Interesting episode. Yes, Garfield apparently uses it to advertise his book. I like the mirage example he uses (at 11:00) to illustrate an illusion which is real as an experience and as a dynamic refraction process but unreal as a physical substance. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220284/losing-ourselvesDaniel Dennett recently posted on Twitter a link to an article which contains the same idea, but for a rainbow instead of a mirage: perceiving a rainbow is a real experience of a colored arc, but also an illusion because there is of course no real physical arc at the place where we see it. https://www.keithfrankish.com/2022/05/like-a-rainbow/Maybe the illusion of the self works indeed in the same way? As whole persons who have bodies and brains we are real, just as raindrops in the sky are real. But when the billions of neurons start to sparkle in the light of conscious thoughts, the experience of a self emerges for a short time like a rainbow which emerges shortly from a million raindrops that bend the light towards the observer.I believe Jay Garfield is right when he says that we are able to construct ourselves as embedded beings. It is as if we are 6, 7 or 8 dimensional beings in a 4 dimensional spacetime where the additional dimensions are embedded in the others. This additional dimensions come through language and enable to specify a personality. If we consider a person from a 3rd person point of view, then the personality of a person certainly determines the behavior. This means everyone has a self in form of a character or personality. Even if it is illusionary or an unreachable ideal to be a certain type of person, such a type can be approximated. Our personalities can be considered as embedded abstract person types that we acquire and approximate in the course of time. In this sense we can say we have a self that guides our actions. And the abstract type is independent from us, since it could also be implemented in a sophisticated robot, android or AI.-J. -------- Original message --------From: [email protected] Date: 5/31/22 11:04 (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[email protected]> Cc: 'Mike Bybee' <[email protected]>, [email protected], 'Grant Franks' <[email protected]> Subject: [FRIAM] Peirce, Buddhism, Monism, Behaviorism, oh my! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/282-do-you-really-have-a-self/id733163012?i=1000563340865 Jay Garfield promotes his book Losing the Self on the Sam Harris Podcast. I can see no evidence that Garfield ever read a word of Peirce, but It’s fascinating how closely he tracks Peirce’s monism. Fascinating, also, to see how Harris never quite gets it, repeatedly trying to drag the outside/inside distinction back into the conversation, while slathering praise on Garfield for eliminating it. Reminds me of James’s failure to ever quite “get” Peirce. But then it was James who died a neutral monist. Oh well. Reminded me of all the times that Dave West has accused me of being a closet Buddhist. Nick Nick [email protected]https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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