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the self

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gepr

the self

So, I read this the other day:

The Promise of LSD Microdoses and Other Psychedelic "Medicines"
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-promise-of-lsd-microdoses-and-other-psychedelic-medicines/

and was reminded of Frank's dare to read:

The Analysis of the Self
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo8324792.html

I subsequently forgot about it all. But then this popped up:

The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins
http://www.alternet.org/belief/dangerous-delusions-richard-dawkins

and:

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/predictably-salon-publishes-a-new-dawkins-hit-piece-and-its-as-dreadful-as-youd-expect/

I still feel (over 2 decades after making a fool of myself during a lunch at the SFI) that the concept of "self" is the most abused concept of humanity's entire existence. Everyone uses it so often and in so many ways that it's pert near meaningless, to someone like me, anyway. What's amazing to me is that everyone can go along on their happy pretense that they've communicated something when they speak/write or hear/read the word. It reminded me again of the appeal (to me) of Hoffman's Interface Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

Anyway, I have no point. Any comments/laughter are welcome. 8^)

--
☣ glen

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Gillian Densmore

Re: the self

Lol I misread the title as promised stuff off the shelf

On Aug 7, 2017 12:25 PM, "glen ☣" <[hidden email]> wrote:

So, I read this the other day:

The Promise of LSD Microdoses and Other Psychedelic "Medicines"
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-promise-of-lsd-microdoses-and-other-psychedelic-medicines/

and was reminded of Frank's dare to read:

The Analysis of the Self
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo8324792.html

I subsequently forgot about it all. But then this popped up:

The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins
http://www.alternet.org/belief/dangerous-delusions-richard-dawkins

and:

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/predictably-salon-publishes-a-new-dawkins-hit-piece-and-its-as-dreadful-as-youd-expect/

I still feel (over 2 decades after making a fool of myself during a lunch at the SFI) that the concept of "self" is the most abused concept of humanity's entire existence. Everyone uses it so often and in so many ways that it's pert near meaningless, to someone like me, anyway. What's amazing to me is that everyone can go along on their happy pretense that they've communicated something when they speak/write or hear/read the word. It reminded me again of the appeal (to me) of Hoffman's Interface Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

Anyway, I have no point. Any comments/laughter are welcome. 8^)

--
☣ glen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Steve Smith

Re: the self

In reply to this post by gepr

On 8/7/17 12:24 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

So, I read this the other day:

The Promise of LSD Microdoses and Other Psychedelic "Medicines"
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-promise-of-lsd-microdoses-and-other-psychedelic-medicines/

and was reminded of Frank's dare to read:

The Analysis of the Self
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo8324792.html

I subsequently forgot about it all.  But then this popped up:

The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins
http://www.alternet.org/belief/dangerous-delusions-richard-dawkins

and:

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/predictably-salon-publishes-a-new-dawkins-hit-piece-and-its-as-dreadful-as-youd-expect/

I still feel (over 2 decades after making a fool of myself during a lunch at the SFI) that the concept of "self" is the most abused concept of humanity's entire existence.  Everyone uses it so often and in so many ways that it's pert near meaningless, to someone like me, anyway.  What's amazing to me is that everyone can go along on their happy pretense that they've communicated something when they speak/write or hear/read the word.  It reminded me again of the appeal (to me) of Hoffman's Interface Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

Anyway, I have no point.  Any comments/laughter are welcome. 8^)

Bwa HAHAHAHAHAHA haaaa...

wondering if maybe I should have tried a *micro* rather than a *milli*dose of psychopharmacuties before reading this!
(or maybe I should have calculated in the amount of mold-spore-dust I've been inhaling in my remodel/cleaning projects?)

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

( Note from/to Self: "I think my grandiose self has taken possession of my expressive body!")

Seriously (maybe?)... I wonder if in any of our long-winded, discursive, discussions about the meaning/use of words if we consider the value of something analogous to tolerancing in engineering? It is common to use the analogy (I've learned not to invoke the concept of metaphor too lightly in this group) of social lubrication, but I think that tolerancing may have a similar/equal/greater role in allowing conversations to clank forward toward some progress down a line of thinking/consideration if not always all the way to a specific destination?

I expect "SELF" to be a very sloppy term with most people... and at best, highly varied in meaning amongst people for whom there is a special slot in their more rigorous professional lexicon.

I suspect your question, as earnest as intended and as interesting as I find it will lead us down a rabbit hole (metaphor in a literary allusion with allegorical implications?) here. I'm game for the journey, but rather than jump the gun (Satan of metaphor, get thee behind me!) with too much of my own clap-tripe (deliberate portmanteau malapropism intended).

I'm hoping someone else will bite on this topic before I throw down with (more of) my own selve's nonsensery!

- Steve

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: the self

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen,

In Smalltalk and Objective C "self" is an alias for any receiver object from the point of view of that object.

E.g. if someone tells me to "jump" I can implement that by sending them a "howHigh" message, or I can send that message to my(self)!

self is a handle to the stuff in me, especially the methods I implement. Different people have different stuff.
Some folks mix-in methods they model in others and some do not. Others can't imagine doing mix-ins and only can get their head around inheritance. (Very tribal are they!)

Some full stop when they see objects they don't understand. Others just send crap to each other all day.

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Monday, August 7, 2017 12:24:57 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] the self

The Promise of LSD Microdoses and Other Psychedelic ...

blogs.scientificamerican.com

The Promise of LSD Microdoses and Other Psychedelic "Medicines" Psychiatrist John Halpern discusses the psychotherapeutic potential of peyote, ayahuasca, psilocybin ...

and was reminded of Frank's dare to read:

The Analysis of the Self
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo8324792.html

The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the ...

press.uchicago.edu

The book The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, Heinz Kohut is published by University ...

I subsequently forgot about it all. But then this popped up:

The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins
http://www.alternet.org/belief/dangerous-delusions-richard-dawkins

The Dangerous Delusions of Richard Dawkins | Alternet

www.alternet.org

His rationalist crusade creates a false impression that the only alternative to religion is reductionist science. The recent cancellation of a book event with Richard ...

and:

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/predictably-salon-publishes-a-new-dawkins-hit-piece-and-its-as-dreadful-as-youd-expect/

Predictably, Salon publishes a new Dawkins hit piece, and it’s as dreadful as you’d expect

whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com

Believe me, the last thing I want to do this morning is sit down and take apart another dumb article holding Richard Dawkins responsible for all the world’s wrongs. I saw this article a few …

I still feel (over 2 decades after making a fool of myself during a lunch at the SFI) that the concept of "self" is the most abused concept of humanity's entire existence. Everyone uses it so often and in so many ways that it's pert near meaningless, to someone like me, anyway. What's amazing to me is that everyone can go along on their happy pretense that they've communicated something when they speak/write or hear/read the word. It reminded me again of the appeal (to me) of Hoffman's Interface Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

Do we see reality as it is? | Donald Hoffman

www.youtube.com

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly ...

Anyway, I have no point. Any comments/laughter are welcome. 8^)

--
☣ glen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Friam Info Page - Redfish

redfish.com

FRIAM Group is an emergent organization of Complexity researchers and software developers in Santa Fe, New Mexico interested in Applied Complexity, Artificial Life ...

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

FRIAM: The Comic Edition

friam-comic.blogspot.com

We decided that lampooning FriAM was about as much fun as shooting fish in a barrel, and about as disrespectful (of the fish and the barrel)!

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: the self

In reply to this post by gepr

Am I the only one that notices that Slate and Salon are prone knee-jerk editorial responses to things?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Monday, August 7, 2017 12:24:57 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] the self

gepr

Re: the self

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

All you've done is pass the buck from "self" to "me". And given the hijinks Roger pulled with Swarm, self might respond to "jump" one day, but throw an error the next ... just like, say, today I can throw a baseball with my right arm. But if I break that arm, tomorrow I might not be able to throw the base ball. So, who's "me" in this temporal game? The receiver of the signal or the arm that does the throwing?

On 08/07/2017 02:54 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> In Smalltalk and Objective C "self" is an alias for any receiver object from the point of view of that object.
>
> E.g. if someone tells me to "jump" I can implement that by sending them a "howHigh" message, or I can send that message to my(self)!
>
> self is a handle to the stuff in me, especially the methods I implement. Different people have different stuff.
> Some folks mix-in methods they model in others and some do not. Others can't imagine doing mix-ins and only can get their head around inheritance. (Very tribal are they!)
>
> Some full stop when they see objects they don't understand. Others just send crap to each other all day.

--
☣ glen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

gepr

Re: the self

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

FWIW, B.C.Smith, that fount of wisdom, references "flex and slop" and cites Hume as inspiration for the idea. It's a tangle of reasoning that boils down (I think - this is my own nonsense, not Smith's) to the idea that there *must* be misunderstanding for communication to exist. (This is an extrapolation from his saying there must be ontological flex and slop for intentionality to exist.) Perfect information transmission would not be communication. So, if our tolerances are too demanding, then we define our _selves_ out of existence. But what happens on the other end is not similar. Too *much* wiggle room and we twitch/impute a meaning into place. You say "ooga booga" and I think "red barchetta".

On 08/07/2017 01:15 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> I expect "/SELF"/ to be a very sloppy term with most people... and at best, highly varied in meaning amongst people for whom there is a special slot in their more rigorous professional lexicon.

--
☣ glen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: the self

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen wrote:

"All you've done is pass the buck from "self" to "me". And given the hijinks Roger pulled with Swarm, self might respond to "jump" one day, but throw an error the next ... just like, say, today I can throw a baseball with my right arm. But if I break that arm, tomorrow I might not be able to throw the base ball. So, who's "me" in this temporal game? The receiver of the signal or the arm that does the throwing?"

I claim a message send is analogous to an axon firing, where there is at least one target neuron for each receivable message. The whole graph and instantaneous charge state of the neurons and the musculature/skeleton/etc. attached to them is the `self'. The edges and effective edges in the graph (apparently) come and go depending on experience. In terms of comparing selves, I think one needs to look at the graphs in terms of the behaviors they exhibit and not their internal wiring. My wiring of yellow can be different from yours. Your perception of throwing a baseball will change with and without a broken arm, not just because the arm might not work, but also because the broken arm will lead to the motor system changing due to the lack of practice with throwing.

Probably there are subgraphs that are more stable configurations than others.

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Monday, August 7, 2017 5:54:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the self

gepr

Re: the self

OK. This is better. But you seem to have defined "unit" or "coherence", rather than "self" ... I'm reminded of Simon's "near decomposability" in The Sciences of the Artificial. To promote a unit to a self, you're going to have to include some sort of loop, like propri- or inter-oception. And that raises the idea that some (exteroception) variables are unbound. If the "unit" has more unbound variables than bound ones and/or the loops see less weight/traffic than the unbound ones, then the "unit" isn't coherent ... not a unit. By that reasoning, we should be able to parse the unit into parts whose excision does not (appreciatively) affect the unit versus parts whose excision fundamentally changes it, including destroying it.

I'd posit that a passable definition of "self" is the collection of parts that can't be excised without causing fundamental changes. So, the loss of things like hair, fingernails, skin cells, maybe teeth, maybe 1 kidney, 1/2 a liver, etc. preserve the unit.

But even *that* definition is hopelessly flawed because it passes the buck to "fundamental changes". Is myself invariant across the loss of a tooth? What were we talking about?

On 08/07/2017 05:52 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I claim a message send is analogous to an axon firing, where there is at least one target neuron for each receivable message. The whole graph and instantaneous charge state of the neurons and the musculature/skeleton/etc. attached to them is the `self'. The edges and effective edges in the graph (apparently) come and go depending on experience. In terms of comparing selves, I think one needs to look at the graphs in terms of the behaviors they exhibit and not their internal wiring. My wiring of yellow can be different from yours. Your perception of throwing a baseball will change with and without a broken arm, not just because the arm might not work, but also because the broken arm will lead to the motor system changing due to the lack of practice with throwing.
>
> Probably there are subgraphs that are more stable configurations than others.

--
☣ glen

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: the self

Glen writes:

"I'd posit that a passable definition of "self" is the collection of parts that can't be excised without causing fundamental changes. So, the loss of things like hair, fingernails, skin cells, maybe teeth, maybe 1 kidney, 1/2 a liver, etc. preserve the unit."

Gasp. Loss of _hair_? _Who_ would say such a thing?

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 8, 2017 5:51:53 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the self

gepr

Re: the self

Ha! We bald people clearly have a stronger sense of self than hairy people.

On August 8, 2017 6:06:12 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Gasp. Loss of _hair_? _Who_ would say such a thing?

--
⛧glen⛧

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen