Richardkcaputophd009 wrote: ↑November 20th, 2022, 4:27 pm Also, how would Scott or anyone else who buys into the two-selves idea know that they are incorrect?
I wouldn't say that I believe in "two selves".
In other words, in terms of the infamous
Mind-Body Problem, I am
not a dualist.
Nonetheless, I do believe, as I pointed out in the book, that the English word 'you' (and by extension the English word 'me') is equivocal.
One of the things to which the word 'you' is often used to refer is something that I believe is an illusion. Moreover, I think science has demonstrated very convincingly that it doesn't really exist. In the book, I sometimes refer to it as "the false self" or "the unreal you". It's to that very point that I believe many scientists and philosophers refer when they say things like
"the self is an illusion". Realizing or learning that it doesn't exist is what many people call
"self-transcendence" or sometimes
"ego death".
In regard to the topics of "ego death", "dying before you die", and "self-transcendence", as well as common claims along the lines of "the self is an illusion" or "continuous personal identity is an illusion", here is a quote from the neuroscientist Sam Harris that I love, which is transcribed from the Big Think video, entitled
The Self is an Illusion:
Sam Harris wrote:I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body.
That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding.
We know that everything you experience – your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there’s not one unitary self that’s carried through from one moment to the next unchanging.
And yet we feel that we have this self that’s just this center of experience.
Now it’s possible I claim and people have claimed for thousands of years to lose this feeling, to actually have the center drop out of the experience so that... you can just be identical to this sphere of experience that is all of the color and light and feeling and energy of consciousness. But there’s no sense of center there. So this is classically described as self-transcendence or ego transcendence in spiritual, mystical, new age religious literature. It is in large measure the baby in the bathwater that religious people are afraid to throw out. If you want to take seriously the project of being like Jesus or Buddha or some, you know, whatever your favorite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology that is described there. And what I’m saying is that it’s a real experience.
My entire political philosophy summed up in one tweet.
"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master."
I believe spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) manifests as bravery, confidence, grace, honesty, love, and inner peace.