What is the true nature of the self?
I read The Self Illusion: Why There is No 'You' Inside Your Head. Have you read it? If so, would you like to discuss it with me? If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
I am sentient but I can't prove to you or anyone else that I am sentient. You could call me a Philosophical Zombie and I won't be able to prove that I am not a Philosophical Zombie.
Many people believe that humans have immortal souls which leave when the body dies and is either resurrected by God or reincarnated according to karma. I am not convinced that souls exist but I am open to examining any new evidence for the existence of souls.
What is the true nature of the self?
Quoting the description of the book:Most of us believe that we possess a self - an internal individual who resides inside our bodies, making decisions, authoring actions and possessing free will. The feeling that a single, unified, enduring self inhabits the body - the 'me' inside me - is compelling and inescapable. This is how we interact as a social animal and judge each other's actions and deeds. But that sovereignty of the self is increasingly under threat from science as our understanding of the brain advances. Rather than a single entity, the self is really a constellation of mechanisms and experiences that create the illusion of the internal you.
We only emerge as a product of those around us as part of the different storylines we inhabit from the cot to the grave. It is an ever changing character, created by the brain to provide a coherent interface between the multitude of internal processes and the external world demands that require different selves.
I am sentient but I can't prove to you or anyone else that I am sentient. You could call me a Philosophical Zombie and I won't be able to prove that I am not a Philosophical Zombie.
Many people believe that humans have immortal souls which leave when the body dies and is either resurrected by God or reincarnated according to karma. I am not convinced that souls exist but I am open to examining any new evidence for the existence of souls.
What is the true nature of the self?
Comments (356)
You might find (the implications of) this discussion interesting ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/894606
So then "consciousness" is impersonal? For instance, my awareness of being self-aware isn't actually mine? :chin:
That seems to be a straight assertion of dualism, but a non-dualist can also have a sense of self, so I must disagree with the book's definition.
Quoting Truth Seeker
You can react to external stimuli, which is perception, and sentience is perception or feelings. Perhaps you cannot prove qualia (what you might designate as feelings), but it's hard to deny that you have perception. Perhaps a different definition of sentience is being referenced. It wasn't given.
I suppose I consider the self to be an illusion (I did not vote since I'm using a different definition of self) since there is no way to demonstrate the persistent identity of anything, be it sentient or not. It is a very pragmatic illusion, without which any complex biological being would not be fit, so the illusion goes incredibly far back in our evolutionary history. I make choices (like draw breath) for the benefit of some future material state, which I consider to be my self. The choice yields no benefit to that which actually makes the choice. It's a sort of pay-it-forward system, and it works.
But I encountered a pretty good argument against this in "The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Heisenberg, Borges, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality."
Eddington writes:
I'm always fascinated by this issue, the difference between conciousness as naively grasped versus what it reveals itself to be when carefully studied. However, I am quite skeptical of the eliminitivist position. Top often is seems like a bait and switch, at least when it is rolled out as an answer to, "from whence conciousness." Because, of course, showing conciousness is not what we naively take it to be is not equivalent with explaining it or "explaining it away," as Dennett puts it something he seems to think he accomplishes, on which I disagree.
The reference to "Funes" here is to Borges' short story "Funes the Memorius," about a man whose head injury curses him with a completely perfect memory. It's a really thought provoking story on this topic and not long.
St. Augustine's consideration of the self building on self-evident triads is an interesting approach too. The one in Confessions is probably the most well-known, but in the second part of "De Trinitate," he builds a remarkable edifice of these, one of the more interesting treatises on philosophy of mind sandwiched into a theology text.
Then you seem to define 'conscious' as having one of those 'self' thingys as defined by the quoted book.
I don't consider myself to be conscious then, in the same way that a roomba isn't. Sure, it reacts to its enviroment, but it's only an automaton and lacks the external control that would give it the free will that actual consciousness would.
I'd select 1 and 4.
1. The self with which "I" identify. The Subject, ego, the sum in Descartes, is an illusion.
4. I intuit a silent self, popularized by Vedanta/Buddhism, as the observer, but not necessarily. I'm exploring "the organic being," aware but of Nature, drives, feelings, sensations, movements, without the content generated by the brain happening to have generated the first self. It is unknowable to the first self, and that's the only self asking, and the only self which wants to know. It on the otherhand, is perfectly content with being itself. (Either/both interpretations)
Anyway, for what that was worth.
I'll read your link. Sounds interesting.
Yes, in spite of the emoji designed to ward off yeses. That "awareness" is the illusion too. Not even awareness in the sense we wish it to mean. It is codes generated to trigger Feelings and action. Some of same have evolved to the complexity of Narrative experience.
Now you have to have meant "mine" as in the being you are, not those constructions. I know you did, because we share the same basic constructions, and that you did, lends more credence to our intuition (call it) that there is a being you are before/beyond/outside of the self generated. Well, that Being you are is not ultimately bothered with the awareness of self aware etc. Unknowable to our philosophies, we are only fanning the flames of the illusion (just as, paradoxically/hypocritically I am right now. Its inescapable). That being you are is always presently responding to the coding of the illusion. The latter, I has displaced it is natural aware-ings with illusions. Most of them in Narrative form, requiring a Subject.
Write the word self on a label and stick it to any one of the options youve provided. The entity upon which that label finally sits is the self, and in every case it is the human individual in its entirety.
The self is generated by the brain. The self vanishes when the brain dies.
That's what the self is. A conglomerate of brain activity. Everything that is important about me is found in that. They are the things that define me. When people talk about me, they may describe me physically, but that's primarily to make sure everyone is talking about the same person. People don't say, "I never liked him, because of his height." Or, "I always enjoyed hanging around with him, because of his hair color."
They might say, "He annoyed me because he talked about genealogy all the damn time." Or, "I love his passion for Bach." [I]Those[/I] are the things that are [I]me[/I]. And that's all brain activity.
I should add that I am not at all convinced that all brain activity is purely physical. As I've said several times, I don't think physical interactions of particles and structures can explain consciousness. I suspect the answer is a form of panpsychism. I suspect particles have, in addition to physical properties like mass and charge, a mental property, called proto-consciousness. Proto-consciousness is absolutely necessary for the generation of self, as are the physical properties.
Always a great question.
I would have voted for 4 but you added and unknowable.
To posit most of us there must be a quantity of distinct things first, and a judgment about most of them. The things here posited are us.
So the author is including himself as part of us but I assume distinguishing himself from at least some of the others by sub-dividing us into most.
So if he is talking about quantity (most) he needs individuals to comprise that quantity.
So he needs a group of separate individual things in this us or we he is talking about.
The true nature of self has something to do with being an individuated thing, as in a brain for instance, but also something to do with words and knowing. By learning, the self is born.
I have no scientific idea about immortality resurrection or reincarnation.
I dont think we need to know that there is a soul a separate Cartesian substance from matter, to have this good discussion.
But why is it that because we posit a self (just as the any author who says most of us must) this self is an illusion?
Just because we posit a self, for it to be there, is it not there, deposited, like anything else might be?
If everything was an illusion, we wouldnt know it. We have to know something to later learn it is an illusion. Once we see the illusion, we dont know that thing - that thing never was in the first place - but now we know not to call it a thing but instead should call it an illusion.
BUT Ive still posited an it just the same, in order to refer to the thing that we now call an illusion.
Before we call the self an illusion, we would need to clarify whatever are we pointing at that is only an illusion. But in order to get to wherever we are pointing at, we must walk a path, speak some words, move on solid ground. We must say something like do you see that thing over there or do you see nothing or do you see something that you call a self but dont realize such a name is an illusion? There are so many things we must know first before we could answer this question.
Everything cant be an illusion or there would be no way to distinguish an illusion.
So maybe the self is what is known in between all of the illusion; the self is knowing itself.
Maybe knowing is the illusion.
Maybe you never read this.
If the self was known to be an illusory construct, to whom (or to what) would that construct be known?
If I posited a pink unicorn and you showed me it was an illusion, we could take it completely out of the conversation, throw to the flames with all of the other illusions, return to reality, and just look at the flames. I challenge you to take the self out of conversation and say anything at all about the flames. The author said we and us in his first sentence quoted. The self is a needed pivot to make words move so unless words are an illusion, or they are self moving (then we wouldnt have this conversation), a self must be in the same picture. The self would still be there, the one talking with words of the known such as flames.
Another interesting post.
And citing Augustine from way back there in history shows this great question we still ask has been there for humans to ask maybe since there were humans.
And I totally agree that self is not just tied up in the brain, but the activity of knowing and willing. Positing a self is willing a known being.
The self feels like an entity to what, or to whom?
Even if it were a process, that process would be something, and therefore not be an illusion.
I think we all say self and we then think of some sort of immaterial soul substance, leading to words like immortal and reincarnation which lead to heaven or God. It is easy for us to throw out God and heaven as illusion, and the soul.
But what is doing the work in all of this judgment between entity and process or reality and illusion?
Answer: an individuated thing. An entity, as aptly identified by the word self as any of we who would use the word us.
"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception."
Notice this does not claim, as is often said, that he denies that a "self" exists, only that he cannot catch it. It plays a fundamental role in perception, but when we inquire as to what it is, we stumble around it.
Quoting Truth SeekerI can't imagine. If it is true that particles have proto-consciousness, then there is no way to test anything in its absence. We can't try to create artificial consciousness without it, because we can't remove it from the material any more than we can remove the mass.
Also, while I don't think the physical properties of the structures and processes are sufficient to explain consciousness, I also don't think proto-consciousness can explain it without the structures and processes. Just as we can't try to explain a magnet with only the mass or charge, I don't think we can explain consciousness with only the physical properties or mental properties.
No. At least not in the way you might be thinking.
I note:
1. The ("experience" of the so called) silent self which can be talked about, is not the silent self.
2. You, I, and every human is ("experiencing") the silent self incessantly (perhaps until death? But I literally cannot "say"). Every breath etc. etc.
3. The silent self is not "achieved" "attained" nor "experienced," it was already always there and needs only to be attuned to.
4. One technique is to attune to your breathing, not as in "I am breathing," "body is breathing," "counting breaths," or the like; not by "switching" from the chattering to the breathing, or from "becoming" the breathing; but rather, by being (breathing).
It seems to be localised. If consciousness is transparent, to the extent that one cannot see the rose tint, or whatever the opposite is (blue?), then this body's consciousness is this body's, and that explains the persistent illusion that the body image is the consciousness, because otherwise it is mere breath (aka 'spirit'). In which case "what it is like to be a bat" is intelligible as being just like being a little furry flying me that is shortsighted and can echo-locate.
And that understanding would seem to lead very naturally to a common-sense ethic - if all consciousness is 'the same', then 'do not do to yourself over there what you would not like if you were over there, because you are over there as well as here.
Instead of from the solipsistic point of view, why not look for this self from the opposite point of view? Instead of looking for your own self, you can look for it as you would any other object of science, by looking at the world out there.
Forget any notion of your self or immortal spirits rising after death. Forget these private fantasies and forget all hopes in a self discoverable alone in your mind. Turn this mind to experience as it comes.
I read Trurthseekers posts and I see something particular to you. I see a unique personality. I read Enoahs, or Unenlighteneds, and I see differences in voice, in tone, in content of focus.
Those are real, measurable differences. Those differences are not illusions. We can start the question what is the nature of self where the differences have so much more contour and form to measure against and balance.
What is the nature of the thing that makes Truthseeker posts never the same as Fire Ologist posts, which are different again from Count posts? How can only illusion link a post to one of us and not interchangeably to any of us?
There must be something behind certain differences between us. How else would we see difference?
The thing in itself of the self need not leave us stranded in solipsism, when the question is about the reality of the individual mind who posts here on this forum. We have each other as testament to the fact that we each must have ourselves.
Regrettably I can't vote for any of the options.
From the jacket copy of the attached book:
I don't much like the use of 'mechanism' as it's a hangover from mechanistic materialism. But otherwise, there's nothing too objectionable about it from a Buddhist perspective, although Buddhism sets this is in the context of continued existence (sa?s?ra) rather than a single life. But it's important to understand that Buddhism generally rejects the idea of a soul that migrates from life to life and of a single unified self that continues to exist unchanged while all else changes (see for example the text Sati, the Fisherman's Son.)
One of the schools of Mah?y?na Buddhism ('Northern Buddhism' which developed historically later than the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka and Thailand) developed ideas of the 'storehouse consciousness (?l?yavijñ?na) in which 'karmic imprints' (vasanas) are imprinted and which then give rise to experiences in future lives. That said, the specific individual in this life is not the same as the individual who generated them in a previous life, but neither are they completely different. When asked if a person in one life is the same as a person in a previous life, the answer will usually be, are you the same person you were when you were a child? The answer being, you're neither the same person, nor a different person.
[quote=Wikipedia, Eight Consciousnesses;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Consciousnesses] The store-house consciousness (?l?yavijñ?na) receives impressions from all functions of the other consciousnesses (i.e. sensory and rational), and retains them as potential energy, b?ja or "seeds", which manifest as, or 'perfume', one's attitudes and actions. Since this consciousness serves as the container for all experiential impressions it is also called the "seed consciousness" or "container consciousness".
According to Yog?c?ra teachings, the seeds stored in the store consciousness of sentient beings are not pure.
The store consciousness, while being originally immaculate in itself, contains a "mysterious mixture of purity and defilement, good and evil". Because of this mixture the transformation of consciousness from defilement to purity can take place and awakening is possible.[/quote]
Allied with this, is the concept of the mind-stream, which is not quite the same as a soul (although to understand the distinction takes considerably more explanation):
[quote=Wikipedia, Mindstream; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstream]Citta-sant?na (Sanskrit), literally "the stream of mind", is the stream of succeeding moments of mind or awareness. It provides a continuity of the personality in the absence of a permanently abiding self (?tman), which Buddhism denies. The mindstream provides a continuity from one life to another and also moment to moment, akin to the flame of a candle which may be passed from one candle to another: William Waldron writes that "Indian Buddhists see the 'evolution' of mind in terms of the continuity of individual mind-streams from one lifetime to the next, with karma as the basic causal mechanism ( :angry: ) whereby transformations are transmitted from one life to the next." [sup]1[/sup]
According to Waldron, "[T]he mind stream (sant?na) increases gradually by the mental afflictions (kle?a) and by actions (karma), and goes again to the next world. In this way the circle of existence is without beginning."
The v?san?s or "karmic imprints" provide the continuity between lives and between moments of existence. According to Dan Lusthaus, these v?san?s determine how one "actually sees and experiences the world in certain ways, and one actually becomes a certain type of person, embodying certain theories which immediately shape the manner in which we experience."[sup]2[/sup]
1.Waldron, William S. (n.d.). Buddhist Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Thinking about 'Thoughts without a Thinker
2. Lusthaus, Dan (2014) Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch'eng Wei-shih Lun. Routledge.
[/quote]
Something to think about, anyway, as Buddhism neither accepts there is an immortal soul in the usual sense, nor the materialistic idea that humans are only physical beings.
The only other point I'd mention is the idea of 'possessing' a self. Usually a self is what has possessions - I have various property, computers, cars, books and so on. Whether I possess a body is a moot point, as I have no way of knowing whether I could exist in the absence of one. One might believe that there is a self, without believing that it is something one possesses. But I admit that is a pedantic distinction.
If you have any evidence for the existence of souls, gods, resurrection or reincarnation please show us and we can examine the evidence together. Thank you.
You ask me for evidence of reincarnation etc. You are the one who in the OP said resurrection and reincarnation, and immortal. Not me. Did you read what I wrote? Ive been saying those are essentially useless to what is otherwise a good question.
Quoting Truth Seeker
What does the term feels like being a self mean? Can you describe the illusion a bit better?
I posit that you have some idea of what a soul is already on your head; some idea of immortal; some idea of reincarnation or movement of souls
And these illusions are getting in the way of considering what is the true nature of the self.
Describe how some thing can feel like this being me and then being a self and how being me can feel. And why do you keep using me anyway?
If the self is not, we should be able to form sentences about what is true nature, without using the term self.
Why would you yourself need to to use the term me and I so much?
I am asking - I honestly have no idea myself, but there I go again.
Our words reflect our experiences. That's why we have words such as "I" and "me". I feel like a conscious individual being.
Have you read the book I mentioned in my first post in this thread?
Isn't one's physical body the true nature of the self? The moment the body dies, mind also dies truly and eternally.
What do you mean by "we appear to be embodied"? Can you imagine yourself existing without your body?
is really a constellation
emerge as a product
These contradict the statement:
Instead of I and we, the pronoun is still it so something is really according to the author who says the self is really a constellation, and so where is the illusion? How is reference to an illusion not a contradiction with reference to a constellation or a product?
Do you understand it? Honestly Im wondering if you are asking me to read it so I can explain to you how a product and a constellation is not an it but is instead an illusion?
I am assuming you posted this to talk about what you understand about it.
From what I understand most people accept the unity of the minimal self as something that is real, that it is built on neurobiological processes and that it is embodied. These processes produce the experience of self (sense of agency, sense of ownership, the immunity principle of self and the non-conceptual first-person content of self). There are some who deny this unity (no-self theories) and I think they support that the sense of self is a set of symbols that appear and disappear in random ways. To be honest I do not find these no-self theories convincing, because, as the critics of these theories say, if it is random then it should not be always present in me (or maybe some moments I should have 2 or even more selves in me) and it should not be present in every person out there.
The continuity-identity of self on the other hand, is much more controversial and this is probably the one that is considered an illusion. Those that support this illusion claim, I think mainly say that a) there is no part of the mental states that constitute the minimal self that remains unchanged through time, so there is no core that is saved to form the identity of self (something that would remain constant, could be the physical manifestation of self) and b) any causal relation between changing states is not sufficient to form a diachronic identity (one way I understand it is that my last moment being alive is causing my first moment being dead, but the self is not there any more, so causality does not save the self. There are also the Parfit examples.)
But if the diachronic self is an illusion, there are two possibilities, that this illusion is constructed randomly or that there is a neuronal mechanism that produces it. If it is random, shouldnt we get exceptions? Moments when I lose myself or find multiple my selves? How something random can be so catholic in the population? If on the other hand is based on a mechanism (neuronal process), why not say that this process (whatever might actually do) is the basis of self?
Finally, I would like to point out that we are talking about the illusion of self, then we are talking about the illusion of free will and then we are talking about the illusion of the subjectivity of consciousness. I would say, once it is luck, twice a coincidence, three times a patern. Three phenomena not completely unrelated that we are called to basically disregard them as fake and irrelevant. Maybe, the simplest answer could be to acknowledge that we simply dont understand them yet.
Well that settles it.
Illusion means seeming as opposed to being. Self seems is better than self is because self is not and only seems to be.
Right? Do I have it?
Still says nothing about the self, only defines illusion.
I guess you just want me to read the book.
Really was hoping to dialogue.
Frankly, isnt it an illusion to think the self is an illusion? You should just stop thinking and talking about all of this no matter what your answer to that question. But then, what did you expect to accomplish by this OP?
Let me try one more time to dialogue.
Lets say I posit a pink unicorn. I just say pink unicorn is the the thing that hops, kicks, jumps, that perceives, that knows, that posits things like itself to itself, and that speaks about all of this to other pink unicorns. Then someone comes along and says pink unicorns are an illusion, they dont exist.
So I then say, okay, lets banish the concept of pink unicorn. But I still need to explain all the kicking and positing of known experiences, etc. So from now on, since there is no pink unicorn, I will never use the term again, since I want to continue to have dialogue about these observations but without any illusion in it.
We should be able to take illusions and illusory references out of any discussion among we truth seekers.
Why do you yourself keep saying I and we and you and itself and self if these are illusory and if you are trying to explain what is not an illusion but what is real?
Can you just refer to it instead of referring to yourself? That might weed out the illusion of this self but somehow communicate the account of all this seeming.
The impossibility of discussing this without reference to I or you or even just itself should give us pause to keep looking and not think weve said enough by saying what an illusion is.
For you to have been experiencing a simulation, hallucination, dream or illusion, you still need the physical body. No one can have all those experiences without having a biological body and brain. Therefore your reply is not making sense. Would you agree?
I am quoting ChatGPT 4:
I am convinced by the contents of the book that the self is an illusion. If you want to assess the contents of the book you will have to read it. I am not going to copy and paste an entire book into my posts - that would breach copyright laws.
Can you prove that is the case with some evidence? Or is it just your guessing or imagination?
According to Hinduism, we are all souls plugged into an illusion called Maya. All we see, hear, smell, taste and touch are part of this illusion called Maya. Allegedly, we reincarnate in Maya according to our karma. It is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of the illusion called Maya.
1. I was not asking you to test the simulation/hallucination/dream/illusion hypothesis. But I was asking you to provide the evidence that your claim is true and real (not guessing and not imagination). That is totally different issue. Would you say so?
2. Are you a Hindu? Because your reply seem to be concretely based on the Hinduism in its principles.
I didn't say it was actually the case. How could I possibly know what the actual case is? There is no way for me to test the idea that what appears to be real is part of a simulation/hallucination/dream/illusion.
No, I am not a Hindu. I am an agnostic atheist materialist monist.
But if my brain had been removed at birth, and put in that jar, I certainly would not be the same self I am now, and I would not bet that there would be any consciousness or self at all. My body, every aspect of it, helps shape my self, even if that self is located in the brain. I would be an extremely different self if I had been born without arms or legs. I'd be different, though to a lesser degree, if I'd grown to 5' 10", instead of 6' 3". And different to a still lesser degree if I wasn't immune to poison ivy.
The body is a life-support system for the brain. Ultimately, everything does what it does in order to keep the brain alive, even if one things immediate job is to keep, day, there heart pumping. But the brain can't very well ignore everything all of that. It all goes into shaping the self.
I see. So the OP is not the actual case. You have been talking the whole lot under a simulation/hallucination/dream/illusion. Got you. Ok, please carry on. :wink:
I said "It's possible that my body, the Earth, the universe, and all the other living things including you, are all part of a simulation or a hallucination or dream or illusion that I am experiencing." The key words here are "It's possible." I didn't say that it actually was the case.
I did answer the second question by editing my initial answer as I had initially forgotten to answer the second question.
Do you have a religion?
I think my self is something like music, with notes and chords like a piano. There's a physical component, and intellectual and emotional ones.
Or I might think of it as a landscape like in the Divine Comedy. I can go exploring with my Virgil.
The fact that I have to resort to metaphors to think about it doesn't mean it's a illusion.
If anyone wants to discuss the book with me, chapter by chapter, I am happy to do so.
In an earlier post, I quoted ChatGPT 4 - if you want to discuss that I am happy to do that, too.
I can't really summarise the book in a few words. I read the book almost five years ago. I still have the book and would be happy to go through it again if anyone wants to discuss it with me.
This of course requires the epiphenomenalism is not true, and in turn that reductionism and causal closure are not true, in essence ruling out most popular formulations of physicalism. The self, being something that exists within phenomenal awareness can have absolutely no effect on behavior under causal closure. Likewise, we cannot eat sweets or have sex because these are pleasurable. Our actions must be wholly explained in terms of our physical constituents, whose actions are in turn wholly determined by physics. If things that are useful for survival and reproduction "feel good," this is merely accidental, having nothing to do with behavior or function.
And, as Jaegwon Kim seems to be able to demonstrate, if substance metaphysics accurately reflects reality, i.e., if thing's properties of things inhere in their material constitution, reductionism pretty much has to be true.
It seems that either way, at least one of our fundamental intuitions/assumptions is wrong. Either consciousness has absolutely nothing to do with function and behavior (which brings up a host of epistemic issues since natural selection will not ever directly interact how consciousness seems) or "what things are and what they do," is not wholly determined by "what they are made of." You'd need something new: information theoretic contextuality, process metaphysics, Deacon's metaphysics of absence and constraint, pancomputationalism (also process) - something that radically departs from the dominant view of what physicalism is re supervenaiance and causal closure.
That, or explaining how elimnitivism and epiphenomenalism make sense and how they don't result in intractable epistemic issues that make them self-refuting. If I knew a good answer, I'd write a book, but I assume the former is a more likely solution than the latter, that the science of consciousness is in a position similar to physics before Einstein, in need of a paradigm shifting rethink of its most basic assumptions.
I don't know. It's uploadable in a lot of science fiction, and those writers weren't thinking of anything mystical. I've always assumed it was some sort of pattern they were supposed to be uploading. Don't know.
I think the previously mentioned science fiction writers would say that nobody thought tuberculosis was curable, until it was. There were those who claimed it was impossible to go to the moon. I say put your biases aside and let yourself know the truth: we don't know. :blush:
I don't think so. When I'm done I want to sink down into the warm ooze of a worm's belly and come back out as something else. Fertilizer for an oak tree maybe.
I was hoping to asses the content of your thoughts on the book, or really your thoughts on the subject of the true nature of the self.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Dont you mean you are not convinced? I mean how can something convince you an illusion? What is there to convince?
You said I am convinced. And you are convinced the self referred to as I is an illusion. So no you are not. You cant be.
Right? No book needed. Totally get it now. There is no conversation here. (And despite the question right? notice no use of the illusory I - trying to be consistent with what remains once the illusions are stripped away.)
I have not read every response here, so perhaps someone else has highlighted the following distinction:
Regarding the self, and, for that matter, Mind, being an "illusion." I do not think the point being made is that the self does not exist, as in, it is like a mirage. Rather, that, as to its nature being real, it is not. It is therefore, an entity, and a functional one at that, but it is not the being of this body; not its essence; not who or what we are. All of these, and many other "conclusions" we make both within and outside of philosophies, are illusions.
I have not worded this with enough diligence paid to precision, etc. However, should I be required to clarify further, I think I might.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. But I think a problem is thinking the self is not real, or is an illusion, if it is not a physical object. If I was frozen in time, or carbonite, or moments after I die, the physical object is there, but there is no consciousness. No self. I'm not that body, or the brain. I'm the activity of the brain. At least certain activities of certain parts of the brain.
Interesting and I added it to my next up set of books.
Quoting Truth Seeker
I do not believe that.
Instead, to me, the self simply is. That is to say there is no 'possession' and writing of it that way seems wrong to me in the gut. The individual is certainly not 'external' either so all the wording is wrong.
Quoting Truth Seeker
It is neither compelling nor inescapable. That is a new fallacy you are applying to many of us that do not feel that way. So, back off, just in general. Your experience is not mine.
The assumption that others feel the same way we do is compelling, but we are supposed to get past that light compulsion around age 2 or so. You know it's about the time you realize peek-a-boo doesn't make the person disappear, really.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Also not true for me. Very early on I had a sense of right and wrong. The indoctrination for the Christian church only put into words what I already felt. Of course, it went to far and then my indoctrination failed because I could not follow the rank silliness of religious dogma. Still, the sense of right and wrong was at least compelling, if not resonant. I prefer the latter word in every way. I did when I was a child even though at that time the word was not a word but a feeling.
Quoting Truth Seeker
There is no difference between a unity of things and the thing as singular. That is the delusion. So this assault is just the giving way of one delusion towards another. And yes, I am claiming that this new revelation is only JUST another delusion. It is uninspired, unremarkable, and in fact dangerous as a belief.
Quoting Truth Seeker
This is chaos-apologist nonsense. The patterns that define the body and give rise in an emergent sense to the mind are linked and not easily changed at all, if ever. The persistence of personality as tendency is profound. Nature is much more determinant than nurture. Still, choice is superior to all of that as choice was what defined the prison of the body up until now. That is state and state changes. Truth does not.
Although choice is infinite in power finally, it is harder to choose well from certain states. Almost nothing is created by the brain. Integration is not finally creation. It is discovery and management, more properly stated.
I do like the idea of multiple mechanisms working together as that matches my feelings regarding the scope of moral agency. But such scopes are all delusional, finally. That is to say, there is only ALL, and delusional sub scopes within all. Identity of any kind is then just delusional. Inasmuch as we are made of cells and then down to atoms and perhaps sub-atomic quanta, and they are doing their thing, which to me is STILL .. JUST ... free will, we then are 'cells' or 'units' of ALL. There is no real difference excepting only the moral agency sum at that level of scope.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Indeed, proof and certainty are delusional and not relevant. Pursuit of greater awareness is not the same thing as certainty. Casting off the foolish need, the timid need, for comfort and certainty is wise. Awareness is ... good enough. Self aware is a vastly debatable topic. The critical issue is already well in place, that is free will, the only truth in the universe. It exists at all levels, even in sub-atomic quanta. It is no surprise at all that this same phenomenon is then emergent to the greatest moral agents of which we are aware, us, human beings.
Quoting Truth Seeker
There is no purpose to the God delusion or the soul delusion.
If all particles in the universe are possessed of free will (and they are) then there is nothing else that need be explained or extrapolated. It is simple and persistent, like all truth. Matter, energy, and emotion; all three are never created nor destroyed. State changes like death are NOT RELEVANT. To believe that they are is the height of conceit and delusion.
Quoting Truth Seeker
The nature of the self is truth, is ALL, is belonging. All separation is delusional.
Yes, and it would be obtuse to disagree with you. However, what you expressed may not be the only, or full, representation of the so called self.
But what I was getting at: (I don't know whose post that quote came from, I mustve erred). To simplify, it was alluding to cognitivescience "defining" the self functionally, and, thereby "resolving" the illusion problem.
I was saying that the self can be functional and still an illusion. The "illusion" is not intending that the self isn't actually existent, serving a function.
The illusion is rather as to its nature and our identification with its fleeting and empty construction, as if it were not just real, but the most privileged among the real, maybe even immortal.
I appreciate that.
Let me know if, though Im using my own words, if it sounds like someone who follows what are saying.
I see a mirage of a tree.
The mirage exists,
but the tree is not real (because its a mirage).
That tracks how Im using exists and not real the way I saw you use them here:Quoting ENOAH
You dont really talk about what DOES exist, but it clarifies what does NOT exist, and they may be enough here.
Just to be careful, to restate what you quoted above with a tree thrown in for a self, I said roughly:
You see a mirage of a tree.
The mirage exists because you are seeing it,
but the tree is not real because its a mirage of a tree, not a real tree.
Theres a nuanced distinction between exists and real were both employing to make either quoted statement. We could pause on that distinction and it would probably even help clarify this, but Ill keep going instead, and see if I can apply all this more directly to a self.
But one more second before we get to self as illusion, a mirage is like a projection, where what exists only behind your eyes in your head, is projected out into the world in front of your eyes as if it was a real tree and some water, but is not. Thats a mirage, like an illusion. I havent really defined anything yet, but shown enough likenesses between projection and mirage and illusion to keep going.
So the self is like the tree when seeing a mirage of a tree.
The self is like the tree when seeing a mirage of a tree.
As in: when you experience your self you really are experiencing a kind of self creation, where the creating is more an activity, and the self thereby created as an object, is not real, not the same way the creating, the act, in this this case simply experiencing, is real..
How far did I get here? Does this track with the self being an illusion, a constellation of functions, producing itself in the producing act?
Quoting ENOAHIt exists, and serves a function, but is an illusion? What is the definition of "illusion" that it allows for that sentence?
Quoting ENOAHI couldn't say, not believing in what I assume you are referring to - an immortal soul that survives the body.
If "illusion" is even the best word*, the illusion isn't as to its existence nor its function. It is this intuition we all undeniably have about it, such as 1. That it is the essence/substance of our bodies, 2. That it is "real" as nature is Real, or worse, more real than nature, 3. That it is a thing worthy of deeper analysis than psychology** (not exhaustive list)
*I prefer "Fiction," but that raises similar problems.
**It is worthy of deeper analysis than psychology, but that is because we have not "awakened" to its "fact" that it is an illusion
Quoting ENOAHIt came about naturally, through nature, through natural processes. It couldn't be otherwise.
Quoting ENOAHMy opinion is that human consciousness is the most extraordinary thing known to us, and is worthy of any amount of analysis.
That might well be exactly what I'm saying, adding, the mirage yet serves a function. E.g., it drives me onward with the hope of its shade/it torments me with its seemingly unreachable distance...it's appearance and effect are there; i.e. they exist, but they are not Real. They are all the workings of ignorance. Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting Fire Ologist
Exactly what I think. Add, the "self" is not even the creator of the created Mind. The self too is a mechanism, the necessary Subject I/me, required to move a Narrative in linear progress as time. Also, and simultaneously, it stands in for the Body, for reference in the self created narrative, which necessarily triggers the body to feel, perceive, act. The illusion is that this mechanism within a constructed Narrative is the Body, and more! Is the Spirit or Soul that the body serves. When factually it is a convenient fiction
You realize I too disagree, right? I'm not attacking. Just clarifying.
Quoting Patterner
So did a beavers dam, but the beaver doesn't falsely identify it as a real extension of its body; but better, so did Mickey Mouse and Oliver Twist but we recognize they are Fictions.
Quoting Patterner
Ok. I respect that. Simultaneously I admit how my communication is confusing. Of course it is the most extraordinary thing known to us, because we are in love with the illusion.
Note: I do not judge it as evil, wicked, immoral, a thing to be avoided, annihilated or abandoned. It is very functional. I just think it is also functional to be aware of its nature.
There is no "you" being uploaded. that's the point of the OP. Without the Body to sense, feel and act, it would be empty code uploaded into an even more Fictional machine; Fiction uploaded to fiction.
In fact, this is almost a thought experiment illustrating that the self is an illusion. What is it without the organism but empty code?
And the thing is, upload it into a fresh body, and its not you! You know this intuitively.
Take a scenario where a gunman threatens to shoot you. But he's compassionate and talented enough to say, I'll upload your self to this brain dead body. No thanks! You'd rush to say. There is no self to upload. I, grasping your chest, am me.
Read this from above:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/897122
Do I sound like I see what you mean by self is an illusion?
Removing the brain from the body would make them both die immediately. Medically, scientifically and realistically it is unimaginable. Brain can only function properly in the body intact from the birth of the agent, and then naturally having been nurtured by the parents, growing experiencing and interacting with the real world and other members in the society.
The body without a brain is a corpse, a brain without the body is just a biological organ. There have been no cases of brain transplanting in human history, and it is doubtful if it would ever be possible.
It means the OP is under some sort of suppositional or imaginary scenario rather than based on the fact. When you say "It is possible that", it must have some degree of plausibility with the factual evidence for being real life cases. Without it, "It is impossible that" has the same plausibility too.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Not too worry.
Quoting Truth Seeker
If religion is a belief system, then no. No religion is my religion.
For an agnostic atheist materialist monist, having all the Quoting Truth Seeker sounds like one's claim that she is a vegetarian, but loves eating beef, pork, chicken, lamb, and enjoys BBQ. :grin:
How do you know that your claims are true?
:up:
We cannot possess knowledge or truth at all. We can only believe or not.
I am NOT saying that one belief cannot be better justified than another.
There are thousands of reasons why I believe THAT belief. Together they collectively inform my belief as stated.
A short justification for the belief that is summary in nature is this:
Because emotional balance has the characteristics it does, and because I have reason to believe that reality is only consciousness, I then believe that what works in the emotional realm shows clearly that nature itself, and colloquial physical reality, is only possible because that balance between emotions is profound.
What is the result of that balance? The result is that an infinitesimally small amount of the motivating force of will, that which we might call 'choice', is all that is ever needed to do something. Of course we all complain about this so immorally that it is ridiculous because we are so lazy. That stupidity notwithstanding, the balance points to one core truth of the whole universe, free will is the only thing happening.
It's much more profound and well thought out than that, but, that is a good start with it.
It is the elusive and unattainable aspect of perfection, the objective GOOD, that cause Pragmatists to throw their hands up in frustration. They are first afraid they cannot attain perfection (easily), and that is correct. Then they start making short cuts to justify 'knowing' AS IF, which is delusional and wrong. In realizing they cannot attain perfection they cut bait, instead of fishing. That is the Pragmatic failure. The other paths have their failures which are less in evidence in this thread as the subject matter being discussed.
Quoting ENOAHI get very annoyed when I make an analogy, and people immediately point out its flaws. Of course an analogy is flawed. The only thing that could be a perfect comparison for x is x. The point of an analogy is not its flaws, as there certainly will be some. The point of an analogy is the common ground, despite the differences.
All that being said, I'm not going to try to pick apart your analogies. Reason being, I don't understand the point you're trying to make with them. I just cannot understand what you mean by illusion. I know you've tried to explain a few times, but I'm not getting it. I don't blame you if you decide you're done trying.
I will say two things about the idea that it is an illusion, both of which I've said in the past, here and there. I realize I may not be addressing the word in the sense that you mean it.
First, just because something does not have physical properties that can be touched, measured, weighed, does not mean it is not real. We are literally reshaping our planet because of our ideas. We want things to be other than they are, and act on the idea of what we think they should be. I don't know how we can view the ideas that are transforming our world as not real.
Second, an illusion needs a viewer. When a magician does a card trick, the cards and hands do not view what is going on as an illusion. The audience watches, and is delightfully surprised to see something happen that cannot have happened. The audience, of course, needs to be able to recognize an illusion. A tree doesn't recognize illusions.
If consciousness is an illusion, where is the viewer of the illusion? How can a consciousness be the viewer of its own illusory nature, fooled into thinking itself actually conscious?
All of that may be a clear sign that I don't know what you mean by illusion.
The self is what is referenced in such various views as Hume's bundle, Metzinger's Ego Tunnel, Tononi and Koch's system of integrated information, systems' theorists predictive modelling of reality (a la @apokrisis), these things are instantiated by brains in humans and constitute a loose functional identity. When this functioning ceases, say in sleep or under anaesthesia, the self ceases for that time.
Consciousness is, at minimum, what makes doing all these functions feel a certain way. Recently I've starting thinking that consciousness may be uniquely causal, so that nothing at all could happen without it.
Quoting 180 Proof
It's a good question, if I understand it, which I'm not sure I do. I'll take an awake, functioning human as being a central case of a person, and it seems to me that both the functioning complex referred to above and the presence of consciousness are necessary for personhood (although there are other senses of 'person' I'm glossing over). So a person aware of their own consciousness is an aware functioning-complex aware of their awareness. So, if I've understood your question properly, consciousness abstracted from any functioning system is indeed impersonal, in that sense.
(But, inevitably, sometimes people (particularly the religious or spiritual) use 'person' simply to indicate the presence of consciousness in the abstract. Sometimes the distinction between 'self' and 'Self' is made, which I guess corresponds to the difference between the functional-complex and consciousness, but I'm no expert on that.)
I disagree. No matter how implausible something is, it is nowhere near the same thing as saying something is objectively impossible. That again partakes of a dangerous misunderstanding of what perfection is. Perfectly impossible is probably just that, as in do not talk about it at all because (re-read this sentence until you get it).
But even immeasurably small chances are nowhere near impossible, finally. In fact, saying they are slightly plausible is infinitely more plausible than objectively impossible.
Just had to jump in and steer that one back on the rails.
And in that one sentence you just described the accurate definition for the term, 'illusion'. Not addressing some perception in the sense that it was meant ... is the definition for illusion.
If you wish to speak on the physical phenomena that cause an illusory perception in others, THAT THING IS NOT the illusion. The illusion is the mistaken perception.
Quoting Patterner
I completely agree. The imagination produces images that are real. They are in the world. They are not physically instantiated in the world. But that IS NOT RELEVANT to the proper use of the word, 'real'. In many cases therefore, the word 'real' is itself too ambiguous to be used. In each case we should make it clear what is being discussed.
Or we can instead discuss any concept as real merely because it is a concept. It has meaning. That is fine with me and it seems that is fine to some extent with you also.
Quoting Patterner
No, it does not.
The unity principle states that perfection is ALL. The unity of all things is a perspective, and perhaps the only accurate one, perfection. As such, the thing observed and the thing observing are the same thing. Therefore, your assertion is wrong.
At any point in the scope of examination, there can be and arguably should be an assumed observer that is the same as ALL or as 'the thing being observed' as self-aware.
Truth is unchanging. Self-awareness is thus an intrinsic part of the universe. It's realization may take some time depending on how much granularity we use to define it. That is not relevant. The relevant point is that self-awareness is a property of all reality.
Quoting Patterner
So, speaking to the awareness of certain limited scopes of reality IS NOT the same thing as cannot. In others choice is infinite. The standing awareness that a tree is not self-aware is ... wrong. It is (self aware). And therefore it CAN detect illusion, but, due to its current state, that choice is super hard for a tree. It is so hard for that tree, that it is represented by the mathematical impossibility of the limit as x approaches infinity with infinity being the possibility.
Yes, this is a radically different interpretation of reality than most. Animism is effectively true and has always been true. Nothing we 'know' denies that possibility.
Quoting Patterner
That is trivially easy. Consciousness is ALL. So it is both the observer and the observed. It also is that which allows for the confusion via poor choice. Delusional choice based on fears or desires or even anger is what causes the belief in the separation of the observer and the observed.
Trees along the road do not see the heat waves coming off the road on a hot day and think it looks like water. The car I'm driving does not think it looks like water. You need a person to see the illusion of water. (Possibly other animals can see it. I don't know.)
"It is possible that " is based on guessing, illusion, unfounded optimisms of low probability of the cases manifesting in reality. "It is impossible that " is based the empirical experience on the cases backed by the highest probability of something not happening in reality.
They are at the opposite end of the scale in the statements. The point was that "It is impossible that" has far more plausibility than "It is possible that".
Well that is interesting. You draw the line on this oddly (to me) especially when you also said:
Quoting Patterner
So, this statement would tend to show that you value and view the realm of ideas as meaningful and that means (to me) that the standard (boring) and traditional barriers to understanding that come into play with having only physical things be 'real' would include such standard (colloquial and boring) interpretations that seem to separate humanity in its various abilities from lower life forms first and then not even living, otherwise accepted as 'inanimate' objects.
I take it now that you are kind of a push-me pull-you of openness. You are open to the idea that ideas are real or let's say at least impactful. But you are not open to the idea that all the seeds of awareness (any level of awareness) are present in all things since the dawn of time as a law of nature. Is that correct?
No it does not.
To partake of the infinite nature of impossible, is a lower chance in all cases than to partake of some small chance.
This is demonstrated quite well by the multiply by zero effect. You are always safer saying a thing is unlikely than you are to say it is impossible.
But that doesn't mean a rock or tree knows what can normally be done with cards, and is surprised when someone skilled at sleight of hand does something that makes it look like a card is floating in the air without any means of support, reforms after being torn into tiny pieces, or passes through a solid wall. They do not know such things, do not have the sensory apparatus to perceive things visually (necessary for visual illusions), and I'm not aware of any reason to believe they have the intellectual capacity to experience such illusions even if they did have eyes. Dogs have eyes, but they don't seem impressed by David Copperfield or Penn & Teller.
Quoting Patterner
Me too. I too use analogies as "a finger pointing at the moon," not at all purported to be the moon itself.
I wasn't actually saying your analogy is flawed (though I can see why you'd think I was). I'm actually using your analogy. Coupled with mine, I'm making (trying. always read "trying" between my lines) the point that things can be constructed out of Matter, but as constructed "things" besides the matter they are made out of--to which their form is irrelevant; like a snowdrift wouldn't "think" itself anything apart from snow--they are empty of Reality, Being, what some want to call essence or substance. They are becoming, never present, never (contra Dasein) there. They are becoming, incessantly and only and necessarily being constructed, not Real Being, like a beavers dam apart from the trees and grasses, fictional.
I am also saying that, though Fictional, they serve a function. In fact all of our joy and suffering is constructed out of or, at the very least, sifted through the emptiness. It exists, alright. But it is not Real.
And I'm not as sure about what follows, as I am about what preceded, but I suspect that because it is functional--our joy and our suffering (empty signifiers coding unnamable feelings, really)--we have adapted this powerful real feeling which is triggered by the code, and which the Signifier world knows as "attachment," to the Signifier world, the beaver's dam! The Fiction. That's the "illusion" everyone here is getting almost mutually hostile over. A poetic dialectic to watch, but to have the privilege of being a part of! That too is the illusion! So what? We never try to deny the Fictional nature of the Mona Lisa (here's a gd analogy, see? They role off our tongues with nothing but the best of intentions towards our neighbors, then they complain.) and yet we glorify its effect upon our Real natures.
Quoting Patterner
I truly agree that our ideas are impactful both upon our nature and in furthering "themselves" our ideas. History is constructed entirely out of our ideas. Not only does it function, but like our individual Narratives, It moves forward in time! And I get why we want to call that real. But it's not. You are correct, I think (remember. also trying) when you say "ideas". They are empty of Reality, though they bear upon Reality by affecting our bodies, and the earth (like when rock is made into Iron or steel manifesting as the Eiffel Tower etc.etc-- that kind of illusion.
Quoting Patterner
Right. That's the real "you" that organism with sensations, inner feelings, image-ing ability, storage ability. The Observer displaced by the illusion. Now note. That Body IS conscious. But whereas presumably for other organisms aware-ing takes place in and of nature, for us, that aware-ing has been ineluctably distracted by the illusions its image-ing and memory have constructed.
Quoting Patterner
I know, right? And, yet
EDIT: I feel compelled to clarify. It requires a dark perspective to see "the 'self' is illusion," pessimistically.
It is not nihilistic. Remember there is still your real self, your body, your brain, and its aware-ing, which never goes anywhere, just gets its "attention" diverted.
Knowing it is constructed rather than emerging naturally, is "salvation," (I would imagine). All of life's karma, it's joy and suffering, it's this and that, need not define you. You are always (as theistic as this is about to sound) perfect in (your) Nature. If you are breathing, you are good. Remembering that might heal suffering in the illusion.
Quoting ENOAHHere we are talking about illusions, and now you're reminding me of Richard Bach's [I]Illusions[/I].
I'll read your post a couple more times, and see if I can figure out what you're saying. I believe you're coming from a place I'm not familiar with.
I don't know it. Looked it up. It looks interesting. If it turns out to share my heretofore narrative, it wouldn't surprise me at all. There's probably hundreds of thousands of "contributors" wittingly or not, to any given "idea " Mind is One structure manifesting as History, and as billions of contributing individual stories.
Let me try this analogy and then I'll leave you to it, sorry.
Assuming our "normal" human experience is Real, and unknown to you, you woke up wearing a Virtual Reality head set. That day (ignore the details and niceties, bumping into tables etc) you experience everything in VR. It all happens, it's there, the experience exists. But the next day would you say your experience was real or an illusion?
Quoting ENOAHExcellent!
If I thought I was operating in the Real world, my experience would be real. One of my favorite sigs I've seen is, [I]If you can't tell the difference, what difference does it make?[/I]. (Another is, [I]I spent a lot of money on booze and women. The rest I just wasted.[/I]). I would think and feel the same ways and things I would have if I hadn't had the headset on. From the standpoint of my consciousness, there's no difference. I would feel the same joys, angers, etc., I would have in the real world.
From the standpoint of the real world, of course, it isn't real. If I broke a mirror in VR, there is no real broken mirror. But, thinking it real, my grief over having broken my grandmother's antique mirror, given to her by her own beloved grandmother, is real.
After I learned I had been in VR, I would have some new experiences. I would be overjoyed that I hadn't broken my grandmother's treasured keepsake.
Quoting ENOAH
Analogies are like the clay of a vase, and words are its particular tall vase shape.
Quoting ENOAH
I can tell you are in the same place as me. This is a deep corner of the cave where only the slightest hint of light is all you need to make a point.
But what I see here retains the presence of essence, as much and as often as it does becoming. I see both becoming and things becoming the same and only find illusion where one or the other is missing or overly reified.
We always need both to speak at all. Speaking is real, so no the becoming and essence is real.
Quoting ENOAH
I see clearly that it doesnt matter what the following words from your quote actually mean, because at the same time, they are present in every sentence we speak. You said They and you said constructed and you even said not real being.
These are assertions of essence, not becoming. If all essence was not real, how is it we never say even becoming without fixing a distinct essence that makes becoming different from not real being? We need a distinction to hold in order to reflect the becoming of it. Essences become so they change; but Ive already taken essences and they just as for granted as Ive taken the becoming and change for granted in this sentence.
Quoting ENOAH
See this is why I think we are in the exact same place looking in the exact same direction. You say emptiness and balance suffering against joy.
And you say It exists alright. I would say these things about becoming.
We all are talking about the idea of self just like the idea of joy and some of us are saying how because these are constructed mental things they are not thing (real being) and are illusion.
This is a broader view - not just self but all mental fabrications.
But I dont see as much difference between what you call the illusion of self or joy all sifted through emptiness, as what I call just an idea. The idea part is where the essence is found. But the idea now exists just like wherever it came from exists.
Let me use an analogy. A squirrel finds a hole in a tree and builds a burrow. A tulip stem reaches through springtime up from the dirt and builds a first flower. A man finds wood and builds a house. The man also sees the squirrel and sees his house and builds the idea dwelling place. This is an idea. Like the burrow, and the flower, dwelling place is just what the man produces, and once produced it exists and is as real as the burrow, or the house or the flower.
Quoting ENOAH
The only way an idea would serve a function, a use, is by being in the real world. The only use, the only being of an idea is as it exists between two people (or as it exists to oneself in reflection).
Another analogy. I say to my son, go get me four apples at the store. Four apples is as illusory as the self as I think you see human idea-ing, but nevertheless four apples can serve a function. My son goes to the store and while he is there my idea of four apples as it is in my head is nowhere near the store - it can remain only in my head and an illusion to the world. But then my son gives my idea four apples meaning while my son is at the store. He sees the essence of four and the essence of apples in his head and picks out 4 apples and buys them. When he returns and gives me what was just an idea in my head, I see that my illusion (in your vernacular), or my idea (in my more neutral vernacular) has been passed through my son, to the store and back into my hands. Four apples an essence, works, serves a function, not only because of the becoming of apples to my hand (the real world), but now, through my son, because of the becoming of ideas such as four and apples in my sons head (now back in my hand and the same real world).
We cant see becoming unless we simultaneously see essences, or beings, that come to be, that become.
Applying this to the idea of self and you can take out my son and do it all in your own head, for your self, to your self. It doesnt mean it isnt real, it just means that through our minds we produce words pointing to ideas like plants produce flowers and squirrels produce burrows. These are all things in the becoming of things.
This conversation works because of becoming AND because of the becoming of things. We need both to have either. The becoming of an idea is just the becoming of a thing that only other minds can sense, can use. The squirrel might recognize the flower just as the man might recognize the burrow, but when it comes to ideas, which like the burrow and the flower is the production of some thing, unlike the other things, ideas exist only in minds, to oneself, or to each other, so though the squirrel might see my house or the flower produced, it will never see the dwelling place or other ideas like real being or illusion. Just because the squirrel cant see it doesnt mean it doesnt really exist.
None of that need be essentially illusion. We can just see ideas for how they are - human tools, but real as they are useful. We can have ideas that are illusions. Just like we can be hallucinating a squirrel. But while we have an idea, be it of real being or of nothing real, the idea itself still exists - the function of thinking is itself still real. And this is an essential quality to all thinking. This makes it difficult to talk about the idea of self. But the idea is not rendered indistinguishable from all else. It has essential differences that keep it distinct. Four apples is not tulip flower is not joy and they remain distinct to the extent they can be distinguished from illusion.
Quoting ENOAH
Signifier world must be fixed and posited for you to say attachment and then join these two by an act of signifying, of becoming. You have to keep positing worlds to draw any distinctions between illusory worlds and real worlds.
In the end, if all we are doing and saying is trading in illusions, we never say anything, we never communicate, we never connect with another mind, two minds joined by an idea, like two squirrels burrowing in the same tree.
The idea that because our ideas as mere copies of the world, constructions superimposed by minding things, just like my sense impression of the squirrel is never the squirrel-in-itself I still sense something real that I call a squirrel; none of this makes those ideas and impressions not exist, not real, not something in-itself too.
We need essences in the becoming to have becoming of essences. (But this can lead to the facade where only the fixed idea is real). Just like we need becoming of essences to call essence illusion and have only the facade of becoming as real.
Quoting Patterner
Cuts both ways, for and against becoming (no essence) only, or essence (illusion /no becoming) only. If it functions, like a squirrel burrowing, like a conversation exchanging essences in minds, then call it real being or illusion, what difference is that to the fact of the conversation? I see this as a demonstration or experience of both becoming and fixed essences. At every turn, in every sentence we speak or experience we have or in every becoming moment.
A virtual reality headset is the same thing as eyes and ears. Sense perception builds a world for us just the same. Thats why we need ideas and essences to connect minds through this world.
In an odd way, it is easier to see the whole real world as an illusion before seeing the self that perceives this world as an illusion.
Ergo the implication is that subjects are not conscious (or impersonal)?
Not by virtue of their structure and function, no. But they are conscious. Consciousness is not structure and function. But a person has both structure and function and is conscious.
In fact, the less the better; just enough so as to not form shadow paintings.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I've come to know that about you, my fiery friend. And I can respect that.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I say speaking is construction, becoming. It travels lightly through Time and vanishes instantly. Where is it "there"? When is it ever being?
... But I recognize you place reality in becoming too, so, for you it's not so significant that speech is fleeting, since that too, somehow*, is Real. *meant with sincere uncertainty, not rhetorical sarcasm
Quoting Fire Ologist
Because--and I sincerely hope this isn't depressing--difference, distinction, and your admirable desperation to square things off against it, are also (to stick to the Language of the OP and pay, at least a token apologetic homage) "illusions" based only in the evolved mechanism "difference", necessary for speech to flourish, a this and a that. The Self illusion is a branch of that in the evolution of Mind: a Me and a You.
Anyway, note that all that I say and write too, is Fiction: constructed out of the tools containing the this and that mechanism. It's ineluctable because the world in which our--and all--discourse takes place is Fiction. Dialectic, like the self, is a branch off of the this and that evolution. It is not Real and natural, but every movement of Human Mind from history to my decision to respond, and my response, is a dialectical movement of made up words and images. So called choice and so called knowledge are just temporary settlements in that autonomous dialectic.
Ah but I speak too much.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Wait. Buddy. I am saying it about becoming. I'm saying these functions exist and affect even reality via the Body, but they are sourced in fleeting chains of nothingness, never there, never ever being, always becoming, not Real.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Completely.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Ok. This is exactly where we diverge. I'm not saying either of us is right. We are both necessarily wrong (ironically, if I'm right, haha). But I say you just believe the idea came from somewhere. That exactly is the illusion. It came from your mind! Yes the idea exists. But it is not Real. It was a fleeting manifestation of a construction out of Signifiers, pointers at the moon, not the moon.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes what the moon produced, even the materials, are all real. But neither the tulip nor the squirrel take that leap which places them upon a new layer with an unbridgeable gap from what they produced and the material they produced it with. None of them calls it a dwelling place and believes that that name is real, that the Signifier is the phenomenon or the experience. See? That's how subtle is the illusion. Not saying these aren't real. But human mind and its system of filtration, displaces their reality with name calling.
Quoting Fire Ologist
That statement directly above, and your excellent four apples example: again, that the essence precedes the becoming is the "illusion." Mind is one, permeable between embodiments. That's how History moves and that's how local histories move. The following is oversimplified.
At some point in your minds development, Apple, 4, store, go, son, buy, me, etc. we're input, and over time processed, reprocessed, used to construct, reconstruct, and so on, thousands of times. So too for your son. This reminds me of Platos dialogue (Meno?) where Socrates marvels tgat an illiterate slave can draw a triangle. Of course he can, it was input into the Slaves mind in thousands of ways other than a geometry lesson. So when you crave apples, that real feeling, triggers to the surface, the construction--through a speedy and often imperceptible dialectic of battling code--out of sognifiers, son go get me 4 apples from tge store. You think you have manifested in words the essence, a marvelous idea. But the manifestation is the essence, both empty constructions which evolved to function. Now because your son shares Mind with you, and thr code had tge same effect on him, your body, the Real you, gets to eat apples. But Mind wrote a whole experience out of that. Displacing human organism pleasure food with hey son how about you go... That's the illusion.
Quoting Fire Ologist
You are absolutely right. For discourse to work, and why else do we do this but that we are built that way--it's not because we are pursuing truth; for gods sake, we don't have to pursue truth, we are truth, in our being--so yes, for discourse to work, I have and am constructing so much shit.
At the end of the day every philosophy, like every thing, will be judged on its function within the very specific locus in which it manifests. Because there is no way to judge upon truth, there is no truth in becoming; only in Being. The Self, is becoming, The Body is being.
Quoting Fire Ologist
That which you call a squirrel is real, so are you and your senses. But yes, while those ideas,(that it is a squirrel, that it is "real", that you sense it,) exist, they are not Real, not thing in itself; they are outside Fictions superimposed as if from above upon the thing in itself. They are representations placed, like labels atop of Reality, and we no longer see tge essence, we see only the label. That too is the self, a label, fictional, like Enoah, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Not making sense at all. "It is unlikely that" sounds you are lacking confidence on what you are saying, or just being evasive. "It is impossible that" sounds far more declarative and certain of what you are saying.
Okay, so then what is "consciousness"?
The capacity to feel.
Quoting bert1
"to feel" ... so you're contradicting yourself :confused:
You have a very strange way of reading 180 Proof. Did bert1 say that "capacity" = "structure and function"? That's an odd interpretation, to assume that a capacity is a structure or function.
Expanding on my answer.
My experiences are real in all cases, all scenarios. If I knew I was experiencing VR, I would have a real experience of a reality that I knew was V. I might act differently. I wouldn't intentionality break my grandmother's heirloom, but I'd probably break a huge window to see how it sounds. :grin:
Dreams are real experiences. I wake up and realize i was not in the physical world, and my thoughts and feelings of my experiences adjust to that knowledge. Dreams that feel more "real" are very interesting. Sometimes I don't just remember one, I continue to feel the emotions I had experienced long after waking up. Ever wake up mad at someone you know, even though you know it's ridiculous? Or wake up missing someone you were intensity in love with?
Someone plugged into the Matrix for decades would not not have real experiences and a real life. Cypher understood, as did "nearly ninety-nine percent of the test subjects [who] accepted the program, provided they were given a choice - even if they were only aware of it at a near-unconscious level." If someone died of old age, knowingly or unknowingly having been plugged into the Matrix their entire life, they would have had a life.
I had a wife wake up and think that I should apologize for what 'I' did in a dream that she had. :roll:
Chicks. Am I right?
You are drawing a distinction between the moon, and the word moon.
Im saying you dont get the moon in the first place for you to construct moon without essence becoming.
There is no priority. Any distinction anywhere, at any time, in the sky between the moon the sky, in your post between idea exists and it is not real - any distinction carries the essence of the things trying to be distinguished.
This means if there were no distinctions, we could not speak or have ideas, AND we could not see the moon. It doesnt mean if all is becoming, as the moon decays, there are no distinctions.
I think the issue is that ideas dont seem to have matter, so there is an ability to think of them as not real. I dont know the full mechanics of idea-ing, but then I dont know the full mechanics of gravity holding the moon round. So I just treat the phenomena be it of matter or otherwise.
Seems like I experience changing becoming.
Seems like changing becoming is only there for experience in distinctions I see changing and becoming. These distinctions are as present in the becoming as the becoming changes distinct things.
There is no priority between essence and becoming. To become is to come from some thing and then become some thing else. To be a thing is to be a thing that passes away and is not a thing.
Thing and becoming.
In every sentence you will write.
They have and there are several ways to interpret that section.
But the main point is that when we try to "catch" the self in real time, we never quite do so. We mention the "I", but one has a very strong intuition that the self goes significantly beyond that word.
Quoting Patterner
Yes there is a Real moon and Dreams are real experiences. But both are, for Humans, displaced by our construction (about?) of them.
Watching a movie is real. Believing the movie is real is the illusion.
Anyway, clearly there are items in my thinking about the self being an illusion which need to be worked out. And who knows, I may come out on the other side much closer to where you are.
Nevermind.
Are you a chick? Or is it just barely awake human brains?
I'm seldom more than barely awake. I would like to blame it on apnea, but that's probably a bit dishonest.
Yes! And to sense, image-make, and act; And the always present [aware-ing of said feeling, image-ing and acting.
Also, if we have the capacity to feel, is it possible to not be feeling?
When I'm under general anesthesia, I don't have the capacity to feel, and I am not conscious. (I've heard of those who do not lose the capacity to feel. They only lose the capacity to move in any way, and remain conscious throughout the surgery. :gasp:)
I have a quote below from [I]Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious[/I], by Antonio Damasio. In short;
-"neither plants nor bacteria appear to have minds or consciousness"
-Bacteria and plants "respond to numerous anesthetics by suspending their life activities and turning to a sort of hibernation where their ability to sense disappears."
-He proposes anesthetics don't target the mind. They target the senses, and "minds are no longer possible once sensing is blocked."Could that be correct? I would think that, if I lost all sensory input, I could still think about things I'd sensed in the past. Or do math in my head. Maybe anesthetics work different on us than they do on bacteria and plants.
Quoting ENOAHNot sure how you mean this. The moon exists outside of our heads. But our experience of it is a construction of it inside of our heads.
If that's what you mean, then I don't see how the same can be said about dreams. Our dreams may contain reconstructions of images of things we saw when we were awake. Even things we never saw may be conglomerates of things we did see. And we may construct things based on things we hear in the waking world as we are sleeping. But the dream is not displaced. It is unique (recurring dreams aside), and some people and places are, afaicat, also unique. In what way is it displaced?
Maybe Damasio is more referring to "sensing" on a cellular level? The general attenuation of neurons' ability to sense, and pass on outputs that are based on their inputs is something I would expect to attenuate consciousness. In any case you've piqued my curiosity about getting a more up to date understanding of anesthesia.
:up:
Quoting ENOAH
I agree speaking is constructing, and I agree it travels lightly and vanishes.
I agree. I see these in my experience too.
But something is constructed, and then that same construction vanishes. I see these in addition to the above.
Where is it there? Where is it ever being? It is there in the flesh of the words being themselves now constructed by our bodies for physical travel and in we who use those words to affect the physical world (as in bring myself physical apples without moving my physical feet through lightly traveled ideas or essences). They only work when real distinctions are made, are constructed.
Quoting ENOAH
Are you saying there are no real distinctions? There were no real distinctions before we humans invented difference?
Because if you distinguish anything, ever, drawing a line between any two things, then on either side of that line you must have two different essences, or at least on either side of the line there is one essential difference.
You cant experience this from that without something essentially this and so not essentially that, and something essentially that and so not essentially this.
So if there are real distinctions, why assume our constructed ideas drawing out such distinctions are ONLY illusion?
Quoting ENOAH
Yes the idea exists. Agree.
But it is not real. Disagree.
I dont place priority on where something came from. Chemicals came from atoms, proteins from chemicals, plants and animals from proteins, feathers from lightweight flying animals, roars from lions, and ideas from human beings. As you say, the idea exists just like the protein and the roar.
Why say something is not real just because it is only traded in among humans? No human trades in breathing water, but that doesnt mean breathing water isnt real. There is the shark. No bird trades in words and ideas, but again, there is the human - these many things move together in the becoming.
Quoting ENOAH
As many instances of essence as there are the undoing of essence in becoming.
Quoting ENOAH
I am beginning to wonder if we should have defined real as distinct from exist.
But Ill continue assuming the real to you is a mind independent thing, and exists applies to those real things, plus our ideas in mind such as self and illusion are costing in a mind.
The apple or self in my mind, I call an idea.
You call these illusion. But some thing exists here, so I dont see the need to call it illusion.
Could this be because you think ideas must refer to a real thing in the world or else these ideas are mere illusions, and since no idea can BE the thing it purports to refer to, all idea-ing is illusion making?
I see the apple-essence-idea transfer-to-son process worked in the real world of bodies only. Fleeting idea apple, wherever and however it came from, became real apple in hand. The mental part that has no body, the idea, need not be called illusion just because it is only something for a mind and from a mind, because it functioned through my sons mind. My idea. In my head. Set loose in my son. Came back to me as an actual, real apple. So my idea apple, like the real apple in hand, is not an illusion.
Quoting ENOAH
This is precisely my point. We are built to build essences shared in words. So words and essences are built into reality like a burrow or the moon or an apple, they are just built by only us and are useful to only us. But they have flesh, skin in the same game as the rest of the becoming.
Quoting ENOAH
This seems to be the heart (the essence?) of what you are saying, or the bumper sticker version of a longer explanation.
I still think we are standing next to each other looking at the same thing, but I would say the opposite about it. I would say the self is held fast and fixed, like something being, but it is held fast by the body that is becoming. The body is in constant flux, becoming older, growing thinner or fatter, like all bodies, becoming. But as we human bodies can spit out ideas, these ideas only function when they lock down real distinctions into words to quickly package them in sentences for others to employ in a conversation about the real or in a trip to the store. Our words insert temporary permanence where we see temporary distinctions in the world. The insertion is real. When it functions as through my son, it is demonstrably real.
Quoting ENOAH
If you want to call ideas superimposed and not a thing, but from above the thing, youve already isolated the idea as distinct, as different. Once it is distinct, it is! It is made. It is real. So you should be arguing not that ideas exist as illusions, but that ideas dont exist at all.
Awesome! My first guess was not wrong then. I am ... relieved.
Quoting Patterner
Ah, I understand now. This is would say, the way you think of it, is wrong.
In others words the one DOES lead to the other, and you think it does not. There is the disconnect. Of course what we are both really discussing at this point is something akin to matter of degree.
For example there are things that make noises that dogs give that side head turn to, but otherwise as you mention they cannot relate to them. However, the seed is there and the reaction is non-zero even to the higher states and aims embedded in the pattern.
Further, my dogs, border collies, are beyond other dogs by such a distance that they will totally freak humans out, some humans. It is hilarious to me that to notice this about border collies is a filtering trait for the awareness of humans in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY that that action which provokes the strange and aware response in border collies is amid dogs.
So, you are not properly allowed to suggest the awareness is zero. And that is where our difference of opinions lies here to me.
It also underscores the central question of this thread. That is to say, knowledge is only belief. Final knowledge is beyond even the awareness of what to do with the card trick. It includes everything about how the cards were made, what time of year it is in which the trick was shown, the life history of the magician in question, and perhaps more importantly the objective nature of the question, 'Should that trick have been shown at that time, in that way'. To know all these things objectively is required by me to 'know'. Otherwise we are only discussing something as relatively unimpressive as ever-increasing awareness. Yet and still that has great value if its PROPER position is understood and adhered to. We do not 'win' the final game by pretending to 'know'. The practical short-cut is compelling and ... wrong.
But awareness and increasing amounts of it are wise as goals. They are generally correct and generally in evidence. There is a faith in this, that the tree 'gets it' on some level and is learning to 'get it' more. I refuse to disallow that truth in my wording and in what I say directly. If the universe is alive and all seeds of awareness are there, it DOES behoove us to act that way.
Think of a human animal on a hypothetical date before language took off (sorry, I won't be specific about those details. Bear with me, if my attempt falls apart for lack of details so be it). And since Language had yet to evolve to a certain point, so too Mind--that uniquely human "form" which consciousness took--had yet to develop.
When that hypothetical human animal looks at the moon, they see it with their organic senses untainted. The real moon exists, and they see that. Whatever it is. And moreover Whatever it is is irrelevant because there is no Language with which to construct what it is. So it remains the moon, Whatever it is.
Once Mind and its constructions evolved/emerged, for Humans you cannot look with your sense of vision and see what it is. Whatever it is. Instead you look at the moon and see what that Signifier triggers as signified. For e.g. you see astronauts, gravity, tides, werewolves, cheese, etc. Not specifically, but I am hoping I've painted the picture.
For one animal looking at the moon, they cannot see the moon as it really is--Whatever that is--they see the Signifiers which have displaced the moon. That is the "illusion." It's not that our life, our actions, drives, feelings, and tge world around is which we are fully equipped for sensing, is not real; rather, our experiences of those things are constructed displacements to which we are (almost) ineluctably attuned/attached.
Sorry, forgot "dreams." That seems trickier on the surface because dreams are already illusions. Yes you are correct that they exist, take place, have effect, but even convention readily accepts, "that wasn't real; just a dream." But that's not addressing your query. But dreams can be treated in the same way as the moon. Whatever dreams were before we emerged Mind, that's what they really are. Like the moon, they are still what they have always been, whatever that us, but we cannot be perceive them through our constructions. Hence the illusion.
Finally, back to the self. The prehistoric human animal was what it was individually, I can suggest a bonding, mating, animal with sophisticated image-ing, memory, etc. and aware-ing those always. But the self we idolize, with a history, in Narrative form, goals, interests, intentions, and a free and selfish will tobcarry those out, is functional as hell, but is a construction. An "illusion," as such.
Perhaps this describes the way it seems for you, but frequently I communicate things via pictures rather than words, and there are many things I can accomplish without words. I'm guessing this is 'poetry' on your part?
But the area of the spectrum a tree is on does not come with the capacity to be amazed by card tricks. That is not suggesting their awareness is zero. It is suggesting a matter of degree in a specific area. If your dogs are far beyond other dogs, is it not possible that other dogs are likewise far beyond trees? Le Guin mentions "the wisdom in a tree's root." A phrase I am very fond of. With regard to a tree's life, and needs, and being, a tree's root is certainly far wiser than we are. But we are far wiser than trees are in other ways.
Excellent. I think we can agree to agree then. What an unusual situation! Yay!
Quoting Fire Ologist
Ok, and I'm not being flippant, then David Copperfield is there. Anyone who enjoys reading Dickens can relay how Copperfield has affected them. But I say, Copperfield exists, has a functional effect on nature, but it is an illusion, a re-presentation at best. But not present. Not there. And same for the self and all of human Mind and History.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I am saying, first and foremost, I don't know. No one knows. For all I know something related to "difference" is an actual and real constituent of Nature and Reality. I'm also not saying I know what Nature/Reality is. No one does. Why? Note the word "know". Like difference, it too is an evolved mechanism of Mind.
I'm saying, I currently believe prehistoric humans and other intelligent animals use drives, memory, conditioning, etc. to "distinguish" shit from food. But "difference," the necessity of a this and that, a not this but that, a this and a not this; these are functional within the churning out of experience in Narrative form. The Fiction Mind writes. Like too is the Subject, I, the Self. "Illusion".
It is a qualified monism. The Body (all of Nature, geological, biological, astronomical) is real. Mind exists, functions and effects. But it is not Real. Hence qualified. If it must be labeled.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I understand your struggle. And I feel badly. I may very well be completely wrong. In fact, by these very hypotheses I'm playing with, I am wrong. But to answer you. The distinctions you draw, the meaning they construct, the very requirement for meaning, for distinctions, is the Great Fiction within which you (we) are struggling. So, of course you wonder how the hell difference is not Real.
Does it help to reiterate, within the "illusion" (I don't like that word--trying sheepishly to stay true to the OP), difference is "real," it is "perceivable" it is functional as neither language nor mind would have evolved tge way they did had mechanisms of "grammar" like difference not evolved.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Fair. And I am not meaning to "deride" mind/self because they are not Real. But they are not. Forgive the analogy, but the tree which made the paper is real. The paper is an artifact. The reality of the tree still exists in the paper, and it's not going anywhere. But the "paper" idea is special to our Fictional world. Now all the more so for the plot of the novel written on the paper.
The human is real and every species sees us for what we are, the tree, in the book analogy. No creature, not even a dog or chimp, thinks Fire is a well dressed man. Just sees an organism.
Now you'll say, we naturally developed the tools to go further than a Chimp. And I say yes, and those tools and everything they construct is a Fictional
Quoting Fire Ologist
The apple is real and it exists. The human construction "apple" and every form of that construction which instantly bubbles up to the surface when you speak that word--fruit, edible, red, green, apple a day, America, Steve Jobs--Exit, but they are empty nothings, passersby; only their effect upon you as an organism, places you under the illusion that for F's sake, they must be real.
Quoting Fire Ologist
No
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes
Quoting Fire Ologist
I sense the same. I sense that in a loose interpretation we agree that we are perceiving "the world" uniquely as humans. But whereas you respect how becoming is that special way Being comes to be for humans--therefore it is part and parcel of one reality; I am insisting on relegating becoming to emptiness, and designating being alone as the domain of truth. ... (?)
And yet, in spite of our differences, I feel a comraderie of interest.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Hmm. Interesting. If this is a point of logic, or a necessity in word meaning, I would immediately defer to you. However, let me reiterate that for me, ideas exist, evident inter alia in their functional effect, but they are fleeting empty structures of signifiers. Not Real "in and of themselves(?)"
Im trying to talk about signification, with the launching pad of the signifier self.
Images and poetry can signify so Im not sure of what Im saying about signification is much different than how poetry can function.
If we are saying that self signifies nothing, that self is an illusion, weve got ourselves cornered into the issue of whether anything can be signified, or what is signification.
Ok, so no distinction whatsoever between Abe Lincoln and Mary Poppins and me and you.
Ill go with it for now.
About distinctions existing independently of the mind:
Quoting ENOAH
My response is simply a question, where did you come up with the distinction between for all I know and real constituent of reality?
You are pointing at objective distinctions to make your point. Your point happens to be that there may not be distinctions. But you distinguished whatever the hell people do for an actual and reality. Oh, and you said constituent. A constituent implies multiple parts, multiple distinct parts.
You are contradicting your point by speaking about it.
I just say, give in to the essence. Its just as there as the existence.
Quoting ENOAH
Why would you assert that. You can distinguish shit from food. You need to. That is because there are real distinctions. But you can distinguish shit from food with ideas just as well. Because ideas reflect distinctions too. Self isnt the same fiction as shit or dragon - distinction is real regardless of minds. Minds can use them to construct functioning ideas. Otherwise we cant speak.
Maybe you are saying we are not really speaking. Maybe you have no idea what I am saying.
Quoting ENOAH
Analogies are great. But to show the illusion forming out of a tree through artifact, that doesnt work, because the tree formed out of dirt and air and sun that were taken and consumed, just like the paper was taken from the tree being consumed. There are no distinctions you can make between artifacts and natural processes. Artifact is serving as a gift from god for you to make your fiction of a novel on paper. Whats an artifact? And why would an artifact cause there to be line between illusion and the real tree?
Quoting ENOAH
I see why youd think I would say that, but honestly, I am not giving any status to ideas whatsoever. Chimps make poop. Birds make eggs. People make ideas. Volcanoes make lava. Chimps make sacrifices. Birds fly. People make poop.
I am simply saying each of these are distinct and real. Including the ideas. The fact that ideas come only from humans is like guano comes only from bats - that doesnt matter to me here. Just the fact that ideas exists in the real world. No status or hierarchy. No reification. Just here we are with our ideas bouncing off of each other, one of us trying to not see them, the other trying to see how not to see them.
Quoting ENOAH
I cant touch this one. Not sure what you mean here. Being is the domain of truth. Becoming is the domain of fiction/illusion then? I dont see how you could ever speak of truth - wouldnt that be a fiction? But then wouldnt it be relegated to emptiness, in which case it is not being? But now being is the domain of truth and of empty illusion.
I dont see why you would introduce truth here.
Quoting ENOAH
I just dont see, at all, why an empty structure would have any functional effect. At least not a repeatable one, but here we go again
You said both that ideas exist and that they have a functional effect but then you say they are empty. Makes no sense to me. You have used empty structures to signify something of ideas and this has brought the effect in me the question, why the hell are you saying that, especially when this is just your idea.
You are contradicting yourself by speaking at all. Or there is something real of ideas. Either one. Cant be both.
This is maybe the first time Ive seen a paradox I dont know if I like.
Becoming spoken as being is not being and so not spoken, but then I just said it makes no sense.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Again, mega-distinctions within the Narratives of history. But just as you might like at two unfamiliar dogs quickly and note no distinctions, ultimately no distinctions which we can speak of.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It rolled off the tongue because of countless prior combinations of related structures of these empty codes and their mechanics or dynamics having arrived at that manifestation as fit for the surface.
Quoting Fire Ologist
The dysfunction--futility--of the hypothesis being explored here is that in so hypothesizing and so exploring, it is already "part of the 'illusion'" All of your critiques directly above are perfectly reasonable and legitimate--if I was purporting to be "being" while speaking. But while speaking, I have already ignored being and displaced it with becoming.
The whole Truth is you cannot escape tge "illusion" in becoming, each effort is the illusion. You can only do so by ignoring becoming and attuning to being; that is, your organic aware-ing and not your ego-self. But this applies to everyone of us, even the most reasonable or profound utterance is made using fiction, and ultimately is
Fiction.
Quoting Fire Ologist
See above. Yes but if what you say is only true because "my" point is true then that contradiction is the closest to the truth that our constructions can take us. All others efforts at truth are even further movements away from the truth (I fully accept you may not get what I mean from tgat previous koan-sounding convulsion. Sorry. Not your fault. Mine.)
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes to the first part, the "you need to". That's why I asserted that. The distinctions "apparent" in nature are only apparent as such. Maybe science can bring us closer to how I naturally avoid eating shit, and other apparent "differences."
And double yes to part two, distinguish with ideas. I'm saying that part is--going far deeper and way back--a constructed evolved process of dancing code.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Ok, look. Yes maybe dragon shit and self are distinct in reality. What I'm saying is, 1. We don't "know" Reality because "know" is also constructed. (Just read a long thread on is knowing belief etc.). 2. The way they are distinct for us is not necessarily how they really are, if they are. So the way they are distinct for us is an "illusion"
Quoting Fire Ologist
Acknowledged
Quoting Fire Ologist
Fair point! You're asking why aren't ideas natural byproducts of the organism, for e.g.? Why give ideas special status?
Your points are excellent. If I wasn't tiring, naturally impatient and lazy; if I wasn't already ashamed (not self deprecating, justifiably) for occupying too much of your time and space in this thread. . . I'll say, recognizing fully it merits more explanation, the "Signifiers" or code are empty. They aren't organic secretions even (yes secretions may be involved). They are representations, vague and fleeting "pictures" stored in memory (yes those are real) functioning in such a way tgat experiences are written out of them. Those are illusions. Sorry. Tired.
You are right to be frustrated here. I need to be more careful with my language. I have already addressed the "paradox" of my speaking of truth, or even speaking at all. As to the use of"structures" and "empty" recklessly, I will rethink and I have no doubt that it will come up again.
It is possible I have gotten a glimpse of your position. The human without language is good. But don't you think every human without language associated the moon with things? One might look at the moon and think of a wolf that attacked one night. Another might think of a sexual encounter that took place in a field one night. Another might think of owls hooting. On and on. Making associations might be a defining characteristic of humanity. Perhaps a living thing that doesn't make associations is, by definition, [I]not[/i] human. Once there were living things that could make associations, they started developing language. Which further shaped the mind, which lead to the ability to make more obscure associations... I don't know the first thing about early humans or the birth and evolution of language. I'm just throwing ideas out there.
Yes. And I wnt get into a prolonged explanation but you're describing the real and organic roots of the so called illusion. Before Language the thinking you're describing would have to be like, eyes see moon, stored image of wolf autonomously surfaces in memory. It's organic function, to trigger a response, hide at night.
For humans this process of images autonomously arising to the surface triggering Body to respond evolved to a complexity with difference, grammar, the Subject vs the object, eventually the incessant surfacing of the Subject I to serve the Narrative form triggering autonomous feelings ultimately leading to the identity of that picture "I" with the always real organic being. The body. A complex dynamic of autonomously surfacing images we take to be real, illusion.
Warning. Either do I. And as for throwing things out there. That's all I do. Sometimes I get things in return. Thank you
According everything else you are saying, no its not.
Are we right?
Quoting ENOAH
The way a bowl of shit is distinct for us or a bowl of food? When I concoct a fictional shit can I use that to signify a distinct bowl of delicious food?
really are .
Youre telling stories again..
Quoting ENOAH
I have to say. This is consistent.
You shouldnt admit the consistency because it would lean towards being something, but Ill admit it for you, since I think I can see a small part of you yourself.
If words are weak attempts at signifying only, and by signifying, divorced from any truth they might wish to signify, then there is no point in speaking.
The paradox of speaking at all. I love that. That is the issue. I dont agree that you have to side with becoming over being when standing at this paradox.
When standing at a paradox, both opposites must be real and cant be real, so what side is there to choose, but both together?
I hate to say it but according to your view, there is no point to speaking at all.
Did I say say it?
Pun despairingly intended. In fact, wait a second, I cant say it, because words always say .emptiness in every breath and sound.
But alas I said it anyway, because the way I see it, we have both actually spoken, conveyed meaning here, not only because of my mind constructing it, but also because of the words here on screen, because of Enoahs words, distinct from my words, and because of Enoahs mind constructing it.
Lots of different essences in the stew of being becoming being becoming.
You might be missing out. And missing out on your actual self. I dont have to say it. You keep saying truth to make your point about no truth, because as you know, there is no knowing.
And I should be tired myself.
Have a good evening.
You're right. I did fail to explain my thoughts properly. That was justifiably upsetting. Not to mention its a frustrating hypothesis to have to consider. Sorry.
In the end, it would be "funny" if, after all of this, the truth were the thing that cannot be spoken.
What are the evidences for the possibilities that you perceived? What makes you not convinced?
The Christian doctrines might have all the answers you are seeking for. Would you not be interested in reading about them?
The real word is:
1. Real
2. Simulation
3. Hallucination
4. Dream
5. Illusion
It's not possible for me to test the simulation/hallucination/dream/illusion hypothesis. Just because they are logical possibilities it does not mean they are actual possibilities. My perceived reality seems far too complex to be anything other than real. I am not completely certain about it but I am almost certain about it.
Wow cool. I never imagined you could have been an ex-Christian.
Quoting Truth Seeker
No, I haven't read the Bible at all. All I know about the Bible is the 1 quote. It goes something like "God said, Let there be light, and there was light. God was jolly happy and satisfied with the light."
Quoting Truth Seeker
Cool. I know who to ask with any queries with the Bible then.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Really? Interesting.
I think you are talking about the Modality and Possible world in Logic, which is interesting subject. Sure, we can talk about the possible world and its scenarios, inferences and reasonings with Modal Logic.
I dont think you can explain it. By definition, explanations are illusions.
It would also be funny if the self was real, and we ourselves didnt know it. Like looking for your sunglasses while they are on your head.
1. The Matrix
2. Predestination
3. Inception
4. The Truman Show
I am not a great fan of movies, but recall watching Inception many year ago. It was an interesting movie right enough.
Here is an evidence all we are experiencing is not dreams, illusions, hypotheses or hallucinations. If it were, you wouldn't be asking the questions or doubting the reality.
If your experience of reality were not real, then it wouldn't last your life time. You would wake up from the illusion or dreams, and get back to your reality within a day or two. Not doing so proves your experience is real.
What if I am in a dream that lasts my entire lifetime? What if my death is the only way to wake up from the dream?
What if I am in a hallucination that lasts my entire lifetime? What if my death is the only way to stop the hallucination?
What if I am in a simulation that lasts my entire lifetime? What if my death is the only way to exit the simulation?
What if I am in an illusion that lasts my entire lifetime? What if my death is the only way to break the illusion?
I will either find out when I die or I will just cease to exist when I die.
No illusions or dreams last one's life time. If it did, then it would be reality. Not illusions or dreams.
Quoting Truth Seeker
What if, death and dyings are illusions and dreams?
If your experience lasted more than a day or two, then you can safely conclude that it was a reality, not dreams or illusions.
But watching movies bores me to death. I would rather read or go for a walk, or do workouts :D
Quoting Truth Seeker
It is impossible for dreams last more than a night, because you would have to wake up in the morning for the real life. Biologically and physically, if your dreams lasted more than 3 days, then you would get exhaustion not having consumed the real food and drinks, your body will not last in the real world, making your dreams evaporate.
Logically possible, metaphysically maybe, but physically impossible.
If you provide some evidence for your presumption, and if they were convincing enough, then I might say "ok maybe, but are you sure?" Without the evidence or arguments, I would say "Nah, impossible" :D
Exactly! I would say that I rest my case, but you are still not getting it.
Confidence IS NOT knowing. Firstly, it cannot be, because one cannot actually know. One only believes. So, confidence is exhibited as 'They who do not know, but believe strongly anyway'. Of course immoral fear types will chafe and call that incoherent. They are not really right, but this is the hubris of relatively high awareness or let's say a facility with awareness.
Confidence is anger. It stands up to fear (all thought, all logic) and to desire (all needs) and basically says, 'Nope! I choose not to be afraid of not being certain, and not to want, at least right now.'
Would you say the most confident people in the world are also the most aware? No. Yet they possess a trait that is useful despite the UNAVOIDABLE position of being unable to know. And that is wise, despite the objections of fear-side certainty seeking cowards.
Perhaps we are just keep missing each other's point. It is understandable that it can happen. After all we have different ways looking at things in the world, and I am not aware of the contents in your mind what is going on, and you must be the same.
Confidence in the linguistic expression is based on the empirical experience and evidence from the real world events and observations, hence it can be said with most certainty.
Everything you claimed as possible i.e. dreaming, being under illusions, hallucinations and simulations are all possible, if and only if you physically existed in the real world. That is the precondition for all the possibilities you listed.
Up to here, we are fine. I respect your temerity and your clear need to find some balance.
Quoting Corvus
No it is not. This is wrong. Confidence is informed by fear, yes. And fear is the patterns you are referring to as experience. But it also includes BEING in those situations. So, it can be hard to speak of single emotions rather than all together in experience.
But fear does realize that reductionism is useful. So, we reduce emotions properly to understand the root of any motivation.
Confidence is rooted in anger, not fear. Real confidence is sourced in belonging and being inseparable from all of reality. Because nothing can be created nor destroyed, death is delusional. Ultimately, that is the source of balance and confidence. 'Everything will be fine' (even if we all die screaming).
Fear cannot track that. Fear is, more than anything else, enervated and aware. It is aware of death most poignantly. Courage and confidence deny the fear of death.
Fear is the source of the need for certainty, a limit that is delusion in ALL cases. So the patterns of awareness are NOT related to confidence directly. The awareness that is related to confidence is the awareness that the certainty of fear must be put down and the awareness that death is acceptable and normal. Of course we do not want to go too far with this. Every emotion can be over-expressed.
Anyway, hopefully that was useful.
In one sense, that IS the case.
Reality is nothing but consciousness. Anger pushing back against fear and desire, and itself, causes mass to exist. The tension of anger is mass itself.
The 'immaterial soul' is just a phrase used to describe the awareness of the illusory nature of physical reality by itself. In other words reality is more than just physical reality. It includes the mind and all fear constructs, as well as desire and perfection as a guide.
The only thing in existence that is not an illusion is the truth of perfection. That is why we are compelled via desire to approach it.
I realize that there is no proof. Apparently you do not. To prove something is to know it, objectively. That is not possible.
We must live based on a well of beliefs, faith. This is not religious. It is nonetheless informed by experience, by being in reality.
Proof is a delusional need. It will not serve you to ask for it. You DO properly take on awareness as a burden. The wiser we are the more of a burden we have to do good, to choose the good, amid free will.
This thread already contains many of my arguments towards truth. Since proof is impossible, it is incoherent to expect it. It is not incoherent to seek truth and awareness though. Fear is useful and parts of it are good.
You call yourself truth-seeker and that is a fine name. Truth arriver, they who have proof, would only be delusion. That name would not be good.
The banana is still there, inside you. You are partially wrong.
Someone may give you another banana. You are partially wrong.
Your examples are too limited to have much use. Experience is not limited in that way, or let's say experience is LESS limited.
Your proofs leave much to be desired. They are in fact not proofs at all.
You left off, "...to a reasonable person."
Unfortunately Chet's schtick is going nuclear all of the time.
Well, that link is to a chapter of Stephen Law's book, Believing Bullshit. :wink:
Thats a meaningless statement if you cant know anything.
Why did you say really? Whats real?
Quoting Chet Hawkins
That sounds like certainty speak.
As soon as we believe there is no knowledge, we contradict this belief by speaking.
I disagree. How can a confidence backed by empirical experience and evidence can be related to fear? You might have fear when you assert something you don't have concrete knowledge, evidence or experience, so you don't know what you are talking about.
If you could provide some evidence or arguments for your "What if" presumption and imagination, then we could further analyse if the what if claim is justified.
But without that, it would be just your unverified and irrational belief, which sounds like the beliefs or stories belonging to in the realm of esotericism, science fiction, or religious beliefs. It would be difficult to discuss under philosophical investigation.
:nerd: :ok:
Science-Fiction sounds acceptable. :)
I thought that was one of the trillions of things you could disprove?
Quoting myself:
I haven't.
When you prove P, you are disproving not-P.
So the hypothesis isn't false.
You say you can prove a trillion things. I imagine those things include being here, being made of matter, typing this post. When you say you can prove these things, you are also saying you are disproving the contrary. You are disproving that you "exist as an immaterial soul that is experiencing the illusion of being in physical body on a physical planet in a physical universe". So it is not longer a hypothetical, because for you, it is false.
1. If I hit the wall with my head it hurts my head.
2. Humans need oxygen to stay alive.
3. Eating a banana means you no longer have the banana to sell or donate or eat again.
4. I am typing in English right now.
5. I have two eyes.
6. The capital of Nepal is currently Kathmandu.
7. The Earth orbits the Sun.
8. The Moon orbits the Earth.
9. Humans don't know how to travel faster than the speed of light.
10. Dogs have four legs.
I don't have the time to list trillions of such things but I think you get the picture.
The untestable hypotheses I listed remain untestable.
This implies you have a material body and are under no illusion of being otherwise.
Quoting Truth Seeker
These imply there is a material world.
So how is "I exist as an immaterial soul that is experiencing the illusion of being in physical body on a physical planet in a physical universe" a hypothetical?
So, the statements below are still provable by using evidence.
1. If I hit the wall with my head it hurts my head.
2. Humans need oxygen to stay alive.
3. Eating a banana means you no longer have the banana to sell or donate or eat again.
4. I am typing in English right now.
5. I have two eyes.
6. The capital of Nepal is currently Kathmandu.
7. The Earth orbits the Sun.
8. The Moon orbits the Earth.
9. Humans don't know how to travel faster than the speed of light.
10. Dogs have four legs.
Most people don't take the simulation/hallucination/dream/illusion hypothesis seriously. Just as most people don't take the solipsism hypothesis seriously. It is extremely unlikely that the world we perceive is a simulation/hallucination/dream/illusion given how complex everything is. This is why even I don't take them seriously. Although, Elon Musk seems to think that it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not!
And what about the event that you are an immaterial soul that is experiencing the illusion of being in physical body on a physical planet in a physical universe?
Let's assume that the machine provides us with a simulation of a thinking being, who can reason, cogitate and think. Once we enter into dialogue with the AI, are we having a real discussion or is it a simulation? Within the boundaries of the simulation could the machine be said to have selfhood? If the machine possesses selfhood or 'subjectivity' how does that relate to ours within the boundaries of the simulation? The true nature of the human self arises, therefore, with respect to its relationship to machinery via technology.
There are many theories about selfhood, but nowadays we have to also take into account the question of whether machines can have true selves, and if not, then why not. Why would it be absolutely impossible for a machine to have a self? If we can first answer that question then we could move on to more precisely describing the nature of our own selves. I think, therefore, I am.
The self is a curious thing. It cannot be a thing because if it were it would be becoming a thing, and so not yet a thing; but yet it is me myself that is wondering about this thing called self.
Curious. How can myself not be a thing as I think these things to myself?
Before we might identify such a curious thing, that must be and must become, dont we need to know if there can be any thing at all to know, if we can know anything? If we cant know, how could we know what a self is?
Descartes cogito purports to prove the self exists. But it does no such proof. As to existence, it takes the existence of thinking as its premise, and as I am thinking already means or includes I am it does not prove existence but assumes it.
Instead Descartes really proved that there is one thing we can know. He proved there was knowledge of separately existing things. He proved if I know that I exist, I know the truth, because by knowing that I exist, I am knowing that I am knowing. His proof is better said I exist; therefore I can know.
So he proved knowledge works because while I am in the act of knowing I exist, I am in the act of knowing something I cant deny, so it is true knowledge.
Now, what do I know of this I, this self, this knowing being, beyond the fact that it exists? Nothing! Or at most very little. Descartes thought he could prove it was immaterial substance, like soul. But we still have the same problems identifying something fixed and permanent that might be knowable. I still am becoming. The I in I am becoming is still undone in every changing instant. He can make very few claims about what the I actually is (even though something is knowing something exists), let alone call it soul and think he has said anything at all that we know about it.
When it comes to the question of what is a self, the most we can say to maybe start to construct an answer is that something is knowing that something exists.
Knowing the self is a curious thing.
Science-fiction must have a plot, and the characters as well as the storyline. The OP seems to lack all the essential elements of qualifying for SF.
If you read Hume, he says all human knowledge is either in the domain of "matters of facts" or "relation of ideas - geometry, arithmetic or algebra". In which category of human knowledge do simulation, illusion, hallucination, hypotheses and dreaming belong to?
Ok your point accepted. :cool:
Under what circumstances do humans have illusions, hallucinations, simulations and dreams?
Some mental events seem to be conscious and self-induced nature such as the simulated perceptions, simulated thinking or making up the hypotheses for the scientific experiments in order to seek pleasure or as part of religious ceremonies or to find some scientific truths via coordinated experiments.
However, some mental events are unconscious and out of one's control such as dreaming, hallucinations or illusions. These mental events seem to occur from drug inducements, hypnosis, during sleep or simple misunderstanding and misperception of the world objects, events and structures.
How does one's idea of self relate to the mental events? Do some mental events have any deeper significance in religious meanings or esoteric nature? Have some world famous artists' creations based on this type of mental events?
There is a lot of meat in the OP from the perspective of philosophy of psychology.
Yeah interesting stuff actually.
That would make you an empiricist, not a pragmatist.
Under what basis and evidences, life could be a simulation? Simulation sounds like you have control in starting and ending the simulation, and also being able to rerun the simulation whenever you wanted. Recall when you are playing the Role Playing Computer games? You can control what RPG you want to play, and Exit anytime when you don't want to play any more?
But there are many things in life you have absolutely no control such as being born, ageing and death. How could life be a simulation, if you don't have any control over these things?
You are most welcome. Why would there be no self without sensory perception of the world? If I am unable to touch, smell, hear, taste and see would my sense of self disappear? I doubt it. I would still be able to think and have emotions and have a personality and have values.
Being unable to perceive anything, so not being able to tell what is beneficial or harmful. Not being able to interact with anyone or anything. How do you suspect someone born into that situation would develop? Can you give any hypothetical idea of progression? Can you tell me what thoughts and/or emotions you would have? What values? What you will learn over time?
He is not saying life is simulation. He is saying that civilisation is simulation, because it is such a short time of history compared to the whole universe.
All civilisation will end, and they could end anytime. We could be living in a simulation, and this is his point. It sounds like a metaphor.
Thank you for your confirmation. It's good that we can eliminate simulation from the idea of self and life. We can move on to the other mental states or events such as illusion, dreams, hallucinations and hypotheses for the investigations.
I understand. But that's not the scenario Nemo suggested. Nemo did not say "[I]without[/I] sense perception." Nemo said "[I]prior to[/I] sense perception."
But you don't want to even consider what might happen if someone was born with no sense perception? I don't think speculation is unheard of in philosophical settings. Lacking the ability to learn anything about anything outside of it's own physical being, and lacking even the ability to sense its own physical being, what mental state would it have when born? And what might it come to know, or emotionally feel?
Quoting Nemo2124I'm not sure I understand your meaning. I'm thinking "self" and "mind" are the same. And I do not think either exists prior to any sense perception.
"[The self] is the being that exists in the mind prior to any sense perception", but "there is no self without sense perception of the world". That seems contradictory.
Quoting Patterner
Couldn't it?
Like this:
Quoting https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2020/02/11/do-blind-people-dream-in-visual-images/
Quoting Patterner
Not necessarily because they can't communicate images and we can't communicate it to them, as they have no outside object to reference with a given word. They could make a language to label the things they see but it would be a sort of private language.
Seems rather weak. As best I can tell from that article, the claim is based on detecting activity in the occipital lobe of people born blind. (As well as what may be spurious eye movements.) However - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24498-occipital-lobe:
Regarding the current conversation, the question is, would an infant born without any senses develop a self/mind from the visual, and presumably other, hallucinations? There would not be any reason to suspect phosphenes and whatever corresponding phenomenon might be associated with hearing would match up, as in the siren and hypothetical blob of color moving together. What thoughts, emotions, personality, or values might we expect to develop?
Which is peripheral to the question. People born blind are still capable of the brain activity which sets up visual perception, because people born blind in most cases have issues in their eye apparatus, not in their brain. It is not a matter of whether they do, but that they can; and the scholarly opinion is it is likely that they do. As the article says:
Quoting Patterner
Kant says in the preface (I don't recall whether A or B) of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft that all knowledge starts with experience. That seems to be a fact of life, we do have senses before we form knowledge in our heads. But I am not sure whether he also meant that experience is counterfactual to knowledge. I think it is the debate whether the mind is a blank slate or whether it has innate ideas. If it has innate ideas, perhaps it would be able to think and therefore know, but I am skeptical of whether even then it would have an idea of self, as someone like that would essentially live in a solipsistic world.
That's sounding like word salad to me.
Sorry, there are a lot of ideas there that are compressed into a short paragraph, because of the nature of the topic. In short, I think there are unconscious dynamics involved in thought.
I agree with ChatGPT 4.
But language? Out of the question. If such a person ever came to think at all, they could not interact with anyone else. Wouldn't even know there was anyone else. There would be no need for language, and no need to ever contemplate such a thing.
No doubt I share your sentiment above. But it shows how much--for us--life is valued in what our minds do. Because your hypothetical human's life is being assessed from our perspective, that of a conceited ape, we cannot imagine that her life has value. Yet, on a balance there is likely far more life on earth that meets that description, I.e., no sensation, thoughts about past and future, just being.
Mind is great. But is life without mind nothing? Or is life nature's "greatness," the essence, and our mind and its constructions (including the topic of this discussion, the so called self) incidental?
Quoting ENOAHOn the contrary. I imagine that her life has value. It is she that does not value it, or imagine, or understand these, or any other, concepts, because she does not have the capacity to do so. My consolation is that she does not suffer from her condition, not having any more capacity for suffering than she does for valuing. But I will help keep her alive.
I have never said that. I have never even thought that. What I said is that it would be very difficult for them to live if they lacked the capacity to see, hear, taste, touch and smell from the womb to adulthood.
I think the life of all living things has value. I became a vegan 18 years ago because I didn't want to cause suffering and death to sentient organisms.
That's interesting. Which path led you to this conclusion?
Quoting Truth Seeker
Quoting Truth Seeker
First, I assume the "we" used refers to each of us as individuals. "We" = "I"
Very briefly, I think the reason "we" are not truly praiseworthy or blameworthy, is there is no central being "I" upon which to attach praise or blame. And further, no individual one. I am currently exploring what "I" say or do as ultimately the result, not strictly of the interaction of genes etc. referred to by you, though they play am obvious role. Rather, I am looking at each decision, feeling, action (speech or deed) as a point of intersection of all of the "code" input from "history," and interacting in a sort of dialectic ultimately trigger such reaction at that precise given locus in History.
If I "choose" to rescue a drowning child, all of the Signifiers input into the embodied system of which "I" stand-in as signifier of that body worked through the Dialectic in that moment which resulted in the most fitting reaction being to trigger the Body to such reaction.
If I "choose" to drown a child, the same, mutatis mutandis.
Thus "we" are all ultimately writing History while simultaneously writing each story within the circle of our locus.
My mind is not a physical object. It is a gathering of processes. Regardless of whether it is entirely physically reducible, or if panpsychism plays a role, or whatever other scenario, the physical brain is essential. It is the medium in which those processes take place. Not only is my brain not made of the same particles it was made of when I was born, but some of the processes taking placer in it no longer take place, have been modified, or are new. Still, I am me. I remember specific events, thoughts, sensory input, and emotions from early childhood. "I" have been present all along, through all the changes. This is the nature of "I".
and
- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/a-tour-of-the-growing-brain-complete-with-upside-down-vision
Quoting Patterner
I'm sorry (possibly, "once again"). Of course you're "not correctly understanding." Because I'm not providing all the details. 1. I do not necessarily fully "comprehend" them in a form coherent enough to provoke understanding, 2. I did not think so until recently, but "my position," (only an acceptable label for the sake of discourse) might "appear" (too) unconventional (for Western(?) listeners), or that might be "me" protecting "myself" and we ought to skip to 3, 3. I might be hastily texting and assuming it's as clear on screen as it is in "head."
Quoting Patterner
You can stop right there. That body is the real experience-ing. It's that the "I" and all of the related Narratives is a projection of those Signifiers structuring the Narrative. It's that "I" which we take to be the central agent in the Narrative. But it is just a mechanism satisfying the evolved efficiency of the movement of those projections through Time. These movements are interdependent, not just upon the signifiers moving seemingly "within," an embodied "projector" or Mind, but also upon all signifiers moving through all human minds in History (those signifiers moving closest to an individual locus, having a greater contribution to its projections). Hence when your real body, which we mistake for the name Patterner and their pronouns, rescues a baby, we think, great job, Patterner. But it was the projections constructed by all of us which intersected ultimately triggering its host body (those cells) to act. We are all praiseworthy. Meanwhile those cells "find their reality," or "truth" (those cells really find nothing, not even searching) not in the projections which are constructed out of signifiers and their automous interactions, not in their hollow comings and goings, not in the becoming which is only constructed for meaninf and was never really there; but in the "breathing" the "running" the "diving" the "swimming" the "carrying" and the drive related to bonding with another human, the feelings promoting and conditioning such bodily movements (but not the emotions which are constructed and projected)in the present being which is never constructed in time for meaning, but always only there. Note that much would require further explanation, but I will only elaborate if you so wish.
Quoting Patterner
I'm not sure if you're presenting immediately preceding to say the Body is also becoming, or to say it is always being. If it's the former, that is an excellent point. In that case, I cannot tell you what, if anything, in the "individual" is being. But I do believe its not in the projecting, that it is not mind and its fleeting projections. I believe the only way to access being is by being. In our e.g. of Patterner rescuing the drowning child, their true being is in the items I described above, and not in the meanin ascribed. So, to access true being, take the body's aware-ing focus off the constructions and projections, and on the feelings and actions.
And (I'll stop after this) while what follows is self serving and convenient, it is impossible to argue for or against. 1. Contra-pro: The hypothesis admits that itself is a construction projected but not ever really there. 2. Contra-Contra: it, the hypothesis, would ask you, why you (I.e. we) are insisting on reality being consistent with our Natures, when it already is, to wit, the hypothesis about being; and besides, you're really referring to our constructions and projections when you say our Natures, because the nanosecond that you represent, you are no longer there, but trapped on the road of becoming.
And to tie in to this thread, the "self" the OP had in mind was the constructions and projections, it's true nature being empty, or no nature. The "True" "Self" if there is one (for e.g. if the brain isn't stable) is not an object knowable. It is accessed in being that "self".
Sorry for my late reply. I have been busy with the work, and had no time for reading posts.
It sounds too far-fetched to say that we could be aliens experiencing a simulation of what it is like to be a human on Earth, when you were born from your own parents, and been brought up by them going through the state education system, and been living a normal human life on Earth.
There is no logical, empirical or physical ground for that beliefs, unless you remember something realistic experience of yours such as being thrown into the Earth from the outer space, or landed somewhere on Earth via UFO etc.
The belief could be interesting in SF, but without any evidence or ground, it would run the risk of committing self-deception.
That's cool.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Death cannot be the exit from the simulation at all, because no dead person has ever survived after their deaths. Once a person dies, he / she never comes back to reality or empirical world at all. They just totally cease to exist eternally.
Quoting Truth Seeker
You could try to prove their existences. I doubt anyone can prove it, but it doesn't mean that you cannot prove it. If you still believe in the possibilities of the existence of an infinite number of universes, why not try to prove it first?
Quoting Truth Seeker
You need to read up QM then.
Quoting Truth Seeker
If an infinite number of universes existed, it would be in the mind of the believer. Never in the physical world.
A lot of people believe in either resurrection or reincarnation of souls. I am not convinced that souls exist and I am not convinced that resurrection or reincarnation happens but I could be wrong about these things.
In Catholicism it is believed that a person isn't complete without their body fully restored at the end of days so technically in that view the soul on its own if it exists isn't the whole thing.
As far as the brain alone it has many thoughts and processes that can seem chaotic that needs to be focused in the same direction. Maybe that's the best definition of a self since we aren't simple robots that are perfectly linear?
Personally hope we do survive death mentally and get compensation for all the times our body failed us.lol.
I don't really know where we part ways. It seems you describe things as I see them. You, shall we say, put the puzzle pieces together as I do. But then you see a different picture when the puzzle is assembled.
I'm not sure what your picture is, however, so I'm not sure. Tell me. Serious question, because I just don't know what you're thinking. For you, does what I view as the Self have any value? If you were told it was going to end, because of death, or you were going to develop amnesia, or maybe some scifi thing... Would you have a problem with that? Would it bother you?
Fair enough. I'll do my best to comply because I respect the value in that. Please assure me you don't mean to exclude the imagination.
Also, please keep in mind that even the dogs are permitted the scraps off their masters table.
Hah! Read my seemingly simultaneous reply to you in Captain Homicide confirming just as you said above. Quoting Patterner Nice. True
Quoting Patterner
Hah, again. The answer might offend some very reasonable sensibilities in this forum. And I mean no disrespect because the answer seems (and I assure you with no pretense nor comedy that I believe it does not) to leave the realm of philosophy and enter, at best "mysticism," honestly whatever that is (I wont demean it--its not "mine" with an at worst).
But for what it's worth and briefly, yes and know.
Yes, it would bother "me" because the story is ending, the attachments will fade for those still sharing my narrative, they'll suffer. "I" will end "my" role in "my" becomings in History. But no, because my sentences will continue to be used in building history, if only for the tiny but equally valuable locus of x people around me.
No it would not bother "me" reflecting upon the real me whatever that ultimately is--my dying body--because "I" have the humbling privilege of "knowing" (believing) that my body does not hold any opinion (including by the way my brain). My body is driven to live and my body dies. And though I am, by being, that always presently aware-ing Body, I am only that by being it, and presently. When it ceases either that aware-ing "melts" into nature's aware-ing (which I sense it already is) or it vanishes. Either way, so what? "What" only belongs to I/me".
Quoting Patterner Yes, as I said in the CaptHom thread, you have an understanding which allows you to pose questions which are relatively more free from the fetters of "xyz"
E.g. below. I completely understand that characterization, and I suspect you might even be going beyond simple functionalism(?)
Quoting Patterner
I've had an afterthought (assuming I've even made my (previous) thought clear enough to follow).
I had left it vague, though a hunch had been brewing, just too early to surface when I said:
Quoting ENOAH
Now add:
Or. have I not gone far enough? I hypothesize body is real. But is that, though real to Mind, ultimately also a projection of atoms and energy? Ultimately only that aware-ing is real.
When you die, you are what you always already are, aware-ing being; not an aware-ing Being.
And yes, smells like panpsychism(?). I have not studied that, albeit it has crossed my path. If it is, so be it. I am not favorable to labels when exploring the less established regions of (I guess any discipline) say, philosophy (the latter too, a label which admittedly makes me nervous because it reasonably implies adherence to a certain process which even this very statement may have violated; though I think not).
Now, it unfolds, and I fear, we are not yet equipped to settle there. Alas, at risk to (not of) being taken seriously, What is the nature of the True [and not the so called] self?
The aware-ing of the Universe. Not the dance it projects out of atoms and energy manifesting as "your" body. Not the dance it projects out of signifiers and flesh manifesting as "your" mind. And certainly not the character in that dance manifesting as an "I". Those are projections of what you really are,. What really is, is (just the) aware-ing.
When "I", Enoah die, I don't die. I was never born. I (only always just) am (aware-ing the dance of the universe; and not, as commonly mis-conceived, "through" Enoah. That is "Enoahs" problem, not Enoahs truth. Who's Enoah think Enoahs kidding? Enoahs not aware-ing anything. Enoahs part of the projected dance.)
The true nature of the self; It is in Being, just not human being; it's in (Universal) Being.
Interesting thing is, I'm pretty sure serious so called eastern philosophy have arrived at that construction (e.g. Thathagata/Nirguna Brahman) centuries ago. I'm not sure panpsychism does their interpretations justice; again, I do not know panpsychism.
I am not myself (purporting/pretending to be) "professing" Buddhism or Vedanta, and only incidentally note the parallels--but lest one be inclined to reject an idea simply because of its parallels to what some may naively call mysticism, there are parallels (to the view depicted here regarding mind body and being) in western philosophy from Socrates and Plato to Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and so on. Parallels are inevitable. We write nothing, we think of nothing on our own.
Imagination is a powerful mental event, which is a vital concept for providing us with the answers to the discussions. For example, isn't imagination the source of the idea of Cause and Effect in Hume?
Quoting ENOAH
Of course, we all co-exist in this universe communicating and sharing the ideas and information via language and actions.
We shouldn't stop at hypothetical talks, but once certain presumptions are agreed, then we could move on to the reasoning on the presumptions, arguments and finally the conclusions can be induced from the arguments.
For instance, what does simulations have as the properties? If somethings is a simulation, then it must have a simulator (God?), simulated (people or you), and observers of the simulation. Simulations also can have hypotheses, forecasted processes and the results. Do we have some or all of these elements / properties on the simulation of life in this universe?
I very much appreciate your view. I've been more than somewhat interested in taoism for most of my life. I loved Le Guin's [I]Earthsea[/I] books and the old Kung Fu tv show as a kid. Years later, for whatever reason, I started reading the [I]Tao Te Ching [/i], and immediately recognized it.
I don't know much about Buddhism, but I gather it goes much farther than taoism does in the direction you're speaking of. But I believe both offer paths to a life that is more content and less frantic. Which probably also helps people be physically healthier.
(Joel learned these lessons in the last season of Northern Exposure, and seemed to me to be a much better person for it.)
So I can see a great value in applying aspects of this truth, if it is, indeed, truth, to our lives. Heck, even if it isn't truth, I see the value. (I suppose that's a matter of opinion.)
The problem I have is that taking this view to the logical conclusion, of I can call it that, which you seem to be advocating, is a rejection of our individuality. The universe allows for me, and for you, to exist. Why should we not embrace and explore this? Why reject what is possible? Why try to [I]not[/I] fully embrace that individually?
I would think this attitude would be even more logical if there is a universal consciousness. If a universal consciousness is (what's the right word) focusing itself in one place/time, why would that focused consciousness reject what it, as the universal consciousness, is trying to do? One day, I'll be dead. At which point, I'll, shall we say, melt back into the universal consciousness. What would have been accomplished by having tried to deny the individual point of acute consciousness when it was possible?
And what would have been the point if there is [I]not[/I] a universal consciousness, and this is it?
Philosophy doesn't dirty its hands doing tests. That's the job of science.
Philosophy inspects the problems, investigates, analyses, reasons, argues, criticises and come to the conclusions.
I can't doubt it has structured the Foundations of my constructions, though I have not picked up anything
Taoist for some time. You mention Lao Tze. You may be getting to this as I read on, but the Zhuangzi are (I can't think of a worthy adjective) insightful. Used to be called Chuang Tzu and I bet there are scholarly translations from that time still in use (Watson? I think).
Quoting Patterner
I have to say, in fairness to both Taoism and Buddhism I am far from an "adherent" nor "auhority". I was "challenged" in another thread(?) when I spoke freely about Jesus but outside of church orthodoxy, and you could say the same about taoism, and Buddhism for me. They are building blocks in what this locus in History is currently projecting.
The primary reason you're right that B goes farther in this (my) direction than T, is T is not a good fit with western philosophy at the level of discourse (and though my loose speech may not suggest it Kant, Hegel, Husserl, etc are also blocks; as are so many without my awareness. I believe I should read Merleau-Ponty, for instance but haven't gotten around to it. And Rorty! No doubt they have constructed my thinking.) Sorry my autobiographical points are to illustrate that I have sensed some--no doubt genius--"philosophers" like to insist upon what I see as "institutional" roots of an idea for it to deserve a hearing. I think almost the contrary. Of course we build off of all that is before us and should endeavor to know. And I admire the knowledge of those who like to root their ideas in authority. I just think "freedom" has its function. Ironic, when there is no real freedom. I know. Truth is, both expressing and following these hypotheses places you in paradox. People critique that (you are contradicting etc) and they're right. But it's because they haven't considered that being in the paradox is almost the closest you can get to an empirical observation (hence Zen Koan, but I'm so off topic).
Quoting Patterner
And an aspect of these hypotheses is that truth is ultimately what is functional. By the way, accepting that Mind is Fictional (bluntly) seems scary, nihilistic, absurd. But it is very functional. I could fill up a page. But at least, remember, mind is Fictional, you are real. It's just that you're not mind. Sounds "religious" but, you're better. Though mind is neither good nor bad but self defines good and bad.
Quoting Patterner
Nice. I am not advocating for the rejection of our individuality. Cherish it. Great has come out of the constructions, love has grown far beyond its organic root. Shelters have become great art, and so too is the individual a great thing. And why should knowing you are the breath of Nature and the aware-ing of the universe make you sad about your Subject. It is a character for you to understand microscopically if you try. And I am not saying I have mastered that or even remotely approached it. But I do believe from a microscopic analysis of your character as if to master a role in a movie, you will be delighted to find that things like peace and compassion arise.
Quoting Patterner
No, I think you are bang on friend. There is a universal consciousness. Move mountains with our special tool, and play your role (reminding me of the Bhagavad Gita--also, turns up out of nowhere without having thought about it; and they say mind isn't autonomous--joke) but know that you are universal consciousness.
You listed illusion as one of the possibilities for the idea of Self. I think it is somewhat meaningful concept. In my time of childhood, I had been living with the 100% of illusions on the world, life, other people and the Self.
I believed Santa Claus was real.
I believed people live forever.
I believed if people die, then they come back to life in a few days of rest, after seeing the same action movie actor being killed in a movie, then a few weeks later, he was back in another movie fighting the gangsters.
I believed that old folks are born old, young folks like me are born young, and it will be like that forever.
I believed that my parents might be God, because they could buy me nice things.
I believed that the world is the size of my town where I lived.
I believed that when I am asleep, the world disappears, and I am the centre of the universe.
... etc etc.
Those were some of my childhood illusions, which were all proven to be false, as I was growing up. I am not sure what other illusions I might still have.
Thank you very much for sharing your childhood illusions with us. I didn't have any of your illusions. I was kidnapped when I was four years and five months old. I have experienced all kinds of horrors that I am not going to give you the gory details of as I don't want to traumatise you.
According to Hinduism, the entire universe is an illusion. I am not convinced that Hinduism is true. I am an agnostic atheist materialist monist hard determinist.
Might I suggest, respectfully, the illusion that you might not have any illusions?
Quoting Truth Seeker
Perhaps you are correct and my read is deficient. But I think for (the) "Hinduism" (you are likely referencing), the Universe is real, but all which we conventionally experience is (clouded by) projections of that Reality and not the Reality Itself, hence the "illusion."
- quoting from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(religion)
I have never been kidnapped. So it is hard to imagine how it would be like to go through experience like that.
I have not read much in Religion, so the Hindu system is unfamiliar to me. Would it be similar to Buddhism? I recall some Buddhism scripture saying "Seeing colour is seeing emptiness" or something like that.
Sure, I am not ruling out possibility of illusions in life and the world.
Two questions come up to mind.
1. If it is a fiction, then why people have been deceived by it for so long time? 5000 years? Surely it takes 5 minutes for ordinary folks to know it is a fiction.
2. If it is a fiction, then what is a philosophical point of it?
Hindus believe their holy books are true. Just as Christians, Muslims and Jews believe their holy books to be true. Only the nonbelievers disbelieve the holy books of all religions. The holy books of all religions are self-contradictory and mutually contradictory. I have studied most religions.
Isn't there a whole branch of philosophy called the Philosophy of Religion?
Most "Hindus" would say, [and I currently generally agree,] that vis a vis the only ultimate reality, everything projected into the world [as a representation of/by Mind] is ultimately a fiction and yet we have been deceived by it. And not just for a few millenia, but since the dawn of human history [as opposed to prehistoric human animals]
Chet, if consistent, would have to be the first to admit that. Which should leave us wondering as to what purpose he thinks his taking at all serves.
Knowing the self is a curious thing.
Fire Ologist
We only know the self inasmuch as we have a sense of self, and a consequent idea that there it is an entity with an identity. When we try to determine the nature of that identity it eludes our grasp.
If these "hypotheses" are untestable then not only can they not be proven, but even their likelihood cannot be established, so of what possible significance could they be to our lives? Even if they were true what would that change? On what basis are they even interesting? Why should be waste any time or energy concerning ourselves with them?
That is true when trying to grasp the identity of anything. Everything is moving.
So Im not disagreeing with you, but I would not conclude from the difficulty of holding an identity fixed and unchanging that there is no self to seek to identify.
Right, I agree the identity of anything is as difficult to grasp as our own and I haven't suggested the self is not real eitheras I said before we have a sense of self, and a consequent idea of it. That it is not determinable does not entail that it is not real, although we might say that it cannot be as fully real to us as our experience is. That said, experience itself (:wink:) is determinable only in terms of identity, and anyway what do we mean by 'real', so where does that leave us?
My mistake. I agree with you here - my sense of what I call self is a sense of something that can be distinguished in experience.
Quoting Janus
I agree here too. It is a pickle to be a real self that cant be by itself, fixed and distinct as everything real is moving and dissolving any attempt at staying a unified identity.
We selves are living paradoxes.
And real - I use this to say whether when we agree, we are agreeing not just because of each others words, but because of the paradox itself that we both now look at and discuss.
The paradox of being a human: the self is, AND the self cannot be. Or with more texture: my sense of self is a sense of something that is already sensing and therefore, is real, AND, nothing I sense has a clear enough structure to be identifiable to be known as real, such as a self.
Quoting Janus
a "sense" of self. What if it's stop right there? I don't like the word "illusion" but it's being used in this thread. So, if you replace "sense" with "illusion", we need not proceed to the equally illusory "idea that there is an entity with an (equally illusory) identity." There is an illusion of self.
Quoting Janus
Correct. Statements about entities with identities, and mine above, attempting to qualify that statement. But why stop there? With the exception of empirical science, which operates under the hypothesis that its method of testing yield truths in the phenomenal world*,
*and if empirical science or conventional activities were to claim, or if we should conclude on our own, that their processes yield ultimate truths about the real world existing independently of the world projected by mind, then 1. That is an untested hypothesis, 2. Our hypotheses even about the so called real world remains untested.
In a word, if it's anything but hypotheses we are after, in every academic discipline, art, and day to day activities, we have a problem
Quoting Janus
Quoting Fire Ologist
I agree. There is no being in Mind's projections. There is only the movements of becoming and the concomitant temporary settlements (beliefs), mechanisms creating all of our illusions.
.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Fire Ologist
I agree with both of you on those points, partly to my surprise. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your views (I understand your views differ from one another on detail too). I wonder if having read my comments, you are surprised I agree with your statements?
It is a necessarily twisted topic. (Jokingly) Its as if someone set up a firewall to prevent its penetration.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes. That actually encapsulates my beliefs too.
Paradox of being human. The Fictional Mind thinks it is real, functions in knowing, but has no access to Reality. The Real Body is real aware-ing, and has no concern for knowing. The knower is ineluctably making up the knowledge. As soon as it gets close to reality, it is blocked by paradox.
The self is... the Body.
The self [which] cannot be...is the Subject, yet
Only the self which cannot be desires to be.
Because the self that is, is being, and only being.
Distinguishing beliefs from the objects the beliefs are about (such as a self), and distinguishing these from illusions are all just illusory distinctions not to be believed and therefore you give me nothing to go on.
Quoting ENOAH
I think that is positive wisdom. The same things show up on threads about truth about objectivity about self about reality and appearance about being and becoming, because these are all twisted together. The only way to ponder about objectivity is to posit a mind or a self, but the only way to posit a self is to be able to distinguish identity at all, and the only way to talk about identity is with metaphysics about bodies, which becomes a battle between being and becoming, which leads to question language and logic, etc
We need to settle something, but we cant. That is our predicament.
I see enough content in all of these areas to make the struggle positive, meaning, productive of truth and wisdom.
Quoting ENOAH
Its not a fiction. The mind is certainly real. I just dont see why we have to deny what we throw in each others faces over and over again in this forum. The irony, the paradox, of philosophizing about mind as a fiction. The mind is a chameleon, a whisper of a fleeting thing, sure, but for flash instant moments, as real as anything else.
Quoting ENOAH
That is true when it comes to almost everything upon first impression, and maybe somethings forever, but now that you know exactly what you just said, now that you that, dont you know something? Truth? The paradox IS!
Quoting ENOAH
The self may be a body. Maybe it is an immaterial function of the body; maybe a soul; maybe a type of body we havent discovered yet - but the self that says self to other bodies IS. Self is still something distinguishable from the liver, the lungs and other parts, if it is body at all.
But regardless of what the self is, the paradox is that it certainly exists, and certainly cannot exist. If we reduce the self to body, then we would have to reduce the body to not existing. And Im not saying that body doesnt exist (that has its own twists and paradoxes). But the self cant seem to exist, yet it certainly does exist as it posits knowledge and wonders if this self knows at all.
Its a mess, I agree. But I see no need to conclude what is illusion and what isnt. You cant call anything an illusion without a reality stick to measure it. Thats the self to me - the measure of reality. We have faulty measuring sticks, and the stick itself alters reality, but then, we are also aware enough about reality to see the measuring stick is faulty and interferes with the reality it pursues. No need to dispense with any part of this as mere illusion.
They have no significance. Even if they were true, we wouldn't know it. I found it interesting to think about these unlikely scenarios but that doesn't mean everyone will find it interesting. We shouldn't waste time and energy concerning ourselves with them.
Quoting ENOAH
If all the religions are fiction as you claim, then why do they keep believing in them for thousands of years?
Quoting Truth Seeker
Philosophy of Religion doesn't deal with the legitimacy of the claims made by the religion. Philosophy of Religion is mainly interested in the linguistic and conceptual analysis of the religious scriptures and expressions.
But if you just label all the religions are fictions, then people might wonder what was the point of you even mentioning them in your posts.
The believers of a particular religion believe their religion is true. They also spread their beliefs to their children. There is often a steep penalty against leaving the religion one is born in. For example, leaving Islam is punishable by death. This is how religions survive for thousands of years.
Quoting Corvus
Whether or not I believe in them, religions exist and billions of people believe in them and live their lives according to them and happily kill others for them.
I don't know anything about Islam, Hindu, Buddhism or Christianity, but I used to think there might be something that is more than what non-believers see and believe.
Quoting Truth Seeker
It seems to be sure that one thing common in religions is that it is beyond the rational thinking system. You kept brining in religions into your threads, so I was expecting that you might be saying something more significant than religions are fiction. Claiming that religions are fiction without solid arguments has no significance in philosophical discussions.
How could religions be true when they contradict themselves and contradict each other and contradict what we know from evidence-based research? Please see https://www.evilbible.com and https://skepticsannotatedbible.com
Quoting Fire Ologist
This is not intended to be remotely flippant, but, yah, they are all just illusory distinctions and therefore no one needs anything to go on. That is our condition. The truth isn't staring us in the face nor as plain as the nose on my face. The truth is--it's comical--(oops, note that I am speaking with the passion of one who thinks they have discovered something and not--no matter appearances--as one who thinks themselves an authority; which in the end, again highlights our (seemingly) inescapable "predicament," the irony, comical)...the truth isn't those things, it is my face and my nose.
We don't even have to "know" this, we are this. That's how (and you raise this appropriately when you ask (in another thread? (apologies, this thread)) how can we reference the world to one another and denied its objectivity?) we are aware of the real world; not by knowing it. By being it.
And yet we toil with concepts and with words, why? Because that's the structure and "nature" of the projections. They are dynamic and autonomous. So called we, you and I cannot help but share so called objects. It's a built in desire leading to the prosperity history enjoys today. I say celebrate that and carry on. Out of such sharing came tge Eiffel tower, Emancipation, Peace, Love, and the Mona Lisa. Yes, too, war, bigotry, and WMDs. But difference too is a mechanism of the movements of history. We cannot share one without sharing the other. Dialectic.
Anyway, the Body, the Real world which we are, I suspect is also One. Aware-ing Universe. But that, as you imply in your poetico-logical rhetoric above, is just Mind's illusion.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes. And though we diverge, because otherwise how the hell are we going to construct history together? (Don't cringe, I mean a locus of history as small as your or my Narratives). It is our seemingly iron strong consistency here which is most relevant to the OP. You have, in my mind, answered the question with that statement.
From of that River, a billion tributaries flow.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Compellingly enough put that you opened my mind up to how, I think, I can agree.
Again, I could explain it a lifetime but I'll be deliberately vague (hope can be cowardly).
Mind is "becoming," we agree.
As real as anything else, I'll respectfully disregard as your using a manner of speaking. Why? Because I say everything else we can know is Fictional because it is projected to the aware-ing Body by mind.
But, for flashing moments real. Yes. It is Real, in the present, when it affects body into feeling or action. But only in that instant, and not in the preceding or proceeding projections. And sadly or happily, "we" move right along with the projections.
Why can "Mind's processes" be real in those present instances where it affects the body? Because Mind has its first cause and final effect in its natural source. Put very simply, the projections are images stored in memory (first cause). The "destination" is as code to trigger Body to a conditioned response, feeling or action,(final effect) followed .
Quoting Fire Ologist and, therefore, you give me nothing to go on.
(As Obiter Dictum: I'd guess mind may have been silent enough for your body to have attuned to the present at the nanosecond which gave rise to that exclamation. But I won't go there)
Quoting Fire Ologist
Self (the one that speaks and is spoken of), to me, is neither body nor body part.
There is no "self" of the Body. There is aware-ing Organism, aware-ing it's present doings whatever they be, x-ings.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Again, where it matters most. Full agreement.
The Subject, the Self of Mind exists, but as a projection (you may reject second half)
That Self cannot exist in the present, it can never know nor be tge real being, the aware-ing Body, the presumed "real self" because it moves incessantly away from it leaving projections for the latter to "suffer" or
"enjoy"
Quoting Fire Ologist
And here again our tributaries flow their separate ways, still drawing from the same river.
Enjoy!
Quoting Truth Seeker
The problem is, like philosophy, science, social sciences, and humanities, some of it inevitably reveals itself to be fiction, some has a much longer life span. Even math. 1+1=2 will likely last for eons. Sure, I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but I can at least imagine some genius will come along one day in "human history" and change the conventional thinking.
The current western narrative at least focuses on the contradictions in religion, signifying a turn in the Dialectical battle in which Science has only recently made headway, but continues to face threats (Fanaticism, Theocracolies, Fundamentalism and Traditionalism).
But I, a single lone random individual, am amazed at the parallel truths "expressed" by so called religion and "discovered" by philosophy grade metaphysics and morality. These parallels are found in so called religious concepts since the dawn of civilization, but certainly since the last half of the first millennium BCE, and some of them not reaching western philosophy to a similarly rich degree of analysis until post Descartes.
Manner of speaking. Hmm. Yes we cannot speak at all without the real. You said becoming is real. You said mind is becoming. So you posited is as if there was a real. So you are speaking, in a manner if speaking, are you not?
Why agree with my words? They are illusory secretions of illusions. Yet you said agree.
If you agree, you assert an object that is not an illusion. Youve said you have something there to agree with. Namely, me.
This is why when talking about objectivity, you end up talking about the self, leading you to identity.
But by now we are way down the path of the real, as much as we might temper this motion of new distinctions with illusion.
Quoting ENOAH
Dont you see? If only for a flashing, fleeting spark of a moment there is a mind, if our whole lives were just one flashing instant, in the grand scheme of things, this may as well be an eternity, for there is a real SPARK. I dont care how short it flashes - I saw it flash. I am it, or it is with me, or it makes me as I vanish, but by then its too late - the real has parts - me now with it.
Quoting ENOAH
You may as well be talking psychology. This is full of this is real, and this is not, and that exists, and that does not speak. You refute the ubiquity of the illusion by trying to explain all for human minding, is illusion. Mind and objectivity as illusion is impossible to speak. By speaking, real objects must be distinguished or else we cannot move to the end of the sentences.
Illusion, yes, keep it close to your mind, as at least a tool, as you experience becoming and sift through the darkness; but denying the objective entirely? The flashes that prompt distinctions. Why speak of what you know with so many words and distinctions, if you always and only know the same illusion?
Id rather you keep speaking, but I dont think you need to forget objectivity to retain illusion, and in fact, I dont think you can retain an illusion, without objectivity.
Really the body is the objectivity - it is prior to the mind, the thing that makes illusion out of this objectivity. Either can only be discussed, retaining both.
Quoting ENOAH
Id say self is a paradox - both part, and identity. Identity is also paradox (in any thing, any unified thing, identity remains becoming, though it remains distinct, though it becomes new, but a new unity, but still changing - a paradox.). So the self IS, a paradox that is built on a paradox.
Quoting ENOAH
The self ONLY exists in the present, immediately undone by each new instant. This is the life of becoming, and how short lived, but real, is the self. In the present only - never needing any memory nor any purpose to simply be, but then, become again anew, undone again, to be born as firmly as always in the present self.
We once again see the exact same thing, from such opposite directions, in such contrasting words, but overlapping precisely in other moments.
I dont see it as a fork in the road, you going one way, me another. I think we are standing around a table looking at the same object from two different sides, each conjecturing or dabbling in the other viewpoint.
And maybe that is expressing the closest approach within "reason" i.e., before the inevitable firewalls: paradox, contradiction (inevitable; not the kind from poor reasoning) absurdity . That each of us is constructing/expressing the same Truth(s) in (varying degrees of(?)) approximations, (as if/because) from different viewpoints.
By the way, lest you thought otherwise, I wasn't disregarding the statement about as real as everything as a "manner of speaking," in any way demeaning the statement. I was assuming, as you might note from my return to an edited version, that you meant "as real as everything" as a phrase like "might as well" or "better than nothing."
I know. Youve had plenty of opportunity to pillory my viewpoint, but keep things cordial and conversational anyway. And Ive probably asked for a good pillorying. Because you are a closet believer in the self and objectivity. :joke:
Quoting ENOAH
Contradiction doesn't mean it has to be rejected out right. Contradiction means it could be further investigated and analysed. Recall Hegel? Without contradictions, there is no progress or understanding in the universe.
Religions have their own truth system, which is different level from truth system based on rationality. There is possibility that human reason is not powerful enough to perceive and understand all the existence in the universe.
You said that you have been reading much and all the religious books. I am sure you would understand my points.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say I've been reading much, and especially not all the religious books. But I had already agreed with you about a rich analysis being needed before making any final judgment on
religion.
I agree. It is futile.
Most religions rely on faith instead of evidence. Buddhism is an exception in that Buddha's original teachings are based on what is empirical.
In that case, truth or falsity don't belong to religious domain. Rejecting religions solely on the basis of lack of truth is not reasonable.
Quoting Truth Seeker
Most religions including Buddhism have been for the believers' wishing good fortune, prosperity, good health, good luck and better afterlife and rebirth after their deaths, rather than academic or philosophical debates on the universe or self.
Some folks and authorities have been using and abusing the religions for justifying their wrong doings and forcing the other folks into irrational actions and practices. These facts are not faults of the religions, but the people and authorities.
On the contrary, religions claim to be true. "Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." - John 14:6, The Bible (New International Version).
Quoting Corvus
No, Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths and they are based on empirical observations. Please see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/buddhism/beliefs/fournobletruths_1.shtml The original Buddhism did not have any Gods. Also, Buddha was agnostic about the existence of souls. He said, ""Don't blindly believe what I say. Don't believe me because others convince you of my words. Don't believe anything you see, read, or hear from others, whether of authority, religious teachers or texts. Don't rely on logic alone, nor speculation. Don't infer or be deceived by appearances. Find out for yourself what is true and virtuous." This is the total opposite of other religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam where skeptical enquiry is prohibited and adherents are required to have blind faith in the religious books.
Also, Buddhism teaches the concept of Anatta which is the doctrine of "non-self" that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon. While Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach that we are immortal souls which are resurrected by God after we die and Hinduism teaches that we are immortal souls which reincarnate according to karma after we die. So, religions are unavoidable in a discussion of the true nature of the self.
You are talking about totally different kind of truth which is in the Bible, i.e. the religious truth. It is not the factual or rational or even empirical truth.
Of course they talk about truth. But what does it mean? It doesn't mean anything. Their truth is not the truth the non-believers know as truth.
Quoting Truth Seeker
There are so many different schools of Buddhism. They all claim totally different things.
Most Buddhists I have met talked about good luck, good health, good fortunes, and rebirthing to richer and more successful folks in their next life. Nothing else.
Truth is truth. There is no separate religious truth and factual truth or rational truth or empirical truth. Religions claim a lot of things are true e.g. the Biblical God created the world in six days.
Quoting Corvus
I am talking about what Buddha taught. Not what different schools of Buddhism teach.
I don't agree with you. Their truth is not philosophical or empirical truth.
Quoting Truth Seeker
It doesn't matter what Buddha taught. We notice how the historical buddhism has been, and is now in reality.
That's fine. I have not asked anyone to agree with me about anything.
Quoting Corvus
It matters to me what Buddha taught. I agree with the concept of Anatta which is the doctrine of "non-self" that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon.
It's because I'm atonal, mixing with an arid humor.
Were all fumbling around in the same cave. With some good company.
Well, if one accepts that human memories are encoded in the synaptic weightings of neural networks, then it doesn't make much sense to think that we have memories from before our conception - when our neural networks hadn't begun to develop.
There are lots of reasons to "say it's unlikely", if one is informed about the nature of human minds.