The self

The reason we have a lot of trouble is that we have selves. If we had no selves, what trouble would we have?
—The Tao Te Ching

John Gall in a talk about feedback loop suggests our sense of self may derive from the exponentially many feedback loops in our brains and bodies:

We have such a flood of feedback that we can construct, inside our own brain, a working model of ourself as a feeling, sensing, responsive entity, updated in real time, like a 3-D hologram, and also models of the persons with whom we are interacting at the moment.

The philosopher David Hume similarly saw the self as coincident with our perceptions, not independent:

a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity

I’m interested in reading The Self Illusion: How Our Social Brain Constructs Who We Are by Bruce Hood based on Maria Popova’s summary:

Hood goes on to trace how the self emerges in childhood and examines why this notion of the illusory self is among the hardest concepts to accept, contrasting the “ego theory” of the self, which holds that we are essential entities inside bodies, with Hume’s “bundle theory,” which constructs the self not as a single unified entity but as a bundle of sensations, perceptions, and thoughts lumped together. Neuroscience, Hood argues, only supports the latter. The Self Illusion tells the story of how that bundle forms and why it sticks together, revealing the brain’s own storytelling as the centripetal force of the self.

The self as a story

The idea of the self as story reminds me of a passage from Ted Chiang’s story “The Truth of Fact the Truth of Feeling” in his book Exhalation:

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived. They’re the narrative we’ve assembled out of selective moments.

The story considers the effects of “life logs,” ubiquitous video recording of our entire lives.

As a byproduct of language

The sense of a separate self is only a shadow cast by grammar. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Further Reading

• Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self by Jay L. Garfield, in which the author brings Buddhist philosophy and cognitive science to argue that the self is an illusion and where we go from there
• Anattā, the concept of “no-self” in Buddhism