The Nothingness of Personality (1922) | Hacker News Reader

The Nothingness of Personality (1922)

filosofiaesoterica.com

52 points5018 comments

> Grimm observes that this rambling dialectical inquiry yields a result that coincides with Schopenhauer’s opinion that the self is a point whose immobility is useful for discerning, by contrast, the heavy-laden flight of time. This opinion translates the self into a mere logical imperative, without qualities of its own or distinctions from individual to individual.

I find it difficult to reconcile this with a modern understanding of neurobiology and psychology.

> Are desire, thought, happiness, and distress my true self? The answer, in accordance with the precept, is clearly in the negative, since those conditions expire without annulling me with them. Consciousness – the final hideout where we might track down the self – also proves unqualified. Once the emotions, the extraneous perceptions, and even ever-shifting thought are dismissed, consciousness is a barren thing, without any appearance reflected in it to make it exist.

I would in fact go in the opposite direction. The self is an amalgamation of all these things, layered upon each other and infinitely interwoven over time. In the same way an electron can be seen as more as a "cloud" with no definite position until measurement, we are a cloud of experiences and thoughts and emotions that happens to take one configuration or another based on external "measurements".

There is no thought or emotion I can have right now that isn't in some way influenced or shaped by what I may have experienced a few minutes ago, or an hour ago, or a week ago, or a year ago, or a decade ago. If I strip away the emotions, the thoughts, the perceptions, all I have is a functionless mirror.

Depending on how you feel about recursion, I have a fairly elegant definition of self.

"You are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are."

In the most syntactically literal sense of tracing back referent objects it is true. But its true in a deeper sense as well.

Human reasoning and consciousness seems to be hacked out of a system for signalling others. There's always a presumed speaker and listener (you/me), even when its the voice in your head talking to yourself. The way we reason by self-dialog is like a strange form of coding where everything has been implemented as a server making requests, but most of the requests are bound for localhost anyway. There is no implementation, its API calls all the way down!

So to rephrase less obtusely, "you" are the source of whatever it is you're hearing which isn't attributed to me or anyone else. The easiest way to hear such things is to ask yourself, for in the process of asking yourself you get the thing you were asking for. In a most literal physical sense, "you" are the standing wave of electrical patterns that echo around in your skull, simulating a conversation as if it were echoing around in an acoustic medium.

What if the query returns a Boolean? We build who we are as a process of elimination of who we aren't. Most of life it can be a fluid set of things that aren't definitive. I would even claim the less someone ask the question the less he is him/her. And it doesn't collide in living. All identity problems or divorces start when people ask basic questions too late...

That's an interesting perspective, thanks.

> we are a cloud of experiences and thoughts and emotions that happens to take one configuration or another based on external "measurements".

> There is no thought or emotion I can have right now that...

I'm confused now. ARE you thoughts and emotions, or do you HAVE thougths and emotions?

> If I strip away the emotions, the thoughts, the perceptions, all I have is a functionless mirror.

Have you done that to be able to reach that conclussion, or is that speculation?

> Have you done that to be able to reach that conclussion, or is that speculation?

It's based on the rest of what I said and by extension my current understanding of cognition and neurobiology.

What is your current understanding about awareness? Can it be like what you call the 'functionless mirror'? What place do you assign to awareness in that equation?

I mean, the layering and modifications of thoughts, emotions and perceptions, may occur without awareness, as the functioning of a machine.

“The human body is the best image of the human soul”

I think this essay gets overly bogged down in thinking that personality is some thing that exists in the brain. Obviously it does to some extent. But instead of trying to self investigate your own personality or your own consciousness, meditate on the people that are close to you. Especially the ones that you love and the ones that annoy you. It’s so blindingly obvious that there’s giant differences between people, but those differences aren’t just in some abstract corner of their brain. People walk differently. They smile differently. Their attention is drawn to different things. What it means for someone to love you is completely different depending on who that someone is, they go about it in their own special way.

Interacting with other people is also your best window into your own personality and your own consciousness. Who are you comfortable with? Who shines brightly in your memory? What things do you miss about a lover when they’re gone? In solipsism our personality doesn’t mean much and our consciousness might as well be a brand floating in a vat. But in community we are as differentiated as can be.

Offtopic comment for the submitter: would you mind emailing hn@ycombinator.com? I would like to send you a repost invite.

I would love to know more about what this means.

Not dang (parent comment above) but this means that the topic is of interest to the general HN crowd and humanity. Unfortunately, it didn't get the front-page treatment on time. The options are to give it a push once it is re-submitted or some magic and then gets another chance.

I love this and makes HN lot more humane than just a bunch of algorithms.

Brajeshwar explained it, but I'll add that sometimes we can just put the posts directly into the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so they get a random placement on HN's front page. But we don't do that if they're more than about 2 days old. After that, we email the submitter a repost link. If they use the link, it will create a fresh submission and then we can put that one into the SCP.

The downside is that if we don't have an email address for the submitter, we can't email them a repost invite! Then I have to resort to off-topic pleadings. That's what you saw.

Thanks. My confusion stemmed from my belief that I clicked through from the first page, so while I was aware of the typical second chance pool from earlier discussion of it, I didn't think that covered this case. But it's quite possible that I misremembered where I saw it.

When I travel, I find myself wondering if there is truly much difference between myself and the millions of people that are living their lives in the giant megacities.

If I were instead born in a foreign country, with the same mind but looking more like the locals, would I act much different?

Isn't it just buddhist Anatta? What is the point of trying to re-invent the wheel from scratch?

Even supposing it is, there's quite a bit of fun in reinventing things. Look how often people on this site post a way that they've recreated Lisp, for example.

This stuff is from 1922, the West was not nearly as aware of Buddhist thought back then. Serious study of it only began in the 19th century.

>There is no whole self.

What makes anyone think there is a self at all? Materialism/physicalism is a more logical way to look at it. From quantum fields to atoms to molecules to biological systems, it's all random.

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