I've been following the thoughts on conscious experience of self and have
nearly dipped in a couple of times, but lack of clarity on my own thoughts
keeps on preventing me. (And Russ, I do love clarity and direct communication.)
I'm still torn between various aspects of the points of view that, mostly, Nick
and Russ presented. Though clarity still eludes me, I would like to share the
following before it just slips away unused again.
I think things pretty much work as Nick painted them. Still, this set of
interacting structures and processes that I think of as myself, can't quite
banish from it's processing space the nagging awareness of something like the
experiencer that Russ argues for. I wonder if it might arise in the manner
outlined below.
I'll start from Nick's model. My brain has learned to turn back it's
third-person perception and modelling functionality on a subset of the
environment that is always present, i.e. self.
Semi-aside: there is something added in the case of self -- richer sensory data
that is not available on other people: touch, pressure, pain, temperature from
skin, breathing and heart rate, proprioception, stress and pain in joints,
vestibular sense, stretch receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, etc. I do
think all of this enriches the model of self to the point where the experience
might be qualitatively different from the models of other people.
But more significant is the fact that I can create an abstracted model of
myself (i.e. imagine myself) and that the model can be made to interact with a
model of the environment, other people, and even internally created models with
no counterpart in direct experience. Consider that usually this model's
usefulness is in projecting it into the future (and, I think, into the past,
when we reconstruct events from memory).
Now, what happens when that model is dragged back into real-time, and held
right next to the more direct perceptual awareness of self? It seems like one
might end up with two selves, and I'm wondering if that experience might not
account for that elusive experience that Russ is referring to.
Regards,
Rikus
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