I spent part of my morning reformatting an exchange with Emily we had more than
a week ago, were I to attempt an answer. This post by turq and the responses do
fit in with the response I was considering. I think that posted article was
sort of in the right direction. Responses to this kind of thing, to me, relate
to how a person experiences what we call 'self'. If one engages with a
spiritual path or paths, this 'self', both conceptually and experientially
undergoes modification, it changes. What we consider ourselves to be,
fluctuates. What Dr Dumbass describes is one way of looking at the sense of
self, but I find his utter rejection of what the lady wrote in that article
somewhat curious, for to me they are in the same ballpark, just described in
very different ways.
For me the crux of this descriptive problem seems to revolve around the
question 'How embodied is your sense of self?' What is it, where is it, and how
much territory does it include. A secondary question is what is the
relationship of thought to sense of self, and if all this has anything to do
with reality, what is the relationship of thought to reality? I am using the
word 'sense of self' because it leaves open the question as to whether there
really is a self at all.
Emily has asked more than once questions of the form '*Who* posted what you
posted?' This seems to imply there is a self. So Emily, what is the *Who* that
is 'Emily' like? What do you find when you look for it? What are its
characteristics? What does it do?
Now my experience of this is that it is empty, it is just a void, nothing is
really there. There are processes, feeling, thoughts, going on, and they
conveniently go under the name 'Xeno' but that is not what they are. It is more
like you have a basket. The basket contains apples, oranges, bananas, maybe a
coconut. It is convenient to call it a 'basket of fruit', but that does not
mean there is an entity, a soul, or anything, that is 'a basket of fruit'
intrinsically. It is just a label for a certain arrangement of stuff.
Now Dr Dumbass seems to experience the sense of self rather delocalised, but I
think he needs to describe it further, difficult though it may be to do so. For
example, he wrote:
Her:
Beliefs (b) + Thoughts (t) + feelings (f) = Internal Reality (IR)
Circumstances (c) + people (p) = External Reality (ER)
Me:
Silence = (Internal) Reality
All the stuff moving around in the silence = (External) Reality
That's the difference. She is still operating on
the assumption that *she* primarily exists.
I do not see, just based on the words immediately above, that she is talking
about a self. Just there is stuff going on in the body, and stuff going on
outside the body. The full article does imply she is thinking of self, but I
can see the above as functioning without a self. That is called bundle theory.
Buddha and the Scottish philosopher David Hume seem to be proponents of this
way of looking at self:
"Hume asks us to consider what impression gives us our concept of self. We tend
to think of ourselves as selves stable entities that exist over time. But no
matter how closely we examine our own experiences, we never observe anything
beyond a series of transient feelings, sensations, and impressions. We cannot
observe ourselves, or what we are, in a unified way. There is no impression of
the "self" that ties our particular impressions together. In other words, we
can never be directly aware of ourselves, only of what we are experiencing at
any given moment. Although the relations between our ideas, feelings, and so
on, may be traced through time by memory, there is no real evidence of any core
that connects them. This argument also applies to the concept of the soul. Hume
suggests that the self is just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain.
To look for a unifying self beyond those perceptions is like looking for a
chain apart from the links that constitute it. Hume argues that our concept of
the self is a result of our natural habit of attributing unified existence to
any collection of associated parts. This belief is natural, but there is no
logical support for it."
What is ambiguous for me here are Dr Dumbass's postulates. If the stuff moving
around in the silence is external reality, how can it be external if it is 'in'
the silence. This needs clarification. For me there is no real sense that
silence is internal or external. All the stuff going on in the mind, and the
stuff the body sees hears etc., outside the body, are very much the same stuff.
As for thoughts about all this, my question is how much is one's experience is
locked into what these thought delineate. Example: if there is such a thing as
reality, why in the case of the Martin Zimmerman trial, are viewpoints so
incredibly polarised? Two bodies met, scuffled, and one died from a gunshot.
Those seem to be the common elements of all the stories that everybody agrees
upon. What is the reality of the rest?
One further note, in my experience, those whose sense of self is tied
intimately to what they think about the world and life, have a hard time
understanding a diffuse or delocalised sense of self, or even the absence of a
sense of self. And it follows that a delocalised sense of who one it or is not
has really interesting implications for such themes as free will and
responsibility. Regardless of whether there is free will or responsibility,
action in the world has consequences.
And as for Barry, we do not know how he thinks about this much. He has fired
another probe into FFL. This was a pretty good one though.
