What are we as individuals without us as a group? Are you the same person always, or do you alter your behaviour and even your thinking depending on both circustances and the people you are surrounded with?
The answer to that question, no matter what you may want to believe, is actually that you reflect the people you grew up with, the parents who raised you and the society you live in. Not completely, but enough that the edges between what you are and groups you live within, are actually very blurred. Social experiments, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment prove that circumstances and group influence can quickly cause peope to behave outside of character. Culture matters.
And it goes beyond which sports team you cheer for. In fact, it reaches the very core of what we are; our thoughts, our morals and our behavior.
I live within a society, therfore I am.
This idea of self comes from Douglas Hofstadter. David Brooks has an interesting article on it in the NY Times: A Partnership of Minds.
Douglas Hofstadter was a happily married man. After dinner parties, his wife Carol and he would wash the dishes together and relive the highlights of the conversation they'd just enjoyed. But then, when Carol was 42 and their children were 5 and 2, Carol died of a brain tumor.
A few months later, Hofstadter was looking at a picture of Carol. He describes what he felt in his recent book, "I Am A Strange Loop":
"I looked at her face and looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes and all at once I found myself saying, as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me!'
"And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that wielded us into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it had lived on very determinedly in my brain."
The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom, and Hofstadter's suffering deepened his understanding of who we are, which he had developed as a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University.
Hofstadter already understood that the mind is not a centralized thing. There are dozens of thoughts, processes and emotions swirling about and competing for attention at any one time. It's like a quantum mechanics light show.
Carol's death brought home that when people communicate, they send out little flares into each other's brains. Friends and lovers create feedback loops of ideas and habits and ways of seeing the world. Even though Carol was dead, her habits and perceptions were still active in the minds of those who knew her.
Carol's self was still present, Hofstadter sensed, even though it was fading with time. A self, he believes, is a point of view, a way of seeing the world. It emerges from the conglomeration of all the flares, loops and perceptions that have been shared and developed with others. Douglas's and Carol's selves overlapped, and that did not stop with her passing.
Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomenon
I've always believed that consciousness arises as an emergent phenomenon.
The shortest way I have worked out to describe "emergence" is to say that Individual agents, self motivated and operating according to simple rules, can suddenly produce patterns. In certain circumstances, these patterns can evolve into behavior that is intelligent. The patterns and the possible intelligence "emerge" at a macro level, and are almost independent of the what the individual agents are aiming to do.
According to Wikipedia, Jeffery Goldstein, describes the concept this way: Emergence refers to "the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems".
Here's a series of diagrams to show what I mean:
Any emergent system is made up of individual agents and ways that those agents interact. Examples of agents include cells in a slime mold, birds in a flock, brain cells, ants, or people in a free-market economy. These agents do not all interact in one simple way. Even in a free market economy, people are not solely motivated by goods, services and money. The success of Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube or Wikipedia, which are powered by user generated content, proves that people are also keenly motivated by social recognition.
The Connection Between Self and Society
If intelligence, consciousness and even thoughts emerge as higher level patterns, then is their very existence something that is apart from, though dependent upon the physical infrastructure (neurons, blood, oxygen, dopamine, etc) that is normally viewed as the container of self (i.e., the brain).
If this is the case, then the boundaries of self are broader than one might otherwise think. The ideas, memories, emotions and the feedback loops that define "self" would include things the begin outside any individual.
Intuatively, this makes sense when you think about how people are influenced by their peers. Familiar insights such as "He was a good kid until he starting running with that rough crowd" imply that we all understand that there is a relationship between the mutable self, ceaselessly evolving, and the rest of the world.
Who's Minding the Mind
Benedict Carey has an interesting article, also in the NYTimes, entitled "Who's Minding the Mind".
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people's judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee â€" and asked for a hand with the cup.
That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
The article highlights at least one mechanism through which external forces impact our thinking and behavior. Carey calls it "priming", which he is careful to separate from the more simplistic notion of "subliminal" messages.
Some scientists also caution against overstating the implications of the latest research on priming unconscious goals. The new research "doesn't prove that consciousness never does anything," wrote Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, in an e-mail message. "It's rather like showing you can hot-wire a car to start the ignition without keys. That's important and potentially useful information, but it doesn't prove that keys don't exist or that keys are useless."
The Limits
As a quick aside, I have to note that obviously, there are limits to the influence of external forces. Just because a proportion of who we are is influenced by the society we live does not mean that the individual is a slave to external forces. Carey puts it this way:
researchers do not yet know how or when, exactly, unconscious drives may suddenly become conscious; or under which circumstances people are able to override hidden urges by force of will. Millions have quit smoking, for instance, and uncounted numbers have resisted darker urges to misbehave that they don't even fully understand.
The same can be said for external ideas that we are consciously aware of.
The Connection With Social Software
The impact of social software on who we are is potentially profound. In an article about the impact that cell phone companies have on who is friends with whom, Angel Jennings put it this way:
people younger than 25 .... see the cellphone as an extension of themselves. They are constantly sending text messages, making calls, checking the time, scheduling appointments, calculating math, taking photos, playing games or looking up something on the Internet.
The emphasis is mine. But, what an amazing way to put it. A piece of social technology is literally viewed as an extension of self.
If consciousness arises as an emergent phenomenon, if who we are is ethereal, a ghost in the biological machine, defined by ideas past and present, and shaped by internal and external forces, then what happens to our "selves" as the level of connectivity increases exponentially?
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