Here’s a TED video about the curious nature of the self.
Anyone who is interested in AI or intelligent machines will inevitably eventually have to confront the nature of the self and its curious malleability. As Ben Goertzel mentioned in “The Hidden Pattern” intelligence is really something which exists between minds as much as it does within them, and it’s in multi-mind simulators such as Noble Ape that these ideas can be explored.
The above video I think has some relevant points: the idea of the self as a constellation of elements which are not necessarily localized, and the idea of consciousness as an “illusion” or “trick”. However I don’t think this goes quite far enough. IMHO the “trick” is really a virtual machine, and the trans-personal nature of intelligence are mobile programs, or “programs in the wild”. When the elements of the brain are arranged in some way and there is a means of communication with just enough bandwidth and generativity then it becomes a suitable initiator and host of virtual machines which can move around, combine, compete and so on.
As people such as Stephen Wolfram have found, it doesn’t take much to make a Turing machine. My guess is that that computation is ubiquitous in all human cultures which contain a generative language, but largely unrecognized and unquantified. Here I’m not referring to digital computers or modern infomatics – which are one example of computation – nor the genome which can be thought of as a Turing machine operating with 3D molecules rather than transistors or tape. So I think that the self is a kind of virtual machine which may be highly localized (as in a hermit living in a cave) or more typically as a distributed entity across multiple minds, including those minds which have become fossilized within cultural artifacts.
The self also seems to have a scale free nature, such that the identity of a group can be similar to the identity of an individual, or vice versa.
