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It's nearly undeniable to me that the conscious mind is not the only thing that inhabits us. If you sit down and meditate, you will quickly realize that: 1. Yo

It's nearly undeniable to me that the conscious mind is not the only thing that inhabits us. If you sit down and meditate, you will quickly realize that: 1. You are not in control of your thoughts without effort (what he describes as 'induction') 2. You are not necessarily the source of your thoughts By 2. I mean that when you stop having a mental narrative, you realize that thoughts and feelings still come seemingly from nowhere. Like making a sea of waves still, and now being able to see bubbles coming up from below. If you're not creating them, where are they coming from? On that note, most people behave in patterned ways and repeat patterned mistakes. If you have a conversation with them, they can sometimes show a complete understanding of their situation, how they went wrong and how to rectify. Yet, when later faced with the same decision, they make the same mistake again. Did they really make the decision or did they just think they made it, much like we believe every thought we hear is ours?

bserge 5y ago
Just my opinions: "You" are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in the physical brain. The thoughts are coming from the brain, which is constantly doing rather massive amounts of processing on acquired data, old and new. You don't have full control of the brain, not by a long shot. You can make a decision and it can be ignored even as you think it's "gone through". Hence, the eternal struggle with "self-control" and "willpower".
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  On a tangent note, Descartes famous "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") falls into the trap of the grammar: it presupposes that the thinker, who does the act of thinking, exists. The actually undeniable empirical statement would be "cogitationes sunt", "thoughts exist", but you can't get anywhere from that without answering additional questions: for example, do the thoughts need a thinker (whatever it may be) to exist and think them, or?.. If you answer "yes", you can follow Descartes' line of reasoning. If you answer "no", no problem, there is a whole philosophical tradition of Buddhism built on that.
- curun1r 5y ago
  > "You" are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in the physical brain Sam Harris has a lengthy discussion about this separation in "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" where he looks at what we've learned from patients who've undergone a corpus callosum surgery. The TL;DR of that surgery is that it's done on people with severe seizures to sever the two hemispheres of the brain to minimize the seizures. But it also tends to (gross over-simplification incoming) create two distinct personalities in the same person, so Harris looks at essentially what gets doubled as elements that cannot be part of the self. A lot of the rest of the book also deals with the nature of self as revealed through meditative practice and drug use. It's a somewhat tedious read, but it's really fascinating stuff.
bronzeage 5y ago
I think if the mind a little like a firewall/router, which has sets of rules it automatically routes in hardware without bringing the packets to the main cpu. Most of the things you do, you do unconsciously. You do them according to set of rules you trained and "compiled" in your mind. To change unconscious behaviors, you either have to retrain a different unconscious behavior, or at the very least, train to take those decisions consciously. I think many times people don't change their behavior because they still take the decision unconsciously. They did fully make a decision to change, but that decision is meaningless because it's conscious, and the code in their mind didn't change to give them a conscious opportunity to make a decision.
pshc 5y ago
Thoughts, feelings, and sensations come and go in the mind, whereas "You" are made of pure perception. You are the presence of awareness, the self that knows, that observes the mind, body, and world. ... at least that's how Rupert Spira put it. > Did they really make the decision or did they just think they made it? They acted out of instinct and impulse, then rationalized their behavior afterward. (The majority of human action comes in this way, since it costs minuscule amounts of energy compared to intentional, logical behavior.)

bserge 5y ago

Just my opinions: "You" are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in the physical brain. The thoughts are coming from the brain, which is constantly doing rather massive amounts of processing on acquired data, old and new. You don't have full control of the brain, not by a long shot. You can make a decision and it can be ignored even as you think it's "gone through". Hence, the eternal struggle with "self-control" and "willpower".

Joker_vD 5y ago
On a tangent note, Descartes famous "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") falls into the trap of the grammar: it presupposes that the thinker, who does the act of thinking, exists. The actually undeniable empirical statement would be "cogitationes sunt", "thoughts exist", but you can't get anywhere from that without answering additional questions: for example, do the thoughts need a thinker (whatever it may be) to exist and think them, or?.. If you answer "yes", you can follow Descartes' line of reasoning. If you answer "no", no problem, there is a whole philosophical tradition of Buddhism built on that.
curun1r 5y ago
> "You" are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in the physical brain Sam Harris has a lengthy discussion about this separation in "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" where he looks at what we've learned from patients who've undergone a corpus callosum surgery. The TL;DR of that surgery is that it's done on people with severe seizures to sever the two hemispheres of the brain to minimize the seizures. But it also tends to (gross over-simplification incoming) create two distinct personalities in the same person, so Harris looks at essentially what gets doubled as elements that cannot be part of the self. A lot of the rest of the book also deals with the nature of self as revealed through meditative practice and drug use. It's a somewhat tedious read, but it's really fascinating stuff.

bronzeage 5y ago

I think if the mind a little like a firewall/router, which has sets of rules it automatically routes in hardware without bringing the packets to the main cpu. Most of the things you do, you do unconsciously. You do them according to set of rules you trained and "compiled" in your mind. To change unconscious behaviors, you either have to retrain a different unconscious behavior, or at the very least, train to take those decisions consciously. I think many times people don't change their behavior because they still take the decision unconsciously. They did fully make a decision to change, but that decision is meaningless because it's conscious, and the code in their mind didn't change to give them a conscious opportunity to make a decision.

pshc 5y ago

Thoughts, feelings, and sensations come and go in the mind, whereas "You" are made of pure perception. You are the presence of awareness, the self that knows, that observes the mind, body, and world. ... at least that's how Rupert Spira put it. > Did they really make the decision or did they just think they made it? They acted out of instinct and impulse, then rationalized their behavior afterward. (The majority of human action comes in this way, since it costs minuscule amounts of energy compared to intentional, logical behavior.)