i don't believe in "myself," from a certain point of view ..
More than half the time I think I am best measured by the friends I have. By that, I mean that what they say gives fascinating ideas and lead me to paths of thought that I'd otherwise not have considered.
A friend of mine wrote this in a comment to when I supposed that I was an automaton.
I think here you fall back too easily on your mathgradness to explain yourself. But you're Jasun first; everything else follows.
That's where I get into trouble. Maybe I inherited this from thinking about Buddhism, or maybe it's an effect of tolerating post-modernist ideas. For those who know more than I do, please comment and correct me if I've misquoted or made an error in logic, please!
At any rate, my current belief is that you're not who you "are" but what you've done and how you act in a particular instance of time. Personality is really no more than history. It is an extrapolation of a person relative to what (s)he has done in similiar scenarios in the past [ 1].
As a result, a person is a manifestation of states related to immediate surrounding and circumstance. From Buddhist bits I've read, the world is claimed to be the same (a collection of states) and as a result, perhaps there is no difference between what you call "self" and "not-self."
In science, we call all things "matter" and academics do not dispute this very much. Supposedly, realising and accepting this is one path towards nirvana, and nirvana isn't so much a notion of 'self-annihilation' or a cessation of self.
Rather, nirvana is the realisation and acceptance that this notion of "self" was an illusion all along. It's not like you, as an single entity, will cease to exist, but that you were never a single entity in the first place.
I still have trouble accepting that, and I make no claims towards attaining nirvana. The matter and particle bits are fine, if that is the prevailing theory in science; I'm fine with a blurred distinction between my physical body and the world that is not my physical body.
But it leads to all sort of questions about cause-and-effect. Think of Descartes "cogito ergo sum" or 'I think, therefore I am.' If you were never a single entity or a cause, then what or where is thought?
If we resort again to science, then is thought the sequence of electrical impulses between neurons in our brains? Must I think of ourselves again as biological automata?
I'm still attached to the notion of "myself." It's a convenient thought construction and helps with day-to-day life, if anything. But I don't take much faith in it when I'm thinking out loud.
[1] One can easily accuse me, at this point, of thinking of a human being as a trajectory path in a dynamical system of ODE, or perhaps a sequence of random variables (a la probability).
I admit, that is a simplistic viewpoint, but I'm willing to entertain ideas.
A friend of mine wrote this in a comment to when I supposed that I was an automaton.
I think here you fall back too easily on your mathgradness to explain yourself. But you're Jasun first; everything else follows.
That's where I get into trouble. Maybe I inherited this from thinking about Buddhism, or maybe it's an effect of tolerating post-modernist ideas. For those who know more than I do, please comment and correct me if I've misquoted or made an error in logic, please!
At any rate, my current belief is that you're not who you "are" but what you've done and how you act in a particular instance of time. Personality is really no more than history. It is an extrapolation of a person relative to what (s)he has done in similiar scenarios in the past [ 1].
As a result, a person is a manifestation of states related to immediate surrounding and circumstance. From Buddhist bits I've read, the world is claimed to be the same (a collection of states) and as a result, perhaps there is no difference between what you call "self" and "not-self."
In science, we call all things "matter" and academics do not dispute this very much. Supposedly, realising and accepting this is one path towards nirvana, and nirvana isn't so much a notion of 'self-annihilation' or a cessation of self.
Rather, nirvana is the realisation and acceptance that this notion of "self" was an illusion all along. It's not like you, as an single entity, will cease to exist, but that you were never a single entity in the first place.
I still have trouble accepting that, and I make no claims towards attaining nirvana. The matter and particle bits are fine, if that is the prevailing theory in science; I'm fine with a blurred distinction between my physical body and the world that is not my physical body.
But it leads to all sort of questions about cause-and-effect. Think of Descartes "cogito ergo sum" or 'I think, therefore I am.' If you were never a single entity or a cause, then what or where is thought?
If we resort again to science, then is thought the sequence of electrical impulses between neurons in our brains? Must I think of ourselves again as biological automata?
I'm still attached to the notion of "myself." It's a convenient thought construction and helps with day-to-day life, if anything. But I don't take much faith in it when I'm thinking out loud.
[1] One can easily accuse me, at this point, of thinking of a human being as a trajectory path in a dynamical system of ODE, or perhaps a sequence of random variables (a la probability).
I admit, that is a simplistic viewpoint, but I'm willing to entertain ideas.