[nlarion]

Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.

[layer8]

This is harnessed in Greg Egan's short story "Learning To Be Me": https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf

[kpil]

I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.

We build models of the world in order to predict it.

But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.

[conartist6]

Hey that printer tray is a bit of someone's soul too. Many people's work and decisions, even a bit of the nature of our whole society is recorded in those flimsy things. It may or may not be comforting that most of what we contribute to the world will ultimately be considered mundane, even and perhaps especially if it's successful.

[mr_toad]

An alternate theory is that we develop models of other people’s behavior to predict their actions, and then we apply a form of those models to ourselves, which becomes what we think of as self-awareness. But the models are just models, they aren’t the mind, which is why our conscious self often has trouble controlling, or even predicting our own behaviour.

[mock-possum]

> our conscious self often has trouble controlling, or even predicting our own behaviour.

That doesn’t ring true for me - I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.

Do you really feel that you are ‘often’ out of control or behaving unpredictably?

[yetihehe]

> I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.

Good for you. I almost parted with a very good friend just because I had a very bad day and a big headache yesterday. Fortunately she is understanding enough. Due to lack of mental clarity I've said things that are simply untrue but I felt that the words I'm writing were correct at the time. I felt it was wrong reaction pretty soon after sending and rereading.

But I'm not "often" out of control. It just happens once or twice a year.

[amelius]

Makes sense. The boundary we draw around a group of neurons that we call "self" is just arbitrary.

[andsoitis]

Then, logically, we can cut away 90% of your neurons and you will still be there, right?

[bossyTeacher]

Depends on what "being there" actually means. Is a sleeping person "there"? Is a comatose person "there"? Until we define this kind of questions, we won't get anywhere