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This is, I believe, one of the big reasons why people find it hard to reject religion (another big one being the difficulty of accepting death, of oneself or of

This is, I believe, one of the big reasons why people find it hard to reject religion (another big one being the difficulty of accepting death, of oneself or of loved ones). There's genuine mystery at work here, or so it seems. You need to distinguish consciousness from ego/free will. Consciousness is the fact that there's something rather than nothing, subjectively. That you seem to experience: sights, sounds, sensations, emotions. Under that definition consciousness is something that cannot be fake (no matter what's the nature of the universe; no matter whether you're asleep or awake), simply because you experience things. Ego/free will is a separate concept and is indeed an illusion (or an evolutionary artifact if you like The Selfish Gene). There's a lot of evidence for that, the simplest being that no mainstream physical theory allows us to have made choices any differently than we have (barring true randomness like quantum mechanics predicts; but it's also easy to see that that's not freedom, just plain randomness).

mbrock 8y ago
As I see it, the basic fact of ego is something that similarly cannot be fake: my mental life has a nexus called “me” at the center of agency, being a symbol for my own body, my desires and fears, etc. It’s no more an illusion than my cat meowing for food in the morning is an illusion. He’s there, he’s hungry, he wants food, so he meows.
- comboy 8y ago
  It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it. There is no little you sitting in your head over the dashboard and making decisions. You don't decide when to decide to move your hand. It just comes to you. If we disconnect your hemispheres which one is going to be you? There are books on the topic, I don't have a slightest hope to get the point across, but I think if you ponder it long enough then you can come to the conclusion even on your own. You can call this familiar pattern "myself" but it's not like there's any ego that you can find in there. And what I mean here is not "let go of your self be free and enlightened". It's just that it's all more reasonable from purely rational perspective. There are a lot of patters that you can observe in and around you. You can call them all John Doe, but when you examine these patterns, you can exclude some as something that's "not you", just a thing that happens here. If you keep doing that I don't see how can you extract what you call ego. You could group some selfish behavior patterns and associate them with ego as in when we say somebody has a big ego, but I don't think that's what you mean here.
  - tremon 8y ago
    It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it This doesn't necessarily follow. Emergent properties are still real, even if you can't separate that property from the system that generates it.
    - comboy 8y ago
      I agree. But you need to define that property. That's what I mean by pinpointing it. Describing what are we talking about exactly. The fact that we are talking about it, is not enough for it to exist. Let's say there is a ray of light from the sky. And people start talking that there's a white tower standing on the ground as high as the sky. Everybody knows what we are talking about, it's just that we go there, examine it, and it turns out it's just a ray of sun from behind the cloud. Not such a great example because a white tower would still be much more clearly defined than the ego is, but that's what came to mind.
  - taneq 8y ago
    > It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it. There is no little you sitting in your head over the dashboard and making decisions. You don't decide when to decide to move your hand. It just comes to you. If we disconnect your hemispheres which one is going to be you? The way I see it, your perception of there being "a little you" is basically a self-referential part of your brain taking a bunch of status readings from all over your brain and using them to generate the sensation of the little you doing whatever it is that you're doing. The homunculus is there in your head, but he's just a picture on the screen in your Cartesian theatre.
  - mbrock 8y ago
    As a first approximation, let’s say I am my physical body. If you’re sitting in the chair across from me you can see me. If I wave, what you see is me waving. I’m a body in space with some peculiar characteristics called “life.” Fine, but what happens when I die? My body is still there but it’s not really me anymore. I’m gone. The body left behind is just a husk. So it seems that I am not just a hunk of matter, but at least a hunk of matter imbued with a dynamic pattern of activity: breathing, perceiving, reacting, speaking, and so on. Fine, but what about sleepwalking? In some sense it’s me who’s doing the things the sleepwalker does, but in some crucial sense it’s not really me. That’s a subtle and strange distinction, but we make this distinction in everyday life. I don’t blame someone for snoring, and when I feel annoyed I recognize I am being irrational. And so on until you start to refine a picture of the person’s self as something like that body’s everyday nexus of thoughts, emotions, and decisions, being the result of socialization and growing to adulthood, especially within a narratively coherent life. There’s no need for a homunculus ego in some infinite regress of ultimate causality—that is indeed a nonreal, fantastical kind of self, the kind of self that early Buddhists criticized the brahmins of their time for promoting as the true self. Real selves are just developed, cultivated, socialized entities that arise as psychological realities. There might be more complex, nuanced structures than just “one body, one self.” But the insistence that selves are just nonexistent delusions seems to me like an unnecessarily provocative way of formulating something.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
I interpret ego as the mechanism that enables competition for surviving and mating. It’s what makes you feel more deserving of the limited resource, such as food or a mate, than someone else, and would seem to be a trait that’s beneficial for passing down genes.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  It's a bad habit e.g: being ego centric and uncaring towards other. But it's the main way our ecosystem (jobs and education works) being an unchanging person with name and sameness.
mannykannot 8y ago
My guess is that it goes the other way: many people insist there must be something to our minds beyond what could result from physical processes in a physical brain that has evolved from much simpler predecessors, because of the profound and disturbing implications it has for what we are and what will become of us. To be clear: the mystery is there - no-one has yet shown how minds do work - it is the assumption that it must be forever so that is a matter of faith (as is the opposite view; the issue is why a person would lean one way or the other.)
- YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
  I think we're agreeing. I didn't spell out that I do think consciousness is not understood, it's a mystery, at least for now. The religious solution is to slam some superstition on top of that mystery to make it more digestible.

mbrock 8y ago

As I see it, the basic fact of ego is something that similarly cannot be fake: my mental life has a nexus called “me” at the center of agency, being a symbol for my own body, my desires and fears, etc. It’s no more an illusion than my cat meowing for food in the morning is an illusion. He’s there, he’s hungry, he wants food, so he meows.

comboy 8y ago
It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it. There is no little you sitting in your head over the dashboard and making decisions. You don't decide when to decide to move your hand. It just comes to you. If we disconnect your hemispheres which one is going to be you? There are books on the topic, I don't have a slightest hope to get the point across, but I think if you ponder it long enough then you can come to the conclusion even on your own. You can call this familiar pattern "myself" but it's not like there's any ego that you can find in there. And what I mean here is not "let go of your self be free and enlightened". It's just that it's all more reasonable from purely rational perspective. There are a lot of patters that you can observe in and around you. You can call them all John Doe, but when you examine these patterns, you can exclude some as something that's "not you", just a thing that happens here. If you keep doing that I don't see how can you extract what you call ego. You could group some selfish behavior patterns and associate them with ego as in when we say somebody has a big ego, but I don't think that's what you mean here.
- tremon 8y ago
  It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it This doesn't necessarily follow. Emergent properties are still real, even if you can't separate that property from the system that generates it.
  - comboy 8y ago
    I agree. But you need to define that property. That's what I mean by pinpointing it. Describing what are we talking about exactly. The fact that we are talking about it, is not enough for it to exist. Let's say there is a ray of light from the sky. And people start talking that there's a white tower standing on the ground as high as the sky. Everybody knows what we are talking about, it's just that we go there, examine it, and it turns out it's just a ray of sun from behind the cloud. Not such a great example because a white tower would still be much more clearly defined than the ego is, but that's what came to mind.
- taneq 8y ago
  > It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it. There is no little you sitting in your head over the dashboard and making decisions. You don't decide when to decide to move your hand. It just comes to you. If we disconnect your hemispheres which one is going to be you? The way I see it, your perception of there being "a little you" is basically a self-referential part of your brain taking a bunch of status readings from all over your brain and using them to generate the sensation of the little you doing whatever it is that you're doing. The homunculus is there in your head, but he's just a picture on the screen in your Cartesian theatre.
- mbrock 8y ago
  As a first approximation, let’s say I am my physical body. If you’re sitting in the chair across from me you can see me. If I wave, what you see is me waving. I’m a body in space with some peculiar characteristics called “life.” Fine, but what happens when I die? My body is still there but it’s not really me anymore. I’m gone. The body left behind is just a husk. So it seems that I am not just a hunk of matter, but at least a hunk of matter imbued with a dynamic pattern of activity: breathing, perceiving, reacting, speaking, and so on. Fine, but what about sleepwalking? In some sense it’s me who’s doing the things the sleepwalker does, but in some crucial sense it’s not really me. That’s a subtle and strange distinction, but we make this distinction in everyday life. I don’t blame someone for snoring, and when I feel annoyed I recognize I am being irrational. And so on until you start to refine a picture of the person’s self as something like that body’s everyday nexus of thoughts, emotions, and decisions, being the result of socialization and growing to adulthood, especially within a narratively coherent life. There’s no need for a homunculus ego in some infinite regress of ultimate causality—that is indeed a nonreal, fantastical kind of self, the kind of self that early Buddhists criticized the brahmins of their time for promoting as the true self. Real selves are just developed, cultivated, socialized entities that arise as psychological realities. There might be more complex, nuanced structures than just “one body, one self.” But the insistence that selves are just nonexistent delusions seems to me like an unnecessarily provocative way of formulating something.

lotsofpulp 8y ago

I interpret ego as the mechanism that enables competition for surviving and mating. It’s what makes you feel more deserving of the limited resource, such as food or a mate, than someone else, and would seem to be a trait that’s beneficial for passing down genes.

HNLurker2 8y ago
It's a bad habit e.g: being ego centric and uncaring towards other. But it's the main way our ecosystem (jobs and education works) being an unchanging person with name and sameness.

mannykannot 8y ago

My guess is that it goes the other way: many people insist there must be something to our minds beyond what could result from physical processes in a physical brain that has evolved from much simpler predecessors, because of the profound and disturbing implications it has for what we are and what will become of us. To be clear: the mystery is there - no-one has yet shown how minds do work - it is the assumption that it must be forever so that is a matter of faith (as is the opposite view; the issue is why a person would lean one way or the other.)

YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
I think we're agreeing. I didn't spell out that I do think consciousness is not understood, it's a mystery, at least for now. The religious solution is to slam some superstition on top of that mystery to make it more digestible.