The Sense of Self

The short answer, for me, is that the self isn't real.

Let's start with defining what is real. There is a cat climbing up on my desk. His name is Bug. He's loud and he likes to sit on my fridge, which is my cat's prefered place to sit. Bug has a temperature, mass, leaves fur everywhere, will eat unattended food, and stares at my pet mice (Geralt and Radovid). Bug is real. If I get hit by a truck and no longer come into my room, Bug will still come into my room.

The diet soda I just drank is real. We could, hypothetically track it into my gut, see it get broken up and carried around in my bloodstream. When I step on my scale and it tells me how hydrated or not I am, we can see the impact of what I did and didn't drink.

Now, when I think about writing this post, we could, if we were scanning, see the thoughts that start and send impulses down my arms, to my fingers, which press keys on my keyboard. My thoughts are real actual things that exist in the physical world.

Now my sense of self, this guy named Jerry Fordor came up with the idea of the modular theory of mind in like the 1970s. It's a splendid idea. The human or mammalian mind didn't just poof into existence. It arose from parts that worked well together and kept the organism alive, thriving, more or less. So you've got a part that does threat detection, mate selection, instinctive needs, language modeling, visual processing.. and so forth. One of those parts is the story teller module that compiles all incoming and outgoing data into a usually coherent narrative. Now this module must be able to tell the difference between an internal and an external threat. The guy who wants to beat my ass in the parking lot because I'm a trans dude is an external threat. The Canadian girl who won't talk to me and my subsequently broken heart is an internal threat. The external threat can and probably should be dealt with by running the F away. Internal threats... that probably won't help as much.

In order to make that determination a sense of self, the concept of I becomes needed and useful. I want a drink of soda. I want the Canadian to message me. I don't want to get punched.

And while all of those can be thoughts that manifest in the electric of the brain, none of them are ... permanent. they're ephemeral. A song that hangs in the air, the soundwaves that hit our ears is real.. but not permanent. The sense of self is like that.. it's a song that plays in our brain, but it's not enduring. It has to be illusionary, to fade away for the next song that will play. I can't have one piece of homework that lasts forever and I never think of anything else again. That would be a kind of death.

Self is impermanent, fleeting, and precious. When I meet some splendid new person and I get my heart all in bowstrings for them - it won't mean that I didn't love the Canadian, but that life is change. Life is one new song after another. The self isn't a durable real item.

References

Rives, B. (n.d.). Fodor, Jerry. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved March 15, 2024, from https://iep.utm.edu/fodor/

Robbins, P. (2009, April 1). Modularity of Mind (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved March 15, 2024, from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modularity-mind/