
A revolution in our sense of self - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/01/revolution-in-our-sense-of-self-sunday-essay
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0xcde4c3db
At the risk of making a middlebrow dismissal, it seems like the author is
dancing around the Buddhist doctrine of _anattā_ / _anātman_ (oversimplified:
"self" doesn't actually exist) [1] without actually confronting it. I guess
that's fair inasmuch as concepts like the existence of a soul are nominally
not part of the field of psychology (though a bunch of clinical psychology
constructs don't really make sense without some kind of soul-like entity, so
the issue is there implicitly). But without following through on the
implications, I'm not sure what makes this a "revolution".

His description of GOFAI also doesn't ring true to me, but maybe that's a
matter of interpretation.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta)

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crispinb
I find it strange that so many of the comments, for & against Chater, are
expressed with such certainly. Philosophy and religion (lots of overlap) have
been discussing these issues without resolution for millennia, psychology for
decades to centuries (depending on your definition), neuroscience is starting
to contribute but is still in its infancy. Thousands of minds (of various
degrees of brilliance), hundreds of subcultures, dozens of nations have made
busy on the topic, without anything having emerged to compel agreement, yet a
substantial minority of readers here seem to think they definitively know the
answer.

Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? Especially in a culture claiming to
vaunt science (especially here, I would have thought), whose very basis is
admission of the limits of the egoistic individual to cognise reality?

After a couple of centuries of incredibly promising empirical work in so many
fields, it should be really, really easy to say or write “I’m not sure”. The
following step (“how can we devise a way to ask nature what’s true here”) may
well be a matter for specialists. But one might have hoped the initial
questioning open stance would have seeped, just a little, into the culture by
now. We have a long way to go.

~~~
verylittlemeat
When you live in a culture that deeply believes in the idea of progress* it's
blasphemous to give time to ignorance. If you believe in progress you can be
humbled by ignorance but not awed by it. In the west we know of other cultures
(past and present) that chose to be complacent and live in ignorant comfort
but we know that they chose that path at the expense of truth. We know that
our striving for truth is the reason we destroyed and dominated those who
chose complacency.

There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit
ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and
grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted
person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a
world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives
because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no
enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and
we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time
for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think
we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't
the one true cultural reality.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_progress)

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ganzuul
This article begins by observing that we can not learn the motivations of a
fictional character because the character died and her motivations were not
written in. It then imagines a fan-fiction continuation for the character then
concludes that we cannot learn anything more.

This keeps on going, apparently trying to ascribe self to the characters in
the author's imagination. They seem to be terrified of the idea that the self
is alone within the body and in response invent an elaborate fiction for why
'self' doesn't exist. - A common fear, but I suppose they are brave for
exposing it even in part.

~~~
barrkel
This notion of self - the idea of an inner homunculus with agency - has always
struck me as off, since I ever could think about it. _My_ self is an observer
of my thoughts and actions; to the degree that I feel involved it is in being
part of an action / reaction loop. I have a thought, observe it and react to
it, which is another thought. The feeling of reaction is my self.

~~~
creep
You've probably heard of the concept of ego. The idea is that the ego reacts
to thoughts and observes itself and thinks it is the self, but beneath the ego
is the true self-- whatever it may be. So the ego in this case would be a
tool.

There's also the idea that thoughts don't come from the ego, or the self, or
what-have-you; the idea that the "I" does not have thoughts, that perhaps
thoughts are randomly generated and something compels us to follow one thought
or another, so that we think an "I" is having a thought.

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barrkel
Your unawareness of your own motivations is hardly news - psychoanalysts have
been making hay here for decades - but it's not evidence of lack of
motivations.

A behaviourist has the hammer of behaviour, and is trying to treat the mind as
his nail. But he missed the mark right from the outset, for me.

I don't think his defence of human creativity is on strong grounds either.
Association and generative application of patterns are pretty key to
creativity to my mind; what we lack is a high enough tower to properly guide
intention in our pattern systems, primarily because of the inefficiency in
training I suspect.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
Its one thing to claim that people are "unaware of their own motivations" and
quite another thing to claim, as this author does, that those motivations
don't actually exist.

~~~
barrkel
There's no difference to a behaviourist...

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laretluval
I'm sympathetic to all Nick Chater's evidence that our conscious explanations
for behavior, as expressed in natural language, have nothing to do with their
actual causation. But it doesn't follow that humans don't have "beliefs" and
"motivations". The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as
maximizing some utility function: that's where the "hidden motivations" of
e.g. Freudianism come into play.

~~~
rocqua
> The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some
> utility function

That needs quite a bit of extra nuance. Certainly, our brains don't actually
find optimal solutions. We do not reliably maximize some utility function.
Instead, it seems our behavior can be explained much like some recursive
approximate optimization algorithm.

In this version, we have some utility function, and we do our best to optimize
it. Each step being made with the presumption it will indeed optimize. But at
that point, it becomes a lot harder to justify that such a utility function
exists. Especially because you need concepts like 'intent' or 'belief'. But
those are terms of human behavior, reducing human behavior to human behavior
isn't very helpful.

There are arguments that go around this. One can say that 'intent' or 'belief'
come from our creator. Or, one can say these are the results of evolution. It
should be noted that going from evolution to 'intent' and 'belief' is really
non-trivial. As such, one might consider that perhaps, explaining humans as
'optimizing some utility function' isn't the best theory.

Personally, I happen to believe the story of 'intent' arising from evolution,
but it isn't clear-cut.

~~~
laretluval
Cool ideas. I think we have to place extremely high prior probability mass on
the hypothesis that humans enact policies that optimize a utility function
determined by evolution, for the simple reason that an organism that does this
will do a lot better than one that doesn't.

This thinking is reducing "human behavior to human behavior" in the sense that
you'd still be using the language of intents. But if we determine intent
through empirical analysis of behavior and inference of the utility function,
then the _content_ of that intent may be very very different from what we
express verbally.

This doesn't mean humans are irrational, just that there's a mismatch between
our true goals and our verbally stated goals.

Now inference of the utility function doesn't have to depend on an assumption
of perfect optimization (it could be a softmax policy or something like that).
Nor would it have to be trivial: to prevent trivial solutions I think you'd
have to make strong assumptions about the space of plausible utility
functions, such as simplicity assumptions, or maybe evolutionary assumptions.

Sounds like a cool PhD project.

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JacksonGariety
Not a psychological theory. And certainly not a "revolutionary" one. This
article is a crude, philosophical "argument" for the non-existence of qualia.
It follows from his conclusions that sunsets can't really be beautiful,
citizen kane can't really be a good movie, and so on.

~~~
zerostar07
> the non-existence of qualia

Or that they are crude approximations of more fundamental neural activations.
Like how clouds follow the laws of physics.

edit: (i seem to be restricted from posting)

i m not claiming clouds are an illusion, that's a strawman, but that studying
the shape of clouds is the wrong way to go about physics.

I also don't understand the arguments for 'inner life'. as far as neuroscience
of the brain is concerned that's an interpretation of brain dynamics. It has
been given too much undeserved attention in philosophy imho. Inner life is
defined as opposed to what? outer life ? as far as the brain is concerned
there is no external world, it processes neural signals that are generated
entirely inside the organism, sometimes in response to external stimuli like
light. Why would it be impossible for it to process the neural activity of
itself the same way that it processes the neural activity of the retina.

~~~
danaliv
And yet no one has ever seriously claimed that clouds are an illusion.

I don't understand this need that behaviorists have to not just set the inner
life aside but to claim that it doesn't even exist. It clearly does. It's the
one thing each of us knows with utmost certainty. Just because there might be
an explanation for it based on more fundamental principles—principles which, I
might add, we are nowhere near understanding—doesn't mean it's not real.

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YetAnotherNick
WARNING: contains spoiler for Anna Karenina. Man, I was just thinking of
starting that book.

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StanislavPetrov
This article is trash. The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole
human race.

>One crucial clue that the inner oracle is an illusion comes, on closer
analysis, from the fact that our explanations are less than watertight.
Indeed, they are systematically and spectacularly leaky. Now it is hardly
controversial that our thoughts seem fragmentary and contradictory.

The author may be accurate in stating that his thoughts and "explanations" are
fragmentary and contradictory - but that doesn't mean the thoughts of everyone
are. Indeed, logical consistency among one's thoughts, positions, and
expositions is, to me, the most important standard when it comes to judging
"intelligence".

>I can’t quite tell you how a fridge works or how electricity flows around the
house. I continually fall into confusion and contradiction when struggling to
explain rules of English grammar, how quantitative easing works or the
difference between a fruit and a vegetable.

Clearly QE and rules of grammar aren't the only thing this author is confused
about. Perhaps the author shouldn't pretend (even to himself) to understand
things that he doesn't and he won't end up rationalizing and inventing
fantasies to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. There's nothing wrong with
acknowledging, whether to yourself or others, that you don't know how
something works. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge - the world is a big
place, its impossible to know everything. The difference lies in people who
come to grips with their limits and abilities, and think rationally about
them, and people who float through life without giving anything much "deep
thought", and instead simply "wing it", and end up (like the author)
constantly generalizing and making rationalizations about whatever is
currently in front of their nose.

~~~
dgreensp
“The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race.”

Yes. Thank you.

Does the author think nobody knows how a fridge works, and actually there is
nothing to know?

I recognized immediately in the metaphor of “selves as fictional characters”
that the author would be arguing we are all “spin all the way down” — just
stories we tell ourselves.

If you work on stripping away the stories, you will find there is a “you”
underneath, after all.

A lot of the things we tell ourselves are not true, but that doesn’t mean
there is no truth of the matter. You can even ask yourself, when you are
telling yourself a story, is that really true? And you may find yourself
answering, “Well, no...” You have to at least believe in yourself (so to
speak) to make progress in knowing yourself, getting along with yourself, and
loving yourself.

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zerostar07
> Don’t despair. This does not mean there isn’t something we can define as a
> “self”.

If Nietzsche were alive today, he would substitute 'god' for 'self' and would
declare "Self is dead". Philosophers of mind have spent the latter part of the
20th century arguing about their intuitions despite contradictory evidence and
really not much progress has been made apart from getting in arguments with
the 'explanationists' like Dennett. But it could spark a whole new set of
questions if they shifted focus from the elusive self back to the whole
(which, ironically would revive god).

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js8
Does it really matter that much whether, in our minds, there is a single
network ("service"), which handles both decision-making and self-
understanding, or these are two disparate networks that work in tandem?

It actually reminds me of adversarial networks (like AlphaGo), you could also
ask why there should be two networks that encode good game states, isn't it a
waste? Maybe each network knows something that the other doesn't.

Likewise, in our minds, maybe sometimes the decision-making network produces
such crap that it needs to be tested first on a fictional model human, our own
sense of self, before it can be vetted enough to be sensible to be actualized
on the environment and other people.

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dgreensp
Wait, what if we’ve just been anthropomorphizing ourselves this whole time??

That’s right, treating humans as if they have human traits like beliefs and
intentions.

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projektir
Before you breach this subject you should first define the terms you use,
otherwise you just end up with gibberish. These articles are often
insufferably vague and unspecific in what they're trying to say.

1) What is a "self"?

2) What is a "rich inner world"?

Define these and all your problems will go away. A lot of the time these terms
are diffuse metaphors for a collection of things, so it's not surprising you
can't find them.

> But did she really want to die?

This question, again, only gains complexity if you do not properly define what
you're asking. What does "really want to die" mean? Create a definition, such
as "a person really wants to die if they have been contemplating suicide for
the past 6 months", and, again, your troubles disappear. If you don't know if
Anna had such a desire for 6 months, then you're just lacking information.
Nothing magical.

Philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., are complicated precisely because
they are vague enough fields that we still need to look at them through an
intuitive lens a lot of the time, rather than the plain logical lens. It just
comes with the territory. All it means is that we do not understand the field
very well.

> But, as likely as not, Anna will be as unsure as anyone else about her true
> motivations.

This is not interesting. All that is happening here is that the entity in
question does not have the hardware needed to understand its own hardware. A
car doesn't understand itself, either. And humans do not fully understand
their brain. Most entities are like this. This doesn't meant the car is
magical and non-understandable, it just means there's no need to keep the
hardware and its own understanding at the same level of complexity. Don't ask
the car how it works, ask someone smarter, the human. Don't ask the human how
it works, as someone smarter, the world.

> Why this sofa? Why Bach, not Brahms? Why this choice of career? Why children
> or not? Why evolution, not creationism? How does a bicycle work, or a
> violin, or a currency? And each justification can be buttressed with further
> justifications, caveats and clarifications, and each of these be defended
> further, seemingly without end.

I wouldn't mix these things up. Most people don't introspect much, and most
people adapt to their environment. You will have a lot of issues socially if
you don't have some simple answer to a question like "why this choice of
career". You're generally conditioned to pick a tribe, so what you believe in
can be important. Basically, these justifications have arisen due to pressure
to create them, they're entirely unrelated to the "self". Saying "I don't know
why I like this sofa" is not fashionable, even if it's very much the truth.
And there's nothing wrong with that: we don't understand our hardware, which
is fine.

Understanding of diffuse things like "currency" is, if anything, one of the
more impressive functions of the brain that I'm not sure how long it will take
for AI to replicate.

~~~
JacksonGariety
Maybe I oversimplified it, but it actually seemed pretty straight forward to
me.

His point is that the terms for "wanting to die" cannot be defined, and from
there concludes that "wanting to die" isn't really a feeling within us.

He can't clarify his terms because, for some reason, he has taken a disliking
to interpretation.

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gcb0
tl;dr psychologist that teaches at a business school finds out about gestalt
and proceeds to sell truckloads of books by dressing it in inflamatory know it
all afirmations, proved by optical ilusions (how else can you prove gestalt?)

ps: same tactics applied to this comment, minus optical illusions

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creep
I found this article quite annoying. The author seems to be evaluating mind on
whether or not it is rational, and taking reason as motivator for depth in the
sense that there should always be reasons for our actions and beliefs.

Of course the mind is irrational. And of course our sense of self is an
illusion. That does not imply lack of depth. Depth in the mind is precisely
NOT based on reason. It is all dynamic; chaotic in the mathematical sense.
There is no "theory of mind" and there is no philosophy that could explain the
self or the mind because it is in a way an abyss, full of elements of time,
emotion, sensory input, and randomly arising thoughts that may or may not
originate from the "self".

That doesn't mean we should dispose of philosophy altogether. Philosophy and
psychology are moved by and created in the energy of the era. It is important
to continuously reevaluate what we think the mind is because it is
representative of how we see the world. And here we have a theory of mind in
our author's little article too.

I see nothing in this article other than an exemplary case of being able to
explain something in any way you wish.

~~~
SeeDave
> our sense of self is an illusion

I've heard this, several times, from "new age" as well as "scientific" type-of
people. I still don't understand what people mean by this... would it be
possible to explain in a bit more detail?

~~~
creep
It's based on uncertainty of perception. We build a model of ourselves, just
as we do with the real world (including scientifically) but this model will
never exactly specify the real world. We can come quite close, but we can't be
infinitely precise. For example, a wheel is not really a circle but it's
circular enough-- and, to build on that, we can't really specify the wheel
itself, except through conceptual models.

In the case of the self, we build a model of what we _are_ based off of data
we gather from introspection and from people who are close to us. But this
model is constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true
self (if there _is_ a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always
changing).

Nonetheless, we rely heavily on our sense of self. This sense helps us make
hard decisions because we want to keep our actions in line with who we think
we are-- we need that structure to survive. So, even though it can't be said
to be real in any objective sense, we treat it as though it were real and we
let it guide us to the point that most of the time we do think it's real.
That's the illusory aspect.

You can really bring this over into anything you perceive. An object? Well,
no. The object is not really distinct from the air surrounding it, except that
we treat mass and visual outline (which is also an illusion created by our
visual cortex) as indicators of being "separate", even though in the strictest
sense the object is completely entangled in the environment of molecules,
atoms, quanta, etc.

~~~
smhost
> we build a model of what we are based off of data we gather from
> introspection and from people who are close to us. But this model is
> constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true self
> (if there is a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always
> changing).

There's another argument (which I think your parent is referring to) which
says that the thing that's doing the modeling is the very thing that's being
modeled, so it's impossible to separate the data from the model. The radical
conclusion people have come up with is that therefore there is no difference
between the model and the data. What we perceive to be the model is actually
the data, that there is nothing outside of the data because there can't be.

I haven't been able to decide if this is profound or incoherent.

~~~
dgreensp
I disagree with this argument. I think some portion of our brain is devoted to
“modeling,” and the things being modeled include other parts of our brain;
other parts of our body; phenomena that include certain parts of the brain and
non-brain body parts (eg emotions); other times and places; other people; our
environment; and so on and so forth.

Certain modes of thinking, like abstract thought and reasoning, can only draw
on these models, so in that limited scope, the only a available data is the
models — which there are more of than we could ever attend to exhaustively. In
other states of mind, there is all kinds of other data.

