Hacker News Reader

Comment by cl42 | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered if self-awareness, free will, etc. is an illusion driven by evolution.

You are more likely to defend yourself and attempt to prolong your life if you believe you are worthy of life -- that you have free will, that life is meaningful, etc.

It would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to evolve a hard-coded belief that any time we question our self-awareness, consciousness, free will, etc. the hard-coded belief kicks in to say "yes, of course you have these things" and thus you will prolong your life, breed, and reinforce this.

Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings.

View on HN

> Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings.

Yeah, this is touched on in Philosophy of Mind classes. It's just a very uninteresting and reductionist view that's probably wrong, so no one really takes it seriously, much like solipsism or the idea that we live in a simulation.

Our entire experience informs us that the world is real, that other minds are real, that our own self-awareness and sense of me-ness is real. There's no real reason to doubt any of it, other than playing clever little logical gotcha' games. A caveat here is that philosophers do write about the reality of things in very deep and meaningful ways and Cartesian skepticism is certainly worth studying.

It is usually only when you wake up from a dream when you find out it was only a dream.

You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real.

One would say seeing a person floating during a magician act was real because we experienced it, but the only thing real was the illusion performed by the magician.

> You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real.

Gobbledygook nonsense. People much smarter than both of us have been asking these questions since the dawn of time, best get to some reading.

“Some reading” consists of thousands of books, which some of us unfortunately(?) have no time to grep. Can you provide some concise excerpts which are to the point? It seems unlikely that this question is raised for the first time and there is no “wiki” to point to.

Ps. I’m not “link!”-ing you, just asking for a way to learn something without burying myself for a lifetime into works which mostly disagree with each other.

A good starting point may be "Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings", edited by David Chalmers. A second edition was recently published.

It contains papers by most important philosophers in the field of 'philosophy of mind'. The papers are surprisingly accessible, and require little to no prior knowledge.

Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut bacteria, etc). Our minds have very little control over most of our cells. We generally have a ship of Theseus going on and replace most of our cells every few years.

The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body. Will that feeling change if we start implanting tech?

With social insects like ants, is an ant more like an individual organism or are ants just limbs with the hive as the "me"?

> Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV.

Everything we observe goes through our first-person-perspective, therefore there's no such thing as a "scientific" POV. We come to consensus, true, but it's still through first-person-experiential phenomena, and not some kind of external "science" validator.

> The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body.

I'm not sure what cellphones have to do with anything, there are much better examples of the "fuzziness" of identity: conjoined twins, multiple personality, schizophrenia, dementia, corpus callosotomy, etc. These are all edge cases, though. We still barely understand the degenerate case.

Looking at edge cases often is the best way to find and understand the boundaries of something, to more clearly define it by looking at edge cases and seeing where certain "core" attributes persist or disappear.

> some kind of external "science" validator

I dunno, we have some pretty exquisite sensing machines today. Including machines that can sense the workings of the hardware running our first-person-experiential experiences.

Just because the bitstream happens to come in today via our eyeballs doesn’t make the actual bitstream any less objective and truthy.

> Our sense of me-ness seems real but it probably shouldn't be from a scientific POV. A decent part of our body is made up of bacteria that doesn't even share our DNA (gut bacteria, etc).

For sure. One of the early stages of many Buddhist meditation practices involves reflection on this question, looking for the "me" using various methods. Eventually the realization is of the emptiness (sunyata) of self and all phenomena. There's nothing that can be solidly considered self (atman). The Heart Sutra is one of the texts that elaborates on it:

[1] https://plumvillage.org/sutra/the-heart-sutra/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra

> sense of me-ness is real

The most important word here is "sense" -- I don't think anyone can argue that the sense of individuality isn't real. But how much of our personal narratives are true, and how much of them do we make up to try and make sense of an otherwise chaotic existence? That isn't a fluffy philosophical musing; it's a core question of human psychology.

Some Buddhist teachings speak of "word sickness", where we spend so much of our lives living in abstractions that we are unable to experience the present moment as it actually is. We've drawn boxes around phenomena to try and classify everything, without realizing that we do this in ways that reinforce our own identities and sense of meaning in the world. We tend to treat the things we are good at as more important than the things we aren't, for instance. So how much of one's concept of self is really real, and how much has been invented to coalesce a sense of identity?

experience informs

How are derealization, depersonalization and similar conditions explained?

But we do live in a simulation - a simulation generated purely in our minds based on the input to our senses that come from objective reality. We certainly don't perceive objective reality directly, otherwise our senses would be overloaded with all the information. We evolved to filter out many of the things that we didn't need to perceive in order to survive. Our mind does enough simulation that it's able to rewind the clock to fill in missing details (like the whole "when I look at a second hand, the first second takes longer to tick" thing, that's your brain literally lying to you about what it saw and retroactively filling in the blanks).

It very much depends what people mean when they say consciousness or self awareness is an illusion.

For example, we only spend spend small portions of our lives in a fully conciliatory state aware of the present. Much of the time we are in undressing sleep, or in a state of fugue or flow in which we are acting unconsciously. When we become consciously aware of the present sometimes it can be disorienting as we transition into full consciousness. So consciousness comes and goes frequently every day. I imagine these semi-conscious or flow states are the standard mental mode for many animals. Thus consciousness if not illusory is certainly ephemeral and transitory.

Then there’s the fact that our conscious experience of the rodent is largely synthetic. That is, in many ways it is a post-hoc construction. We take many actions unconsciously and then construct post-hoc logical justifications for why we did them. We experience deja vu, or e.g. when a phone rings sometimes we think we experienced knowing the phones was going to ring before we are aware of the sound. We construct a conscious experience after the fact and sometimes we get it wrong. Conscious thoughts are only a small part of our ongoing mental activity, including decision making, and not always in the driving seat.

We are so much more than our conscious experience, which is only a fairly small subset of our actual ongoing mental activity, which itself is continuously influenced by the needs and responses of the body beyond the brain.

First, I definitely don't think self-awareness is an illusion (any more than anything else is.) You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED.

Second, your idea only works if there is also a mechanism that would cause us to value consciousness, free will, etc. You have to explain the reason that those things would make life "meaningful" (i.e. be motivational) for an animal. I'd argue, as the Devil's advocate, that they actually don't and we can probably live without them perfectly fine. I think some people do.

I don't know if this solves anything, but the way that I think about it is that the the mind is just the body's UI to the body. The body is the machine and the operator of the machine and the mind is just like the Windows desktop. I think I got this from something Donald Hoffman said. He talks about ideas similar but different from yours by the way. Might be worth a search on YouTube for you. He definitely doesn't think we see reality the way it is and has accumulated good evidence and theory for that and has spent a lot of time connecting it to evolutionary biology.

> You (i.e. your body) are clearly aware of yourself (i.e. your body.) QED.

Reminds of “I think therefore I am” except a body doubting self-awareness shows the body is aware of the thing it doubts the existence of. Nice.

Well, "I think therefore I am" is really question begging if taken as a deduction and can be ambiguous, depending on the speaker and context, since the referent of "I" is not always clear. (i.e. does it mean mind, body, soul, etc.) Something thinks though, and something is obviously aware; since you have direct empirical evidence of both. You don't need an argument for either.

You should read "I am a Strange Loop".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

But it is an assumption that the body is aware of itself. That is part of the same illusion.

When you dream, does that dream feel real?

I don't think I'm capable of actual introspection or self-awareness during a dream; I feel and experience certain things but IMHO I can apply my consciousness to these things to properly notice anything about them only afterwards when I wake up.

I.e. the question "does that dream feel real" is only answerable when I have woken up and interpret my recent memories of that dream, which can easily be post-factum rationalization that has nothing to do with what I actually felt back when I was dreaming.

An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness.

I’m not sure that’s true, it depends how you define an illusion.

One would be to say that Illusions are merely incorrect interpretations of sensory data. They can be experienced by beetles, and even amoeba.

A more sophisticated definition might say that an illusion is when a subject, which has a mental model of a situation, incorrectly interprets sensory data to create a major mismatch between their mental model of a situation and reality. If we take this definition, then since many mammals or even vertebrates construct mental models of situations, they can all experience illusions. For example an animal seeing a reflection of itself, or it’s prey.

> incorrect interpretations

> they can all experience illusions

> mental model

The OP was trying to explain away consciousness as some illusion, while the person you responded to rightly pointed out "An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness".

Your attempt to define/explain what 'illusion' might be is similarly unhelpful, because you are appealing to mental/consciousness related terms like 'interpretation', 'experience', and 'mental model'. It seems like you're depending on the very thing you're trying to explain away, just as the original 'illusion' claim did.

One of Advaita’s (“not two” - no duality teaching) pointers is to pay attention to one’s choices and try to observe “free will”.

I became curious about it a few years ago - surely free will should be easy to see.

So far I have not observed a single choice independent of environment, conditioning, bodily needs, desires, thoughts, instincts or personal preferences. I have not chosen any of the above. I may be the only human without free will, or maybe what we call free will is a bundle of things that we don’t have any control, or “will” over.

What’s free will if it doesn’t include choices based on thought or preference? I’m not really sure what’s left when you exclude all the things you listed :)

Exactly, not “free.” I am still waiting to observe this “independent / free” authoring force that presumably I choose with.

The ancients had vastly a better take on free will (ie it is a completely incoherent notion) than the moderns.

Consciousness itself is not an illusion. This is the hard problem of consciousness.

However, your interpretation of reality is an illusion caused by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

If everybody’s interpretation of reality is an illusion, how do we know that consciousness is not all an illusion?

As usual it really depends on what you individually are referring to when you use the words "self-awareness" or "free will". Even "illusion" in this context could refer to something other than what you might expect. It really muddies the waters when seeking clarity on these questions, as it often seems like people don't even agree on the referent in the first place.

Based on your description this view sounds like it would be in the wheelhouse of the likes of Dan Dennett and Keith Frankish, the latter of which argues for a view called Illusionism [0]. Just note in this case "illusion" doesn't mean "not real", but more like "isn't what you think it is".

[0] https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...

Any Buddhist or Daoist will tell you the self is an illusion. Not that it does not exist, but that it is not self.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self

All we are is a bundle of our six senses (the 6th sense being thought). If you take away these senses, where are you?

We need a sense of self to navigate our way through the world, and the senses help the brain create time and space and movement.

I don't see how is this different

What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.

> And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.

Exactly.

I imagine founts of sense experience, each a node with a stream of information reaching the brain. Taste, touch, etc each are streams that meet at the brain, are filtered, interpreted then digested. The brain has some emergent sense streams, like thinking, which it feeds back into itself.

If we turned each node/stream off one at a time, the brain eventually generates simulations of each stream. This is how sensory deprivation hallucinations occur.

It's fascinating to think that our sense of self is a modular construction. It's so easily disrupted. Viewing it from this frame of modularity makes it much easier to understand no-self.

The internet feels very real, but has no physical form. If everyone turned off their computers there would be no internet. Like our sense of self, its emergence is dependent on the whole, not individual parts. A brain without sense organs is not a self, a computer without a network is not the internet.

Our selves are fleeting, made up of transitory, temporary information. "The internet feels proud today" is an absurd sentence. Isn't it absurd then to say "I feel proud," if 'I' is an amalgamation of sensory information?

Sorry for the digression, I let the meditation you triggered run free.

Split-brain patients studies.

Though if you think about the results... I will just say if you are heavily grounded to idea of 'free will you' maybe skip on reading it.

If you combine it with 'free-will' concept it paints a bleak picture of what is it to be conscious.

It depends on what definition of "illusion" would be useful e.g., you don't see what your eyes receive, you see what your brain predicts (hallucinates). All models are false, some are useful.

It’s best to ask Pandas or biologists these questions and not philosophers.

It’s all over biology, accepting this would mean the end of philosophy

It doesn’t need to be hard-coded, it’s in the early educational curriculum, and socially reinforced at every turn.

Buddhism has rather a lot to say about this. I’d recommend some Dōgen but it’s quite dense stuff.

Here is a series of writings on this from a series of Buddhist writers that might fit the audience a bit better:

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202...

Unfortunately with almost all this stuff you realise quickly it’s been written by someone with an understanding of nonduality, which makes it not so useful to anyone who doesn’t. Which is almost everyone.. I mean, we can actually explain fairly simply once you understand it but for anyone who hasn’t spent two years on the cushion it’s indecipherable. Saying “I am every cup of tea and lion” maybe makes sense to me, but probably not to others?

I wish we had a way to communicate this stuff better, we’ve been trying for a long time..

I share your wish, but I think that a big part of this is actually only understandable through experience.

Just like you cannot really describe an unknown taste to someone, or describe colors to a blind person, etc.

Apparently there is some work with transcranial ultrasound that can instantaneously turn hallucinations on and off…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com