What is the Self?

Let’s be honest with ourselves and start at the beginning.

For us and many other animals it starts with a unique egg and sperm and not so much a plan as an imperative.

Grow, survive, prosper.

The imperative within me came out of the momentum of half a billion years’ worth of 100% successful generations building upon each preceding generation. Always learning and refining.

“Self” begins with your biology interacting with the physical world around us. Senses + body + brain, constantly interacting with the real world, exterior and interior.

Let’s be realistic, how could any creature possibly feel like anything other than what it is? How can any creature not feel itself, since itself, and its own needs, are all that it knows?

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Can Other Things Be Conscious?

Panpsychism makes no sense.

What is the point of consciousness, when there aren’t any decisions to be made? Which is the case out in the cosmic realm of particles and energy and gravity.

Why On Earth Are You Even Aware?

 

This is condensed out of my previous exposition.

Blame it on Evolution.

If one is not aware, one gets eaten and never makes babies.

Think about this — you exist within an evolved incarnation of a body/brain that has gone through some half a billion years worth of development, each new generation building upon the previous one. Not one single miss during all that time, or you would not be here.

It gets wilder, the cells that make up your body — their history goes back over four billion years’ worth of successful reproductive cycles — all within a harsh and unforgiving biosphere. (see Nick Lane)

Awareness was required for single cells to succeed, even before the eukaryotic cells took it to a whole new level with their nucleus, organelles and complex insides. Science shows us that awareness, drifting into consciousness was one of biology’s first hurdles on the way to creating life. (see Arthur Reber)

Even single celled creatures require awareness, communication, command and control, along with a vessel to navigate.

The rest is Evolution.

This Pageant of Evolution forces us to realize our body started as something very simple. With each generation modeled by the trials and tribulations dished out during its, one day at a time, life cycle, before getting passed along to the next generation. Always building upon what was there before. Striving to do better.

Considering Things Science Can Explain About Consciousness.

"Without deeply, personally appreciating the Pageant of Evolution, trying to ask, and answer, these deep existential questions is like playing basketball in zero gravity."

"Dr. Mark Solms makes it clear: … Modern science shows us that our mind is best understood as “a reflection of your body communicating with itself.” "

"Consider that momentous invention some four billion years ago of the Krebs cycle. Here on Earth, when geology and chemistry learned how to harness electricity, thereby giving birth to this Krebs cycle, which in turn gave birth to biology. There you’ll find the difference between a rock and living creature." 

Introduction

Students’ Resource: A representative cross-section of Dr. Mark Solms' scientific publications.

We're now into section five of a larger project that’s intended to be a ‘Student’s Resource for Defending Physical Reality.’  In this third chapter of my introduction to Dr. Mark Solms, Ph.D., ( #1, #2 ), I provide a bibliography of his insightful publications (books & scientific papers) which explain the basis for bringing the study of our human consciousness, and the so-called Mind-Body Problem, into the realm of sober, physical reality respecting, evolution appreciating, science.  (Incidentally, thereby putting the lie to the claim that meta-physical outside agents are needed to explain and understand human consciousness.)

This list is not complete by any stretch, but it is an impressive introductory sampling, and it’s intended to serve as a reference that’s guaranteed to inform, perhaps inspire, the serious student, along with serious enthusiasts of science.  People interested in better understanding how Earth’s evolution made us who we are. 

 …  (Continued at the end of this bibliography)

Dr. Mark Solms, PhD.

Professor of Neuropsychology

CURRICULUM VITAE Mark Leonard Solms

Born district of Lüderitz, Namibia, July 17, 1961

The International Neuropsychoanalysis Society

Co-chairs, Mark Solms with Cristina Alberini

Google Scholar list of Dr. Solms' scientific papers

Solms-Delta Wine Estate

Franschhoek Valley, South Africa

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Dr Mark Solms, Ph.D. (WITS)

University of Cape Town, Department of Psychology

Background and research interests

• Brain mechanisms of dreaming, emotion, motivation.
• Psychological mechanisms of confabulation and anosognosia syndromes.

Teaching responsibilities - Neuropsychology – Research and Clinical.

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Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute  |  Mark Solms PhD

Psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist.

Affiliations:

Dr. Solms holds the position of Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital (Departments of Psychology and Neurology) and is the President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Dr. Solms founded the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society in 2000 and was a Founding Editor (with Ed Nersessian) of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. He is Director of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, a Trustee of the Neuropsychoanalysis Fund in London, and Director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Trust in Cape Town.

Dr. Solms’ Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis can be viewed here.

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Regarding Mark Solms South African Farm and dealing with a history social injustice

Jill Choder-Goldman interviews Mark Solms, August 2019.

“I started to realise that the first thing is not to impulsively, concretely enact something, but rather just sitting with it and letting it be the ugly thing that it is, until you start to see what the nature of the thing is,” says Mark Solms.

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What is Neuropsychoanalysis?

Turnbull Lab, Prifysgol Bangor University, Wales, U.K.

The term 'neuropsychoanalysis' was first used in the late 1990s by Mark Solms, as the title of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. 

Scientism: On getting lost within the Mindscape.

It’s an odd sensation, periodically rediscovering how some things that I find self-evident, seem absolutely foreign (if not invisible) to most others.  When I embraced the term “Mindscape” a couple years back, I thought I did a good job of capturing a metaphor for those universes of thoughts that we possess just beyond our physical brain with its neurons, synapses and electro-chemical cascades.  The seat of ego, emotions, thought, reflection, god seeking, knowledge seeking, love seeking, success thirsting, the sense of self, our life’s spirit, our soul, whatever labels you want to tag onto it.  

The world flowing through our physical senses and then getting sorted through our genetic and environmental filters before being reflected against the metaphorical retina of our brain and infusing through our body.  The thing that thinks it’s telling our body what to do, when most the time it’s the other way around.  The thing that believes it’s in control of us, or out of control, as the case may be.  The thing that is us, but has yet to be found by scientist or philosopher.  

I’ve discovered that suggesting we should categorize it differently than the stuff of atoms and the laws of physics invites the wildest mental gymnastics intent on drawing the discussion away from the essence of acknowledging the ephemeral nature of our human mind, that thing that animates our bodies during our short dance across physical reality’s stage, or more specifically, Earth - and then disappears when we die.

"Mindscape" it's a psychological thing.

I need to correct some unfortunate misunderstanding regarding my use of the term "Mindscape" and why it matters.  This is a continuation of the discussion at Center for Inquiry's forum and I appreciate the opportunity to reconsider and restate something that's important to me.

Lausten:  August 4, 2020 at 4:19 pm - at CFI

Not too clear to me either Tim. I see “opposed to” and take it as something separate from, something “not”. 

I agree there is a lot we don’t know, and you could say that is conceptual or theoretical, or I would say that, but anyway, but I don’t really draw a line at “human desires”. 

Human desires arise from the physical, so there is no separation. 

It’s almost like CC thinks you are making a case that human thoughts cause things to occur in the physical world. I think you would say that but only in the most circular way, that is, thoughts are created by physical particles interacting, and physical particles act on each other.

Or am I getting too far out there?

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Okay please give me the benefit of the doubt, lets backtrack on all this and start at home base again.

Forget about the organism of our brain and our little gray cells and all the marvelous things they do that (together with the environment it’s dealing with) produces the mind, thought, consciousness, sentience, memory, mindscape. 

First step,

It’s about me and the way I look at the world.  There’s my body and then there’s that “sense of self” that is constantly thinking and talking, ‘me’ – where does it reside?  All my learning happens through it, heck seems like all I am radiates out from there.  And all the world must enter through my senses and get translated into something my “sense of self” can do something with.

My “sense of self” (mindscape) reinhabits my body when I wake in the morning.  I then through my body proceed to deal with all the environmental requirements of my day to days.  Where do I get my sense of self from?  First I think of my sight that takes in the world and my other senses smell, taste, sound, touch filtering the world that arrives in my consciousness.