Exploring the "mountain at a distance" (or here "apple at a distance") problem is quite revealing. We argued that to see the mountain it must obviously have already been seen. This makes the added journey of light from that distant mountain to a supposed self at the centre of the world completely unnecessary. This extra bit is actually the mental constructions that is caused by the emergence of the mountain. If there is a "true" self it is involved with the sensing of the mountain and the creation of these post hoc mental ideas like "self" and not the actual self we think at the centre.
This gets complex. Obviously everything written in a blog is even further down the causation chain, post-hoc even to the post hoc self apparently at the centre of experience. In Dennett's terms the self in the cartesian theatre is just an idea the real self fabricates to explain what is going on.
So this points into the realm of experience. That mountain over there is where the real magic is happening. What we "think" is happening while no less miraculous is only miraculous in that it happens. The contents of our thoughts and mental construction are not real or miraculous.
We get to Vipassana meditation and the closing of mental formations to see them just as they are: things arising int the mind, and definitely quite distinct from the sensation like the mountain over there.
When we do this, and then understand it, we have some new very powerful mental constructs that I can write about here. There are the bins of "sensations" and the bins of "mental constructs like thoughts and dreams." We can say that sensations are real in that they are actually happening. We say that mental constructs are not real, they are illusion, in that they are about real things while not being real themselves. We can think about a car accident without actually being in one thankfully. This distinction is very clear. Now into these two bins of reality and illusion, where does the "self" go? Well we already said that thing in the centre of our world is actually just a mental construction to explain things: it is an illusion.
But whoa something not quite right here...
My "self" is not an illusion it is definitely here sensing the world. There are eyes that sense light and brains that turn that light into a mountain over there. This is real. Yes and that Self creates the illusion of the mental self at the centre of the world! So the scientist in the lab studying a brain is looking at the Self, but when that brain processes itself to model what is going in we get a mental construct which we think is our self but which is really only a thought.
This is where Buddha's two arrows come from. There is the actual arrow entering our skin and causing pain, and then there is mental construct that works with this sense data to create a mental model of what is going on. The problem if we look really carefully about this is that we actually give primary significance to the mental model and not the data that is processed to create it.
This links very deeply with Western Philosophy and long acknowledged primacy of sense data to knowledge. All knowledge beings with our senses. So we learn about the arrow when our senses detect it and our perception interprets that. We then layer on the processing to get a self. But the self we think is a mental image. It represents the real self, but it is not the real self. And this is where the problems start.
Armed with the mental model we then project it into reality saying: ah ha I know myself, I have a mental image of "me" it must exist. But look at the mistake. We only know about this "self" from the data. And what does the data look like? It looks like a "mountain over there." How different is this from the image we have of a self "here." They are completely different in fact. This is the disconnect from which all the problems begin. This mental image of "me" becomes the real me and hijakcks our brain.
We can see how total this hijack is when we look at Kant. Kant projects a Transcendental Unity of Apperception to explain the condition for all our senses appearing to come together into a unified consciousness. But this never happens. The "mountain over there" is over there, the pain in our foot is over here and if we look carefully they are separate. That we can have thoughts that link them is just another event. The idea that all this occurs in a bubble of consciousness is just another idea and this idea is really based on the prior idea of this discrete self at the centre. Kant is taking this deduced and invented self at the centre and projecting it into the stratosphere to be a condition for the sense of unity. But if he looks back at the data as it is, he will see it is all separate.
This idea that we are a body, or a soul of whatever is an idea that is based upon a prior concept of a self at the centre of the world. We like to draw boundaries around things to try and replicate this sense of the imaginary self being discrete. But we are just projecting from inside to outside. There is no discrete entity outside. There is no outside!
If we draw all this out in time we can see the loops of the end point of a concept of self being sent back into to confuse the raw data. If we are strict about time we can stop this and see the proper order of events. We see the mountain over there, and while it is still over there it has been seen (obviously) then we think about how it is seen and invent the thoughts of a self here etc.
Now "mountains over there" are quite easy to see as separate from our invented self. But it gets more confusing when we think about events "here." Because we believe the invented self is here, then events that occur here like a pain in our foot seem to be "inside" the invented self giving it feeling and reality. But we can start all the Hindu thought experiments of if we cut the foot off is that pain still ours?
This all culminates in Douglas Harding's "headless way." If we point at things we can say this and that is over there. We start at mountain but we can get all the way to feet, hands and shoulders. But when we point at our head we get a sudden arresting experience. There is no head there.
We can think about this as can explain it as the eyes are unable to see the eyes. But we need go back to the moment of arrest and realise what just happened. We were "thinking" about imaginary self as this complete body and this model was going well until we got the experience of pointing into our eyes. That does not work. And it does not work because the real self that is actually seeing is not the same as the mental idea we have at the centre of our world. The real self is taking this data and senses in and is responsible for constructing the whole world. It is not to be confused with the thought of "self" we have about this. Harding demonstrates this deep reliance we have on the "thought self" in place of the real "experience self."
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