The latest pitch is from developmental psychologist Bruce Hood, author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.
“You are actually a collection of conflicting messages and signals and thought processes,” says Hood. “And these are somehow brought together to experience as unified self.” Fine, so your self is just the “you” experiencing that, right? That becomes a Russian doll problem, says Hood. “There’s someone inside the head who’s having these experiences taking place inside their head and so on,” he says.
Catherine de Lange, “Who do you think you are? Why your sense of self is an illusion” at New Scientist
In reality, naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” have gotten exactly nowhere in understanding consciousness. And the results are, as an article in Chronicle of Higher Education noted last year, bizarre. That is, ultimately, if you have a self, so does your coffee mug. So maybe you don’t have a self.
This stuff never gets old because naturalists need to believe it and to believe it, they must market it as science.
Note: There is an important sense in which our consciousness is an illusion, as Michael Egnor points out: We are aware of the outcome, not the processes. But he doesn’t mean what these people seem to mean. You really are you. You just don’t observe the processes enabling you.
See also: In one sense, consciousness is an illusion. We have no knowledge of the processes of our consciousness, only of the objects of its attention, whether they are physical, emotional, or abstract (Michael Egnor)
Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself
and
Consciousness Studies Is a “Bizarre” Field of Science
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