So the archaeologist reading an ancient inscription says "it is like this person is speaking to me from the past"
But these are just marks chiselled into a rock. Where does the person and the voice come from?
Now people might argue the existence of such a structure could not occur at random. But then we are in a similar mindset to someone seeing a flower and saying this can't happen by accident so it must be created by someone.
But we may argue of course it was etched by human hands, it is a culture that we have inherited and we still do it today. So we can immediately decipher at least the process and culture behind inscriptions without any doubt. There was a person physically there writing something that they thought important enough to fix in stone so that other people for eternity could read. And now I am reading that so this is definitely a person speaking to me across the centuries.
But there is something odd here. It is actually an inscription in rock. Nothing could be more lifeless and dead. There is no person in this inscription. Or is there?
Where is this person?
We say in the Past. So we agree they are dead. So why do I think they are speaking to me from beyond the grave? This is impossible.
We are being a bit creative here. We are inventing a person who we believe must have existed in the Past to think and write this inscription. We have no idea who they were, it is enough to just acknowledge there was someone there. So we are inventing them, but based upon the evidence of this inscription. And yet this is more than a dry factual conclusion, we can sense an actual person speaking to us.
Now this is interesting because what is the difference between sensing someone in an ancient text and sensing someone in the room with us right now? The sense of "someone being there" is the same.
Years ago late at night I had this idea to hook up an ALICE bot in python to the Windows speech recognition and speech synthesiser. Putting in a pause so it didn't end up talking to itself, I said "Hello" and it replied "Hello, what is your name?" I had the undeniable sense that I was not alone in that room. I realised that this incredibly profound experience of being with someone is actually really and surprisingly easy to create. If we think about it kids do it with dolls and imaginary friends very easily, and animists do it with the natural world. This was around 2007; you don't need powerful transformers and Large Language Models to create a sense of a person.
Now there is a thing called "pareidolia" which is the mind's ability to read meaning and patterns into actually random noise. However this is where the logic is possibly original, this means that when the mind is in the presence of non-random things, it is still it that is reading meaning into non-random things, it is not the things that decide the meaning, it is still the mind.
Perhaps to illustrate this logic we have a fire alarm. When there is a fire, it goes off and people leave the building. Now people light say they leave the building because of the fire but we can test this. If we set the alarm to go off when there is no fire, people will leave the building. Now its true they will confirm whether there was a fire by other means and eventually "cry wolf" style learn to ignore the fire alarm. And the same with the "sense of someone there". When we find out we've been tricked by an ALICE bot we quickly lose that sense of someone being there. But the point is we were tricked and that "sense of someone being there" was generated. This shows that "sense of someone being there" is not the same as someone actually being there. And when we read a text, like this blog, we are being tricked, because there is obviously no one there.
This means that the sense that there is someone there is actually created by the mind. We can get that sense even when there is not someone there. This was most obvious with the inescapable sense of being in the room with someone else, even though I knew it was a simple ALICE bot running an AIML engine.
Now if we apply this insight to ourselves it has a really profound implication: "The sense that I exist is created by the mind", whether I actually exist is a different question.
When we are bound to this idea of a "person" being inside me, saying that "I do not exist" sounds crazy and also very defeating. If I do not exist then what is the point of my life, and many, many other negative responses.
But if we look again what exactly are we expecting to change if the "person" in us is just a sense created by the same part of us that saw a person in a chatbot, or perhaps for another example seeing a shadow move late at night and thinking we are being followed. Or for another example seeing a film, or reading a book and thinking we are dealing with other human beings. All these are not real, so what if "I" am unreal too, what am I expecting to change?
Well if "I" don't exist I might expect my feelings to stop, or my wishes to stop, or my enjoyments of life to stop, or my purpose in life to stop. But look at what was just written there: each of these was described at "mine." I own all these things, I am not any any of them. I own my house, it is my house, but that doesn't make me a house. Likewise I own "my feelings", "my wishes", "my enjoyments", "my purpose" but I am not any of them. So when we say "I" don't exist then all these things are safe, they can carry on just as before. In fact everything carries on exactly as before! All that changes is I realise that the sense that there is "someone" in my life called me is manufactured by my mind. Another way to see this is that I carry on with large sections of my life without really noticing myself. When I am asleep for example really not thinking about myself. So this sense of "me" comes and goes, so it is clearly not a fixed and essential part of life.
So we can use this text here. When we read a text, especially a random one on the internet, we certainly used to before AI, assume that there was someone behind it, who did the writing. Well it is true there is something there to do the writing, but the issue is, is that person "in" the text. Is some talking to us as we read it. Well obviously not. I am about to stop writing and publish after which I am not talking to any one, but the text remains like a novel with potentially a character embedded inside it - the person who has recalled memories and thoughts and done some live analysis while they write. But clearly I don't get stuck in this text, I wander off and do other things in a moment. So where is this person? It is created by you the reader as you read this (which could be future me if I come back to read this and I create a sense of a past self - which I have always found weird, that sense of a "me" from or in the Past - how do I get there and how do I get back to the Present). But of course there is no me in the Past or a Past self, I make this person up right now as I interact with things like inscriptions, text or perhaps a shadow late at night of a time travelling me.
All this hopefully shakes the idea of the "me" living inside me, and replaces it with a dynamic "me" that is created by the mind at will right now in certain situations like reading something I wrote or perhaps while I am thinking I can see a "person" doing this, but that "person" is created right now and goes away just as easily.
Enlightenment is the freedom to let this invented self go away freely and come back as needed. I believe I can improve my understanding of Eckhart Tolle's realisation that there is no self suffering, to there is no permanent self sitting there inside your body and life suffering. Instead we bring this self up at times , but importantly we let them dissolve again when the circumstances fade. So when I stop writing the person we just invented to talk to us throughout this writing can fade as our mind move onto other things. And this "death" is the exact same "death" we and other people undergo in reality. Since the "me" inside a life can come and go freely, and can be transferred to a piece of writing we read after someone has died and feel they are with us again (which is impossible as they are dead - what is dead if people are not dead), it means that death - at ;least the hard party of death which is letting "people" go is actually very easy. we let someone go in a second when this text ends. And "I" who is writing this must learn to let that self go as well when the text ends. That simple thing is Enlightenment! Tomorrow when I reread this I will create a person inside it, and call is "Past Self" just as any reader, but I will create a special person who I think is "me," but not really special as they are made the same way as anyone.
So hopefully this removes completely the "metaphysics" of self, and shows that is easy and without consequence. We don't need to carry a house sized self around with us like a snail, the self is actually complete light and as easily made and evaporated as a character in a film, or a flash of light...
“Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.” “So is all conditioned existence to be seen.”
[Diamond Sutra]
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