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Comment by passion__desire | Hacker News Reader

> the unification is an illusion or an appearance

Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs

Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking. Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live their life.

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There is an important issue with reducing this problem to linguistic conventions of how we use words.

'This block of ice is actually made up of lot of atoms and will melt away soon, but meanwhile it is a useful abstraction to treat it as a single block'

Compatibilists tackle the free-will issue in a similar way, Dennet says something like 'This chess program is perfectly deterministic, but it has free will - Even its programmer has to guess, as to what is its next move.'

The above usage of terms is OK at some level, but there is something independent of definitions - How we actually see the self, and the cause of actions. When somebody insults me, does it feel like the insult is describing I/me or does it feel like describing a bundle of thoughts/habits? Was the bad thing done by 'me' or was it done by desire and anger? Even if these are processes, we can't help but reify them into unitary agents and actions.

A major claim made by Hindu/Buddhist teachings is that once there is a shift in *internal perception* of how actions are happening, towards a more analytical view which breaks up the ego(ahamkara), this causes a major shift leading to liberation from cycles of suffering.

In Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, there is an analysis of thoughts and feelings behind actions, with a goal of liberation from chronic problems. This is very similar to a stage of manana(intellectual contemplation of certain statements in Vedanta).

With regard to your question about who or what is being insulted, Perhaps the first thing to note is that we are to others what they have observed of us, modified by what their theory of mind intuits from those observations. The former, and even more so the latter, are not all that reliable, though they are all we have to go on.

Yes, we misrepresent others constantly. A more basic point is that we are misrepresenting ourselves - Without a clear, detailed vision of thought/emotion flow, statements like 'I did this' are reifying this flow into an agent(not as a convenient abstraction to stand for a group of thoughts, but a felt sense that there is an 'I' actually doing something).

The way I think is it is like a pattern trying to maintain itself. Pattern is the ghost in the machine. But the pattern isn't significant in itself in that apart from continuing its existence there is no other requirement. It's just that intelligence either individual or collective helps in continuing the pattern further. Self in that sense is like a soliton on a water surface.

Thanks for sharing! I think these are probably the lines of reasoning that best bridge from Western philosophical traditions to the Buddhist ones.

Anatta seems to be one of the trickiest subjects in Buddhism, not least because there is a very wide range of theories across the different traditions. Some traditions literally claim nothing exists (the solipsist position?) whereas some are very clearly stating “not Self, not No-Self” ie some middle position that should probably be understood contextually against Hindu notions of eternal self that were the ground truth at the time of Buddhism’s formation.

I think the “traditional” Buddhist position is something fairly similar to Hume’s view as Bundle theory.

Simply stated here: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.th...

I personally find process philosophy to be the ultimate description. i.e. Heraclitus position

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

Put another way, it's dynamic structures all the way down or up

https://youtu.be/j96Hls_-Ulc

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