Who has a "Self?"

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First off, I´d like to mention that I think it´s fascinating that so many of us have had a similar "camera" incident, in that we chose to take pictures of the things we did, and somebody complained about that. Wow, every day I find more and more similarities with people here on WP! - (which is very different from my experiences in life, offline). When my mother chided me for taking the pictures I did, I think I had a feeling like "oops, there I go again, being somehow wrong as usual". But it´s just a matter of perspective.

animal: how do you know that animals or trees have no "I"? I know that humans generally like to believe these things (so we are taught to believe them), but I question that. None of us really know what it´s like to actually BE a cat, a monkey or an oak tree, so how can we say what kind of consciousness those animals or trees are experiencing? They may experience some kind of "I"; it may be similar to how we experience it, or it may be drastically different. I´m sure there are many different ways to experience an "I", fragmented or otherwise; once again, it´s just a matter of perception.

yeah... good points morgana. sometimes my position on the great question of "I' in relation to the ASD person is that the "I" is far more akin to the animal "I" in that it is disinterested in self-consciousness and more sensorially attuned. that is how it is for me, anyway. and given that, it operates as a plethora of sensory fragments that are all about heightened responses to things and the realm which is the space between words.

i think your camera story was incredible. so similar to my upbringing.

i find photos of BITS of people by far preferential to a whole entire body portrait. same when i am painting. it is that tendency toward detail as opposed to "wholes" - which leads right back to the issue of whole things for ASD people. give me bits anyday and fragments anyday.

Hmmm.............

Apparently yesterday's animal didn't believe she had a self. That's kind of weird. But also typical of my series of mes. My metaphysical leanings change daily. Perhaps it's possible that yesterday, I actually had no self, but today I don't even know what self is, so I can't answer the question.

Does the existence of a self presuppose the existence of discrete entities?
What does it mean to be an object (such as a person or a wallhanging) as opposed to being a pattern (such as the design on the wallhanging, or the cracks in the pavement)?
Can you have a self if you are a pattern of change (eg a termite colony)?
Where does one thing end, and another thing begin? Are the boundaries physical absolutes?
Does the existence of a self presuppose the ability to act on the world, as opposed to simply reacting to it (is action only reaction when it all comes down to it)?
Can self exist without sense of self (what are the differences between the two)?

These are some of the questions I am asking today.

I can't really answer any of the questions put to me, only respond with more questions.

This is very interesting.

I remember sitting in a High School Assembly once and a teacher showing us a pair of crossed hands on the projector. He said that he was showing us small part of a painting.

"I wonder if anyone could possibly guess which painting this is from?" he asked.

My hand was ready to shoot up into the air with the response. I knew instantly that the painted hands he was showing us came from the "Mona Lisa". His tone of voice was rhetorical: I realised that he was trying to illustrate a point, so I didn't raise my hand. I was so glad that I didn't answer in the end. It would have ruined the whole lecture for the other students.

"I'm not surprised you're all having difficulty," he said: "In fact, virtually no-one can ascertain the bigger picture just by looking at a tiny zoomed in section. The answer is that these woman's hands are in fact the Mona Lisa's."

He showed the entire painting on the projector to prove his point.
It was one of those "Blind Man and the Elephant" style lectures.

The thing is, I'd known what the answer was almost instantly. It was as if I'd stored the picture of the Mona Lisa in my mind like a "jigsaw puzzle" of small parts (her hands, hair, eyes etc.) that I could reassemble at will. I focused on the minute details of the painting.

Perhaps everyone else saw the Mona Lisa holistically as a woman sitting down, but couldn't split her up into her component parts as easily. It was as if the other students had to split the picture up into details, whereas I reconstructed the picture from the details.

My view:
Reassemble picture fragments to form a whole picture: construction

Other students' view:
Split the larger whole picture up into smaller fragments: deconstruction

Wow, I'm exactly the same with my photography/painting. Like in my icons, I like to focus on parts of the human body up close, such as the hair or eyes or bits of the face or hands.

Well, I HAVE been pigeonholed, but into a LOT of little holes. As I have said at other times, I have interests, but one seems to often replace another. So I can't REALLY be "summarily categorised as anything", but others often DO try to pigeonhole me.

I have quoted myself as if Marshall was saying it, sorry.

Yes, count me in too as preferring bits of people in pictures and paintings- (by the way sunshower, nice picture)! About the least interesting thing for me in terms of artwork is portrait paintings; (and there were years and years of that...boring ...)
I think that was why I have been mostly attracted to impressionism and post-impressionism. I like pictures of landscapes or closeups of trees and bushes, and I particularly like paintings or photographs that express a mood. One of my favorite Van Gogh paintings is of a lone boat on the shore...(I believe it is called "Amite"). It is said that this painting is symbolic of Vincent´s loneliness....though I always found it soothing and comforting somehow...maybe it just goes to show how one interprets the word "solitude"? Anyway, for me this painting is incredibly expressive, and has such a soul to it. Same goes for the painting he did of the old, worn shoes. I think Vincent really saw the life and personality of so-called inanimate objects- (and it is believed he was on the spectrum, which makes sense to me). I have a far greater memory for those paintings than I do usually for people´s faces...(although, I have to admit I do remember the Mona Lisa´s face, just because it´s used and shown so much. I never really liked that face, either. People say it´s actually the face of da Vinci himself, laughing at the world).

The paintings of whole people that I find most interesting are mythical characters, or Gods and Goddesses. I find them particularly interesting if they are combined with animals- (winged bird-like people, centaurs, etc.), or if they are slightly abstractly done. I guess I find the mythical, archetypal qualities of people most interesting. Hmmmm....must have to do with my "special interests".

Oops, sorry if I got a little "monologuey", and off-topic as well...

Yep, that was quite typical of my upbringing. There are more stories where that came from! Strange how we are so brainwashed when we are younger, and people telling us how we are "supposed to be".

I remember, when I was in first or second grade, I used to lie in bed and ask myself this question. Who am I? What is life? Isn't the world all just molecules and atoms and rays of light and energy?

Coming from a scientific point of view, I really do think of humans, animals, plants, and other life in the same regard. We are made of cells. Some of us are made of different kinds of cells. cells are systems. In humans, these cells (systems) work together to form other systems and parts (heart, liver, gall bladdar, skin), which work together in larger systems (digestive system, endocrine system, etc.). Then, all of these systems function together as a large system- a human. It sounds terribly complex, but it did take a lot of evolution to get us here.

Biology lesson aside, I see myself as a system- a minor system that is quite small in comparison to the universe. However, in social situations, and in thinking in general, I must call my body- my system- I, so as not to confuse anyone.

Thus, when "I" feel pain, for instance, it is just a flood of chemicals in my brain and the firing of synapses. jealousy? Regret? Happiness? Love? Meme chose.

Does this make any sense? Maybe it is just a "cold calculating" ramble. Ah well...

It makes sense up to a point. What people seem to be forgetting is that we have consciousness, and that scientific findings suggest that consciousness exists as an emergent property of central nervous systems. I refuse to believe that my fellow autistics are zombies who lack minds, but it may be that some of you do not introspect enough to recognise that you have minds, whatever that reality may signify. {It's impressive, though, that one of you had clearly read about how scientists see reality as purely physical energy by the age of 5!}

Most scientists in the field will tell you that consciousness has no independent reality apart from the brain, but it makes no more sense to say that consciousness does not exist (and that we are therefore no different to rocks) than it does to say that 2 and 2 make 5. The question is one of the nature and origin of consciousness, not of whether it's part of reality or not.



Correction - It's the inward experience generated by those physical events. Again, this needn't be a dualistic statement; we just need to recognise different aspects of single phenomona if we're interested in 'truth'. Even if we define some aspects of consciousness as illusory, we still have to recognise the existence of the illusion and explain how it's generated, such that calling it illusory didn't really add much to the investigation.



Again, this seems to oversimplify the situation - A system is something that happens within a body, not a label given to the body as if it were a corpse. It involves consciousness and many other processes, which are associated with living bodies operating in time as well as in space.



Maybe you've just pondered the concept to a point at which you're aware of more of its potential definitions.



Well, a self defined as centred on consciousness implies a discrete process at any rate. You seem to imagine that non-autistic people literally share each other's mental processes, but I'm assured that they do not. Whereas 'patterns' can merge into each other, even the most empathic person merely decodes information about other people from external clues such as facial patterns - It's a simulation, not an overlap; consciousness is, if you like, a 'closed' aspect of an otherwise open system.

And again, consciousness isn't an aspect of objects such as wall-hangings that lack complex internal systems. I'm not trying to patronise you, but your autism is clearly very profound if you cannot even recognise that your earlier statement 'was staring at' tells you something about yourself that is not shared by the wood under observation.



Well, people do define self much more broadly than we've been doing. Usually they define themselves as patterns of interaction with other 'selves', though since that's clearly a circular argument, it's probably fair to say that Self, as normally defined, is illusory. {It would be inconsiderate, though, to go around showing off that autistic insight to non-autistic people, as it could by definition make them feel completely undermined!}

ahh the title of this post reminds me of when i was young and on my own i used to have little bets on what will happen and either i could win or my brain could win,
i always thought that as if me and my brain were seperate things all together
like what someone else had said earlier on this post because of this i used to contradict myself inside my head when thinking

Since the brain is not a simple object like an apple or an orange, there's no reason why it can't generate a sense of self that is 'out of sync' with how it generally functions. I'd venture that the old idea of a normal person/heart trapped by an autistic shell could have descibed you, whereas on the other hand there are clearly many others here who have always been autistic to the core.



That's a pity; introspection's an ecstatic kind of pain when you get it right

According the the philosopher, David Hume the Unitary Self is an illusion. Our awareness of self consists of bits and snatches. We are a lot of mental processes concurrently operating in the same wet-ware.

ruveyn

So true.