The Illusion of Self | Hacker News Reader

The Illusion of Self

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23 pointsnollidge15 comments

Fascinating concept. For those interested (and who have not yet done so) look into Zen Buddhism, which has been teaching this lack-of-self for ages. I recommend Herrigel's "Zen in the art of Archery," and Suzuki "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism." Both Zen and the more modern take on the ego (or lack thereof) in this book are endlessly interesting.

Philosophical precedent:

"Descartes should have said: "thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the force of the cogito, Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a thinking thing, the reference of the "I," is more than the cogito can justify. Friedrich Nietzsche criticized the phrase in that it presupposes that there is an "I", that there is such an activity as "thinking", and that "I" know what "thinking" is. He suggested a more appropriate phrase would be "it thinks." In other words the "I" in "I think" could be similar to the "It" in "It is raining." David Hume claims that the philosophers who argue for a self that can be found using reason are confusing "similarity" with "identity". This means that the similarity of our thoughts and the continuity of them in this similarity do not mean that we can identify ourselves as a self but that our thoughts are similar."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum#Criticisms

Abstraction is not the same as illusion.

Think of the self as a function, not any particular return value. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out; the self remains.

(Of course this doesn't do justice to how inputs transform the self at runtime, but it's just an analogy. If we want to push it further, we could say that the self is a recursive first-class function.)

> in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hrs of the day. This is why you cannot see your own eyes moving when you look in a mirror!

False! Stare into your own eyes in a mirror and turn your head left and right while continuing to look at your eyes. You can see your eyes moving left to right in their sockets.

Saccades may blind you, but the only reason you can't see your eyes in the mirror is because changing your gaze means you're not looking at your own eyes anymore. What silly "evidence"...

The illusion of self as well as, for instance, illusion of free will, only work best for book titles.

Mind can sometime be tricked by illusions, or it can, sometimes, not be free, but that does make it a rule. It doesn't mean all we experience, self included, is an illusion, or that we don't have a free will. Drawing conclusions from particular examples, and particular persons is, well...

John Carpenter's early science fiction film DARK STAR has a humorous but illustrative discussion with a thermostellar bomb's AI about the limitations of experience and the self:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk&t=22s

> We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience.

This is very true.

It's been said that our minds create the whole of our reality at every moment, everything is a thought (an action), from the color, to the shape, to the relationship, to the idea.

It's also been said that if you drop that reality and simply exist in the now, a point where you stop "doing" (action) and start "being" (no action), you'll remove that separation of the "self" from the rest of the Universe and shed everything that's false, temporary, and transitional.

"It's also been said that if you drop that reality and simply exist in the now, a point where you stop "doing" (action) and start "being" (no action), you'll remove that separation of the "self" from the rest of the Universe."

With all due respect, that sounds like bollocks.

Clearly you have never been dosed with PCP.

With all due respect, it's one of the basises of Buddhist philosophy.

Don't be such an egotist! Try to come up with a clear demarcation of "self" and you will find it impossible.

"Ego death is said to be characterized as the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of the loss of "control", the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a "personal agent", and loose "cognitive-association binding".

This "perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment" is said to be experienced through a sensation that one is the whole universe (and therefore there is no need to differentiate the "I" from the "universe") or by simply acknowledging the "I" does not exist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death

The mind doesn't create the whole reality. Most of the time, it's operating on stuff that comes from out there in The World (hallucinations, dreams, etc are exceptions). The position that the mind creates the whole reality in Western Philosophy is called Idealism and is associated perhaps most famously with Bishop Berkeley.

> The mind doesn't create the whole reality.

Reality as it is created internally, not externally. I believe that the Universe exists regardless of someone observing it.

I'm also referring to the fact that we experience the "outside" only through our senses and our mind. Both fallible. And nothing else. Hence we create the whole of our own reality, where everything is projected inside the mind.

I get what you're saying although I personally would not put it so "mystically."

I would start by saying that the quoted sentence perpetuates the Cartesian mind/body dualism, where "my body" is not "my self." But that dualism is outdated. It arose from a philosophical approach to understanding natural phenomena that we have since discarded in favor of the scientific method.

So now we know a few things that Descartes did not know:

1) We--human beings--are entirely natural phenomena. We're not special or distinct in any physically measurable way. We are as subject to the scientific method as anything else.

2) We have never observed a human self separate from the human body. The vast preponderance of the evidence (i.e. all of it) is that what we call "mind" is simply one aspect of a physical human body.

So I would say that if we consider mind and body as simply different aspects of a unified concept of a human being, then in fact we do experience direct contact with reality. When I touch water with my fingertips, my fingertips are part of me--so I am in direct physical contact with reality. My brain also performs processing on the fingertip signal to store and match it against my mental model of the universe. But that is not any more inherent to my self than my fingertip is.

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