Self, Me and Contradiction

These two things are intimately related. SRH (a thread of this blog) notes the negative relationship between self and itself that is the basis of many (if not all) paradoxes and contradictions.

Yet the relationship between self and itself is hypothesised to be the key to self-consciousness.

When we posit a "me" we are not just claiming a self, of why everyone has a self, we are claiming the selfhood of the claimant. Intrinsic to the structure of the "I" or the "Me" is that the self has a relationship with itself and this relationship is positive and reinforcing. Indeed the opposite of what is found in contradiction.

The "I" or "Me" mentioned above is the hypothetical "Hard Me" by which I mean an actual entity. The "Hard Me" is most famously known as the "Soul." A "Soul" is the belief that within a conscious sentient being there inhabits an entity called the Soul which is a distinct thing and which gives metaphysical foundation to the "I" or "Me." Despite the fact that the West bases its entire politics, economics and metaphysics on the "Hard Me" it has never been identified and remain hypothetical.

Paranormal and Ghosts are sometimes correlated with "Hard Me" to suggest that an entity that is separate from the physical body and which corresponds to the "I" survives death and can manifest. However while paranormal phenomena certainly exist they are not understood and the idea they represent the "souls" of people is also hypothetical.

"Soft I" includes more tangible things like "Language Constructs" and social norms. In a property owning society for example it follows that there must be posit things to actually do the owning. An "owner" is a result of such a society. But we do not forget that the "owner" is a product of a social behaviour and has no reality outside this. Likewise many languages identify the subject of a sentence. "John ate the cake" places the cake as the object and John as the subject. and we read a lot into John being the subject. John is a sentient being engaged in meaningful activity. But we could have "the garbage crusher ate the cake", are we suggesting that the subject of this sentence the "garbage crusher" has sentience and subjectivity? "Soft I" is the arising of a subject in situations that do not require any deep metaphysics.

A small addendum that this goes into Quantum Physics and the place of the "observer." It is often suggested that human sentience and consciousness are critical in creating an "observer" and the wave equation collapse is somehow linked to the unique features of human self and subjectivity. But experiments have shown that collapse can occur through any type of recording with or without human's involved.

I was always slightly depressed by arguments that seemed to rip the "soul" out of the world and suggest that it is all manifest, straighforward and without mystery. But there are three issues with this. (1) the world is what it is, why do we need to hold on to myths and fantasies to make it more wonderful? (2) if we need to hold on to myths and fantasies to make the world seem more exciting we are underappreciating the magic already present. Take a humble apple that a painter may struggle for days to capture in a painting. We can fetishise that as much as we like. How amazing that for reasons we cannot understand, not just that the apple evolved and was cultivated by our ancestors into this sweet fruit, but that the universe ever came into existence to support such a thing as an apple and myself. In that moment seeing the apple already the mystery of the whole universe is present. (3) but finally let us look at our mind and its need for excitement and mystery. Why does the universe create such a psychological need? Immediately we have risen above the trivial level of seeking particular mental states into appreciating the universe in a much more profound and respectful way.

So in conclusion, it is being noted that the relationship between the self and itself is normally negative and destructive. but in the one very notable case of the hypothetical "Hard Me" we use it to posit a self-reinforcing Self. Hmm some suspicion!