Self Illusion: Why There is No 'You' Inside Your Head

The Self Illusion: Why There is No 'You' Inside Your Head [Extract] by Bruce M. Hood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first heard of Bruce Hood from Maria Poppova, on a brainpickings post, almost a year ago. This was right before going on my second trip to India. In this article, Poppova presented many interesting ideas from this author and recommended The Self Illusion for those interested in understanding the self as an entity derived from a biological phenomenon that is the mind. An electrical fish creates electrical waves to avert predators, we primates use the electrical discharges of our neurological system to create our spirit and thus our self. This idea, despite simple, was very striking on me. I immediately ordered the book, but since it would be shipped from overseas it didn’t make till left to India. Given the impossibility of bringing the book on my trip, I decided to buy other publication available in the local market. Then I stumbled upon to his other book SuperSense which argues how we tend to trick ourselves turning the unbelievable into believable. This reading couldn’t be more appropriate while having a “spiritual” trip through the Indian subcontinent. Religion is undeniable powerful and it take advantages on people’s incapability to accept that their ego is as perishable as their body. People need to believe that through religious transcendence, magic is plausible and death is not a definite event. It is an important social manifestation since it can calm the spirit from its anxieties regarding its origins and its ends. Religion works to split the material phenomena which is the body from its electrical phenomena from where comes the mind, therefore it can trick the ego when it faces despair and death. Hood maintain that everyone is born with a tendency to have this "Super Sense" and social institutions, such as religion, profits on that. I still think that any religion mythology is a rich source of insights for human psyche and for how it dealt since our even our ignorant and “enlightened” society still lacks for peace of the soul like the first Neandhertal did. Consequently, it helped me to better understand the spiritual experiences I had not only in this trip but also with my later Ayhuasca experience. Where my divine experience was realizing that there is a much bigger force than me and that I am just a machine as full of grace, blood, meat and bones that will stay alive during an amount of time impossible to totally grasp the origins its origins even with all the clear evidences of the absence of magic and super creator. Besides, the topics discussed are all a vanguard on neuroscience the text is very well written and fluid, making the reading experience more interesting.

With this in mind, I started reading the Self Illusion three weeks ago. The book was very helpful to better understand the dynamics that ego creates to justify itSELF and how we are tricked to believe that we transcend our body. Like his previous books, Hood present empirical evidence based on common sense life events of and the last brain science discoveries supported by philosophers (such as Daniel Dennet) and cognitive psychologists (Pinker and Kahnemann).He asserts that THE SELF is not programmed to identify itself. That's why many animals from Birds to Dogs or even we, when little, take some time to understand what is our reflection on mirrors. He also argues about the window of opportunity of brain development, such as a chick is programed to identify its mom to follow to and from to the nest. Identically in the Super Sense, Bruce Hood argues again how babes when born don't have a clear sight, they just want to absorbe as much information as possible, they don't know exactly the shapes of heads of their moms just like chicks don't know who to follow, despite knowing they have to follow. Therefore, the evidence would suggest that like for Noam Chosmky we have built-in traits genetically evolved and inherited to identify the sources of security to better deal with natural selection imposed by the environment. An illusion is not what it seems and for most of us, we consider our self as some essential core of who we are. For example, most us think that we see the world continuously throughout the waking day when in fact we only see a fraction of the world in front of us, and because the brain blanks out our visual experience every time we move our eyes in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hrs of the day. Although the brain is just a loom of electric neurons and contradictory impulses, the self makes us whole how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life he self – this entity at the center of our personal universe – is actually just a story, a “constructed narrative”.

Our brains think in stories. The same is true for the self and I use a distinction that William James drew between the self as “I” and “me.” Our consciousness of the self in the here and now is the “I” and most of the time, we experience this as being an integrated and coherent individual – a bit like the character in the story. The self which we tell others about, is autobiographical or the “me”. The neuroscience supports the claim that self is constructed readily confabulate an explanation to reconcile information unconsciously processed with information that was conscious Ramachandran describes patients who are paralyzed but deny they have a problem. These are all extreme clinical cases but the same is true of normal people. Nietzsche said it first: “My hypothesis is the subject as multiplicity,” we really just a collection of “splinters and mosaics”. We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience. If the human condition it is not materialist, then an alternative good explanation must be non-materialist. Show me good evidence for souls and spirits and then I will be forced to change my view about how plausible is the hypothesis on how supernatural entities can inhabit our bodies. In contrast, we know that if you alter the physical state of the brain through a head injury, dementia or drugs, each of these changes our self and, thus, easily to promote the necessary delusions to make god possible.

Nietzsche said it first: “My hypothesis is the subject as multiplicity,” we are just a collection of “splinters and mosaics”. As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out, when it comes to the mind you cannot be both the hunter and the hunted. I think that he is saying that the brain creates both the mind and the experience of mind. An illusion is not what it seems and for most of us, we consider our self as some essential core of who we are. Deconstruction of the Self Illusion is hard to pin down since we consider our self as some essential core of who we are.


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