THURSDAY, DEC 28, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
Know Then Thy Not-self
Why You Have Nothing to Lose by Losing Your Self
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: RENORMALIZE, FROM THE WIRES, OR CELEBRATE SELF WHILE YOU CAN
Abstract: You naturally think/believe you have a self —which is why you/we are wrong about everything.
COOS BAY (A-P) —Elements of Indian and East Asian Buddhism, Daoism, Western philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience question the existence and persistence of a self other than as belief-based “Self” and “Other” social/cognitive constructs (i.e. as illusions, explanatory fictions). This error/ignorance/illusion-based putative being/entity is dangerous, a foundational existential risk to our species’ persistence (or we selves are the best thing ever — noble, infinite in faculty — how express and admirable — how like a God! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals).
There happens to be a wide range of arguments out there, a mountain of them about the size of Olympus Mons, for and against the existence of the self. There are, however, too many little-known philosophical and scientific reasons/evidence to deny the reality of the self (soul, etc.). Becoming selfless persons may be the wicked distal solution to our proximal wicked overshoot meta-problem needed to sidestep human extinction.
The idea of no-self is powerful and transformative, having potentially immense practical (e.g. paradigm shift) benefits. If we trade egology for ecology, then perhaps our present pathway could have a different outcome.
If we could let go of our humancentric, egocentric worldview/mindset, back away from our addiction to our expansionist r-culture which isn’t working for us (to viably persist long term), then perhaps humanity could live long and prosper in sapience. To abandon egoism, to act morally and ethically, to actually be sane/sapient and navigate ordinary life more skillfully, i.e. to renormalize as evolvable animals in perhaps 8 to 20 generations— is to perhaps consider.
Getting over the self-illusion also means escaping the isolation of self-identity, tribal-identity (we/other-identity), and ending the condition of being a political animal (a denormalized, non-evolvable, belief-ridden domesticant, a technology dependent animal, i.e. a human of NIMH).
Perhaps transformative change from being/serving our expansionist r-culture to a condition of radical humilitas, of living like evolvable K-strategist animals again, is to consider.
And when you’ve had enough of SELF, have choicelessly emptied your cup full of it, then question your belief in belief, ending life as you know it (i.e. the best thing that could ever happen for posterity’s sake). Your conceptual house of cards will fall down and go splat. Your burnt, wabbling finger stops pointing at the Moon.
“There are only four things certain since Social Progress [expansionist civilization] began. That the Dog [a domesticant] returns to his Vomit and the Sow [a domesticant] returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world [of empire building] begins [again] When all [domesticant] men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins [we consumers do not pay for destroying a planetary life-support system nor for our Anthropocene mass extinction event], As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings [e.g. That All is not Gold that Glitters and Two and Two make Four] with terror and slaughter return!” — The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling, 1919
“A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
[Or following environmental restoration, remnant human populations recover to embrace the Gods of Growth again, burn their finger again, and mistake it for the Moon until extinction delivers them from their condition of error, ignorance, and illusion.]
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“The total number of minds in the universe is one.” — Erwin Schrödinger
As Buddha, Heraclitus, Spinoza, John Locke, David Hume, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein suspected or ‘knew’, the self does not exist as a separate/permanent entity, but as a narrative fiction. For a more recent 2009 case for the myth of the self: The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger. A review may be a start, and the book is available on bittorent and elsewhere. Also Self and No-self 2007 and The Useless Self 1998 by Jean-Michel Terdjman. Science provides supporting evidence: The Self Illusion, 2012. Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self 2022 Jay L. Garfield — Why you don’t have a self — and why that’s a good thing.
The me, myself and I as a ray of consciousness, a tunnel vision, is a narrative. Eyes close; eyes open. The ‘I close and open my eyes’ is narrative, based on memory and selection, the telling of a story of a conscious entity. A ‘sense of self and other’ is the original story told by the storytelling animal as socially constructed and shared explanatory fiction, as foundational me-not-me conceptual dualism.
Many other stories, a multiplicity of beliefs, attach to Self, which is no-self, and to Other, which is another fiction. We believe in our narrative of the world only because of our ignorance. The self as narrator gives meaning, tells stories. Without the pathology of Self and Other, the what-is IS. It is possible for the xinlightened to tell stories (without a sense of Self, without the illusion of ego over system) about complex open thermodynamic systems.
Xin, for example, may be a form of religious inquiry, but is not an organized religion. Organized religions are religious control systems based on beliefs that can be virally spread within memetic systems. The religious quest/impulse (fideism, literally “faith-ism”), is not a matter of for/against, is/isn’t believing. Faith is based on idiosyncratic need, as William James argued.
When verbally expressed, fideism takes the form of a belief. For example, “I have a need to believe that eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly” is a fideist expression (of James Lovelock et al., other fideists being Occam, Pascal, Kant, James, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Peirce, Unamuno, Zhen, and Martin Gardner) that implies a recognition of potential, not belief-based certitude. “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” ― Charles Sanders Peirce
Epistemologically, faith and belief differ foundationally. Religious doctrines may be expressions of faith, a faithist may be cited as a source, even though faith as inquiry/impulse is not belief based. It is entirely possible to be a fideist and believe nothing. Religious intellectual inquiry is the endeavor to understand faith as a characteristic quality or potentiality of human life, that propensity of hu-mans (hubris humans) that across the centuries and across the world (within complex societies) that has given rise to a prodigious variety of religious forms, and yet has remained elusive and personal, prior to and beyond the believing forms that fideism has mutated into. The challenge is to understand the impulse that lies behind the belief-based forms, and the meaning/addictions that they have conferred/inflicted upon their billions of adherents. [Partly paraphrased from Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s book “Faith and Belief: The Differences Between Them.”]
To the unrepentant Modern scoffers who have drunk the cool-aide of 1st Enlightenment science, you view your standard of truth as the only standard and dismiss those who might inquire outside your paradigm. To equate “religion” with a set of “beliefs” is a recent Modern invention, commonly accepted as an adequate and proper characterization of religion. Since “religion” has not always been thought of as equal to “beliefs”, then there may be something else going on with folks who are religious, something which reductionist dismissives, who view religion as the set of “their beliefs,” miss. No defense of “religion” is implied, but a need for conceptual clarity and adequate scholarship is.
Our challenge is to try to understand the concept “religion” more adequately. Science is not so fragile that we have to protect its truth from those who would consider religious inquiry. We face paradigmatic change that is more comprehensive than at any time in the last 1,000 years. Elites in our modern techno-industrialized world, who pretend to lead and inform the rest of us, don’t know Xin. As things stand now, we face a terrifying future with little capacity to see a pathway through the mess of living complex messes we have unconsciously created.
There can be no defending religious and faith based claims about the unknowable, of things outside the cosmos. Modern views of “religion” and “faith” as atavisms was uncritically accepted by the more “progressive” thinking products of Modern culture and routinely taught as the truth of the matter in our universities in the mid-to late 20th Century by those lacking epistemic humility. [Prior three paragraphs mostly paraphrased comments of Ruben Nelson.]
That most religious scholars of the 21st Century have rejected dismissive views of religion could be another iteration in error, ignorance, and illusion as usual. Believe nothing. As has been said, “Paradigms change one funeral at a time” [apocryphal quote]. There are no true paradigms, as Donella Meadows notes.
Albert Schweitzer’s paradigm shift from human to Nature centric 1915, Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben [Venerate all Life]:
“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
“Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life.”
[Or thought can, as it does now, and humans can go extinct. Thought is your Enemy.]
