Why You Don't Really Exist

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion, right? I mean, even if we're in the matrix, this is just a simulation. If we're confused about everything, if our physics is fake physics because we're not in touch with the base layer of reality, if this is all a dream, you know, if you're the only person who exists and we're all in your dream, no matter how confused you could be about the nature of reality, one thing you can't be confused about is that something seems to be happening, and that seeming is the fact of consciousness. Should we give up the idea of distinct selves as simply incoherence? Well, first let me say it's a pleasure to almost be there with you. It sounds like I'm escaping this sweltering heat, but it's an honor to be invited. Thank you. Well, there's one sense of the term self, and I believe it's the most common one, and it's the sense that we feel subjectively, most of us most of the time, which I think is genuinely an illusion and leads to other illusions, cognitive and moral. It's the other side of the coin of the sense of free will that puzzles so many people. So, you know, I would ask you to just notice this feeling in yourself if you have it, and if you're like 99% of people, you'll get this sense that you feel that there is a subject, a kind of unchanging point from which you notice experience, which doesn't leave you merely identical to experience. Rather, you feel like you're appropriating your experience, you're having an experience. There's a place from which you can aim your attention at the objects of experience, and most, if not all, of your experience has this subject-object character where you're the subject, noticing sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and moods. That subject is an illusion, and we can know that really from two sides. First of all, from the third-person side, neurologically, it makes no sense. There's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. But more importantly, I think, from the first-person side, subjectively, as a matter of direct experience, you can look for this sense of self, you can look for the eye in the middle of experience, and fail to find it in a way that is conclusive. And this effort goes by many modes and many names. I mean, this is something that meditation in various practices directly targets. People using psychedelics have had this experience, but there's a vast testimony to the perturbability and the transiency of this sense of self. And I would actually say that most people, even if they're not meditating or taking psychedelics, they're continually losing this sense of self without noticing it. Which is to say, you can lose yourself in your work, you can lose yourself in an athletic performance, you can lose yourself just in an outgoing act of attention, where the clear sense of self becomes kind of retrospective. When you take stock of yourself, you then notice it. But it is continually interrupted, I would say. But to interrupt it consciously as an act of contemplation is very different, because then you can actually be free of it, more or less, whenever you remember to pay attention. And that's a very different way of moving through life. Let's bring Roger in here. Roger, does this idea of distinct selves make sense, or is it an incoherent notion? And just to bring in Sam's point from the get-go there as well, does it make sense to have an illusory self, or is that illusion a very instance of the thing which we typically take to be the self? I mean, I regard the question of self as all tied up intimately with the issue of consciousness. And if you weren't conscious, then what concept wouldn't even be discussed. But there are, I remember reading a long time ago now, example of a patient who had serious epilepsy or something. And they performed an operation, which seemed to me pretty extreme, of dividing the brain into two separate halves. I don't know how separate it was, too. There's no doubt it was the cerebrum and not the cerebellum, but still. And this person almost considered herself, or maybe people considered, that they became two separate people, in a sense. So that it did seem to be tied up with the way the brain is organized. And with this split-brain person, they could do one thing with one hand, and the other side wouldn't know what was going on. It struck me as rather, well, the whole thing is rather awful. But apart from that, does the presumably single self that this person had previously, what does happen to that when it becomes, does it become two selves later on? I have no idea. So I'm just filled with lots of question marks when I think about this problem. The question of consciousness is bad enough. It seems that if this person with a split brain in this experiment, or this, I don't think it was an experiment, I'm not sure. It's supposed to be a treatment. If this person was considered to have two selves at that stage, well, it raises a difficult question as to what you mean by the self and consciousness, and presumably the memories of the past were shared by the people, if I can use that term. I'm not sure. I don't know that the descriptions I read of the situation were detailed enough for me to form a real view about it. But it did seem to me that it has bearing on this question. And it's one of the few experiments which I know of, certainly not even an experiment as far as I know. Treatment, I guess it was, that I know of, which have some bearing on the question. Of course, you could imagine somebody to be unconscious. Could one side of the brain be unconscious as the other? Well, then you have to ask a dolphin, I suppose, because the dolphins go to sleep one side and the other side separately. And to a dolphin, that must be a strange effect. I mean, are they still awake all the time, but yet being, in a sense, having a different self? I have no idea. I'm just raising these points. Sort of scientific issues which might have relevance to the general question. Can I ask you this, just before we bring in Sophie? So you raised the split-brain case as a problem of split someone's brain, either both sides are them, neither side of the brain is them, or one or the other is them. And that seems like a big philosophical problem if your view is that ourselves are identical to our consciousness. I just want to ask you this before we bring Sophie in. Do you take the self to be identical to a stream of consciousness, or is it more of a capacity to be conscious, which we're identical to? I see what you mean. Does one sew all the conscious experiences up together and make one thing out of it all? I think one does, but to what extent is this a feature of memory? Because the memory transcends this, and you remember events which took place before you went to sleep or something. But then when you are asleep, you're still to some degree conscious if you're dreaming. And I certainly experience, I'm not somebody who has what they call vivid, what's the term people use to dream? Lucid dreaming. Lucid, that's right. Now the only experience of that nature which I remember, is in my dream I was walking around in New York, and I was turning the wrong way and turning around and getting completely and utterly lost, and I didn't know what to do. So I went into this store, it was a store because it was America, into the store and I decided, well look, if this is a dream, I can walk on the ceiling. So what I did is walk on the ceiling. So I said, yeah, it's a dream. Could I wake up? No, I had a lot of trouble. I don't know the relevance of this to the disciples. Maybe it wasn't a dream, maybe you're in New York and there's some pretty crazy CCTV footage out there of you walking on the ceiling. You can speculate about these things. I think I was dreaming to be walking on the ceiling. I wouldn't put it past you, Roger. We have laws against that in America. Sophie, is this idea of multiple selves, distinct selves within one body an incoherent notion? I mean, I think it's something that definitely requires, as both Sam and Professor Penrose have already said, that you've got to have some definition of exactly what you mean by that. So do we mean conscious awareness, a sense of being the subject of your experiences, or do we mean something that's like a sense of yourself as a coherent person with sense of identity around that? We need to define that. And in the introduction, we were going across several different levels of analysis. So I think it is worth trying to get into that in more detail. And it's also worth bearing in mind that you've got that 86 billion brain cells, and you were born with almost all of them. So on the course of every 10 years or so, you get a completely new body, except for the hair cells in your ears, the cells in your crystalline lens in your eyes, your egg cells if you're female, and your neurons. Everything else is renewed. Everything else is changing. So if you look at a photograph of yourself as a baby, none of that person is there anymore, except for primarily your eyes, your ears, and your brain. And because that's one of the reasons why you would have, you know, if you lose your aspects of brain function, it will have tremendous impact on how you're able to actually function. But of course, it's also there because that is where your memories are stored. They're not being renewed. They are stored within that system, stored in a very clever way. And the purpose, I suppose, of many ideas of what we mean by a sense of self or kind of a subjective experience of the world is arising from the function of that network. And anything that changes in your brain, anything you learn, anything that you remember from today is going to be because that network is remodeled and changed. The brain cells are talking to each other slightly differently, and that's how we encode information. There isn't anything else. That is the sum total. It's an enormous structure, but that's what you've got to learn with and to be you. I think the only other thing I'd be interested in thinking about is selves or a sense of self in terms of your interactions with other people, because we're social primates. Our lives have meaning largely in the interactions we have with others. And that requires you not only to have a sense of the idea of other people's sense of selves and how they could be thinking and could be thinking differently from you about things, but also arguably, you need to have a model of how they're seeing you. What is their model of you as a self? So the kind of the social elements of this and the big changes. I'm a very different person if I've been talking on the phone to my mum than I am if I've interacted with the police. There's many different aspects of my behavior in place. And I got run over by somebody on a line bike a couple of weeks ago. I ran over somebody on a line bike a couple of weeks ago. I don't think it was you. I think you'd remember because I discovered that my fight or flight response leans heavily on fight. I was very, very cross. And I couldn't understand. I could not understand why the woman kept asking if I was okay. But why are you just a stupid question? You absolute idiot. You haven't realized how stupid you've been. And I was just, hang on, hang on. Okay. She's just run me over with her bike. She's probably worried that she's hurt me physically. And I just, it took me minutes to get to that. So, you know, within milliseconds, you can be prompted into a place. I'm not normally that unpleasant. It takes normally running into me on a bike to take you there. But it's, that was a very, you know, I was just propelled into a completely different state of awareness, fully driven by emotion, which is, of course, a huge element of what we're seeing, which affects everything that everyone's talked about so far. Well, it's interesting. The main question we've asked there is whether it's coherent to have distinct selves, but you've all seemed to set out your stall in regards to what it is to be a self to begin with. And if I'm getting this right, Sam thinks that selves are illusory. Roger thinks that selves are constituted by consciousness. And you seem to be saying that it's your brain, the contents of your brain, and what other people see you as as well. So, Sam, if the self's illusory, how do you make sense of conscious experiences and the contents of those experiences? Where is that conscious experience happening, if not mine and myself now, and yours and yourself now? Where is this theatre of experience on your view? Well, we should distinguish consciousness from the self. In my view, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion, right? I mean, even if we're in the Matrix, this is just a simulation. If we're confused about everything, if our physics is fake physics because we're not in touch with the base layer of reality, if this is all a dream, you know, if you're the only person who exists and we're all in your dream, no matter how confused you could be about the nature of reality, one thing you can't be confused about is that something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the fact of consciousness. So I'm quite convinced that consciousness as a concept and as a starting point to just epistemologically to know anything is foundational. But that doesn't answer the question how it relates to the physics of things, right? So I think the jury is still out on just how to solve the so-called mind-body problem, which is to relate the fact that there's something that it's like to be us with the fact that much of what's going on in the universe, at least from the outside, appears not to be conscious or not be a basis for consciousness. And there are many different views that people I'm sure have heard about, you know, idealism, physicalism, panpsychism, etc. I think you can table all of that, all the metaphysics there, and talk about the nature of experience, however, and come to realize that this notion of a center in the middle of consciousness that is unchanging, this feeling of I, this feeling that I'm behind my face, that I'm a subject up in the head, in some sense, riding around in my body as a kind of passenger, that really is the default sense that I think most people are referring to when they're talking about a self. They don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they're in relationship to their body. If you have a terrible pain in your knee, you very likely feel like you're up in your head in some basic sense, now resisting this pain, right? And the pain is down there and you wish it would go away. You know, everyone starts there. If you really try to interrogate this contemplatively, if you learn to meditate or you have some other mode of introspection, you do start as this sense of being a subject in the head that is now trying to figure out what's real about this sense of self. It is that sense that is illusory and it's that sense that you connect with what Roger said about the split brain procedure. It's that sense that I think very clearly can be divided. I think when you cut the corpus callosum, which is the series of white matter tracks that connect the two hemispheres of the brain that occasionally get severed in a surgery to mitigate grand mal seizures, when you cut all of those fibers, you are certainly dividing the access that each half of the brain has to certain phenomenal states, you know, sight, sound, sensations, and also motor control. And you do almost certainly produce two separate fields of experience, which are no longer integrated. And so, as a matter of consciousness, those are now separate, you know, conscious access to contents. But I would say as a matter of a felt sense that there's a subject too, I think the question is probably open whether or not both hemispheres of the brain would form that to precisely the same degree. But, you know, it was clear from some of that fascinating research that there are almost different people in the two hemispheres. I mean, they have different beliefs, they have different desires, they can fight, they can get into a tug of war over objects with, you know, the right and left hand. You know, one subject was embracing his wife while the other, with one hand and trying to strangle her with another. In any case, yeah, I think the sense that there's nothing lost at the level of consciousness, really, if you lose the sense of self, except you lose the sense of self. And that should give you some indication that it is a, it is itself an object of consciousness. It is an appearance of some kind, otherwise you could never feel that it could change or be lost. Yeah. That's, Roger, when you set out your story, you sort of gave your view, but also laid your own trap and said, here's my position, but here's the problem with my position. Have you got any intuitions on how it might be solved? It seems like more of a problem in terms of the self for your view than it does for Sam's. I guess the question, as you raised it, was not just the question of consciousness, but why one identifies the consciousness as a continuous thing, which goes from early childhood and remains the same thing, in a certain sense, until death, which is the sort of a rational sort of view, or is there a sense in which it starts all over again each time you wake up or whatever it is, start having a dream or something, I suppose. And to identify it with the earlier ones is a feature of memory. Now, is it only memory? I suppose that's your question. Or is there, in a sense, some entity which continues right through? And then if someone undergoes one of these split brain, poor person, operations, to what happens to that train of experience? I don't really know. I mean, I'm just, it's a long-winded thing. I don't know, I think. Well, Sophie, you think memory is important here. John Locke's example of the, maybe he's got the first body swap tale. We've got lots in Hollywood now, but the cobbler and the prince is Locke. So the cobbler wakes up in the prince's body. The prince wakes up in the cobbler's body. And it's because they have the same memories and the stream of consciousness that we're just talking about that Locke thinks they're the same person, despite having a completely different physical vessel, which they occupy. Would you see yourself in part of that tradition that Locke was defending? I mean, yes. In that, if you had a brain transplant, it would be a body swap. It would be, because your brain is you. That's the sort of where we're fairly confident you can have a heart transplant and you're not a different person. There are some really interesting points around memory. I was talking to Tom Manley, my partner from Cambridge University. We were talking about Clive Waring earlier, who is somebody who had a really horrible case of herpes encephalitis, which is very, very destructive of neural tissue. Different kinds of brain damage cause different kinds of damage, intensity of herpes really does. It just destroys brain tissue. Do not catch it. How don't you catch it? Well, unfortunately, most of us have got herpes. It's going to be a cold sore, so we're kind of... He's left and he's still alive. He was a musician. He worked for the BBC and he was left densely, densely amnestic. He cannot form new memories. He has barely any access to old memories, to the extent to which his conscious awareness is that he is continuously just waking up from a coma. Every other person with amnesia, you can give them a diary and they can write things down in their diary and they will make some use of that. He comes across his diary and goes, someone's been writing in this, crosses it out and then writes in, I'm awake for the first time. A few seconds pass, he'll go, someone's been writing in my diary, crosses it out. It's desperate. It's a horrible, horrible situation. The weird thing is he knows who he is. He knows his name. He knows his wife. He can learn procedural things like where cups go in the cupboard, the sort of sensory motor stuff. You don't need to have a more detailed analysis maybe to learn, maybe resting on different brain systems. When he engages with music, he is completely, totally engaged. He can conduct music without flaw, knows what he's doing. Outside of those few things, he really is absolutely all at sea except he knows himself. So there is some interesting kind of, maybe that's what you're seeing of the self when you've taken away all possibility of memory helping you, is a sense of who you are, but nothing else until other things like your wife turning up or someone plays music that gives you something to hold on to. So memory isn't necessary for being yourself? It's maybe not necessary for being yourself, but it maybe is necessary for being able to situate that self into something that's meaningful and which calms you. Because he also has desperate problems with emotion regulation, terribly, he's very frightened and upset by what's happened. And your memories help you do that. If I go to sleep and I wake up the next day and everything about me is familiar, then memory is helping me not panic. If I woke up somewhere new and I didn't know where I was, I would be frightened. So memory is really important in helping us understand, and that's the world around us. And of course, that's really important for being able to just regulate our moods within that. Well, let me push you on this and get some more of your thoughts on it. You gave the example earlier of, you're a different person when you speak to your mother than when you do to the police. I'm not always talking to the police, I'm just an example, just an example. And the thought there is, right, we all know we have different aspects of our personality, but we still think it's the same me, the same entity, which was there 10 years ago, 10 minutes ago, 10 seconds ago. It's the same me throughout time there. So I wonder what you think more particularly about whether or not we could have multiple of those entities which are me throughout time in one brain. So for example, you get people with schizophrenia who feel like they've got multiple inner voices in their heads, people with Cotto's syndrome who feel as if they're dead, or they're having the thoughts of someone who's passed away. And they don't feel like those thoughts are their thoughts, but someone who's deceased. To continue watching this video, click the link in the top left or in the description below. With a free trial, you can enjoy the full talk and thousands more. Thank you for being part of the conversation.