Things I believe that I will only ever rationalise and seldom actually sincerely question include :
- I'm me.
- Time exists.
- I have free will.
You can argue against them if you like, but I probably won't believe you even if your argument is dead clever. That's not to say I don't find the alternatives uninteresting, but I don't believe them. Interesting ideas can be very silly, but that's okay.
That's all by way of disclaimer. From the article :
The denial has two dimensions—the diachronic and the synchronic. That is, Buddhists deny that anything retains its identity over time (this is the doctrine of universal impermanence), and that even at a given moment, there is no unity to who we are, and nothing in us that answers to the object of our habitual self-grasping.
Let us begin with the impossibility of anything retaining its identity over time - the diachronic dimension. To see this point, it is useful to distinguish between strict identity and mere similarity. When we say that x is strictly identical to y, we say that x and y share all properties, that they are one and the same thing, perhaps under two different descriptions. So, for instance, Her Majesty the Queen of England is identical to the world’s best known breeder of Welsh corgis in this strict sense. You can't meet one without meeting the other; you can’t kick one without kicking the other. It is not just that they look so similar, and each wear the same kind of hat. There is only one thing, under two descriptions.
But Her Majesty the Queen now and the young girl who was crowned in 1952 are not strictly identical to one another. They are similar in certain respects, but different in many others. One is much older than the other. One is married to Phillip; one is not. We call them by the same name, but that is because of relationships of similarity and causal continuity, not strict identity. There is no strict identity over time, because any two stages of the same continuum are of different ages, if nothing else, and so do not share all properties, and so are not identical. The fact that we treat individuals as literally the same despite changes over time is a confusion of identity with similarity and causal continuity, not a recognition of an underlying reality.
I think it's more like an object in a programming language. Thus :
"ElizabethWindsor == Queen" evaluates to true since 1952.
ElizabethWindsor.age = some value
ElizabethWindsor.CorgiBreedingSkill = Maximum
ElizabethWindsor.NumberOfLegs = 2
... and so on. ElizabethWindsor has some properties which change, but a deeper, fundamental identity which cannot be defined by particular attributes. I don't claim to know how this identity can be defined, but you can push things quite hard before identity truly breaks. For example if I set ElizabethWindsor.NumberOfLegs = 0, it wouldn't make sense to say she's no longer herself. It's just that her particular properties have changed. To say that her entire identity is invalid because properties vary is too drastic for me; she doesn't have to be strictly identical in order to be fundamentally identical. Even though I'll cheerfully admit to having no good definition of what the fundamental identity really is.
Think of somebody whose body you’d love to have, for whatever reason. I have always wanted to have Ussain Bolt’s body, at his peak, for just about 9.4 seconds. Just to see what it feels like to go that fast. You probably have other desires.
In any case, I don't want to be Ussain Bolt. That would do me no good. He is already Ussain Bolt. I want to be me with Ussain Bolt’s body. That shows that I do not take myself to be my body, but to possess that body, because I can imagine (whether coherently or not) being me with a different body.
But how about my mind? Same thing. Imagine somebody whose mind you would like to have for a little while. I would like Stephen Hawking’s. Just for a bit. So that I could understand general relativity and quantum gravity. It would be so cool. Again, I don't want to be Stephen Hawking. He already is, and that does me no good. I want to be me with his mind. That shows that (whether coherently or incoherently) I don’t imagine myself to be my mind, but to be its possessor, which could be the same self with a different mind.
How monstrous ! I don't want anyone else's body or their minds at all. If I want to change myself, I want my mind and body to have different abilities. I can imagine I might, at least in principle, make drastic changes to my body without fundamentally changing my mind. But I can't just replace my mind with someone else's and still be me, that would be daft. I could, however, alter many of my mental abilities and still remain fundamentally me.
When we experience ourselves as decentered persons, however, we experience ourselves as part of a larger network of others, whose interests we share, and whose pains and pleasures we share as well. This allows the cultivation of the set of virtues known in the Buddhist tradition as the brahmavihāras, or divine states.They are benevolence, care, sympathetic joy and impartiality.
I don't think it's necessary to question the fundamental nature of identity for this. You can just assume that the network in which we're embedded changes some properties of us, and we in turn change some properties of the network, but some properties change very rarely or never.
https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/why-there-is-no-self-a-buddhist-perspective-for-the-west-auid-1044
Existence is behaviour.
ReplyDelete... existence is confusing.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor you might want to check my latest philosophical regurgitation... it's relevant to "Things I believe that I will only ever rationalise..."
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor you being you enforced by the free will does not relate back to the existence of a "self". The latter is more of an analytical construct than actual instance.
ReplyDeleteTo the extent of my knowledge this is where the eastern and western approaches diverge.
The western approach is cave-centric. It does not render harmony(both inner and outer) replacing it with a conflict. In order to instantiate this approach it requires a rigid self hidden deep into the cave.
The eastern approach on the other side seeks to remove the conflict by nesting. In mathematical terms it is like a fractal- you are the same as your environment and no matter how deep(in terms of privacy/intimacy) you go the interactions persist as structure. This concept does not require poles(me-the others) to model exchanges since it tends to create/promote an emotional vacuum in which the the bad and the good dissolve in each other.
We may argue if those models are comparable and/or the definitions they promote are more or less functional, but at the end none of them try to render you "being" around other "beings" (with all that comes with it) non existent. They simply introduce a meta-framework that allows a society to make-sense of itself. That to be said both frameworks tend to foster insane amounts of mysticism that can get rather ridiculous, but although caused by the framework that can not be blamed on those explicitly.
How can I have a belief in "the self" if I'm not even sure what "the self" refers to?
ReplyDeleteWhat is this "concept of the self" that I supposedly have?
On the weight of all available historical evidence, a rationalist position should never be particularly surprised to discover that the world and all of its contents have a tendency to reveal themselves as being radically other than what our naive intuitions suggests it to be. I remain agnostic on this issue of articulating Self, for complex reasons, but suspect that the very first thing that a continuously self-propagating energy-and-information-processing-pattern-as-cognitive-system-or-nodal-ego-point would do when challenged is to assert it's own assumptive and self-assessed or articulated self-existence as axiomatic and foundational.
ReplyDelete😆
If we were all really just simulations or approximations and transient caricatures of identity and Self, blind-shuffling and recombining rules and the variously prefabricated linguistic and psychosocial contexts and strategies of our era, we could no more prove or disprove authenticity from within this expanding, hyper-inflating logical space than we could ever lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. Anti-gravity bootlaces, notwithstanding...
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