A lot of thinking about this term occurred in this body recently. It started with a song that Spotify's algorithms had selected for the author's "Discover Weekly" playlist. Although the song was quite good, the name was what sparked interest. Although the term sometimes occurs in various media, this article cannot provide a lot of detail on what it means, since the term is quite elusive and the Wikipedia article only brings up more questions. What is "Ego" in this context? Do people generally want it dead? If there's ego death, is there also ego murder or ego suicide?
Writing a blog post that intentionally tries to stay away from the concept of "self", especially on a blog that usually contains personal opinions and stories, might bring some light into what it means to loose self-dentity. But reading it critically, one might notice that the result will still be an opinion piece based on one individuals personal stories. Writing it " without the concept of self" might just be a language hack. A party trick. The reason this endeavor is doomed to fail lies in a concept that recently led to a major break through in a field you might have heard about: talking machines, better known as large language models, or LLMs.
The concept in question is called "attention". Although questioned by some, it is usually assumed that the universe contains a lot of information. It may seem counterintuitive but this vast amount of information is to the self what the field is to a particle. Only by selectively filtering this near infinite amount of information, or in other words "attending to it", can the self be "localized", just like one needs a fluctuation in a field to localize a particle. In humans, this filtering of information is taking place through chemical processes inside their biological bodies, as information is only accessible if the particles carrying it interact with the human sensory system. The individual pieces of information, or "stimuli", are further processed and filtered in the human's nervous system. Hence, this physical system facilitates attention and with it the self.
This is why any experience that people refer to as "ego death" cannot be more of a party trick than this blog post. The respective experience cannot be removed from the individual experiencing it, for it will only be a small slice of the vast information of the universe, filtered by the physical reality of that individual's body. Instead, what the individuals reporting these experiences might be encountering is a rapid increase of uncertainty about the ego's location.
Coming back to the particle analogy, models might assign an uncertainty to a particle's location that can be quantified as probability distributions to assign wave-like properties to those particles. Could it be possible that a similar concept can be applied to an individual's self? After all, neural circuitry in the brain processes a lot more information than what is consciously perceived. These circuits constantly make decisions in ways that are too fast to be influenced by higher level thinking. Often there is no other way for the cerebral cortex than to explain those decisions post hoc and attribute them to the illusory construct of self.
From the viewpoint of consciousness, a wave of uncertain information enters the sensory system, gets processed by subconscious neural circuits and causes reactions in the body that, too, are sometimes just as uncertain. The bottom line is that consciousness may often be in situations where things have happend in and around the body it is supposed to be in control of, yet it is impossible to reconstruct with certainty what exactly happened. However, higher level tasks may still require an understanding of it, like resolving the resulting predicament or producing an adequate linguistical explanation for other humans. That's why the brain needs circuitry to decide on what it considers the truth of what happened, despite the uncertainty. It is this circuitry that one might consider to produce the illusion of self.
So the key point to understand is that there is a difference between the true self and the illusory self, just like there is a difference between a true probability distribution and a statistical model for it. The former will always exist, as long as there is a physical entity processing information. What individuals experiencing "ego death" might actually be perceiving is a malfunction of the neural circuitry that produces the latter. Since the self is merely an illusion produced by our own bodies, getting rid of this illusion may, in some way, be more true to reality. This is probably why some people like this phenomenon.
This leads to an important question: who wrote this blog post? Is it fair to attribute the authorship of this long string of characters to an illusory concept, made up by neural circuitry that had no part in the process? Or is it maybe more accurate to say that the blog post wrote itself?
