It's an interesting idea. I can only respond that during my little episode, I was doing the right things: walking in the right direction, using my head-torch, crossing rivers without falling in or getting any wetter. I'd much rather have stopped for a cup of coffee and a bit of chocolate before yomping on down the path, but that wasn't a dangerous issue.
I doubt if we'll ever have any epidemiology on the risk/benefit ratio of depersonalization, but if it eliminated a lot of young people from the gene pool during survival situations, one wonders why it's still around.

Grant Hutchison

Yes, your experience (and genetics) has shaped you into the person you are. In this case, one's "sense of identity" can be considered something along the lines of "all the ways one would act in various situations if they presented themselves."

If you disagree, it may help if you can clarify what "sense of identity" means or refers to.

A more interesting question is if the patient complains of two selves, does the doctor get to bill them double?

You go to the dentist complaining of a toothache, but the doctor doesn't work on the "ache" as if that was something he could put on his workbench and operate on. He works on the tooth so that you can get back to using it again.

In the bigger picture, doctors help people get back to living the way they need and want to live. A co-worker had her hip replaced not just because it was painful, but so that she could do things she hasn't been able to do like put on her own socks.

That was the sense I meant of treating the patient and not some inner state. Anyway, if the patient is suffering from a mental disorder, why should the report of multiple selves be taken as accurate reading of something going on inside the person? The report is valuable, and may lead to successful treatment, but we don't have to believe the literal interpretation of it.

I think you answered your own question!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I'd be curious to know what the "literal interpretation" of a purely internal sensation is: when my uncle experienced phantom limb pain, was he "literally" having pain, or just having pain? Or was he not "literally" having pain, but just complaining of having pain?
Or perhaps he just had a mental disorder, and the doctors should have tried to fix that.

Grant Hutchison

Saying your are in pain is part of being in pain. It is an alternative to crying or exclaiming "Ouch!" It is not a report of pain in the sense that you observe yourself and discover that there is a pain inside of you. You have simply learned to leverage the language of reporting to talk about pain. Since such talk often brings relief, it doesn't matter if it is not technically correct to a pedant like me. The ultimate purpose was not to report but to bring relief.

You mentioned patients who report they “have separated into an 'observed' and an 'observing' self. “ The statement is clinically valid. People who go to a doctor and make statements like that require treatment, and the statement may dictate a specific therapy. I don't think we, however, are justified in concluding that there are literally two selves in the person, just like we don't conclude there are demons inside people who say they feel that they are possessed by the devil.

As you know, reasoning from a perspective of "everything that exists does so for direct survival advantage" is a trap. As primate males often compete to reproduce as well as to simply survive, the latter is not the whole story.

Again to me that seems like the person that I "am" as other people would define me. I define myself much more simply-- I just perceive myself, that's the point about what consciousness "is". I think that is the key point you are missing here, and I'll bet that you perceive yourself that way too, independently of how others define you, or how you behave in various situations, or your DNA sequence. That does not sound like a "sense" that you describe, but rather a property of some kind.
The problem word in the phrase is "sense". In one usage, like a "sense of touch", sensing only means the ability to detect, like the "sensors" on the Starship Enterprise. Another usage, like a "sense of beauty", is a higher-order phenomonen that links what is being sensed to how something is reacting to it. A sense of identity combines the thing being sensed with the entity reacting to the sense, until they are indistinguishable. If you can distinguish the sensor from the sensee, you are not talking about an identity.

Yes, it wasn't a coherent argument. More of a passing thought.
But the underlying idea is a question about whether depersonalization has positive or negative survival value in situations more extreme than the one I encountered. Noyes et al. have some interesting data relating to depersonalization in accident victims, at the time of the event. There are also accounts from survivors of, for instance, the Herald of Free Enterprise sinking, and a helicopter ditching in the Atlantic, in which survivors describe performing complex tasks while in a depersonalized state. The helicopter survivor had undone his lap belt before the machine rolled, and so was the only person who fell on to the inverted ceiling of the aircraft. The others were then trapped hanging in their seats, because they were unable to undo their belts while their weight applied tension to the buckles. In what sounds like a depersonalized state in his narrative, the survivor walked the length of the aircraft between his dangling colleagues, stood beneath an open hatch as water poured in and the aircraft filled with water, and then floated free through the open door as the machine sank, drowning everyone else on board.

Now, one of the hypotheses relating to the evolution of consciousness is that it derives from our ability to model the thought processes and behaviour of others. As part of that facility, the hypothesis goes, we also started to model our own behaviour (the behaviour of eburacum45's agents, or Dennett's daemons), and it's this internal modelling that produces our perception of "self".
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that that's the case. Perhaps we might retain a faculty to suppress that whole layer of modelling, and just go with the activity of our neural agents, if pressing need arises. In some cases, ignoring our self, and the selves of others, will produce survival (albeit with a high level of guilt in the example given).
The success or failure of this "neural strategy" would depend critically on the competence of our neural agents. In familiar (or practised) situations, the agents will do the right thing. In unfamiliar settings, they'll perhaps do dumb things.

I don't believe there's much evidence to support this as a hypothesis. I just find it an interesting idea that seems to fit several observations.

Grant Hutchison

No, the question was: In what way can I tell if someone is "literally" in pain, as contrasted with simply reporting pain (a reporting process which may or may not involve weeping, writhing and screaming)?
If there's no difference, then the word "literally" serves no function, and we can move on to the difference between reported selves and "literal" selves.

Grant Hutchison

It would seem that detachment of self is not necessarily a bad thing for survival, but there may be other situations where the "autopilot" mode is fatal. The fatalities don't get interviewed, so you'd have to look for near-fatalities who were rescued and undertake a difficult statistical analysis. (I agree there are evolutionary pressures for the type you describe.)
I'm going to call that a design flaw!
In that situation, one might see how survival required depersonalization. The decision to abandon the others would likely be incongruent with most people's sense of self, as you recognize. I share your skepticism of this hypothesis. There are a few rickety steps there. First of all, there are obvious survival advantages in modeling other primate's behaviors. But why model our own? The hypothesis must be that this type of modeling is an inevitable spandrel of the helpful type. The other problem is that even if we begin modeling our own behavior, an intelligence that models everyone's behavior would not seem to have any particular way to single out one particular individual as being special just because the data is better-- why is that modeling any different from the others? (But maybe people who live so intimately with another for so long that they can model the other person as easily as themselves do in some sense come to feel a unity of self with that other person.)

Still, I think I see a more natural survival benefit in having a sense of self that is not a spandrel of modeling-- it motivates the survival urge. Sure all creatures seem to have some kind of survival instinct even without a sense of "self", but it doesn't work in concert with intelligence. Fear is a motivator too, but sometimes survival requires doing exactly what is feared. If we want to draw from the survival advantages of our intelligence, we need to convince the intelligence that it is worth saving. That reminds me of the end of the movie "Dark Star", where the crew tries to convince the artificial intelligence of the ship not to self destruct. I forget how they tried to do it exactly, but it might have involved giving it a sense of self... (I don't believe it worked).
I agree, but don't see how the modeling concept comes directly into play. I think your argument is the same if one substitutes "self-building" where you have "modeling". Furthermore, I find it more plausible that we build a sense of other selves after we have built a sense of our own self, just as we imagine other consciousnesses only after we discover our own. Certainly our own sense of self is more refined, but one might argue that it's because the data is so much better, I just don't know.


Yes, this could be the survival tradeoff right there, as situations involving practiced agents would be more likely. The squirrels in my back yard run away from my dogs several times every day, and most live to reproduce, surprisingly.

No need for a stroke here:
I've had that experience hundreds of times waking up with a numb arm or hand...
(after falling asleep in a weird position, and cutting off the blood stream for a while)

You could certainly treat it as a spandrel, but the idea is that the creation of a sense of self hugely improved our modelling of other people: introspection immediately yields a better dataset than simple observation of others.
So the hypothesis would be that depersonalization shuts down your own sense of self, but at the same time it disconnects your ability to identify with other humans. One can imagine there might be evolutionary selection pressures on either or both of these options.

They introduced the intelligent bomb to solipsism. How could it know it was carrying out its mission correctly (to explode and destroy "unstable planets") if it couldn't be sure that the external world existed at all?
The bomb accepted the reasoning that it could only be sure of its own existence, as a lone intelligence in an otherwise unknown void, and then said: "Let there be light!"
Bang.

See above. The whole "self" thing is hypothesized to be part of an applet in which introspection and modelling of other humans as "people like me" are strongly linked. So taking "self" out of the loop removes both functions.

Grant Hutchison

Most of this, I believe, is fairly easy to understand, based upon what I know about the brain. I think that the feelings and problems that have been outlined can be explained with less difficulty than is supposed. Since I am not a neuroscientist this will not be a great answer, but I believe what I say will shed light on the subject.

Covering our brains is a thin sheet called the neocortex. If you look at a top down view of the brain and see all those nice folds, you are looking at the neocortex. It is very thin, but it is the part of the brain that contains the part of you that understands what I am saying. It is there that knowledge of self is held.

Many of our sensory inputs and motor outputs have connections in the neocortex. There are defined pathways that most sensory input follows to the neocortex. However, there are smaller bandwidth pathways that take different routes, and I can't recall off the top of my head what portion of the brain they are routed to, but those parts of the brain watch for certain patterns and fire off immediate emergency "subroutines" when one of those patterns comes in. When you react "without thinking" to a sudden frightening stimulus you can thank these pathways for that quick response. If the logical mind had to decide what to do most of us would probably be dead already. I know with certainty that I would be. I took a lot of dumb risks as a teenager and my "reflex" responses saved my life more than once.

The logical part of the mind can view these responses as being separate from itself because they are. But they still take place in the brain and are a part of you. Nobody ever wonders who's breathing for them or who's making their heart beat. You don't say you have a split personality because some functions are autonomous, it's something you accept because it has occurred your entire life. These other situations are similar, we just aren't used to them, so we can feel disconnected from what is happening.

I don't know what it is called now, but kinesthetic memory is what we think of as muscle memory. You perform some task over and over again and your body becomes so used to doing it that you no longer have to think about it. When I learned karate this is one of the main focuses of the training. When you are fighting for your life you must react without contemplation. (I should point out that it isn't your muscles that are learning it, although they may develop an increased ability to do what you are training for, what is really happening is your brain is wiring for those motions).

When you first learn to drive you pay attention to every detail of what you are doing, and most people do a very poor job of operating a car. After much practice we become so good at it that we can let the part of our brain that learned it take over and do it. Learning to type is similar. But after you've become a good driver, you can literally drive a hundred miles or more thinking about something else and somehow manage to not kill yourself and everyone else. This is one of the wonderful features of the brain. When learning, we have to focus, when we have learned, we can use "auto-pilot". There is a term for auto-pilot but I don't recall that either.

To sum up the point I am trying to make, when we learn a new skill we do not add a new gremlin to our brains, we enhance our whole self.

It is only when an aberration occurs that we develop problems with the harmony of our brains behavior.

__________________
The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

There is a difference between the two situations.
You find an arm in your bed, you follow it to your shoulder, you say "Phew! It's my arm."
The patients I'm talking about observe an arm dangling from their shoulder which they know is not their arm; it has ceased to be part of their body image. This has a hifalutin' medical name: hemiasomatognosia, "not knowing half of the body", or just asomatognosia "not knowing the body".

Grant Hutchison

Different concept entirely! These people do not say that their limb is asleep, they reject ownership of the limb: "THAT IS NOT MY ARM!!! I don't know whose it is or why it is where mine should be, but it isn't mine!"

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson