Consciousness Chapters 4 and 5

I’m going to tackle chapters 4 and 5 together in this one since I found them to build off of each other. Chapter 4 introduces the idea of 'is consciousness an illusion?’ Are we really seeing everything that is goin on around us, or are we in someway manipulating the world around us? Blackmore gives several examples on what is meant by this: on page 56-57 we discover our blind spot. At the top of the page, on the right side it shows a large black dot. on the left a drawing of a cat. When held at arms length, with the right eye covered and the left eye staring at the black dot, the viewer can make the cat disappear by slow moving the page side to side. Eventually you will find your blind spot, all the while looking at the dot, the cat on the page seems to vanish. Does this mean we see a hole in our vision? No, our brain is able to fill it in so we don’t notice it. Well, if that’s the case, how does it know to do that? There has to be some level of conscious awareness that ‘we’ need to be able to see and make a coherent picture without a hole in our vision from our blind spot. Another example given is on page 59-60. Blindness to change. Experimenter’s showed test subjects a picture on a screen and where told to look at it. When it was detected the subjects eyes moves, the picture was quickly changed to another picture, with one slight change somewhere on the image. Did test subjects realize they were looking at a different picture? Most did not. So if things are happening and changing right in front of us without us noticing, what does that mean? Enter sensorimotor theory. This states, you exploit the way your own actions affect the information you get back from the world, interacting with the visual input as it changes with eye movements, body movements, blinks, and other actions. In other words, vision is action: so seeing (p.65).

Well if vision is seeing, who’s seeing it? Me, I, the self? On to chapter 5.

There are many theories on what the self is, or should I say could be. No one really has it figured out yet. Most of us can agree that on some level we can’t help but feel we exist.
There seems to be two main branches of thought, Bundle theory and Ego theory(s). David Hume (1711-76) argued in favor of the bundle theory by “staring into his own experiences looking for the experiencing self, all he ever found were the experiences. He concluded that the self is not an entity but more like a ‘bundle of sensations’”(p. 68) or that the experiences of the self must be explained in some other way other than there being a continuing self. Ego theory, and there are more than one, stem from the premise that we are indeed continuing selves. Most religions are ego theories: Christians, Jews, Muslims as explained on page 69 in Blackmore’s book.

By mid chapter I had no idea which one I was, luckily on page 74-75, Blackmore provides a short test to which your answer will tell you if you’re more of an ego theory believer or bundle theory believer. “Imagine a machine that you can step inside and travel anywhere you wish to go. When you press the button every cell of your body is scanned, destroyed, and recreated at your chosen destination. Since the is a through experiment we must assume that the procedure is 100 per cent safe and reversible. So you can have no legitimate fears about getting lost on the way. The question is- would you go? Bundle theorists would say yes because since we are just illusionary selfs, the process won’t change anything. Ego theories would say no, because the thought of being destroyed and recreated makes them believe it might not really be them that gets put back together, but a different version, or copy but not the original.

Personally I would have no pressed the button which means I must believe in some inner self. While I can admit that is true, I really don’t know what that means yet. More to come I hope.