Our Sense of Self →
We perceive our sense of self as an amalgamation of the different sensory inputs - visual, tactile, locomotive, etc., that our brain processes and interprets. Or in other words, our sense of self is an interpretation made for us by our brain (mind) after processing several inputs. In olden days philosophers who tried to understand one’s true self found it difficult to reason about the interpretation of sense of self - are we really who we are? or are we manifestations of our mind’s interpretation of several inputs? This is a fascinating topic and lately neuroscience research is trying to understand which parts of the brain are processing and how our brain creates such interpretations.
In his book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, journalist Anil Ananthaswamy takes us through the neuroscience research on this topic. The main message of this book is that our sense of self is an interpretation of several inputs which are beyond just sensory inputs but our own physical body and society play a vital role. And in this age where Computer Scientists are working on Deep Learning as well as trying to understand the neurological pathways in order to build systems that mimic the human decision making apparatus, while that apparatus itself is not completely understood.
What fascinates me about this study is how the mind’s computation of sense of self can be influenced (or cheated) by changing the mapping (think of it as lookup table entries) the mind preserves for different sensory and other inputs. In many cases, what we feel and believe our sense of self is, is just an interpretation (an entry in the table) that is fetched given the inputs. We can influence such inputs to pick up a different entry that would alter our sense of self. There is also a classic neuroscience experiment from the 90s that demonstrates how the mapping in our brain, representing our physical sense of self, can be altered within minutes. You can take a look at an example experiment below:
I am intrigued about the possibility of changing our emotional sense of self and if it could be done non-invasively using technology. Such a possibility would be a big boost to curing several mental disorders just by altering the mapping in the mind, when we know how the mapping is created, where it is stored and how it is interpreted. Also, one needs to be aware of ramifications of this - can such mappings be altered by say adversarial inputs - visual or societal - in the form of social media posts or news articles. We might be destroying our own sense of self by letting our mind interpret the inputs that we consume, without us realizing the end result - thinking we are who our mind interprets (influenced interpretation/self) rather than who we really are (actual self).