human identity: the machine in the ghost?

[JohnJones]

@iambiguous

@JohnJones

I don’t know what you mean by an elusive “i”. “i” is a mathematical term, as far as I know, and has something to do with the square root of two, or was it minus one?

Identity is not elusive.

My name is John Jones. Proof of my identity can be got from my passport and from people that know me. No mystery here.

Perhaps you don’t want to know. And if you really do reduce your identity down to the information on your passport what in the world are you doing in a philosophy forum? That’s the sort of explanation one gives in an elementary school excercise we used to call “show and tell”. Or is this all just an exercise in being cleverly ironic?

You know, like Andy Warhol used to be when asked about his art?

When we are confused, lost and disempowered the angels will ask us to say our name. That’s sufficient for purposes of identity and to restore a sense of who we are. An identity-less person is a person who may have no culture, who has lost his memory, or some other calamity like disempowerment. There’s no other meaning to the word identity. You want to make a mystery out of the commonplace.

[JohnJones]

@iambiguous

@JohnJones

How can the thought “I am…” get in my way?

Perhaps you will understand this more clearly when you reach the part that goes like this: “I am…about to die”.

Or is the Lord waiting for you on the other side?

Is there another way of going my way other than it is I who am going it?

[iambiguous]

@JohnJones

You want to make a mystery out of the commonplace.

Is that the machine in you talking? Or do you pay someone to think this stuff up?

[Ganapati]

@finishedman

At some point I asked myself, “How the hell do I know that I am in a blissful state?” That was when I suddenly realized how stupid it was to believe in this kind of nonsense. Obviously the knowledge of the blissful state that is passed on to me is from one who tells me that the state I am in is called blissful. “This is bliss. You are blissful. You are in a blissful state,” he says. Otherwise-if I wasn’t told I would have no way of knowing whether I am in a blissful state, or in the state of eternal happiness, or that I am bored, or that I am in any kind of state. The experience itself, never ever tells me that I am in a blissful experience. And after having known a so-called blissful experience for the first time, there is bound to be a demand to have more blissful experiences and to have fewer not-so-blissful experiences.

You cannot know the state when you are in it, since knowledge requires thought and you ruled out the existence of thought in that state. So the knowledge of that state has to occur after it ceases to be i.e when you remember it. Any “demand” for it is necessarily a product of thought. Unless it is some drug induced state, the very demand will have to prevent the recurrance of the state.

If there indeed is a “real” self that is not a product of thought isn’t it up to this “real” self to come out of hiding and control thought, since thought by its very nature would be incapable of transcending itself and let the “real self” be?

It is precisely the thought that a ‘real’ self can come about and control thought – and that this new state will be a much more improved state – that keeps the real self from coming to terms with itself and its life as it is.

Whether it controls thought or not is not relevant. Since the “real self” is absent when thought is present, every attempt to communicate anything about the “real self”, such as what you are doing, is a product of thought and not anything about the “real self” itself, unless you can claim you are in that state when typing the sentences and the words are not product of thought, but somehow coming from a thoughtless state.

[finishedman]

@Ganapati

You cannot know the state when you are in it, since knowledge requires thought and you ruled out the existence of thought in that state. So the knowledge of that state has to occur after it ceases to be i.e when you remember it.

When happiness occurs, it is being recognized or witnessed as happiness. That’s an experience. That’s all there is to it.

When there is no thought, how can the mind experience anything? How can you experience anything when there is no thought? Without mind, there is no experience.

It may be claimed that in a moment of contentment or satisfaction – for instance when a strong desire has just been fulfilled – there is no thought containing a further desire or aversion – and that’s what is meant by “thought free.” But, if you were in a thoughtless state, you’d be dead.

A lot of people say they have been in a thoughtless state; they have experienced the total absence of thought. Those people were kidding themselves. How can you experience a state in which there is no thought? In any experience, thought is very much there.

Any “demand” for it is necessarily a product of thought. Unless it is some drug induced state, the very demand will have to prevent the recurrence of the state.

Why? If thought tells you there is something more interesting, more meaningful to do than what you are presently doing it will try to solve that ‘problem’ by making comparisons between the knowledge of past pleasures and pains and the present. It will pass judgments and in the process avoid the present by concocting a future and pursuing it. But for the comparisons that thought makes there is no problem with our ‘real’ life as it is; and there is no other life. That’s what I mean when I say that it’s precisely our thought of a better state that prevents us from coming to terms with life as it is.