What or where is our real sense of self?

[ConradDJ]

You have read Jayne's curious success, the Bicameral Mind then.

Yes, along with Onian's Origins of European Thought, Snell's Discovery of the Mind, etc. -- relics of my academic years (which are by now also ancient history). But thank you for the reference to Danziger, I'll put it on my want-list.

I still like Jaynes' book, which has an interesting take on what we mean by "consciousness". He points out that we can do most everything we do without being conscious of it at all... like driving all the way through town to work, while thinking about something else, oblivious to what you're passing on the road, yet all the while maneuvering around potholes, etc. We only really need to be conscious when we're dealing with new and challenging situations, he suggests. And he goes on to ask how people might have dealt with such situations before there was the kind of developed “sense of self” that came with philosophy and the emergence of “self-reflective” internal dialogue.

This was a fine effort to imagine a really different kind of consciousness. The odd thing is that he’s dealing with the period of transition from oral to written culture, but missed the significance of that change. It's so difficult not to take for granted the basic tools we ourselves use in being conscious, like the ability to record spoken language.

What really shocked me when I first started out was how poor my introspective abilities actually were. It took years of practice (and good theories about what to expect to find) to really feel I was catching the detail of what actually took place.

Yes, you’re right – and of course, all the deep layers of consciousness that we evolved when we were young have long been covered up by the more sophisticated and more verbal layers we’ve built on top of them. We have no memory at all of our earliest years, since the neural structures to support conscious recollection we still undeveloped.

 

[ConradDJ]

The animal sense of self would be the completely subjective emboddied form. The point about humans is that we carry around in our heads a second "objective" view of ourselves - the view that society would have of our actions and our existence. Our every emboddied response or impulse is being run through that secondary layer of ideas that is socially evolved.

Yes, I think this gets at what's essentially distinctive about human consciousness -- that we're operating mentally on two planes. The one plane is what we share with other animals, a highly evolved interactive connection to the world in present time. The other is a highly evolved projection of objective reality that we learn to construct and maintain in our heads as we learn to talk -- a projection that goes far beyond the "here and now", to include things that happened hundreds of years ago and things we imagine may happen far in the future, and things that may be going on now in distant countries, etc.

Human "language" is not merely a matter of words and grammar. In essence it's a software technology that has two primary functions -- (1) creating and maintaining this projection of the world from a standpoint "outside of time", as a perspective from which we experience and interpret our real-time interaction. And (2) communicating itself and its projections from one human brain to another, as its means of reproducing itself.

If we try to understand the differences between humans and other animals in terms of what we and they can or can't do, we can find primitive versions of most things human. Because we don't have clear definitions of "consciousness", "self", "introspection", "thought", "memory" or "language", etc. we can find ways to use all these terms for what animals do, if we want to.

But it seems to me the key is this software-layer of consciousness that has evolved by reproducing itself from brain to brain, and has evolved more and more complex ways of ensuring its own reproduction. You and I, as "conscious minds", are essentially run-time constructs of this software, running on the neural hardware of our brains.

So what's different between us and other animals isn't so much what we do as how we do it. What's unique about us is this software that gets installed in each of us in the first few years of our lives. At some point early on in human evolution, this symbiotic relationship became so vital to our biological survival that our brains and bodies began adapting very rapidly to support it -- including not only changes in the brain, but a great lengthening of the period in which human children are helplessly dependent on adults and deeply attached to them at an emotional level.

 

[apeiron]

Yes, I think this gets at what's essentially distinctive about human consciousness -- that we're operating mentally on two planes.

So when it comes to the OP, there are three levels of selfhood.

1) animal level is BEING a self.
2) human level is KNOWING you are BEING a self.
3) Vygotskean level is KNOWING that you KNOW you are BEING a self.

It is meta-metarepresentation.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

So when it comes to the OP, there are three levels of selfhood.

1) animal level is BEING a self.
2) human level is KNOWING you are BEING a self.
3) Vygotskean level is KNOWING that you KNOW you are BEING a self.

It is meta-metarepresentation.

So, to sum, I take it #2 is representing representations or manipulating representations of representations.

This is possible among many animals. It is possible among animals which may not communicate so specifically, e.g. a lion can weigh a visual representation of an amount of defenders against an aural representation of an amount of opponents, and will determine whether to act or not to act (Dehaene). Such abstractions are also performed by pre-verbal 4-6 month human infants (Dehaene, again). And then, it is demonstrated in the Richard Attenborough BBC doc, linked elsewhere, that monkeys who produce and hear specific calls representing specific threats which are confirmed by visual representations. Further, these representations may be manipulated for deception.

So, what is the actual distinction between # 2 and #3 in which language provides a uniquely human consciousness?

 

[apeiron]

So, what is the actual distinction between # 2 and #3 in which language provides a uniquely human consciousness?

That was a joke . Sorry if it was not obvious.

Though 3 would indeed be an example of socially constructed knowledge that takes individual self-awareness to a higher level.

BTW I would not use the term representation as it is a strictly computational concept - information as input that gets displayed. The brain does not work like that. (Cue the usual chorus...)

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Yes, I was enjoying indulging in manipulations of metas, too . However, I don't see reason to take this last necessarily as a causal connection, if there is anything to these last ideas at all.

 

[tessxyz]

Long but highly recommended.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbItRBc4Cp8&feature=related

 

[Tregg Smith]

Would a person with absolutely no memory have self?

 

[Pythagorean]

Absolutely none? Of course not.

An amnesiac? Yes, but the self wouldn't be allowed to evolve due to hippocampal damage. The hippocampus "writes" to your neocortex (especially while you sleep).

 

[apeiron]

Would a person with absolutely no memory have self?

You can't really have a brain and not have "memory" - a neural organisation with a specific developmental history.

But there is evidence for what happens when for example the hippocampus is destroyed and people can't form fresh autobiographical memories - store new experiences.

See the celebrated case of Clive Wearing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing

 

[Lievo]

Would a person with absolutely no memory have self?

You may wish to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat" . Likely the best pop book on neuropsychologia ever. It mentions among other things the case of anterograde amnesia that Pythagorean and Apeiron mentionned, and discuss your question specifically (argue for a yes).

 

[Pythagorean]

And of course, amnesiacs can still learn implicit memories, since their basal ganglia are still in tact, though implicit memory are not conscious.

Parkinsons and Huntingtons patients, on the other hand, are associated with basal ganglia problems.

The two different kinds of damage are associated with different kinds of learning deficiencies, though amnesiacs are clearly the case for the more popular autobiographical memory.