Edgar boyo,
If you have Welsh ancestary then you have privileged genes for sure. Did you know the Welsh for Mt Snowdon is Eryri - 'the place of eagles'? I'm not sure if they disappeared because of human over-population or because, in fact, they don't exist.... Mike --- On Sat, 26/5/12, Edgar Owen <[email protected]> wrote: From: Edgar Owen <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Zen] The Self Illusion To: [email protected] Date: Saturday, 26 May, 2012, 22:14 MIke, No trespassing! My ancestor Owens were the original Princes of North Wales and Snowdon is rightfully mine!:-) Edgar On May 26, 2012, at 6:13 AM, mike brown wrote: I'm going to climb Mt. Snowden in Wales next week. I hope it's still there - there's not much credit climbing a mountain that doesn't exist. Mike --- On Sat, 26/5/12, Merle Lester <[email protected]> wrote: From: Merle Lester <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Zen] The Self Illusion To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, 26 May, 2012, 8:56 edgar then where is the real world????????? and where is reality? what amazes me is how adults have such pre-concieved minds states...that once they have made their minds up..it is set in concrete and very hard to shift..you need a jack hammer to get through..and in many cases the concrete is rotten with "cancerous" growth of bullshit, half truths, prejudices, and lack of insight. .. going zen opens the mind..so one is fresh alert and prepared for the unexpected...just as a young child is before they are fed "how to think and feel"..through the education system happy "zenning"! and long live zanism cheers merle >and don't actually exist out there in reality... Then again, Zen is very pragmatic and would say you'd best duck when an 'object' comes hurtling your way. This is why, after all, mountains really are mountains... Mike --- On Sat, 26/5/12, Edgar Owen <[email protected]> wrote: From: Edgar Owen <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Zen] The Self Illusion To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Date: Saturday, 26 May, 2012, 2:38 ED, The self we are all familiar with is as you say a mental construct in our mind's simulation of reality. Actual sensory input comes into organisms in fragmented bits such as color, motion, shapes, etc. As the mind develops in infancy these sensory bits are gradually organized by the mind into larger more persistent constructs such as objects, one of which is the self. There is a lot of research by cognitive scientists on how and when this occurs in childhood but cognitive scientists assume mind just begins recognizing the objects that actually exist out there in reality. Buddhist on the other hand claims that the objects are all mental constructs and organizations of raw input from external reality and don't actually exist out there in reality... There is also a lot of information about how the concept of objects arises from developments in robotics. It turns out it is very very difficult to construct (robotics calls it identify) objects from raw sensory input.... For example most objects produce very very different sensory input depending on their orientation and distance from the eyes so it takes very sophisticated mental software to identify all those different perceptual views as the same object, especially against all sorts of different backgrounds... So direct experience consists solely of sensory input momentary in the present moment. The whole idea of persistent objects including the self is a mental construct and as Zen would say an illusion not actually present in the external (real) world. Edgar On May 25, 2012, at 10:29 AM, ED wrote: Excerpt:"In what sense is the self an illusion? For me, an illusion is a subjective experience that is not what it seems. Illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain. Most of us have an experience of a self. I certainly have one, and I do not doubt that others do as well – an autonomous individual with a coherent identity and sense of free will. But that experience is an illusion – it does not exist independently of the person having the experience, and it is certainly not what it seems. That's not to say that the illusion is pointless. Experiencing a self illusion may have tangible functional benefits in the way we think and act, but that does not mean that it exists as an entity. If the self is not what it seems, then what is it?For most of us, the sense of our self is as an integrated individual inhabiting a body. I think it is helpful to distinguish between the two ways of thinking about the self that William James talked about. There is conscious awareness of the present moment that he called the "I," but there is also a self that reflects upon who we are in terms of our history, our current activities and our future plans. James called this aspect of the self, "me" which most of us would recognize as our personal identity—who we think we are. However, I think that both the "I" and the "me" are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors. I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective contours – illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern where you see an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words, the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed. They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were. Now that line of reasoning could be applied to all perception except that not all perception is an illusion. There are real shapes out there in the world and other physical regularities that generate reliable states in the minds of others. The reason that the status of reality cannot be applied to the self, is that it does not exist independently of my brain alone that is having the experience. It may appear to have a consistency of regularity and stability that makes it seem real, but those properties alone do not make it so. Similar ideas about the self can be found in Buddhism and the writings of Hume and Spinoza. The difference is that there is now good psychological and physiological evidence to support these ideas that I cover in the book in a way that I hope is accessible for the general reader."Source: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-illusion-of-the-self2
