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Comment by SeeDave | Hacker News Reader

> our sense of self is an illusion

I've heard this, several times, from "new age" as well as "scientific" type-of people. I still don't understand what people mean by this... would it be possible to explain in a bit more detail?

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It's based on uncertainty of perception. We build a model of ourselves, just as we do with the real world (including scientifically) but this model will never exactly specify the real world. We can come quite close, but we can't be infinitely precise. For example, a wheel is not really a circle but it's circular enough-- and, to build on that, we can't really specify the wheel itself, except through conceptual models.

In the case of the self, we build a model of what we are based off of data we gather from introspection and from people who are close to us. But this model is constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true self (if there is a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always changing).

Nonetheless, we rely heavily on our sense of self. This sense helps us make hard decisions because we want to keep our actions in line with who we think we are-- we need that structure to survive. So, even though it can't be said to be real in any objective sense, we treat it as though it were real and we let it guide us to the point that most of the time we do think it's real. That's the illusory aspect.

You can really bring this over into anything you perceive. An object? Well, no. The object is not really distinct from the air surrounding it, except that we treat mass and visual outline (which is also an illusion created by our visual cortex) as indicators of being "separate", even though in the strictest sense the object is completely entangled in the environment of molecules, atoms, quanta, etc.

> we build a model of what we are based off of data we gather from introspection and from people who are close to us. But this model is constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true self (if there is a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always changing).

There's another argument (which I think your parent is referring to) which says that the thing that's doing the modeling is the very thing that's being modeled, so it's impossible to separate the data from the model. The radical conclusion people have come up with is that therefore there is no difference between the model and the data. What we perceive to be the model is actually the data, that there is nothing outside of the data because there can't be.

I haven't been able to decide if this is profound or incoherent.

That makes sense too, and can also be argued for or against!

I disagree with this argument. I think some portion of our brain is devoted to “modeling,” and the things being modeled include other parts of our brain; other parts of our body; phenomena that include certain parts of the brain and non-brain body parts (eg emotions); other times and places; other people; our environment; and so on and so forth.

Certain modes of thinking, like abstract thought and reasoning, can only draw on these models, so in that limited scope, the only a available data is the models — which there are more of than we could ever attend to exhaustively. In other states of mind, there is all kinds of other data.

George Lakoff wrote a great book on this called "Where Mathematics Comes From."

He is critical of how mathematics is currently taught from "first principles" and proofs rather than from a more intuitive body/metaphor perspective. He believes proofs are in many ways academic gatekeeping. His final chapter explains Euler's identity using only the intuitive metaphors he built up in previous chapters.

Very interesting, thank you! I've actually been wondering about this sort of idea of teaching math.

Several great answers already, there are certainly many ways to look at this. One that makes sense to me is to consider that we spontaneously create a sense of self as and when we need to, and dissolve it when we don’t. Where is your sense of self when you are asleep, or ‘in the zone’ playing a sport, or ‘lost in yourself’? At those moments we are no longer conscious of our present thoughts, we have no sense of self as such for much of the time. It’s as though we are in the animal state, our higher brain functions disengaged. A sense of self and personal consciousness is an illusion because it is something ephemeral and temporary.

I believe that that idea is about that in our consciousness there's an idea about who we are, an idea of self, and we believe that we are that idea, and that that idea has agency or free will. But the idea of self is like any other idea, it arises in the impersonal functioning of the mind. There's no homunculus, no little man in the control center of our brains, no ghost in the shell. As the stomach digests, the brain thinks, there's no thinker, thoughts 'happen' without a self that controls it. Thoughts happen not at random but as reactions to previous memories and experiences.

"...men believe that themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby these actions are determined." Spinoza, Ethics

In spite of this I wrote, I'm not sure if I understand very well the 'self is an illusion' argument, I may be misunderstanding something.

I think you are simply presenting another theory of mind that doesn't really answer the user's question. We don't know that there isn't a real self, but we do know that the way we perceive ourselves is illusive.

To extend the idea, some philosophers that lived at different moments explained that consciousness is independent of the body and feelings and thoughts and that to experience what we ultimately are we have to experience "consciousness without objects", for example Franklin Merrell-Wolff in his book "Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object" says this, but also indian and buddhist philosophy says something among those lines.

I cannot say if what these guys said is true or if they were psychotics.

The fact that you don't realize that you're just a piece of complicated matter that acts according to the laws of nature and believe that "you" as some kind of mind or soul exist, have point of view and free will – this is an illusion.

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