human identity: the machine in the ghost?

Some feel a sense of power with the acquisition of much knowledge. In the world of ideas, those who possess more know-how and adroitness do wield a kind of advantageous ‘intelligence’ simply because their performance in their society allows them to derive gains. Iow, they function well. Yet, it does not suggest that by using the indoctrination purposes, one is exempt from the realization that this way of life is not an indication of a self experiencing reality. It is merely a ‘self’ that has taken on the form of an imposed reality. And there is no harm in that.

Using this ‘arbitrary reality’ is one thing. Investing one’s entire being and existence in the knowledge that society dictates – and expecting to find peace, happiness and certainty in it – is wrong thinking. Even the thought that you are trapped in that thinking is also wrong thinking. If you believe that, all the more you will try to get out of the trap by utilizing the same instrument that caused you to think that you are trapped in the first place.

Thought seems to be the main controller, the chief manipulator, so watch how much it is instrumental in separating you from what you in fact are. That is, what you are when you are still and not constantly using anything else of what all of mankind has felt known and experienced: the main ingredients of thought.

I was just re-reading Susan Sontag’s introduction to Emile Cioran’s, The Temptation To Exist, and thought it fits in well with this thread.

To wit:

We understand [the world] by locating it in a multi-determined temporal continuum. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present and future. But even the most relevant events carry within them the form of their own obsolescence. Thus, a single work is eventually a contribution to a body of work; the details of a life form part of a life-history; an individual life-history is unintelligable apart from social, economic and cultural history; and the life of a society is the sum of ‘preceding conditions’. Meaning drowns in a stream of becoming: the senseless and overdocumented rhythym of advent and supercession, the becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilites.

[my emphasis]

The paradox of the modern age [or postmodern age if you prefer] is that we have never been so fragmented. Try to imagine the enormous gap between our world today and living out your entire life in an aboriginal village—a proper role for everyone and everyone in their proper role. Many today pick out a lifestyle as they do tubes of toothpaste and car models.

They choose their niche, in other words, and envelop it: music, film, art, career, love, sex, relationships, the home team, the very latest technological gadgets. They set themselves apart as though the sleek and sophisticated manner in which they do makes it so. And then “something happens” and they move on to another lifestyle. Soon, I suspect, there will literally be lifestyle malls. You go into the store that is most “you” and you spend and spend and spend to make it more so.

It’s a superficial farce, perhaps, but at least it’s out there for sale. It’s there if folks want it. And, so many want it very, very badly, right? The new “identity fashions” today revolve increasingly around pop culture, mindless consumption and celebrity worship.

It’s straight out of Paddy Chayefsky, isn’t it?

Perhaps I don’t understand your point, but can’t it be argued the manner in which children were raised in Nazi Germany—to embrace fascism [and genocide]—was quite harmful to, say, the Jews? There are imposed realities and then there are imposed realities.

I agree. But this does not mean that, in probing the world around us [more autonomously], we can find our “true identity”; one that necessarily leads to those things. This will always be embedded largely in dasein, in my view, in individual points of view we seek to share with others. I certainly do not subscribe to the idea that we can know, “what you in fact are”.

It’s in the moments when there’s no probing, no searching for certainty that one can be at peace with what he has and what he is. Yet, for some reason, people want to be at peace with themselves. When every individual is seeking certainty for himself there can be no certainty in this world.

Not all thoughts are characteristically cultural; not our immediate perceptions and emotions, which are ours alone and which we may not pass on. However, once we express them or speak about them to others, be it our feelings or our ideas, they are passed on. Culture may go through modifications this way.

Exactly. Once you understand that clearly, there is no more helplessness, your helplessness no longer exists. Then you actually don’t know what to do. And, if you expect that something will happen to give you an identity from what you then call your ‘clarity of thinking’, or something similar, then you’re lost forever. Because that is not the true clarity. When you let it all go, whatever is left can begin to express itself freed from the stranglehold of thought. But don’t expect that what does express itself will be a help to society. If that’s the intention then you get dragged down into the machine again and begin to take on the form of an identified, defined, structured ‘self.’

…Speak for yourself. …I never order the same thing twice.

… and your choices are limited to what comprises the self.

The self is an illusion, a product of thought, a high order abstraction which thought uses to perpetuate itself.

Thought is always limited to its knowledge and how far it can be made to continue.

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.

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

Even if there is an experience when thought is absent, how can one remember and communicate such an experience without thought? How does anyone conclude the entity experiencing in the absence of thought is the “real” self and not the self that is the product of thought? If there indeed is a “real” self that is not a product of thought isn’t it upto this “real” self to come out of hiding and control thought, since thought by its very nature would be incapable of transending itself and let the “real self” be?

There is no entity there in ‘my’ separate from the ‘I’ in “I am.” It is thought itself splitting itself in two creating the illusion of subject and object.

When it comes to thought, in order to perpetuate itself thought creates many experiences. It is only thought that can identify experience. In the absence of thought identifying and recognizing we have no way of knowing an experience of a certain kind. Thought uses the mechanism of knowledge to perpetuate itself, to create a continuity and permanence for itself.

At birth we are all given a sense of certainty by those who indoctrinate us to view reality in one way rather than another. Then, as we grow older, we come into contact with existential variables that either cement into place all the more this dogma or begin to poke holes in it. Until it becomes a sieve allowing for many alternate “realities” to take hold. But this varies considerably from person to person; and it is always manifested through the cracks and the crevices of contingency, chance and change.

Clarity being the absense of clarity itself. I agree. But in acknowledging this, one can still feel lost. Or at least I have. I find myself tugged in both directions—relishing in the freedom afforded me in not being tied down to only one sense of reality, but also feeling that vertiginous sense of bewilderment in having nothing really substantial to anchor my “self” to.

Especially when confronting the gaping maw that is oblivion.

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?

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?

I said how can the thought “I am…” get in MY way?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.