How would you interpret the Reputation element of the diagram? Does it refer to how a person sees himself, or to how the person thinks others see himself? — Gnomon

I think the Reputation element in the diagram is intended to be the person's reputation among others. It is their actual reputation which they cannot know themselves.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us! — Burns

If it was either of the options you gave, it would be part of the Mind element. Now what I call the reputational self is internal and is about how you see yourself, and how you perceive (ie estimate, hypothesize) that others see you. I think those two things are closely linked and can be confused or conflated by the reputational self. And I mean everyone's reputational self, not just Trump's. The reputational self serves a function analogous to the public relations department of a large organization. Its job is to represent 'this brain and this body' to others. And we can all start to believe our own publicity.

The reputational self is naturally a part of Seth's social self, but he doesn't talk about reputation, or the related notion of status. I think this is a major omission.

Here is some of what he does say.

These ideas about social perception can be linked to the social self in the following way. The ability to infer others' mental states requires, as does all perceptual inference, a generative model. Generative models, as we know, are able to generate the sensory signals corresponding to a particular perceptual hypothesis. For social perception, this means a hypothesis about another's mental states. This implies a high degree of reciprocity. My best model of your mental states will include a model of how you model my mental states. In other words I can only understand what's in your mind if I try to understand how you are perceiving the contents of my mind. It is in this way that we perceive others refracted through the minds of others. This is what the social self is all about, and these socially nested predictive perceptions are an important part of the overall experience of being a human self. — Seth, Being You, p167

Now I've described the reputational self I can give a sort of an answer to the OP.

Descartes' self stays within the confines of the public relations department. What can the PR dept really trust? It can't be sure about the rest of the organisation or the apparent world out there.

The Cartesian self is the illusion arising within the PR dept that it is the whole organisation, and/or that it is in charge of the whole organisation.

I'll pass on Anscombe.

Why do we always fall reflexively back to a Cartesian perspective? I agree with Taylor above that morality and the emotions associated with it are the real power source for the self. My question is: is that always going to be a Cartesian self? I think it might be that everytime we go to explain the self, we'll automatically conjure some kind of independent soul. What do you think? — frank

I think that since the reputational self has the job of representing the organism to others, it must be able to explain the organism to other similar organisms, so it easily takes on the role of explaining the organism to itself. None of the other of Seth's selves has the wherewithal to talk about the organism. So you're kind of stuck with interacting with the reputational self, at least as a kind of gatekeeper to other selves, whether you're asking others about their consciousness, or introspecting your own.

Three stages of self - Damasio — Gnomon
Thanks for the link. Note that the figure you provided is not Damasio's, it's one of the other figures from the linked article. — T Clark

Sorry. Under the heading of "Three stages of self - Damasio" I picked the one that looked most like a diagram instead of text-based tables. :yikes:

If it was either of the options you gave, it would be part of the Mind element. Now what I call the reputational self is internal and is about how you see yourself, and how you perceive (ie estimate, hypothesize) that others see you. I think those two things are closely linked and can be confused or conflated by the reputational self. And I mean everyone's reputational self, not just Trump's. The reputational self serves a function analogous to the public relations department of a large organization. Its job is to represent 'this brain and this body' to others. And we can all start to believe our own publicity. — GrahamJ

Some years ago, I worked with a woman who had a shapeless obese body, but a pretty face. She would take selfies that carefully excluded the body. I suppose the cropped pictures agreed with her "representational self".

Trump's political appearances seem to use a similar strategy to tobacco companies, promoting the myth instead of the reality. His "genius" is not in business, but in persona public relations. So, the voting public elected a presidential persona. :smile:


A persona is a public image of someone's personality, or the social role they adopt. It can also refer to a strategic mask of identity that someone uses in public.
___Google AI overview

The New York Times Confirms Trump Is a Genius :
contrasting the Trump myth with the reality embedded in the tax returns. . . . .
— Trump is a phony, who really is not that great at business after all. . . . .
“Trump’s image is a sham”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/29/the-new-york-times-confirms-trump-is-a-genius-422837

Trump Company public relations reputation :
The Trump Organization, the company led by former President Trump and his family, finished last in an Axios Harris survey of brand reputations for the second year in a row.
https://thehill.com/business/4016738-trump-organization-finishes-last-in-brand-reputation-survey-for-second-straight-year/

What I know of Taylor appears in your quote, so feel free to fill in the details of what I don't know. — Hanover

Taylor was brought up by Joshs. I think the idea was crime and victimhood are sources of the idea and experience of the self.

The little book I'm reading was written by Hagberg and his focus is the autobiological self. He brings up Cartesianism because he wants us to wake up to the way that paradigm secretly influences the way we think about the self (which among other things, has us imagining that we have a vantage point on the self) and he wants to talk about the psychological reinforcement for the idea. He talks about how Schopenhauer shows up in the Tractatus and how things were tweaked later on. I'm a fan of both Schopenhauer and the Tractatus, so I'm digging it.

What I don't see though is why I could not be a Cartesian and fully agree with Taylor. Cartesian dualism posits a mind that has a free will that is subject to moral evaluation. Wouldn't Descartes agree with Taylor's assessment of the significance of understanding morality if one wanted to understand humanity then? — Hanover

That's a good question. I don't know. Thanks for the questions!

All cool stuff. Thanks!

In a way, the Cartesian self belongs to both religion and science. — frank

Interesting and I agree. However, it seems to me that science is more deeply rooted in and more focused upon the "res extensa" than is religion. But of course there is nether science nor religion in the absence of the "res cogitans." I suspect Descartes would be uncomfortable with the contemporary radical separation of subject/object.

Through this thread I kind of changed my mind, though. The prevailing scientific view of the self isn't Cartesian is it? Except for a couple of physicists who entertain some kind of panpsychism, aren't most scientists non-reductive physicalists?

I suspect Descartes would be uncomfortable with the contemporary radical separation of subject/object. — Arne

Hagberg says that view originates in the 20th Century and was projected back onto Descartes.