The Birth of the Self
hudsonreview.com
hudsonreview.com
"To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?"
For most people that ego goes unnoticed, until they look or listen for it. Upon reflection the ego (and the self) is quite obviously an illusion, yet, this constant chatter, the constant fear, anxiety, anger, remorse, from living in the past or future is source of so much violence among human beings.
Maybe this is off-topic but I feel that the "take what I want" attitude has is source in the unnoticed ego illusion.
But I guess the timing is off; this is within, not before, that.
> The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a 2020 book by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain history and psychological variation with approaches from cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. In the book, Henrich explores how institutions and psychology jointly influence each other over time. More specifically, he argues that a series of Catholic Church edicts on marriage that began in the 4th century undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created the more analytical, individualistic thinking prevalent in western societies.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
Review:
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books/review/the-weirdest...
> This short but highly ambitious book asks us to rethink the evolution of the ideas on which modern states are built. Larry Siedentop argues that the core of what is now our system of beliefs, liberalism, emerged much earlier than generally recognized, established not in the Renaissance but by the arguments of lawyers and philosophers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
"""At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we think it was our right to take what we wanted? . . . When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?"""
In short, he says that for a long while we had two relatively separate functions acting together in the brain: the planner and the doer. The planner would be represented by gods, god-kings, or any other form of authority whose voice and sometimes image would deliver orders for the doer to do. The doer would mostly just orient itself toward satisfying the needs of the planner. Jaynes says that Odysseus was the first expression in culture (that still remains today) where a person joined those two forces into one and recognized their own agency as planner-doer, hence all his cunning and wit that defied "physics" at the time. He uses more arguments beyond that (e.g. the origin of funerary rites as being ways to silence or "put to rest" the god-king who, after death, still speaks to and visits those who lived under him as the physical form of the planner that emits instructions from within people's minds) which are compelling but it's a bit hard to know what to do with them except inform one's own crackpot theories about psychology and civilization.
The theory is untestable but fascinating in its ingenuity. And kinda feels on the right track. The physiological explanation was pretty much bunk according to 70s and 80s neuroscience (planner lives in one brain hemisphere, doer in the other), but interpreting this fusion of planner-doer as "ego" in modern terms seems to track with how the ego operates and how people respond to its needs.
But that's exactly what you're supposed to do with it! Personal crackpot theories are beautiful in a way that no mainstream ideology will ever be. More useful, too - as they're attuned to one's own lived experiences in this world, and not to the ideal spherical rational agent in a vacuum that the bean-counters assume.
> We are still, it seems to me, struggling to understand the Ich’s importance—or lack thereof—and whether we should kowtow to its importunate demands.
Don’t even try this crap. Come on.
Not too long after someone else started trying to determine our lives. Self determination is the way most animals operate.
Global warming, microplastic, soil depletion ….
See the “Century of the Self” by BBC for how this has been done in the past 100 years.
> “Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a ‘living organism.’” According to Friedrich Schlegel, “it should forever be becoming, never perfected.”
The idea of having prototypes and no classes rhymes with forever becoming whereas classes are aligned with reasoning.
>The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason rather than feeling, Schiller claimed, had led to the excesses of the French Revolution.
The french revolution being driven by class consciousness.
The following sentence is strange, though:
>“Utility is the great idol of our time, to which all powers pay homage.” Beauty, on the other hand, leads to ethical principles, and art, as its vessel, makes us better people as well as wiser ones.
When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning?
>He was a key figure in the Jena thinkers’ attempt to fuse the scientific and the emotional, art and nature; he preceded Keats in judging truth to be beauty, beauty truth.
I would love to see an approach to build AI programmatically. Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine.
But they've been trying to do that since (at least) the 1950s! And indeed moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves. The evolution of programming languages and programmed systems goes hand in hand with that.
Until we get to the present situation where someone invented a program so generic and all-encompassing (a language model, ffs!) that it turns out all "meaning" and "reasoning" is just a moderately illusory effect induced by correlations between morphological tokens: to a large language model, things that "rhyme" (more like "appear in proximity within a corpus of text" - but that's a criterion of similar complexity to "sound alike or have similar morphological origin") are the things that make sense. And a lot of people can't tell the difference.
> Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine.
You could imagine Human Language alike to a cellular automaton of virtually infinite complexity, serving as the substrate for all thought; programming languages, and indeed any formal language, such as mathematics and its subsets used in different sciences, are abstractions over that infinite field of possible patterns: they hide the messy details and provide idioms of varying (but not infinite) complexity, for achieving particular goals (such as making webpages dance). While a neural network could be said to "see everything simultaneously", in JavaScript you can't even be sure what the keyword "this" refers to (from context - you gotta trust the docs or look under the hood). Vastly different scopes aside, AFAIK you can't beat the notion of "selfhood" into neither a program nor a NN, because neither actually has to fend for itself in order to keep thinking.
>When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning?
One of those is a subset of another, and for many people the need for "intelligence" and "reasoning" never went any further than knowing how to operate the right machine. (There exist unimaginably many beautiful and useful things that each one of us fails to grasp, because we're busy parroting the opinions of whoever reached the opinion-parroting machine first.) But it inevitably turns out that when beauty does not figure into the equation, there remains very little in this world worth reasoning about - other than ensuring adequate caloric intake and that sort of thing.
It would be interesting to see what GPT has to say to your question though. Anyone feel like asking it? I dropped my barge pole in the swamp
We have moved the goalpost for intelligence but not for self. There are also programs to model the units of the human brain but I am not aware of programs that model the self.
In short, do we even know where that goalpost is? The "self" is kind of a linguistic phantom: we talk about it as if we know what it is, we even sometimes attribute "selfhood" to non-human animals, inanimate objects with complex behavior, the words of a long-dead author - yet I still don't know of a technology that lets you experience anyone else's "self" but your own. Maybe with Neuralink-type brain-to-brain stuff we could convince ourselves we are experiencing another person's perceptions - but how can we ever be certain that we are experiencing their perception of selfhood in the same way that they do?
In the present day, the related question of how consciousness (with all its bells and whistles, including qualia and selfhood) arises from brain activity is only seriously engaged with by some fringe theorists, with predictably unsatisfactory results; while mainstream authors just handwave the whole thing away. Thinkers fundamental to our cultural tradition, like Plato and Descartes, pondered these matters in two completely different ages, and came to the same conclusion that this is somehow beyond the knowable, and indeed if you poke too much at it you end up having to reconstruct your cognition from first principles.
This is why I posit the "school of hard knocks" theory to the "hard problem of consciousness": for a thing to have a self, it has to have to fend for itself. It's how we've producing "selves" for millenia without being able to model them. But this still has very low explanatory power (beyond giving someone a hard knock when they ask a hard question) so I'm not really planning to make any YouTube videos about it.
Personally, I'm partial to Julian Jaynes' yarn, but it's still an outside view - a history of the cultural concept of consciousness, but still not of consciousness itself. One interesting thing that one may derive from it is that the ancient pagan gods were "China brain" consciousnesses running as background processes on the brains of entire nations, and the founding fathers of monotheistic religions perpetuated the greatest "white hat" hacks in history. (Also the JavaScript ecosystem may be conscious in a "China brain" sense, and laughing at us.)
I suspect that, if "the self" is not just a word, some neural network may end up containing an accidental model of "selfhood" itself, and not just of the usage of the world "self", and we would still be incapable of knowing such a model when we see it.
If you have any ideas about how you would even model a thing that contains all your perceptions, and is not observable from the outside, I'm eager to hear them. Maybe you see something I don't.
The interesting thing about philosophy is that it perceives perception from inside.
I would use philosophical texts as design documents and turn them into code. There was a shift in mathematical algorithms from texts to formulas. It made reasoning much easier. Likewise, I think reasoning about philosophies will be easier when they are formalized.
Once philosophy becomes code, it can be combined with the signal processing code and code that models the brain. Having an idea of what to look for, it could be easier to discover self than to wait for selves that fend for themselves.
>The interesting thing about philosophy is that it perceives perception from inside.
Isn't that's also the futile thing about it, though? It can reflect on reflection, ad infinitum - while being subject to the same external forces and constraints as other, more linear human activites: e.g. to do philosophy one needs to find an academic institution, wealthy patron, or circle of like-minded folks, who would publish it for future outsiders like us to appreciate; one needs to avoid retaliation for disrupting the discourses of power; etc.
>Once philosophy becomes code, it can be combined with the signal processing code and code that models the brain. Having an idea of what to look for, it could be easier to discover self than to wait for selves that fend for themselves.
Have you considered that an organism as simple as a bacterium might possess perception and experience? It would know no restraint or reflection, only one or two overwhelmingly pure emotions depending on whether it's feeding, being fed upon, dividing, transferring genes, etc. As evolution layers more complex behaviors on top of this "primordial spark of consciousness", the internal experience of the organism would become more complex until we get to the present state of affairs.
Of course current science doesn't agree with the idea of consciousness without nervous system - although it doesn't convincingly explain their relation, either. (Favorite crack: how exactly have we been able to confirm that the brain is not just a big antenna, for some transmission we haven't been able to observe yet - and conscious experience doesn't originate somewhere entirely outside the physical, on a client-server basis?)
But I think the connectome of something like a nematode or fruit fly has been mapped. So maybe one could start looking for that "proto-self" in a recording of the activity of such a simulated connectome over time?
Also, I've read a couple of sci-fi writers who try to address the technical details of simulated consciousness for nerd cred; they just hand-wave away the discrete nature of the simulation, positing continuity of consciousness even when running at <1 FPS. If one could somehow identify "consciousness" in a simulated nervous system, it would be possible to verify that experimentally.
How would we be able to identify a particular feedback loop between organism and environment as "consciousness" or "self-experience" though?
>I would use philosophical texts as design documents and turn them into code.
The main obstacle I see is that philosophical texts are linguistic in nature: if you can find a base text that is "dry" enough (I've seen works of analytic philosophy already structured as paragraphs of bullet points so that could be a start; but then you might as well start with the penal code of a small country, legal thought is also a form of philosophy, and it's one of the few practical applications of theories of selfhood that we see today), you could write a program that applies the conditionals described in the source text - but how would acting according to those conditionals work? Especially if the program has no intrinsic goals of its own, like self-preservation?
For me, philosophical texts are more like the fossilized byproducts of someone's consciousness, rather than blueprints for it. I'm interested in things that could disprove that view.
I think that consciousness will reveal itself in a not so distant future. There are already implants for blind people. More and more parts of the brain will be replaced which will reveal where consciousness is situated. I like to think that fruit flies are also conscious so it could also be possible to enhance the brains of flies. However, I expect that its easier to enhance human minds and let humans communicate their experience than it is to find the consciousness patterns in flies.
>to do philosophy one needs to find an academic institution, wealthy patron, or circle of like-minded folks,
All you need is a blog. But I don't think that engaging in the current style of philosophy is time well spent because written language could be at its limit. Philosophy has the ideas of people who were thinking for several thousand years. They were very keen on being right. That could be a solid foundation to build on. The bones of birds are not very helpful to design planes but they still offer the idea of wings.
Individuality and self-centric-philosophy is a consequence of financial independence. And if you think capitalism is to blame in this case, please visit Asia where individualism is still mostly stuck in the pre-revolutionary era.
Contrary to this, what the article here is talking about is an intellectual exercise.
Nobody else can access my experience. Nobody can move my arm from the inside like I can, nobody can see through my eyes, read my memories or know how it feels to type this right now, sitting on my bed with my cat beside me. My experience is inaccessible to others unless I communicate it to them, with great inaccuracy and crudeness through some system of symbols.
To me, this existential situation seems much more of a foundation for the individual self than linguistics, capitalism, or whatever Edward Bernays did 70 odd years ago.