Posthuman Blues

A case of mistaken identity crisis

"As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts it: 'Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly 'purposeful and integrated' way simply by having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision.' The self, then, is not what it seems to be. There is no soul, no spirit, no supervisor. There is just a brain, a dull grey collection of neurons and neural pathways -- going about its business. The illusion of self is merely a by-product of the brain's organisational sophistication." (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

I cringe at the use of the word "merely," as used here. I think the evidence that our brains -- gnarled masses of meat -- can produce a sense of self (or, even more fantastically, two or more of them) is genuinely awe-inspiring. I don't know about you, but I don't find the notion at all demeaning; if anything, it's liberating because it suggests that we can duplicate the feat, eventually re-engineering our neural system architecture at will.

As for the non-existence of the so-called "soul": I'm not so sure. Parapsychology is patiently but inexorably teaching us we're much more than the sum of our molecules. Dennett may be comfortable dismissing centuries of conflicting evidence (anecdotal and empirical), but I'm not as easily swayed.