The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [103]
Before psychological experiments began to make us realize how unreliable introspection is, few were prepared to challenge its insistence that there is a single enduring self that exists continuously throughout each life. Those who saw the problems of a nonphysical, nonmaterial self tried in vain to show that the self was part of the body. Almost always the favored part was the brain. No luck. To begin to see why, just think about Dennett’s brain in the vat or the Freaky Friday movies, where no brains are exchanged while selves are. The movies don’t make sense if the self is physical, because the mom’s body and the daughter’s body don’t trade anything physical at all when they trade selves. When your brain is moved to a vat, introspection tells you that your self stays in your empty head, where its point of view is. Physical things don’t behave like that.
There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.
The notion of an enduring self is another part of the mistake that introspection makes when it thinks consciousness is making plans that guide behavior. Thinking about things seems to require a thinker; planning for things seems to require a planner. Humans, like other animals, have been selected for taking steps over time that preserve and protect them and that exploit their environments in ways that enhance their fitness. They even make use of their naturally selected capacities to do things that may harm their fitness or that have no effects on fitness either way, like inventing calculus or building a cathedral. These activities give the appearance of purpose and planning. Insofar as introspection rationalizes these activities as the result of the reality of planning—real thoughts about futures need a real planner, one that lives long enough to carry out the plans no matter how long it may take. So, the fiction of the enduring self is almost certainly a side effect of a highly effective way of keeping the human body out of harm’s way. It is a by-product of whatever selected for bodies—human and nonhuman—to take pains now that make things better for themselves later. For a long time now, Mother Nature has been filtering for bodies to postpone consumption in the present as investment for the body’s future. It looks a lot like planning. Even squirrels do it, storing nuts for the winter. Does this require each squirrel to have a single real enduring self through time? No. If not, then why take introspection’s word for it when it has a track record of being wrong about things like this, when the self just looks like part of the same illusions and is supposed to have features that physics tells us nothing real can have.
For all we know, consciousness may have some function in organizing the body to do things that look like they are the results of purposes and plans. Neuroscience just doesn’t know enough about the brain yet to rule that out. But it can already rule out common