LosingOurselves

• Very good! Transformed my thinking about the self and about free will!
• The book argues explicitly for a position that many think flies in the face of common sense "That we are not selves", nor do we have selves. I will not argue that we do not exist. (That would be madness) But I will argue that we exist not as selves, but as persons.
• Too often what masquerades as common sense is in fact nonsense. Any philosophical program that takes our commonsense intuitions for granted, and then takes as its task to defend them by elucidating them, or making them more precise, may simply ramify confusion instead of generating clarity.
• Many people take themselves to be selves and not persons in the relevant sense and that are wrong to do so.
• Candrakirti was distinctive in his defense both of the robust reality of the world we inhabit, and of the view that despite – or more accurately because of – the fact that it is real, our own existence and that of the objects and institutions that surround is merely conventional, dependent upon the way we think and the way we talk.
• David Hume argued that we must take the reality of the world around us for granted; he also argued that we are systematically confused if we take our own existence, and that of the world around us, to be prior to and independent of our conventions – our ways of acting, talking and thinking.
• My aim is to develop and to defend the idea of person-hood on its own terms in the absence of any self, and to explore its ramifications.
• I believe that the illusion that we are selves undermines ethical cultivation and moral vision, and that coming to understand ourselves as persons facilitates a more salutary, mature moral engagement with those around us.
• Once we recognize that a conception or commitment is causing us problems, it is often easier and more tempting to confuse it with another idea, to refute the other idea, and to leave the problematic conception in place.
• Although the majority of this book in concerned with investigating the illusion of the self, in the end it is really a book about ethics.
• The first thing we must do is identify what this self is supposed to be. We thereby ensure that our analyses are directed at the correct target.
• Atman: The idea that the Atman lies at the core of our being is ubiquitous in orthodox Indian philosophy, and was a principal target of Buddhist critique. In the Vedas, particularly Upanishads, it is characterized as unitary, as the witness of all that we perceive, as the agent of our actions, and as the enjoyer of our aesthetic experience. It is regarded as that which is always the subject, never the object; and as that which persists through life despite changes in body and mind, and which even persists beyond death.
• The supposed relation between the self and the embodied person as akin to that between you and your wardrobe. You, the Atman, put on a new mind and body in each life, but are never identical to any mind or body; instead you are the bearer of that mind and body, which are just as much objects to your subjectivity as any external phenomenon.
• The self is argued to be necessary in order to explain sensory integration. They also argue that the self is necessary in order to explain the possibility of memory.
• Any no-self position, must assume the burden of explaining both the apparent integration of consciousness at each moment and our perceived identity over time in the absence of a unitary subject and agent.
• A person is a socially embedded human being with no self.
• (In a Christian context) The soul (or psyche) is help to be distinct from and to be the possessor of the mind and body; the subject of knowledge; the agent of action; the object of moral approbation or disapprobation; and the enjoyer or sufferer of reward and punishment.
• St Augustine also argues that the psyche is immediately available to us in introspection and that it has the distinctive property of freedom, of exemption from causation in its active role, a property he deems necessary for moral responsibility.
• You might think that the idea that our existence involves the reality of a self emerges in diverse traditions is evidence for its correctness. This ubiquity is in fact evidence for a kind of innate tendency to succumb to a particular cognitive illusion.
• The word person denotes the complex, constructed, socially embedded psychophysical complexes.
• "Who are you?" If you seek the referent of the name, you find nothing. But it is just the opening move in the debate.
• A complete inventory of the basic constituents of the world, even if it contains chariot parts, contains no chariots. This is how we should think of the person and his relation to that name. He is no singular entity. He is neither identical to no distinct from his parts. A final account of the basics constituents of the world, even were it to contain his hair, fingers, desires, and experiences, could not contain the person. He does not exist in the way we might have imagined him to exist before we considered the matter with care.

WhoWeAre

• Any account of personal identity must explain how and why we persist over time. A self would seem to do that; in its absence, we need an alternative account.
• We are causally and cognitively open continua of psychophysical processes. No one of these processes by itself captures who we are; none persist unchanged over time; none are independent of the others. Together they constitute our conventional identity, an identity we can now see to be very robust indeed. We do not stand over and against the world as isolated subjects; we do not act on the world as transcendent agents. Instead, we are embedded in the world as part of an interdependent reality.
• When I take myself to have a self, the self I posit is one I can know and recognize. When I look inside all I find are psychophysical processes, not some ghostly owner hiding behind the curtains.
• Just as dollars exist on a different plane from dimes, persons exist on a different plane from minds and bodies.
• When we use the word self we roughly mean the core that is neither identical with the mind now with the body, but which possesses mind and body.
• The idea that we have or are selves is not even false, it is just gibberish.
• Nobody takes the self to be something inaccessible to introspection; instead we take it to be the most immediately given, most certainly real object of our experience. Anything that fails to satisfy this description fails to be a self. And there's the rub: Hume invites us to introspect carefully and honestly. He claims when we do so, we find sensations, perceptions, affect, cognitive states, but nothing more than that. "I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception." The collection that we find is not constant, but is always changing.
• A self is meant to have an existence that is prior to, or more fundamental than, that of body and mind; it is that which is the subject of our cognitive objects, and so distinct from them; and it is the agent of action and the locus of responsibility. In the "Tractatus", Wittgenstein takes the self to be a transcendental ground of our experience of the world that is absent in the world we experience. This invites us to see the self as outside of the world and as existing independently of it, but as making it known.
• The duality of subject and object: We experience ourselves as subjects and everything else as objects.
• An alternative is a non-dual model of experience.
• The complex of perceptual processes realized in our nervous systems creates an experience for us. But it cannot do this by somehow transporting external objects and their properties into our skulls. What we construct in response to the causal interaction with our sense organs depends not only on what impinges on them, but on the kinds of sense organs we have, and the kings of processing that occurs in our nervous system. This means that the world we experience is not dually related to us, and independent, but one that we construct in our ongoing engagement with our environment.

WhoWeAre

• Much of our life is structured by the illusion that we just find what we in fact construct; but the fact that this illusion (the dichotomy of self and other) structures so much of our experience does not mean that it is not an illusion.
• Among the illusions for which we seem to be wired is the illusion that our decisions to act are uncased.
• At the most basic level, the illusion of a self is the illusion that we stand outside of and against the world. The feeling that we as selves are not something in the world.
• We are wired to misunderstand our own mode of existence.
• We are more like hives than bees.
• We are neither identical to nor different from the facts that ground our existence. It would be wrong to say that Hamlet is identical to the words in Shakespeare's script, or to the series of performances of his role, or to the critical literature on the play, or even all of these things put together. Hamlet is a fictional prince, not a non-fictional set of text and practices. No set of texts and practices can fall in in love with Ophelia or betray Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It would be equally wrong to say that Hamlet was different form the words, performances, critical literature, etc. For apart from them, there is no Hamlet.
• The self is taken to be preexisting, primordial, unitary, and transcendent of the world of objects, independent of body, mind, and social context. The person is constructed; The person is dependent on the psychophysical and social network in which it is realized. The person is complex, embodied and embedded. That is the difference between the actor and the role. We are roles, not actors.

WhoWeAre

• By distinguishing from the self and the person we can separate what we are from what we naively take ourselves to be; we can distinguish the reality of our existence from its appearance. We can come to see just how powerfully cognitive instinct can shape our sense of who and what we are. And this in turn can dislodge an entire set of seductive myths to which we also unreflectively subscribe, all myths grounded in the self illusion: -) That we know ourselves immediately and infallibly as selves -) there is something irreducibly special or transcendent about our mode of existence -) that the so-called first person perspective involves a specially kind of immediate self-access To dispel these myths is philosophical progress
• The Cartesian argument for the self (I think, therefore I am) occurs much earlier in the work of the Indian philosopher Uddyotakara
• Another central premise of the Cartesian argument is manifestly false: that only substances can act or have properties. Such composite, non-substantial entities as corporations, committees, colleges, and nations have plenty of properties and perform plenty of actions.

Used To Believe

• There is no reason not to believe that composite, non-substantial persons can have properties, such as thinking, as well.
• A plethora of subconscious perceptual and cognitive processes can jointly generate the representation of unitary objects in a unified experiential field. There is no need for their interaction to be integrated or managed in any single neural or cognitive structure.
• The idea that awareness always has a subject-object structure – with a subject characterized by a kind of interiority, as opposed to the exterior object that is somehow brought into awareness in that interior space– might well be an illusion of consciousness. The conviction that awareness is fundamentally a relation between an independent subject and a substantially distinct object may be the result of a cognitive illusion, just as the conviction that we are selves is not the consequence of looking inside and simply finding a self, but of cognitive illusion,
• It makes a great deal of biological, psychological, and ecological sense instead to think of awareness as a constant modulation of the open interaction between an organism and its environment, of the adjustment of the state of the organism and attunement of the posture and goals of the organism as its senses and movements interact with the world it inhabits, We can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of the relating between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection. To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we dont stand against the world as subject that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.
• Our existence may well be that of a complex set of subjective processes as opposed to that of a single self.
• The subject-object structure that we take for granted may well be illusory.
• If I am truly immersed in an experience, my own subjectivity is the furthest thing from my mind. If I am just a stream of psychophysical processes there may be nothing beyond the stream of which to be aware.
• Tsongkhapa's advice is that only long-term meditative exercise is capable of ridding us of the innate sense of self; it is too wired into our psyche to be extirpated just by doing philosophy. This is indeed why meditative practice is so important in Buddhist traditions: it is a vehicle through which philosophy can be transformative, by allowing that philosophy to seep so deeply into our consciousness that it comes to shape our experience.
• We dont succumb to the illusion of the self at every waking moment. There are times when we dont represent ourselves as selves at all, when we spontaneously engage with the world in ways that implicate no sense of self.
• To take ourselves to be selves is to take ourselves to be subjects with a very different mode of existence than that we assign to our objects. It is to regard ourselves as standing against the world rather than as being embedded in it. And it is to take our self-knowledge to be immediate, as opposed to the mediated knowledge we have of our objects. Each of these modes of self-awareness is an aspect of subject-object duality, of taking experience to be a relation between these two entities of entirely different kinds. That polarity of subject and object in our experience is tantamount to the reification of a self. To the extent that we have experiences that are non-dual in character, we are experiencing ourselves without positing a self. We can make the same point about agency.
• Immersed phenomenology (ie flow states) is less likely to lead us into the error of positing the self. Immersed phenomenology is indicative of expertise, and facilitates more fluid, successful performance.
• When we are learning we have not yet achieved expertise, or when we are teaching a skill to someone else and reflecting on it, it is often necessary to take this perspective on our activity.
• Novices who attend to their own performance do much better than those who are distracted. self-conscious attention facilitates performance and learning. Experts who are asked to attend to their own performance, unlike novices, do much worse than those who attend to a distractor.

Consciousness

Rationality

• We are at our best in expert performance. Expert performance reveals our most successful engagement with our world. The fact that this engagement is most successful when the self illusion is out of the picture is further evidence of the illusory status of the self.

WhoWeAre

• The entities of the empirical world do not constitute an independent reality with which we interact, but instead constitute our reality as sub-processes of the causal unfolding of the universe.
• As persons we are not only embodied, but embedded. And just as our bodies can fall either on the subject or the object side of our awareness, the environment beyond our bodies can do so as well.
• The imagination of the self is context-specific, and always a construction, not a discovery.
• Kant: If morality merely tracks my desires and preferences, it is no morality at all.

Ethics

• Morality, as Rawls so eloquently emphasizes, demands common assent.
• To see everything through the subject-object lens is to see oneself as subject and agent, and everyone else as moral objects and as patients.
• Persons: beings who come into existence in open causal interaction with the rest of the world, and whose identity is constituted by the collectively composed narrative in which we are actors.
• Partial Affection: in which one is a good friend to those one likes, but not to others, or in which one's motivation for wishing for anothers good is because it is pleasant for oneself – might feel good, and might even feel like being a good friend. But it would be to re-inscribe the egocentric understanding of the moral world to which this alternative vision is meant to be an antidote.
• The moral side of regarding oneself as a self is the implicit view that ones own status is different from that of the rest of the world and that the status of others is dependent on their relation to oneself. To see things from the egocentric perspective reflecting the view of a self is to remove oneself from membership in the world and to adopt the position of an experiencer of the world and an agent acting on it. And that is the moral side of the self illusion. Its inevitable consequence is – at best – the adoption of the near enemies of these four virtuous states as ones mode of comportment, substituting rationally defensible, beneficial attitudes with irrational and ultimately destructive ones, made all the worse because they can masquerade so effectively as virtue.
• We see that it is both rational and morally important to shed the self illusion. It is rational to do so because it fails to fit our best understanding of the world and our place in it. It is morally important, because this investigation reveals that the self illusion is not harmless.
• When we recognize that we are part of the causal order, the fact that all of our perceptions, thoughts, and actions are caused seems just obvious. It then appears bizarre to think, or to wish, that our behavior is uncaused. To be uncaused would be to be random; and to behave randomly would not be a kind of freedom, but instead a terrible curse.

FreeWill

• When we deliberate about what to do, or when we assign blame or praise to ourselves or others, we often instinctively do so on the assumption that our – or their – actions are not caused by previous events.
• "agent causation" a spontaneous act of the will unconstrained by deterministic causes.
• The idea that there is this special kind of causation is enshrined not only in our cognitive habits, but also in the law.
• Philosopher Augustine of Hippo introduced the difference between free acts and acts that are caused in order to absolve God of moral responsibility for the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Augustine solved this theological conundrum by introducing the idea of free will. Not that his required him to introduce two new ideas: that of a will, and that of its exemption from causation. Their freedom set a limit on his omnipotence. So, out of a theological problem, a moral, legal, and metaphysical ideology was born. And this ideology has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that we accept it without question. We forget its religious roots and motivation.
• Free will and the self are both illusions of our 1st person perspective on the world.
• Nobody thinks, "Now let me be angry" Instead, people just get angry.
• So, when one sees anyone – whether friend or foe – Perform an unreasonable action, One can think "this has been brought about by conditions" And so one can remain content.
• Seeing ourselves as autonomous selves among other autonomous selves both gets the nature of agency wrong and leads us to maladaptive behavior and attitudes. Seeing ourselves as persons in an interdependent matrix of other persons both gives us greater insight into our own and others agency and leads us to healthier moral responses and great moral maturity.
• Who we think we are determines in part who we eventually become.

[BROKEN LINK: 56F11I1-8IK9-1MM1-6M56-M42M638435IK]

• Persons are poised between the biological, the psychological, and the social, and they live on the cusp of fact and fiction.

WhoWeAre

• We are brought into existence as persons through the complex interplay between our biology as members of species Homo Sapiens and our interactions with one another in the context of the social structures that make persons both possible and necessary. That origin renders us fictional, or constructed; it means that our reality as persons is not primordial, or independent of human activity. But this tale of origins does not render us unreal. Persons are also factual. We, like the civilizations, cities and civic practices we create, are real parts of the natural and social world. And we have real biological, psychological and social properties. That is what genuine empirical reality is; the kind of supernatural reality that would attach to a self is no reality at all.

WhoWeAre

• You can't use physics to understand a chess game, or to understand how money works.
• Some aspects of our biology are driven by our psychology and our social structures; some aspects of our psychology are driven by our social matrix as well. So, to understand who and what we are, all of these levels of description – and maybe more – are necessary.
• What our goals are, how we behave, and what gives us pleasure and pain are to a large part determined by our social context. It is therefore impossible to understand who we are psychologically without understanding who we are socially.
• The lines we speak, the gestures we make, the lives we lead, are structured in large part by the roles we play and the social structures that define those roles and make them possible.
• One can only perform on the stage what one is biologically capable of doing. These constraints are independent of, but interact with, the stage directions an actor receives and the script they follow. But these factors are not sufficient to explain what the actor does.
• The genes that determine who we are biologically are subject to social and psychological selection pressures. And that means to even understand our biology, we must understand our social context.
• We are biologically determined to create social structures that provide the context in which we develop psychologically. Our psychology in turn helps to elaborate these social structures, which in turn shape our psychology. This complex psychological and social environment in turn helps to determine our biological heritage as well as its expression in concrete situations. Persons emerge form this, looping, spiraling interaction between variables at each of these levels of description. None can be ignored if we want to understand who we are.

WhoWeAre

• We are biologically wired for language, and without this wiring it would be impossible or us to learn or use it. We have be selected in our evolution because of the success that language confers in the human social niche.
• We must have a propensity to recognize and to be governed by systems of conventional norms. We have evolved to recognize and to respect norms of various kinds, that in turn reinforces that evolutionary pressure.
• Words are meaningful only because there are rules governing their use.
• When we ascribe contentful mental state to others, we engage in an act of interpretation, using sentences and the meaningfulness of language as a model by means of which to understand human behavior and cognition, a way of making sense of what we and others do. It is less obvious – but no less true – that we do the same when we come to understand ourselves. We describe our own beliefs, intentions, and so forth in linguistic terms as well, and we do so without observing or positing inner sentences. This is the only way we can understand ourselves, in a constant act of auto-interpretation.
• The word I is first and foremost a linguistic term.
• We are constructed as persons both by our intentional, conscious participation in social structures and by our tacit participation in them; that construction includes both attitudes and roles of which we are explicitly aware and those that may be merely implicit. To be shaped by and to shape this spiral requires us to be in constant open causal interaction with our physical and social environment; it requires that our behavior and thought are conditioned by that environment. This is the flexibility and the embeddedness of persons, not the isolation and constancy of selves. Indeed, there is no place for the self in this story.
• We have no reality at all outside of the context of the stores in which we figure. This is why we are persons, and not selves. But we are real persons, not imaginary persons. Therefore, in another sense, we are different from Hamlet and his cohort, and that difference is every bit as important as the similarity. Shakespeare's fiction is local, optional, and its roles need not be instantiated; the fiction in which we play our parts is global and mandatory. And the roles we play are necessarily instantiated by biologically real creatures.

WhoWeAre

• Our understanding of our own minds and of those of others arises not from the discovery of primordial facts, but instead from acts of interpretation.
• While the whole system is created, once created it in turn creates a context in which particular statements can be true or false in virtue of the interpretations already assigned to others. That is how it is with us, when considered not as hominids, but as persons.
• "Are you a zombie?" Notice that you cant know that, since if you were a zombie, you would believe that you have an inner life just as you do now. There is no way you could tell!
• We each know immediately that we are minds not through introspection, but through participation. We know that others are minds not through inference and not through clairvoyance, but through co-participation.
• To believe that we have selves is to succumb to a natural illusion, just as we succumb naturally to optical illusions.
• The kind of self-consciousness that arises from thinking of ourselves as selves gets in the way of fluid expert performance. Giving up the self facilitates spontaneity.
• To the extent that I think of myself and others as selves, I undermine my ethical life and my ethical engagement with others. The self illusion distorts our own sense of agency, and distorts our attribution of agency to others.
• To see ourselves as interacting persons allows us to consider the causes and reasons for our own behavior and attitudes, as well as those of others, and encourages us to resolve problems rather than to recriminate, to ameliorate situations rather than to punish, and to cultivate attitudes that make everyone more effective and happy.

Ethics

• To see ourselves as persons instead of selves allows us a richer, more nuanced understanding of who we are, of how we become who we are, and of the importance of our development and social context to our identity.
• The fact that a dollar is not a piece of paper does not mean that dollars dont exist, and the fact that we are not selves doesn't mean that we do not exist.