The Illusion of the Self

Dr. Benedict Beckeld discusses how the illusion of the self facilitates the current civil unrest.
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[@brianoneil6659]

More brilliance from you Dr. Beckeld. And the more casual attire does not lessen a tad your intellectual heft. Thing is, you don't intimidate, you educate. Which is a real gift, right there. Be well, Benedict. Be safe.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Ah, I did actually question my own sartorial choice, but then thought: it's summer and 90 degrees. But it's true I usually prefer the classic gentleman's look of the 1940s or thereabouts. And thank you very much, your words are extremely kind and mean a lot to me. My fondest regards to you.

[@davidferrer6771]

Thank you! 🙏

[@allenmeyer2705]

Brilliant; simply brilliant. Still relevant to this day.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thank you, that means a lot.

[@Gordesm]

How does one come to the same conclusion as Plato without ever hearing of Plato's writings if Plato was the creator of this "The Illusion of the Self" ? My internal understanding is simply "Reality being the physical form of consciousness. The human body is a flesh and blood vehicle for the Spirit, an avatar for consciousness. We are all one in the same." Energy vibrating at different frequencies which creates matter. Love always!

[@wardandrew23412]

This is a topic that has intrigued me for years, and I'd like to hear Dr. Beckeld's take on the following. Many years ago I had a conversation about reincarnation with Nelson Pike, who at the time was still teaching philosophy at UCLA. In that conversation, Dr. Pike mentioned popular stories in which humans are transformed into non-human beings of some sort (eg: Prince Charming turning into a frog, or Gregor Samsa turning into a beetle in Kafka's, "Metamorphosis"). He went on to say that the fact that we can make sense of such stories shows that the concept of "personhood" can be understood quite apart from the physical body which a person happens to "inhabit". I'm inclined to think Pike was mistaken on this point. For starters, one might wonder how exactly the "soul" can in any sense be considered the same person from one incarnation to the next when the memories of a previous incarnation are not inherited by the next incarnation, and when the life experiences that shape who we are, are unique to each incarnation. If one of my previous incarnations had been a 15th century African woman, for example, it's exceedingly difficult to understand how she and I could in some way be the same person, given that we don't have the same memories, inclinations, or life experiences. An even more fundamental problem, it seems to me, is that who/what we are as unique beings is very much determined by the way we interact with the world through the medium of our physical bodies. The brain of a frog, for example, doesn't possess the physical structure to enable it to think like a human, nor could it understand the world around it as humans do, given the physiological differences in it's perceptual and cognitive apparatus. I doubt, in light of these considerations, that we really can make sense of the claim that Prince Charming is in any sense the same person after being magically transformed into a frog, as Pike claims. The very idea seems unintelligible to me, and I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on this.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

(I've been having some technical issues posting my reply. Hopefully it works this time.) I like the Kafka example which is very apt, and a manifestation of what is essentially the Cartesian position. I'd say that personhood is imaginable, whereas I am talking here about what actually exists. On that level, personhood is simply a nominal category: sometimes a useful one, but a nominal category all the same, as opposed to something that really exists. And I try to explain in this video some of the reasons why this category can in some contexts even be harmful. And so while I think that Pike's explanation, as you have conveyed it, is useful, I do not believe that it correctly describes reality, so I suppose you and I are in agreement. You will not be surprised to hear that I do not believe there is such a thing as "soul", and therefore, while I agree with what you say about its incoherence for identifying personhood, I myself don't even make it as far as describing its incoherence for personhood, since I don't even subscribe to its existence. So I'd conclude by saying that there's a good reason why we call the Prince Frog a fairy tale and the Metamorphosis a work of surrealist fiction. Your description of how our bodies impose limitations on what can realistically be understood as personhood is, to my mind, entirely correct.

[@wardandrew23412]

@@BenedictBeckeld Thank you for your response. The concept of a soul reminds me a bit of the concept of Libertarian free will that we discussed earlier, which is to say that some concepts are so deeply problematic that refuting them only requires that we state them explicitly.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Indeed, if we think them through consistently all the way, we realize that they can only be accepted on pure faith.

[@chanasahler1244]

I always look forward to your refreshing and informative videos!

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thank you! ❤️

[@HolyGround777]

These videos are so incredibly informational! The level of knowledge that you can provide in just over 10min is next level😄

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thanks, I'm very pleased you like them!

[@darkphoenix8278]

Thank you for the video.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thanks for watching it!

[@zafthedon]

The idea of no self or Anata is mystical as is the idea of the self.

[@solomontruthlover5308]

What do you mean by mystical and why do you think this idea mystical

[@zafthedon]

@@solomontruthlover5308 It cannot be defined exactly, as well as free will - its out of the domain of logic or the empirical realm, Like morality or love it has its own experiential category

[@solomontruthlover5308]

Thanks for another great video!

[@BenedictBeckeld]

My pleasure, thanks!

[@posivibez2094]

This seems spot on. Great content.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thank you!

[@dmihaesi]

Another great summary.Greetings from Australia.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thank you, greetings back from the U.S.!

Very very interesting again. These are very insightful ideas.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Thank you, I'm glad you think so!

[@TheJoyofThinking]

Thank you for your Insights ♥ I've come to a similar POV, after learning about focal brain injuries and the loss of behavior that are classically associated with properties of Soul/Personality (e.g. Phineas Gage and Company). I know the idea is probably common among more modern philosophers but has it ever been codified by any major/minor ideology/religion? If so, is it possible to determine what consequence large scale adoption might mean for a society? I'd like to think that this insight if readily adopted could inhibit our preference for short-term self-interest (future discounting) which seems to facilitate the "Tragedy of the Commons" among other negative social conditions you mentioned (greed, exceptionalism, moral purity). This is one of those foundational assumptions built into human minds... Is it so antithetical to intuition to ever find foothold in popular culture? ♥Thanks Again Great Content!

[@BenedictBeckeld]

My pleasure, thank you! When it comes to religion or mass ideology, Buddhism is perhaps what comes closest to it, although its point of approach is rather different. Buddhism is, in turn, not very suitable for developing an active and powerful civilization, and so I don't think the West is well served by it at all. It would be good if people learned to dissociate themselves from their selves in some measure, as I discuss, but all the other baggage that would come with a religion or mass ideology that repudiates the self would not, I think, be in our interest as a society. (As I say in my video "Is God Necessary for Morality?", some of our metaphysical nonsense is socially useful.) And so, yes, I do think it's quite counter-intuitive for most people.

[@socialbuzzhivebyemilystand7049]

Sorry if this is a naive question; but do you think the 'self' adapts to different stages of life? Different situations? Or is one essentially ones 'self' one's meaning one's nature (thinking of Marcus Aurelius) throughout a given lifetime? Love your videos and blog! Thank you for more inspiring ideas!

[@BenedictBeckeld]

That's not at all a naive question. And my answer would be a resounding Yes (to the first question): It will vary from individual to individual, of course (some people change more than others), but by and large we can say that one's "nature" does not remain steadfast throughout a lifetime, which is the point of the admittedly extremist position of Rilke's protagonist that I mention. It's true of course that we all have our particular "personalities" and that one can trace certain behaviors and personal quirks in any person from childhood to late adulthood, but I'd go so far as to say that I feel sorry for those who insist on their own particular "nature", because they seem to me to be subconsciously closed to the possibility of new horizons, new developments, and radical "self"-improvement. The denial of the "self" allows us to be more open to new ideas, to art, etc. etc. It is like the creative mindset of the child, who has not yet realized that it has a "self" and certain parameters to follow, but who simply embraces whatever strikes its fancy.

[@NoWorriesLad]

Another great video, I really enjoyed it. I'd love to have your thoughts on the below taken from Philosopher William Lane Craig In Angus Menuge in his paper “Why Not Physicalism?” Menuge says, Reductive and eliminative forms of physicalism fail to account for our mental lives. But . . . the varieties of non-reductive physicalism also fail to account for mental causation. If these theories are faithful to physicalism, then supervening or emergent mental properties cannot add anything new that was not going to happen anyway, as a result of their physical base properties. If we want to account for consciousness, mental causation and reasoning, we need some entity over and above the body. This entity must be simple, have thoughts as inseparable parts, persist as a unity over time, and have active power. That sounds like a soul . . . Let’s break this down a bit. Menuge distinguishes between two types of physicalism. First was the reductive or eliminative type of physicalism. According to this view, there just is no such entity as the soul. Rather, all that exists would be the brain - a glob of tissue that sits in your skull. There simply is no such thing as a mind or the soul. Or, there are non-reductive varieties of physicalism which says that the brain has mental properties or states that are states of awareness that we would normally ascribe to the soul but in fact there isn’t any such thing as the soul; these are just epiphenomenal states or, as Menuge puts it, supervenient or emergent properties of the brain. All that really exists is the brain but in addition to that there are these epiphenomenal or supervenient properties that are mental in nature. Reductive or eliminative forms of materialism are increasingly unpopular. They just don’t seem to account, as Menuge says, for our mental lives because the brain, as a physical substance, simply has physical properties: things like a certain volume, a certain mass, a certain density, a location, a shape. But the brain doesn’t have mental properties. The brain isn’t jubilant, the brain isn’t sad, the brain isn’t in pain. When your back hurts and you are in pain it is not the brain that is in pain even if the brain is involved in the circuitry that gives you the experience of pain. So the brain alone as a physical glob of tissue doesn’t have the mental properties that are characteristic of mental states so reductive materialism doesn’t work. This has led many thinkers to affirm some sort of non-reductive physicalism - that the brain gives rise to these epiphenomenal states of awareness like jubilance or sadness or pain. But there isn’t any thing - there isn’t any soul or mind - that has these. Rather, these are just states of the brain and the brain is the only thing that really exists. Menuge identifies a number of problems with this view that makes it improbable.First of all, he points out that this is incompatible with self identity over time. Think about it - if the brain endures from one moment to another, the brain endures through time and so has identity through time but these states of awareness don’t endure from one moment to the next. There is no enduring self - no “I” - that endures from one moment to the next. On this view, the self - the “I” - is rather like the Buddhist view of the self which says that the soul or the self is something like the flame of a candle. The candle and the wick endure from one moment to the next but the flame doesn’t endure. There is a different flame at each moment of the candle’s burning but you have a sort of continuity but there really isn’t any identity over time. I think you can see that in this case with these states of awareness. Every state of the brain at different times has a state of awareness associated with it but there isn’t any enduring self or “I” that endures from one moment to the next. This leads a naturalist philosopher like Alex Rosenberg to boldly affirm that there is no enduring self on atheism or on materialism. That it is an illusion. It is an illusion that you are the same person who began reading this comment. In fact, you are not because there is no identity over time. So if you do believe that you are the same person who began reading this comment, you ought to reject this non-reductive physicalist view of the self. Also, intentional states of consciousness don’t seem to make sense on this view. The property of intentionality is the property of being about something or being of something. For example, I can think about my summer vacation or I can think of my wife. Physical objects don’t have these sorts of properties. The brain is not about something any more than a chair or a table is about something or of something. It is only thoughts which are of something that have this kind of aboutness or intentionality to it. But on this view there is no self - there is no soul - which has the property of intentionality; instead you just have the brain and intentionality is in effect an illusion. So, again, Rosenberg bites the bullet and says that we never really think about anything. It is just an illusion that we have intentional states. Not only is that contrary to experience - I mean, after all I am thinking about Rosenberg’s argument right? - but it is actually self-refuting. What is an illusion? An illusion is an illusion of something. So it is itself an intentional state. An illusion of intentionality is an intentional state - you are having an illusion of something or about something. So the view that intentionality is merely an illusion is literally self-refuting and incoherent. If you think, again, that you ever have thoughts about something or of something you ought to believe in the reality of the soul and reject these physicalist views. Thirdly, free will seems impossible to reconcile with either reductive or non-reductive physicalism because on these views there is no causal connection between the states of awareness. The only causality is on the purely physical level. So that is totally determined by the laws of nature and the initial material conditions. So there just isn’t any room for freedom of the will. So on this view, again, free will is an illusion - you never really do anything freely. And that flies in the face of our experience of ourselves as free agents. I can freely do certain things or freely choose to think about certain things. I am not simply determined by my brain states. So freedom of the will - if you believe in that - gives you reason to believe in the reality of the soul and to reject these reductive and non-reductive physicalist views. Finally, the last phenomenon that Menuge points to is mental causation. Notice that on these non-reductive physicalist views, the only arrow of causation is from the brain to these epiphenomenal states. The epiphenomenal states themselves don’t cause anything. They are utterly causally impotent. So there is no return causality from awareness to the brain. Why? Because there is nothing there - there is no soul, there is no mind, that can exert a causal influence on the brain. So on this view, the arrow of causality goes only one way - it is from the brain to these epiphenomenal states and that is incompatible with my, again, introspectively graspability to cause things. I can cause my arm to go up; I can raise my arm by thinking about it. I can do other things through thinking and thereby bring about causal effects. So, in all of these ways, it seems to me that Menuge is right that we ought to reject these materialistic and physicalist views in favor of some sort of dualism-interactionism. That is to say, we are composites of soul and body and the soul and the body - in particularly the brain - work together to think. And in this way we have a kind of union of the soul and the body in this lifetime.

[@BenedictBeckeld]

Hello again, and thank you! The dualism-monism controversy of course is very old, but there is a reason why philosophers have increasingly abandoned dualism and why those who still hold on to it are mostly religious philosophers, like Craig himself. People sometimes say that real progress can only be made in the natural sciences, not in philosophy, but in fact I do think that this is one of those areas where we can clearly say that there has been progress within philosophy, too. Contrary to what is implied in the excerpt, at least as it seemed to me, neuroscientists have quite a good idea of how the brain works (I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'm happy to learn from other fields). Physicalism in general does not "fail to account for mental causation" at all. It's true that "emergent mental properties cannot add anything new that was not going to happen anyway", but physicalists (or materialists) don't deny this; it speaks to his point about free will, which I'll get to in a moment. So it is not true that, as he says, "[i]f we want to account for consciousness, mental causation and reasoning, we need some entity over and above the body". When he says that "reductive physicalism" means that there "is no such thing as a mind or the soul", that in itself is a bit of a reductive definition. There's no soul, but if we define mind as a series of operations within the brain, there is of course a mind. There is no great difference between "reductive" and "non-reductive" physicalism with this definition, which also means that it is not really the case that philosophers have escaped into "non-reductive" physicalism upon realizing that "reductive" physicalism doesn't work. Since the brain can be analyzed in its various parts and operations, it is not true that, as Craig says, "[t]he brain isn't jubilant, the brain isn't sad" etc. In fact, the brain is precisely these things. These are "states of the brain", as he says. Sorry for the brief ad hominem here, but it seems to me that Craig is often more interested in "debating" and "convincing" than in a disinterested pursuit of the truth, and so he'll say things that sound obvious and like common sense (e.g. "the brain isn't sad") and that aren't meant to be probed any further. The point that on the physicalist view there is no "self", is acceptable. But Craig seems to treat this as some sort of "gotcha" point, whereas in fact physicalists would agree. Craig needs there to be a "self", because he is a religious philosopher who wants there to be a soul, and as I say in the video, the idea of the self is indeed quasi-religious or quasi-mysticist. To say that "states of awareness don't endure from one moment to the next" is false, and Craig says this in order to impute to physicalists a position that appears to be absurd. But of course states of awareness endure; this does not have to mean that there is a separate entity known as a self. A typical Craig-esque statement is to say, in describing the physicalist position: "It is an illusion that you are the same person who began reading this comment", because it sounds absurd on its face, and as I said, he is more interested in "debating", "convincing", and "winning" than in actually understanding other positions (he seems like a very smart fellow, but I base this on what I have seen of his interactions with other philosophers and with people who ask him questions). The fact that there is no self does not mean that we do not have mental states that endure. The same can be said regarding his point on intentionality, which is really just the same point restated with a somewhat different vocabulary. When he implies that physicalists would hold that the brain is comparable to a table or a chair as regards intentionality, that is patently absurd. Again, mental states can endure. There has been a lot of controversy about whether there is such a thing as a faculty of the "will", an older term than intentionality, and it depends to a great extent on how one defines these terms, which is not immediately obvious (some people who deny the will and some who accept the will actually mean the same thing), but that the brain performs operations that push an individual to desire a certain thing over time is uncontroversial. His point about free will is also not controversial: Sure, there is no free will (I have two videos on that on this channel). Instead of trying to philosophize, he seeks to persuade the laymen by such statements as that the lack of free will "flies in the face of our experience of ourselves as free agents", which in fact is a tad circular - because who says that we experience ourselves as free agents? - and is also highly subjective. Craig is in the philosophical minority when it comes to free will as well. In the two videos to which I referred, I explain briefly how free will arose as a defense of what is at its core a religious position. His final point, about the one-way direction of causation, is circular because it sets up epiphenomenal states as a separate entity, to which causation flows from the brain (which admittedly is the literal meaning of epi-phenomenon: "on" the phenomenon, i.e. separate from it). But the point is that the brain and epiphenomenal states - if that is what one chooses to call them - are part of the same package, so in treating the epiphenomenal states as something separate, he is already assuming that which he is trying to prove, namely that there is more than the brain and its operations. It is a secondary, or perhaps even tertiary, point, but I think it should also be pointed out that his dualism would raise even more questions and problems than it would solve, and by Occam's razor we try to find the simplest solution to problems, which is another reason why most philosophers nowadays are physicalists/materialists. So there you have it! I hope I don't sound too dismissive, which is not my intention. As perhaps you recall I am an atheist who nonetheless takes the side of religion in many modern-day socio-cultural controversies. And I wish that other intellectuals would also try to see beyond their own personal preferences and persuasions (some do, of course). Perhaps I'm being unfair to Craig, but it seems to me that he has an "agenda", that his primary concern is to convince others that his world view is the correct one - in short, to proselytize - and not to find out in association with others what the truth may be.

[@kyselykovac2477]

Any time you have ideologies based in individual gratification, it’s going to lead to the degradation of society.

[@bobymocanu5256]

You are illusion

[@solomontruthlover5308]

In what sense

[@bobymocanu5256]

@@solomontruthlover5308 what the fuck say i dont exist ?

[@bobymocanu5256]

What means self for you ???

[@solomontruthlover5308]

@@bobymocanu5256 well some form of you exists as a consciousness that is the mystery of consciousness