On the existence of the self

[gib]

I’ve seen two flavors of self-skepticism, by which I mean the position that the self isn’t real. I’ll call them the Eastern/Buddhist argument and the Western/materialist argument. I’ve always felt that self-skepticism philosophies are problematic for a number of reasons, but there is this one reason that I want to say is shared by both the above arguments.

1) The Eastern/Buddhist argument: Nothing is permanent. Therefore, the self is not permanent. What we call the ‘self’ is actually a series and mixture of experiences, internal and external, that are constantly undergoing change. Therefore, it is, like a flowing river, never the same one twice. As soon as you think you’ve identified yourself, it no longer exists.

2) The Western/Materialist argument: The self is a psychological product of the brain. Neuro-chemical events somehow manage to give us the impression that we are a self, but this, like all other mental content, is an illusion, a narrative the brain is telling itself. One might think of it as similar to value in that it is not something objectively and independently real, but subjective and totally dependent on us in order to exist, if it exists at all. Thus, the self is not really objectively real, but more of an “apparition” that the brain fabricates and convinces itself of.

The one problem that both of these suffer from, IMO, is that if you’re going to say this of the self, you have to say it of pretty much everything.

In the case of 1), the argument is the same old traditional argument of the identity of things (first proposed by Plutarch about the ship of Theseus). If a thing is constantly undergoing change, as is the nature of real things everywhere, little by little, piece by piece over time, then nothing is ever absolutely one thing or another for more than an instant. If on this basis, the self doesn’t exist, then nothing does.

In the case of 2), the arguments seems to be: if it’s mental, it’s unreal. But I’m hard pressed to think of a single thing that isn’t mental–at least, in the sense that if I can give such an example, I have no way of doing so except by presenting my mental construct of it (whether it be a thought, sensory object, memory, an emotion, etc.). Anything I purport to be really “out there” must, by that token, be “in here” (for otherwise, I couldn’t purport it at all). Yes, this is idealism 101, but it is unescapable, and furthermore is inescapable because of the Western/Materialist argument–that is, if the self is unreal because the only way we are acquainted with it is via the brain’s production of our inner sense of selfhood, then so too is anything we are acquainted with via the brain’s production of our inner sense of it (where sensory perception, being “mental”, is here considered “inner”). The entire world is therefore unreal–or at least, anything we want to offer up as an example of something real (for that entails the brain producing it in consciousness first).

Now here’s something a bit more positive on the self, and closer to common sense: going back to the ship of Theseus argument, what the argument comes down to is the fact that nothing is ever “fixed”–everything is constantly undergoing change. This is even true of a rock. A rock just sitting there apparently not doing anything is still changing. You have to look down to the microscopic scale to see it, and when you do, what you see are electrons buzzing around a nucleus (or, more accurately, forming a ‘cloud’). Therefore, even the rock is never really ‘still’. But the catch here is that these atoms and molecules are always reacquiring their prior states. That is to say, they are repeatedly coming back to the same state they were once in, much like the seasons, though going through flux, always come back to the same ones, or the planets always coming back after making a full revolution around the Sun. What this means is that on a much higher scale, the scale of the rock (or the solar system, or the years as they go by), what you get is a kind of “steady buzz”–that is, an apparent stillness, a constant. The rock seems to be one unchanging thing over a long stretch of time because of this perpetual reacquiring of prior states at the microscopic level.

Change need not mean never being the same thing twice.

Now what in the self might fit this formula? What is it in the constituents of our minds that might be considered to reacquire the same states over and over again? Well, lots of things: our memories, our identifications with our names, the particular face we see in the mirror, our beliefs, our friends and family, our values and attitudes, our tendencies, characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, our sensitivities and reactions to things, our belongings, our writings and other creations, and so on and so forth. All these things recur with a certain regularity–maybe not like clockwork, but enough so such that, if we were to step back from ourselves and our lives, looking at ourselves from the scope of our entire life span, we might just see a kind of “steady buzz”, a fuzzy semblance of what we might call our ‘selves’.

Of course, I don’t think what we’d see is an absolutely unchanging constant at this level–as much as we are constantly changing in the moment, we are also slowly changing through time–a once vibrant and energetic young man might one day turn into a frail and near-lifeless old man–but this just proves the point: it proves that if there is this slow change that occurs on the scale of our entire life span, then there must be some kind of “constant” (or an approximation thereof) at smaller scales. It would be like watching a computer monitor slowly change from red to orange to yellow over the course of 5 minutes or so. If this steady change does indeed occur, then there had to have been smaller intervals (say on the order of a few seconds or so) where the rate of change of the color was negligible or unnoticeable, and therefore could be called “constant”. This “constant”, as it applies to the self, is still the “steady buzz” that is just the “gloss” of all the more detailed and variegated elements of our psychology, which I still maintain is ever changing every second, but I still say they always come back to reacquire their prior states, and it is on this that the “steady buzz”, which is a rough basis for the identity of the self, rests. It may just be an abstraction–not a material object, or even an immaterial/metaphysical one–but as such it suffices as an adequate definition of ‘self’ as far as I’m concerned, and so we don’t have to say the self doesn’t exist.

[finishedman]

If thought is self perpetuating and the inner constancy of thought maintains the self as a perceived entity, then there is no way you can look at the self as separate from the thought. If the thought that structures the self stops then the self is gone.

The ‘you’ is thought-generated. Thought is memory, your cultural and individual past, operating on the present situation. Each thought splits itself, as it were, into two: the object thought about and a fictitious, non-existent subject. It creates the illusion of the subject, the thinker. Since there is no thinker as such, we can never know the thinker. The thought is the thinker. There is no other thinker.

Thought cannot understand reality. Reality and life are constantly changing. Thought, being dead and static, can never understand them or know them. We know or understand anything only through experiences molded out of our past. If thought cannot understand reality, nothing else can, either. You can never know anything directly, without the mediation of thought or knowledge. If we could, then there would be no need to understand anything.

[Nah]

@gib

I’ve seen two flavors of self-skepticism, by which I mean the position that the self isn’t real. I’ll call them the Eastern/Buddhist argument and the Western/materialist argument. I’ve always felt that self-skepticism philosophies are problematic for a number of reasons, but there is this one reason that I want to say is shared by both the above arguments.

1) The Eastern/Buddhist argument: Nothing is permanent. Therefore, the self is not permanent. What we call the ‘self’ is actually a series and mixture of experiences, internal and external, that are constantly undergoing change. Therefore, it is, like a flowing river, never the same one twice. As soon as you think you’ve identified yourself, it no longer exists.

2) The Western/Materialist argument: The self is a psychological product of the brain. Neuro-chemical events somehow manage to give us the impression that we are a self, but this, like all other mental content, is an illusion, a narrative the brain is telling itself. One might think of it as similar to value in that it is not something objectively and independently real, but subjective and totally dependent on us in order to exist, if it exists at all. Thus, the self is not really objectively real, but more of an “apparition” that the brain fabricates and convinces itself of.

The one problem that both of these suffer from, IMO, is that if you’re going to say this of the self, you have to say it of pretty much everything.

I guess so.
But it’s only applicable to “Permanent existence” of everything, if you follow “Buddhist” argument you showed.
Maybe they don’t deny “non-permanent existence”.

In the case of 1), the argument is the same old traditional argument of the identity of things (first proposed by Plutarch about the ship of Theseus). If a thing is constantly undergoing change, as is the nature of real things everywhere, little by little, piece by piece over time, then nothing is ever absolutely one thing or another for more than an instant. If on this basis, the self doesn’t exist, then nothing does.

Again, according to the argument, it denies only “permanent” self (and everything permanent, obviously).

In the case of 2), the arguments seems to be: if it’s mental, it’s unreal. But I’m hard pressed to think of a single thing that isn’t mental–at least, in the sense that if I can give such an example, I have no way of doing so except by presenting my mental construct of it (whether it be a thought, sensory object, memory, an emotion, etc.). Anything I purport to be really “out there” must, by that token, be “in here” (for otherwise, I couldn’t purport it at all). Yes, this is idealism 101, but it is unescapable, and furthermore is inescapable because of the Western/Materialist argument–that is, if the self is unreal because the only way we are acquainted with it is via the brain’s production of our inner sense of selfhood, then so too is anything we are acquainted with via the brain’s production of our inner sense of it (where sensory perception, being “mental”, is here considered “inner”). The entire world is therefore unreal–or at least, anything we want to offer up as an example of something real (for that entails the brain producing it in consciousness first).

Now here’s something a bit more positive on the self, and closer to common sense: going back to the ship of Theseus argument, what the argument comes down to is the fact that nothing is ever “fixed”–everything is constantly undergoing change. This is even true of a rock. A rock just sitting there apparently not doing anything is still changing. You have to look down to the microscopic scale to see it, and when you do, what you see are electrons buzzing around a nucleus (or, more accurately, forming a ‘cloud’). Therefore, even the rock is never really ‘still’. But the catch here is that these atoms and molecules are always reacquiring their prior states. That is to say, they are repeatedly coming back to the same state they were once in, much like the seasons, though going through flux, always come back to the same ones, or the planets always coming back after making a full revolution around the Sun. What this means is that on a much higher scale, the scale of the rock (or the solar system, or the years as they go by), what you get is a kind of “steady buzz”–that is, an apparent stillness, a constant. The rock seems to be one unchanging thing over a long stretch of time because of this perpetual reacquiring of prior states at the microscopic level.

I don’t think electrons and particles have perfectly steady track to follow.
Even earth’s orbit is not fixed (because of many influences) and I don’t think it passes exact same location (relative to sun) in exact same speed, angle, etc, twice.
So, I think you might be doing wishful thinking, here.

Change need not mean never being the same thing twice.

For something complex, I don’t think it just buzzes and repeat exact same state, again and again.
It repeats similar state, but not perfectly the same.

Now what in the self might fit this formula? What is it in the constituents of our minds that might be considered to reacquire the same states over and over again? Well, lots of things: our memories, our identifications with our names, the particular face we see in the mirror, our beliefs, our friends and family, our values and attitudes, our tendencies, characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, our sensitivities and reactions to things, our belongings, our writings and other creations, and so on and so forth. All these things recur with a certain regularity–maybe not like clockwork, but enough so such that, if we were to step back from ourselves and our lives, looking at ourselves from the scope of our entire life span, we might just see a kind of “steady buzz”, a fuzzy semblance of what we might call our ‘selves’.

Self may give the impression that it is the same for certain period of the time, or repeating the same state.
But I guess it’s just the impression we tend to have (due to our certainty/permanence bias).

Of course, I don’t think what we’d see is an absolutely unchanging constant at this level–as much as we are constantly changing in the moment, we are also slowly changing through time–a once vibrant and energetic young man might one day turn into a frail and near-lifeless old man–but this just proves the point: it proves that if there is this slow change that occurs on the scale of our entire life span, then there must be some kind of “constant” (or an approximation thereof) at smaller scales. It would be like watching a computer monitor slowly change from red to orange to yellow over the course of 5 minutes or so. If this steady change does indeed occur, then there had to have been smaller intervals (say on the order of a few seconds or so) where the rate of change of the color was negligible or unnoticeable, and therefore could be called “constant”. This “constant”, as it applies to the self, is still the “steady buzz” that is just the “gloss” of all the more detailed and variegated elements of our psychology, which I still maintain is ever changing every second, but I still say they always come back to reacquire their prior states, and it is on this that the “steady buzz”, which is a rough basis for the identity of the self, rests. It may just be an abstraction–not a material object, or even an immaterial/metaphysical one–but as such it suffices as an adequate definition of ‘self’ as far as I’m concerned, and so we don’t have to say the self doesn’t exist.

It’s easy to note that the state of basic awareness is ever changing, moment by moment.
And even slightly different state of awareness may yield very different worldview, feeling, perception, and so on.
The perceived “self” differs considerably, as well, depending of awareness and other factors.

After all, just like stupid “god”, existence (or not) of “self” isn’t a problem to me.
What’s wrong (for you) if it doesn’t exist?
What’s wrong if it exists?
What’s the problem (for you)?

[gib]

@finishedman

If thought is self perpetuating and the inner constancy of thought maintains the self as a perceived entity, then there is no way you can look at the self as separate from the thought. If the thought that structures the self stops then the self is gone.

So self is thought. If thought exists, so does the self. If I sat on an A-bomb and it exploded, my body would surely be obliterated. Does that mean my body never existed?

@finishedman

The ‘you’ is thought-generated. Thought is memory, your cultural and individual past, operating on the present situation. Each thought splits itself, as it were, into two: the object thought about and a fictitious, non-existent subject. It creates the illusion of the subject, the thinker. Since there is no thinker as such, we can never know the thinker. The thought is the thinker. There is no other thinker.

Note that you’re just defining ‘self’ in your own way. It’s an alternative to my definition. Sure, thought is important to the identity of self, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Without thought, I might be an entirely different self (what with other mental content still recuring regularly enough to get that “steady buzz” I was describing), but I still think there would be something of a subject there.

@finishedman

Thought cannot understand reality. Reality and life are constantly changing. Thought, being dead and static, can never understand them or know them. We know or understand anything only through experiences molded out of our past. If thought cannot understand reality, nothing else can, either. You can never know anything directly, without the mediation of thought or knowledge. If we could, then there would be no need to understand anything.

I disagree. Thought is in the business of producing understanding–it gets it wrong sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that genuine understanding is impossible. What you’re saying is like saying that because we can’t see objects directly (because there’s this thing called a “visual perception” mediating the objects and us), then vision is always wrong. I’m not sure why something being mental necessarily makes it false.

@Nah

Maybe they don’t deny “non-permanent existence”.

Yeah, but try to get them to admit that.

@Nah

Again, according to the argument, it denies only “permanent” self (and everything permanent, obviously).

No, this argument says that if it’s mental, if it’s a product of the brain, it’s false.

@Nah

I don’t think electrons and particles have perfectly steady track to follow.
Even earth’s orbit is not fixed (because of many influences) and I don’t think it passes exact same location (relative to sun) in exact same speed, angle, etc, twice.
So, I think you might be doing wishful thinking, here.

The states they reacquire don’t have to be perfectly the same. The argument is like this: imagine the color red on a computer monitor. This red slowly changes to orange and then to yellow. Once it becomes yellow it starts back in the other direction, passing through orange and becoming red again. Then it repeats. It does this indefinitely, going: red → orange → yellow → orange → red → orange → yellow → orange → red → …

Now the red it reacquires does not have to be exactly the same hue or saturation or brightness every single time. Same goes for the yellow at the other end. What matters is that if we take a large enough sample of all the colors it transforms into over a relatively long period of time, and we average these colors, we will get some shade of orange. This orange can be said to be the overall color that the monitor displays.

Note that it never really is this particular shade of orange at any particular time (or if it is, it only by coincidence that it happened to pass through that exact shade at a particular instant in time). But that’s ok. We can define the overall color of the monitor in abstract terms.

@Nah

Self may give the impression that it is the same for certain period of the time, or repeating the same state.
But I guess it’s just the impression we tend to have (due to our certainty/permanence bias).

I don’t even think it gives the impression. This is more of a habitual way of conceptualizing the self. It may be wrong, but I don’t think wholescale self-skepticism is therefore warranted.

@Nah

What’s wrong (for you) if it doesn’t exist?
What’s wrong if it exists?
What’s the problem (for you)?

The problem is that self-skepticism is an incredibly bold position. I’m going to need a lot more convincing than merely the fact that our psychological makeup changes over time or that the sense of selfhood we occasionally have is a product of the brain.

I see myself every day when I look in the mirror. As I sit here typing this out, I find myself to be present in the world. I can assure you I’m sitting right here right now. To tell me this is all an illusion is too absurd for me to accept just like that. I’m not saying I can’t be convinced, but that when it comes to bold absurd claims, it’s reasonable to consider that we just went wrong somewhere in our logic than that this radical and bizzar conclusion we came to is inevitably right.

I think it’s too obvious that I exist for me to doubt it. But I’m in full agreement that there is a serious philosophical problem as to what the self is, how to define it. I think the merits of the two arguments above (the Eastern/Buddhist argument and the Western/Materialist argument) are that they show us what the self is not. It’s not something permanent, and if it is a product of brain chemistry, it can’t be just that (then it would be just an illusion). Both these insights strike a blow to Cartesianism, which is a good thing in my view, but I don’t think becoming eliminativist about the self is warranted. I think we ought to treat the self as real and just come up with some other way of defining or conceptualizing it such that it makes sense to say it is real.

[finishedman]

Is it possible for you – let alone the mind, or the entity, or the I, or the self, or the soul, or whatever you want to call it – to experience your body as a body, without capturing it in the framework of knowledge you have of it? If you have no knowledge how could you formulate a question about something you do not know? Iow, if your brain has nothing in memory or your memory was temp erased, there would be no subject that is projecting knowledge; no circumference means no center point of reference, no self, no body, no nothing. But life? Yes. The buzz of life? Yes. Not even a buzz but a roar.

[finishedman]

@gib

Thought is in the business of producing understanding

And the structure of that is knowledge.

[finishedman]

@Nah

… existence (or not) of “self” isn’t a problem to me.
What’s wrong (for you) if it doesn’t exist?
What’s wrong if it exists?
What’s the problem (for you)?

The self you maintain through the constant utilization of thought has played a huge part in what you are today. In that sense it has tremendous value. But it is also the very thing that can destroy you.

The constant buzz of sensory activity that ultimately ends up transferred to the brain might be what gib’s purporting. That’s a natural state of affairs; it’s not the state of a self-realized person, it is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it’s there — it’s the living state. This state is just the functional activity of life. Not life as something abstract; it’s the life of the senses, functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive: thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them, and uses them to give continuity to itself.

[gib]

@finishedman

Is it possible for you – let alone the mind, or the entity, or the I, or the self, or the soul, or whatever you want to call it – to experience your body as a body, without capturing it in the framework of knowledge you have of it?

As far as I’m concerned, the knowledge is what makes it a body.

@finishedman

If you have no knowledge how could you formulate a question about something you do not know?

I wouldn’t. But since I do know, I can.

@finishedman

Iow, if your brain has nothing in memory or your memory was temp erased, there would be no subject that is projecting knowledge;

That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a subject.

@finishedman

no circumference means no center point of reference, no self, no body, no nothing.

The self isn’t necessarily a center of some ‘circumference’.

[Stuart]

I don’t know about the materialist argument. It starts with numerous assumptions that have accumulated over hundredss of years of scientific “discoveries”. But, science always changes. I don’t deny that science is very useful, but it seems very stupid to take something that changes so much and consider it in a static state, that is to take the prevaling assumption of science at the moment and then use those assumptions to define who we are. That type of philosophy will have to change every 20 years with a new paradigm shift in the sciences.

My understanding of the Eastern argument is best summarized as that we are and we aren’t, we have a self and we don’t. Perhaps coinsidentally Sartre’s or the existential argument is summarized the exact same way. Both those philsophies go into much more detail on such contradictions, but the premise remains the same. I find it extremely useful but some don’t, and I can understand that. Some don’t think stating a contradiction in the moment answers any fundamental questions such as what the self is, but the contradiction will still arrise.

You mention how some claim there is no self because of change, but argue that the self exists by averaging itself out over time. But, one made the claim your arguing against with the same technique. Perhaps for many years people said the self is self because it’s static and then others made an argumnet about how much the self really does change, with the conclusion that there is no self. But, now you reverse the argument by showing how the self averages out.

I don’t suppose these issues are very pragmatic for most. But, they are very useful for me. I spent years trying to grasp who I was and failing. Then suddenly in the last 8 months I stopped virtually out of nowhere. Now I find my sense of self slowly going away. But, it’s far from a spectacular experience.

[gib]

@Stuartp523

You mention how some claim there is no self because of change, but argue that the self exists by averaging itself out over time. But, one made the claim your arguing against with the same technique. Perhaps for many years people said the self is self because it’s static and then others made an argumnet about how much the self really does change, with the conclusion that there is no self. But, now you reverse the argument by showing how the self averages out.

Except that my ‘self’ is a lot more of an abstraction. I’m ok with that. The point for me is not to prove in any definitive way that the self exists tangibly or as something having a presence in the material world, but to not have to resort to self-skepticism. Maybe the self doesn’t exist in the intuitive sense or in any sense we have thought, but I can’t shake the feeling that the self must exist in some way.

[finishedman]

That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a subject.

But it would mean we would be asking no questions about it. The assumption wouldn’t even be there. No communicating about it there.

We become conscious only through the help of thought. But unfortunately it is there all the time. So, the suggestion that it is not possible to experience anything makes no sense at all, because there’s no reference point there when this movement is absent. When this movement is absent, all those questions about consciousness are not there. That is what I mean when I say that the questions are absent.

What’s the significance, meaning or purpose of a non existing subject in a discussion other than comparing the knowledge we have acquired about it?

[finishedman]

The self isn’t necessarily a center of some ‘circumference’.

Then there’d be no experience there.

You would not be one thing, and life another. It would be one unitary movement and anything said about it would be misleading, confusing.

If you are not a “person”, not a “thing”, not a discrete entity surrounded by “other” things, that unitary movement would not be something you could experience.

[gib]

@finishedman

What’s the significance, meaning or purpose of a non existing subject in a discussion other than comparing the knowledge we have acquired about it?

That the subject is non-existent is what’s in question. The point of the discussion is to see whether we can say the subject, in some way, exists.

The question does arise because we do think about it.

@finishedman

Then there’d be no experience there.

Why wouldn’t there be? Why couldn’t the self just be the circumference? (just to give one example).

[gib]

Just this morning, I had to change a tire on my car. My car changed. I still call it “my car”. The notion that car doesn’t exist, or never did, is utter nonsense.

[finishedman]

@gib

Why wouldn’t there be? Why couldn’t the self just be the circumference? (just to give one example).

The establishment of the relationship between the knowledge acquired about the physical self and the actual physical self places the physical self (body) in the circumference-of-objects out there that the subject (thought sustained self) projects knowledge upon.

[finishedman]

Whenever a thought takes its birth there, you have created an entity or a point, and in reference to that point you are experiencing things. So, when the thought is not there, is it possible for you to experience anything or relate anything to a non-existing thing here? Every time a thought is born, you are born. Thought in its very nature is short-lived, and once it is gone, that’s the end of it. You have no way of experiencing what is there between these two thoughts.

The world you experience around you is also from that point of view. There must be a point and it is this point that creates the space. If this point is not there, there is no space. So, anything you experience from this point is an illusion.

Not that the world is an illusion. The world is not an illusion, but anything you experience in relationship to this point, which itself is illusory, is bound to be an illusion. You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the center is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic.

[Stuart]

@gib

@Stuartp523

You mention how some claim there is no self because of change, but argue that the self exists by averaging itself out over time. But, one made the claim your arguing against with the same technique. Perhaps for many years people said the self is self because it’s static and then others made an argumnet about how much the self really does change, with the conclusion that there is no self. But, now you reverse the argument by showing how the self averages out.

Except that my ‘self’ is a lot more of an abstraction. I’m ok with that. The point for me is not to prove in any definitive way that the self exists tangibly or as something having a presence in the material world, but to not have to resort to self-skepticism. Maybe the self doesn’t exist in the intuitive sense or in any sense we have thought, but I can’t shake the feeling that the self must exist in some way.

I don’t think any religion or philosophy Eastern or Western says that one can shake their sense of life simply by believing in a philosophical argument. You are probably well aware of some of the various Eastern techniques to do this and I don’t recall anyone saying they’re easy. A key element that I’ve read about is that one really can’t begin to lose one’s sense of self with the intention of doing so.

Seemingly one has very little reason to get over the idea of the distinctness of their self. But, I would think that as one gets older one would take comfort in a lessening of that distinction. It’s been lessening for me as I said, I don’t know how much is due to age and how much is do to the other reasons I mentioned earlier.

[Stuart]

Finishman, having read through this thread let me see if I understand what you’re saying. The self is perpetually renewing, it is at the center of a circle, the circle containing everything the self is currently aware of including what ever ascpects of it’s body it’s aware of. Then you’re claiming that their is a reality out there that we are not aware of or yet aware of?

[gib]

@finishedman

Whenever a thought takes its birth there, you have created an entity or a point, and in reference to that point you are experiencing things. So, when the thought is not there, is it possible for you to experience anything or relate anything to a non-existing thing here?

It’s not possible to experience anything in relation to a non-existent thought, but thought is not the only form experience can take.

@finishedman

Every time a thought is born, you are born. Thought in its very nature is short-lived, and once it is gone, that’s the end of it. You have no way of experiencing what is there between these two thoughts.

Thought is experience.

@finishedman

The world you experience around you is also from that point of view. There must be a point and it is this point that creates the space. If this point is not there, there is no space. So, anything you experience from this point is an illusion.

No, this does not follow. It just means that the existence of what you experience depends on the existence of the point of view.

@finishedman

Not that the world is an illusion. The world is not an illusion, but anything you experience in relationship to this point, which itself is illusory, is bound to be an illusion. You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the center is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic.

Now you’re starting to make a bit more sense… I still don’t agree though.

This depends on two things: 1) the model of consciousness that would say consciousness is not a direct awareness of reality as it is (what I call the “window-to-reality” model), but a system of experiences, perceptions, thoughts (what I call the “system-of-experiences” model) that are definitely felt but not necessarily reflective of a real world beyond them. 2) That if it’s mental, it’s not real.

Number 1) I can hop on board with. 2) I cannot. It’s the legacy that Descartes left us with–the idea that if it’s perceived, that’s not enough to prove that it’s real (and therefore the real world is something behind our perception and essential “unperceivable”). The problem is not just in its absurdity. It’s in its incoherence. If you’re going to say that something being mental makes it unreal, you have to take that to it’s logical conclusion. You have to say every thought you have, every belief, every instinct, anything you think makes sense, is false and illusory (and this includes your own theory, finishedman). You can never get it right. How then can you be right in thinking it’s an illusion?

That’s why I prefer idealism myself, but even Berkeley’s idealism (which is still the standard form of idealism today AFAIK) is too Cartesian for me.

@Stuartp523

A key element that I’ve read about is that one really can’t begin to lose one’s sense of self with the intention of doing so.

I would believe that.

@Stuartp523

Seemingly one has very little reason to get over the idea of the distinctness of their self. But, I would think that as one gets older one would take comfort in a lessening of that distinction. It’s been lessening for me as I said, I don’t know how much is due to age and how much is do to the other reasons I mentioned earlier.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to get rid of the sense of self, I’m just saying that this doesn’t implies that the self is non-existent.

[Stuart]

I’m not implying that just because I believe one can lose their sense of self the self must be non existent. Nor am I claiming that the existence of the self comes and goes with the claims coming from the physical body’s mouth as to whether it has a distinct self or not. The self simply, at all times, exists and doesn’t simultaneously. Is there anything wrong with that explanation?