Ego vs Awareness/consciousness

[Angrboda]

I should refrain from addressing quantum mechanics, for I don't know what I'm talking about when I do, but I'd make a few suggestions. First, the interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the science of quantum mechanics. The science of quantum mechanics is the equations and rules for mapping them to observation. Quantum mechanical interpretations, to my mind, are mere metaphysical propositions; the interpretation can change while holding the equations constant. So what is the interpretation describing? IMHO, nothing, noumenon. ...

Beyond that, I think the idea that we need to invoke some sort of quantum consciousness is crap. People look at consciousness and find it mysterious, so they conclude that its explanation must be mysterious too. It's the sort of law of similars that we would quickly conclude is absurd when practiced by a modern day witch or homeopath, but readily glom onto because we don't like not knowing how we at bottom work, and it allays some anxiety. I'm perfectly willing to accept a quantum consciousness when someone presents some evidence of it, but they haven't; and the only reason it guides many people's ideas on consciousness is that it forms a "God of the Gaps" explanation for consciousness, effectively putting consciousness in a place that is not well understood to safeguard it from being deconstructed into mundane and unremarkable components.

As to the self/ego, I come down somewhere between a simple eliminative materialist or adaptive unconsciousnist's view, and the view that... IIRC, Daniel Dennett has evolved. His idea is that the self doesn't exist as a thing or center in the sense of being a thing, the self is the narrative center of the behaviors of the organism. It isn't a place where what we are emanates from, it is a process which associates some aspects of our biological existence with others. For example, suppose we when faced with a beggar on the street we typically give the person some change. We assert that the self is caring and giving, but what we're really seeing as just a way of organizing how we make sense of our behaviors. (This, I think, is a modest distortion of Dennett's view, but I think it gives the flavor without requiring pages of exposition. For a firmer understanding, read Dennett, starting with The Intentional Stance and Consciousness Explained, and working from there. Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves are related, being his works on free will; Elbow Room being a dense but powerful early work, and I haven't yet read the later. If you are interested in philosophy of mind, I strongly recommend that you read Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy — which is not a book about conclusions or theories, but more a primer on how to approach the subject of mind philosophically, what common errors of thinking about it are, and why, and so on. It's been well over a decade since I've read it, but for many years it remained, for me, one of the most important books I've ever read.)

Now, I don't go quite that far as I have other ideas which place the self/ego as an actual maintained entity, in a sort of semantic holism / coherentism that, while not eliminating the center, a la Dennett, reduces it to mere information processing in the brain. These ideas that the self/ego is somehow a mysterious emergence in reality in some ways echoes the Buddha's doctrine of Anatta or what little I understand of it, anyway. In traditional Vedic Hinduism, there is the concept of the Atman, or the transcendent self, which in many versions is a universal monadic consciousness (I'm going beyond my reading, so forgive any misstatements), and that transcendence entails realizing our true nature as Atman. The Buddha inverted this in the doctrine of Anatta, asserting that there is no self, there is anatman, or "not-self". According to Buddha, you could look within for the self, and the more you look, the less you will find. He concluded that the self or ego which binds together our existence is an illusion, and that there is in fact no center, and our clinging to the idea that there is a center is what prevents us from becoming truly enlightened, in a way analogous to the way that realization of Atman brought enlightenment to the Hindu.

Now, I suspect the Buddha was largely right in saying that you can look and look within consciousness and not find it. However, I believe the Buddha was wrong in concluding that because you cannot find it within consciousness, that it therefore is not there. I think that latter entailment is not fully justified, strange as it may sound. I'm going to leave you at this point, as explaining my evidence or reasons for suspecting this shades into ideas which at this time are, for lack of a better word, proprietary, as I have not decided whether to contribute my ideas freely, or what. Anyway, I hope I've provided enough to pique your interest, and provide some sustenance, even if I have to hold something back.