Subject: Does the self exist?
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 00:31:55 +1000
From: Robert Davidson >
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

I would be interested to see what people here 
think of the ideas Susan Blackmore has been 
writing about lately in her book “The Meme 
Machine”.

She writes that the self doesn’t actually 
exist but is an emergent illusion of our brain 
(rather similar to certain Christian mystic 
traditions, and mystic traditions of many 
faiths).  If true, this has profound 
implications for faith Blackmore is a Psychology 
professor at the University of Reading in the UK.  
Here she is:

“I think modern neuroscience makes it clear 
that the self cannot be what it appears to be. We 
may feel as though we have a special little 
“me” inside, who has sensations and 
consciousness, who lives my life, and makes my 
decisions. Yet, this does not fit with what we
know about the brain. Look inside a brain and 
what do you see?

There is no central place into which all the 
impressions come and from where the orders go out. 
Rather, there is a massive processing system 
dealing with numerous things at once, only very
few of which ever reach consciousness.

It may feel as though “my” consciousness 
starts the actions this body performs, but as Libet’s 
experiments showed, conscious awareness takes 
about half a second to build up, far too long for it
to initiate reactions to a fast changing world. And the
brain is constantly being changed by everything 
that happens to it, so that “I” am not the 
same as I was ten years, or even a few moments, ago.

There is a long and venerable tradition of thinkers who
have rejected the idea of a real and persistent self. The
Buddha proclaimed that actions and their consequences exist,
but that the person who acts does not. According to the 
Buddhist doctrine of anatta, the self is more like an 
ever-changing construction than a solid entity. The 
18th-century philosopher David Hume likened the self to 
a bundle of sensations tied together by a common history.
Using more contemporary metaphors, Dennett argues that
the brain builds multiple drafts of what is happening as
information flows through its parallel networks. One of 
these drafts becomes the story we tell ourselves and 
includes the idea of an author of the story, or a
user of the brain’s virtual machine-consciousness 
is a “benign user illusion”. So rather than 
being a permanent, persisting entity, the self may be 
more like a story about a self that does not really exist.”
Quoted from Susan Blackmore, “Meme Myself I”, 
New Scientist, 13 March 1999.  The whole is available 
from www.newscientist.com.

Robert Davidson