Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

They say words can never harm you but for the self illusion, words from other people can be everything. The case of Mr Bungle raises so many interesting issues about identity, the self and the way these operate in online communities. Everything that happened, the characters, the assault, the reaction and the eventual retribution were nothing more than words, the frenetic typing of cyber geeks on their keyboards. But why the outrage? Why did people feel emotionally upset? No physical contact had ever taken place. Clearly the players were not deluded into believing that a real assault had happened, but psychologically the users felt violated. In the minds of the players it had gone beyond role-playing. Their indignation was real. Ostracism and the pain of social rejection can be so easily triggered by simple computer simulations of communities that are a sufficient substitute for reality. That’s because they stimulate our deep-seated need for social interaction.

So where is the real self in these different examples of online communities and virtual worlds? Most of us believe that we are not hypocrites or duplicitous. We like to think we have integrity. If the self is a coherent, integrated entity then one would predict that the way we behave online should accurately mirror the way we behave offline. However, that does not appear to be the case. How people behave depends on the context in which they find themselves. The Web is no different. The way you behave online would never be acceptable offline and vice versa. Online you have to be open, engaging and willing to share but then you are more likely to tell others what you think of them, flirt and generally act in a way that would get you into trouble in real life.

Sometimes we surprise our self in the way we behave online as if we have become a different person. Maybe this is why online life is so popular. We get to be a different self. We get to be someone else – maybe someone we aspire to be. At the very least we get to interact with others who are missing in our daily lives. This need for an online identity that seems so different to our offline self perplexes pre-Web adults, but we need to understand how this need for technological escapism has become integrated into the human psychological development. This is because the Web will eventually swallow up everyone on the planet so it is important to consider how it may influence and change the next generation. We are not likely to become like the Borg, but we do seem to shift effortlessly between our online and offline selves. Consequently, the Web dramatically reveals the extent to which the notion of a core self is an illusion.

9

Why You Can’t See Your Self in Reflection

When I was a graduate student working on visual development in very young babies some 20 years ago, I studied how they move their eyes. Babies don’t speak, but their eyes are windows into their brain. Where they look and for how long, reveals what their brain is paying attention to. Where is the self in this decision? If you think about it, for the most part, we do this unconsciously. But who is moving our eyes? Who decides? Does a newborn have a self in control? Working with newborn babies, sometimes only minutes old, I never really asked this sort of question. I was more concerned what newborn babies looked at.

It seemed obvious to me that babies look at things that they can see most clearly and that this is determined by what is out there in the world to look at. As far as I was concerned, it seemed unlikely that they had models of the world already encoded in their brains that predicted where they would look next. Rather, at the very beginning, everything must be driven by what existed already in the environment to be seen. It is the properties of the external word that compete for the attention of the eye movement systems in the baby's brain. There was no need for a self in control. Newborns don’t really make decisions about where to look. Rather, the brain mechanisms they are born with have evolved to seek out information from the external world and then keep a record of those experiences. It was this early insight into the mind of an infant that opened my eyes to the self illusion.

As the brain develops, it builds up more complex models of the world–expectations about where and what should happen. We develop an increasing flexibility to apply those models to understand and make predictions. Twenty years ago, I appreciated that development was the integration of internal mechanisms working in conjunction with information in the world. That fundamental principle works all the way up the nervous system from simple eye movements to the full repertoire of human thoughts and behaviours – the same activities that give rise to the self. This is why the self is an illusion. It did not suddenly manifest one day inside our head on our second or third birthday. It has been slowly emerging – sculpted out of the richness of human activity and interaction. Our self is a product of our mind, which in turn is a product of our brain working in conjunction with other brains. As the brain develops, so does the self. As the brain deteriorates, then so must the self.

Why did we evolve the self illusion? Like every other illusion our brain generates, it serves a useful purpose. If you think about the “I” and the “me” that we usually refer to as the self, it provides a focal point to hang experiences together both in the immediate here and now, as well as to join those events over a lifetime. Experiences are fragmented episodes unless they are woven together in a meaningful narrative. This is why the self pulls it all together. Without a focus, the massive parallel processing in our brain means that we would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of computations if we ever had to deal with them individually, Rather, we get a summarized headline that relates all the outputs from these unconscious processes. Sometimes we can delve into the details of the story a little more closely if we scrutinize the content, but very often much of it is hidden from us.

The self illusion depends on stored information that has been acquired during a lifetime. These are our memories that are constructed as we interpret the world. That interpretation is guided by mechanisms that seek out certain information in the world but also by those around us who help us to make sense of it all. In this way we are continually shaped by those around us. As the species with the largest proportion of life spent as juveniles dependent on others, human children are particularly evolved for social interaction and much of what our brains compute appears to be dedicated to socially relevant information. In the absence of social interaction early in development, children can be permanently socially disabled even though their intellect may be intact. Certainly, the formative years leave a legacy of how we interact with others for the rest of our lives. It is through this social interaction with others that we construct our sense of identity and ultimately our sense of self.

We have not evolved to think about others as a bundle of processes. Rather we have evolved to treat others as individual selves. It is faster, more economic and more efficient to treat others as a self rather than as an extended collection of past histories, hidden agendas, unresolved conflicts and ulterior motives. Treating humans as selves optimizes our interactions. We fall in love and hate individuals, not collections. We cannot abandon our morality simply because we decompose the individual self into its myriad of influences. Punishment and praise is heaped on the individual not on the multitude of others who shaped the self. Those who reject the notion of a self in control of destiny, lead sadder, less satisfying lives. Those who embrace the self illusion feel fulfilled and purposeful.