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Full Idea
The effect of our string of personal narratives is to encourage the audience to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words they are, about whom they are: in short, to posit a centre of narrative gravity.
Gist of Idea
We spin narratives about ourselves, and the audience posits a centre of gravity for them
Source
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1)
Book Ref
Dennett,Daniel C.: 'Consciousness Explained' [Penguin 1993], p.418
A Reaction
What would be the evolutionary advantage of getting the audience to posit a non-existent self, instead of a complex brain? It might be simpler than that, since we say of a bird "it wants to do x". What is "it"? Some simple thing, like a will.
| 4006 | I can only be aware of myself as a person who changes by means of my personal history [Taylor,C] |
| 21050 | I can only make decisions if I see myself as part of a story [MacIntyre] |
| 7381 | We tell stories about ourselves, to protect, control and define who we are [Dennett] |
| 7382 | We spin narratives about ourselves, and the audience posits a centre of gravity for them [Dennett] |
| 5353 | The self is an abstraction which magnifies important aspects of autobiography [Flanagan] |
| 5354 | We are not born with a self; we develop a self through living [Flanagan] |