Self-consciousness comes and goes. Like the self.

Everybody has had this sort of experience:

Walking into the house after driving home, I'm carrying the car keys in my hand. A few minutes later I'm wandering around the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, muttering Where the hell are my damn car keys?!

I was conscious the entire time after I came in the front door. I didn't black out. I didn't suffer amnesia. At every moment I was aware of where I was. Yet at some point I became divided into a "me" who had put down the keys somewhere, and a "me" who had no idea where the keys are.

Today I listened to a Point of Inquiry podcast about consciousness and near-death experiences which featured an interview with psychologist Susan Blackmore. 

I've read several of Blackmore's books. I've enjoyed them. Listening to her talk with the host, Indre Viskontas, helped me to understand some points Blackmore has emphasized in her books which I didn't grasp very clearly before. 

She asked Viskontas, "Are you conscious right now?" The answer, "Yes… I think so." Blackmore said she's asked this question of many hundreds, even thousands, of people. That's the typical answer. 

Seems straightforward.

But the interesting thing is, what happens when the question is asked? What shift in consciousness occurs when we hear, "Are you conscious?" Basically, we shift from being simply conscious to being more complexly self-conscious.

Yet that word "self"…

Blackmore doesn't believe we humans have a self, or are a self. Rather, what we refer to as "self" pops in and out of existence many times a day as we shift from just doing what we're doing to being aware of "This is what I'm doing."

(For sure, I'm mangling the finer points of what Blackmore said, since I'm writing from my fallible memory. Still, I think I'm conveying her basic message.)

She said that when we're asked to recollect what we were doing/thinking a minute, five minutes, an hour, or whenever ago, we have no idea whether what we remember is close to what we actually were conscious of.

This seems to be akin to my experience after a colonoscopy, when I was given an anesthetic that I was told could produce some memory loss. I came home and did some things on my to-do list. I was awake, aware, and conscious the entire time. However, a few days later, when I called someone to order a vegetarian meal for a lunch meeting I planned to attend, the woman who answered the phone said, "You've already ordered one."

On the afternoon of my colonoscopy.

Yet I have no recollection, none at all, of doing that. This is a lot like what happens when I put my car keys down while being awake, aware, and conscious of what I'm doing, then wander around for a long time looking for them.

Blackmore said that our "self" is a transitory, ever-changing phenomenon which basically comes into existence when we look for it. It doesn't exist, though it seems real. Someone asks me, "Are you conscious?" and I say, "Yes, I am." 

At that moment there's an "I" who feels distinct from my "am." Later, that "I" can disappear and the "am" lays my car keys on a refrigerator shelf next to the milk carton that I brought home from the store. "I'm" clueless about that, because there was no I/self in existence when I did the absent-minded deed.

Near the end of the interview Blackmore said that realizing there's nobody home in the brain, so to speak, can feel scary to many people. On the other hand, this can be a liberating, even enlightening, realization. 

All there is, is a single cosmos with countless interconnected parts, she said (more or less). No independent selves. Each of us is part of the whole, not a distinct part.

The interviewer then commented that this can be reassuring to people. It gives them a sense that after they die, something of them will carry on. Blackmore responded as I intuitively thought she would, after I heard Viskontas say what struck me as a discordant observation.

That's a wrong view, Blackmore said.

This is what religions want us to believe, that there's some sort of soul which continues to exist after death. No-self doesn't imply yes-soul. Realizing there's no distinct "me" doesn't mean "I" am everything. 

How could there be, if there's no "I"?