Brain, mind and self awareness

This is quite interesting and important for anyone interested in how human beings grow in mind and emotion and spiritually.

for the Edge 10th Anniversary Essay, we are pleased to present a new work, "The Neurology of Self-Awareness", in which "Rama" explores the concept of the self, tying in the ideas of researchers such as Horace Barlow, Nick Humphrey, David Premack and Marvin Minsky (among others), who have suggested that consciousness may have evolved primarily in a social context. This includes Minsky's ideas on "a second parallel mechanism that has .evolved in humans to create representations of earlier representations" and Humphrey's arguments "that our ability to introspect may have evolved specifically to construct meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior. "

"Have we solved the problem of self?", he asks in concluding the essay. "Obviously not — we have barely scratched the surface. But hopefully we have paved the way for future models and empirical studies on the nature of self, a problem that philosophers have made essentially no headway in solving. (And not for want of effort — they have been at it for three thousand years). Hence our grounds for optimism about the future of brain research — especially for solving what is arguably Science's greatest riddle."

I'm not sure that it is fair to claim that 3,000 years of philosophy have made no progress on the nature of the self: it seems to be one of those slightly arrogant statements that some scientists less schooled in wider cultural matters make from time to time. It seems to come down to "Philosophy hasn't given us an answer to how a sense of self arises from or in a brain; bad philosophy. But good us because we think we can show how it might have come about." It would have been good to check whether this was (a) what philosophy etc was trying to do (not really) and (b) whether it has actually come up with things that are germane (yes) even though looking at things differently with a different set of questions in mind. But that little quibble aside; this needs to be looked at.

Edge 10th Anniversary Essay



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