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Ok... I've recently come upon a very important subject, that of the "self".

Now I'm not a philosopher, and I haven't read enough on the subject but there are lots of very smart people here... and I thought you might help me out, and perhaps find out some new things in the process.

I'm looking at a possibility... a very crazy possibility... that there simply is no such thing as a "self", a permanent entity behind all our thoughts and actions. Everything that I think of as "me", simply isn't there. It's just a concept.

Still with me? This thread is not for entertainment. I've come accross some interesting discussions all over the 'net but often times philosophers and/or philosophy subjects are mentionned that I don't understand very well.

This could be a fun ride.

So to get started:

I don't wish to debate/research the subject of "no self" quite yet.

Right now, I'm looking at the subject of causality. I was surprised to hear about David Hume, and the idea that in fact causality if something we superimpose on top of reality ( Causation ). That's not too hard to accept, just I never had thought about it.

Causality isn't there anywhere in the real world. Only we look at two things and say one is the cause for the other.

I still don't get this one fully, anyone willing to dig into this or explain it to me in plain english?

I recommend Thomas Metzinger:

You could introduce yourself to Hume in a reverse engineering sort of fashion, via Meillassoux: http://books.google.com/books?id=SnMb9-M...me&f=false

Hume talked about the problem of induction which is related, in that you can't tell whether one thing happens after another because the first caused the second or if they just coincidentally have been happening in that sequence a lot of times. Maybe the next time something different would happen. Technically this issue undermines all (or almost all, cogito's excluded?) knowledge, in that we can't know 100% that it's true, but nonetheless if you think pragmatically, our knowledge seems to be "working" so perhaps that is good enough?

About whether there is a self, I think philosophers/scientists universally agree that there is nothing aside from matter (maybe saying this is controversial haha), so our sense of agency must be some sort of illusion. I personally think that the self and that we made choices is something that we apply after the fact, using a "self-concept", which is not an agent but content, to decide why we did things. It's hard to phrase this sort of thing without making paradoxes about what is applying things to what, but regardless.

If you do want to read about this, Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who deals with this sort of thing and writes pretty accessible books.

nest0r Wrote:I recommend Thomas Metzinger:

You could introduce yourself to Hume in a reverse engineering sort of fashion, via Meillassoux: http://books.google.com/books?id=SnMb9-M...me&f=false

Yo that was crazy interesting. This video version is even better showing the slides if I can add :
http://youtu.be/G2GC3Rux0Yo

Very interesting concept

Thanks, I was originally going to post the two part version but thought the single part was the same version, didn't realize it had the slides in the frame.

Here's Metzinger on neuroscience/meditation/manipulating self-models: http://books.google.com/books?id=dxNPa41...on&f=false

Metzinger reminds me of John Malkovich. ^_^

“He confronted me with an intriguing idea: Could deep meditation be the process, perhaps the only process, in which human beings can sometimes turn the global background into the gestalt, the dominating feature of consciousness itself? This assumption would fit in nicely with an intuition held by many, among others Antoine Lutz, namely that the fundamental subject/object structure of experience can be transcended in states of this kind.

Interestingly, this high-amplitude oscillatory activity in the brains of experienced meditators emerges over several dozens of seconds. They can’t just switch it on; instead, it begins to unfold only when the meditator manages effortlessly to “step out of the way.” The full-blown meditative state emerges only slowly, but this is exactly what the theory predicts: As a gigantic network phenomenon, the level of neural synchronization underlying the unity of consciousness will require more time to develop, because the amount of time required to achieve synchronization is proportional to the size of the neural assembly — in meditation, an orchestrated group of many hundreds of million nerve cells must be formed. The oscillations also correlate with the meditators’ verbal reports of the intensity of the meditative experience — that is, oscillations are directly related to reports of intensity. Another interesting finding is that there are significant postmeditative changes to the baseline activity of the brain. Apparently, repeated meditative practice changes the deep structure of consciousness. If meditation is seen as a form of mental training, it turns out that oscillatory synchrony in the gamma range opens just the right time window that would be necessary to promote synaptic change efficiently.

To sum up, it would seem that feature binding occurs when the widely distributed neurons that represent the reflection of light, the surface properties, and the weight of, say, this book start dancing together, firing at the same time. This rhythmic firing pattern creates a coherent cloud in your brain, a network of neurons representing a single object — the book — for you at a particular moment. Holding it all together is coherence in time. Binding is achieved in the temporal dimension. The unity of consciousness is thus seen to be a dynamic property of the human brain. It spans many levels of organization, it self-organizes over time, and it constantly seeks an optimal balance between the parts and the whole as they gradually unfold. It shows up on the EEG as a slowly evolving global property, and, as demonstrated by our meditators, it can be cultivated and explored from the inside, from the first-person perspective.”

Edit: As far as the agency thing goes, with models such as Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace, it's not an issue: http://www.unicog.org/main/pages.php?page=Consciousness (Or more accessibly: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene0...index.html - See the section “A Global Neuronal Workspace”.)

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Very interesting!

My only issue with Metzinger's talk is the assumption that the window can not be seen ("too fast, too robust"), because spirituality traditions for centuries past have pointed at the state of "no self", or "satori", as something that is in fact within the reach of human consciousness. I will just for now, not believe, but have faith that the "realized/awakened" people are not all liars or deluded, and that it is possible, and continue to question that assumption that the window can not be seen or experienced.

Amset Wrote:in that we can't know 100% that it's true, but nonetheless if you think pragmatically, our knowledge seems to be "working" so perhaps that is good enough?

Ok is that the central thesis of Karl Popper summarized as "Certainty is fragile, and possibility is bulletproof." ?

Haha. I just copy and paste. I only half grasp it. What does certainty is fragile mean? What does it mean to say that nothing can be 100% certain? Because you assume that at some point in time it may be disproved (as often happen)? Is that the same idea as "you can't disprove something that doesn't exist, or can't be found" (like the flying spaghetti monster) or is that latter one another philosophy concept?

I'm reading about induction.

What about this I had a reflection yesterday: I can't say that x is the cause for y because the only reality is this very moment (past and future are now concepts, and only real in the form of thoughts, memories).. in this very moment I can not tell yet if X will be a cause to an effect since that would be divination. I can look at Y and look back through memory (not this present reality, thus looking back through an impression of what was, but that may be taking it a little beyond the main idea..).. and then make a link, which is anyway an interpretation.

Ahh I see now the interpretation may be so common, that you could say it is a probability, is that it? It's very probable that this very real Y in this moment, is the effect of a X that *was* (no longer real though). It is probable, but not certain.

Does that make any sense?

Ufff I can't read so many books but I'll try to read the Meillassoux chapter. It's just that some Wikipedia pages are not very descriptive. Is there like a philosophy database site with detailed summaries of all the concepts ?

@Fabrice

I don't think Metzinger believes that the self is a permanent, immutable, absolute illusion, but just the opposite, that it's a transient and malleable model that can be made opaque rather than transparent. My impression is that he's one of the folks like Damasio who are bringing a cognitive scientific understanding of such processes that corroborates ideas from thousands of years ago. I think Damasio and the Dalai Lama collaborated on a book or something?

I think this sort of thing is what Metzinger was getting at in the above quote on meditation.

Meillassoux has interesting ties to this topic in that he promotes a view that we can understand reality or whathaveyou without being constrained by the self/subject/etc. In doing so, he goes after folks like Kant and Hume in various ways. Totally blew my mind when I read that book, and a lot of others were electrified by his arguments when the English translation was released relatively recently. There's a French version as well.

Here's a couple sites:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Mult...afts_model ← Sort of like Wikipedia, but usually I think the authors themselves contribute (Dennett for this entry, or Metzinger for this one: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Self_models)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/

Here's another quote:

“There is, however, a second possibility and it is of much greater philosophical interest. In section 6.4.2 we saw that the human self-model is interestingly characterized by exhibiting a continuum ranging from full transparency to opacity, typically ascending from the sensory aspects of bodily self-awareness to purely cognitive levels of self-reference and reflexive self-consciousness. Try to imagine a PSM that was fully opaque. Imagine a system that all other aspects held constantis characterized by the fact that constraint 7, the transparency constraint, is not satisfied for its self-model at all. Earlier processing stages would be attentionally available for all partitions of its conscious self-representation; it would continuously recognize it as a representational construct, as an internally generated internal structure. The SMT makes the following prediction: Phenomenologically, this system would not have a self, but only a system-model. It would not instantiate selfhood. Functionally, it would still possess all the computational and informational advantages associated with having a coherent self-model, at the price, however, of a somewhat higher computational load. In addition, it would have to find a new solution to the problem of not getting paralyzed by an infinite loop of self-representation, to the problem of avoiding an infinite regression in the absence of transparent primitives. But possibly it could still operate under a centered model of reality, even if this model were not phenomenologically centered anymore. What the neurobiological characteristics of such a system would be is presently unclear. However, it may be interesting to note a specific phenomenological analogy.

There is one type of global opacity that we discussed in our last neurophenomenological case study, namely, the lucid dream (see section 7.2.5). In the lucid dream the dreamer is fully aware that whatever she experiences is just the content of a global simulation, a representational construct. It is also plausible to assume that there are state classes in the phenomenology of spiritual or religious experience resembling this configuration but only during the waking state. Now imagine a situation in which the lucid dreamer would also phenomenally recognize herself as being a dream character, a simulated self, a representational fiction, a situation in which the dreaming system, as it were, became lucid to itself. This is the second possibility for selfless consciousness under the theoretical framework proposed here.

I am, of course, well aware that this second conception of selflessness directly corresponds to a classical philosophical notion, well-developed in Asian philosophy at least 2500 years ago, namely, the Buddhist conception of ‘enlightenment’. However, let us adopt a metaphysically neutral terminology here and call this phenomenological state class ‘system consciousness’.”

Edit: By the way, from a more modern sociocultural perspective, are you already aware of stuff like that well-regarded documentary Century of the Self?

Lots of interesting thoughts the past several years on this topic of the modern Western notion of the self and how it came to be, so to speak.

Here's that Damasio/Dalai Lama book: http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Cros...1559391278 - Guess I linked that before already. But it's interesting, Damasio's a smart neuroscientist that focuses a lot on the self in their work.

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@nestOr

Yeah that is very interesting, saw your message after posting.

As I read more recently about the actual moment of awakening in Theravada literature I was very surprised how technical it is. In the Theravada Path of Insight, the moment one sees the "window" instead of the content would be called stream entry. It is the "1st path" and a very important one, but not even the end of the road.

It is physically experienced as a cessation of the senses (both physical and thought processes), and so it is like a micro sleep (the latter already scientifically studied, I think). It lasts just a brief moment. During this blip out and in existence of consciousness, nothing can be remembered, so the meditator would know something happened because they are observing moment to moment and felt a before and after and some sort of a loss of continuity. I guess that makes sense if one experiences the window instead of the content, that the content disappears for a brief moment.


I am looking at the possibility that the cogito "I think therefore I am", presupposes an "I", is in fact incorrect, and that it is *possible* for there to be thinking without an agent, except perhaps awareness itself. I thought I had read somewhere that philosophers have criticized the cogito... has "think, therefore am" ever been seriously considered in philosophy?

Had this reflection recently: everytime I witness a thought, it is usually at least halfway through, or I just remember having had one. NEVER have I been able to witness the creation of a thought. How could I? If I could, then that means I would have to be able to know the thought before it arises. Now it is entirely possible that there is something faster, subtler than ordinary consciousness, which creates the thought, which is then experienced by my sluggish-slow-as-molasses consciousness. In which case it doesn't matter because the subjective experience is the same: everytime I attribute a thought to "I", it's B.S., the thought just happened. Without an "I" there would still be something alongside a distinct me, simply thinking arises out of conditions, as does bodily feelings, emotions, hearing, seeing... hmm... I guess where I'm trying to go is: if I truly do not control my thoughts, then there is no "I" to drive them.

Metzinger points out that "I" seems to be an illusion based on a conglomerate of thoughts and bodily sensations, instead of an actual separate entity. This perfectly matches the first stages of the Vipassana insights ("body and mind", "cause and effect").

So even if it is an illusion, even if one accepts that one doesn't control the thought stream, but rather than things just arise out of conditions without a doer... even so one still feels everything revolves around the "I". Why why why?? :p


I'm still confused about the whole causality thing. Especially determinism, very very boring subject somehow to me, not sure why. Too much variants of it I guess.

Still very confused about the presence or absence of free will, within the theory that there is no need for an "I" to do the thinking. One can see easily that most choices we make and attributes to ourselves, arise out of conditions. One never makes a choice based on knowledge one doesn't have, for example. You don't choose to eat sushi if you never heard of it. So assuming you have free will to act upon a set of known things, and seeing as the intention itself arises so fast you can't know it before it is... then there is no free will.

Hmm... perhaps there is no free will for "I". Without "I", there can be free will. Or maybe "free will" just only makes senses with an "I"? I wish I was better at philosophy chances are some of these things are already self evident or plain wrong. :/

When you figure this one out, RevTK will become a pilgrimage site.

It is the most fundamental question in Buddhism. I don't have the sharpest mind, so formulas that stimulate the intellect don't work well for me. They say the self exists, and at the same time doesn't exist. What part of me that survives the scattering of elements after the body dies is the self? What could I take away from my opinion of self, and it still be me? Where do I draw the line where self ends and non-self begins? Can self exist without non-self? It appears altruism, or imagining the expansion of self, increases happiness. Is that sense of well-being a clue?

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Hey bodhi. I read that Buddhist philosophy allows for *some* amount of free will, but have no idea what their line of thought is. Curious about it but I think for my purposes it's not 100% necessary.

Well ok, the "self" exists as a conglomerate of thoughts and body sensations for example. If you sit in Vipassana you could chase the sensation of "self". Sometimes you may feel that it is in the face (often times unconscious tension is there, linked to emotional states). If you move awareness there, it may relax, then there may be pain and immediately your aversion to it, and in that aversion, the sense of self "naaaw it happens to meeee, pooor me is suffering". Metzinger somewhat referred to that in the ownership. We assume there is a center "I", so we logically extend it as ownership. Ownership of pain sensations, pleasant sensations, the body, our possessions etc.


I'm not quite sure how Metzinger understands there being a sense of a continuous, consistent "self" with a supposed past and envisioned future, that has such a huge impact on our lives (to the point that some "selves" want to annihilate out of despair, sometime even out of belief!!)... which is composed of different parts that are not even fixed.


So here's another piece of the puzzle:

Because we always see our life and the world through the concept of causation, categorising things that inherently have no such properties (David Hume), then we sort of always assume that there was a cause for our life.

Because we assume that there is a reason for our lives, perhaps that is the sticky sauce, the ingredient that causes us to always grasp onto sensations, thoughts and so on, and take ownership of them (vs. simply seeing what arises as a function of life, and just allowing it to be).

Here's a great vid with Alan Watts, talking about the concept of "I".

Alan Watts: A Conversation with Myself (part 3, part 1 & 2 is mostly rambling IMHO)

"But of course If you try to give up your ego with your ego, then it will take you to the end of time" ^_^

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Bodhisamaya Wrote:Can self exist without non-self?

Lol, is that a koan?

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bodhisamaya Wrote:It appears altruism, or imagining the expansion of self, increases happiness. Is that sense of well-being a clue?

Altruism is renunciation of self right? Yes I totally get that. I was listening to a Adyashanti talk Beyond the Personal will (YouTube) (edit: wrong url). It was very comforting to me. I'm going through that and it sucks. I have no passions anymore. No will. I have energy, if I want to, so I'm finally understanding it is not depression. I always had doubt, but I'm pretty sure now. It's just a realization, that it is pointless to try and change things. I already had that last year around March, when I vented off on this board, and said I am tired of the rat race. Even meditation becomes a rat race "oh in 10 years I will be awakened, after much hard work". And you suggested the Tibetan voluntary work and I went to India

Thanks again btw! It was valuable. Never had been to a poor country before. Was both great and shocking. Tibetan people there in McLeodganj were amazing for the most part, so relaxed. I wish I was even a fraction as relaxed as they were.. But that's the advantage you have when you already have lost your country, your land, your possessions etc. What else do you have to loose?


Well anyway Adyashanti explains that, the flowering of a different way of being, in the moment, no longer struggling with a self, separate from nature and everything.. it can only flower in this falling away of personal will.

And I'm lucky apparently.. I'm single. Some people who are married sometimes totally wreck their lives and relationships during this period. And it's not even guaranteed that you'll reach the end of the tunnel before this life is over.

FUN STUFFF!! WOOOHEEE!! Anybody else onboard the Wrecking Express??

Ok back from my rant... what do you mean by "expansion of self"?

See I'm starting to understand that trying to make oneself happy is itself part of the struggle. It's TIRING man, it's WORK. It's unnatural....

(Deleted. Was too tired at time of posting, haha)

i like hume, but i would definately recommend skipping straight to Kant. mmmm synthesis ^_^

ファブリス Wrote:Hey bodhi. I read that Buddhist philosophy allows for *some* amount of free will, but have no idea what their line of thought is. Curious about it but I think for my purposes it's not 100% necessary.

I was told that unless you are on a serious path of self-discovery, you have no free will and will automatically be propelled to wherever your birth's karma dictates.

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bodhisamaya Wrote:It appears altruism, or imagining the expansion of self, increases happiness. Is that sense of well-being a clue?

Oh I got it now by expansion you meant when one sees oneself as also containing others, like being part of a whole?

Altruism is focusing on other selves seemingly at the expense of one's self. Expansion of self, well if it leads to feeling as if there is not so much distinction between your self and others, than that's the same, it's pointing at no self because self is ME, MY LIFE, not another person's.

But yeah, it is a spiritual path in and of itself isn't it. However people do that for their entire lives and don't get liberated from the illusion, so it's not quite the full picture. Because in a sense, to "will" to deny the self is to support its existence so it's a trap.

Imagining altruism is not liberation, it is just getting the mind used to the idea such a state is possible. Many people dedicate their whole lives to helping others, but don't experience true happiness because they still believe that there is a self that is being sacrificed for others. Compassion without wisdom does not lead to liberation. The vipassana meditation you do is building wisdom. A truly altruistic being experiences no pride or suffering from serving others, has no attachment to praise, or aversion to criticism. I am just quoting theory. I am no where near this actualization myself.

I'm a little late to the party, but I thought I should mention that Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit is one of the most celebrated recent philosophical investigations into the nature of the "self." Since it comes from a contemporary Western philosophical perspective, it is also more accessible to a Western audience than ancient Eastern texts.

Many recognize parallels between Parfit's ideas and Buddhist thought. In fact, according to an interview in the New Yorker, monks at a certain Tibetan monastery are memorizing and chanting Reasons and Persons alongside the traditional sutras.

Unfortunately, only subscribers can access the full interview, but I may be able to help the curious mind if I were contacted via email.

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Thanks for sharing. It's always interesting to see more Western philosophers/writers touch on the subject of the "self".

I don't know if I shared this before, but it seems to be completely on the topic, it's a TEDx talk I saw on Reddit recently:

The Ego Tunnel: Prof. Dr. Thomas Metzinger at TEDxRheinMain

I think it is a fascinating subject in light of the Oculus Rift headset that NukeMarine mentioned recently. I thought it was quite interesting that the developers at Steam refer to the immersion effect as "presence".... what a choice of word. It is an english word that is so commonly used in spiritual/metaphysical teachings. To achieve "presence", as they explained in a presentation (slides were on Reddit /r/gaming I think?), you need a certain framerate, certain speed for input, reproduce artifacts of our eye sight, etc. (in order to fool the brain).

It may be still many years away though until the day we take off the headset and we become confused. Wait.. which is the real world? I have memories of this being the real world. Ok, this is the "real" world. Does it matter? It's been "presence" all along.

I think there is a self. I follow that notion by ascribing it to the concept of "I think, therefore I am." If I wasn't myself, then it doesn't makes sense to me why I, or anyone else for that matter, would even exist.

To me, if there wasn't a self, then I would be you. And I'm not you, because I'm already me, if that makes sense, and if I interpreted the concept of "self" correctly.
I also don't know that I fully want to follow the concept of causality, because when I break the concept down it just seems like simple cause and effect. Which I personally just take as a basic concept itself.

Cause and effect to me is just... you do something and something else will happen or might happen. The effect of which can take many forms depending on what was done to cause it. Some effects will be known, some effects will be theorized and tested, and many effect will remain unknown and out of our hands.

I love philosophy, but I also love tangibility. And when speaking of concepts like causality and of the self, I sometimes like to follow a method of thought that incorporates physical things and reality, since the philosophy would make a lot more sense and I could relate to it better if it can be tied to reality and something tangible in some way.

Edit: Lol, I just saw that this was back in 2011.

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It's okay that the thread is from 2011. It's kind of an ageless discussion :p

I would say I can account for a sense of self. So whether I am me and you are you, I would say it is a question of whether I experience this here, and you experience that over there (including thoughts, feelings, ... all of which are based on conditions). In that sense for me the actuality of being "me" is more like a stream of experience.

I find contemplating the question of self to be very therapeutic, so I feel it has tangible effects. It can be very powerful in the midst of difficult feelings such as sadness or anxiety, to just plainly look for a self that is thought to be experiencing said feelings. It's a beautiful way of practicing what the Buddhists call "equanimity".

Whether this is because there is a self or not, I can not say with certainty. However I can say it has been my experience that contemplating seemingly intangible questions can create a very physical tangible effect, in this case a lessening of the sensations, often accompanied by a a sense of release, sometimes a spontaneous deep breath.

I wonder what has become of ice, nest0r et al...

liosama Wrote:I wonder what has become of ice, nest0r et al...

I believe Bodhi and nest0r left after getting into arguments with the admin, and IceCream left after prolonged and strained interactions with an opinionated poster (there may have been tension with the admins as well).