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Martin

About the illusion of self...

When I read Blackmores book I was thrilled by the insight into human behaviour it provided, especially human behaviour in groups. The conclusion she drew, that the self is an illusion and that happiness is to be found in the loss of self, struck me as defeatist psuedo Buddhist rubbish.

You seem to of picked up on this aspect, and seem to be agreeing that that the self, will and self determination are an illusion.

To say that the self is an illusion, is like saying biology is an illusion, its all just chemistry, or that object oriented programs are an illusion its all just assembler.

The self is a phenomenon that has emerged out of biology and memeotics, yes it can be explained away in terms of memeotics, but to understand people we have to include the idea of self in the picture. To allow the emerging self to realize its full potential we have to take our understanding of biology and memeotics to let the self be in control of our precursive systems, not buffeted by them.

A great many of human problems are the result of people acting in ways which are dictated by the worlds of biology and memeotics, to improve our lives we have to understand what we emerged from, learn to live with and control those aspects of ourselves and set the direction of our lives and our world to suit what we want.

An old analogy says that people have three brains, a crocodile, a horse and a monkey, apparently these correspond with areas of the brain dealing with basic need such as hunger and sex, emotions such as fear and love and finally abstract thought and language.

An update of these would add a software system with two layers, a chattering email system driven by manic robots and a emerging layer of meaning rising from the heaps of spam, corresponding to the whoever it is writing this.

You and me babe ain't nothing but mammals - no we've emerged from the memeplexes that colonised a species of mammals, we are only just starting to understand our origins, but in the excitement of that discovery we should not lose sight that we emerged from those origins to become something else.

anyway keep up the good work the site is a gem.

Andy M

Thanks for the comments. I too was instantly struck with the idea that The Meme Machine was full of defeatist pseudo Buddhist rubbish. At least as far as the conclusions and suggestions went. The first three quarters of the book were excellent. Giving good analysis and reasonable suggestions as to the nature of evolution of our brains. I read the chapter through again to see if I missed something, I could not see the logical jump between seeing memes as forming the self and the idea that the self should be freed from memes, it seemed a strange conclusion to draw.

I do not agree that memes were the principal cause of our brains. Memes filled our brains because it is in the nature of memes to do so, not that memes created the brains. Brains were created by social interaction among cunning and communicative apes. We got smarter to out smart each other. Memes rushed in to use the apparatus that had developed. A direct analogy; pornography did not create the Internet, or even Mosaic, but once Mosaic (the proto-browser) was in place pornography rushed in to use a media "that it was made for".

Yes the self is an illusion. If you have a problem with that it is probably because you define illusion in a very narrow way with a built-in suggestion that illusions are bad. The self is pretty much interchangeable with consciousness in my world view. Consciousness is a whole-brain phenomenon. I am unaware of any person ever who has had a stroke and been rendered unconscious but otherwise intact, like a sleepwalker. There is no seat of the consciousness, or the self, or the soul or the inner man. All these are the same thing, the whole brain's operating system. Perhaps using a word like illusion is wrong if I have a different definition of the word. It is an abstraction. The self is real in the way that society is real, Britain is real, the Windows desktop is real and socialism is real. That is, meaningful, but perhaps not quite as tangible and easily defined as something else, like a molecule, a Ferrari or Venus. I think we are agreeing on this point, so I think I will stop using the word illusion, and try to use abstraction instead. (Another re-write required, sigh).

I think you are right, we, the bits of our multi-dimensional existence that we regard as truly us, is a program running on hardware of an earlier system. We are living in mammals, but also of mammals. At present it is not possible to separate us from the hominid, and I doubt that it ever will become possible. Watching people fall asleep or degenerate with dementia shows the reality. That which we respond to most is the intelligent communicating entity not the animal form. But that intelligence is still very much an animal intelligence, not an abstract pure force like a soul. Deep inside me I am a shallow mammalian intelligence, my lusts and drives are primarily determined by bodily needs and the reproductive imperative. I seek to impress people with the clarity of thoughts, probably because I think it is a good strategy to get laid, or at least it appeals to urges that have evolved for those reasons.

We have emerged as a slightly different entity, at least some of us have, possibly only a minority. We have begun to exist on a slightly elevated level of intellect and to enjoy the flexing of the intellect the way a dancer can enjoy putting a body through a workout. Who knows where this may lead? It may begin to involve the fusing of artificial and biological intelligence to create a new raw form of intellect. Maybe. That is certainly a challenging possibility. It is also a more positive image than sitting around cross legged trying to think away the self.

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