Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Self and Not Self

Try this simple experiment before reading the following explanaton. Thar be spoliers there.

Step 1: Get a pen or pencil. Or anything else spear or rod-like you can poke things with.

Step 2: Hold this pen (or whatever you have) like you're going to poke something with it.

Step 3: Poke a lot of shit with it. Poke a pillow, then poke a wall.

Step 4: Notice how when you poke shit with your pen, you sort of have a feeling for the end you're poking shit with and not so much where you're actually touching it.

Step 5: Note how totally weird that is now that you've taken the time to think about it. I mean, it's just the tip of a  pen, and not an extension of yourself you should be able to feel despite the lack of nerves extending into it right? Well...


Here be the explanation:

As sensory information streams into your brain and before you become consciously aware of it, your brain does something interesting to it -- it divides the sensory information into two categories:

1. sensory information about yourself
2. sensory information about that's not yourself (world, universe, environment, or if you're fan of buddism, not-self).

If you look at your hand, that's sensory information about yourself.

If you look at the wall, that's sensory information about something that's not you.

Even though the information about the wall and your hand can be encoded at the same time from the same retina at the back of one of your eyes, it's no big deal, when the information hits your brain it will helpfully sort out which is which before you even have a conscious awareness of what you've seen. This is fortunate because otherwise you couldn't tell your hand from the wall and would experience them as part of the same thing.

If all the sensory information you're receiving at one instant to be a sheet of paper, then the process I'm describing is cutting your shape out of the paper and standing you up out of it like a pop-up book.

BTW, this process is why self-relevant information is so damned salient and accessible. It's why you can distinctly hear someone say your name in a room filled with several  people talking all at once. See: cocktail party effect (later, after you're done reading this.)

Now there's ways to fuck with this process in really interesting ways. For example, The Rubber Hand Illusion which tricks this process into granting self-status to a rubber hand (which then the illusionists always seem to  smash with a hammer, scaring the holy shit of thier subjects who fully believe it's their hand that was about to get smashed..) You should easily be able to find a fun video about it on Youtube.

So, about the "pen effect" (my term) -- something really interesting happens when you pick up something, especially a tool. The boundary between self and world moves to encompass the tool as a part of yourself. No shit. Think about using a broom and how you can kinda feel the floor and not so much the handle you're touching, or swinging a baseball bat and feeling what you hit more than where you're holding it.

This is how your brain does it: After encompassing the tool as a part of the self, it remaps the sensory information coming in from where you're touching it to  the place where the action happens. If you concentrate on where you're touching the pen while you poke something it'll drop that mapping and you'll feel the pen push against your fingers and you'll also (hopefully) have the "ah-ha" that your brain was using the pressure on your fingers to figure out what was going on at the tip, but presenting the information to you as if it was directly from the tip.

Allrighty, let's sum it all up.

1. Our brains separate incoming sensory information into two different categories: you and not you. Needless to say an unprocessed stream of neural impulses makes a lot more sense to you and your brain after this separation. The seperation more or less literally creates your experience of yourself and the environment you exist in. (the world,  universe).

2. The boundary is fuzzy and you can be tricked into thinking something that isn't you is you. (Rubber hand illusion) but the reason we can do this is to better handle things like tools which are more easily processed as a direct extension of ourselves automagically rather than having to consciously fumble around with them.

And about the universe of those astrophysicists:

3. The universe which extends in all directions infinately which astrophysicists study but can't ever properly define is actually created by the separation of sensory information into self and not self/environment. This is why there's no coherent definitions of what the universe is exist besides "all that exists". But, astro-scientists, not being into psychology, never realize that the fact we can experience ourselves within a universe requires a psychological process to create that experience.

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