Nadia Hassan reads ‘Re-thinking identity: Children’s experiences of self’
Listening | Psychology | 2021-12-12
Nadia Hassan
Donna Thomas, PhD
In the best episode of ‘Essentia Readings’ yet, Nadia Hassan introduces us to her young niece, a child who is aware, during sleep, of the fact that she is asleep. This suggests that our original, natural sense of self and consciousness, before culture tells us how to think about both, is much different than our adult understanding. The original essay by Dr. Thomas can be found here.
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As any essay on free will, the present one is bound to be polemic. We believe the debate on free will is important and the present essay meaningfully contributes to it. Nonetheless, we feel bound to clarify our editorial position here: as a foundation dedicated to promoting objective formulations of metaphysical idealism, we endorse the existence of a reality beyond the seemingly personal self, which behaves in a predictable, lawful manner. An implication of this view is the impossibility of libertarian free will: we do make our own choices, but our choices are determined by that which we, and the universe around us, are. Yet we believe that there is a very important sense in which free will does exist: under idealism, the universe is constituted by the excitations of one, universal field of subjectivity. The impetus towards self-excitation that characterizes this field of subjectivity is free will, for it depends on nothing else. The entire dance of universal unfolding is a dance of universal free will. This is the sense in which, for example, Federico Faggin and our own Bernardo Kastrup defend the fundamental existence of free will in nature. This understanding of free will is entirely compatible with the understanding that our choices are determined but that which we truly are. Finally, objective formulations of metaphysical idealism deny, just as the author of the present essay does, the fundamental existence of a personal self. Instead, the latter is regarded as a transient, reducible configuration of the underlying field of subjectivity. As such, there cannot be such a thing as personal, egoic free will, for the personal self itself isn’t a fundamental construct.
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Could it be a coincidence that two founding fathers of modern day computing, independently from each other, are both coming with theories of consciousness that are idealist in nature? Or does a deep understanding of what computation is—and what it is not—inevitably lead away from physicalist ideas on consciousness?
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Once an enthusiastic Idealist in the tradition of Arthur Schopenhauer, the later Friedrich Nietzsche broke from Schopenhauer’s philosophy with a vengeance. Adebambo Adedire argues that this shift had more to do with Nietzsche’s later rejection of the metaphysical project itself, than with the particulars of Schopenhauer’s Idealism. For Nietzsche was to eventually consider the goal of understanding the nature of reality both impossible and inherently demeaning to the human condition. Yet, we ask, can a thinking human being ever stop wondering about what reality, and the self within it, ultimately are? Even if we, as primates, cannot arrive at the ultimate metaphysical answers, aren’t we correct in aspiring to overcome our own metaphysical mistakes and delusions?
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