Jonah Lehrer interviewed psychologist Bruce Hood about his book The Self Illusion which, not surprisingly, argues that the self we all experience is an illusion,
HOOD: When I was first asked to write this book, I really could not see what the revelation was all about. We had to be a multitude – a complex system of evolved functions. Neuroscientists spend their time trying to reverse engineer the brain by trying to figure out the different functions we evolved through natural selection. So far, we have found that the brain is clearly a complex of interacting systems all the way up from the senses to the conceptual machinery of the mind – the output of the brain. From the very moment that input from the environment triggers a sensory receptor to set off a nerve impulse that becomes a chain reaction, we are nothing more that an extremely complicated processing system that has evolved to create rich re-presentations of the world around us. We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience.
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LEHRER: If the self is an illusion, then why does it exist? Why do we bother telling a story about ourselves?
HOOD: For the same reason that our brains create a highly abstracted version of the world around us. It is bad enough that our brain is metabolically hogging most of our energy requirements, but it does this to reduce the workload to act. That’s the original reason why the brain evolved in the first place – to plan and control movements and keep track of the environment. It’s why living creatures that do not act or navigate around their environments do not have brains. So the brain generates maps and models on which to base current and future behaviors. Now the value of a map or a model is the extent to which it provides the most relevant useful information without overburdening you with too much detail.
The same can be said for the self. Whether it is the “I” of consciousness or the “me” of personal identity, both are summaries of the complex information that feeds into our consciousness. The self is an efficient way of having experience and interacting with the world. For example, imagine you ask me whether I would prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream? I know I would like chocolate ice cream. Don’t ask me why, I just know. When I answer with chocolate, I have the seemingly obvious experience that my self made the decision. However, when you think about it, my decision covers a vast multitude of hidden processes, past experiences and cultural influences that would take too long to consider individually. Each one of them fed into that decision.
I may be getting this wrong, but if I remember correctly Douglas Hofstadter argues in I Am A Strange Loop that the self is an emergent phenomenon that is the result of the brain taking the tools it uses to analyze external phenomenon and turning those inward to analyze its own processes and activities.
Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what most of us experience as the self. Rather, the self is experienced as the director, controller and master manipulator of the mind and body.
If accurate, this is yet another reason to reject the notion of free will — the self that I experience chooses to pick chocolate ice cream over vanilla, but on further examination it appears the brain constructs this narrative for itself to explain and rationalize its own actions to itself.
Second, it makes it highly probable that human beings are not the only animals to experience something like the self (or alternatively, that the qualities about the human self that are used to justify its primacy are likely not as significant as widely believed).