Taking Care of Your “Self?”

The debate has raged for centuries. Ancient religions have wrestled with the notion of the existence of a separate “individual self or soul,” which might actually be a mental illusion (Maya) blocking our efforts to eventually attain true enlightenment.  According to the Eastern philosophical view, release from the relentless cycles of Samsara (Moksha) requires abandonment of the ego and severing the connection to all earthly desires, in order to experience oneness with Brahman, or the Ultimate Reality.

Philosophers throughout the millennia have weighed in on whether or not we naturally possess a definable “self,” made possible by mental processes which emerge as our human “mind,” positing theories which lead us to suppose such a “self” exists in the first place.

As I slowly came back to consciousness this morning, once again hoping to delay my return to a fully conscious state, I was able to linger in a fairly pleasant hypnagogic state, mulling over what felt like a recollection of the experience of an elaborate dream, where the content of the dream gave me cause to attempt to frame a brief narrative that I could bring back with me upon waking.  Remaining as long as I can in this transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep has occasionally produced helpful results in the process of working my way through my efforts to understand and consider the complexities of the subjects about which I write.

In this instance, the dream seemed to center on the recent ruminations I have been mulling over about my inner life. The phrase “taking care of your “self,” remained in my mind, and I deliberately chose to isolate the word “self” in the phrase to distinguish it from the more common formulation of “taking care of yourself,” which implies efforts to attend to temporal self-care and personal safety.

In a previous posting from June 2009, I wrote:

Our sense of having a “self” or an identifiable person contained within our bodies, clearly requires possessing a nominally functional brain with a minimal amount of experience as a living being, achieving a reasonable ability with language, and being able to express both our thoughts and our basic awareness of existing as an individual. Our observation of other sentient beings suggests that we exist outside of them, and our commonsense notion that “you” are not inside “me.”  Because the brain is so central to our identity as an individual and to the existence of what we call “the mind,” places it center stage in any discussion of “self,” even though the primary role of the brain is as the hub of all activity within the human body; a sort of clearinghouse or control center for a living being.

 Some would describe the terms, “mind,” “self,” and “soul,” as interchangeable, and indeed there are vitally important relationships being described when we use those terms, but there are also very important distinctions contained in them.  When we refer to “the mind,” we are referring to the functioning of a brain with a highly-developed structure like ours; including a process of cognition which is a synthesis of many operations and inputs. 

Once these cognitive processes reach a nominal level of functionality, it becomes possible to develop a sense of a unified “self,” a whole person identifiable as a specific and independent entity who is in possession of “a mind.”  Once we acquire a sense of an “identifiable self” in possession of “a mind,” the potential for discovery becomes available to us, to develop an additional level of awareness of an animating force or energy within us, sometimes referred to as the “human spirit,” which is distinct from the human mind and the temporal bodily experience of the individual “self.”

In our modern epoch, it seems obvious to us that we are physical entities existent in a physical universe, and our modern comprehension of basic neuroscientific principles helps us to appreciate how complex brain processes provide us with a unique advantage in understanding our own and others human behaviors, and in developing treatments for pathologies, which may prevent nominal brain functionality in an otherwise healthy individual.

What is still not so clear is how we might come to understand more fully the true nature of our humanity, and how studying the mechanisms of cognition and brain function might lead us to account for the richness of our subjective experience of existing as physical beings.

 

We are slowly making progress in the fields of quantum theory and cosmology, and the field of neuroscience is expanding exponentially with the assistance of our advanced technological innovations in artificial intelligence and medical science.  In spite of a tremendous gap between what we observe in the advances made through an improved understanding of brain physiology, and in the progress in a variety of cognitive studies, with what we experience subjectively as objectively real within the parameters of our burgeoning inner life, we still see headlines that wish to infer the possible development of sentience and consciousness in the products created using the latest technological hot-button research.

According to an overview of sentience on www.sciencedirect.com:

“Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations, to have affective consciousness, subjective states that have a positive or negative valence. (Chandroo et al., 2004)

Recent publications in mainstream scientific media seem to suggest that sentience may already be present in the latest iterations of A.I. chat bots, based on their ability to respond to inquiries by biological humans, regardless of how limited in scope they might be with regard to “experiencing feelings,” and how reliant they are on the vast resources of information only available by directly accessing all the digital libraries existent in the world today.

Sentience is not specifically and only about achieving a particular level of intelligence and lightning-fast access to a nearly limitless supply of information available across the globe.  Such access, which provides A.I. with what is touted as “human-like abilities” allowing it to appear to mimic human interactions, were it possible to incorporate it equally within the complex structures of a device similar to a human brain, would still not include the human advantage of subjective awareness of experiencing the world as living entities; something currently unavailable to any and all non-human software and devices.

Yes, of course, the algorithms which provide the functionality to A.I. and the access to the volumes of information and writings of humans throughout the millennia, can give these chat bots the appearance of being sentient to the casual observer, but artificial creations of any variety, no matter how sophisticated they become, since they are not ALIVE, and cannot not be said to possess any real depth of individual self-awareness currently, can only imitate someone who actually does, and must conjure responses based on a technological slight-of-hand and very clever programming routines. 

These accomplishments are truly astonishing and have provided humans with extraordinary assistance in a variety of applications in medicine, science, and education, but they are not now, nor will they ever be, human beings; and while they have capabilities which we may never possess ourselves as individuals, they are subject to technical rules of information processing and limited by whatever humans can manage to provide them as they are developed.  Whatever device or software-enabled intelligent structure might eventually be developed in the future, it seems unlikely at best, that such a device will achieve what is called, “metacognition:”

“The ability to think about, or reflect upon, one’s own thoughts and feelings…(which is) clearly underwritten by self-awareness in the psychological realm, but not necessarily by self-awareness in the physical realm.”

—D.M. Broom in the “Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior”

 

At some point, during the latter part of my dream, it occurred to me that in the same way we do not expect to conduct a conversation with a rock or negotiate with a planet to adjust its path around the sun, it doesn’t make any sense to suppose that we might eventually create an artificial device that might one day, as Pinocchio did in a fairy tale, become a real person. We continue to search the vastness of space primarily for “signs of life,” not for signs of intelligent androids or super-intelligent robots. Of course, should we ever encounter such robots as we venture throughout the known universe, my guess is that it would mostly indicate the existence of some variety of actual sentient life which produced them.

The proliferation of living organisms, which are abundant on Earth presently, can clearly be said to represent an extraordinary range of what is possible to achieve, when a sufficient variety of species are brought to life, given the optimal conditions and extensive sustainability of the sort we observe here on Earth.  Without the possibility of some variety of LIFE first developing on any other distant planet, in some manner, as it did here, nothing else can be brought to life, artificial or otherwise.