No, a self model is not just a point of view. All conscious entities have a point of view. That does not mean they have any conception of having one. Nor does self-consciousness require a knowledge of historically peculiar skills like grammar or even language. Those are things a self-model lets you acquire, not the other way around.

A sense of self requires narrative memory, and a constructed model of who one is distinct from other people and things—not spatially (all brains that model environments locate themselves in it), but conceptually: personality, desires, etc.; which requires meta-cognition: you have to be able to think about other people’s thoughts, desires, etc. (even in fact to understand, not just intuit, that they have them at all), so as to even be able to comprehend their differences from yours. And this precursor step (called “meta-cognition”) exists to varying degrees in many animals up the evolutionary tree (dogs have it, cats might; monkeys definitely), but it is a precursor step, it is not identical to the next step, which is self-meta-cognition, turning that ability onto oneself, and hence the construction of a thought-matrix about oneself.

This means one must have the ability to think about oneself as a person. Cats definitely don’t have that. Elephants might. Humans provably do. And we can connect this ability to specific organs of the brain that don’t exist and have no analog in, for example, cats. Nor do they exhibit any of the associated behavior. So we can be quite certain that isn’t a thing.

Anytime you are thinking “I am experiencing this” (whether using language to think that or not), such that you can think about what it meant for you to go through that, you had a self model running. When a self model fails to run, you can no longer run narrative memory. You therefore won’t even remember the experience, much less have had any coherent thoughts about it at the time.

So “zero introspection” is not dissolution of the self. If you remember concentrating on having no introspection, and have thoughts about what that was like for you, you were not dissolved. Your self model was entirely functional and integrating the experience into its model. You were still there watching it happen. This is not a thing in almost all other animals.

And yes, you could not write that comment to me without a self model. You couldn’t even string a sentence together or comprehend that I exist so as to write to me, or comprehend that writing things would communicate anything about you or your thoughts—at all, much less to another person. None of that understanding would be possible without a self model to relate it all to and draw upon to build the rest out. That’s why animals don’t publish newspapers or jabber on social media, and can’t enter contracts, not even implicit social contracts.

Meanwhile, being able to imagine different kinds of you (with different powers, even having a different gender or sex or body altogether) is not “dissolution” of a self-model, it is just creatively playing around with a self-model. Being a superhuman sentient woman spider in a dream is not the loss of a self-model. It’s just a different self-model.

Clearly I am deficient, as introspection never reveals any model of my “self.” It either reduces into the sensorium or into a stream of consciousness, which is to say, verbalized thoughts. But I have no internal model of grammar, or the sources of inspiration for verbalized thoughts. When I don’t think in words but pictures or sounds I don’t think I have any internal model even of the verbalized sort. So far as I am aware I have no sense of self at those times at all, yet I can’t perceive this as a dissolution of the self, even if it contradicts the postulate there is a self-model in the neural program. Much of my personal “thinking” involves things like recognizing familiar objects and I find that for me these are notably automatic, i.e., involving zero instrospection.

Neither remembering what I’ve said or written, nor planning on what I will say or write involves any internal model. My experience has been that language is irremediably intertwined with the social environment. I suppose this is why actual social experience is required for people to learn to speak on the one hand and why it is so difficult to program a Chomskyan-esque grammar in computers.

But then, I have had dreams where I wasn’t present, where I engaged in impossible feats both physical and mental (sudden transitions from one place to another, bursting through walls, speaking foreign languages, seeing the future.) This strikes me as an impaired sense of self. And it especially strikes me as violating the model of the self postulated above. I’m not sure that taking the brain=computer/mind=program so literally can’t be misleading.

it is the ability to model things that don’t exist that is a hallmark of intelligence

I agree that that will produce substantial gains in intelligence. I don’t think it’s required for “just any” intelligence. You are conflating intelligence with imagination. Imagination can substantially increase intelligence. But it is not coterminous with it. And there was indeed evolutionary pressure toward ever-more-effective abilities to use imagination to learn and anticipate.

But I doubt spiders do this. Their brains are too simple to have that kind of architecture. I doubt they “plan” their web structure, but rather just produce it by instinct (the same way spiders don’t “figure out” how to walk, or squirrels don’t “figure out” the advantage of storing nuts; they are just born with the instinct to do it, unaware of its benefits or purpose or even procedure).

Spiders very probably do, however, build a memory (a model) of their actual web. And use that to employ it as a tool (both sensory and motive).

It’s not clear what ego construct means here.

It means what it says: a constructed identity, a self, towards which to relate thoughts. This appears only (so far as we know) in certain primates (particularly us). It might be happening in certain other animals (e.g. cetaceans and corvids and elephants claim the best evidence for this, even if it’s not conclusive).

But I’m not talking about “a difference between being here and someplace else,” as no ego construct is needed to comprehend that. Even spiders must comprehend simple things like that. That’s what a model of an environment is for.

An ego construct is a model of a self (a model of the internal environment: what’s going on in their brains, rather than outside of it). The difference this allows to understand is between “subjective” and “objective” truths. Cats can hypothesize, but they don’t know they are doing that. They can’t think about thinking. So they don’t ponder what might be in the real world outside of them. There is no outside of them. There is only their experience. Just like human infants, cats are functionally solipsists. They don’t assume their mind controls everything, but they don’t have any idea of there being a different thing “out there” than is going on “in here.” Human infants eventually learn this, because they have the brain architecture to.

Perhaps that’s why when people are asleep or hallucinating their sense of self is so impaired?

I am not aware of that being the usual. In dreams and sleep people very much still grasp their presence in the scenery.

There is a lot of nonsense hippie talk about dissolution of the self, but this is impossible. If that happened, you could not be thinking about it like that. You can’t be there thinking about the dissolution of your self if your self had been dissolved. So that’s clearly an illusion. Your self is still there noticing, commenting, and cataloguing the feelings being experienced. It hasn’t dissolved at all.

Since a self is just a model of a self (a computed output), as long as there is an ego thinking about what’s happening to it, the model is running. It is not collapsing. But that is the one program cats can’t run. They are never running a self-model. They are just a stream of consciousness. Because that is all their computers are equipped to calculate.

Re: those who make an argument for Biblical Christianity: Are any of them remotely valid even internally? From what I’ve seen, the claims all go something like “Christianity believes in a God of truth while other religions don’t” (which is doubly false and ignores the entire spread of theisms that weren’t born from existing mythology which would actually be the only likely place to look), then citing a spurious Bible quote and not making a systemic argument. Basically, I’ve just seen them pass off bald assertions as arguments, essentially by just expressing some of their own supposed dogmatic Christian beliefs. Certainly there’s very little inherent to “A triune God had one of its three aspects appear on the world to sacrifice itself to itself in blood magic” that’s going to be necessary for science. You can actually see this tension even in alchemy: The alchemists have to go into weird mysticism like the Kabbalah because standard Christian doctrine so dramatically establishes that any true power should be in the hands of God that they can’t find much in orthodox doctrine to hang their hats on for even a crank chemistry. I just don’t see anything in Christianity that’s even arguably remotely unique to it that establishes a basis for truth-seeking, world consistency, etc. in a way that generic theism wouldn’t equal or exceed, even if the cherry-picking of verses and ideologies that the argument engages in is allowed.

.Re: Holland: I guess I did forget that we are in the corrupt end state of Christian fascism and some are saying the quiet part out loud, but even within that argument that only works for the illiterate masses. The scientists themselves would presumably know as they do work that it’s all BS and that we’ve moved past it. In any case, the fact that science proceeds apace in an increasingly secular internal context empirically disproves them.

I’m basically responding to the Jaki-inspired types who have as one of their motte-and-bailies the two claims of “Christianity had ideological conceptions that were useful for science in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and early Scientific Revolution” and “Christianity is useful for science now”. It would have been possible for Christianity to have helped modern science get started with certain independently-defensible assumptions without science today benefiting from it. From what I can see, Holland just repeats the assumptions someone like a Jaki asserts were actually held and were actually useful in the past as being useful today, and they’re not.

Re: Intelligibility: Agreed. My point is that the degree of intelligibility of the world is an a posteriori conclusion not an a priori assumption. Actual philosophers of science have since Hume conceded that things like causation, regularity, patterns, etc. are all things we have to infer.

What I see these approaches exploit is that so much of scientific philosophy has begun from literally the point at which we are asking any non-trivial scientific question, not at initial assumptions, but that everyone who has actually thought about the methodologies knows that. The fact that a scientist could drive on a highway with their car to a lab to sit down, formulate a hypothesis and investigate it shows, a posteriori , that the world is at least locally intelligible enough to do that. If the world is intelligible enough for you at least to try to do science, if you’re not living in a I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream Cartesian demon hellhole, then you can at least look at local patterns. But everyone knows full well that local patterns are not actually good to extrapolate to the rest of the world with, whether as regards intelligibility or anything else: See dark matter and dark energy.

But, yes, we definitely agree that the very fact that any systemic study requires a development of a series of mathematical, logical and methodological tools essentially none of which are intuitive and become increasingly less so as the objects of study become more sophisticated is strong disproof of God. And as regards the utility of these purported Christian faith assumptions, it actually shows that those assumptions have negative utility, because if believed honestly they would lead to the assumption that any problem should be ultimately soluble, and this is not an assumption that scientists have actually found useful.

” In simpler animals, who have no ego construct—like, say, cats—there is never any question of subjective constructs, since cats have no conception of a distinction between subjective and objective constructs; but their brains, as a matter of practical fact, still construct models of an actual, not simply an imaginary, environment. That’s why they can get around without bumping into things.” It’s not clear what ego construct means here. Certainly the cat never thinks “I am here and to get to there I have to avoid these obstacles,” as cats have no language. But I’m not sure that knowing the difference between being here and someplace else isn’t itself a kind of “ego construct.” Of course the arrow would not more have any self-awareness than an arrow labeled “You are here” on a schematic map of a shopping mall. But the whole map with tag does seem to parallel the sensorium and the ego construct? Perhaps that’s why when people are asleep or hallucinating their sense of self is so impaired?

The utility of conceiving the brain as a computer is becoming less obvious, to me at least.

The claim that we believe in an independently existing objective world seems off-hand to omit all varieties of objective idealism, proponents of whom would seem to be a part of “we,” though. At a guess, seeing this independence of the material world is itself the materialist stance. But I suspect that many of the people attempting to argue for the intellectual necessity of “God,” (left conveniently undefined,) are conflating laws of nature with legislation by a supernatural agent. Being a crude thinker innocent of philosophy I think it is possible to declare there is no “God,” (and an unnamed God is a swindle not even an hypothesis.)

Just a few qualifications…

Their arguments all only apply to theism, not Christianity.

Not all. Some do try to shoehorn in Biblical Christianity as necessary (this happens in the cultural argument, for example). But yes, mostly this is another bait-and-switch where an argument for theism is handwaved into an argument for Christian theism.

Second, it ignores that ideas that are false can create a favorable ideological basis for inquiry.

Not always. I mention counter-examples. For example, Tom Holland specifically advocates this, i.e. that even though Christianity is false we still “need” it to ground useful assumptions that we depend upon (like science and democracy and human rights). This is indeed the entire philosophy of religion native to Neocons, for example. And it is essentially the entire thesis of Plato’s Republic.

But yes, most advocates of this approach try to hide this point, as it undermines what they actually want to argue.

Connected to that is ignoring how modern science actually operates.

This is a key fact and it will come up in today’s follow-up article about the argument of Tomas Bogardus. Keep an eye out for that.

We actually have to reject lots of religious assumptions, even the assumption that the world is naturally comprehensible.

This of course would hinge on what one chooses to mean by “comprehensible.” I make this point in The End of Christianity thus (pp. 23–24):

[H]umans evolved to understand the world they are in, not the other way around. Even then, the universe is so difficult to understand that hardly anyone actually understands it. Quantum mechanics and relativity theory alone try the abilities of someone of above average intellect, as do chemistry, particle physics, and cosmological science. Thus neither was the universe designed to be easily understood nor were we well designed to understand it. We must train ourselves for years, taxing our natural symbolic and problem-solving intelligence to its very limits, before we are able to understand it, and even then we still admit it’s pretty darned hard to understand. If you have to rigorously train yourself with great difficulty to understand something, it cannot be said it was designed to be understandable. To the contrary, you are then making it understandable by searching for and teaching yourself whatever system of tricks and tools you need to understand it. Our ability to learn any system of tricks and tools necessary to do that is an inevitable and fully explicable product of natural selection; that ability derives from our evolved capacity to use symbolic language (which is of inestimable value to survival yet entails the ability to learn and use any language—including logic and mathematics, which are just languages, with words and rules like any other language) and from our evolved capacity to solve problems and predict behaviors (through hypothesis formation and testing, and the abilities of learning and improvisation, which are all of inestimable value to survival yet entail the ability to do the same things in any domain of knowledge, not just in the directly useful domains of resource acquisition, threat avoidance, and social system management).

Thus the actual intelligibility of the universe is not at all impressive, given its extreme difficulty and our need to train ourselves to get the skills to understand it—indeed, our need even to have discovered those skills in the first place: the universe only began to be “intelligible” in this sense barely two thousand years ago, and we didn’t get much good at reliably figuring it out until about four hundred years ago, yet we’ve been living in civilizations for over six thousand years, and had been trying to figure out the world before that for over forty thousand of years. Given these facts (our universe’s actual intelligibility), [Intelligent Design] is actually improbable: the probability of the degree of intelligibility we actually observe is 100 percent if there is no [Intelligent Design], but substantially less than 100 percent if [Intelligent Design] caused it, in fact no more than 50 percent at best. It is almost certainly far less, since a God could easily have made the world far more intelligible by making the world itself simpler (as Aristotle once thought it was), or our abilities greater (we could be born with knowledge of the universe or of formal mathematics or scientific logic or with brains capable of far more rapid and complex learning and computation, etc.), or both, and it’s hard to imagine why he wouldn’t. God gave us instead exactly all the very same limitations and obstacles we would already expect if God didn’t exist in the first place. Given [even a] prior probability of no more than 25 percent, once again we end up with a posterior probability of [Intelligent Design] that’s no greater than 15 percent on the evidence of an “intelligible universe.” In other words, there’s probably no [Intelligent Design] here, either.

In other words, the actual scale of intelligibility of the universe is evidence against the existence of God, by these Christians’ own premises. Not the other way around.

First of all, their arguments all only apply to theism, not Christianity. These are often coming from fundies or people with a more literal worldview, and so they tend to at least consider the possibility that God could harden a heart or create an illusion or do what Paul expressly says God does to sinners’ mental states. So not only is Christianity per se not remotely implied (and so there can be no explanatory reason why science seemed to rise against in Christendom instead of under the Romans – as it actually did – unless Christianity actually had very specific cultural traits which it objectively didn’t), Christianity is a bad version of theism for those goals. Which is actually precisely what we find when we look at the history: Over time, scientists and philosophers had to move toward deism or pantheism because it was the only reasonable element at play.

Second, it ignores that ideas that are false can create a favorable ideological basis for inquiry. Even if some aspects of Christianity could ultimately be harnessed by scientific reasoning, this isn’t the sixteenth century anymore. Five centuries of science have actually shown us quite clearly that the free inquiry of science requires at least some degree of secularism within a society. Eventually, science will trod on a sacred cow, and religions have historically not been very good at allowing their ideas to be tested with the confidence that they will be confirmed. Which would mean that, even if we could thank Christianity retrospectively for the right ideas at the right time (just like we can thank lots of non-Christian things that Christian apologists want us to ignore because this is about their woobies and not good history), we should not let that thanks guide us now . At best , we’ve outgrown Christianity, transparently. So the entire argument ends up being a series of motte-and-bailey fallacies (e.g. “The Dark Ages’ length and intensity has sometimes been exaggerated” with “There was no Dark Ages”) ending with the motte-and-bailey fallacy of “This idea was useful in the past as a sociological reality” (which is possibly defensible as a sociology of science argument) with “Therefore we should endorse it at present even though we know its present utility is not what it was in the past”.

Connected to that is ignoring how modern science actually operates. We actually have to reject lots of religious assumptions, even the assumption that the world is naturally comprehensible . It’s possible that it isn’t. If it isn’t, we’re screwed and science is screwed, but science cannot ignore that fact . So even under the most charitable reading possible, which ignores all of the ugly and superstitious and grasping parts of Christian intellectual history, the things they are describing as salutary still aren’t . Radically challenging the idea of a subjective center of the universe in God, not assuming that intelligibility is guaranteed or that the universe was designed for us to be easy to understand (and therefore not assuming that it will be intuitive)… we’ve had to learn all these things in the centuries since the start of the Scientific Revolution. Which means we have to discard Christian faith assumptions.

And, of course, the entire argument hinges on having to ignore the roughly thousand years where there was not a Scientific Revolution or even a Renaissance precisely when Christianity per se was at its peak of institutional power, and to ignore that those changes actually coincided precisely with an increasing lack of centralized Christian power that effectively weakened rather than strengthened Christianity. Because a casual look at the data so strongly falsifies the argument, the people who put it forward end up having so many dominos fall to defend it, just like with any other bad theory from creationism to Holocaust denial. So guys like Jaki have to basically peddle the “There was no Dark Ages” line you’ve refuted (and that line is getting popular because it works well for Internet contrarians and it helps classicists try to get people to pay attention to the interesting stuff that was going on during the Dark Ages but also clearly because there’s ideological utility behind it) and have to make really shameful defenses of Christian scholasticism. They have to ignore and downplay Islamic contributions. They have to ignore the role of Chinese technological imports. What a totally inconvenient coincidence that defending Christianity as being important for science also ends up pushing forward all sorts of other racist, Islamophobic, Christian dominionist narratives!

It gets on my nerves so much.