Below is a brief and limited outline of an essay that I am working on on the sense of self in relation to the world around us. I am eager for some feedback and the chance to refine my thinking through dialog.
While my motivations for posting this are ironically selfish, I hope that exploring some of these ideas together might be inspirational to others here as well.
Thanks for taking a moment to read.
(Note: this is a work in progress and many of the ideas below are not my own originally. While I have at this point not included citations, I do owe some of my points below to sources such as Thomas Nagel for the example of the Bat and specifically Deepak Chopra for his interpretations of Vedic thought and in particular the concept of the "Silent Witness". All distortions on these subjects below are entirely my own.)
What is reality and what makes me me and you you?
The bottom line is that we have no idea what really is out there, impacting our minds. To even say that there is a world out there is an enormous leap of faith. What we know as the "world" is what we experience through the mediation of our minds. The world as experienced by a bat, for example, is a completely different place than the one we interpret through our own senses and central nervous system.
A world image as reconstructed through the sonar interpretations of a bat is essentially equally valid an interpretation as the one we reconstruct in our minds through the filters of our senses and our limited brain capacity.
Another example: snakes. Try to imagine, for a moment, a world "image" as interpreted primarily through infrared heat-sensing and a smell sensitive tongue. Or a shark as it responds primarily to tactile and weak electrical impulses in addition to smell.
Our brains are rigged to respond with a certain prejudice to a narrow-band visual sensory array involving a limited light and color field.
Even when we try to extrapolate what it is like for a dog to sense the world so overwhelmingly through the nose or a bat through sonar or a snake through heat, we cannot help but be biased by our own sensory limitations.
Coming to the realization that the world that we experience is an interpretation of limited sensory range and a limited cognitive rendering, ie that the world as we know it is "(re)created" primarily inside our own minds, (which by the way, is not the same as solipsism), is not easy to understand. We are so invested in our own interpretations that we forget that the quantum fluctuation soup out there that we reformulate inside our own heads and project as the "world out there" is a creation of the sensors and processing power that our nervous system reconstructs as a coherent whole.
We have little way of knowing what is really out there. We can only speak of the interpreted and heavily filtered result that our brains and language reproduce.
OK. So the sense of self is a mystery of sorts. One definition would rely on the unique perspective that our individual vantage points offer each of us. No one else, (that we know of), occupies the exact space-time POV that each of us inhabits.
But even if we were to leave it at that, we have certain problems. Most of the cells in our bodies are regenerating, leading us over a span of seven years to be mostly different people physically than we were just years before. And yet we remain with a near constant sense of self. The sense of self persists into our dreams and spans both our conscious and unconscious minds. Memories are selectively created, stored, distorted and forgotten or remembered. Studies of the effects of drugs, hypnosis and altered states associated with trances and drugs show that a certain sense of self transcends the physicality of our existence.
Some call this the "Silent Witness" the part of "your" self that observes you observing. There are many reasons to explore the "sense of self" behind the limiting parameters of our physical beings. A sense of being alive that we seem to recognize all around us in Nature.
Ultimately the definition of self is determined by the limitations our physical tools and our ability to sometimes expand our even transcend those limitations for brief moments of illumination, those moments of ecstasy or deep connection achieved through dreams, trances, drugs, art, beauty and meditation.
So what is it that defines who I am? Do we have the tools to explore this fully or are we mostly limited to guesswork? Is science alone enough to satisfactorily describe what it means for me to be me and you you?
Are religion, philosophy and art and other altered states necessary to complete the picture? Will our essential nature always remain shrouded in mystery?
Is the sense of self primarily a sort of amalgamated fluke resulting merely from electrochemical interactions of the brain and central nervous system?
Is self merely a factor of place in space-time?
To be continued...