The notion that "the self does not exist" is based on an epistemic error. Apologies for the links to my own substack, but the arguments I make in the links are directly relevant to this topic, which is something I've given a fair bit of thought.
The error works like this:
1) Observe a phenomenon (an effect), and impute an entity that produces it (a cause). We do this all the time. See trees waving. Probably wind. See one tree waving and not the ones around it... maybe the crazy dude next door is shaking the trunk (I live in the country, so this happens). See all the trees waving and the buildings as well? Earthquake! All of these causes are entities (the distinction between "process" and "thing" is one of convenience and perspective: they are all entities)
2) Investigate the phenomenon unsuccessfully for ages--like, generations, centuries, millennia--and in the course of that investigation oodles of imaginative individuals put all kinds of constraints and additional attributes on the entity in question, based on what they imagine it to be, and that all becomes part of the commonplace meaning of the word for the entity.
3) Discover that the actual entity (or process) behind the phenomenon does not conform to these purely imaginary, by now traditional, constraints, in which many people have a high level of emotional investment.
4) On that basis declare the entity is not real.
In the case of the "self" the big imaginary constraint is unitarity. But the conscious self is a biological regulator of behaviour (https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-consciousness) that has no necessary condition of unitarity. It's just something that people who didn't know the Earth moved around the sun or that pathogens cause a lot of disease made up, along with a good deal else. The constraint of unitarity can be violated and the conscious self as a cause of human behaviour remains. And this is in fact the case: the conscious self remains a useful and powerful concept in understanding the world. That it happens to arise from the complex interaction of a lot of moving parts is irrelevant.
Three comparisons:
1) Do internal combustion engines exist? They, like the self, are a complicated collection of interacting parts. Why would anyone on that basis say they don't exist? And if we wouldn't say that about internal combustion engines, why would we say that about the self?
2) Do emergent phenomena exist? There is no phenomena more purely emergent than heat, which once upon a time was believed be due to a substance of some kind (caloric, phlogiston, etc) but it is now known to be the random (in a precise sense of "carrying no information") motion of atoms and molecules. Does that make heat "not real"? Stick your hand in a fire and find out! But if heat--the ultimate emergent phenomenon--is real, what basis do we have to say that the self--also an emergent phenomenon--is not real?
3) Electrons were, like the self, an imputed entity. They explained the conduction of electricity. An Anglo-Irish physicist named Stoney came up with the idea in the 1870s, but their specific nature was unknown, and fortunately things moved fast enough that there wasn't time for a lot of imaginary baggage to accumulate. JJ Thomson demonstrated in 1897 that electrons are particles. His son, George Thomson, demonstrated in the 1930s that the electron is a wave. Did anyone say, "There is no such thing as an electron"? Of course not: we were simply learning about the nature of the entity that causes electrical conduction. So why would we say "There is no such thing as the self" when we discover the self's properties are not entirely what we previously assumed?
I hope that's enough to at least stimulate some thinking. As I said, I've thought about this a fair bit, and have written about this error at some length with regard to another entity that exists but lacks the imaginary baggage people have loaded it with: https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/introduction-to-quantum-theology
My point in summary is very simple: if we use the word "exists" in precisely the same way for the self as we do for literally everything else--and I don't see that we have a warrant for doing otherwise--the self exists.
I enjoyed the thought experiment very much as it is always as good reminder that we should be open to considering what our true responses may be to specific situations. In order to get through each day or week, we need to rely on tried and true beliefs and responses to situations - it would simply be debilitating to debate each decision to its deepest level. And thus we often jump to the conclusions you allude to in your piece.
However, the reality beyond your thought experiment is usually much more complex and this results in an even greater default to easy reactions. I was struck by one of the early paragraphs in your first piece proposing the thought experiment:
“This photograph was taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936. The people are workers at a Blohm & Voss shipyard. It’s not certain who that lonely dissenter was. One family claimed he was Gustav Wegert, who refused to salute on religious grounds. But it is more widely believed that he was August Landmesser, who had joined the Nazi party in 1931 in hopes of getting work but had been expelled in 1935 when he was engaged to a Jewish woman, in contravention of Nazi law. The woman was eventually caught up in the Holocaust and murdered. Landmesser was ordered into a military penal unit and killed in action.”
It suggests that we have no real idea why the person in question did not join the others in saluting. Nor can we assume that everyone saluting in the picture did so out of a lack of moral courage. The motivations and reactions of any group of a 100 people are likely to be incredibly nuanced and varied. If any of the people in the photo were opposed to the Nazi government, they might legitimately determine that showing that opposition in this situation would raise questions that could limit some other action or position they were taking. I lived this quite often as a foreign service officer representing Canada abroad. In many places where I was posted, I could legitimately have denounced publicly human rights abuses in those societies almost every week. But to do so, to always take that moral high ground might actually to have hindered the ultimate objective which was to see if we could help protect those at risk or influence behaviour in a positive direction. Calling up a government contact, for example, to seek information about a member of the LGBT community who was being held and assaulted by police sometimes resulted in that person’s release. Making a public statement had the opposite effect as now the government officials had to stay the course or risk appearing to bow to foreign influence.
At the same time, it was always important as well to ask yourself if your decision not to take a public stand was due to a genuine assessment of its potential positive or negative impact rather than possibly reflecting a desire not to rock the boat to maintain good relations or a sense of impotence related to the strength of our influence. So when I look at the picture and consider your thought experiment, I doubt that I would have been the only one not saluting. I hope that doing so might not imply that I was fully supportive of the government of the day. Yet, I also know that there are a myriad of possibilities, including, as you suggest, that having grown up in the time period and in that place I would have been an ardent supporter.
Thanks for this round up and for including my comments Dan. All of these responses to your fantastic post are worth reading and I missed a few gems! In response to your comment to Frederick about the Buddhist monks achieving a "lived experience" of really getting that there is truly no self: I am no expert or advanced meditator myself, but in most Buddhist teachings I have come across there is folded into the teachings that, practically speaking, we must live with this delusion of a self AS WELL AS challenge it experientially through meditation. It's not really something you can truly grok intellectually, though the concept serves as a guide to deeper understanding. "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water." Who is chopping the wood and carrying the water, if not our "self?" So in these teachings it's an acknowledged paradox, which is at least better than a teaching that there is literally a self! Perhaps some advanced meditators or special souls keep this awareness of "no self" at all times, but that's a very rare person! And even those people have to use the fiction of the self to practically move through the world.
The notion that "the self does not exist" is based on an epistemic error. Apologies for the links to my own substack, but the arguments I make in the links are directly relevant to this topic, which is something I've given a fair bit of thought.
The error works like this:
1) Observe a phenomenon (an effect), and impute an entity that produces it (a cause). We do this all the time. See trees waving. Probably wind. See one tree waving and not the ones around it... maybe the crazy dude next door is shaking the trunk (I live in the country, so this happens). See all the trees waving and the buildings as well? Earthquake! All of these causes are entities (the distinction between "process" and "thing" is one of convenience and perspective: they are all entities)
2) Investigate the phenomenon unsuccessfully for ages--like, generations, centuries, millennia--and in the course of that investigation oodles of imaginative individuals put all kinds of constraints and additional attributes on the entity in question, based on what they imagine it to be, and that all becomes part of the commonplace meaning of the word for the entity.
3) Discover that the actual entity (or process) behind the phenomenon does not conform to these purely imaginary, by now traditional, constraints, in which many people have a high level of emotional investment.
4) On that basis declare the entity is not real.
In the case of the "self" the big imaginary constraint is unitarity. But the conscious self is a biological regulator of behaviour (https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-consciousness) that has no necessary condition of unitarity. It's just something that people who didn't know the Earth moved around the sun or that pathogens cause a lot of disease made up, along with a good deal else. The constraint of unitarity can be violated and the conscious self as a cause of human behaviour remains. And this is in fact the case: the conscious self remains a useful and powerful concept in understanding the world. That it happens to arise from the complex interaction of a lot of moving parts is irrelevant.
Three comparisons:
1) Do internal combustion engines exist? They, like the self, are a complicated collection of interacting parts. Why would anyone on that basis say they don't exist? And if we wouldn't say that about internal combustion engines, why would we say that about the self?
2) Do emergent phenomena exist? There is no phenomena more purely emergent than heat, which once upon a time was believed be due to a substance of some kind (caloric, phlogiston, etc) but it is now known to be the random (in a precise sense of "carrying no information") motion of atoms and molecules. Does that make heat "not real"? Stick your hand in a fire and find out! But if heat--the ultimate emergent phenomenon--is real, what basis do we have to say that the self--also an emergent phenomenon--is not real?
3) Electrons were, like the self, an imputed entity. They explained the conduction of electricity. An Anglo-Irish physicist named Stoney came up with the idea in the 1870s, but their specific nature was unknown, and fortunately things moved fast enough that there wasn't time for a lot of imaginary baggage to accumulate. JJ Thomson demonstrated in 1897 that electrons are particles. His son, George Thomson, demonstrated in the 1930s that the electron is a wave. Did anyone say, "There is no such thing as an electron"? Of course not: we were simply learning about the nature of the entity that causes electrical conduction. So why would we say "There is no such thing as the self" when we discover the self's properties are not entirely what we previously assumed?
I hope that's enough to at least stimulate some thinking. As I said, I've thought about this a fair bit, and have written about this error at some length with regard to another entity that exists but lacks the imaginary baggage people have loaded it with: https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/introduction-to-quantum-theology
My point in summary is very simple: if we use the word "exists" in precisely the same way for the self as we do for literally everything else--and I don't see that we have a warrant for doing otherwise--the self exists.
I enjoyed the thought experiment very much as it is always as good reminder that we should be open to considering what our true responses may be to specific situations. In order to get through each day or week, we need to rely on tried and true beliefs and responses to situations - it would simply be debilitating to debate each decision to its deepest level. And thus we often jump to the conclusions you allude to in your piece.
However, the reality beyond your thought experiment is usually much more complex and this results in an even greater default to easy reactions. I was struck by one of the early paragraphs in your first piece proposing the thought experiment:
“This photograph was taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936. The people are workers at a Blohm & Voss shipyard. It’s not certain who that lonely dissenter was. One family claimed he was Gustav Wegert, who refused to salute on religious grounds. But it is more widely believed that he was August Landmesser, who had joined the Nazi party in 1931 in hopes of getting work but had been expelled in 1935 when he was engaged to a Jewish woman, in contravention of Nazi law. The woman was eventually caught up in the Holocaust and murdered. Landmesser was ordered into a military penal unit and killed in action.”
It suggests that we have no real idea why the person in question did not join the others in saluting. Nor can we assume that everyone saluting in the picture did so out of a lack of moral courage. The motivations and reactions of any group of a 100 people are likely to be incredibly nuanced and varied. If any of the people in the photo were opposed to the Nazi government, they might legitimately determine that showing that opposition in this situation would raise questions that could limit some other action or position they were taking. I lived this quite often as a foreign service officer representing Canada abroad. In many places where I was posted, I could legitimately have denounced publicly human rights abuses in those societies almost every week. But to do so, to always take that moral high ground might actually to have hindered the ultimate objective which was to see if we could help protect those at risk or influence behaviour in a positive direction. Calling up a government contact, for example, to seek information about a member of the LGBT community who was being held and assaulted by police sometimes resulted in that person’s release. Making a public statement had the opposite effect as now the government officials had to stay the course or risk appearing to bow to foreign influence.
At the same time, it was always important as well to ask yourself if your decision not to take a public stand was due to a genuine assessment of its potential positive or negative impact rather than possibly reflecting a desire not to rock the boat to maintain good relations or a sense of impotence related to the strength of our influence. So when I look at the picture and consider your thought experiment, I doubt that I would have been the only one not saluting. I hope that doing so might not imply that I was fully supportive of the government of the day. Yet, I also know that there are a myriad of possibilities, including, as you suggest, that having grown up in the time period and in that place I would have been an ardent supporter.
Thanks for this round up and for including my comments Dan. All of these responses to your fantastic post are worth reading and I missed a few gems! In response to your comment to Frederick about the Buddhist monks achieving a "lived experience" of really getting that there is truly no self: I am no expert or advanced meditator myself, but in most Buddhist teachings I have come across there is folded into the teachings that, practically speaking, we must live with this delusion of a self AS WELL AS challenge it experientially through meditation. It's not really something you can truly grok intellectually, though the concept serves as a guide to deeper understanding. "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water." Who is chopping the wood and carrying the water, if not our "self?" So in these teachings it's an acknowledged paradox, which is at least better than a teaching that there is literally a self! Perhaps some advanced meditators or special souls keep this awareness of "no self" at all times, but that's a very rare person! And even those people have to use the fiction of the self to practically move through the world.