Daniel Dennett - What is the Nature of Personal Identity?

What makes one a person or a self? If he or she sees, hears, thinks and feels, is that a person or a self? How can separate perceptions bind together into a coherent mental unity of a single person or self?

[MorphingReality]

The only way to get me in a church would be if Dan sat in front of me and we just talked through the whole mass.

[stevedavis]

Perhaps the most insightful commentator on the ineffable problem.

[chewyjello]

Im just so curious as to why they chose to film this in a church.

[FirefoxisredExplorerisblueGoog]

People have suffered from brain trauma resulting in noticeable change in personality even though they retained all the memories they previously had. So memory can't be the only thing that shapes personality since both can change/develop independently of one another.

[Wingedmagician]

This is more terrifying than illuminating. It’s strange to me they’re not going insane by contemplating these things.

[stevedavis]

...just a "leftover from metaphysical absolutism"... a point so exactly and precisely stated.

[luizr.]

The self is not unified. The processes that loop around selfhood are complex and can shatter. This is an important insight.

[dearistocratia]

NOTES :
SELF
1 - Ability To Choose Action. (necessity)
2 - Maximum energy-economic value. (evolutionary utility)
3 - Center of gravity="preferential decidability" (seems not only common but universal)
4 - Competitive centers of gravity (common, but one observer?)
5 - Undecidable centers of gravity (uncommon but ... solipsism to autism?)

The common Error of mechanistic and material (cells), rather than persistent information within the limits of human actions that the cells make possible. Information can persist across cell lifetimes if only by revisiting memories.

We evolve from 'mostly personality' to 'mostly memories'.

As someone who has had many episodes of unconsciousness it is very clear to me that as we 'wake' the 'self' exists prior to memory, and is identifiable to the increasing layers of introspection.

It has made me extremely conscious of the change in my 'self' how it relies upon my personality's biases, and then as memory increasingly becomes available, how we adjust perception as we retain consciousness.

[andriyandriychuk]

There is an idea of parts in human psyche. Very useful.

[NicoleTedesco]

After traumas of various kinds, be it environmental or medical, one can feel like their old self had died.

“I am not the same person as I was before.”

I certainly had that experience after a period of seriously increased epilepsy. A friend had that experience following a stroke. Some people feel that following a psychedelic trip or two. That persistent sense of self can, and sometimes does, have subjective discontinuities.

[MrRight]

This is the only episode which actually makes sense, as appose to scattered philosophizing on the theme of consciousness.

[bryandraughn]

Yaaay!!
My nonsensical biases that work against Mr. Dennet's ideas, have been resolved!

[callmeishmael]

The self is a construct of the brain based on time, place, and circumstance. My identity is the situation I exist in now. My past informs my self, but like the many other things informing my self, it is ever interpreted in the present. Everything is filtered. My self creates the concept of my self at every thought, and at the moment I fall asleep, my self disappears. When I wake up, my self is in a new time and circumstance, maybe a new place, and the train of thoughts goes on creating a new self, directing the body. People meet me and see my body and assume I’m the same self and I may surprise them showing that my self has changed. My guiding function based on my interpretation of my past operates the body in a similar fashion, but my new time, place, and circumstance has altered the construct of my self. The fact that I feel like I’m still the same is just from the need for confidence in a sense of continuity of a central guiding function. That is the self. When that confidence diminishes, that is the start of schizophrenia.

[enemarius]

Equating a subjective sense of self with personality is an error and a quite obvious one too. Personality is a form of identity not a sense of self. Of course you have people with multiple personalities, but each of them has a single sense of self. The error comes from trying to answer the question from an objective perspective when in fact it should always be posed subjectively.

[delq]

But my personal experience has limitations and is incomplete considering the total reality of the universe. There clearly are things "i know" and "i do not know". Self is just a word i like to adress this division, which is to be more precise my inability to be another person at this moment in time and have access to their experiences over mine.

[stevewiencek]

I do love listening to Dennett. I don't get why he seems hostile to Buddhist/eastern thought though (not in this clip but in others I've seen). Quite a bit of what he says here is a hair's-breadth away from Buddhist notions of "no self." A good question the interviewer could have asked is "Once you realize that your "self" is more accurately described as an internal (biological? mechanical?) desire for consistency than it is a solid "fact, " does that change your moral outlook on your own behavior? How does knowing your "self" is a process rather than a thing change how you behave in this moment?"

[bobaldo]

I like this guy, and everything he said.

[zhenminliu]

The reason he laughs is that truth is sometimes amusing, even funny. The “interviewer” is Robert L Kuhn, an exceptionally intelligent and knowledgeable person.

[petermiesler]

3:00 Here's another example of the philosophical disconnect from physical reality: How can Dissociative Identity Disorder be discussed, without mentioning the environment that's forcing this survival strategy upon this particular creature? How about the fundamental fact that we are biological creatures and the product of hundreds of millions of years worth of evolution? We presume to come up with theories, yet seem uninterested in learning about what actually grew our brain, that is, evolutionary developmental. Organisms can't be understood without understanding the environments they exists within. A theory of consciousness will flow from absorbing biological and evolutionary facts.

[DestroManiak]

As an atheist, I have always hated the "if you dont believe in god, how can I trust you not to torture me?". But at this point, I have to ask Dan the same thing. "If you believe that my conscious experience is an illusion, how can I trust you not to torture me?" I simply do not see why it would be wrong to torture an entity without genuine first person subjective conscious that is continuous.