* Responses in [Red]
Searle-real
"...The 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume denounced the very notion of a self. 
To Searle, we can try to define continuity of self — that is, a self that remains even as every other aspect of a person changes — by continuity of body (or of memory, personality, etc.). But we find that none of those criteria suffices, because any or all of them can be altered, even eradicated, and we still sense a continuing, unified self.
"You have to postulate a self to make sense of rational behavior," Searle said. "We want to find a 'soul' that is at the bottom of all this … but, of course, there isn't any." [but, of course,
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7]
McGinn-ing
British philosopher of mind Colin McGinn agrees. To him, our confusion about the self is essentially ignorance about the brain. "The self is something real," he said, but "the self has got to be grounded in the brain — the self's unity over time must be a function of what's in the brain. We don't know how that works, but it must be so."But McGinn rejected any sort of supernatural entity, [that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, 2 Peter 3:3] which he called "a kind of receding transcendent thing that is capable of strange feats." "People imagine themselves to be capable of all sorts of strange things, supernatural things, where a self can exist independently of the brain," he said. "I'm saying that the self is rooted in the brain. … But we have a really thin conception; it's just the idea of 'I.'"
Blackmore-list
Some say there is no mystery because there is no self; the self does not exist.Could our internal sense of personal identity — about which we seem so sure — be an illusion? I asked former parapsychologist, now skeptic, Susan Blackmore.
"There's no reason to suppose that we have real continuity," Blackmore said. "Because if you look at what a body and a brain are, there's no room for a thing called a 'self' that sort of sits in there and has experiences. So then, the question becomes, why does it feel that way?"
To Blackmore, we invent that feeling ourselves. "The illusion of continuity is created only when you
"This so-called 'me' is really just another reconstruction," she continued. "There was an earlier one 30 minutes ago, and there will be others in the future. But they're really not the same person; they're just stuff happening in the universe."
"So there's no self to die," she concluded, [...the soul that sinneth, it shall die. Ezekiel 18:4] because there is no self prior to death and "there's certainly no self to continue after death."
Sue appears rather cheerful in her inexorable mortality, so I asked if she thinks that "no self" is "good news?"
"I'm smiling because it's so beautiful when you get it," she says. "You can let go and just accept that it's just the universe doing its stuff. It's not me against the world because there really isn't any me at all. Death has no sting, because there never was a 'you' to die. [Actually, as we all know, death does have a sting...O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; 1 Corinthians 15:55,56]
Every moment is just a new story."
Dennett-vity
To Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, our conception of a self is an illusion created by our experience of the world. He offered an analogy of an object's center of gravity, which is an abstraction, not an actual concrete thing, yet we treat it as something real. "Faced with complex human sentience, we do the same thing: We try to make everything cohere around a single point," Dennett said. "That's the self — the center of narrative gravity."What makes a self is a big collection of memories and projects, desires and plans, likes and dislikes — a psychological profile," Dennett continued. "Well, what holds that all together? Opposing processes in the brain, which tend to abhor inconsistency." And so when inconsistencies arise, Dennett said, either you have to jettison the thing that's inconsistent or concoct a coherent story to explain the inconsistency.
How, then, does the self persist through time, notwithstanding all the changes to the body and brain? "The notion that the only thing that could persist is a little, special, unchangeable pearl of self-stuff seems like a fairly lame solution
to the problem," Dennett stated. [ That "self-stuff" is an "unchangeable pearl" that has value in the sight of God - Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. Psalm 116:15]"That's just gift wrapping the problem and pretending to solve it.
"But more to the point, what makes you so sure there has to be an answer to these questions?" he continued. "The conviction that there has to be a single right answer is a leftover from metaphysical absolutism. [Dennett is an example of what Paul was talking about - Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. 2 Timothy 3:7]
And we should just dismiss it." LiveScience
