Home Page                                                          Table of Contents

Chapter 7

SELF

The Self is Our Experiencer

The self is an "Experiencer" that experiences live.  Minute by minute our life continues.  It is like watching a narrated movie.  Actually this movie is generated by a "world simulator" within in our brain.  It seems to be located in the thalamus area. If the thalamus is damage it could lead to a permanent coma.  Most sensory inputs go to the thalamus (except the sense of smell).

 In addition to being the experiencer of the outer world, it is also the experiencer of the inner world.  The self looking inside us, gives us the sense of self.  It gives us identity the internal feeling of being this way or that.  The self is also our chief decision maker with records who we think we are.  The self identifies what wear, what we do and in some cases how we feel.  It is the story maker about who we are.

 Often people think that they are only a body.  We are much more than that.  A little person may feel like a giant inside. Small dogs bite more than big dogs.

 Deepermind breaks the world into 17 different parts, most of them are inside us.  By doing so, we can more clearly define these parts and how they interact.

 One of the areas that benefit greatly from the concept of having different parts is sexual orientation.

Sexual Orientation

 When it comes to sex, we are not one homogenized male or female. Those who can recognize there more aspects to sexual orientation than society's binary division.  Here are some of the parts:

 Sex — Body - Genetic and physical body characteristics people are born with, labeled male or female.

Gender — Earthy Emotions -A social and cultural expression of sex; not the biological sex people are born with.

Intersex — Body - People who are born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit typical definitions of “male” or “female.”
Sexual Orientation — Relationships - Romantic, emotional, and/or sexual attraction to others.

Gender Identity — Self -An internal feeling of being male, female, or something else.

Gender Expression — Self -Ways of showing gender to others, such as through mannerisms, clothes, and personal interests.

Our language uses the words "I", "me", "myself."  But what is behind the these words? 

The Little Green Man

We might ask what is the experiencer? Is it just a computer in the brain and made up of atoms like everything else.

Lets go an a wild tangent, and say it generates consciousness, and is something fundamentally special. Assume that consciousness is an undiscovered aspect of the physical world, just like electricity was a long time ago.

 Lets suppose it is like little green man who lives inside us. If the little green man is physical it has a brain and senses the world.  If the little green man is like ourselves, it has a brain and an experiencer too, only at a higher level.

An the second little green man has another little green man within it.  Like Russian dolls, there is one within another. In theory we have a infinite number of little green men, something like having an image reflect between two parallel mirrors.

Perhaps the little green man is in another universe, with more than three dimensions.  Thus we could imagine that we are a spirit living within a three dimensional body.  We could think of ourselves as being part of God, like one drop in a vast ocean of consciousness.

We are Probably Not a Material Thing

If we see ourselves as just a brain, a collection of neural networks, built with chemicals and atomic particles, one might wonder where awareness starts.  Can you make awareness on the chemical level, the or the organ level?

Awareness might be a constant factor in the universe, like electricity.  It probably does not related directly or within mass, energy, time or space. 

The brain is complex, with about 80 billion neurons, and 100 trillion synapses connecting the neurons together? Does complexness lead to consciousness?