How would you know yourself if you don't know what kind of thing a self is.

– John Vervaeke

The language by which we train our behavior is not the same language by which we explain our behavior.

– John Vervaeke

The Self is a transducer of multiple incoming potential states, transduced to multiple new outgoing potential states…that is a pure abstraction and that’s what the Self is.

– bonnitta-roy

• self is not ego

• self is a pure-abstraction

• What is the logos of the self

• elusive I

  • practical distictions
    • In one sense there is nothing more familiar to you then yourself
    • In another there should be nothing more mysteries to you about the nature a function of that self is

• self is a causal actor

• self is a transducer

• psychology

  • You cannot escape psychology
    • Either you have an implict or explicit one
      • Folk psychology as implicit example
        • It means basically desire+believe
      • explicit is about quesioning folk psychology

• phenomenology

  • interpretation of your experience
    • determine the structure of your experience
  • experience is tendivly split into inner and outer
    • inner subject
    • outer objective
  • Folk phenomenology
    • ways we have developed interpretations of the structures that make our experiences meaningful
    • Why question folk phenomenology?
      • We often conflate what is perhaps essential/universal to human phenomenology to what is cultural specific
        • Meaning me think phenomenons are essential/universal where they are actually cultural
      • For example inner/outer experience might be universal but subject and objective experience not and more a cultural one
      • So what phenomenology tries to do is find the invariant potential universal features that meaningful structure our experience

• Types

  • Academic/scientific phenomenology
  • Folk phenomenology
  • Academic/scientific psychology
  • Folk psychology
    • antromorphice
      • The tree is weeping in saidness

• Why do we have both?

  • Science is the inversion of common sense

• Common sense

  • We use the familiar to understand the unfamiliar
  • This is how it worked for me now this is how it will work then
  • Science does the opposite, it proposes very unfamiliar entities to explain things we are familiar (e.g. table consists of atoms)
  • So science problematises our folk/common sense understanding

• We need to do in other to do a science of the self we need to do the inversion. To problematice that folk model.

  • So we take the folk model that is so familiar to you and then we do the scientific inversion of it and problematice it.
  • Only by doing this we can deepen our understanding of it.

• Standard features of the folk model based on ...

  • The self is a thing
    • a thing: persistence, structural, functional organisation that unifies features or components into a causal whole so that we can attribute properties to that whole
  • Its a mental thing
    • body changes but you not
    • it priotices the phenomenology and psychology and not so much the body
      • we don't want to point to a cartesian-dualism
  • You are a single self
    • Does not mean homogeneity or some monad
      • So there can be parts in the self that we "play" with for a lack of a better term
      • As long as there exists this structural organisational thing that acts as a whole
      • So folk model is a model of singularity but not homogeneity
    • Where are the boundaries of the self?
      • The boundary problem
    • Time related single self as when we say of an old picture of ourselves that it is us.
      • its non-logical. For it they must be of the same kind so to at least share the same properties
        • So you are not logical identical to your past self
      • You are also not categorical identical to your self
        • because what you are is not the same as anything as because your self is about you being different than others
    • So the identity you have is not logical or categorical but a weird one
    • Combining these the identify function of the self becomse very problemantic
  • The self is a subject of experience (in action)
    • The term "subject" is very vague
    • What it might mean is that we are a center of a perspectival field
      • Like we are the center of our experience
    • connection of self-hood to self-conciousness
      • types of knowing
    • See Functions of the self
  • The self is an agent
    • An agent can determine or detect (not aware) the consequences of its behaviors and adjust them according to the goals it wants to achieve
      • functional awareness and responsivity from the third person
      • very different than how a tornado behaves
        • which is self-organising but not functional in the sense that it help seek out its own existence
      • central features
        • adaptive
          • adjust its behavior so than it can change the consequences
        • autonomous
          • it creates pinciples than govern itself
        • autopoetic
          • self-creation
    • Means that the self is an adaptive, autonomous and autopoetic thing
      • How is it that thing?
      • A self that is continious with all that
  • The self has a character and personality (and personhood)
    • character-personality
    • model 1
      • charater
        • is your system of virtues you identify with
        • the best aspect of features of yourself
        • character to some degree formed by habit
          • aristotele: we can transform our habits by deliberate cultivation of our character
          • character function that speaks to how we adapt
        • personality
          • more from the genes
          • gets co-opted by trait-theory
            • meaning personality suddenly means trait which is not true
            • provide a powerful model for individual difference
              • 3 levels
                1. what is human nature a. what is the basic architecture b. how are we all basically alike
                2. what are the key dimensions where we differ
                3. what makes as unique or particulare
        • personhood
          • legal and moral properties that make you inherently valueable
    • model 2
      • temperament(dispositions) + character = personality

• Structuralism vs functionalism appraching/thinking/perspective to the self

  • We should also not be satisfied with just one or the other

• Levels of the self

• Functions of the self

  • It has an entic function so it points to an entity the "self"
  • It as a recursive function
    • A tornado is self-organizing but has not a self that is organising the tornado
      • Its not organising into a self
      • A flow function
      • selforganizing without being autopoetic
    • There is not center of self that is experiencing the tornado
    • it also means self-consciousness
      • I have access to my dreams my way of seing color red etc.
      • You are conscious of your consciousness
      • There are states of self-consciousness which clame to be a state where you realize you have no-self (the pure consciousness event)
      • You participate in yourself like nothing else is participating
      • We are always alone with others
        • There an aloneness we can never escape
      • There is also the reverse case where we are never escape togetherness even in our deepest solitude.
      • There is an aloneness as a dreamer that no one else can eveer have
  • You should not equate self-consciousness with consciousness of a self

• Is there a self ulitmately beyond selforganizing?

  

• Origins of the self bonnitta-roy

  • individuation beyond identity
    • move outside the story
  • self reinforcing loop
    • lack of tolerances for not being the idealised "I"
  • affect
  • perspective streams (pathways)
    • allocentric processing right-hemisphere
    • egocentric processing left-hemisphere

• questions

  • Would you choose anothers life with the whole package?
    • Everybody would say no.
    • Be mindfull that all comes in packages

books

• 'Selving' and Union

  • The idea that the self is an illusion is problematic and possibly incoherent. Moreover, that the self is multiform and change-able does not argue against its existence. However some of the target papers suggest that there are 'self' states that are sufficiently divergent for them to have incompatible properties -- one refers to the analogy of light as both wave and particle. Many of these dualities have parallels with some of the main distinctions between the ways in which the left hemisphere and right hemisphere present, or represent, the world, and in which they contribute to the self.

• kinds

  • executive-functioning?
  • narrtive

See

• origins-of-the-self
• ego-self-axis
• self-development
• ego-is-not-the-self

tool

• Future me: Write a letter to the future

Notes

• Multiple modes of self-desolution. Self is a multidimensional construct

Links

• The Elusive I - Part 1 - The Cognitive Science Show
• https://expressiveegg.org/portfolio/self-unself/
• https://meaningness.com/self
• https://www.essentiafoundation.org/reading/there-is-no-self-the-periodic-table-of-experience/
• The Self as an angel that god send to us to love us
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_other
• Ep142: Science & the Enlightened Self - Dr Jud Brewer, Shinzen Young, C Fasano, & Dr Sanguinetti
• Atomized self
• The Self: a Reality or a Concept? Dr. Tony Nader with Dr. Evan Thompson
• Discussion with Michael Pollan of new ideas on memories and Selves this was really good