Excerpt:
"In what sense is the self an illusion?
For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it
seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there
in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us
have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt
that others do as well an autonomous individual with a coherent
identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion
it does not exist independently of the person having the
experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That's not to say
that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have
tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does
not mean that it exists as an entity.
If the self is not what it seems, then what is it?
For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual
inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two
ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There
is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the "I," but
there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our
history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this
aspect of the self, "me" which most of us would recognize as our
personal identitywho we think we are. However, I think that both
the "I" and the "me" are actually ever-changing narratives generated by
our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all
the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors.
I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective
contours illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kanizsa_triangle.svg> where you see
an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding
context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they
may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural
activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words,
the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies
revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed.
They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were.
Now that line of reasoning could be applied to all perception except
that not all perception is an illusion. There are real shapes out there
in the world and other physical regularities that generate reliable
states in the minds of others. The reason that the status of reality
cannot be applied to the self, is that it does not exist independently
of my brain alone that is having the experience. It may appear to have a
consistency of regularity and stability that makes it seem real, but
those properties alone do not make it so.
Similar ideas about the self can be found in Buddhism and the writings
of Hume and Spinoza. The difference is that there is now good
psychological and physiological evidence to support these ideas that I
cover in the book in a way that I hope is accessible for the general
reader."
Source: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-illusion-of-the-self2
<http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-illusion-of-the-self2>
