

The Illusion of Self - nollidge
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/the-self-illusion-an-interview-with-bruce-hood/

======
calinet6
Fascinating concept. For those interested (and who have not yet done so) look
into Zen Buddhism, which has been teaching this lack-of-self for ages. I
recommend Herrigel's "Zen in the art of Archery," and Suzuki "An Introduction
to Zen Buddhism." Both Zen and the more modern take on the ego (or lack
thereof) in this book are endlessly interesting.

------
alexmat
Philosophical precedent:

"Descartes should have said: "thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the
force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a
thinking thing, the reference of the "I," is more than the cogito can justify.
Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is
an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what
"thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks." In
other words the "I" in "I think" could be similar to the "It" in "It is
raining." David Hume claims that the philosophers who argue for a self that
can be found using reason are confusing "similarity" with "identity". This
means that the similarity of our thoughts and the continuity of them in this
similarity do not mean that we can identify ourselves as a self but that our
thoughts are similar."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum#Criticisms>

------
WalterSear
Abstraction is not the same as illusion.

------
FreakLegion
Think of the self as a function, not any particular return value. Stuff comes
in, stuff goes out; the self remains.

(Of course this doesn't do justice to how inputs transform the self at
runtime, but it's just an analogy. If we want to push it further, we could say
that the self is a recursive first-class function.)

------
powertower
> We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is
> an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing
> machinery of our brains to produce experience.

This is very true.

It's been said that our minds create the whole of our reality at every moment,
everything is a thought (an action), from the color, to the shape, to the
relationship, to the idea.

It's also been said that if you drop that reality and simply exist in the now,
a point where you stop "doing" (action) and start "being" (no action), you'll
remove that separation of the "self" from the rest of the Universe and shed
everything that's false, temporary, and transitional.

~~~
dansingerman
"It's also been said that if you drop that reality and simply exist in the
now, a point where you stop "doing" (action) and start "being" (no action),
you'll remove that separation of the "self" from the rest of the Universe."

With all due respect, that sounds like bollocks.

~~~
tgrass
Clearly you have never been dosed with PCP.

------
d2vid
> in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at
> least 2 hrs of the day. This is why you cannot see your own eyes moving when
> you look in a mirror!

False! Stare into your own eyes in a mirror and turn your head left and right
while continuing to look at your eyes. You can see your eyes moving left to
right in their sockets.

Saccades may blind you, but the only reason you can't see your eyes in the
mirror is because changing your gaze means you're not looking at your own eyes
anymore. What silly "evidence"...

------
cristianpascu
The illusion of self as well as, for instance, illusion of free will, only
work best for book titles.

Mind can sometime be tricked by illusions, or it can, sometimes, not be free,
but that does make it a rule. It doesn't mean all we experience, self
included, is an illusion, or that we don't have a free will. Drawing
conclusions from particular examples, and particular persons is, well...

------
cpeterso
John Carpenter's early science fiction film DARK STAR has a humorous but
illustrative discussion with a thermostellar bomb's AI about the limitations
of experience and the self:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk&t=22s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk&t=22s)

