Self? What self?
Neuroscientist and illusionist Henrick Ehrsson in Stockholm is a cutting-edge thinker blasting aside the delusion that there exists an unchanging and fixed self. In Nature, Ed Yong writes:
Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, [Ehrsson] has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.
Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.
But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.
“Descartes said that if there’s something you can be certain of in this world, it’s that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson. Yet Ehrsson’s illusions have shown that such certainties, built on a lifetime of experience, can be disrupted with just ten seconds of visual and tactile deception. This surprising malleability suggests that the brain continuously constructs its feeling of body ownership using information from the senses — a finding that has earned Ehrsson publications in Science and other top journals, along with the attention of other neuroscientists.
via Nature. Ehrsson’s work has also been repeatedly discussed on the Mind Hacks website.
Science is catching up to the insight gained by mystics for thousands of years: that the self is not unchanging and easy to pin down. The self is not only in the body, but the Self which contains all bodies.
About Joe Perez
Something does not add up for me here. You claim in your first that the self is not located in the body and then go on to say, “blasting aside the delusion that there exists an unchanging and fixed self”. If there is no fixed self then logically there can not be self that exists outside the body. I am sure that you will be able to clear this up due to your extensive respectable studies at Harvard. So please do your work.
Note: I also saw that you make a distinction between self and Self (as an ultimate self). Perhaps I would buy that The Self (capital S) in not located in the body, but contains all bodies. In this instance you must change your title so the S in self is capitalized. Then we have something that says, ” each individual self is an unchanging and not fixed self. While the Self, something more abstract and should perhaps be called something different, is constituted through all bodies… But it still seems to me that to say there is non-self and to also say that the self exists is not located in the body seems contradictory.
Hi Abe,
Thanks for your pointed questions. I didn’t intend the brief commentary here to be an exposition of metaphysics, more just a way of introducing fascinating research which is undermining conventional beliefs about selfhood. That said, I believe neither the self nor the Self is located in the body; and the self is not “real” in the sense found offensive by Buddhist teachers of no-self if I understand them correctly. But the self is unique, and in its inimitable uniqueness it is a mirror of the Self, and in that sense, it is also ultimately real. Buddhist teachers of no-self missed the boat on that key insight, again, if I understand them correctly.