Bas C. van Fraassen - What are Selves?

What does it mean to be a 'self'? What characteristics distinguish a self from a non-self? What are the boundaries between self and non-self? Is there a difference between a self and a person? What follows from the existence of selves?



Bas C. van Fraassen is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[quantumdave]

Dissect anything enough and it will be unrecognizable. We are an extremely rare, unique aberration in the quantum fluctuations of eternity, imbued with the gift of awareness and emotional connectedness. We are the eyes and ears of the Universe, examining itself and wondering why?

[maxd]

"We didn't came into the world..we came out of it " Alan Watts

[daithiocinnsealach]

More or less my own stance right now. Came to it through years of religious studies and intellectual studies and psychedelics. The pyschedelics were like a temporary brain upgrade. I finally understood so much that was in my head but was confusing. Laozi, Buddha and others, I believe, came to these understandings in a pre-scientifoc world. It's my belief that what they were doing was a form of science. It is the distraction of the world around you that inhibits you from understanding yourself and keeps you locked in a myriad of confusing and contradicting beliefs and ideas. The proofs of relativity and quantum mechanics, to me, are verifying what these ancient Eastern mystics discovered through intense, isolated meditation.

[johnyharris]

You could think of the self as the first sense. And all other senses stem from this the base, central sense. So asking 'what am I?' is akin to hearing trying to listen to itself, sight trying to see itself, taste asking what flavour am I, touch trying to feel itself. I think the reason he's having trouble with the question is because of the 'sense of self'.

[caricue]

He says he's not a thing, but he is definitely a thing. He is a solid physical object made of matter. This piece of matter has a strange arrangement that makes it jump around and change form over time, but it is definitely a thing.

[bluelotus]

Selves are individual sparks of consciousness. This is their eternal, spiritual asset, but once they take on a temporary material body, they look like lumps of matter. Actually the embodied selves are the best example of how thoroughly appearances can deceive us.

[JustAThought]

Q. What are selves?
A. Self is the individual human being. Each individual is unique. Each has a unique environment in which to explore and create the best life experience for which they are capable. We spend our years gathering knowledge and skills. The essence of self: self is aware, self has five sources of information (the five senses), self has memory of past events, self has a collection of beliefs, self has the skill of intelligence, self has a set of assumptions about realty.

[Robinson]

I've come to respect Bas van Fraasse a lot through these videos and I owe a lot to his book about space and time I found online. Was hoping to get his book on paradoxes but unfortutely it's too expensive and only available abroad. Too bad, looked very promising to me!

[ginadisantis]

That was Great! Loved how he explained selves. Bravo!!

[SarupSingh-mcgk]

You are BOTH –
the very question and
THAT which remains
In the absence of the question.

[FAAMS]

You are a string of information in spacetime that within spacetime displays self reference in a phenomenological form, you are a thing that is a subset of other things!

[erdwaenor]

This is a really good one; at least on its beautifully simple and effective form for human social life better relashions. I guess it has roots in Systems Thinking and Heraklitus thinking.

[messenjah]

Small "s" self is an illusion of a separate being. Capital "S" Self is the eternal Unified Spirit of which there is infinite expression. We are all one in this Unified Spirit, but we are asleep to it while dreaming the dreams of the small "s" self.

[ReynaSingh]

Between the “true self” and the “non self” or even consciousness, the difference lies in semantics as opposed to conceptual disagreement. how are you supposed to discuss what you can’t name?

[riteshpanditi]

Artificial intelligence seems to be relatively conscious, but in the progress towards AGI, it seems we can't really define it concretely when we ourselves don't understand consciousness. The relationship between the incompleteness theorem and consciousness is highly interesting.

[carolinaterri]

I am a spirit having a human experience.

[jamesruscheinski]

Talking about the self / consciousness / mind using language of words, grammar, stories, etc. might provide added insight to what is known through mathematics?

[HuntFishJits]

I'm here writing this now but this is just energy in different forms and my self is turning that energy into my reality. Basically we're in a simulation and if there's this then when this is over there's something else.

[fractaorganism]

the self is an open system in the process of becoming, which in evolutionary terms emerges with the origin of life, but which is ultimately the dynamic of the cosmos itself. see "cosmo-autopoeisis"

[heresa_notion_]

OK, I'm intrigued, but I wonder if this "I'm not a thing but not nothing" state also applies rather frequently to other categories in our mundane existence besides a self. One particular (human-specific) not-thing I'm thinking of is a computer program; let's say a complicated one like a full-featured word processor. Maybe people are just some kind of reality-processor, where the programmed and the programmer are merged. I might also add that "goals" (in humans and animals) are an immaterial thing in the sense that you can deconstruct a Rube-Goldberg-esque implementation of them but still never see precisely where the goals reside. They have to be somewhere materially between an input and an output (e.g., an organism has them), but if you stop and look closely for them all you can see is electrical and chemical transfers. Spooky, isn't it?