Selfhood quotes

"I don’t like the phrase “existential risk” for several reasons. It presupposes that we are clear about exactly what “existence” we are risking. Today, we have a clear understanding of what it means for an animal to die or a species to go extinct. But as new technologies allow us to change our genomes and our physical structures, it will become much less clear when we have lost something precious. Death and extinction become much more amorphous concepts in the presence of extensive self-modification.

It’s easy to identify our humanity with our individual physical form and our egoic minds. But in reality our physical form is an ecosystem, only 10% of our cells are human. And our minds are also ecosystems composed of interacting subpersonalities. And our humanity is as much in our relationships, interconnections, and culture as it is in our individual minds and bodies. The higher levels of organization are much more amorphous and changeable and it will be hard to pin down when something precious is lost."
-Steve Omohundro (http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/04/13/steve-omohundro-on-the-global-brain-existential-risks-and-the-future-of-agi/)


"I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people."
-Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html)


"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it."
-Tallulah Bankhead (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tallulah_Bankhead)


"There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed."
-Peter Sellers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zSJc72OC7Dg#t=47s, http://petersellers.fashionstate.com/)


"The clues might differ over time. The clues that told you which monkey was Bruce ten years ago might be quite different from the ones that tell you that now. Yet you will do best to steadfastly believe in a continuing Bruceness inside all those creatures. Which is because even if he changes from an idealistic young monkey to a cynical old monkey, he still remembers that he is your friend, and all the nuances of your relationship, which is what you want keep track of. So you think of his identity as stretching through an entire life, and of not getting stronger or weaker according to his physical details."
-Katja Grace (http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/reasons-for-persons/)


"Seriously I am mildly uncomfortable with even referring to myself as 'I' these days because I try to keep very careful record of which factors influence my mind and how they influence me and after I add all this up it seems pretty clear to me that I do not exist."
-Cassandra2 (http://lesswrong.com/lw/v4/which_parts_are_me/oe2)


"Your brain notices what sort of choices you make, and then tries to make those choices immediately. Beware; you are smarter than your brain."
-Peter de Blanc (https://twitter.com/#!/spaceandgames/status/27880399409516544)


"An identity is at root a simple understandable description of a person, from which others can predict how he or she will behave.  This theory of identity suggests there really is no “true self” until we make one; we had to wait to see what world we lived in before we could sensibly choose an identity.  But we want to make it seem as if we think we just could not be anyone other than we are and seem to be; our behavior will continue to fit the identity we project because we just can’t imagine betraying “who we really are.”  Though we might maybe make one big change of “discovery” to a very different identity."
-Robin Hanson (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/08/a-theory-of-identity.html)


"In my appraisal the overall evidence from many sources (clinical, experimental, developmental, correlational) shows the human mind to function like an extraordinarily effective reducing valve that creates and maintains the perception of continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behavior."
 - Walter Mischel, Continuity and Change in Personality (http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1970-08433-001)


"As in dream logic you are likely only hallucinating your life's coherence."
-Sark Julian (https://twitter.com/#!/afoolswisdom/status/160857138019844097)


"A useful teaching is conceptualizing reality as six sense doors: touch, taste, seeing, hearing, smelling, and thought. It may seem odd to consider thought as a sense door, but this is actually much more reasonable than the assumption that thoughts are an “us” or “ours” or in complete control. Just treat thoughts as more sensations coming in which must be understood to be impermanent, unsatisfactory and not self. In this strangely useful framework, there are not even ears, eyes, skin, a nose, a tongue, or a mind. There are just sensations with various qualities, some of which may imply these things for an instant."
-The Dharma Overground (http://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB%20No-Self?p_r_p_185834411_title=MCTB+No-Self)


"The historic difficulty of specifying what the self consists of doesn't come from its superfluousness, but from the fact that it's a set of tacit alliances rather than an organ."
-George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will


"But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective.  I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way.  At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change."
- John K. Clark (http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Quotes/posthuman)


Contributions are welcome.