Yes Descartes still seems to have a point. The self can’t be a complete illusion or there’d be no self to be deluded.
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The linked article was about how the rational self is illusory. People constantly create just-so narratives to rationalize things we’ve already done, and the data is very clear that most (maybe all) of our “rational self” is a fiction we tell ourselves. Unsurprisingly, the type of narratives we concoct differ across cultures
That article then made a fairly dumb pivot to say that people’s problems are personal - like not being able to pay the bills - and since the self is illusory the problems are made up*. The BB post managed to sum up the article without conveying any of the actual science
*sure, there is a sense that all societal problems are made up but they’re still real in any normal use of the word
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There was an excellent SciFi short story that delves into that. In it a teenage girl does a drug that disconnects you from your “self”. But she overdoses and ends up a completely different, “new” person. The story includes some of the neuro science behind the idea. The author uses the model that the brain, neurons, and “self” are the Parliament, Page, and Queen, respectively.
Parliament does its thing, the tells the Page to inform the Queen. But the drug causes the Page to get lost looking for the Queen.
Frightening realistic model of how our grey mush works.
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Had to google that
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As has been stated by many before, the idea of ‘self’ seems to be an emerging property of our highly complex neural network computers (aka brains). Which is fine, where else would it be?
There is an interesting if somewhat scary neurological condition where the patient has obvious cognitive defects and lapses in short term memory but can very convincingly explain them away, because the ‘self’ constantly updates the internal reference or story of what is happening. Also the patient is still convinced that all actions are based on their own free will. So, it appears that the accuracy of processing (or the possible deterministic natue of resulting actions) has little to do with the sense of self and free will, which is mostly an internal narrative to make sense of the sensory input and taken actions.
Doesn’t make it feel any less real for me, though.
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Maybe Emperor Frederick II was the original, “pictures or it didn’t happen,” guy.
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i think these are called “mondays”
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im not entirely sure those are “just so” narratives. really, i’d describe them as models.
it’s kind of the whole point of something like therapy. to develop a model for our previous behaviors, so that we can find tools to change our future behavior to meet more of our various needs in accordance with our values
i don’t think it’s possible to say whether the model/story of our history is “correct”. the only true “map of our territory” is ourself, everything else is going to be several steps removed, described through layers of language and definitely culture
however, i think a just-so story doesn’t generally have any utility, while the stories we concoct for ourselves are of great utility and of the utmost importance
the conceptualization as a computer only goes so far. our physical bodies, our soup of chemicals, and even our microbiomes are all part of the state of being us
we might be able to replicate some form of thought with computers eventually, but we’re not going to be able to replicate “us” without some seriously similar hardware
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We seem to be talking about different things. By “things we’ve already done”, I’m talking about what we did less than a second before (we also do it some on longer time scales, but it’s the immediate rationalizations that is mostly what is meant by the “self”). We constantly tell ourselves just-so narratives in realtime about why we are doing what we are, but many experiments have clearly shown the rationalization follows the behavior rather than causing it.
And thanks for pointing out that we work fundamentally very different from computers
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