Hacking the Self
I just found this article about conceiving of yourself as a sentient shell script making supervisor calls on an automated, unconscious, animal-evolved kernel. Ignore the opening where the author is so dazzled by the importance of his idea that he has to talk about it for three paragraphs. He could be on to something. I don't know what to make of it, but it's interesting enough to bear further exploration and experimentation. Excerpt:
"And don't get me wrong, after weeks of playing around with this stuff, I'm still no superman or Zen master. But I have managed a few very interesting hacks. For example, a few weeks ago a certain situation led to me feeling very bad. Intellectually, I totally knew there was no reason to feel bad, because what happened had nothing to do with me. Emotionally, though, I was a wreck.
_
Suddenly, I had a flash of insight: these are two different neural networks. The intellectual understanding and the emotional response were networks that evolved at different times in my life, under different circumstances. They were therefore not connected, except through their mutual activation in the current circumstance. Therefore, I experienced each network's output as a full and distinct input, but the "emotional" net had no way to receive data from the "intellectual" net, in order to moderate its output. This led to an experience of conflict, in which I could try to suppress the output of the emotional net, given the data from the intellectual one, but this couldn't and wouldn't stop the emotional input from coming in my input pipe.
As soon as I could see that, it was obvious what I needed to do: pipe the output from the "intellectual" net into the "emotional" net, instead of trying to integrate the data downstream in the "consciousness" process. And literally, as soon as I imagined this, the two upstream networks integrated, and the need to feel bad went away. I still felt bad physically, in my body, so I "shook it out" and it went away. (It appears that shifts in glandular output and neurotransmitter states are used as a crude system-wide state machine to aid in sorting input and output, so even after you adjust an upstream source, you may retain some kinesthetic "pollution" downstream until you garbage collect it.)
_
Now, before I go further, I want to explain that the "emotional" and "intellectual" networks I just mentioned were not my entire emotional or intellectual being. That's precisely the sort of large-scale behavioral integration that our brains do not have by default. I integrated two isolated "understandings", each of which was a simple script to assign meaning to a certain class of events. In programming terms, each of these nets could be considered a "business rule"; just pattern recognizers that fired off to send "me" their analysis of the situation. It's just that one of those rules fired off a "knowing" and the other fired off a "feeling".
So, the fact that I did this one particular edit of my brain's rule system does not now mean that intellectual understanding is now integrated with all my emotional impulses. During early life, we write a lot of scripts in our brains that are not abstracted or reused in any significant way. Later scripts may abstract or absorb chunks of previous scripts, but they often do so in a downstream way; that is, they take their input from older scripts and output commentary on them, but this commentary doesn't necessarily have any effect on our behavior or feelings, and therefore leads to the experience of inner conflict. So, we inherit a lot of "legacy" code that desperately needs refactoring."
The money quote:
"So how do you do this? How do you edit rules, pipe one net to another, make a supervisor call? In the same way you waved your hand at the screen, several paragraphs ago. You imagine it, in command mode."
Comments
phecda on Aug. 3, 2005 7:19 PM
You should take a look at John Lilly's "Programming the Human Biocomputer" -- of course it was published back in the 60's so the metaphor of the shell script wasn't in existence yet...
I also recommend Robert Anton Wilson's "Prometheus Rising" which was published a couple decades later. Just remember that the map is not the territory.
avt-tor on Aug. 11, 2005 12:37 AM
It's not as simple as you are describing. Your brain belongs to your body and emotions, not the other way around.
You need a clear set of values to define your priorities. You need to understand yourself to develop a set of values that you believe in. If you have a workable weltanschuaung, then you can map experiences to that and emotions to the experiences.
If you don't fully understand why you are making choices, the "animal-evolved kernel" will interrupt your conscious thoughts with its own priorities. Consciousness is a tool your brain uses to evaluate its environment; it is not an end in itself. You can't choose to ignore your own choices, and if you attempt to ignore your emotional inputs, then all you end up in your image of "self" is just a thought experiment that has little relevance to who you actually are and what you end up doing.
Leave a Comment