Sunday, February 07, 2010

Ben Goertzel - The Phenomenal Self

This is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

The self is largely phenomenal, a "self-constructed dynamical phenomenon," but it is not a simple function of the brain. This is where all these transhumanist ideas go awry. Please follow this closely, it's important:

The self is a construct of the body (genetic, biologic, somatic), the brain/mind (genetic/epigenetic/neurologic, subjective, psychological), and the culture/society (family, friends, peer group, racial heritage, worldview, values, nation, society, political system, technology, environment, etc) in which that body/mind moves and lives, located in space and time.

The self we think of as "me" or "I" is that complex (in fact, probably more so) - and there is simply no way to transfer that complexity into a synthetic neural net.

The Phenomenal Self


Ben Goertzel
Ben Goertzel

Cosmist Manifesto

Posted: Feb 2, 2010

What is this thing called “self”—this inner image of “Ben Goertzel” that I carry around with me (that, in a sense, constitutes “me”), that I use to guide my actions and inferences and structure my memories?

It is nothing more or less than a habitual pattern of organization in the collection of patterns that is my mind, correlated with habitual patterns of organization in the collection of patterns that is the mind of the portion of society I habitually associate with.

imageMy “self” keeps telling itself that it is the mind associated with my body ... and in trying to make this story true, it usually succeeds to some degree of approximation (though rarely as high a degree as it thinks it does!) ... but ultimately it is not the mind associated with my body, it is just a portion of that mind which has some overall similarities to the whole.

Thomas Metzinger, in his wonderful “neurophilosophy” book Being No One, uses the term “phenomenal self” which I find to be a good one.

Seeing the self as the self-constructed dynamical phenomenon it is, is one of the main insights that commonly results from meditation practice or psychedelic drug use.

The attachment of primal awareness to self is part of what characterizes our deliberative, reflective consciousness.

Self wishes and acts to preserve itself—this is part of its nature ... connected with the fact that it continues to exist! ... and is also part of the drive some humans feel for immortality.

If the whole mind wants to be immortal, it will be partly satisfied by spawning children, writing books, and so forth—things that extend the patterns constituting it further through time.

If the self wants to be immortal, it doesn’t really care much about offspring or literary works—it wants to keep churning along as a self-creating, self-persisting dynamical subsystem of the mind.

It is unclear the extent to which transhuman minds will have “selves” in the sense that we humans do. Part of “human selfness” seems to be an absurd overestimation, on the part of the self, of the degree to which the self approximates the whole mind. If this overestimation were eliminated, it’s not clear how much of “human selfness” would be left. Some of us will likely find out ... (except the issue of whether it will be “us” that finds out, or some descendant of us, is precisely the question at hand!)

This brief article is part of the overall Cosmist Manifesto.

Ben Goertzel is a fellow of the IEET, and founder and CEO of two computer science firms Novamente and Biomind, and of the non-profit Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (agiri.org).

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