Nope. If anything, awareness of the lack of a unitary self is more modern than the opposite. Modern life is no respecter of comforting illusions like “self”. Dennett’s is a more fitting approach for modern life than Descartes’.
Absolute hogwash. As evidenced by the fact that I’m a happy and well-adjusted adult who derives great joy from living.
It’s not lack of a unitary self that creates unhappiness. it’s the conflict that arises from clinging on to the notion that it’s something necessary. Self-delusion itself is the problem, not the thing one is delusion about. Honesty is always the best policy, even when relating to one’s own inner life.
Factories and computers aren’t introspective.
Living an authenticlife is by definition the very opposite of being deluded. Clinging to a notion of self that’s easily disproved by science is something we Existentialists call bad faith. And feeling hostile about having that illusion shattered? We havea term for that, too.
Again, empowering “to him.” “Knowing there is no self is empowering” is correct for no other reason than the direct experience that his mind derives empowerment from it. Simply stating that something “is empowering” makes no sense as empowerment is a feeling, a perception, that requires a mind. In other words, it’s subjective; it’s codependent on many other factors. That you cannot derive empowerment from it is your subjective experience.
Any sense of inherentness is an artifact of language because we are so used to just saying “X is Y” when what we really mean, and what would be more accurate, is to explicitly say “X is Y to him/her/me/you” The contrary requires you to disprove the experience of every living being that is empowered by such knowledge.
I don’t intend this as an insult, but I get the feeling from that statement that you really don’t know what subjectivity is supposed to be.
You really, really would benefit from reading some Dennett before speculating on the veracity of the self-reported perceptions of other people. It’ll save you from some common cognitive biases :
The self temporarily exists, until all of the chemicals stop whizzing around in our brain. To me, it isn’t whether “I” exists, but rather when does it stop existing? The answer is inevitable death.
How does an action that takes place not, by definition of “taking place”, exist?
I feel like you’re in the position of someone who saw a mask and found out it wasn’t an actual monster’s face. Just because it wasn’t what you originally thought it was doesn’t mean the mask doesn’t exist.
You seem to be equating the “self” with the concept of a “soul”, and since souls are indefinable and by all indications don’t actually exist, you conclude that you, yourself, don’t exist. That’s a fundamental mistake. Just because your “self” arises through natural processes, and dies when your body dies, instead of carrying on in some disembodied spirit form, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means you were mistaken about what it is.
Of course it does. A “puppet” without a puppet master is just a doll. The very definition of “puppet” implies an outside mind controlling them.
I have seen a more complete form of this quote that goes:
You have a body, but you are not your body.
You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts.
You have feelings, but you are not your feelings.
All these statements seem intuitively true: it’s fairly easy for us to imagine “ourselves” occupying different bodies, or as thinking or feeling something different than what we are actually thinking or feeling at some particular time.
But then what is the “you” that is doing this imagining? Buddhism, as I understand it, posits that “you” are actually part of a universal consciousness that some might call “God”, or “the Tao”, or even just “the laws of physics”.
An analogy would be to waves on the ocean: they aren’t illusory or imaginary, they definitely do exist (temporarily). But there is no clear dividing line where the wave stops and the ocean begins; the wave is simply what the ocean is doing at some particular time and place. If waves were conscious, they might be terrified of the prospect of falling back into the sea and ceasing to exist as distinct entities. But really, the wave was just water before conditions caused it to temporarily manifest as a wave, and it continues to be water afterward, so what does it have to fear?
Likewise, whether we are referring to our physical bodies, our intellects, or our psychological dispositions, there is no way to clearly distinguish a boundary between “us” and the environment that produced us.
Our ordinary experience is that we view the world as a collection of separate objects, of which “we” are one. But from the larger perspective, there is only Unity. Imagine children playing in the mud, forming human and animal forms and telling stories about them. From the child’s perspective, these imaginary creations are distinct from each other. From an adult perspective, they’re all just mud. Neither perspective is objectively right or wrong, and wisdom lies in recognizing that, not in rejecting one view in favor of the other.
According to Metzinger, all of this is, practically speaking, incommensurable with the register of human perception. To experience ourselves as self-models, or to experience whatever is “beyond” the self-model (whatever that may mean) is just not the sort of thing that is within the domain of human capacity. Indeed, as may be well exemplified in Rust, even acknowledging that this is the case ‘may be damaging to our mental well-being’ [6]. Yet, as in much of Ligotti’s fiction, Rust seems to hover on the brink of this experience – one foot in and out – at once he is restricted by his “programming”, and yet he is also capable of sensing the “psychosphere”. The latter is akin to Ligotti’s notion of the “fictional diversion”. This is a Borgesian fiction within a fiction, but also one which structures our experience of the world into something that is comforting, homely; something liveable (otherwise, as Rust’s partner, Marty Hart puts it, ‘why get out of bed in the morning?’)
You are still speaking as though the self exists. But it doesn’t. There isn’t one. The fact that you are fine and well adjusted as you claim shows you haven’t grasped what is being said. Or as they say you are still indulging in the fiction.
There is no such thing as authenticity because there is no self. There is nothing being authentic to. The same thing with bad faith. The existentialists failed miserably on this matter, and quite frankly in their overall works.
Of course what I said is not where you were going; it was a disproof of where you’re going.
You utterly failed to address anything I said. Specifically, that the fact that the character/puppet is seen to interact intelligently inevitably proves that there is an intelligence behind it. It very literally doesn’t matter what’s underpinning the character -whether it’s an actor, strings tied to it, a hand stuck in it, print on a page, stuck-together clouds of interacting atoms- that’s all irrelevant to the point. It’s not what it is that proves it’s got a person behind it; it’s what it does.
When you interact with something that interacts back with you as a person, then you’re interacting with a person. You don’t really know anything about the person for sure -does she really like you, or in her mind is she just being polite? But you can be absolutely sure there is at least one person involved in every interaction between people.
Again, how can something that doesn’t exist be tricked into believing it exists?
Sure, your self isn’t what you thought it was. It’s nothing like a soul or allspark or whatever mystical notions of the self people used to have.
So what?
Now on to your problem that if the self doesn’t exist then existence is meaningless, and you’re upset by that.
How could you be, though? If your existence is meaningless, how could you be upset by the meaninglessness of your existence? If everything is meaningless, then meaninglessness is meaningless.
See, that’s why people like you don’t really believe life is meaningless, because you think it is highly significant that life is meaningless. If you all really thought life was meaningless–I mean for real–then you wouldn’t care. A rock doesn’t care about the meaninglessness of being a rock. It’s nothing but a collection of atoms! It means nothing! And guess what, it doesn’t care about anything, not even the fact that it can’t care about things.
You’re like Data from Star Trek, who is very sad that he will never experience human emotions. Except Data is a fictional creation. A real robot that didn’t experience emotions wouldn’t have any feelings about not having feelings. You’d have to have the capability of caring about things to care that you don’t care. It’s something that cannot exist. The fact that you care about the non-existence of the self and the meaninglessness it implies proves conclusively that you don’t actually really believe it.
Actually, there is a great deal of such evidence. It’s all anecdotal statements about people’s subjective experience, but that’s the best we’re ever going to be able to do with regard to this topic.
You find the idea of the self not being “real” distressing *as an intellectual concept. *But clearly the vast majority of people who have, through mysticism, drugs, or neurovascular trauma, actually managed to temporarily achieve the state where the essential unity of all being is as clearly obvious to them as the existence of distinct and separate objects usually is to us – where they are directly experiencing themselves as one with “God” or whatever, as opposed to philosophizing about it – find this experience one of blissful euphoria and report that it permanently shifted their perspective so that they felt much happier and more content than they had previously. The Buddhists refer to this as “enlightenment”, and achieving it is, to them, the most desirable goal a person can work towards. William James’ 1902 work The Varieties of Religious Experience is a classic exploration of this phenomenon. Many similar testimonials can be heard in the parking lot at any Phish concert.
A book I haven’t yet read but would like to is My Stroke of Insight, by Dr. Jill Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist who experienced a stroke which temporarily damaged the part of the brain which maintains the sense of ourselves as separate from the rest of the world (yeah, apparently it’s been identifed…who knew?). Her consciousness continued to exist, but she no longer had any sense of it being connected to her body or as being in any way localized to a particular place. She found this experience profoundly meaningful, and has since tried to communicate the spiritual insights which she experienced at that time.
Yeah, about that - since you seem mistaken about the meaning of such a simple concept as “subjective”, I’m going to need some elaboration on your understanding of the highlighted terms below, before I comment. Note - not just another repost of someone else’s words, but your own understanding of what they mean:
I eagerly await your explication.
No, I’ve very clearly stated that the unitary self is a pleasant fiction we tell ourselves after the fact. Don’t be fooled by my use of such common idioms as “I” - I’m under no illusions about the nature of self.
Oh, please do go on telling me how unreliable my introspection is. That’s not revealing of cognitive bias at all.
So, when I tell you outright that I think “the unitary self is illusory”, at* what point *does that translate in your head as into “this guy thinks the self exists”? I’m so very curious.
Singular self is not required for authenticity.
Technically, this is known as bullshit. We’re authentic to our plural selves and our library of stories, and the collective Project we engage in to live those stories.We don’t need to be unitary to do so.
More bullshit. Not that I think you actually know what bad faith is, in this case, but there’s no requirement that bad faith be to a singular consciousness. In fact, the bad faith is to the freedom to act and be.
Huh, wish I’d had you to tell me how they’ve failed *before *they improved my life and made me so happy. Or not.
It isn’t a disproof. What you are interaction with is nothing more than a collection of mental processes. It’'s not a person. Not even an intelligence. It’s just something that reacts to things around it. What it does is not what matters, its what it IS.
This is absurd. I know of literally no studies that demonstrate that there’s no self. How on earth would you even pretend to demonstrate that, by the way?
For a study to disprove the existence of the self it would have to demonstrate that I didn’t exist enough to read the study. It would have to demonstrate that [big giant nothing], because if I had no self, I would experience nothing, because there would be no “I” to experience it.
Forget the universal perspective for a moment. Let’s talk about your perspective. If you didn’t have a self, you wouldn’t have a perspective. You would have no consciousness, you would have no perspective, you would have nothing to interpret the signals from your organs. You would most certainly not be reading and responding to this thread. Because there would be no “you” to do the reading and responding.
The existence of a self is very nearly axiomatic - in asking the question you have answered it, because if you lacked a self you could not have asked.
Then why are you bothering to discuss this with us? Just post “This is what I believe, and it doesn’t matter what you say.” Then you ask the mods to close this, and we’re done.
You have not explained how there not being a self is a good thing, so I’m guessing you are making that part up to make me feel better.
Your first bolding just supports my point about how the lack of a self is a bad thing.
You also have not said how authenticity or bad faith can exist in absence of the self when in fact they need a self to work to begin with. With no enduring or unified self there is no such thing to be authentic to, just like there is no bad faith with that.
Literally both definitions require it:
Simply put, there is no individual to which any of these apply to since there is no “one” to which these are affected by. You aren’t authentic to a plural self (because it doesn’t exist, it’s only a phenomenal self or process) nor your library of stories (which are just acts, nothing more).
Your mention of introspection is fallacious as the subject in question is the worst judge of whats in the mind. Not to mention there is no “one” to look into.
It’s funny how you just say things are wrong without saying why, which makes me think you are either deluded or full of hot air.
The existentialists didn’t help you, but sold you a bill of goods that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Believing in their fiction causes the illusion of help, but really it’s ignoring reality.
Again, you have yet to mention any how or whys. So if you can’t do that then what you say has little value.