It’s a question that is on my mind ever since Buddhism, does the self exist? They seem to say that it is an illusion and it’s a thought shared by other philosophers (I think so). I think Thomas Ligotti (of "the conspiracy against the human race) said that the unified self is just a myth, that we mistake the collection of thoughts going on in this meat sack as some unified “I” with an arbitrary name.
Well a collection of anything is something. Why not go read some actual neuroscience books on the self instead of a horror writer?
Maybe start with: Neuroscience of Self.
The human meat sack is like the needle on a record player. Grabbing streaming bits of information from the ethos and converting it into a medium that can be shared with other meat sacks.
Also, Cogito Ego Sum.
Who wants to know?
First off, I think it is an excellent question
Before we go dashing off to answer it, some attempts (however futile they may be) to define WTF we mean by “self” might help – if only to clarify that some of us may be treating the term as meaning or implying things that other participants don’t regard as integral to the definition.
To ME, the question of “self” is deeply interwoven with the notion of determinism versus free will. As I’ve said over and over in those constantly-recurring threads, I believe that somewhere in the universe there exists a conscousness that makes unforced choices, choices of its own volition, where the reason for the choices made is accurately (i.e. not an illusion) described as “because I willed it so” – but that consciousness is probably not accurately or adequately located in my individual self, the local guy that most folks think of when they say “self”.
“Self” is also deeply interwoven with the notion of consciousness. The place where thought occurs. I’m going to start there. I believe that the thoughts that occupy my head are actually mostly there because they are thoughts that are occupying the heads of vast numbers of people in the society of which I am a part. These are subjects of cognitive attention by me and other humans – they’re spoken of on the radio, on Facebook, in coffee shops, at work around the water cooler, addressed in films, sung about in songs, written about in books, and so on. With me so far? Now, I am not saying that individual people don’t add any content, that our minds are tabula rasa onto which society writes. The word most is a hugely different one than all. But yeah when you come right down to it, most of what’s going on in individual people’s minds is actually the species as a whole pondering things, having an internal dialog with itself that takes place among its individuals who carry the conversation forward, sometimes over the course of many generations (even centuries or millennia).
TLDR Summary:
Self as folks think of it: individual
Self as it actually is: mostly aggregate, at the entire-species level
Realness thereof: yes its real and it possesses free will and is conscious
The last Buddha is recorded as often remaining silent when asked whether the self exists or doesn’t exist. That is because, as a virtue of how our language works, saying it does or doesn’t exist runs the strong risk of introducing, in his perception, false views that will divert people away from the goal of liberation. Specifically, these false views are eternalism and annihilationism, that there is an eternal self or the self ceases to exist after the body dies respectively.
The Buddha’s general idea (and I’m working mainly from my understanding of the Pali Canon, the oldest Buddhist manuscripts IIRC) was akin to a mirage: the mirage as a thing is real, it exists, the processes that brought about the mirage exist. However, that which we perceive the mirage to represent does not exist. If I’m delirious in the desert and see an oasis, the mirage of an oasis exists but the oasis itself does not exist. As soon as the conditions maintaining the mirage cease to exist, the mirage ceases to exist.
Similarly, in the Buddhist view, the “self” is simply an amalgamation of processes that we often perceive as being either eternal or purely an illusion conditioned solely on our bodily existence. His view was that these processes, like any other natural process, continue until they are ultimately resolved. Since the timeframe that these processes resolve are not confined by the lifespan of the physical body, it is these processes that are said to continue into a new body and are erroneously perceived to be a completely “new self.” At least in his view, this new self is neither wholly akin to any previous self, nor is it wholly disconnected from any previous self. These supposed new selves are merely different states of the same amalgamation of processes.
Wow that got rambly, but I wanted to throw in a sufficient amount of detail as I understood it. This has personally been the most agreeable conception of self that I have run across.
The existence of the self is actually just about the only thing we can know for absolute certain. We can’t be actually certain what we are like, but that we (well, I) exist? No existential doubt about it.
So I understand what you mean here, are you speaking of a self that is acting solely of its own volition (radical free will) or simply that it is acting with some deterministic forces present (some form of compatiblism as opposed to radical determinism)?
The thing that twists my brain is when exactly does the “self” leave the body at time of death. I ponder this every time I have to euthanize a pet, and when we had to put down my beloved dog, I had great difficulty leaving the room because I felt like I was abandoning him although I knew intellectually that he wasn’t there any more. Of course there are physical things that the vet checks: breathing stops, heart stops. But… it seems like there should be some sort of bump, click, beep, sigh… anything to indicate that the consciousness/self has “left the bulding”.
Being an atheist I won’t be able to give you an answer to this you’ll like. Death is like turning off a television by dropping a safe on it. The ‘soul’ of the TV doesn’t go anywhere; the TV just stops functioning in its intended and expected way.
Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender asks him if he would like a drink. Descartes replies, “I think not,” and promptly vanishes.
In the version I heard, Descartes replies, “May I use your bathroom?”.
Not as funny.
Self? Why, of course it exists (using AHunter3’s first definition). It is the collection of my conscious (and subconscious) experiences. My self is judged to different values by those who encounter me every day (“That shun’s an asshole” or “Shun solved my problem so effortlessly”). Even I will re-evaluate the worth or position of my self from time to time as context changes. This difference and individuality of self is apparent as I compare my experiences to others, especially those elsewhere on the planet. I recognize how different these “selfs” are and so they should exist. For example, the poor Nepalese woman who lives in a remote village would not have any experiences or value of a trip to Whole Foods. Likewise, I don’t know what it’s like to rely on my daughter carrying water from 4 miles away every day. So, I think self is real and is an identifier.
Though, I would argue that my “self” has no intrinsic value at all. It was my understanding that evaluation of the self (from Buddhism) is to keep one from thinking that they are *better *than the others that we encounter. We are all very similar and seek similar goals within our existence. This would lead to AHunter3’s second definition. In this context I think our perceived self is discounted in value but I don’t think it’s totally negated.
I love this stuff, even though I have a difficult time explaining myself.
I’m not particularly religious, so that’s okay. I think what bothers me is all of the physical signs can each individually be “turned off” without the person/animal being dead. Think heart surgery, for example. It’s not a soul thing for me entirely, but more being pedantic with the mechanics, I think.
If I’m only having an illusion of selfhood, what exactly is having the illusion?
There’s no little man inside my brain having the illusion that he’s looking out my eyes and moving my arms around. There’s no center, no core, no nubbin of selfhood, no essence of selfhood, any more than there’s an essence of a beard. Put enough hair together on someone’s face, and eventually we start calling it a beard. “Beard” is just a word, same as “self”. It’s a name for something that doesn’t have precise boundaries.
If you started to poke an icepick through my brain, you’d start destroying parts of my self. My self would get smaller and smaller and more and more damaged, until eventually I wouldn’t be the same person anymore. My body might live on, parts of my brain might live on, it might even be that some of my memories and such are still there, but since they can’t be accessed by any other parts of the brain they might as well not exist. You could keep going until the body itself shuts down and dies and then we could say for sure that my self doesn’t exist any more.
Where did it go? It didn’t go anywhere, since my self is just the jumbled collection of thoughts, memories, reflexes, and neurological modules scrambled together in my body but concentrated in the brain. It was created by billions of years of evolution tweaking existing organisms and adding more and more complexity until we had multicellular life, and then nervous systems and sensory organs, and then a critter that flopped around on land, then climbed trees, and then started walking around on two legs and banging rocks together. It’s not for any purpose other than an attempt to keep stumbling forward in life trying to survive and leave behind offspring. If it fails in this attempt, that’s too bad, but billions of other organisms have also failed.
You don’t want to continue to stumble along trying to survive? Go right on ahead and stop trying. The only difference between you and a gazelle with a broken leg that gets eaten by a lion is that your brain is slightly more complex and you have some idea of what the possible future might or might not hold and the gazelle doesn’t.
And then a horse walks into the bar. There is no punchline as you put Decarte before the horse.
It seems to (someone? Me?) that human language is predicated and dependent on the existence of “self”. That is, communication by definition must be between one “self” and another “self”. Therefore it is impossible to properly frame a question about the existence of self in language. Every attempt assumes the conclusion. The statement “I don’t exist” is semantic nonsense.
Which is not the same as saying that the self must in fact exist. We just can’t talk about it.
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