What’s the point of having a self? [Updated 2010-03-21]

First off, I don’t know the answer.  I never thought of it until someone asked the question. This whole post is a stab in the dark, and I thoroughly expect to be wincing and re-editing this long after I click ‘publish’.

Anyhow. This is what I’m thinking so far:

So you have reality (such as that is).
And I am told that we perceive this reality through sense organs.

And that these sense organs begin to share information and communicate with each other, leading to a nervous system.

Then these nervous systems start to evolve hubs, which eventually need a control center of sorts, and hey presto you’ve got a brain.

But the system as a whole needs some sort of edge over the environment. A sort of prescience, if you will. A better understanding of cause and effect, for solving ‘what would happen if’ scenarios, and strategies for keeping hind-legs out of predator mouths.

So. Some neuronal subnets get good at recording sequences of patterns in the outside world, and playing them back; emulating. And with a bit of piggybacking and rewiring, those subnets get coralled into a new mode of processing: Simulation. The brain begins to maintain it’s own internal model of reality, and it pays off, for the most part. So far so good.

But soon the ‘simulation’ gets out of hand, starts strutting about upstairs and calling itself “I”; forgets to maintain the vital umbilici to the ‘ground-floor’ reality it grew out of, and well… turns in on itself, in a myopic, navel-gazing stupor of self-investigation. The solipsistic qualities of the ‘simulation’ detach it once and for all from the rest of the brain’s functions, birthing the illusion of dualism. Continue reading →