Give it a few years. At my age, a couple of hours of hard work and I feel like I might never walk again. A good night’s sleep and I’m a “new man”.
I don’t know what you mean by paradox. I do know that it’s difficult to grasp that the rest of the world can be shown to be determined and human behavior can be shown to be a reaction to chemical interactions BUT we feel like we make decisions. Part of this is that people confuse determinism with fatalism. I’m pretty sure fatalism is what you are feeling.
You don’t have free will, but don’t worry.
Then there is a much longer discussion, some of it we have been having here for 18 months, that it’s true that you don’t have free will but the universe, that is the forces that created you and led you to grapple with this question, does not know what is coming next. The computations and reactions that lead to this moment can only be made by the system that is making them. We will never be able to step outside of that system and make those calculations. Instead, we are part of it, experiencing it. You can choose to enjoy that or not.
(140) Find MORE Meaning WITHOUT Free Will! | Bernardo Kastrup Explains - YouTube
Hank discusses some of those infinite calculations, you have beliefs that you developed as a result of all of the interactions with you and the people you have known and they got them from their personal history, you have a temperament as a result of your DNA, physiology, and your biology, all of those add up to give you desires. You can’t “get ahead” of the determinism and make a different choice. Your knowledge of it was determined and a choice to stop caring about life would be determined. But notice that you still feel like you have choices, so you can have that ice cream sunday and your taste buds will feel better for a bit. Or, you can decide to work for peace and justice in the world and some children won’t go hungry because of something you did and you’ll get some hugs and that will feel good for a while.
I think they don’t mean it metaphorically.
I think the term is choice paralysis.
I suppose there is a freedom to realizing you don’t have a choice in a sense and just enjoying the ride. I can dig that.
If I could just find a way to deal with stuff like this I’d be golden though:
A very different thing than a reaction to accepting we don’t have free will.
I don’t either. Many philosophies of life include some variation of “creating your day”, the act of waking up and looking at what’s possible and setting goals for the day. You can even extend that to each moment.
I guess so.
I just wish I had a solid idea of the notion of self so I could respond to stuff like:
“There is no self present in him. For the rest of us, we do well to recognize that “to experience things as real is not to experience real things.” If what we experience as real causes us problems, then we may have the option of experiencing otherwise. This is the case with the self.”
Which made me think about what you mentioned about the self as a feeling and how that is real.
But in that stack exchange answer the guy talked about how there not being a self is ontologically true and I’m not sure how to answer stuff like that. Personally I think it’s based on how you define a self.
That guy says a lot of things. And like people here, you ignore them. You confuse things and don’t work on calming the chatter in your mind, something all of these teachings talk about
He says,
sounds like you’re conflating anatta with nihilism, and getting messed up about it, as if nothing’s real and nothing matters, but that’s not what it means, and the Teachings warn that nihilism is wrong view. More well known are the teachings on compassion, and good will in general.
But what about the self? About me? If I’m always changing then how am I supposed to navigate life?
I don’t even understand no self and what it means, every time I try to understand it just leads to apathy and indifference and depression.
Acquire a purpose!
See Stuart Kauffman.
If I answer your questions about self, you ask about free will, if I address those, you say “choice paralysis”, next thing I know your talking about self again. Your depression is not caused by these questions.
I wonder at times. The article on Big Think with the left brain interpreter had me wondering that if I don’t choose what I like or how I feel about stuff then is it me? I don’t think so but I can’t say.
There is another part of me that wonders if maybe that everything is just matter and that consciousness and the self is just a trick of perception and we are just living a fantasy we all have woven and agreed to.
Some guy I was talking to mentioned how amnesia would change who you are and started talking about ways how things are not you: like if they cut out the part of the brain that is responsible for thought, or if they amputed a leg and kept it preserved (is it still you)?, or that the self only arises when thought comes into the picture and if you’re able to cease thought then the self goes with it.
They deleted the old answer and reposted this one because I kept poking holes and saying how the self is more complex than he’s making it out, even amnesia doesn’t really erase what we think and as for the part of the brain responsible for thinking, that would be all of it…
I just don’t have answers to a lot of this stuff and I know you said that just because I don’t know doesn’t mean I’m wrong or they’re right, but usually “i don’t know” just leads to me believing who thinks they do know.
One thing was about how you’re not the same person who went to sleep last night because dreams can change you, thoughts can change you, and we’re always changing, but part of me thinks there’s more to it than that but I can’t put it into words.
Stuff like that and more just weighs on my mind and some days I think I won’t be able to just go back to before I read all this stuff.
More than that there was also a point he made about memory and how we only like what we like because of our experiences and if that memory is lost we’d lose “who” “we” are.
Exactly, memory loss causes a gap in your existence.
The thing is that you must see your brain as a prediction engine that acts only on the information it receives and recognizes, from memory.
It is very good at guessing from little information and can learn almost instantly when given clues.
But that is your brain, which is not you. Your brain can be functioning while you are asleep or under anesthetic.
You are a self-aware emergent consciousness that exists over and above the sum of the sensory information processes in your brain when fully engaged.
This is how your brain can function, while you are unconcious.
Watch Anil Seth again and pay attention to the section where he demonstrates how the brain can be fooled (the false hand), but also how it can learn from minimal vocal clues.
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Really? Can you show me where? Did they give an explanation for the deletion? Did you ask about it?
I clicked on one of the links within your link, Sutta SN 22.1. It ends with
"He does not assume consciousness to be the self, or the self as possessing consciousness, or consciousness as in the self, or the self as in consciousness. He is not seized with the idea that ‘I am consciousness’ or ‘Consciousness is mine.’ As he is not seized with these ideas, his consciousness changes & alters, but he does not fall into sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair over its change & alteration.
“This, householder, is how one is afflicted in body but unafflicted in mind.”
In other words, there isn’t some way you can conceptualize self that will reduce your anxiety about what the self is.
“living a fantasy” assumes that there is some reality to live in. A fantasy compared to what? Fantasy is “the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need”. But for most of human existence, we haven’t known what “especially unrealistic” is, so we created religion and myths and “I think therefore I am” to deal with the improbable reality that we are here. We’re still grappling with those questions because we still don’t have all the answers.
That’s the bad news, we don’t know what we are. We have only recently determined the age of the universe, and that we evolved from earlier, simpler forms. The implications of that are enormous and wipe away almost all of the speculation that came before that. This is upsetting, unsettling, and the cause of a lot of anguish by a lot of people. Many are hanging on to the old mechanisms, I consider those to be fantasies.
The psychological need to have answers doesn’t go away when a religious person realizes they are living a fantasy. But, that’s different than seeing all of reality. Losing religion is a process of understanding the probability that religion is wrong. You don’t then realize a 100% probability of what is right. Same for understanding “self”. The latest neurology, or an insight from an expert in Buddhism, does not give you “the” answer. You seem to want “not living a fantasy” to be “the answer” so it’s unsettling that there are all these people saying they have an answer, and you can “poke holes in them” but you don’t have the answer either. What you miss is, some of them, actually quite a lot of them, are saying “I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I know, here are some ideas about how to live in this world of unknowns, and in a time of rapid change.”
Not sure that you mean?
Never felt different from what?
What does that have to do with consciousness not being an, all or nothing, phenomena?
You’ve heard the term, “let’s sleep on it” - because the sleep process does help the body-brain-mind process the happenings of the previous day - along with mental conflicts we may be working through. Case in point.
Never felt different from what?
Your body-brain interacting with the world is the source of your consciousness - I seems to me, you will always (in normal health and circumstance) wake feeling like you, because it is pretty much the same physical stuff, happening within the same psychological milieu, producing the same spectrum of impulses.
Wow, what an excellent observation.
And the timing is down right serendipity.
Thank you.
Now can you show me what area of philosophy studies the question: Who Am I?, ?
I was just tracking down your posts on the philosophy exchange, just for fun, time to kill, you know. Some of them are precious. Even though you take on a bit different tone there, more scientific, less circular and less talk about everything troubling you, they come back with some truly precious responses. All of them though, are basically what everyone here is saying, and probably what therapists have told you, and your family, and who knows who else.
Not sure which is my favorite, but, “question the article, not the world” is a good one.
Is that rhetorical? What do you mean by “area of philosophy”? Branches?
Philosophy of self - Wikipedia
I prefer this line of study Neural basis of self - Wikipedia
Well it turns out that experiment has some caveats to it.
I can’t. I posted a link to it earlier in the thread but it doesn’t exist anymore, so my comments and theirs won’t show. But it’s the same exact answer without the exchange.
Sooo what am I supposed to do then?
I’m getting a different impression, more like “This is it and it was proven thousands of years ago”.
They aren’t though, and if you read the replies you’d get why I’m troubled, especially that Crig guy. My therapist can’t really help me with this, they just comment on “that must be hard” yeah no shit it is…
Work more on understanding anxiety and how to handle it and less on trying to figure out what the self is.
Who proved it? Buddhists? They might think they did or claim they did but why hasn’t everyone else accepted what they say, why hasn’t it been confirmed? Do you think they hold some secret? That’s what people used to believe, that there was a guru on a mountain somewhere with all the answers. But it’s easy to get to those mountains now, and they just have koans.
I guess so. It just feels like this stuff is the cause of my anxiety, at least that’s what it seems.
I guess, I try to argue that but I don’t really have anything for stuff like this:
"If you see your hand in front of your face you see it without any concept right before your mind conceptualizes it and the understanding of the raw sensory experience without conceptualizing that experience is what is meant by non-conceptual understanding AKA paramatta in Pali. Its very hard to understand unless you practice some way of gaining profound insight like vipassana. It’s ineffable when anyone tries to conceptually describe it. "
“I don’t know how you are defining attachment but depending on happiness is an attachment and it leads to suffering or dukkha. You can call dukkha good or bad but it still is what it is. Attachment to wanting to exist or not exist, is attachment so try contemplating that one.”
“Paramatta understanding is not in the past or future, it is each individuals raw experience coming through the eye, ear, nose, bodily sensations, emotions and thoughts in the instantaneous moment they happen , moment by moment as they happen in the individuals stream of consciousness. Vipassana insight is a meditation that facilitates seeing in this way.”
"If someone becomes a zombie, they are not practicing correctly. Attachment is what makes us exist so , you are kinda right about attachment is what makes us human but we can transcend our limitations, we can transcend suffering and let go of being anything. It’s hard to hear that because we think we have this never changing central core that is “myself”
Most of that I have some doubts on given what I learned about the brain and how we perceive the world. There was that article about how our brain predicts reality to compensate for the delay and how it does that based on what it has seen before, meaning their “non conceptual” reality doesn’t really exist given what we know about senses and the brain today.
There was also some scientist with a theory of consciousness:
Though I’m not sure how you have a non-concpetual theory based on learning. But it is rooted in interactions, learning, and all that stuff, which means there is no real pure state.