Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuros...-and-self/

EXCERPT: In what may be a world first, a peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Psychology, has published a song. The musical contribution to science is called ‘It’s Hard Work Being No One’, and it comes from psychologist J. Scott Jordan of the Illinois State University. [...] You can listen to the rather catchy piece as part of the Supplementary Material.

In the accompanying notes to the song, Jordan explains that he wrote it in 2006 while working with philosopher Thomas Metzinger. [...] Metzinger argued that the ‘self’ is an illusion. For Metzinger, the self does not exist except as a model, yet we confuse this model for a reality: “Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models.” This is known as the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMTS). Jordan says that ‘It’s Hard Work Being No One’ is an affectionate tribute to Metzinger and contains many references to SMTS, as well as to Jordan’s own Wild Systems Theory....

MORE: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....02632/full

RELATED: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Self_models

I am only a self in highly specialized social occasions when I have to put on airs and be someone people can relate to. 95% of the rest of the time I am my own private thoughts and feelings reacting silently to my computer and my TV or a movie. I like not being a self. It's very liberating.

LOL! Private thoughts don't have a self.

The self is an individual person as the object of his or her own reflective consciousness.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self

Metzinger had been noted as believing that we really aren't ''beings'' or ''things,'' but rather a series of ongoing processes. I don't mind that idea, but if I were an atheist, it would probably sit better with me.