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7385
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People accept blurred boundaries in many things, but insist self is All or Nothing [Dennett]
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Full Idea:
Many people are comfortable taking the pragmatic approach to night/day, living/nonliving and mammal/premammal, but get anxious about the same attitude to having a self and not having a self. It must be All or Nothing, and One to a Customer.
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From:
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2)
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A reaction:
Personally I think I believe in the existence of the self, but I also agree with Dennett. I greatly admire his campaign against All or Nothing thinking, which is a relic from an earlier age. A partial self could result from infancy or brain damage.
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21314
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Consciousness presupposes personal identity, so it cannot constitute it [Butler]
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Full Idea:
One would think it really self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity, any more than knowledge can presuppose truth, which it presupposes.
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From:
Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1)
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A reaction:
It rather begs the question to dogmatically assert that mere consciousness presupposes a self, especially after Hume's criticisms. That consciousness implies a subject to experience needs arguing for. Is it the best explanation?
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21318
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If the self changes, we have no responsibilities, and no interest in past or future [Butler]
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Full Idea:
If personality is a transient thing ...then it follows that it is a fallacy to charge ourselves with any thing we did, or to imagine our present selves interested in any thing which befell us yesterday, or what will befall us tomorrow.
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From:
Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1)
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A reaction:
We seem to care about the past and future of our children, without actually being our children. Can't my future self be my descendant, a close one, instead of me?
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7386
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Selves are not soul-pearls, but artefacts of social processes [Dennett]
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Full Idea:
Selves are not independently existing soul-pearls, but artefacts of the social processes that create us, and, like other such artefacts, subject to sudden shifts in status.
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From:
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.2)
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A reaction:
"Soul-pearls" is a nice phrase for the Cartesian view, but there can something between soul-pearls and social constructs. Personally I think the self is a development of the propriotreptic (body) awareness that even the smallest animals must possess.
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7381
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We tell stories about ourselves, to protect, control and define who we are [Dennett]
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Full Idea:
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
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From:
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1)
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A reaction:
This seems to suggest that there is someone who wants to protect themselves, and who wants to tell the stories, and does tell the stories. No one can deny the existence of this autobiographical element in our own identity.
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7382
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We spin narratives about ourselves, and the audience posits a centre of gravity for them [Dennett]
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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.
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From:
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 13.1)
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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.
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7370
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The brain is controlled by shifting coalitions, guided by good purposeful habits [Dennett]
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Full Idea:
Who's in charge of the brain? First one coalition and then another, shifting in ways that are not chaotic thanks to good meta-habits that tend to entrain coherent, purposeful sequences rather than an interminable helter-skelter power grab.
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From:
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 8.1)
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A reaction:
This is probably the best anti-ego account available. Dennett offers our sense of self as a fictional autobiography, but the sense of a single real controller is very powerful. If I jump at a noise, I feel that 'I' have lost control of myself.
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