Different perspectives on the concept of self • Consciousness may be closely associated with or identical to the brain having a model of how attention is controlled. • Different people may have different concepts of self. • Some people may feel that self is fundamentally in the body. • Others may consider it to be in their set of memories or in the experience of free will. • Some may view self as a reflective and metacognitive experience. • There is no universal definition of the self and it may vary based on individuals’ dominant perceptions. • Meditation can lead to a better understanding of one’s self.
Anil Seth
Michael Graziano makes this case very eloquently in his book about the social brain. He thinks consciousness in general is closely associated with or identical to the brain having a model of how attention is controlled. But that’s one answer. I think if you ask different people, you really get different things. For some people, self is fundamentally in the body. It’s this really deeply embodied feeling of being alive. For other people, it may be in the set of memories they have. For other people, it’s really in the experience of free will, the experience of I’m the cause of this action, I’m the author of this thought. And for other people it’s a bit more reflective and metacognitive. I think a little bit along the lines of what you were saying, that there’s not only an experience, there’s the experience of being the observer, the experience of having an experience. And it may be that one of these aspects is more common, but I don’t think it would be universal. And even if it is, that in itself doesn’t mean that that’s where the self really is. That just means that’s one of the more dominant aspects of this collection of perceptions that collectively make up the experience of human selfhood.
Spencer Greenberg
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I don’t think others would necessarily give the same answer. And without doing a bunch of meditation, I’m not sure people even would think about that part of themselves as being a distinct part. I think through meditation is where I started to feel that way.
Anil Seth
Yeah, I mean, that’sThe Inaccuracy of Perception: A Constructed Reality • It’s impossible to see things exactly as they are. • It’s more useful to construct colors than to perceive the actual light. • Our perception is systematically inaccurate but helpful in understanding how objects behave. • Our perception is always an interpretation. • Our construction of reality is designed by evolution based on utility rather than accuracy.
Anil Seth
I don’t think it’s possible to ever see things exactly as they are. And I don’t think that even if we could, that would be the best thing. This takes us back to the start. There’s this back to Kant and the idea that there’s this inaccessible reality. It’s much more useful for us to see colors, to construct colors, than it would be to perceive the actual light that’s coming into our eyes. Because it’s changing all the time. The light waves that come in change all the time. But what is useful for us is to understand how objects out there behave. And so it’s much more helpful for our perception to be systematically inaccurate or systematically different from what’s actually there. I think that’s the key point here. We could never see things exactly as they are anyway. It doesn’t really even make any sense because what we see is always an interpretation. It has to be. Experiencing light waves or experiencing pressure waves in the ears doesn’t really mean anything. And we don’t have any direct contact with external reality apart from through our senses. So it has to always be a construction. And then that construction is designed by evolution, not by criteria of accuracy, but by utility. We see things as they are useful for us, not as they actually are. But, know having said that clearly
