The Illusion of the Self (Die Illusion des Selbst)

[AgentProvocateur]

Diese Buchbesprechung habe ich neulich gefunden: Bruce Hood - The Illusion of the Self

Die mir wesentlich erscheinenden Stellen habe ich mal übersetzt, (Anmerkung: mehr schlecht als recht - wie immer ist es besser, die Originalquelle zu lesen):

[AgentProvocateur]

Vielleicht nochmal explizit gesagt, das kommt vielleicht oben noch nicht so richtig rüber: meine Einwände sind Folgende:

1. muss mE dabei sehr wohl dabei gesagt werden, wer oder was dieser angeblichen Illusion unterliegt. Diese Frage einfach als 'oberflächlich' abzutun und sie 'dualistisch' zu nennen hilft dabei kein Stück.

2. nach dem Realitätsverständnis des Autors - zumindest so, wie ich das verstehe - ist nur das real, was man anfassen kann, was z.B. Ecken und Kanten (oder andere sinnlich unmittelbar wahrnehmbare Eigenschaften) hat. Und alles andere existiert nicht und ist ergo Illusion. Was aber - zumindest mir - absurd erscheint, denn z.B. Prozesse sind meiner Ansicht nach ebenfalls real. Z.B. dieses Forum hier (das FGH) existiert, obwohl ich es nicht anfassen kann. Und ebenso sind z.B. meine Erinnerungen und Gedanken real - obwohl es die ohne mein Gehirn nicht gäbe und die ergo laut der Argumentation des Autors ganz genauso illusionär wie ich, (meinem Selbstbild oder wie auch immer - mit dem Begriff 'Selbst' habe ich so meine Schwierigkeiten, denn mir scheint, der impliziere eine Reifikation/Verdopplung von mir/eine Art Homunkulus, was ich aber nicht wahrnehme), sein müssten.

3. was immer der Autor wahrnimmt, wenn er über das 'Selbst' redet und was immer er meint, dass andere Leute wahrnehmen: ich selber hatte noch niemals den Eindruck bzw. die Wahrnehmung, dass ich das 'Selbst' anfassen könne. Ich kann mich selber, (meinen Körper), berühren, gut, das meine ich in der Tat; aber ich hatte auch noch nie den Eindruck, ich sei irgendwie eine Entität über mich hinaus. Daher kann ich nicht nachvollziehen, was er selber fälschlich von sich meint, tatsächlich aber nicht ist, was also genau hier die fälschliche Wahrnehmung sein soll, die er als 'Illusion' bezeichnet.

[Tom der Dino]

[Myron]

[Tom der Dino]

[Myron]

Galen Strawson über das Selbsterleben:

"There's a distinctive kind of experience which I'll call 'self-experience'. …Self-experience is not just experience of what is in fact oneself. Nor is it just expressly self-conscious experience of what is in fact oneself, i.e. experience of oneself conceived of specifically as oneself. In the ordinary human case it's experience of oneself as being an 'inner' subject of experience or locus of consciousness—inner relative to the human being that one is considered as a whole. More generally, it's experience of oneself as something which is not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole; experience of oneself as a specifically mental presence of some sort, a mental someone or something. One might say that it's experience of oneself as having nothing more than mental being, inasmuch as it doesn't involve any positive or express figuration of oneself as something that has any existence beyond one's mental being; but it certainly needn't positively exclude the idea that one has existence that goes beyond one's mental being. … Self-experience, then, is experience informed or shaped by—involving the deployment of—a certain complex experience-determining mental element: the idea or sense or feeling of the self. Self-experience can exist whether or not selves do, just as pink-elephant-experience can exist whether or not pink elephants do.
Let me repeat this: self-experience exists, as a form of experience, whether or not selves do. 'Self-experience' is a strictly phenomenological term. It's a name for an aspect of our existence of how things are that exists whether or not things are that way in fact. Self-experience may turn out to be illusory in so far as it purports to be experience of an existing entity properly called a self, but its phenomenological reality—its reality as a form of experience, a way of conceiving or apprehending things—is not in doubt."

(Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 1-2)

Im phänomenologischen Sinn besteht das Selbsterleben also im Erleben seiner selbst als eines inneren und geistigen Erlebnissubjektes, das nicht mit dem Körper oder zumindest nicht mit dem Körper als Ganzem identisch zu sein scheint.

[AgentProvocateur]

[Tom der Dino]

[step]

[Landei]

[Skeptiker]

[Marcellinus]

[AgentProvocateur]

[Myron]

[step]

[Tom der Dino]

[step]

[AgentProvocateur]

[step]

[Myron]

[Myron]

[Kramer]

[Kramer]

[Myron]

"A self is certainly—essentially—a subject of experience, and it’s certainly—essentially— not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole. I take these two claims to be true by definition. Some say that the only thing that is legitimately called ‘the subject of experience’ is the human being considered as a whole. One must reject this view if one holds that there are such things as selves. A self is some sort of inner conscious presence that is not the same thing as a human being considered as a whole, if it is anything at all. It’s the kind of thing human beings have had in mind, over thousands of years, in talking of ‘my inmost self’; ‘my self, my inward self I mean’; the ‘living, central,…inmost I’; the ‘secret self…enclosed within’. It’s part of what Hindus have argued about for at least three millennia, and Buddhists for almost as long: ‘my self, that which I most intimately am’.

Self-experience is experience of there being such a thing as this. It’s experience as of there being there being such a thing as the self, whether or not there are such things. Self-experience exists on a view like Dennett’s, for example, according to which selves don’t really exist in the straightforward sense I’ve committed myself to defending, but are, rather, useful fictions or abstractions that help us to organize our experience when we think about ourselves and our lives.

It’s a mistake to think that this form of experience, this sense of self, is a peculiarly modern or ‘Western’ phenomenon, or a product of the Romantic movement or of an unusually leisured or intellectual life. It is, for one thing, and as just remarked, something that has been explicitly discussed in the Eastern tradition of thought for thousands of years. But that is a vanishingly small point next to the point that self-experience, as understood here, is as old as humanity, fundamental to the daily experience of all normal human beings.

If you doubt this, I haven’t yet managed to convey what I have in mind. Self-experience is something extremely basic. It begins in early childhood. It’s vivid in one’s coming to consciousness of the fact that one’s thoughts are unobservable by others and of the fundamental respect in which one is ‘alone in one’s head’. It’s universal in ordinary human beings, in the sense in which I’m concerned with it. It’s not subject to significant cultural variation. There is, furthermore, no conflict between the fact that self-experience presents the self as a specifically mental presence or entity and the fact that self-experience is fundamentally grounded, in all ordinary human beings, in the experience of embodiment.

Self-experience is not something that is less available or natural in (say) traditional African societies. Mbiti considers the replacement, in such societies, of the Cartesian ‘I think, therefore I am’ with ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am’ (1969: 106). Senghor suggests replacing or complementing ‘I think, therefore I am’[9]with ‘I think, I dance the other; I am’. These proposals have a clear and vivid point, but the sense in which they’re accurate doesn’t conflict with the present claim that self-experience is universal in ordinary human beings. To think that it might be somehow less prevalent or less strong in such societies is to show that one hasn’t understood what I have in mind when I talk of self-experience. One is thinking instead in terms of some more theoretically and culturally encumbered notion of self-experience.

When Henry James writes, of an early book, ‘I think of…the masterpiece in question…as the work of quite another person than myself…a rich relation, say, who…suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship’ (1915: 562–3), he knows perfectly well that he’s the same human being as the author of that book, but he doesn’t feel he’s the same person or self as the author of that book. This feeling is common when people consider their past, and perhaps also their future: one of the ways in which people tend to figure themselves to themselves, quite independently of whether or not they have any religious beliefs, is as something whose persistence conditions—identity conditions, existence conditions—are not necessarily the same as the persistence conditions of the whole human being that they are. This way of figuring oneself presupposes—involves—the fundamental phenomenon of self-experience."

(Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 8-9)

"Some philosophers deny that they have any self-experience, any sense of themselves as a subject of experience or locus of consciousness that isn’t the same thing as the human being considered as a whole. This isn’t because they’ve engaged in meditative practices of the kind that are designed to eliminate a sense of the self but rather, it seems, because they subscribe to deeply entrenched doctrines in philosophical metaphysics and philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and in philosophical psychology—doctrines about personal identity, about the reference of the word ‘I’, about the fundamental importance of the body in shaping our experience, and so on—that they take to provide powerful grounds for resistance not only to the claim that there’s such a thing as the self, the subject conceived of as something distinct from the human being considered as a whole, but also to the claim that self-experience exists. Trefil, though, is right about the phenomenology: ‘no matter how my brain works …, one single fact remains…I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from somewhere inside my skull…this is…the central datum with which every theory of consciousness has to grapple’ (1997: 181), as is Dawkins: ‘each of us humans knows that the illusion of a single agent sitting somewhere in the middle of the brain is a powerful one’ (1998: 283–4)—even as he says that this experience is illusory.

It’s wrong to think that self-experience automatically incorporates some sort of belief in an immaterial soul, or in life after bodily death. It doesn’t, even if it’s often the basis of such a belief. Philosophical materialists who believe as I do that we’re wholly physical beings who don’t survive bodily death, and that complicated conscious experience of the sort with which we are familiar evolved by purely physical natural processes on a planet where no such experience previously existed, have self-experience as strongly as anyone else."

(Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 37)

[AgentProvocateur]

[Myron]

"Ich" in Eislers philosophischem Wörterbuch: http://www.textlog.de/3995.html

[AgentProvocateur]

[Vobro]