpsychism:
    Rather than everything having a little bit of consciousness i.e. there is something that it is like to be an electron, I would propose that everything is informative. Yes the difference that makes a difference. Rain falling on the limestone rock pits it, it collects more rain in the pits, they deepen etc. With more complexity more information until we come to the human who can talk into his own ear. This is what gives him his sense that his internal dialogue with its key and melody is really himself.

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  2. Yohan Avatar
    Yohan

    “The Self is known with every state of consciousness. The problem arises when we attempt to identify the self with any particular state or attribute of the person.”

    Yup! I like to use the language of invariance to say this: the self (in Advaita-style thinking) is invariant to changes in the contents of consciousness.

    Regarding Maya, I like the trajectory of the Kashmiri Savites. Too much emphasis on the illusory nature of Maya might make you dislike or distrust the world. Recognizing that Maya is part of Brahman helps. One might even suggest that there is a dialectic process at work.

    “Rather than everything having a little bit of consciousness i.e. there is something that it is like to be an electron, I would propose that everything is informative.”

    I suppose everything is “potentially” informative, but that doesn’t achieve what panpsychists want: a solution to the mind/matter problem. Terrence Deacon’s book ‘Incomplete Nature’ has some relevant ideas about information.

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  3. Jabr Avatar
    Jabr

    If by the self is meant an entity beyond or different than or separate from the collective parts and aspects of mind and body and thus is beyond change and transformation as everything else in the world, in the same way God is separate from the universe, then it is an illusion as far as we rationally think about it.

    But if one believes in the existence of such an entity then such a belief embeds itself in the mind and becomes as powerful as the belief in God which can be used to explain what is happening, to motivate actions which affects people’s lives plus to organize positively or negatively our cognition and emotions and as a consequence controls our responses to life.
    However, personality which is the organised system of mind, body and social relationships plus the universal social convention that each person is uniquely different and separate from all other persons, such a personality does exist no less than a chair or a car or a star or anything in the universe which are ultimately made up of parts, their interactions and their collective relationship with the environment in which they exist.

    Paper money is analogous to personalities which does exist by its physical composition, the patterns drawn on it and the universal economic convention of having the power to buy goods and services.

    Another useful analogy to personality from physics is what is called the effective mass of a body moving in a medium which is a combination of the actual mass of the body plus the volume of the body multiplied by the density of the medium. Thus, the effective mass incorporates the relationship between the moving body and the medium in which it moves.

    Now, because of the structure of language which enables us to internally and externally talk or think about our personality, and because of our upbringing and the way society deals with us as separate personalities, the notion of the self as a separate entity beyond the working of body, mind and relationships which senses, thinks, feels and acts has become falsely crystallized in us and is extremely difficult to be free from in the same way it is impossible to see the moon or the sun at the horizon (where they look bigger) as having the same size as when they are at the zenith despite them subtending the same visual angles at both positions because it is embedded in our brains that the horizon is much farther away than the zenith.

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    1. Yohan Avatar
      Yohan

      “But if one believes in the existence of such an entity then such a belief embeds itself in the mind and becomes as powerful as the belief in God which can be used to explain what is happening, to motivate actions which affects people’s lives plus to organize positively or negatively our cognition and emotions and as a consequence controls our responses to life.”

      I think I agree… but the interesting this is that in this construction, the phrase “one believes” implies a “one” doing the believing. This entity is necessarily different from, as you put it, the “collective parts”, by virtue of being capable of doing such things as believing. Brains don’t believe, people do. This is one of the motivations behind emergentism: it deals seriously with the arising of new properties in wholes that do not occur in the parts.

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      1. Jabr Avatar
        Jabr

        [the phrase “one believes” implies a “one” doing the believing.] No, what has happened is that a belief became part of the mind content because it was not rejected by already existing beliefs. Saying that “one believes” is only a manner of speaking and does not imply the existence of a chooser other than the process of choosing.

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