my mind on books

Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences by David Gauntlett is based on a project in which people used Lego pieces to create metaphorical models of their identity (sounds something like “sand tray therapy“).

The author has posted an extract from the conclusion; here is part:

“I was struck by ‘the will to coherence’ – the desire to assemble a solid and unified view of self-identity. It was also possible to see participants asserting their own distinctiveness within the context of an increasingly globalised and mainstream fashion-led culture. The role of the media emerged as the provider of stories – ethical resources which people use to orient themselves towards aspirations. We saw that the sense of a journey was common, with each person as the hero of their own story, often moving away from historical ties towards greater stability, fulfilment, and engagement with the world. … these goals were not about possessions gained, but about social connections, inner happiness, and a life well lived.”

More on the project at the ArtLab website… and the author’s website….

Online texts on self/person/personal identity
Unfortunately, some of the links are broken, but this is still a rich resource.

The parent site also links to online bibliographies, journals, and related associations and institutions.

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The “mind” and “self” were formerly the domain of philosophers and priests. Today, it’s neurologists who, armed with giant magnets, are
asking the big questions, like “How does the brain make me?” We stare into the mirror with Dr. Julian Keenan, reflect on the illusion of
self-hood with British neurologist Paul Broks, contemplate the evolution of consciousness with Dr. V. S. Ramachandran. Also, the story
of [a] woman who one day woke up as a completely different person.

Steven Johnson, author of ‘Mind Wide Open,’ is also interviewed.

Listen to the archived program: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/24

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I caught myself looking longingly at the fiction after a spate of nonfiction, so I picked up a copy of Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which turned out to be an entertaining “thought-experiment” dealing with issues of mind and identity, wrapped in a good story.

In Stross’s future, memories can be erased, personalities edited, people regularly make back-up copies of themselves, and their minds can be placed in different bodies. Problems and issues such as these arise:

p 2 – “It’s tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.”

p 15 – “Not wearing a face in public is a deliberate snub.”

The action soon moves to an experimental simulation of a ‘Dark Ages’ society (c. 1950-2040), which affords a look back at the present-day world from the future perspective.

At Stross’s website, www.accelerando.org, his earlier book Accelerando is available as a free ebook.

Author’s blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/

In I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter doesn’t use the term tangled hierarchy but possibly it was in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid– at least Wikipedia associates the two terms by making tangled hierarchy refer to strange loop.

I had written down this quote a few years ago from Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe:

The self of our self-reference is due to a tangled hierarchy, but our consciousness is the consciousness of the Being that is beyond the subject-object split. There is no other source of consciousness in the universe. The self of self-reference and the consciousness of the original consciousness, together, make what we call self-consciousness. (p. 188)

So Goswami, unlike Hofstadter, distinguishes between consciousness and the self.