The Self

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  • Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari
    • [[The Self]]
      • Most people think that even though my body and brain undergo a constant process of change, as neurons fire, hormones flow and muscles contract, my personality, wishes and relationships never stand still, and may be completely transformed over years and decades. But underneath it all, I remain the same person from birth to death - hopefully beyond death as well. But this is rather naive as evolution rejects the idea of a true self and an "eternal essence".
      • "Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities. From an evolutionary perspective, the closest thing we have to a human essence is our DNA, and the DNA molecule is the vehicle of mutation rather than the seat of eternity. This terrifies a large number of people who prefer to reject the theory of evolution rather than give up their 'souls'."
      • "Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero."
      • Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention.
  • Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari
    • [[The Self]], too, is an imaginary story, just like nations, Gods and money. Humans are masters of [[cognitive dissonance]], we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or parliament.
  • Made You Think –– Homo Deus
    • [[The Self]]
      • Are you an individual self?
      • Concept of [[Intersubjective Entities]].
        • We tend to think of something as subjective or objective: interpretation vs. hard reality. But there is a third layer: intersubjective entities.
        • "Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. Many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. Yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages and clothing."
        • Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.
          • Life meaning exists only within the network of stories we tell one another.
        • Why does a particular action – such as getting married in church, fasting on Ramadan or voting on election day – seem meaningful to me? Because my parents also think it is meaningful, as do my brothers, my neighbours, people in nearby cities and even the residents of far-off countries. And why do all these people think it is meaningful? Because their friends and neighbours also share the same view. People constantly reinforce each other’s beliefs in a [[self-perpetuating loop]].
        • As we develop more as a species, and move away from the natural world into the internet, for example, reality becomes much more focused on the inter-subjective.
        • Designing for a website, for example, is not an objective reality. The quality of "design" or "writing" is inter-subjective, it has no inherent meaning.
      • When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. The width of my desk remains the same whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise numerical marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically.
        • Human cooperative networks usually judge themselves by yardsticks of their own invention and, not surprisingly, they often give themselves high marks.
  • Made You Think –– Homo Deus
    • Individual vs Dividual: the Experiencing Self and the Narrating Self. ([[The Self]])
      • Plato’s Rationality, Energy Spirit, Desires chariot analogy. There's no real you. [[Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature]]
      • We're starting to put more faith in technology and human data that will do a better job of knowing us and the self.
  • More Notes on Mastery
    • [[The Self]]: It seemed as well that our sense of self is far more subjective and fluid than we had thought. If our experience of our own body is something constructed in the brain and can go haywire, then perhaps our sense of self is also something of a construction or illusion, one that we create to suit our purposes, and one that can malfunction. The implications here go beyond neuroscience, and into the realm of philosophy.
  • The War of Art –– Steven Pressfield
    • When we deliberately alter our consciousness in any way. we're trying to find [[The Self]]
  • Highlights from Homo Deus
    • [[The Quantified Self]] argues that [[The Self]] is nothing but mathematical patterns. These patterns are so complex that the human mind has no change of understanding them. So if you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis. But rather, collect systematic data, and allow algorithms to analyze them for you and tell you who you are and what you should do. 'Self knowledge through numbers.'
      • Thanks to our growing understanding of human biology, medicine keeps us alive long enough for our minds and our 'authentic selves' to disintegrate and dissolve. All too often, what's left is a collection of dysfunctional biological systems kept going by a collection of monitors, computers and pumps.