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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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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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20833
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A swerve in the atoms would be unnatural, like scales settling differently for no reason [Chrysippus, by Plutarch]
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Full Idea:
Chrysippus argues against the 'swerve' of the Epicureans, on the grounds that they are doing violence to nature by positing something which is uncaused, and cites dice or scales, which can't settle differently without some cause or difference.
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From:
report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Plutarch - 70: Stoic Self-contradictions 1045c
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A reaction:
That is, the principle of sufficient reason (or of everything having a cause) is derived from observation, not a priori understanding. Pace Leibniz. As in modern discussion, free will or the swerve only occur in our minds, and not elsewhere.
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20836
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The Lazy Argument responds to fate with 'why bother?', but the bothering is also fated [Chrysippus, by Cicero]
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Full Idea:
Chrysippus responded to the Lazy Argument (that the outcome of an illness is fated, so there is no point in calling the doctor) by saying 'calling the doctor is fated just as much as recovering', which he calls 'co-fated'.
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From:
report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 28-30
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A reaction:
From a pragmatic point of view, this idea also nullifies fatalism, since you can plausibly fight against your fate to your last breath. No evidence could ever be offered in support of fatalism, not even the most unlikely events.
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