An important observation, but there are also counterexamples-- if they say "I don't know what possessed me", the "I" is still there, but so is some other being or consciousness, acting in some bizarre shared state. They might say "I was possessed by the devil" to excuse their behavior, but if they really believe it, they must believe that their identity was interrupted by the possession. Perhaps a need, brought on by guilt or incredulousness, can exceed even the need to sense a continuous identity.

It's an example of the sort of thing I mentioned to Joe Durnavich earlier, the fact that many people have the experience of being a spectator in their own heads from time to time.
In that situation, the "I" is still there, forming a bridging continuity between "before" and "after", but (apparently) existing outside of the decision-making loop during the events under consideration.
More extreme is the situation I experienced, in which I "found myself" in a consciousness which I experienced as having no continuity with my original persona: I felt that I wasn't "I" any more, and it was the original "me" who was working my body.
And more extreme again is the situation experienced by others, in which their familiar "I" is just gone: there is no reassuring presence in the body, just an automaton-like response to outside influences, which they observe in some way but seem powerless to modify.

Grant Hutchison

I was acting on the assumption that a self-described "demonic possession" is generally a mental construct of someone who could not face the reality of their own behavior. A cynical view, perhaps. You are right that another possibility is some actual altered mental state at the time due to a more clinical neurological issue. I was thinking more of situations where the psyche might intentionally break its concept of continuity for self-preservation of a perceived identity, as in, perhaps, a multiple personality disorder.
A fascinating (albeit horrendous) condition, one wonders why you would associate "yourself" with something other than the "original" you. One wonders how you managed to reunite without seeming like an "invader" to the original you. I wonder what happens to "bifurcations" that fail to reunite, perhaps that is a path to MPD.That would be unfortunate indeed.

You described walking and not being able to stop. Would it be fair to say that it was your behavior at the time that you felt disconnected with? Your example describes a disruption in behavior--a "this not how I normally am."

(Try not to let my use of the word behavior influence you the wrong way. Nobody is talking about rats pulling levers here, but of the indescribably rich tapestries of human life and all that it entails.)

Rather, I think "internal" and "external" are primarily metaphors for talking about aspects of our lives. They are handy shorthand for referring to otherwise complex aspects of life. My own situation in the world is unique to me. I may describe aspects of it as if I was necessarily witnessing events taking place strictly inside of me instead of as something I do or that has happened to me and that you do not share in or are aware of.

"Objective" and "subjective" are just handy inventions of the philosophers. The substrate of everything we talk about is our lives in the world. We draw all sorts of pictures in such talk including the pictures of "internal" and "external" worlds. Normally, I would be polite and not point that out, but this is a science forum on a skeptic board. I feel obliged to keep you all on your toes!

Ah, I see what you mean. One wonders to what extent that manoeuvre would be successful, internally: if the continuity of self would acquire a retrospective break, or if the denier is still aware of continuity at some level.
At a more mundane level, does everyone who behaves appallingly when drunk really "remember nothing" in the morning?

Yeah, MPD; or to give it its new name, dissociative identity disorder. It's tricky example, since it's extremely rare and of dubious status as a clinical entity. There are arguments (which I find fairly convincing) that it's iatrogenic, or at least built up in a sort of collusion between patient and therapist.

Well, I can shed no light on the first question. It's just the experience I had, a strong component of which was the sense that I was outside myself: that the original "me" was still in charge of things, and that I had slipped out of register with "me". I've spoken to a couple of other people who've had similar experiences after long periods of exertion and sleep deprivation in endurance sports. But they both describe "out of body" experiences, without any sense of "lost self": they just drifted along while their body did the work, unsupervised. Both found it rather pleasant, since they were isolated from the pain and exertion.
My own experience involved four days in the Scottish Highlands in which I climbed a lot of hills in horrible weather, got very wet and tired, missed a lot of sleep, didn't eat very well, and finally had my tent shredded by the wind. So I set off in a moderate storm to walk to the nearest town. Initially I struggled through deep heather in the dark, falling frequently, and promising myself a rest when I got to a path several miles away. Eventually I stepped out on to the path, thought "Right, I'll sit down" and just carried on walking. That (of course!) was the point at which I had the very strong sensation of having come unstuck from myself.

I "got back in again" as I approached the lights of the road, when I began to panic that the "I" in charge might just walk straight out into such negligible traffic as there might be on a Highland road at four in the morning. There was a bit of a psychic lurch, and there I was again, with tarmac hard under my feet, the road lights very bright, and the sound of the river very loud. My legs were very tired.

I don't see this as any sort of mystical experience, and I wasn't in any sort of "do or die" survival situation: it would have made much more sense to find a bit of shelter by the path, brew up a hot drink and eat the last of the chocolate before starting off for the road. It seems like I just got hit by a variant of the more "usual" out-of-body experience reported by tired people who are still exerting themselves.

Grant Hutchison

That happens every time you are startled. When there is a loud bang, your body first flinches seemingly on its own. You can feel afterward that you are not the only one running the show.

That describes one's surprise at one's behavior. We tend to think of a person (including ourselves) as a body being driven by an internal operator, much like a bulldozer or construction crane has an operator in the cab. We do that, I think, because we are otherwise at a loss to explain how bodies can do the things they do.

When your actions puzzle you, it can seem like there is more than one operator in the cab. There is only one person, however, and no operator. (Or we could say that a person is a first-class operator and not something that is operated.) That one person can act in complex ways.

Am I correct that you are describing people in a condition where they are unable to speak or otherwise respond to those around them? If so, notice that it is behavior that is being referred to here and not a literal "inner I" that has vanished.

No, I felt disconnected from myself. I was not myself. I was another self, which felt no continuity with the self I was observing. The other self was responsible for the behaviour that I did not will.
It's evident that what I describe is not something you recognize as a possibility inside your own head. That's perfectly all right by me: it's a weird thing. But at this point (as I suggested earlier when talking about interviewing patients with regard to their experience of "self") you either have to take my word for my own subjective experience, or decide that I am mistaken or deluded.

Grant Hutchison

If you excised all that happened and all that you did in your life from consideration, are you saying that what would be left over is your raw identity? Is it something that could be bottled and studied in the lab? Injected into someone else?

Because the word "identity" is used as a noun, and nouns often refer to distinct things (like a house or a tree), I think you are looking for a distinct something that is the referent of the term "identity." You even used the term "perceive," as if your identity was something that stood before you in some sense.

I think you may be reifying identity.

No, I'm referring to prolonged periods of complex behaviour: speaking, carrying out a sequence of actions, moving from one place to another.

No, these are people who are describing episodes in their lives when they have become "depersonalized": have lost their sense of self entirely, or have separated into an "observed" and an "observing" self. During these episodes, their behaviour and conversation may appear normal to those around them, but they have an inner sense of behaving like an automaton, or of observing themselves carrying out behaviours that they are not personally engaged with. They are often frightened or distressed during such episodes, but can't externally evince these emotions, which adds to the sense of depersonalization.
By some counts, depersonalization is the third most common psychological symptom in the general population, after depression and anxiety. Like depression and anxiety, most episodes are transient, and don't herald any sort of psychiatric illness.

Grant Hutchison

I have had quite a few experiences that I interpret as concurrent processes handling different functions. For instance, I can start thinking about something on the freeway, and, without realizing it, drive under what I call "autopilot." That is, part of "me" will continue driving the car and alerts "me" when I'm getting close to the off-ramp. There have been times I've been quite surprised when I realized where I was. Another fairly common example (and I think most people experience this) is if I try to remember something - a name or face, for example - and I can't quite place it. It isn't unusual that I will seem to forget about it, but several hours later the answer will pop up, as if some process had continued searching memory and came back with an answer. Even in writing this, there seems to be a part that thinks of words, another process that types the words, and still another process that proofreads those words.

It does seem to me that many of the concepts we have about individuality are learned through the culture. While I certainly have a (fairly strong!) self identity, it does seem that many people insist on absolute ideas about what constitutes their identity that I find rather odd.

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I'm sure the autopilot thing is in there, in the spectrum I'm trying to describe.
The "passenger in your own head" phenomenon involves actually observing that autopilot in action, rather than realizing after the event.
Hearing yourself give a surprisingly good (or bad) answer during a viva examination is one example that many of my colleagues seem to recognize; a number also identify with the sense of watching themselves manage a medical emergency, and wondering where all that good stuff is coming from.
On a more bizarre note, Susan Blackmore describes the regular experience of going into a restaurant, opening a menu, and then mentally "sitting back" with a degree of interest to hear what she's going to order when the waiter comes over.

Grant Hutchison

Sorry. I got a little confused over who is who in you! Which self is speaking to us today? Is it the one I labeled [1] or [2]? Why would self [1] think that self [2] was its former self if not by the change in your body's behavior?

Also, isn't it possible that you are just drawing linguistic pictures for us as a means to get a grip on a complex change in your life, in this case the picture of two "selves" fighting for control of Grant Hutchison?

Far from true, my good man! We are all sometimes not ourselves at times because of stress or other reasons. Your body will protect itself. If your life emotionally exhausts you, for example, you may find yourself in a condition where you are unable to get out of bed and face the world.

Actually, Grant, I have been keying on the fact that when asked for an example of a disrupted self, you responded with a description of your behavior, in this case, your walking and not being able to stop. I wanted to point out the role that action plays in the notion of "self." If you didn't include your behavior, I don't think there would have been a case of disrupted self left over.

As I say, now's the time you get to choose whether you believe my report of an internal state, or not. From the pop-psych and the use of the phrase "my good man", I think I can guess which option you're going for.

Grant Hutchison

Notice, though, that the way you describe it, the "observer" never suffers from disorder. It is always functionally competent to observe the part suffering the disorder. People tend to describe the action of drugs in a similar way. They divide the body into an observer and an observed. The drugs never affect the observer part. Instead the observed part generates hallucinations that the observer observes.

This homuncular language is a sure sign of folk psychology, that is, our handy way of explaining complex behavior through simple metaphors.

Then you should perhaps write to the compilers of ICD-10 and DSM-IV, both of which use the reported "observer" state as a criterion for diagnosis of depersonalization disorder. What people report is, after all, how we learn about their internal state.

Grant Hutchison

I think that your claim of a "report of an inner state" is the employment of metaphor to describe a change in your life. Because I speak English and am somewhat competent in its metaphors, I understand what your report means. Your report allows me to appreciate and sympathize with your situation. It doesn't mean I have to treat it as literally the case that there are two "selves" running around inside you. It is Grant Hutchison I sympathize with.

But you treat the patient, not some internal state.

And to psychoanalyse me over the internet, apparently.
You're kind.
I see I didn't mention that the whole thing happened thirty years ago. I did describe how it terminated after an hour or so, though. So there seems to be just one of me in here today, thanks.

Grant Hutchison

And if the patient's only complaint is of an internal state?

Grant Hutchison

I've heard these processes described as 'agents', and the process of consciousness as being the result of a collection of agents working together. The apparent fact that sometimes these agents can act without being fully conscious is interesting, and a little disturbing.
Who are all these people running around inside our heads?

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One hypothesis is that the sensation of self comes from a sort of "agent wrangler", which either keeps the agents in line, or works to "explain" the agents' activities post hoc. If the wrangler gets out of synch with the agents, depersonalization ensues. There are certainly differences in the distribution of neural activity on fMRI scans during episodes of depersonalization, suggesting that there's a neurological mechanism at work.

Grant Hutchison

I guess that one can only be answered by the "man in the mirror"!
Yeah, the movies love to portray it, but I've no idea if it is real. I was once on the telephone with someone who was displaying it, but it could have easily been an act. Not necessarily a deception-- people can take their own act very seriously (to some extent I think we all do).
I'll bet you were fairly young at the time? A friend of mine who knows something of extreme sports said that, surprisingly, young people fare badly on long-term eco-challenge kinds of ordeals, like wandering lost in Siberia or something, compared to less well conditioned but more mature people. Apparently, the sense of self is so challenged that mature people can hang on, while younger people at some point just sort of "wander off into the night" and perish. Apparently that's not uncommon-- and your story sheds some light on that firsthand. (I don't know if you were close to perishing, exactly, but had the weather been just that much worse...)
One might think it was the survival instinct that brought you back, but in light of my story of those whose didn't, I wonder if it was instead the basic familiarity of the rules of the road!
Indeed, in worse conditions I suspect that you were in more of the "die" than "do" situation!

I would say that along with the other ways that my mind developed, I seem to have developed an ability to create a sense of identity. That ability could survive the removal of memory of the rest, as far as I know. It certainly seems that it could survive the end of everything I now hold dear, not that I would care to test that.
Doubtful.They already have it.
I would say that I am deconstructing it, actually.

This can happen in more mundane situations-- I have found that sometimes when I am asked a question in class, I identify the question as "easy" and let my "spinal cord", in some sense, answer it-- often later wishing I had paused to reflect first. It's not just a hasty answer I'm talking about, it really is hearing myself answer and trying to find ways for my conscious mind to finish sentences that my "spinal cord" began! I've even had to reverse the sense of the answer in some cases...

I would agree that consciousness is the same in every person in the same sense that I would agree that the brain is the same in every person. There are differences in architecture, and that is a good thing because it allows us to explore the problem of survival, but the differences in architecture are far fewer than the similarities. Even so, if we were all clones we would develop different neural connections that make us very unique individuals. Our neural nets are a better way of identifying an individual than DNA testing. The network changes over time, but some pathways will remain identifiable throughout life.

I believe your analogy using water describes the energy that flows through us rather than consciousness or intelligence. Consciousness would be the ability to predict the ebb and flow of that energy while intelligence would be a measure of the accuracy of that predictive ability.

What I just said could be seen as being New-Agey as well, but it isn't. I do not attribute any mystical properties to the energy from the Sun that flows into our ecology, through us, and ever onward. I believe the Sun is a big thermonuclear reaction, not a deity. (Just clarifying in case anyone incorrectly interprets what I say.)

From what you have said it sounds like you are a Dualist, meaning you believe that the mind and brain are separate. I do not believe that. I believe the brain makes the mind. Going back to Grant's experience, the way I see it is that the person and consciousness was always Grant despite a sense of viewing his actions remotely. What he experienced was an aberration, not the norm.

If I took a good dose of LSD and my brain began working strangely my experience would not be real but I would try to operate with that impairment in the same way I would try to deal with the real world. I would try to predict what was going to happen and react accordingly. If I suddenly realized that my perceptions were totally crazy, as long as I could still comprehend the fact that I took LSD and that the effect is temporary I could predict that more craziness was coming and I would do the most intelligent thing which would be to sit in one place and wait (and try to make the best of it). If someone slipped the LSD to me in a drink, and I was unfamiliar with the effects of LSD, I would probably become very frightened and ask to be taken to the hospital. Less rational people might "freak out" because their ability to predict would be completely haywire. Their brain would be throwing all sorts of curve balls that would make prediction very difficult.

I do not believe that we are different people throughout life. We are the same person (and personality) but we change with experience. In the past we may have behaved a certain way that we now look back and regret. Somewhere along the line, perhaps even as a consequence of that behavior, we learned that there was something wrong with the behavior. We look back with 20/20 vision and wonder how we could have been so stupid. Well, that's easy, we just didn't know better and we learned from the experience. (On a side note, I'll say that we may have known better at the time but ignored that internal warning. But now we know some additional thing, such as having really experienced the consequences first hand instead of the vicarious knowledge passed along by Mom, Dad or anyone else).

If we could say that changes in our personality make us different then that would hold true instant by instant and the me that started writing this post is not the me that is writing now. I don't consider that a rational conclusion.

You could think of your self as a bunch of feed back loops. When you talk to yourself (inner dialog) you are simply pushing information back out on the feed forward connections. When you visualize you do the same. When you listen to music in your head you do the same. As humans our feed back loops are far more complex than other creatures that we consider unintelligent. I believe that is really the key distinction. I don't see animals as not intelligent, I see them as less intelligent. I also believe they have consciousness because I believe that self-awareness is consciousness, and sensory input is self-awareness, so if an animal has sensory input, it is conscious.

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From what I've read on dissociative identity disorder, it is extremely rare and a result of a failed survival mechanism which happens when a victim of child abuse is able to dissociate during the abuse but becomes unable to reconnect after.
It only happens when the abused is young enough to not have a fully formed sense of self and the abuse goes on long enough thus keeping the dissociation going for long enough for multiple selves to form.
Since different memory sets "belong" to different selves, they each can have a sense of continuous existence, such as we have after unconsciousness.
I'd guess at least some of the arguments for it being iatrogenic comes from a refusal to accept that child abuse of that severity happens, and a lot of the others comes because of overzealous psychiatrists who try to make their patients fit the diagnosis thus generating arguments against the diagnosis existing in the first place.

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There's also the matter of "recovered memories", some of them leading to imprisonment of alleged perpetrators, which have subsequently been proved false, including but not restricted to the various satanic abuse panics. There's good research showing how easy it is to emplace false childhood memories by suggestion. Where the order of "recovery" of memories is available, there's evidence that they become more baroque with time. There's evidence that if you reverse the logical flow, moving from a known event of child abuse to the adult who experienced that abuse, you don't find repression of memories, but very vivid and intrusive recollection instead. There's the epidemiological curiosity that DID is (still) a strongly North American diagnosis, restricted to a relatively small number of practitioners with strong beliefs about recovered memories and DID.
Nicholas P Spanos' book Multiple Identities & False Memories: A Sociocognitive Perspective is a good, well-referenced, read on this topic, from a sceptical viewpoint.

Grant Hutchison

Yes, it was thirty years ago. I suspect that has prime relevance because these days I wouldn't get myself into that sort of situation. I'd be off the hill after the first bad night. As my wife said during one memorably bad day when we turned back early: "Life's too long for this!" There's (almost) always tomorrow.

Yes, one wonders if I was in any (more) danger during this episode. It really depends on who was "running the show" while I was having my distressing episode. Was it Van Rijn's autopilot, just a mess of unconscious agents doing their unconscious business? Some cognitive scientists would suggest that the purpose of my consciousness is simply to explain, after the event, what these little applets have done; so my body may have been as competent as ever, while I fretted elsewhere. Or perhaps I was running two instances of "self" at that point, and one was fully engaged with the misery of trudging down the path.
I don't think the neuroscience is good enough at present to say what the exact mechanism is, but the prevalence of episodes of "depersonalization" is certainly telling us something about how the brain generates "self".

I get something similar with spontaneous jokes. I have a reputation for being "quick" (I'm not sure, maybe that's a Scottish expression), in the sense of seeing a humorous retort and bouncing back with it quickly. My internal experience is sometimes that I start to speak the retort without consciously knowing how the sentence is going to end. I have time for a little flicker of tension as the sentence moves towards its conclusion, and then I relax as I "get" the joke myself. So I appear to have a "joke applet" that runs with a degree of autonomy. So far, it seems to have reasonably good taste and a sense of social appropriateness.

Grant Hutchison

The basic problem with consciousness that separates it from intelligence, in my view, is that consciousness is the one thing that none of us would have any way of understanding if we didn't have it ourselves. You have IQ and other tests for intelligence, you can test behavior around a sense of self, you can see if someone is capable of being creative. But how do you measure "how conscious" something is without asking the host? Perhaps you could callibrate some proxy that way, and use the proxy for things you can't communicate with, but it's still just a proxy.
All I'll say is that we don't know a brain makes a mind. An alternative is the "Field of Dreams" model: if you build it, he will come. That is normally the way we view transcendant phenomena, by which I mean, phenomena that have their own characteristics that are not sensitive to the details of the medium that is expressing it. One obvious example would be "wave mechanics"-- one might say that water can manifest a wave, but we would likely not say the water "creates" the wave. Then with the study of light, we found that you can have the wave without the water at all, and with quantum mechanics, we found that waves rule particles, not the other way around. So much for "emergent" behavior!

I'd say it's perfectly rational, it's a question of whether we gain by understanding our "selves" in that light. Generally no, that model would not be very helpful functioning in the world, nor would it convey survival advantages to our genome. But in some situations, that recognition might be quite helpful. To use the water analogy for lack of a better one, the model we normally use is that a "glass of water" always has the same water in it, until we drink it. But if we want to make calculations of how long it will take to evaporate, we need to understand how it is coupled to the water in the air. Or in quantum mechanics, we generally imagine an atom has a "particular electron" in it, until we deal with high density situations where it is important to recognize that all electrons are indistinguishable and the atom does not in fact hang on to any particular electron.

So the question is not, does consciousness emerge from brain function, the question is when do we benefit from choosing that model, and when do we miss something important by doing that. Our brains cooked up "realism" to handle things outside our own consciousness, so we need to recognize the potential limitations to applying realism to our own consciousness.
That's clearly an important component of intelligence and the objective imprint of consciousness. I'm sure we'll want to understand that as much as we can. I merely caution against expecting consciousness to emerge from the physiological functioning-- the waves of quantum mechanics "emerge" from the equations, not the physical reality we use them to represent. We use the objective imprint of those waves to describe their properties, but we are not directly accessing their emergence, which remains mysterious.

The fact that a key danger in an eco-challenge is loss of self control, stemming from what might be a loss of self itself, suggests that this is not always the proper perspective to take.I'm wondering if you experienced a near-breakdown in a survival function. Robots can walk right into fire, what prevents people from doing that is either a fear of fire, or if that fails, a sense of "self" that understands that fire is death. When you can't trust basic fear, because of exhaustion etc., you need to fall back on that sense of self-- and losing that in Siberia can be, and apparently is known to be, fatal. What your story makes me wonder is if those people who did wander off and die had someone inside thinking "oh no what am I doing, I'm going to die if I don't get back in charge". The more mature people who survive may find that this was a crucial moment in their survival, while younger people or people with a less well developed sense of self may be at terrible risk in these situations.

Or how it manifests it, to borrow the word from my response to FriedPhoton.
You are fortunate-- some people's "applets" get them into a lot of trouble and lose friends! But I also wonder if part of it might not be the "quiz show" effect, where good players organize knowledge in a kind of "two-stage" way: stage 1 is "do I know it", then hit the buzzer, then stage 2 is "figure out the answer". If you wait for stage 2, it will be too late, the moment will be lost. So it is with retorts, they must be quick to work, so you have to first recognize "there's a joke here", and trust yourself to figure it out by the time you get to the punchline. Or for shorter retorts, you at the very least have to disable the "is this funny" function, because you haven't got time to get the "go ahead".

Indeed, I think the time alloted for a retort is amazingly short. I noticed this phenomenon when in public in France. I had learned a kind of "cerebral form" of French, where given time I could construct a decent sentence. So I thought I might be able to communicate on the street-- not realizing that this is not how street communication occurs. I found that if I bumped into someone, I had to instantly come back with "excuse-moi" or some such thing, automatically. If I took an instant to think "OK, what are the special conditions of this situation I need to incorporate into the complete sentence I now manufacture", the moment is long gone-- the person I bumped looks at me for one fraction of a second and if they encounter hesitation, they just break the encounter and that's it, it's over. I never tried to actually time that moment, but I'll bet it is no more than half a second before the "buzzer" sounds.