`` As if - the explanation of Emergence

Under Construction


The Self - An Autobiography


Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory - Benjamin Disraeli


Index


What is a Self?


A biography is a story told about a life, an autobiography is the story told about the life of one's own Self. I suppose Disraeli was making a point about the authenticity of the detail of real lives, over the interpretations and perhaps assumptions of History. But what is the Self? Does, in fact, any such thing exist?.


The traditional view, informed by religion and the myths of the Ancients, for instance, Plato's Myth of Ur, has it that we are souls inhabiting bodies, and that when we die the spirit part of us will continue in one form or another. In the meantime, it is our soul that being the true 'us' makes decisions and takes responsibility. The more recent view is that there can be no immaterial part to us, certainly not one that could exist without the benefit of a live body, and so when we die that is the end of the story, and as according to Mark Twain, we shall be as unbothered by not existing after death as we were unbothered by not existing before birth.


Daniel Dennett points out the unworkability of the idea of an observer in what he calls the Cartesian Theatre, some watcher that gives our mind consciousness. But, in Consciousness Explained [that does no such thing] he also introduces the idea of the Narrative Self; that, if I understand it, provides a sense of self simply as a by-product of a lifetime of conscious activity.


Virtualism makes the claim that consciousness consists of facts; facts that are bright in the present, through being connected to other facts, part of which is the fact of the brain activity that causes the facts of mind to emerge. The consequence of this, and the eternal truth of facts, is that each life produces a trail of rather less bright facts of consciousness, leading off into the past, and that it is these facts that underpin our rather imperfect powers of recall, and form all that remains of us post mortem.


So, Mr Dennett and myself are not so far apart, except that Daniel believed we had to 'habeus corpus', whereas in my view the body is not strictly necessary, unless one wants to amplify facts by the power of the brain.




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