alt.hn

4/17/2026 at 11:51:39 PM

There is no you in your brain – your identity is a "society of the mind"

 https://bigthink.com/books/our-brains-our-selves/

by lschueller

4/19/2026 at 11:36:27 PM

> Your sense of self isn’t located in a single part of the brain — it emerges from a complex interplay of cognitive processes that change over time.

Good guess there, Masud, but do we actually know this?

Damage to the pre-frontal lobes can thrash the personality more than damage elsewhere, so it seems plausible that the processes and relationships that hold up the self concept are likely concetrated there.

by kazinator

4/18/2026 at 11:08:16 AM

I just picked up my fifth Michael Pollen book, A World Appears: a Journey into Consciousness

https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...

Very excited to start turning pages on this one (after his How to Change Your Mind, Botany of Desire, Shedbook, cannot remember fourth rn).

----

For the brief period my half braindead mother was conscious, it was interesting to play my own Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat -clinician. Watching videos of corpus-collosum -severed people, interacting with worlds/hemispheres... is quite an interesting take on being-whole-braint.

by ProllyInfamous

4/18/2026 at 7:24:05 AM

We think, therefore I am.

by pr8dan

4/18/2026 at 6:25:00 PM

From a beekeeping POV:

They don't think, yet they are [supra].

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Ubuntu concept: "I am because we are" [intra-connection]

by ProllyInfamous

4/18/2026 at 12:01:59 AM

If that's true, what is "ego death?"

by turtleyacht

4/18/2026 at 2:32:02 AM

I will try my best here...

Near every thought in your head is an abstracted away primal urge. Hunger, fear, security, etc - We justify and express these urges with our actions and thoughts and interactions each day. This mesh of impulses eventually creates patterns of behavior that form our identities.

We go about our lives viewing the world through the lens of this identity, with even our most selfless actions being driven by a reason derived from the rule set of the identity. This rule set is the "ego"

Ego death then is the temporary dissolution of the guiding ruleset of the identity. It is a self, without the self. You exist, but, often for the first time in your life, your mental and emotional rule set does not.

Often, without the blinders of the ego blocking a view of the world, a person experiencing ego death feels the unimportance of their existence - not in a bad way - but in a universal matter of fact state, shared by everything else. This is often the "awe" of ego death

by homeonthemtn

4/18/2026 at 4:59:11 AM

Well put. There is a wealth of world literature, poetry and song, in various cultures from Buddhist, Christian mystics, Sufism, etc., that celebrate this state of being free from your "self".

It's called "death" because it can be scary as f to experience the dissolution of what you thought was yourself, it can feel like the end of the world. Sometimes it's described as a "surrender" to a higher power, though the latter is beyond words and religions often prohibit pointing directly (HaShem). Why surrender? Because the ego and the little self will go to great lengths to prevent from losing its dominion, including emotional and psychological tricks from outside your conscious view - so you don't even know what your "self" is doing. This is why people say, "Your worst enemy is yourself." But of course you are your best friend also.

My favorite is how this transcendent experience is called "love". How do I love Thee? Let me count the ways. When you get it, you see how so much of poetry and music is singing about this.

by lioeters

4/18/2026 at 4:18:08 AM

There's this TED talk from someone knowledgeable in the brain science field who happened to experience loss of function temporarily to one side of the brain that had the affect of attenuating the self identity but widen the spread of parts belonging to the whole

by __patchbit__

4/18/2026 at 3:08:20 AM

Yeah, extreme and pointed departure from the default mode network, with prefrontal engagement. Well said.

by Emanation

4/18/2026 at 5:27:33 AM

Excellent. Now do “superego death”.

by yawpitch

4/18/2026 at 2:31:10 AM

Dissolution of a myth.

by perfmode

4/18/2026 at 12:11:39 AM

If you mean this in a psychedelic context, my theory is the temporary dissolution of this “society” in recognising the “self” as “self”

by chychiu

4/18/2026 at 2:46:24 PM

What do you think is inside AI?

by R_Horiguchi

4/18/2026 at 8:57:14 AM

Molyneux's mecosystem

by xwat