I Think, Therefore: ??!?!!???
I finished reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained last weekend, or I should say finished re-reading, since I read it a couple of years ago. At that time I felt like I hadn't successfully absorbed what he had to say; this time around I think I have a better bead on it, or at least I've filtered out the parts which I can get interested in. This should hold me as far as smarty-pants beach reading for the summer goes.
Describing the self as a "center of narrative gravity" located among a bunch of competing mini-streams of thought sounds like it could be about right.
At one point, Dennett notes how much visual discontinuity the brain can process without it seeming discontinuous, and I think this is a neat thing to think about. It's easy to take this for granted, since we all live it constantly, but as Dennett writes, we don't notice as visual details fall in and out of our (very narrow) range of detailed sight. Patterned areas seem to be clear throughout even if areas of it aren't visually in focus, and in general we don't mentally store nearly as much visual information as it seems: we just observe our surroundings constantly, without a sense of anything going missing or becoming less well defined.
I wonder if there's an analogue here to the sense of continuous self. You feel like your personality traits, ways of thinking, word associations, memories, etc., all "belong to you" & are present constantly even if you're not constantly thinking of them. But maybe when they're out of your immediate stream of thought, they're just gone, stored in your brain but not accessed: and when they percolate back up into your stream of thought, you don't notice the discontinuity, since it's familiar.
What we identify as sustained presence (of visually recognized objects, or of memories) isn't physical reality, necessarily, just a feeling of the brain not registering discontinuity.
So I don't think one's self is made up out of the sum total of one's traits & memories, and neither does the self bundle traits & memories together into a sustained identity. The feeling of sustained self is just a reflection that when these traits & memories "pipe up" for whatever reason, they're not unfamiliar and therefore apparently continuous with who you apparently are.
It's easier to think about how a self can exist in the physical world when it isn't assigned the impossible quality of sustaining nonphysical things like personality traits or moral values. There is no sustaining of anything: just repeated, discrete occurrences of certain mental states (observations of objects, ideas, impulses) that produce no sense of discontinuity. Maybe. Does this make any sense?
Or something like that. I don't think any of us will ever figure this out, but fortunately we have worse things to worry about.
Anyway, that wasn't really Dennett's point. I haven't mentally stored all of Dennett's actual arguments, but they're there in the book if I feel like observing them again.
Describing the self as a "center of narrative gravity" located among a bunch of competing mini-streams of thought sounds like it could be about right.
At one point, Dennett notes how much visual discontinuity the brain can process without it seeming discontinuous, and I think this is a neat thing to think about. It's easy to take this for granted, since we all live it constantly, but as Dennett writes, we don't notice as visual details fall in and out of our (very narrow) range of detailed sight. Patterned areas seem to be clear throughout even if areas of it aren't visually in focus, and in general we don't mentally store nearly as much visual information as it seems: we just observe our surroundings constantly, without a sense of anything going missing or becoming less well defined.
I wonder if there's an analogue here to the sense of continuous self. You feel like your personality traits, ways of thinking, word associations, memories, etc., all "belong to you" & are present constantly even if you're not constantly thinking of them. But maybe when they're out of your immediate stream of thought, they're just gone, stored in your brain but not accessed: and when they percolate back up into your stream of thought, you don't notice the discontinuity, since it's familiar.
What we identify as sustained presence (of visually recognized objects, or of memories) isn't physical reality, necessarily, just a feeling of the brain not registering discontinuity.
So I don't think one's self is made up out of the sum total of one's traits & memories, and neither does the self bundle traits & memories together into a sustained identity. The feeling of sustained self is just a reflection that when these traits & memories "pipe up" for whatever reason, they're not unfamiliar and therefore apparently continuous with who you apparently are.
It's easier to think about how a self can exist in the physical world when it isn't assigned the impossible quality of sustaining nonphysical things like personality traits or moral values. There is no sustaining of anything: just repeated, discrete occurrences of certain mental states (observations of objects, ideas, impulses) that produce no sense of discontinuity. Maybe. Does this make any sense?
Or something like that. I don't think any of us will ever figure this out, but fortunately we have worse things to worry about.
Anyway, that wasn't really Dennett's point. I haven't mentally stored all of Dennett's actual arguments, but they're there in the book if I feel like observing them again.
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