Where does 'me' come from?   (Read 3399 times)

It is interesting to me the explanations I see about how we, as human beings function and interact.When an explanation is given as to why we are able to acheive something with our bodies it is pertaining to parts of the brain (or the brains tissue) reacting, responding to stimuli.

The idea that I have though is, if our brains are the sole commander in our bodies army why do we call it the brain? It would make sense that the self referencing words of each language would not be applied merely as a prefix to 'brain', they would mean 'brain'.

When I say 'my brain' - what is 'my'? When I say 'My entire body' it encompasses the brain but still does not explain the existence, state or meaning of 'my'.

As I sit here right now and type with 'my' fingers, writing the words that come to 'my' mind, I wonder what is 'my'? It is not my brain else I would refer to my brain as me. It is not my body else I would refer to my entire body as me. What lies inside, what powers that which is referred to as 'my'?

This thought, this idea leads me down the path of detatchment from my body. In death, what must die for 'my' to die? My heart stopped and my brain dies from lack of oxygen but does this just leave 'my', does this just leave 'me'? What is 'me'?

I would take 'my' as something you own.. thus my brain is mine but if I said brain it could mean I was talking about brains in general or someone else's brain. It would be kind of confusing if someone came up to me and said man I've been racking brain over this and can't figure it out.. I would probably think they were speaking of a person called brain.. and then I would probably start thinking of that classic cartoon 'Pinky and the Brain', but that's going off topic, lol.

As for when I die, what happens to 'my'. My thoughts on it would be that your body is your own, so that is a 'my' as well as all of your possessions (sp?).. so therefore they still manage to exist even after you have passed on.

I hope I have gone the right way with what you were talking about

Well the brain by itself could not function without the rest of the body.. So it would be strange to talk of ourselves only as brains when without our body it can't survive.

I agree with Joshwa that 'my' refers to the ownership of something. It is a way to express that something belongs to you..

And I think 'my' can only exist if the brain still recognizes and can claim it as 'my', but if you are dead the brain will no longer function and there could be no 'my' or 'me'. Unless you believe in spirits

Because we don't have the science to work it out yet, all we can do know is go with what feels like the truth for now. Personally, I believe in the "soul", which I define as the "me" beyond my brain and body. When my brain and body die, my soul does something else, leaves this plane, this dimension or goes into another body.

Spirit, soul or otherwise, there there's got to be something beyond the conscious brain, because there's an observer...
...or are we just tiny etheric beings driving our vehicles like that Krang guy from TMNT?

Even more spinny, in a state of meditation, you can observe yourself observing. Kind of like those infinite mirrors where there's a smaller copy in the reflection of the mirror. Observe the observer and see how it feels. Ah. There's that detachment Rakuli was talking about.

In asking such questions, you're touching upon the central problems in the Philosophy of Mind: what is the difference between the mind and the brain?; and what is consciousness?

These are extremely deep questions. You seem to be heading in the direction of Cartesian dualism: Descartes created an ontology (a way of partitioning reality) that divided the universe into physical and mental substances. Objects in the world, including your body and brain, are physical; by their nature they have such properties as extension (they take up space). Your mind (or soul, as Descartes would have it) is mental; it is opposite in nature to physical things, and lacks such properties as extension.

There's more to his theory than that, but that's the important point: divide reality into the physical and the mental. The main problem with this theory is it's theoretically impossible for mental things to influence physical things, or vice-versa. Descartes fudged this horribly, by locating the point of interaction in the pineal gland -- essentially allowing this tiny part of the brain to become a magic box.

These ideas often lead people towards the paradoxical notion of a homunculus [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus#Homunculus_argument_or_fallacy_in_the_philosophy_of_mind ]: a "little man" who sits inside the brain, rather like the old Numbskulls cartoon from the Beano [ http://www.fustar.info/2006/12/02/193/ ].

In more modern theory, the questions are more concerned with how mental events (thoughts, consciousness) arise from the physical brain. Although neuroscience can correlate brain areas with certain functions, consciousness is particularly elusive. It's hard to point to a part of the brain and say, "this is consciousness", or "this is a thought".

I believe that consciousness is most likely an emergent entity. Emergence is a fascinating concept that explains how systems with a large number of individually "stupid" parts can develop astonishingly complex behaviour. Such systems are often described as "self-organising". Important examples of self-organising systems include slime mould and ant-colonies. Ant colonies in particular have been demonstrated to develop long-term memories and to solve geometric problems with great precision; and yet the individual ants are far too stupid to be capable of such feats.

Emergence is a new kind of etiology ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiology ), completely divorced from traditional philosophical thought. I believe that the human mind is an emergent system: thoughts and consciousness emerge from interactions (the firing of neurons) within the physical brain.

In my view, the whole brain vs. mind problem is based upon the fallacy of division ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division ). This fallacy insists that any property possessed by an object must also be possessed by its components. Normally we can detect such fallacies easily (see the examples on that link!); but when it comes to our own minds, we seem to have a peculiar logical blind spot.

I agree, the whole "little man" behind the eyes things is not something that I picture when stray down the path of no resolution and I can see and understand your belief for consciousness.

It makes sense that I cannot decide what me is because me is not a sum of my parts and not any particular part. Me is me as a whole. Emergence makes for some interesting reading which I will continue to do.

That wikipedia link of the fallacy of division makes some parallels in the thinking I undergo whenever I pose this problem to myself.

I like the idea of Emergence but I don't think (or at least I am not entirely convinced) it completely explains consciousness.

Etiology is just another thing that has changed with the times. The Aborigines of Australia, 50 000 years ago, created the Dreamtime with stories that explained how everything works and why it is so.

Today Emergence, although much more informed, seems to be another incarnation of the Dreamtime as we try to discover what consciousness is and why it is so.

The idea and innovation in Artificial Intelligence has always fascinated me with one opposing viewpoint to the technology being the eventual takeover of humans by sentinent machines. I cannot see this as valid opposition because consciousness is not something that can be programmed. So, the whole, the sum of the parts, the collective intelligence of otherwise stupid parts does not fully explain why we ask and get confused by the "who am I?" questions.

But emergence is not just a jury-rigged attempt to explain consciousness. Other emergent systems (ant colonies, slime moulds, evolutionary circuits...) have been studied and independently found to possess these self-organising traits.

There's a difference between just inventing a story to explain something, and applying a theory that is, in itself, independently plausible. The application of emergence to consciousness is controversial; its application to slime moulds is not.

So, with all due respect to the Dreamtime, I don't think these two theories can be lumped together. Theories of emergence are based on scientific studies; the Dreamtime is not. That difference should not be trivialised, despite the trendiness of espousing enlightened, condescending "wisdom of the ancients" inclusivism.


Isn't it? What makes you say that?

For a start, it's possible to interfere with the mind by operating on the brain. Lesions to the frontal lobe alter a person's personality in quite predictable ways; and so do drugs. There are myriad ways to influence a person's consciousness.

If a machine were to possess a similar relational structure to the human brain, then I would expect it to be a mind. Of course, we're not currently capable of making such machines.

I didn't mean to say that emergence is a fairytale, far from it. It is an observation and explanaion fully supported by science and facts

I was drawing a similarity between Dreamtime and emergence as well as modern Etiology. They are nothing alike yet they are explaining things based on the knowledge available at the time of their conception. Emergence is the way individual parts of a whole interact to become much more than the sum of their parts and the Dreamtime still uses this definition by the way the stories all interact to explain the world around the Aborigines.

If you take a look at some of the stories you will see that their explanation of events are always series of complex events between parts of the environment. It is also interesting to note that the "little man" makes an appearence in many of them.

Presently however we are supporting these explanations and chaining of events with facts where previously, Etiology often was little more than imagination.

I don't throw around "Wisdom of the Ancients"-like messages, trendy or otherwise, I just saw way of comparing the Dreamtime stories to the present day -- they just didn't have the facts.

I haven’t read the original posts on "emergence" so I’m not entirely sure what the context was. Picking up on Rakuli’s interesting remarks on dreamtime I offer a few rambling notes of my own:

The factuality (the observed/experienced/verified) of aboriginal dreamtime is a bit more complicated than "little man" or, as otherwise said, the dream that dreams the dreamer. In fact, etiologically and psychologically, a whole lot more complex.  For one thing, the rituals and manipulations that engage
dreamtime for the practitioner are quite precise and rigorous. They have been tweaked for at least 3000 years, and are well-rooted in some notable features of aboriginal psyche. For one, the whole matrix is
entirely a-temporal. As such the experience and vision of it does not engage objects as we might think
of them in extant terms (here and now, having these properties, presenting these facts). Rather, dreamtime
seems to extract the connective fluids that flow among and between such facts and from that present only
shape of their universality.  This might be taken to mean that the altered states of dreamtime are a bit drifty and disengaged from our reality and of little practical relation to the world around us.  But, on reflection, this is anything but the case. Aboriginal life, going back as far as we can surmise was always rooted in a keen sense of the observable universe and a very practical and factual anchor to it. In many of the regions they inhabited (and, some still do) their survival depended not only of the factuality of their knowledge, but on applying those facts in precise applications that allowed little margin for error. Indeed, it would appear that this faculty was not simply cultural or intellectual, but plainly and systemically biological.  They knew their facts right down in the marrow of their bones as much any higher cortical levels (where our own current paradigms place it, almost entirely). Most of you probably know of the ability of aborigine’s talent for sitting immobile for days or even weeks on the desert floor during a lean hunting season until, at exactly the right moment, they suddenly leap up, run full tilt into a ‘factually’ empty and lifeless landscape. After running for as much as 10 miles, they will exactly intersect the path of some creature, a mammal or marsupial, and pounce on it. They never seem to miss. Or another "mystery" about them came from medical studies done in the 60’s (can’t remember who, but that they were reputable) that discovered that the aborigine’s are able to expend more calories over a given period of time than they consume without losing any discernible body mass.  My own guess is these faculties, which seem nearly magical to us, are quite rooted in facts; just not the kind of ‘fact’ that we might acknowledge or that quite fit our own standards of what qualifies as fact (and here I think of Wittengenstein as one of the preeminent definers of ‘facts’).

What does this have to do with ‘dreamtime’?  Well, perhaps everything or nothing.  To me, it suggest that dreamtime is one of the facts of the Aboriginal universe which we do not understand as such simply because of our assertions about what facts are. In fact, our determination of what constitutes a fact may only encompass a small subset of what might properly be called the universe of factuality. A universe which, from such a position, can hardly speak of the existence of facts outside of its schema (and that proposition is, definitely, Wittgensteinian).  Dreamtime is no accident. Nor are things we regard as "mythological" quite so ephemeral as we might suppose.  Not simply because our stories often have some historical antecedents, are rather exaggerations of common experiences; but because, in some way I don’t think we quite get yet, they participate in a body of facts that a-temporally surround us without ever being recognized.

Oh dear, I see I have just run on..and on, & that for a first post. I hope none will think it impolitic of me. I never did mention how I think this may tie into ‘emergence’ and the science of emergent systems.  Suffice to say there is a small volume by Herbert Simon on the subject of irreversible and nearly-decomposable system which quite captures the subject of ‘emergent’ properties (Been thirty years or so, but I think it was his "Sciences of the Artificial"  or, perhaps one of his others - a slim, gray volume as I recall). Simon, interestingly is known as a brilliant political scientist and economist (Nobel prize for that) or as a principle founder of the science of artificial intelligence (Turing prize, among others), depending upon whom you ask about him. Anyway the book was a watershed of ideas and plowed up a lot of unheard of ground, much of which remains, to this day, unexplored territory.  Worth the read if you haven’t.  Well, that’s a subject for another day, so I’ll say thanks for reading and adieu, before ‘that reminds me of another story…  - red   

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Crackpot Advice:
Choose a hammer that is best suited
to the material and size of the pot.


 

Rakuli,

Part of the problem here may be that we're dealing with two different branches of 'emergence' and the place of 'dreamtime' within the concept of 'fact'.  One branch (largely motivated by human wish-lists) is a story-telling/story-making mode. Quite legitimate in its own write (sp intentional). In the appendix of one of my own works (http://home.comcast.net/~redslider/Ballad/chap_xE.htm) I wildly indulge that branch of 'emergence' theory - in fact, I do it as a means of describing human emergence itself. But it is pure fancy associated with a poem of pure invention - facts are not in play (except that I very carefully checked facts - celestial, geographical, cultural, etc. - that are employed in the work itself).  But, for the most part it is whooey - though always with the proviso that 'Yesterday's whooey may become tomorrow's...!   Suffice to say, I withdrew from investing any real credibility to the inventions of the 60's and 70's that proposed everything from alien-buddies for specially nice people (invariably the speaker included) to the sounds of wisdom signifying empty homilies (Seth Books, ad naseum) Still read and enjoyed and was sometimes provoked to useful consideration of much of that stuff (i.e. it does contribute to the richness of our culture and enjoyment), but as something to eat, naaaaaa.

The other branch, however, considers emergence as part of a chain of being that is much in evidence and for which much evidence is given.  It is Darwinian/Lamarkian in nature; it is rooted in hard factual physical and biological data; there is a large body of scientific and philosophical work on the subject; and, it appears to be a meta-category of how mind and universe work that cannot be ignored if one of the goals of the project is to seek useful, verifiable, predictable and reliable explanations for just what kind of things we are. At heart, it postulates that no progress in the matter (or perhaps any matter) can be made if we don't, in some way, attend to the subject of 'becoming' as a process that is a factual property of everything we encounter and which intrinsically implies 'emergence' as a feature.

Now, that's a whole different branch of the theory and practice of emergence. I can think of work such as:

           - Langer: Essay on Mind
           - Gould:  Panda's thumb
           - Piaget: Theory of Ontogenic Intelligence
           - Leary (when he wasn't doing 'cult' leader clowning) Psychologic
           - Randall: Warped Passages
           - Sahlin's and Service:  Evolution and Culture
           - Derrida, Levi-Strauss et. al.: Take your pick
           - Tart: Altered States
           - Ornstein: Any of his mind-brain books or popularizations.
           - William James: his 2-vol Philosophy of course
           - Kuhn: The Structure of Science
           - and on and on and on.....

These are not wishful crackpots. All have hard-won credentials, did serious work
and somehow had to come to terms with the properties of emergence that were escaping the net of our 'fact-filled' enclave. W

Work in genetics is now identifying actual locations that may be sites of future properties of mind and body. I suspect, before long we will be identifying locations that may play a part in identifying properties whose realization cannot be understood simply because we don't yet have them.

Anyway, this is the branch of emergence-studies and emergence-philosophy which is intimately attached to facts ('emergent facts'?) of science and world (philosophy) that are well-confirmed, if not well-understood. Where does 'dreamtime' fit in?  Well, I think the jury's out on that subject. As I suggested in my other post, there's more to the subject than James Merrill's ouija board (The Changing Light at Sandover) can account for. Perhaps one of the first matters that needs to be addressed is how does one distinguish between the two branches? What are properties of physical and psycho-physical emergence as opposed to ephemeral and psycho-inventive emergence?  We might also ask (in the same spirit as we inquire about mind-body connections) what, if any, is the connection between the two? Do they share some inter-informative property that serves to configure one or both of their respective realms? Do they prefigure one another in some measurable way? I can think of examples, but make no suggestions here. What I am suggesting is perhaps we need, for now, to focus on the noun, 'emergence' before we tackle the verb, 'emergence'.

Of course, there is a final question, but for me alone. It is, 'is there anything of current interest in this little ramble for me; or, is it just another closet of my mind which I once visited decades ago, but has long since had the lights off and the door shut. Perhaps it should stay that way, I've other things I wish to explore....  - red

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if I could say with a certainty
what was emergent,
I would demolish the subject.     

That's a great couple of posts, whether simply an outlet for your own long-lost ponderings or otherwise. I cannot respond further without looking into references provided by Mike and yourself but I appreciate the time you've taken and look forward to further discussions on this and many other topics.

The little man in my mind has some reading to do