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

By the way, if anyone is interested in a great podcast about the brain then give The Brain Science Podcast a whirl. You can find it on iTunes too. If you listen and don't like it I'll let you have some of the years I knocked off my life by being a bad boy when I was younger.

__________________
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

You can often distinguish between the two by looking at the wider context. If you are at a play and an actor screams in pain after, say, being shot at by another actor, you can justifiably conclude that he is not literally in pain. Or, he might appear pain-free again at the curtain call, etc. A person in pain may check themselves into the hospital, or in my case once, well, twice, agree to a root canal on a tooth. It in these types of contexts that we learn to describe real pain and, say, pretended pain (including, of course, are own experiences with each).

I agree with this. A "report of an observing and observed self" is actually agnostic to private details. There doesn't have to be actual referents to the term "self." The report itself has a function in society in the appropriate contexts.

Hmmm. I really don't know how to answer the question, "Joe, how do you perceive yourself?" except in regards to my life. To perceive myself is to reflect on what I think, how I feel, what I do, what I value, what I strive to achieve, etc. And no, that is not necessarily how other people define me.

You said earlier:

I take that as experience having shaped mature people into people that can, and do, handle challenging situations. A survivor may very well attribute his success to his well-developed sense of self, but that is like attributing it to, say, his sense of resolve. Such language serves to underline the fact that he can and does master challenging situations. And that is genuinely noble and worthy of poetic praise. In fact, I contend that is the element worthy of praise here. Attributing it to a "sense of self" almost sounds like attributing the achievement to steroids.

That doesn't gibe with my general impression that most people are far better at predicting the behavior of others, based on their mood and body language, etc., than they are are predicting or even being aware of their own behavior. We can tell when someone else is angry, and act accordingly, but when we are angry we are consumed by it, it becomes not a laboratory for studying anger but the personification of anger. The hypothesis seems to suggest we start out with an intelligence that is trying to predict what other people will do, say, when they seem to be about to get angry. The intelligence notices that when its own body exhibits those signs, and they are much louder and clearer data, it is about to undertake certain things, so this is the laboratory for understanding that. But if that were true, surely we would be very good at understanding our own moods and how to predict/control what we are about to do. If that was actually true, wouldn't we be much better at predicting when we were about to do something regrettable, and control it?

I think our sense of self develops when pain hurts and pleasure feels good. An ant presumably has little sense of self, yet can act as though it is in pain. We assume it is not really in pain, because it has no sense of self to be experiencing that pain. That may be true. So what animals "feel pain"? Those who have a sense of self. Could we really feel pain if there was nothing within us noticing at a visceral level at least that "I am in pain, not somebody else"? Ergo, the survival advantages of being able to feel pain and pleausure (which are hard for me to understand) are intimately related to the survival advantages of having a sense of self. I cannot see how "modeling skill" could ever trump that, even though I don't know why we need to feel these things to have them help us survive. I certainly don't think the ability to feel pain is a side effect of learning to "model" how other people act when in pain!
Could be, or it could just be a breakdown of some kind that is not evolutionarily useful. Some physiological changes, for example, that might help us in some situations can kill us in others (shock, for example, must have some purpose at lower levels but it can also kill, and a fever can too). So maybe it is good to be able to "slough off" many intelligent functions to "agents" so you can focus on the most crucial task at hand, but in some situations you go too far and delegate everything to the agents, even what you should be concentrating your sense of self on ("in the zone" becoming "zoning out", as it were). How do we know that depersonalization emerged as a survival trait? Again the interviews with the fatalities might tell a different story.
Ah yes, that was it.
I see, the purpose of the hypothesis is then to explain why empathy is lost when depersonalization occurs. But I still think any model of self-building will have that attribute, because we naturally build our sense of "other selves" as copies of our own, no matter how we arrive at our own. In other words, I see the ability to model others as a kind of side effect of the self-building we do in order to "feel" things ourselves, not the other way around.

OK. So there are people who are pretending to be in pain, and there are people who are in what you call "literal pain".
My uncle goes to the doctor, saying he has pain in the phantom arm he has experienced since the amputation of his real arm. It is in the wrist of the phantom arm, and he can point to the site of the pain (it's in the air about a foot beyond the stump of his real arm). He is distressed, losing concentration and sleep, and represents to the doctor his fervent desire not to have this sensation which he describes using the word "pain". He is not an actor, and not known for deceitful behaviour. Does he have "literal" pain?

Grant Hutchison

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty good at predicting and controlling such things. I can also sort other people into those who are good at controlling emotional outbursts, and those who are not, and I can then make some prediction of what they're likely to do, depending on whether I think they'll follow impulses like the ones I'm suppressing, or will suppress their impulses as I do. Interestingly, I note that colleagues who have problems with outburst-control are very much wrong-footed by people who can control outbursts, which suggests they may have a problem modelling behaviour they can't access by introspection.
But the reason we still exhibit certain behaviours we do not like is easy to see when we go back to the model of consciousness as one of primarily explaining and cataloguing what our various "agents" are up to, rather than of initiating their specific behaviour. It's hard to modify the behaviour of agents: it takes years of aversive training as a child to get it right, and people who get to adulthood with poor control generally don't make much of a fist of it thereafter.

Grant Hutchison

That doesn't sound like "perceiving yourself", that sounds like describing yourself. In other words, it sounds like you are trying to find what is unique about you, when the most unique part involves nothing to "reflect on"-- you are the only one you perceive. Does that not serve to distinguish you from others?

I don't know what is the crucial property they develop. Grant and I have been discussing if the brain is gaining a skill there or losing one, that isn't even clear!
I agree that resolve is likely a crucial element of the survival we're discussing, the question is, what is the source of the resolve? Steroids didn't hit any of Barry Bonds' home runs for him, but it seems they did help him build the strength to do it himself.

Yes, Joe Durnavich seems to have a strongly behaviourist approach to the mind. It's not a framework that encourages (or even recognizes) introspection as a route to knowledge.
From my link: Grant Hutchison

I too am of the self-control variety, but we still have a problem with testing the differences in descriptions of self-building. If the hypothesis you mention was correct, I expect that people who have not mastered their own self-models well enough to know when to step in and interdict some brewing behavior would also be particularly poor at modeling and predicting others. However, if the latter skill is actually a side effect of their own self-building, the same prediction is made. It might be an interesting test to see if either idea has any basis, but it won't distinguish them.That's a data point. However, is not someone with a "passive aggressive personality" not typically quite good at manipulating others, while having little understanding of their own invisible drivers? On the other hand, they may have found ways to manipulate others without modeling them, and indeed may often express surprise or disappointment in how others do behave, or interpret the behavior in a false light. So there may be a signal in this data, but it doesn't distiguish the hypotheses, as both involve a correlation between a concrete sense of self and a keen sense of other selves.
That all seems right to me, but it also fits nicely into the hypothesis that we develop our own sense of self first, and then extrapolate it to others based on whatever level of success we have had understanding ourselves. Again the if you build it, he will come picture might also work here-- the brain builds the ability to draw on whatever is consciousness, which affords the survival advantage of a sense of self, and can also come with the beneficial side effect of being better able to build a clearer impression of the selves of others. When we make a model that works, we should look at other models that work too. Probably studies of young children would be the way to distinguish these models-- do young children show signs they understand themselves separately from others before, or after, they begin to start to predict how others might respond in new situations? (Not in situations they have seen before, that's not modeling it's stimulus/response memory.)

Grant, take a look at this, it might be helpful to your uncle. Mirror Therapy for phantom limbs works by retraining the brain. The success rate is high.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/21/2206

__________________
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

I am likely tripping over my own use of the word “literal” and causing unnecessary confusion. I apologize if that is the case. I'll try to constrain myself to causing only necessary confusion!

Note that “literal” derives its meaning in my examples because I contrasted it with pretended pain. I agree that “literal” can be superfluous. However, the other sense of “literal” I had in mind when we were discussing selves was in the sense that if you opened up a person, you would find selves and pains inside. (Nobody thinks that, but they do insist that when they introspect, they perceive their self and their pains. I think that is the same mistake.)

Yes, we would say that he is in pain, that he has pain, and if we needed to distinguish from pretended pain, that he has literal pain. However, just because the grammar of “He has a pain” is of the same form as “He has a wallet,” it doesn't mean that we should expect to find a pain somehow in his possession, perhaps as a private entity that only he has access to.

The issue here is primarily a grammatical one. It concerns the use of pain language in our lives. We tend to want to focus in and single out the pain to resolve the issue, but in this case we need to step back and appreciate the wider social context.

Well, he died more than a decade ago, so missed out on a chance at the first really effective therapy for phantom upper limb pain.
But Ramachandran's mirror box is where I was heading with my questions to Joe Durnavich, so I might as well spill it now.

The point about phantom limb pain is that the patients describe an internal state for which there is no external evidence. They may tell you that they have a sore wrist here, at a point in empty space which doesn't even correspond to the position of the wrist in their missing arm, and that it is sore because it is permanently hyperextended.
Now, you can treat them as if they're depressed, and give them antidepressants, but that doesn't work very well. Or you can treat them as if they are having difficulty coming to terms with the loss of a limb, and give them psychotherapy, but that doesn't work very well or for very long. Or you can treat them as if they have some kind of "literal" pain, but the success rate from attacking various pain modalities with drugs is very poor. Or you can treat them as if there is something wrong with their existing nerve roots, but drugs and surgery don't work very well with that hypothesis, either.
Or, surprise, you can just listen to what they report about their internal experience and take it seriously, then try to come up with a way of fixing it. Specifically, they report an immobile limb locked in awkward position, so Ramachandran came up with a way of letting them fix this locked proprioceptive signal. And it works. And it has provided real neuroscientific evidence of cortical plasticity of a speed and magnitude that we've never suspected before.

The analogy with people's reports of "altered selves" is pretty clear. We're not at the stage of doing anything about it, but we've got strong evidence that if we take them seriously and look at them with functional MRI or PET, they show different activity in their association cortices and frontal lobes. So "altered selves" are a potential way of coming at the neural correlates of consciousness and teasing out a single aspect of the experience of being conscious. Which seems useful and interesting.

Joe Durnavich, as he says, is under no obligation to believe anything so implausible.

Grant Hutchison

Yeah, that's what you get from a steady diet of JJ Gibson, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Daniel Dennett, Alva Noe, and Kevin O'Regan. Although "behaviorist" brings to my mind notions of rats pressing levers. Perhaps a phrase involving "ecological" might fit better. I'm interested in the lives we lead in this world and all the strategies we gainfully employ (such as language and metaphor).

That is a common misconception. I don't think you are "perceiving inside yourself" except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. I think to introspect is to reflect on aspects of your life. And you can learn from that.

I suspect the social context of his wallet is comparable to the social context of his pain, in extent and impact. We can think about wallet or pain in isolation if we so desire, or we can recruit social context if that's appropriate.

So we're agreeing that his report of his internal experience has some validity to you, even if his pain is reported as hovering in empty space outside his body. He's reporting a quale, in the jargon: an internal experience, like "the colour violet" or "the smell of roses", an entity of importance to him which he can only report, rather than take out and show.

The next step in where I was headed appears in my previous post, precipitated a little by Fried Photon.

Grant Hutchison