Well, other than the obvious fact that it’s a contradiction, no. What do you mean it does and doesn’t exist simultaneously?
Every consept does and doesn’t exist simultaniously. Sometimes, as with the consept of the self it’s useful to mention this, but in most cases it isn’t. But, the contradiction will eventually arise anyway. I’m still trying to grasp this philosophy myself.
You are implying that there is a self that stands apart from and makes reference to another self (sense of). Or what is it in you that will endeavor to deal with its alter-self? It’s thought that creates this illusory split in consciousness claiming that you are one thing and self another. Each thought we think splits itself up and creates the division of the thinker or the self and the world including you as an object in the world.
Do you mean this in the sense that the concept exists in the head (because it’s just obvious when we bring it to consciousness and behold it in our minds), but it doesn’t exist as an object in the outer world?
I’m implying that the logic of the argument is unsound. Saying that with the absence of the sense of self comes the absence of the self itself is like saying that with the absence of a visual beholding of an object like an apple comes the absence of the apple itself (like if we close our eyes, the world dissappears). Now, if you’re an idealist or some such, this thought may appeal to you, but any realist would be quick to point out that it doesn’t follow logically.
A kind of duality does occur, yes (I don’t know if I’d call it a “split” though). Thoughts are typically intentional–they tend to be “about” something other than themselves. So I could visually behold an apple in front of me, and at the same time, I can think about that apple. Those thoughts are about the apple which is not a thought (whether you want to consider it a physical object out in the world or a visual perception in your head is beside the point). So yes, from the visual beholding of the apple comes a kind of “split”–there are now two items: a visual perception and a thought.
The thought about the self isn’t necessarily the self itself. But just as the thought about the apple (or the visual perception of it) isn’t necessarily wrong just because it’s something different from the apple (or visual perception of…), so too is the thought about the self not necessarily wrong just because it’s something different from the self.
So the contents of your mind, your thoughts, are separate from your physical self. We’re not talking about right or wrong here. Thus, as we slowly but surely acquire knowledge stored in memory about the world and develop a relationship based on that we in turn develop a relationship between thought and self. It’s dependent on the knowledge which is memory – the cells of which are activated simultaneously with the visual, retinal stimulated signal transferred through the optic nerve to the brain (un-interpreted perception) creating interpretation.
Yes, for most kinds of thoughts.
So what you’re saying that this amassing of information over time, which gets stored in memory, affects our thoughts about the self, and this inevitably leads to a distortion of what the self is. Is that right?
Thought identifies experiences; in the absence of thought identifying and recognizing we have no way of knowing that something is an experience, let alone a mystical experience of a certain kind. Thought uses the mechanism of knowledge to perpetuate itself, to create a continuity and permanence for itself.
Of the sensual side of mind, thought doesn’t usually fully know anything as it is. It distorts what is given according to its predilections as to what is pleasant and what is unpleasant, pursues what it sees as pleasant, avoids what it sees as unpleasant in experience, and perpetuates itself in this process of seeking. So for thought there might seem to be a problem with life because it extracts certain knowledge out of past pleasures and pains, compares the present with it, passes judgments, avoids the present by concocting a future and pursuing it. These comparisons can present a misrepresentation or distortion of the true condition of life – that there is no problem with life as it is. Thoughts that are parallel to it and interfere with the smooth functioning of life by involving itself with foreign demands from outside its functioning prevent the coming to terms with life as it is.
I know this doesn’t pertain to the main issue of this thread but thought does have such a tremendous affect on the life (of the senses I’d guess you’d say) that it’s probably worth mentioning.
I think the argument is more that there is no coherent whole; the self is made up of discrete sub-selves that jostle and fight for a voice. The self that experiences pain is different from the self that remembers pain, for example (see Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow for some interesting evidence of this). There are subconscious urges pushing and pulling in all directions, and the exact role of the conscious part that we consider most “us” is unclear, but doesn’t seem to have any form of captaincy or executive veto.
And this pain (not only physical but all forms), where is it? It doesn’t exist at one or another metaphysical level — it is here, it is part of the body. Therefore the body has to take the consequences and generally you cannot solve the problems. The body has to work them out, and the body can do that in a very intelligent and successful way if you just give it a chance. The desire to solve the problem at some other level will not be honored. It just remains a hope and nothing else. There’s very little if nothing that you can do. But accepting that is difficult, because the instrument that used for that is the thinking, and the thinking can’t accept that because it has always gotten results for you.
You are what you are because of all the things that thinking has produced for you, and that have cost you much time and effort. Therefore, you also assume that every result achieved by means of thinking necessarily requires time. And it is this principle that shifts the whole business away from you and says: ‘this situation is hopeless, we need time’, because time has helped to reach results in all the previous situations.
We understand things at the level of thinking. There is no other level of understanding, and in spite of the fact that all our attempts to understand this sort of clarity have generally not helped, there is still the hope that this instrument will be of some use in understanding things, maybe tomorrow, next time. So is this the instrument for understanding that?
Again thought comes in and tells you that there is something more meaningful or interesting for you than what is happening presently. As long as this mechanism is searching for a goal, and as long as it is attempting to take you a place of more meaning, interest or purpose ‘you’ will remain wandering around restlessly.
Yes, and since we have thought, we can know.
Life strives to perpetuate itself–that’s about the closest I can come to relating to what you’re saying here.
Ok, I can appreciate what you’re saying to an extent. What comes to mind is when I identify colors–I usually categorize them accord to the colors of the rainbow–but I’ve heard of other cultures having totally different schemas by which they categorize color (the Eskimos, for example, have a whole slew of different hues just for the color white, or so I’m told). But is the world really chopped up into one or another particular system of color categories? Does the raw data that hits our retina come in only so many color flavors (well, I guess there’s only the red, green, and blue cones, but as it hits areas V1 and V4 of the occipital lobe, we get a mixing and combining of colors–but are they fixed to certain categories at this point?).
So it may be hard for someone like me to think of the particular shade of white I might be seeing in precisely the terms an Eskimo might think it, but I don’t think we can go so far as to say I am not aware of what I’m seeing. I could just make up a word for that particular shade of white, and if I make a point of comparing every shade of white I come across with this particular one, I may become quite skilled at identifying it automatically.
Getting back to the point, I believe this was about how we think about the self. If what we’ve been taught about the self, all our knowledge, assumptions, memories, if all that colors and distorts our understanding of the self, then what do we know about the self? It’s a good question, but self-skepticism is still unwarranted.
Yes, but at least according to this account, there is a self (or selves).
We are all living in a ‘thought sphere’. Thoughts belong to everybody, not just you or me. There are only thoughts, but then comes about the counter-thought, the thinker, with which every thought is read. The effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within, called the ‘I’. This movement of thought is parallel to the movement of life, but isolated from it; it can never touch life. The life of the living creature is led within the realm of this isolated, parallel movement of thought. Cutting the self off from life is something very unnatural.
You will never be without thought until the body is a corpse, a very dead corpse. Being able to think is necessary to survive. But in this state thought stops choking you; it falls into its natural rhythm. There is no longer a ‘you’ who reads the thoughts and thinks that they are ‘his’.
Can you look at that thing you call ‘I’? It is very elusive. Look at it now, feel it, touch it, and tell me. How do you look at it? And what is the thing that is looking at what you call ‘I’? This is the crux of the whole problem: the one that is looking at what you call ‘I’ is the ‘I’. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand that ‘you’ or to change that ‘you’ into something beautiful or marvelous, that ‘you’ will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there, it’s gone.
How do you understand this? “What you are looking at is not different from the one who is looking.” What do you do with a statement like this? What instrument do you have at your disposal for understanding a meaningless, illogical, irrational statement? You begin to think. Through thinking, you cannot understand anything. You are translating what I am saying, in terms of the knowledge you already have, just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing — trying to understand, or trying to change yourself — is the state of being that I am describing.
I still don’t know what you mean by a “thought sphere”. Although I can entertain the idea that some thoughts belong to everybody, as you put it (for example, universals), I can certainy conjure up a brand new thought that no one has ever thought before and it would be “mine” as long as I keep it private.
I’m not sure why the fact that thought can lead to the concept ‘I’ is supposed to show that the ‘I’ is not real. I look at my car, and that illicites a thought about my car. Is my car therefore not really? Or what if I have to infer it? What if I hear the garage door open and infer that my wife is driving the car into our garage? Does my not seeing the car directly make my inference false? Why does coming to the conclusion that I exist, even if I don’t see myself directly, mean that I don’t exist?
I don’t think anyone would ever confuse their thoughts about their car for the car itself. Why does my conjuring up a concept of myself entail that I’ve confused this concept for my actual self?
Nonsense. I’ve had plenty of moments without thought. Just being in the moment, engaging myself in a task, I lose myself.
There is no thought of the self, but that doesn’t mean the self has vanished.
Every time I look in the mirror.
I’m not 100% sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t exist.
Doesn’t that entail that the ‘I’ exists?
Two things: 1) just because we bring to mind a thought about the self does not mean we’ve confused that thought for the actual self. 2) If this is the means by which it keeps itself going, then it must exist at least for that period of time.
The thought is gone.
What would it mean to understand something then?
Earlier you said that thinking is necessary to survive, and that when used only for this purpose, “it falls into its natural rhythm.” Does thought not try to understanding anything in this state?
Finishedman, you seem to regard consciousness as having some kind of obligation to mimic reality as it really is, or to create an exact copy of reality inside itself, before it can rightfully tell itself that it is, in fact, aware of reality (or anything therein). I’m guessing this is the reason you seem to think that thought it hopeless at ever helping us to understand anything. To understand a physical object like a book, for example, requires, according to you it seems, replicating everything about that book–all its features, properties, characteristics–in the mind somehow so that we can truly say that what we behold in here is an exact match of what’s out there, and so we really do grasp it. Since what we will ever behold in our minds is thought, and since thought is always something different from things in the outer world, we can never truly grasp those worldly things.
I’m skeptical about the “copy” view of the mind. This is another Cartesian legacy we’re still spellbound by. Descartes tells us that whatever we behold about the outer world really isn’t a part of the outer world at all. What we behold are our own sensations and perceptions. They are like an impenetrable curtain baracading us from any direct contact with the outer world. But since God is a nice God, He would never deceive us, and so He makes the images on the walls of perception surrounding us exact copies of what’s really out there.
I think the relation between thought and reality is more like a key to a lock. They have to be different in order to be the right match for each other. If you wanted to make the perfect key for some lock, one that works perfectly at unlocking it, you absolutely cannot simply replicate the lock. One lock doesn’t unlock another one. Only a key unlocks the lock. Thus, the key must be, in form, structure, substance, etc., different in important ways from the lock in order to work. Likewise, I believe, a thought, in order to “unlock” the mysteries of the world, in order to “match” reality, must be different in important ways. If we wanted to understand the world by making copies of the things in the world inside out head, we wouldn’t have understanding, we’d have brain damage. It’s not a surprise that our thoughts about things in the outer world turn out to be, well, thoughts, for that’s exactly the kind of difference required in order to have understanding. The things in the world to be understood can be a whole variety of different things (physical, spiritual, etc.), but to have understanding, you need thought. It’s the contrast between the former and the latter–particularly in that the latter is thought–that makes understanding possible.
The self are determined by experience and hormone lvls, so the self can change if experience are significantly changed or hormones lvls changes.
With time we learn new stuff, we mature some won’t, we have different intelligences that can conflict with eachother and lastly hormone lvls can change significantly, some are cranky in the morning, some get traumatized and some gets ecstatic, all which changes our moods and hormone lvls.
The question is how much does it take to make a mental change?