Understanding the Mind
Ships at Sea: Exploring the Mysteries of Self and Consciousness
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Can a self remain stable while its cells continually change? Opening a four-part series based on Kim Armstrong’s ‘Ships at Sea: Exploring the Mysteries of Self and Consciousness,’ Doug moves from Jonas Frisen’s finding that intestinal cells renew every five days while some neurons remain from birth, to Buddhist non-self and Ann Taves’s research on ego dissolution — the possibility that a person is less a fixed entity than an ongoing process.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The title of this post is identical to the title of an article by Kim Armstrong in the jan-feb22 issue of Psychological Science.
The author writes, “The common claim that all cells in our bodies are replaced every 7 years may be a bit of an exaggeration, but as stem cell biologist Jonas Frisen of the Karilinska Institute has found our cells seem to differ considerably in how quickly they die and are replaced. Frissen’s research suggests that the cells lining our intestines, for example, are replaced every 5 days. Yet he found that some of the neurons in our brains remain with us from birth, although we may continue to generate a certain number of new brain cells into adulthood through a process known as neurogenesis.
Various traditions throughout human history have grappled with the question of how humans can maintain a stable sense of self in the face of such constant change. A central concept of Buddhist tradition, for example, is the idea of non-self. …The concept of non-self proposes that humans, like all things, change so much from moment to moment and year to year that no irreducible, permanent self can be said to exist. Instead of a person, there is a process.
Over the past century or so, psychological scientists have entered the fray, exploring the myriad ways in which self-awareness and self-control influence the highs and lows of human experience, from religious trance to post-traumatic stress disorder. Even before researchers began inspecting the mysteries of consciousness under controlled laboratory conditions, humans were experimenting with the sense of self through rituals designed to create mystical experiences of altered consciousness, such as meditation and the use of pschoactive drugs like ayahuasca, wrote Ann Taves of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Central to each of these experiences, Tavis wrote, is ego dissolution, whether experienced in a house of worship or under the influence of a psychedelic at a music festival. Through this process, the perceived boundaries between the self, other people, and the world may seem to disappear, often resulting in a feeling of profound unity.
Viewing mystical experiences through the lens of ego dissolution allowed these seemingly anomalies to be better integrated into our broader understanding of human psychology, Tavis continued.
‘Researchers have generally converged on a distinction between two levels of self: a basic sense of self, referred to as the minimal core, or embodied self, that emerges in conjunction with low-level bodily processes…and a more elaborated sense of self, often referred to as the narrative self, constituted through high-level reflective processes involving introspection and autobiographical memory,’ she explained.
Ego dissolution has been found to influence both levels of self-awareness, Tavis wrote, which can lead to feelings of becoming ‘one with the universe’—or, for those in the throes of a bad trip or psychotic episode, feelings of existential terror that one has ceased to exist at all.