X-Message-Number: 14759
From: "George Smith" <>
References: <>
Subject: The subjective self in experience - important paradoxes
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 21:05:50 -0700

I enjoy reading in the Cryonet the efforts to narrow down the field of the
subjective sense, the effort to identify a "self circuit" or deal with the
horrid questions of mental clones of one's personality and what that could
practically mean.  These are fascinating puzzles.

But there is another direction which I do not see anyone here exploring.
What exactly IS the sense of "being there" that we are all so interested in
preserving and extending via life extension and cryonics?

And when you look for the actual experience of what you are, there are some
incredibly weird paradoxes which result.

None of these paradoxes have been described here before to my knowledge.

Here is just one.

Look at your body.

ON PRESENT EVIDENCE ALONE (perceptions only please) do you notice that:

(1) Your feet are smaller than your hands?
(2) Your torso, arms and legs are actually ABOVE you as you look at them?
(3) If you move your finger touching your chest up toward your subjective
point of view (where YOU are), your finger VANISHES from sight when it
reaches your neck line?
(4) When you 'look down" at your feet what you are actually SEEING is your
body swinging UP ABOVE YOU?

Do you realize that the only reason you mentally treat your feet as larger
than your hands, your body as if it were below your head, your finger as
still visibly real and your perception of swinging up the visible world as
"looking down" is all because you are operating from a mental perspective or
"cultural map" which IGNORES your direct physical perception in favor of
that map?

And why is this important?

Because your sense of the subjective (the first person singular, the "self")
operates from your perceptual base from at least birth.  Later, with social
conditioning and especially language, you began to restructure the
perspective you normally operate from and then "see" the world from a mental
"map" exterior to your body, from a mental perspective of disassociation.

If you don't take the fundamental perceptual facts of experience into
account when attempting the define the self, you will very likely miss the
little devil entirely.

If you make a computer model of the personality which does not INCLUDE ALL
of these perceptual foundations, what you will have is NOT the same
subjective experience that you do now at all.  You would have a possible
duplication of the COGNITIVE cultural model of experience and end up lacking
the very sense of self  "feeling" which Professor Ettinger suggests may be
at the heart (pun intended) of the self.

These are just a very few of the perceptual inversions which come from our
cognitive map of the world displacing entirely our ongoing sensory
perceptions of the world.

More of these are explored at www.headless.org and there are still a few
more I discovered on my own and use in therapy.

Your subjective experience of self is entirely different from the experience
you have of other human beings.  The cultural cognitive map of the self is
from an OUT OF BODY perspective and does NOT MATCH what you see with your
own eyes, hear with your own ears and feel with your own skin, etc.

For example, think back to where you were on New Years Eve two years ago.
Go ahead.  Actually do it.

Now, did you have a memory in which you could see yourself in that memory?
Could you see your own face, perhaps?  If not, try a few other memories.
Usually we edit our memories and view them from just such an out of body
perspective - a perspective as if we were looking at our bodies from the
outside.

In cases of traumatic injury (such as rapes) where the patient still suffers
years later from the experience, the problem is often quickly alleviated by
having the person review the traumatic memory AS IF SOMEONE ELSE WERE
WATCHING IT.  As long as the victim remembers the painful memory from a
perspective of being IN the body, behind the eyes, the memory of the event
tends to also bring up the fear, shock and pain as well.

When the patient practices (sometimes only once!) viewing the memory from a
dissociated perspective, the associations to the emotions of the event seem
to disconnect as well.  We seem to naturally do this with our memories,
perhaps because it does break up paralyzing phobic associations which would
hinder our ability to survive.

However if the human personality is ever uploaded into a program that lacks
the current structure of subjective perceptual experience, I can see where
you would have missed the "self" entirely - or produced an acute case of
schizophrenia with an entirely confused dissociative mental illness.

Is this important right now?  Not really.  But as the attempt to "create"
subjective awareness in computer models (true AI) proceeds, this issue will
become critical in my opinion.

Just one more example.  The next time you drive in a car ask yourself what
do you actually SEE moving:  you or the scene outside the window?

When you recognize that what you actually see is the WORLD moving, and NOT
you, then think what would happen if you set up a upload program for
personality which followed the commonly held cultural belief that the CAR
and DRIVER is what is moving.

Would the consciousness that resulted from such programming be considered
"sane"?  I seriously doubt it.

A traditional expression for recovery from delusion is "coming to your
senses".  The senses experience the world "out there" from "in here" and it
is this "in here" that helps define the subjective, the "self".  You simply
don't find the self "out there".  The experiencer is not the experience (if
there is to BE any experiencer to find).

A large part of  "being human" includes BOTH the cognitive mental map from
an exterior viewpoint AND the internal perceptual experience which very few
adults can recognize (much as fish do not perceive water).  And the
QUALITIES of what we actually and directly perceive are so radically
different from our cultural mental map that when someone is exposed to a
drug like LSD which temporarily occludes our ability to impose the cultural
map OVER our perceptions, we then call these experiences "psychedelic" or
"mystical".  The cultural definitions of self seem commonly assaulted by
perceptual experience in such situations.  Permanent "assaults" are often
called psychosis.

This is a fact "just as plain as the nose on your face" ... which you CAN'T
SEE - neither your FACE nor the NOSE!  (You do see 2 pinkish floating things
in your outer left and right lower field of vision which our culture then
calls your singular nose, but you certainly don't see ONE nose unless you
are blind in one eye!  And you certainly DON'T see your face unless you look
in a mirror, in which case your face is not where YOU are, but is over there
in that mirror!  And to make things even worse, that face of yours in the
mirror is separated from the body YOU are operating out of and is far too
small to cover the space the culture tells you is your face).

The paradoxes between actual experience and our cultural mental maps go on
and on.  They must be taken into account in any full accounting of what it
means to be human, conscious and in the search for what the "self" actually
IS.... or we just might miss that little devil altogether.

Just a thought.

George Smith

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