I’m intrigued by the reports (including but not limited to the Martin 2020 “PNSE” paper) that people can “become enlightened” and have a radically different sense of self, agency, etc.; but friends and family don’t notice them behaving radically differently, or even differently at all. I’m trying to find sources on whether this is true, and if so, what’s the deal. I’m especially interested in behaviors that (naïvely) seem to centrally involve one’s self-image, such as “applying willpower” or “wanting to impress someone”. Specifically, if there’s a person whose sense-of-self has dissolved / merged into the universe / whatever, and they nevertheless enact behaviors that onlookers would conventionally put into one of those two categories, then how would that person describe / conceptualize those behaviors and why they occurred? (Or would they deny the premise that they are still exhibiting those behaviors?) Interested in any references or thoughts, or email / DM me if you prefer. Thanks in advance!
(Edited to add: Ideally someone would reply: “Yeah I have no sense of self, and also I regularly do things that onlookers describe as ‘applying willpower’ and/or ‘trying to impress someone’. And when that happens, I notice the following sequence of thoughts arising: [insert detailed description]”.)
I’m not very comfortable with the term enlightened but I’ve been on retreats teaching non-dual meditation, received ‘pointing out instructions’ in the Mahamudra tradition and have experienced some bizarre states of mind where it seemed to make complete sense to think of a sense of awake awareness as being the ground thing that was being experienced spontaneously, with sensations, thoughts and emotions appearing to it — rather than there being a separate me distinct from awareness that was experiencing things ‘using my awareness’, which is how it had always felt before.
When I have (or rather awareness itself has) experienced clear and stable non-dual states the normal ‘self’ stuff still appears in awareness and behaves fairly normally (e.g there’s hunger, thoughts about making dinner, impulses to move the body, the body moving around the room making dinner…). Being in that non dual state seemed to add a very pleasant quality of effortlessness and okayness to the mix but beyond that it wasn’t radically changing what the ‘small self’ in awareness was doing.
If later the thought “I want to eat a second portion of ice cream” came up followed by “I should apply some self control. I better not do that.” they would just be things appearing to awareness.
Of course another thing in awareness is the sense that awareness is aware of itself and the fact that everything feels funky and non-dual at the moment. You’d think that might change the chain of thoughts about the ‘small self’ wanting ice cream and then having to apply self control towards itself.
In fact the first few times I had intense non-dual experiences there was a chain of thoughts that went “what the hell is going on? I’m not sure I like this? What if I can’t get back into the normal dualistic state of mind?” followed by some panicked feelings and then the non-dual state quickly collapsing into a normal dualistic state.
With more practice, doing other forms of meditation to build a stronger base of calmness and self-compassion, I was able to experience the non-dual state and the chain of thoughts that appeared would go more like “This time let’s just stick with it a bit longer. Basically no one has a persistent non-dual experience that lasts forever. It will collapse eventually whether you like it or not. Nothing much has really changed about the contents of awareness. It’s the same stuff just from a different perspective. I’m still obviously able to feel calmness and joyfulness, I’m still able to take actions that keep me safe — so it’s fine to hang out here”. And then thoughts eventually wander around to ice cream or whatever. And, again, all this is just stuff appearing within a single unified awake sense of awareness that’s being labelled as the experiencer (rather than the ‘I’ in the thoughts above being the experiencer).
The fact that thoughts referencing the self are appearing in awareness whilst it’s awareness itself that feels like the experiencer doesn’t seem to create as many contradictions as you would expect. I presume that’s partly because awareness itself, is able to be aware of its own contents but not do much else. It doesn’t for example make decisions or have a sense of free will like the normal dualistic self. Those again would just be more appearances in awareness.
However it’s obvious that awareness being spontaneously aware of itself does change things in important and indirect ways. It does change the sequences of thoughts somehow and the overall feeling tone — and therefore behaviour. But perhaps in less radical ways than you would expect. For me, at different times, this ranged from causing a mini panic attack that collapsed the non-dual state (obviously would have been visible from the outside) to subtly imbuing everything with nice effortlessness vibes and taking the sting out of suffering type experiences but not changing my thought chains and behaviour enough to be noticeable from the outside to someone else.
Disclaimer: I felt unsure at several points writing this and I’m still quite new to non-dual experiences. I can’t reliably generate a clear non-dual state on command, it’s rather hit and miss. What I wrote above is written from a fairly dualistic state relying on memories of previous experiences a few days ago. And it’s possible that the non-dual experience I’m describing here is still rather shallow and missing important insights versus what very accomplished meditators experience.
I won’t claim that I’m constantly in a self of non-self, but as I’m writing this, I don’t really feel that I’m locally existing in my body. I’m rather the awareness of everything that continuously arises in consciousness.
This doesn’t happen all the time, I won’t claim to be enlightened or anything but maybe this n=1 self-report can help?
Even from this state of awareness, there’s still a will to do something. It is almost like you’re a force of nature moving forward with doing what you were doing before you were in a state of presence awareness. It isn’t you and at the same time it is you. Words are honestly quite insufficient to describe the experience, but If I try to conceptualise it, I’m the universe moving forward by itself. In a state of non-duality, the taste is often very much the same no matter what experience is arising.
There are some times when I’m not fully in a state of non-dual awareness when it can feel like “I” am pretending to do things. At the same time it also kind of feels like using a tool? The underlying motivation for action changes to something like acceptance or helpfulness, and in order to achieve that, there’s this tool of the self that you can apply.
I’m noticing it is quite hard to introspect and try to write from a state of presence awareness at the same time but hopefully it was somewhat helpful?
Could you give me some experiments to try from a state of awareness? I would be happy to try them out and come back.
Extra (relation to some of the ideas):
In the Mahayana wisdom tradition, explored in Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees, there’s this idea of emptiness, which is very related to the idea of non-dual perception. For all you see is arising from your own constricted view of experience, and so it is all arising in your own head. Realising this co-creation can enable a freedom of interpretation of your experiences.
Yet this view is also arising in your mind, and so you have “emptiness of emptiness,” meaning that you’re left without a basis. Therefore, both non-self and self are false but magnificent ways of looking at the world. Some people believe that the non-dual is better than the dual yet as my Thai Forest tradition guru Ajhan Buddhisaro says, “Don’t poopoo the mind.” The self boundary can be both a restricting and very useful concept, it is just very nice to have the skill to see past it and go back to the state of now, of presence awareness.
Emptiness is a bit like deeply seeing that our beliefs are built up from different axioms and being able to say that the axioms of reality aren’t based on anything but probabilistic beliefs. Or seeing that we have Occam’s razor because we have seen it work before, yet that it is fundamentally completely arbitrary and that the world just is arising spontaneously from moment to moment. Yet Occam’s razor is very useful for making claims about the world.
I’m not sure if that connection makes sense, but hopefully, that gives a better understanding of the non-dual understanding of the self and non-self. (At least the Thai Forest one)
Many helpful replies! Here’s where I’m at right now (feel free to push back!) [I’m coming from an atheist-physicalist perspective; this will bounce off everyone else.]
Hypothesis:
Normies like me (Steve) have an intuitive mental concept “Steve” which is simultaneously BOTH (A) Steve-the-human-body-etc AND (B) Steve-the-soul / consciousness / wellspring of vitalistic force / what Dan Dennett calls a “homunculus” / whatever.
The (A) & (B) “Steve” concepts are the same concept in normies like me, or at least deeply tangled together. So it’s hard to entertain the possibility of them coming apart, or to think through the consequences if they do.
Some people can get into a Mental State S (call it a form of “enlightenment”, or pick your favorite terminology) where their intuitive concept-space around (B) radically changes—it broadens, or disappears, or whatever. But for them, the (A) mental concept still exists and indeed doesn’t change much.
Anyway, people often have thoughts that connect sense-of-self to motivation, like “not wanting to be embarrassed” or “wanting to keep my promises”. My central claim that the relevant sense-of-self involved in that motivation is (A), not (B).
If we conflate (A) & (B)—as normies like me are intuitively inclined to do—then we get the intuition that a radical change in (B) must have radical impacts on behavior. But that’s wrong—the (A) concept is still there and largely unchanged even in Mental State S, and it’s (A), not (B), that plays a role in those behaviorally-important everyday thoughts like “not wanting to be embarrassed” or “wanting to keep my promises”. So radical changes in (B) would not (directly) have the radical behavioral effects that one might intuitively expect (although it does of course have more than zero behavioral effect, with self-reports being an obvious example).
Some meditators say that before you can get a good sense of non-self you first have to have good self-confidence. I think I would tend to agree with them as it is about how you generally act in the world and what consequences your actions will have. Without this the support for the type B that you’re talking about can be very hard to come by.
Otherwise I do really agree with what you say in this comment.
There is a slight disagreement with the elaboration though, I do not actually think that makes sense. I would rather say that the (A) that you’re talking about is more of a software construct than it is a hardware construct. When you meditate a lot, you realise this and get access to the full OS instead of just the specific software or OS emulator. A is then an evolutionary beneficial algorithm that runs a bit out of control (for example during childhood when we attribute all cause and effect to our “selves”).
Meditation allows us to see that what we have previously attributed to the self was flimsy and dependent on us believing that the hypothesis of the self is true.
My experience is different from the two you describe. I typically fully lack (A)[1], and partially lack (B). I think this is something different from what others might describe as ‘enlightenment’.
I might write more about this if anyone is interested.
Normies like me have an intuitive mental concept “me” which is simultaneously BOTH (A) me-the-human-body-etc AND (B) me-the-soul / consciousness / wellspring of vitalistic force / what Dan Dennett calls a “homunculus” / whatever.
to:
Normies like me (Steve) have an intuitive mental concept “Steve” which is simultaneously BOTH (A) Steve-the-human-body-etc AND (B) Steve-the-soul / consciousness / wellspring of vitalistic force / what Dan Dennett calls a “homunculus” / whatever.
I think that’s closer to what I was trying to get across. Does that edit change anything in your response?
At least the ‘me-the-human-body’ part of the concept. I don’t know what the ‘-etc’ part refers to.
The “etc” would include things like the tendency for fingers to reactively withdraw from touching a hot surface.
Elaborating a bit: In my own (physicalist, illusionist) ontology, there’s a body with a nervous system including the brain, and the whole mental world including consciousness / awareness is inextricably part of that package. But in other people’s ontology, as I understand it, some nervous system activities / properties (e.g. a finger reactively withdrawing from pain, maybe some or all other desires and aversions) gets lumped in with the body, whereas other [things that I happen to believe are] nervous system activities / properties (e.g. awareness) gets peeled off into (B). So I said “etc” to include all the former stuff. Hopefully that’s clear.
(I’m trying hard not to get sidetracked into an argument about the true nature of consciousness—I’m stating my ontology without defending it.)
I think that’s closer to what I was trying to get across. Does that edit change anything in your response?
No.
Overall, I would say that my self-concept is closer to what a physicalist ontology implies is mundanely happening—a neural network, lacking a singular ‘self’ entity inside it, receiving sense data from sensors and able to output commands to this strange, alien vessel (body). (And also I only identify myself with some parts of the non-mechanistic-level description of what the neural network is doing).
I write in a lot more detail below. This isn’t necessarily written at you in particular, or with the expectation of you reading through all of it.
1. Non-belief in self-as-body (A)
I see two kinds of self-as-body belief. The first is looking in a mirror, or at a photo, and thinking, “that [body] is me.” The second is controlling the body, and having a sense that you’re the one moving it, or more strongly, that it is moving because it is you (and you are choosing to move).
I’ll write about my experiences with the second kind first.
The way a finger automatically withdraws from heat does not feel like a part of me in any sense. Yesterday, I accidentally dropped a utensil and my hands automatically snapped into place around it somehow, and I thought something like, “woah, I didn’t intend to do that. I guess it’s a highly optimized narrow heuristic, from times where reacting so quickly was helpful to survival”.
I experimented a bit between writing this, and I noticed one intuitive view I can have of the body is that it’s some kind of machine that automatically follows such simple intents about the physical world (including intents that I don’t consider ‘me’, like high fear of spiders). For example, if I have motivation and intent to open a window, then the body just automatically moves to it and opens it without me really noticing that the body itself (or more precisely, the body plus the non-me nervous/neural structure controlling it) is the thing doing that—it’s kind of like I’m a ghost (or abstract mind) with telekinesis powers (over nearby objects), but then we apply reductive physics and find that actually there’s a causal chain beneath the telekinesis involving a moving body (which I always know and can see, I just don’t usually think about it).
The way my hands are moving on the keyboard as I write this also doesn’t particularly feel like it’s me doing that; in my mind, I’m just willing the text to be written, and then the movement happens on its own, in a way that feels kind of alien if I actually focus on it (as if the hands are their own life form).
That said, this isn’t always true. I do have an ‘embodied self-sense’ sometimes. For example, I usually fall asleep cuddling stuffies because this makes me happy. At least some purposeful form of sense-of-embodiment seems present there, because the concept of cuddling has embodiment as an assumption.[1]
(As I read over the above, I wonder how different it really is from normal human experience. I’m guessing there’s a subtle difference between “being so embodied it becomes a basic implicit assumption that you don’t notice” and “being so nonembodied that noticing it feels like [reductive physics metaphor]”)
As for the first kind mentioned of locating oneself in the body’s appearance, which informs typical humans perception of others and themself—I don’t experience this with regard to myself (and try to avoid being biased about others this way), instead I just feel pretty dissociated when I see my body reflected and mostly ignore it.
In the past, it instead felt actively stressful/impossible/horrifying, because I had (and to an extent still do have) a deep intuition that I am already a ‘particular kind of being’, and, under the self-as-body ontology, this is expected to correspond to a particular kind of body, one which I did not observe reflected back. As this basic sense-of-self violation happened repeatedly, it gradually eroded away this aspect of sense-of-self / the embodied ontology.
I’d also feel alienated if I had to pilot an adult body to interact with others, so I’ve set up my life such that I only minimally need to do that (e.g for doctors appointments) and can otherwise just interact with the world through text.
2. What parts of the mind-brain are me, and what am I? (B)
I think there’s an extent to which I self-model as an ‘inner homunculus’, or a ‘singular-self inside’. I think it’s lesser and not as robust in me as it is in typical humans, though. For example, when I reflect on this word ‘I’ that I keep using, I notice it has a meaning that doesn’t feel very true of me: the meaning of a singular, unified entity, rather than multiple inner cognitive processes, or no self in particular.
I often notice my thoughts are coming from different parts of the mind. In one case, I was feeling bad about not having been productive enough in learning/generating insights and I thought to myself, “I need to do better”, and then felt aware that it was just one lone part thinking this while the rest doesn’t feel moved; the rest instead culminates into a different inner-monologue-thought: something like, “but we always need to do better. tsuyoku naratai is a universal impetus.” (to be clear, this is not from a different identity or character, but from different neural processes causally prior to what is thought (or written).)
And when I’m writing (which forces us to ‘collapse’ our subverbal understanding into one text), it’s noticeable how much a potential statement is endorsed by different present influences[2].
I tend to use words like ‘I’ and ‘me’ in writing to not confuse others (internally, ‘we’ can feel more fitting, referring again to multiple inner processes[2], and not to multiple high-level selves as some humans experience. ‘we’ is often naturally present in our inner monologue). We’ll use this language for most of the rest of the text[3].
There are times where this is less true. Our mind can return to acting as a human-singular-identity-player in some contexts. For example, if we’re interacting with someone or multiple others, that can push us towards performing a ‘self’ (but unless it’s someone we intuitively-trust and relatively private, we tend to feel alienated/stressed from this). Or if we’re, for example, playing a game with a friend, then in those moments we’ll probably be drawn back into a more childlike humanistic self-ontology rather than the dissociated posthumanism we describe here.
Also, we want to answer “what inner processes?”—there’s some division between parts of the mind-brain we refer to here, and parts that are the ‘structure’ we’re embedded in. We’re not quite sure how to write down the line, and it might be fuzzy or e.g contextual.[4]
3. Tracing the intuitive-ontology shift
“Why are you this way, and have you always been this way?” – We haven’t always. We think this is the result of a gradual erosion of the ‘default’ human ontology, mentioned once above.
We think this mostly did not come from something like ‘believing in physicalism’. Most physicalists aren’t like this. Ontological crises may have been part of it, though—independently synthesizing determinism as a child and realizing it made naive free will impossible sure did make past-child-quila depressed.
We think the strongest sources came from ‘intuitive-ontological’[5] incompatibilities, ways the observations seemed to sadly-contradict the platonicself-ontology we started with. Another term for these would be ‘survival updates’. This can also include ways one’s starting ontology was inadequate to explain certain important observations.
Also, I think that existing so often in a digital-informational context[6], and only infrequently in an analog/physical context, also contributed to eroding the self-as-body belief.
Also, eventually, it wasn’t just erosion/survival updates; at some point, I think I slowly started to embrace this posthumanist ontology, too. It feels narratively fitting that I’m now thinking about artificial intelligence and reading LessWrong.
(There is some sense in which maybe, my proclaimed ontology has its source in constant dissociation, which I only don’t experience when feeling especially comfortable/safe. I’m only speculating, though—this is the kind of thing that I’d consider leaving out, since I’m really unsure about it, it’s at the level of just one of many passing thoughts I’d consider.)
This ‘inner proccesses’ phrasing I keep using doesn’t feel quite right. Other words that come to mind: considerations? currently-active neural subnetworks? subagents? some kind of neural council metaphor?
(sometimes ‘we’ feels unfitting too, it’s weird, maybe ‘I’ is for when a self is being more-performed, or when text is less representative of the whole, hard to say)
We tried to point to some rough differences, but realized that the level we mean is somewhere between high-level concepts with words (like ‘general/narrow cognition’ and ‘altruism’ and ‘biases’) and the lowest-level description (i.e how actual neurons are interacting physically), and that we don’t know how to write about this.
We can differentiate between an endorsed ‘whole-world ontology’ like physicalism, and smaller-scale intuitive ontologies that are more like intuitive frames we seem to believe in, even if when asked we’ll say they’re not fundamental truths.
The intuitive ontology of the self is particularly central to humans.
Note this was mostly downstream of other factors, not causally prior to them. I don’t want anyone to read this and think internet use itself causes body-self incongruence, though it might avoid certain related feedback loops.
I’m intrigued by the reports (including but not limited to the Martin 2020 “PNSE” paper) that people can “become enlightened” and have a radically different sense of self, agency, etc.; but friends and family don’t notice them behaving radically differently, or even differently at all. I’m trying to find sources on whether this is true, and if so, what’s the deal. I’m especially interested in behaviors that (naïvely) seem to centrally involve one’s self-image, such as “applying willpower” or “wanting to impress someone”. Specifically, if there’s a person whose sense-of-self has dissolved / merged into the universe / whatever, and they nevertheless enact behaviors that onlookers would conventionally put into one of those two categories, then how would that person describe / conceptualize those behaviors and why they occurred? (Or would they deny the premise that they are still exhibiting those behaviors?) Interested in any references or thoughts, or email / DM me if you prefer. Thanks in advance!
(Edited to add: Ideally someone would reply: “Yeah I have no sense of self, and also I regularly do things that onlookers describe as ‘applying willpower’ and/or ‘trying to impress someone’. And when that happens, I notice the following sequence of thoughts arising: [insert detailed description]”.)
[also posted on twitter where it got a bunch of replies including one by Aella.]
I’ll give it a go.
I’m not very comfortable with the term enlightened but I’ve been on retreats teaching non-dual meditation, received ‘pointing out instructions’ in the Mahamudra tradition and have experienced some bizarre states of mind where it seemed to make complete sense to think of a sense of awake awareness as being the ground thing that was being experienced spontaneously, with sensations, thoughts and emotions appearing to it — rather than there being a separate me distinct from awareness that was experiencing things ‘using my awareness’, which is how it had always felt before.
When I have (or rather awareness itself has) experienced clear and stable non-dual states the normal ‘self’ stuff still appears in awareness and behaves fairly normally (e.g there’s hunger, thoughts about making dinner, impulses to move the body, the body moving around the room making dinner…). Being in that non dual state seemed to add a very pleasant quality of effortlessness and okayness to the mix but beyond that it wasn’t radically changing what the ‘small self’ in awareness was doing.
If later the thought “I want to eat a second portion of ice cream” came up followed by “I should apply some self control. I better not do that.” they would just be things appearing to awareness.
Of course another thing in awareness is the sense that awareness is aware of itself and the fact that everything feels funky and non-dual at the moment. You’d think that might change the chain of thoughts about the ‘small self’ wanting ice cream and then having to apply self control towards itself.
In fact the first few times I had intense non-dual experiences there was a chain of thoughts that went “what the hell is going on? I’m not sure I like this? What if I can’t get back into the normal dualistic state of mind?” followed by some panicked feelings and then the non-dual state quickly collapsing into a normal dualistic state.
With more practice, doing other forms of meditation to build a stronger base of calmness and self-compassion, I was able to experience the non-dual state and the chain of thoughts that appeared would go more like “This time let’s just stick with it a bit longer. Basically no one has a persistent non-dual experience that lasts forever. It will collapse eventually whether you like it or not. Nothing much has really changed about the contents of awareness. It’s the same stuff just from a different perspective. I’m still obviously able to feel calmness and joyfulness, I’m still able to take actions that keep me safe — so it’s fine to hang out here”. And then thoughts eventually wander around to ice cream or whatever. And, again, all this is just stuff appearing within a single unified awake sense of awareness that’s being labelled as the experiencer (rather than the ‘I’ in the thoughts above being the experiencer).
The fact that thoughts referencing the self are appearing in awareness whilst it’s awareness itself that feels like the experiencer doesn’t seem to create as many contradictions as you would expect. I presume that’s partly because awareness itself, is able to be aware of its own contents but not do much else. It doesn’t for example make decisions or have a sense of free will like the normal dualistic self. Those again would just be more appearances in awareness.
However it’s obvious that awareness being spontaneously aware of itself does change things in important and indirect ways. It does change the sequences of thoughts somehow and the overall feeling tone — and therefore behaviour. But perhaps in less radical ways than you would expect. For me, at different times, this ranged from causing a mini panic attack that collapsed the non-dual state (obviously would have been visible from the outside) to subtly imbuing everything with nice effortlessness vibes and taking the sting out of suffering type experiences but not changing my thought chains and behaviour enough to be noticeable from the outside to someone else.
Disclaimer: I felt unsure at several points writing this and I’m still quite new to non-dual experiences. I can’t reliably generate a clear non-dual state on command, it’s rather hit and miss. What I wrote above is written from a fairly dualistic state relying on memories of previous experiences a few days ago. And it’s possible that the non-dual experience I’m describing here is still rather shallow and missing important insights versus what very accomplished meditators experience.
Great description. This sounds very similar to some of my experiences with non-dual states.
I won’t claim that I’m constantly in a self of non-self, but as I’m writing this, I don’t really feel that I’m locally existing in my body. I’m rather the awareness of everything that continuously arises in consciousness.
This doesn’t happen all the time, I won’t claim to be enlightened or anything but maybe this n=1 self-report can help?
Even from this state of awareness, there’s still a will to do something. It is almost like you’re a force of nature moving forward with doing what you were doing before you were in a state of presence awareness. It isn’t you and at the same time it is you. Words are honestly quite insufficient to describe the experience, but If I try to conceptualise it, I’m the universe moving forward by itself. In a state of non-duality, the taste is often very much the same no matter what experience is arising.
There are some times when I’m not fully in a state of non-dual awareness when it can feel like “I” am pretending to do things. At the same time it also kind of feels like using a tool? The underlying motivation for action changes to something like acceptance or helpfulness, and in order to achieve that, there’s this tool of the self that you can apply.
I’m noticing it is quite hard to introspect and try to write from a state of presence awareness at the same time but hopefully it was somewhat helpful?
Could you give me some experiments to try from a state of awareness? I would be happy to try them out and come back.
Extra (relation to some of the ideas): In the Mahayana wisdom tradition, explored in Rob Burbea’s Seeing That Frees, there’s this idea of emptiness, which is very related to the idea of non-dual perception. For all you see is arising from your own constricted view of experience, and so it is all arising in your own head. Realising this co-creation can enable a freedom of interpretation of your experiences.
Yet this view is also arising in your mind, and so you have “emptiness of emptiness,” meaning that you’re left without a basis. Therefore, both non-self and self are false but magnificent ways of looking at the world. Some people believe that the non-dual is better than the dual yet as my Thai Forest tradition guru Ajhan Buddhisaro says, “Don’t poopoo the mind.” The self boundary can be both a restricting and very useful concept, it is just very nice to have the skill to see past it and go back to the state of now, of presence awareness.
Emptiness is a bit like deeply seeing that our beliefs are built up from different axioms and being able to say that the axioms of reality aren’t based on anything but probabilistic beliefs. Or seeing that we have Occam’s razor because we have seen it work before, yet that it is fundamentally completely arbitrary and that the world just is arising spontaneously from moment to moment. Yet Occam’s razor is very useful for making claims about the world.
I’m not sure if that connection makes sense, but hopefully, that gives a better understanding of the non-dual understanding of the self and non-self. (At least the Thai Forest one)
Many helpful replies! Here’s where I’m at right now (feel free to push back!) [I’m coming from an atheist-physicalist perspective; this will bounce off everyone else.]
Hypothesis:
Normies like me (Steve) have an intuitive mental concept “Steve” which is simultaneously BOTH (A) Steve-the-human-body-etc AND (B) Steve-the-soul / consciousness / wellspring of vitalistic force / what Dan Dennett calls a “homunculus” / whatever.
The (A) & (B) “Steve” concepts are the same concept in normies like me, or at least deeply tangled together. So it’s hard to entertain the possibility of them coming apart, or to think through the consequences if they do.
Some people can get into a Mental State S (call it a form of “enlightenment”, or pick your favorite terminology) where their intuitive concept-space around (B) radically changes—it broadens, or disappears, or whatever. But for them, the (A) mental concept still exists and indeed doesn’t change much.
Anyway, people often have thoughts that connect sense-of-self to motivation, like “not wanting to be embarrassed” or “wanting to keep my promises”. My central claim that the relevant sense-of-self involved in that motivation is (A), not (B).
If we conflate (A) & (B)—as normies like me are intuitively inclined to do—then we get the intuition that a radical change in (B) must have radical impacts on behavior. But that’s wrong—the (A) concept is still there and largely unchanged even in Mental State S, and it’s (A), not (B), that plays a role in those behaviorally-important everyday thoughts like “not wanting to be embarrassed” or “wanting to keep my promises”. So radical changes in (B) would not (directly) have the radical behavioral effects that one might intuitively expect (although it does of course have more than zero behavioral effect, with self-reports being an obvious example).
End of hypothesis. Again, feel free to push back!
Some meditators say that before you can get a good sense of non-self you first have to have good self-confidence. I think I would tend to agree with them as it is about how you generally act in the world and what consequences your actions will have. Without this the support for the type B that you’re talking about can be very hard to come by.
Otherwise I do really agree with what you say in this comment.
There is a slight disagreement with the elaboration though, I do not actually think that makes sense. I would rather say that the (A) that you’re talking about is more of a software construct than it is a hardware construct. When you meditate a lot, you realise this and get access to the full OS instead of just the specific software or OS emulator. A is then an evolutionary beneficial algorithm that runs a bit out of control (for example during childhood when we attribute all cause and effect to our “selves”).
Meditation allows us to see that what we have previously attributed to the self was flimsy and dependent on us believing that the hypothesis of the self is true.
My experience is different from the two you describe. I typically fully lack (A)[1], and partially lack (B). I think this is something different from what others might describe as ‘enlightenment’.
I might write more about this if anyone is interested.
At least the ‘me-the-human-body’ part of the concept. I don’t know what the ‘-etc’ part refers to.
I just made a wording change from:
to:
I think that’s closer to what I was trying to get across. Does that edit change anything in your response?
The “etc” would include things like the tendency for fingers to reactively withdraw from touching a hot surface.
Elaborating a bit: In my own (physicalist, illusionist) ontology, there’s a body with a nervous system including the brain, and the whole mental world including consciousness / awareness is inextricably part of that package. But in other people’s ontology, as I understand it, some nervous system activities / properties (e.g. a finger reactively withdrawing from pain, maybe some or all other desires and aversions) gets lumped in with the body, whereas other [things that I happen to believe are] nervous system activities / properties (e.g. awareness) gets peeled off into (B). So I said “etc” to include all the former stuff. Hopefully that’s clear.
(I’m trying hard not to get sidetracked into an argument about the true nature of consciousness—I’m stating my ontology without defending it.)
No.
Overall, I would say that my self-concept is closer to what a physicalist ontology implies is mundanely happening—a neural network, lacking a singular ‘self’ entity inside it, receiving sense data from sensors and able to output commands to this strange, alien vessel (body). (And also I only identify myself with some parts of the non-mechanistic-level description of what the neural network is doing).
I write in a lot more detail below. This isn’t necessarily written at you in particular, or with the expectation of you reading through all of it.
1. Non-belief in self-as-body (A)
I see two kinds of self-as-body belief. The first is looking in a mirror, or at a photo, and thinking, “that [body] is me.” The second is controlling the body, and having a sense that you’re the one moving it, or more strongly, that it is moving because it is you (and you are choosing to move).
I’ll write about my experiences with the second kind first.
The way a finger automatically withdraws from heat does not feel like a part of me in any sense. Yesterday, I accidentally dropped a utensil and my hands automatically snapped into place around it somehow, and I thought something like, “woah, I didn’t intend to do that. I guess it’s a highly optimized narrow heuristic, from times where reacting so quickly was helpful to survival”.
I experimented a bit between writing this, and I noticed one intuitive view I can have of the body is that it’s some kind of machine that automatically follows such simple intents about the physical world (including intents that I don’t consider ‘me’, like high fear of spiders). For example, if I have motivation and intent to open a window, then the body just automatically moves to it and opens it without me really noticing that the body itself (or more precisely, the body plus the non-me nervous/neural structure controlling it) is the thing doing that—it’s kind of like I’m a ghost (or abstract mind) with telekinesis powers (over nearby objects), but then we apply reductive physics and find that actually there’s a causal chain beneath the telekinesis involving a moving body (which I always know and can see, I just don’t usually think about it).
The way my hands are moving on the keyboard as I write this also doesn’t particularly feel like it’s me doing that; in my mind, I’m just willing the text to be written, and then the movement happens on its own, in a way that feels kind of alien if I actually focus on it (as if the hands are their own life form).
That said, this isn’t always true. I do have an ‘embodied self-sense’ sometimes. For example, I usually fall asleep cuddling stuffies because this makes me happy. At least some purposeful form of sense-of-embodiment seems present there, because the concept of cuddling has embodiment as an assumption.[1]
(As I read over the above, I wonder how different it really is from normal human experience. I’m guessing there’s a subtle difference between “being so embodied it becomes a basic implicit assumption that you don’t notice” and “being so nonembodied that noticing it feels like [reductive physics metaphor]”)
As for the first kind mentioned of locating oneself in the body’s appearance, which informs typical humans perception of others and themself—I don’t experience this with regard to myself (and try to avoid being biased about others this way), instead I just feel pretty dissociated when I see my body reflected and mostly ignore it.
In the past, it instead felt actively stressful/impossible/horrifying, because I had (and to an extent still do have) a deep intuition that I am already a ‘particular kind of being’, and, under the self-as-body ontology, this is expected to correspond to a particular kind of body, one which I did not observe reflected back. As this basic sense-of-self violation happened repeatedly, it gradually eroded away this aspect of sense-of-self / the embodied ontology.
I’d also feel alienated if I had to pilot an adult body to interact with others, so I’ve set up my life such that I only minimally need to do that (e.g for doctors appointments) and can otherwise just interact with the world through text.
2. What parts of the mind-brain are me, and what am I? (B)
I think there’s an extent to which I self-model as an ‘inner homunculus’, or a ‘singular-self inside’. I think it’s lesser and not as robust in me as it is in typical humans, though. For example, when I reflect on this word ‘I’ that I keep using, I notice it has a meaning that doesn’t feel very true of me: the meaning of a singular, unified entity, rather than multiple inner cognitive processes, or no self in particular.
I often notice my thoughts are coming from different parts of the mind. In one case, I was feeling bad about not having been productive enough in learning/generating insights and I thought to myself, “I need to do better”, and then felt aware that it was just one lone part thinking this while the rest doesn’t feel moved; the rest instead culminates into a different inner-monologue-thought: something like, “but we always need to do better. tsuyoku naratai is a universal impetus.” (to be clear, this is not from a different identity or character, but from different neural processes causally prior to what is thought (or written).)
And when I’m writing (which forces us to ‘collapse’ our subverbal understanding into one text), it’s noticeable how much a potential statement is endorsed by different present influences[2].
I tend to use words like ‘I’ and ‘me’ in writing to not confuse others (internally, ‘we’ can feel more fitting, referring again to multiple inner processes[2], and not to multiple high-level selves as some humans experience. ‘we’ is often naturally present in our inner monologue). We’ll use this language for most of the rest of the text[3].
There are times where this is less true. Our mind can return to acting as a human-singular-identity-player in some contexts. For example, if we’re interacting with someone or multiple others, that can push us towards performing a ‘self’ (but unless it’s someone we intuitively-trust and relatively private, we tend to feel alienated/stressed from this). Or if we’re, for example, playing a game with a friend, then in those moments we’ll probably be drawn back into a more childlike humanistic self-ontology rather than the dissociated posthumanism we describe here.
Also, we want to answer “what inner processes?”—there’s some division between parts of the mind-brain we refer to here, and parts that are the ‘structure’ we’re embedded in. We’re not quite sure how to write down the line, and it might be fuzzy or e.g contextual.[4]
3. Tracing the intuitive-ontology shift
“Why are you this way, and have you always been this way?” – We haven’t always. We think this is the result of a gradual erosion of the ‘default’ human ontology, mentioned once above.
We think this mostly did not come from something like ‘believing in physicalism’. Most physicalists aren’t like this. Ontological crises may have been part of it, though—independently synthesizing determinism as a child and realizing it made naive free will impossible sure did make past-child-quila depressed.
We think the strongest sources came from ‘intuitive-ontological’[5] incompatibilities, ways the observations seemed to sadly-contradict the platonic self-ontology we started with. Another term for these would be ‘survival updates’. This can also include ways one’s starting ontology was inadequate to explain certain important observations.
Also, I think that existing so often in a digital-informational context[6], and only infrequently in an analog/physical context, also contributed to eroding the self-as-body belief.
Also, eventually, it wasn’t just erosion/survival updates; at some point, I think I slowly started to embrace this posthumanist ontology, too. It feels narratively fitting that I’m now thinking about artificial intelligence and reading LessWrong.
(There is some sense in which maybe, my proclaimed ontology has its source in constant dissociation, which I only don’t experience when feeling especially comfortable/safe. I’m only speculating, though—this is the kind of thing that I’d consider leaving out, since I’m really unsure about it, it’s at the level of just one of many passing thoughts I’d consider.)
This ‘inner proccesses’ phrasing I keep using doesn’t feel quite right. Other words that come to mind: considerations? currently-active neural subnetworks? subagents? some kind of neural council metaphor?
(sometimes ‘we’ feels unfitting too, it’s weird, maybe ‘I’ is for when a self is being more-performed, or when text is less representative of the whole, hard to say)
We tried to point to some rough differences, but realized that the level we mean is somewhere between high-level concepts with words (like ‘general/narrow cognition’ and ‘altruism’ and ‘biases’) and the lowest-level description (i.e how actual neurons are interacting physically), and that we don’t know how to write about this.
We can differentiate between an endorsed ‘whole-world ontology’ like physicalism, and smaller-scale intuitive ontologies that are more like intuitive frames we seem to believe in, even if when asked we’ll say they’re not fundamental truths.
The intuitive ontology of the self is particularly central to humans.
Note this was mostly downstream of other factors, not causally prior to them. I don’t want anyone to read this and think internet use itself causes body-self incongruence, though it might avoid certain related feedback loops.