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Any Buddhist or Daoist will tell you the self is an illusion. Not that it does not exist, but that it is not self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_deni

by podgaj 5y ago

Any Buddhist or Daoist will tell you the self is an illusion. Not that it does not exist, but that it is not self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self All we are is a bundle of our six senses (the 6th sense being thought). If you take away these senses, where are you? We need a sense of self to navigate our way through the world, and the senses help the brain create time and space and movement.

mrwnmonm 5y ago
I don't see how is this different What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.
- trevyn 5y ago
  > And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left. Exactly.
nefitty 5y ago
I imagine founts of sense experience, each a node with a stream of information reaching the brain. Taste, touch, etc each are streams that meet at the brain, are filtered, interpreted then digested. The brain has some emergent sense streams, like thinking, which it feeds back into itself. If we turned each node/stream off one at a time, the brain eventually generates simulations of each stream. This is how sensory deprivation hallucinations occur. It's fascinating to think that our sense of self is a modular construction. It's so easily disrupted. Viewing it from this frame of modularity makes it much easier to understand no-self. The internet feels very real, but has no physical form. If everyone turned off their computers there would be no internet. Like our sense of self, its emergence is dependent on the whole, not individual parts. A brain without sense organs is not a self, a computer without a network is not the internet. Our selves are fleeting, made up of transitory, temporary information. "The internet feels proud today" is an absurd sentence. Isn't it absurd then to say "I feel proud," if 'I' is an amalgamation of sensory information? Sorry for the digression, I let the meditation you triggered run free.

by podgaj 5y ago

mrwnmonm 5y ago

I don't see how is this different What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.

trevyn 5y ago
> And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left. Exactly.

nefitty 5y ago

I imagine founts of sense experience, each a node with a stream of information reaching the brain. Taste, touch, etc each are streams that meet at the brain, are filtered, interpreted then digested. The brain has some emergent sense streams, like thinking, which it feeds back into itself. If we turned each node/stream off one at a time, the brain eventually generates simulations of each stream. This is how sensory deprivation hallucinations occur. It's fascinating to think that our sense of self is a modular construction. It's so easily disrupted. Viewing it from this frame of modularity makes it much easier to understand no-self. The internet feels very real, but has no physical form. If everyone turned off their computers there would be no internet. Like our sense of self, its emergence is dependent on the whole, not individual parts. A brain without sense organs is not a self, a computer without a network is not the internet. Our selves are fleeting, made up of transitory, temporary information. "The internet feels proud today" is an absurd sentence. Isn't it absurd then to say "I feel proud," if 'I' is an amalgamation of sensory information? Sorry for the digression, I let the meditation you triggered run free.