= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kaj_Sotala comments on Mental Clarity; or How to Read Reality Accurately - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (24)
I thought this was a decent, if unexceptional, statement of the principle that anyone interested in reality should learn to pay attention to reality. But then I looked up your blogs and found that you're one of those people pushing the idea that "there is no self". All this talk about paying attention is just a step towards the real goal here - to pass on the perspective that "There is no me. There isn't a you either."
When I read statements like that, sometimes l feel like punching the author in the face. Or I feel like I need to vomit out what they have written. I want to say that this is a lie whose magnitude is unbelievable. But that would be going too far; this isn't a lie in the sense of a cynical statement whose author doesn't believe it. It's just a mistake. But something about it strikes me as amazingly pernicious. It's like a recipe for being unable to think correctly; the ultimate wrong assumption.
Earlier today I happened to visit the blog of LW contributor "Grognor"; and found a recent post by him called "You Do Not Exist". So I left a comment there too, berating this attitude. But I also remarked that contemporary assertions of the belief that there is no self tend to come in two forms, a "Buddhist" form and a "reductionist" form. The reductionists deny that there is a self because they believe in an atomistic universe and there are no "selves" in a place like that, just atoms. The neo-Buddhists take a Humean, phenomenological approach, and say, where is this self, show it to me, it's not there; there are experiences, but no "self" experiencing them.
Grognor is clearly in the reductionist camp, though he does also appeal to experimental evidence that people have false beliefs about themselves and their psychological causality. You are just as clearly in what I call the neo-Buddhist camp, though neo-Buddhist deniers of the self will sometimes assert a basic materialist perspective by saying e.g. there's no person there, just a body and a brain and a world, or something of that nature. So there is some crossover. Nonetheless, the two forms of anti-self-ism have distinct origins: reductionism comes from science and from a drive to see reality as it is, neo-Buddhism from a drive to end suffering. Psychological suffering (as opposed to sensory pain) is supposed to derive from attachment to the existence of the nonexistent self - that is the usual premise.
I understand why the reductionists deny selves - they are just trying to live the implications of their ontological beliefs, and scientific culture shows many other examples in which ontologically inconvenient aspects of experienced reality are denied, in order to preserve the belief that one's favorite scientific ontology is the whole truth about reality. The motivation of neo-Buddhists is more exotic to me - if they aren't clinging to a particular scientific doctrine, why on earth would they deny their own existence? But I think it must come back to the promised payoff, an end to personal suffering. It can be painful to not get what you want, and life is all about not getting what you want. Believing that you are not really there is somehow instrumental in weakening desire, and hence in attenuating the suffering that comes from desire denied by reality.
The critique of reductionist denial of self has two fronts. One may question it phenomenologically, and one may attempt to show that the scientific ontology which appears to be inconsistent with the existence of a self need not be the last word. Similarly, I would attack the neo-Buddhist denial of self on two fronts: I would challenge the argument that the self is nowhere to be seen or that it is possible to make sense of experience without an experiencer, and I would also call in question the very desirability of the psychological payoff that apparently supplies the appeal of the neo-Buddhist outlook.
I've often written on this site, without much success, against the various denials of reality motivated by adherence to a particular scientific ontology, and about alternative physical ontologies friendlier to the existence of a self. Articulating the exact positive phenomenological basis of belief in a self is also hard. On your blog, for example, you say that what seems to be a sense of self is actually a sense that an intention is at work. This is an attack on the notion of self from within the universe of psychological concepts. In strict physicalism, there is no such thing as an "intention". On the other hand, it is an everyday concept in "folk psychology", the informal understanding of everything mental that most of us share; but in that universe, every intention is someone's intention, it's always associated with a person. By saying that there can be an intention without a self or a person, you are ripping the concept of intention out of its original context and attempting to do without that context.
This analysis at least exposes what's at work behind the bland assertion that what one senses is only an intention and not a self as such. But it still doesn't say what is the phenomenologically and epistemologically correct approach to the existence of the self. Is the principal evidence for the self to be seen in the "unity of experience" - a reflective perception that the instantaneously perceived world is perceived as a single gestalt ("apperception") - the existence of this gestalt then being interpreted as an aspect of the existence of a self that perceives? Or is there sometimes a direct awareness that there is a perceiver and not just a perceived world? Such a direct sense isn't always present, but I do believe it's present sometimes... It's the knowledge that I still can't give a crisp and rigorous phenomenological rebuttal to the purveyors of no-self which accounts for some of the venom of my reaction to them - they're out there and I can't just efficiently shoot them down as they peddle their sophistries and superficial phenomenological analyses; I can only complain mightily and hope that I thereby keep a few people in touch with the hard-to-pin-down-in-words, yet plain-as-day, knowledge of their own existence as perceivers and as agents.
How about the supposed benefits of no longer believing that you exist? There is some genuine freedom to be obtained, not by believing that you don't exist, but by questioning attachments which may form a part of your "identity" in the broad sense. But this is mostly a matter of being attached to a belief or a desire. You can let go of something like that without espousing the ostentatious and metaphysically perverse line that "I don't exist". Similarly, it is possible to obtain philosophical distance from the disappointments of life just by being less self-involved; you shouldn't have to completely erase yourself from the ledger of Being in order to do that.
I would also take the critique further and question the general desirability of detaching oneself from beliefs and desires in favor of going with the flow. If a person is interested in exceptional achievement, this is certainly the last thing they should do; you should abandon a desire only if you have a way of transcending it for something more important, not just because abandoning it will lead to a life of greater ease or of happy indifference; that's my advice, not for everyone, but for people who think they have a destiny to catch. For someone like that, it's important to cultivate an identity, a sense of who you are, consistent with the purpose you have set yourself, because the more distinctive and original that purpose is, the less reinforcement the external world will provide you in pursuing it. So the reinforcement has to come from within, which is why it becomes important to remind yourself that part of who you are is "the person trying to achieve X". See Celia Green's writing on psychological "centralisation" for more on this topic.
I find that the best argument against a "self" is that it's simply unnecessary for any reductionist theory: it doesn't add any explanatory power, and seems mostly like a folk-psychological construct that Occam's Razor cuts away neatly, and afterwards our models are much clearer. I take it that you disagree?
Can we taboo 'self'? I think I might be working with an incorrect model of what it is, exactly, that you are asserting.
I'm finding it difficult, without positing the existence of myself, to explain some of my observations. For example: all of them.
Part of the difficulty with tabooing "self" is that tabooing it would require replacing it with a clear definition, but I'm not sure that the concept is coherent enough to have a clear definition. Also, different people mean different things by it.
Anyway, the point isn't that you wouldn't exist as a physical entity. You certainly do. Some possible meanings of the no-self claim are:
No-self as the lack of a homunculus: there's no self in the sense of a unitary "master controller" in the brain that would be active all the time. Rather there are just a variety of modules, with some set of them being active at one time, another set of them at another. E.g. Kurzban & Aktipis in Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-Ish?:
See also TEDxYouth@Manchester 2011 - Julian Baggini - Is There A Real You? for a related view.
No-self as the lack of continuity: the teletransportation thought experiment is possibly the best illustration. Suppose that your brain and body are scanned into a computer with perfect resolution and detail (presume, for the sake of argument, that this would be possible). Your original brain and body are then destroyed, with a duplicate being manufactured somewhere else. Were you transported to some other location, or was the original you murdered with a copy manufactured in its place?
The "no-self" view says that if all of your data was perfectly copied and the replica is indeed perfect, then there's no meaningful way by which you can claim to be different than the "original", and have no reason not to consent to the operation. The "self view" would say that you should never consent to such an operation, because you get murdered in it, and although an identical copy of you does get constructed, it isn't you but merely a perfect copy of you. The "no-self" view mutters under its breath that the "self view" seems to be postulating some kind of an intangible soul or something.
The "no-self" view might also claim that even now, the you who is reading these words is a different person than the one who hadn't yet started reading this comment. Very similar, yes, but your brain now isn't in the exact same state as it was before: it has changed, and therefore become another person. Even if the teletransporter did kill you, that doesn't matter, since you get killed and reborn all the time anyway.
The phenomenological no-self. We generally think that experiences are experienced by some specific person. If you could choose between your loved one or a total stranger experiencing some amount of suffering, and your choice would have no other consequences, then all else being even, you would probably prefer that it was somebody else than your loved one who had to suffer. Though maybe if you knew that the stranger had already suffered a lot in their life, you might decide to spare them the suffering, because they'd had enough of it already.
The "no-self as the lack of continuity" view might say that this choice is meaningless, because neither your lover nor the stranger are continuous people - even if the stranger had already suffered a lot, that suffering had been experienced by a huge number of other people, not the one who will suffer the consequences of this decision. But even if your lover wasn't a single person, but a collection of many closely related ones, you might still choose to care about that collection of closely related people not suffering, in which case the "no-self as a lack of continuity" view wouldn't be relevant for your decision.
The phenomenological no-self view, however, takes things one step further, and asks what it even means for something to be experienced "by" someone. Yes, an experience is clearly the result of some kind of information-processing happening within an organism, and that information-processing is (in a functional and a physical sense) happening within some particular organism. But what about the phenomenological experience, the qualia of sensory experience - what does it mean that that's experienced by someone? It would seem to imply that there is a specific observer who observes, for example, sensations of pain. But what, exactly, is that observer? The simplest answer is that there isn't one - sensory experiences aren't experienced by anyone in particular, they just happen. Ken Wilber, in No Boundary:
(I subscribe to all of these no-self views.)
Kaj_Sotala
My reading of the meaning of "no-self" is quite like yours. Personally I came to these conclusions through the phenomenological frame you summarize here. A phenomenological understanding of the phenomena described by the term "no-self" is crucial in getting to the true meaning of that term, in my opinion. The mediated understanding we can glean through conversation on this topic, though valuable, does not really get us closer to the meaning of that phrase. This is probably due to the structure of our language and it's assumption of a self/actor, that has and does things. I don't really think it's possible to grasp the concept outside of phenomenological investigation.
I'd like to add also something you braced with the "lack of continuity" of self. Lack of essential nature to self. When we consider all the things we think of as constituting "self" as relative phenomena devoid of essential nature, the argument for self is harder to buttress.
(Posting this as a separate comment, since adding it to my other one would make it too long)
Note that in each case, the "no-self" view is really more of an antiprediction than a prediction - it only says that some postulated "self" (either in the form of a central controller, some mysterious immaterial essence that you have but a copy of you doesn't have, or some observer entity that is separate from what is observed) doesn't exist, because we have no reason to presume that it exists. People tend to assume a self by default, and ask for evidence for why one wouldn't exist, but to do so is to privilege the hypothesis. A supporter of a "self view" should provide some coherent definition of a self first, and then some evidence for postulating one in the first place.
I think I was able to understand the first two, but the third one just seems to be asserting (unconvincingly: why should a hearer, if it exists, be able to hear itself?) that we are all p-zombies. I'm pretty damn sure that I, as a conscious, introspective, qualia-having, thinking entity, exist, and that is because I have an awareness of myself, and I do not accept that things that don't exist could have properties such as 'awareness of self'.
I obviously and definitely exist, because nonexistent entities can't do the things that I do.
To assert that we are p-zombies was not the intention. You could shoot a p-zombie without causing any suffering, but you will certainly (even under the third theory) cause suffering if you shoot somebody.
Let me try to condense the third one into a few short sentences, and see if that helps convey the underlying intuition better: "Brains implement cognitive algorithms, which upon being run, produce qualia. But these qualia are not observed by any particular person - to the extent that they can be said to be observed in the first place, they 'observe themselves' and then vanish."
To elaborate a little on that: if a qualia was observed by somebody, that implies that that person would experience the qualia of observing a qualia. And since qualias were presumed to be observed by someone, somebody would then have to observe the qualia of observing a qualia of observing a qualia... leading to an infinite regress. The only way (it seems to me) for that regress to bottom out is by positing that qualia aren't observed by anyone - they just are.
That makes a bit more sense, but I still disagree. We don't have any problems with infinite regresses elsewhere that require such drastic denials of our own existence. I can think about a thing, and then I can think about thinking about the thing, and then I can think about doing that, and so on. But we don't feel compelled to say "actually the thinking is happening without anything doing it" to rectify this. The infinite regress doesn't seem to cause any problems, and in that case it's an actual infinite regress occurring in my brain, not just a semantic infinite regress occurring in our definitions of 'qualia'.
It seems like the problem can be just as easily solved by saying that the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself. Why should they need to be separate? You experience the sensation of redness, and the experience of experiencing that sensation of redness is precisely the experience of the sensation of redness.
experience[experience[redness]] = experience[redness]
But that's not an actual infinite regress - you can go up however many levels you like, but it's still a finite number.
I'm not sure how your "the qualia of observing a qualia is the qualia itself" is different from my "a qualia observes itself".
The difference, I think, is that there is an observer having the qualia, rather than just a qualia happening by itself without a qualia-haver to have it.
This is starting to feel very nebulous and free-floaty. I feel like the words we are using are not locking on very strongly to robust concepts in my mind. It may not be a productive line of discussion.
Agreed - I'm not even sure whether we actually disagree or are just using different terminology.