much of who you are only exists (or is expressed) in the presence of other people.
When I imagine someone like this, I imagine someone who does not know what to do with themselves when they are alone, however briefly, and finds any length of time alone unpleasant. I imagine someone who scarcely has any sort of self at all, a zombie. Not the shambling dullard of horror movie zombies, but someone full of activity and apparent life yet with no-one at home.
But this is just my imagination confabulating by the yard. I do not actually know what it is like to be such a person. However, the number of modern Buddhists and the like proclaiming their discovery that they have no self (e.g. Sam Harris, Susan Blackmore) suggests to me that there may be something to this picture. And how else can one explain the existence of behaviourists, other than as people with no awareness of their own self, like other people who lack a sense of smell and may never realise they’re missing anything?
For me it is the opposite. Dealing with people is always irksome, however useful it may be. What I am is most fully expressed when alone.
I feel similarly to what you expressed in your first paragraph, and somewhat similar to your third. When I realize certain people can’t stand being alone, I imagine them as someone who has no idea what to do with themselves. I feel like my brain is highjacked if I’m not given enough alone time to process my thoughts, and that parts of me are never fully expressed until I am alone.
Maybe this means I need to improve my social circle?
Your observation of the Buddhist “no self” claims seems to me like a misunderstanding due to different definitions of self. After much staring at these claims on my part, I think what they are (rightly) saying is that there is no single “executive” module in charge in our brains, and that our impression of a unified self is an illusion that rises from a bunch of separate modules.
I think what they are (rightly) saying is that there is no single “executive” module in charge in our brains, and that our impression of a unified self is an illusion that rises from a bunch of separate modules.
Is that different from saying that a car does not exist, because it’s made from a bunch of separate modules? And what of the modules, that are made of smaller parts, all the way down to atoms, quarks, and whatever may lie below those? I don’t see a level to stop once you say that a thing does not exist because it is made of parts.
I go with the view that a car does exist, and so do I, even though I am made of parts.
And yet, there is still a claim that there is something delusional about the notion of an “I”. Perhaps my puzzlement with all this sort of thing (enlightenment, kensho, etc.) is not that I do not understand the state of mind being boomed (at least, when described in terms of concrete experiences rather than nonexistence), but that I do not understand the state that is being booed.
One way of putting it, which I think should be mostly accurate, is that the state that is being a booed is a belief in the homunculus fallacy.
Dennett, Kurzban, and others have pointed out that there are facts about the way in which the mind and consciousness function which feel deeply counter-intuitive, and that even neuroscientists and psychologists who in principle know that the brain is just a distributed system of separate modules, still often seem to operate under an intuition that there is a single “central” self (as seen from some of the theories that they propose).
I’m not sure whether that’s the source of the intuition, but it also seems related that humans seem to have a core system for reasoning about agency which takes as an axiom the assumption that agents exhibit independent, goal-directed motion (as opposed to objects, which only act when acted upon). Which makes sense if you’re just reasoning about e.g. social dynamics, but gets you into trouble if you try to understand the functioning of the brain and feel intuitively convinced that there has to be a “central agent” (homunculus) there somewhere, and it can’t just be interacting objects all the way down. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Kurzban’s book had a bunch of examples about how neuroscientists who should know this stuff were still making hypotheses that had the homunculus intuition lurking somewhere.
So when Buddhists say that “there is no self”, they are saying that the intuitive belief in the homunculus is wrong; and when talk about realizing that this is a delusion, they talk about actually coming to internalize this on a deep level.
There are those concepts “just” and “central” again. Is a car “just” a system of separate modules? Is there a “single, central, car”? To me these questions are as otiose as the elementary conundrum about whether a tree falling unheard makes a sound.
The car consists of the right components arranged in the right way. When they are, a mode of operation is created that cannot be found in any part. There is the car, as real as anything. “The car” is not a separate animating principle that makes the components perform. Knowing how the car works does not dissolve the car, but does enable one to use it more effectively, and to repair it when it goes wrong.
So also with the mind.
A complication present with the mind but not the car is that (with present technology) the car is not the person operating it, whereas the mind and its operator are one and the same. We must discover and mend our flaws with the very instrument that is flawed. That is what makes it difficult, but there are ways. Some of which I have experienced, although not along the lines of recent posts about enlightenment experiences.
I haven’t read Kurzban’s book*, but I agree that there’s a lot of dualist talk from supposed materialists, when they talk about how “you” don’t do things, “your brain” does them, and the like. Also the anti-pattern “X is the mechanism of Y, therefore Y does not exist”, X and Y being physical and mental phenomena respectively.
\* (The free extract on Amazon suggests to me that the book will argue for the nonexistence of the mind.)
This was a failure of communication on my part. While indeed there are extroverts for whom what you say about zombieness is true, I’m making a general claim that everyone has a good deal of neural circuitry (you can call it persona or masks if you like) that only expresses itself in the presence of others. Whether or not you want to identify this as “what you are” is up to you. For what it’s worth I think you’ve made the right choice.
Nevertheless, it’s useful to optimize the social circuitry and that’s can only really be done while in social situations. That’s all I’m saying.
When I imagine someone like this, I imagine someone who does not know what to do with themselves when they are alone, however briefly, and finds any length of time alone unpleasant. I imagine someone who scarcely has any sort of self at all, a zombie. Not the shambling dullard of horror movie zombies, but someone full of activity and apparent life yet with no-one at home.
But this is just my imagination confabulating by the yard. I do not actually know what it is like to be such a person. However, the number of modern Buddhists and the like proclaiming their discovery that they have no self (e.g. Sam Harris, Susan Blackmore) suggests to me that there may be something to this picture. And how else can one explain the existence of behaviourists, other than as people with no awareness of their own self, like other people who lack a sense of smell and may never realise they’re missing anything?
For me it is the opposite. Dealing with people is always irksome, however useful it may be. What I am is most fully expressed when alone.
I feel similarly to what you expressed in your first paragraph, and somewhat similar to your third. When I realize certain people can’t stand being alone, I imagine them as someone who has no idea what to do with themselves. I feel like my brain is highjacked if I’m not given enough alone time to process my thoughts, and that parts of me are never fully expressed until I am alone.
Maybe this means I need to improve my social circle?
Your observation of the Buddhist “no self” claims seems to me like a misunderstanding due to different definitions of self. After much staring at these claims on my part, I think what they are (rightly) saying is that there is no single “executive” module in charge in our brains, and that our impression of a unified self is an illusion that rises from a bunch of separate modules.
Is that different from saying that a car does not exist, because it’s made from a bunch of separate modules? And what of the modules, that are made of smaller parts, all the way down to atoms, quarks, and whatever may lie below those? I don’t see a level to stop once you say that a thing does not exist because it is made of parts.
I go with the view that a car does exist, and so do I, even though I am made of parts.
Yes; see the first half of this comment for an explanation. The physical existence of the entities is not in question.
And yet, there is still a claim that there is something delusional about the notion of an “I”. Perhaps my puzzlement with all this sort of thing (enlightenment, kensho, etc.) is not that I do not understand the state of mind being boomed (at least, when described in terms of concrete experiences rather than nonexistence), but that I do not understand the state that is being booed.
One way of putting it, which I think should be mostly accurate, is that the state that is being a booed is a belief in the homunculus fallacy.
Dennett, Kurzban, and others have pointed out that there are facts about the way in which the mind and consciousness function which feel deeply counter-intuitive, and that even neuroscientists and psychologists who in principle know that the brain is just a distributed system of separate modules, still often seem to operate under an intuition that there is a single “central” self (as seen from some of the theories that they propose).
I’m not sure whether that’s the source of the intuition, but it also seems related that humans seem to have a core system for reasoning about agency which takes as an axiom the assumption that agents exhibit independent, goal-directed motion (as opposed to objects, which only act when acted upon). Which makes sense if you’re just reasoning about e.g. social dynamics, but gets you into trouble if you try to understand the functioning of the brain and feel intuitively convinced that there has to be a “central agent” (homunculus) there somewhere, and it can’t just be interacting objects all the way down. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Kurzban’s book had a bunch of examples about how neuroscientists who should know this stuff were still making hypotheses that had the homunculus intuition lurking somewhere.
So when Buddhists say that “there is no self”, they are saying that the intuitive belief in the homunculus is wrong; and when talk about realizing that this is a delusion, they talk about actually coming to internalize this on a deep level.
There are those concepts “just” and “central” again. Is a car “just” a system of separate modules? Is there a “single, central, car”? To me these questions are as otiose as the elementary conundrum about whether a tree falling unheard makes a sound.
The car consists of the right components arranged in the right way. When they are, a mode of operation is created that cannot be found in any part. There is the car, as real as anything. “The car” is not a separate animating principle that makes the components perform. Knowing how the car works does not dissolve the car, but does enable one to use it more effectively, and to repair it when it goes wrong.
So also with the mind.
A complication present with the mind but not the car is that (with present technology) the car is not the person operating it, whereas the mind and its operator are one and the same. We must discover and mend our flaws with the very instrument that is flawed. That is what makes it difficult, but there are ways. Some of which I have experienced, although not along the lines of recent posts about enlightenment experiences.
I haven’t read Kurzban’s book*, but I agree that there’s a lot of dualist talk from supposed materialists, when they talk about how “you” don’t do things, “your brain” does them, and the like. Also the anti-pattern “X is the mechanism of Y, therefore Y does not exist”, X and Y being physical and mental phenomena respectively.
\* (The free extract on Amazon suggests to me that the book will argue for the nonexistence of the mind.)
This was a failure of communication on my part. While indeed there are extroverts for whom what you say about zombieness is true, I’m making a general claim that everyone has a good deal of neural circuitry (you can call it persona or masks if you like) that only expresses itself in the presence of others. Whether or not you want to identify this as “what you are” is up to you. For what it’s worth I think you’ve made the right choice.
Nevertheless, it’s useful to optimize the social circuitry and that’s can only really be done while in social situations. That’s all I’m saying.