# Consciousness, self; what makes me ME? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 9, 2002, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061 "2002-07-09T12:11:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![perspective](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f475e1/32.png) [@perspective](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/perspective)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2002, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/21 "2002-07-12T21:36:03Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Mangetout \* > But much of the physical ‘me’ has been replaced since I was three years old, so in a sense, my memories from that time are not exactly _directly experienced_ either. There are certain patterns to the interconnections between neurons that remain from your experiences though. I have a scar on my chin from an accident that happened when I was four. The cells that make up the scar tissue have changed yet I still have a scar. A duplicate of me would have a scar too, but not from the same causes. ---
**Author:** ![perspective](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f475e1/32.png) [@perspective](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/perspective)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2002, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/22 "2002-07-12T21:59:33Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by erislover \* > .So I can’t know I am talking to **perspective** when I talk to **perspective**? Or I can’t know that you have a sense of self? Or, um…? (sorry, not trying to be all Socratic and questioning everything, but I’m not clear on precisely how this works) Positing a self that is similar to your own to explain my actions is a very insightful conclusion. But this does not change the fact that you cannot experience my sense of self. Is there anything more subjective than the very experience of subjectiveness? I don’t think a perfect copy negates any sense of self. Uniqueness is unrelated to my experience. If there were an entire universe seperate from my own, yet completely identical including another me, who cares? It has no direct relation to my experiences. If one was the result of a copying process and the original were still around, it would become an important psychological dillemma for the copy, but not the original. It would have to come to grips with arising from a perfect illusion perpetuated by its very biological being.Yet, whatever the causes it arose from, it would still have a “me” just like the original. A far more interesting example to me is what happens if our consciousness can be transferred through means outside of our body. What if we could use artificial memory devices, or experience some sort of technological “mind meld”. I think those sort of things would directly affect our experiences as selves. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2002, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/23 "2002-07-12T22:02:34Z")
True, but the _cause_ of the scar is something that has disappeared down the plughole of time; all that you now have is the scar and the memory; objectively, the copy would have the same and yet it wouldn’t be you (your sense of self would be duplicated, not transferred) The fact that the interconnections between my neurons were established by natural means and those of the copy were **exactly** duplicated by mechanical ones can’t be that important a difference can it? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2002, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/24 "2002-07-12T22:05:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by perspective \* > \*\*A far more interesting example to me is what happens if our consciousness can be transferred through means outside of our body. What if we could use artificial memory devices, or experience some sort of technological “mind meld”. I think those sort of things would directly affect our experiences as selves. \*\* I would have to question again whether this would be a true transfer or just a copy and destroy original process. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [July 12, 2002, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/25 "2002-07-12T22:06:02Z")
> [@](#): > > If one was the result of a copying process and the original were still around, it would become an important psychological dillemma for the copy, but not the original. It would have to come to grips with arising from a perfect illusion perpetuated by its very biological being. Of course, this presumes the copy wouldn’t say the same tihng about you. Which I’m not so sure it wouldn’t. > [@](#): > > But this does not change the fact that you cannot experience my sense of self. I’m not trying to. I’m trying to find out what makes you so sure the copy isn’t you after saying such things. ---
**Author:** ![perspective](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f475e1/32.png) [@perspective](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/perspective)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2002, 10:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/26 "2002-07-13T10:13:31Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Mangetout \* > The fact that the interconnections between my neurons were established by natural means and those of the copy were **exactly** duplicated by mechanical ones can’t be that important a difference can it? The important difference is that the two beings now inhabit different places in space and will lead seperate lives. If you wanted to put a blindfold on the experiment and leave no way for the original or the duplicate to know their origin, then they might both make an equal claim to the past life. But just because no one could discern the difference doesn’t mean that there is none. One popped out of a replicator, one did not. One remained where it was, one arrived in a new place. There was one self, now there are two. The argument over which is the original has important practical implications for those involved but does not diminish in any experiential way their internal sense of self. I might wonder if I was the original if the facts were hidden, but there are many things in life I don’t know. I might become insecure and worried, but my experience of self is still essentially the same. > [@](#): > > I would have to question again whether this would be a true transfer or just a copy and destroy original process. Neither, either or both depending on how it’s done. Imagine a process whereby your senses are expanded, so that you brain recieves and sends nerve impulses outside of your body. Your body is not destroyed but modified. These impulses might appear as sensations, memories, communications etc… How would your sense of self change if you had an extra eye somewhere outside of your body? We have already achieved this to some degree with film/television/“VR” and I think the results in our behavior are obvious. Our minds enter a trance-like state and our bodies become relatively still as we instinctively suspend disbelief and experience the media as if it were an extension of our senses. Of course we still have the option to turn the tv off or look away, but what if we didn’t? Furthermore,what if that “third eye” belonged to the person you were having a conversation with? What if you heard other peoples thoughts as they thought them and they yours? Thought would no longer be a solitary process and your thinking would be seriously altered. Your sense of self might never be the same. Seeing one’s doppleganger would be a mind altering experience where one’s intellectual ideas about self would be challenged and you might even develop a neurosis concerned with your originality, yet you would still experientially have the same sort of awareness. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2002, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/27 "2002-07-13T16:31:59Z")
Posted this in the wrong forum at first… Okay, here’s an interesting thought experiment: It’s the future, and they have developed a way to make artificial neurons that can be plugged into the brain in place of real ones. But these neurons are little computing devices, and can be replicated and report their state, etc. So we sit you in a chair, remove the top of your skull, and start replacing neurons. You’re awake through this entire process. Bit by bit, your brain is cut away and replaced by an exact functioning replica. When they are done, your original brain is in the trash, and you have a computer in your head. You never lost consciousness. Are ‘you’ still ‘you’? Do you still have a soul? How could you tell? Now, we send a command to your brain to send back its state, so that we can make an identical copy. We store this so that you have a backup of ‘you’ in case something should happen. One day, you’re walking down the street, and a bus squashes you flat. So they make a clone of you, and plop your backup brain in it. Let’s say it had been a week since your last backup. Are ‘you’ STILL ‘you’? Isn’t this exactly the same as suffering blunt trauma to the head which destroys short-term memory? Wouldn’t you just lose a week? But wait! Someone has been archiving backups of ‘you’. So they crank out another one from a week before that, and place it in another clone. NOW which one is ‘you’? Wouldn’t both of you have the same claim to being the ‘real’ person? Would a backup copy essentially be a ‘do-over’? Would people make a backup of themselves before doing something dangerous, so that if it went wrong and they were killed, they could be restored to the same state? Here’s yet another one - During the initial process of replacing your brain, they make TWO of them, both outside your body. You’ve been twinned, but you wouldn’t know it. Both copies never lost consciousness, or so they think. Which one is the real ‘you’? To me, all of these thought experiments lead to one conclusion: There is no soul. ‘You’ are merely the expression of the complex calculations of the brain. If they made two of you, both of you would think you’re the real one, and both of you would be alive and self-aware. ---
**Author:** ![pldennison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9fc29f/32.png) [@pldennison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pldennison)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2002, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/28 "2002-07-13T16:41:10Z")
> [@](#): > > On a similiar note, on cloning an individual would they have the same ‘soul’. I don’t like the idea of cloning but it would be interesting to know if it would be the case. Nah, of course not. A clone is nothing more than an identical twin that happens to be conceived later rather than contemporaneously. Despite all the other interesting observations about identical twins, they do not share a single conciousness, or “soul,” or what have you. > [@](#): > > Thinking further on that, if they cloned Einstein would the clone be as smart? It would have the same _potential_ intelligence as the original, I would think, but might not develop the same interests or talents. Individual life experience counts for a lot. A good book along these lines (avoid the movie at all costs) is Ira Levin’s _The Boys From Brazil_, in which an escaped Dr. Mengele not only has cloned Hitler many times over, but is trying to control the external circimstances of each cloned boy’s life in an attempt to actually recreate “Hitler.” > [@](#): > > (Is this one of those hijack things that people mention?) Yep, and welcome to the boards! ---
**Author:** ![pldennison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9fc29f/32.png) [@pldennison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pldennison)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2002, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/29 "2002-07-13T17:00:28Z")
> [@](#): > > On a similiar note, on cloning an individual would they have the same ‘soul’. I don’t like the idea of cloning but it would be interesting to know if it would be the case. Nah, of course not. A clone is nothing more than an identical twin that happens to be conceived later rather than contemporaneously. Despite all the other interesting observations about identical twins, they do not share a single conciousness, or “soul,” or what have you. > [@](#): > > Thinking further on that, if they cloned Einstein would the clone be as smart? It would have the same _potential_ intelligence as the original, I would think, but might not develop the same interests or talents. Individual life experience counts for a lot. A good book along these lines (avoid the movie at all costs) is Ira Levin’s _The Boys From Brazil_, in which an escaped Dr. Mengele not only has cloned Hitler many times over, but is trying to control the external circimstances of each cloned boy’s life in an attempt to actually recreate “Hitler.” > [@](#): > > (Is this one of those hijack things that people mention?) Yep, and welcome to the boards! ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2002, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/30 "2002-07-14T04:58:40Z")
My two cents on these matters have been heard before so I’m mainly gonna just cut and paste from “The self: an urban legend” thread in May. My small contribution then focused on the distinctions between different meanings of the concept of “self” and the role of a “self” evolutionarily. These conversations seem to center around “self” as a “conscious” entity, defining its current pattern state as “self” with constant updates. I’ve added bolding. > [@](#): > > How about Science April 22, 2002? The abstract - > > > [@](#): > > > > Self-Representation in Nervous Systems Patricia S. Churchland\* **The brain’s earliest self-representational capacities arose as evolution found neural network solutions for coordinating and regulating inner-body signals, thereby improving behavioral strategies.** Additional flexibility in organizing coherent behavioral options emerges from neural models that represent some of the brain’s inner states as states of its body, while representing other signals as perceptions of the external world. Brains manipulate inner models to predict the distinct consequences in the external world of distinct behavioral options. The self thus turns out to be identifiable not with a nonphysical soul, but rather with a set of representational capacities of the physical brain > > Some snippets - > > > [@](#): > > > > Descartes proposed that the self is not identical with one’s body, or indeed, with any physical thing. Instead, he famously concluded that the essential self–the self one means when one thinks, “I exist”–is a nonphysical, conscious thing. At this stage of scientific development, the Cartesian approach is unsatisfactory for three reasons: (i) psychological functions generally, including conscious thoughts such as “I exist,” are activities of the physical brain (1, 2); (ii) aspects of self-regulation (e.g., inhibiting sexual inclinations), and self-cognition (e.g., knowing where I stand in my clan’s dominance hierarchy), may be nonconscious (3); and (iii) as the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) realized, there is in any case no introspective experience of the “self” as a distinct thing apart from the body (4). Introspection, Hume concluded, reveals only a continuously changing flux of visual perceptions, sounds, smells, emotions, memories, thoughts, feelings of fatigue, and so forth. … This remarkably diverse range of uses of the self-concept motivates recasting problems about “the self” in terms of self-representational capacities of the brain. Doing so deflates the temptation to think of the self as a singular entity and encourages the idea that self-representing involves a plurality of functions, each having a range of shades, levels, and degrees. Further, it broadens the inquiry beyond humans to other species, suggesting that varying levels of coherencing operate in all nervous systems of any significant complexity. The reformulation also sets the stage for designing experiments to determine more precisely the types of self-representations nervous systems have, how they are connected to one another, and the nature of their neural substrates (6). … **Self-representations may be widely distributed across brain structures, coordinated only on an “as-needed” basis, and arranged in a loose and loopy hierarchy.** … The most fundamental of the self-representational capacities probably arose as evolution stumbled on solutions for coordinating inner-body signals to generate survival-appropriate inner regulation. … An appealing hypothesis defended by Damasio (12) is that the self/nonself distinction, though originally designed to support coherencing, is ultimately responsible for consciousness. According to this view, a brain whose wiring enables it to distinguish between inner-world representations and outer-world representations and to build a meta-representational model of the relation between outer and inner entities is a brain enjoying some degree of consciousness. … On this hypothesis, the degrees or levels of conscious awareness are upgraded in tandem with the self-representational upgrades. > > Interesting point of view, neh? > > \<… later in the thread …\> > > Varela echos some of the same themes: biological self manifests in minds as metaphysical self - > > > [@](#): > > > > I’m interested in the nervous system, cognitive science, and immunology, because they concern the processes that can answer the question of what biological identity is. How can you have some kind of identity that simultaneously allows you to know something, allows cells to configure their own relevant world, the immune system to generate the identity of our body in its own way, and the brain to be the basis for a mind, a cognitive identity? All these mechanisms share a common theme. **And self in the cognitive system is a function of that looping constantly reupdating infinite regress** > > … > > > [@](#): > > > > this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can’t discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. … In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2002, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/31 "2002-07-14T05:17:21Z")
[This](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=117034) is the link to that thread, in case any one is curious. ---
**Author:** ![Go\_alien](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9d8465/32.png) [@Go\_alien](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Go_alien)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/32 "2002-07-15T11:26:44Z")
The question of “what is me?” has been addressed many times in science fiction, especially with reference to copying. Orson Scott Card, in one of his series (the name of which escapes me), describes a civilisation based on brain recording & suspended animation. A person can have their brain recorded, the body is stored or any number of years, and when woken up, the recording is put back in the brain. Card didn’t really probe the question of personal identity (the stories were about the dystopian effect of the system), but I wondered. The individual was conscious for a period after recording, so he/she was experiencing existence. When they went under, that small segment of experience was lost. To me, the recording was just that. The post-recording person was mentally scrubbed, and a foreign recording was put on a blank slate when woken up. The recording was a copy and the original destroyed. Another story, I think by Fred Pohl. Interstellar travel was achieved by sub-light speed space ships. However, a faster than light teleporting system worked, so once the ship (with teleporter) arrived, people could go to the destination. But it wasn’t just a teleporter, it was a copier. The original remained behind and the copy continued its new life at the new location. The story discussed the problems for the hero, repeatedly copied, meeting a copy of his wife (who was a copy from before she met him and had married someone else), and the mental torture of sending copies of himself on suicide missions. IMHO, there is only one me. The stream of consciousness I perceive is the original & genuine, anything else is a fake. Oh, and by the way, when I die, the universe ends. You are all figments of my (possibly deranged) imagination. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/33 "2002-07-15T11:33:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Sam Stone \* > \*\*To me, all of these thought experiments lead to one conclusion: There is no soul. ‘You’ are merely the expression of the complex calculations of the brain. If they made two of you, both of you would think you’re the real one, and both of you would be alive and self-aware. \*\* That isn’t necessarily the only possible conclusion; others might be that the thought experiment will actually remain impossible to implement in reality, because of the (Hypothetical) existence of a soul (although this is falsifiable) or that there is such a thing as a soul, but it is an emergent function, like everything else. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/34 "2002-07-15T13:17:18Z")
I dunno, **Magetout** … sounds like a new spin on the old Theseus’ Ship problem. And a soul, like a ship’s crew, could be present the whole time. ---
**Author:** ![Scylla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a5b964/32.png) [@Scylla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scylla)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061/35 "2002-07-15T13:31:12Z")
Here’s a great article on what neuroscience mayb e saying about all this: “Sorry, Your Soul Just Died” [http://www.brainmachines.com/body\_wolf.html](http://www.brainmachines.com/body_wolf.html) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/consciousness-self-what-makes-me-me/118061.md?page=1)