So its very simple. We think "I" am what lies behind what I do. In a way it is true, but in a massive way it doesn't make sense.
When you ask a chef how they cook something they can take you through all the steps. They could show you how to do it. Like in the film "Working Girl" (1988) if a chef produces a meal, but then cannot explain how they made it, you would have every reason for thinking it was bought ready-made, or they got someone else to make it.
Likewise consider Descartes and his "I think." Okay show me how you think? How do you actually create a thought? Lets get really basic: just show me a thought? Where is it? How does it happen. What are the steps from going from no thought, to having a thought there. Why did you think this today and not yesterday? When Hamilton famously etched the equation for Quaternion numbers on the Broom Bridge in Dublin while out for a walk. Now if Hamilton really did this then he would be able to explain why it took until a walk on 16th October 1843 to think this. It seems a strange time to be crafting thoughts. I mean a chef does not do critical cooking work while out on a walk, he saves it for the kitchen. Indeed in the same way why I am posting this today rather than any other day. I am even referring to an idea I had while climbing onto a train 35 years ago. That idea was wrong, and I'm going to detail how that pitfall exists. If I was really in control then I would have these ideas when I decided to make them. If we prefer emotions rather than thought consider those: emotions turn up, but can we really say why or how they turn up? They appear to have life of their own and that is the key insight to all of this. "I" am not behind them, only they are behind what happens.
The truth is that all these things happen in their own time. Musicians say the same. Inspiration is like a force from beyond that impact us. Love most definitely is. Do we decide to fall in love? It can be extremely awkward when it happens, and can make a mess of our lives. If we were in charge we would fall in love with the "right" people, the convenient people. How much easier a life if we could just fall in love with our partner when we needed to. There is a film, I forget, where someone says to the King that surely he can have anything he wants, but the King despondent says but even I cannot chose what I want.
It all points to "I" not being in control. When we are asleep who breathes for us, and who dreams?
So this led me to imagine that Consciousness and "I" was an epiphenomenon. The world unfolds, the body does what it does, and somehow floating in the stratosphere above it all is the Self and conscious watching it all happening. This mirrors the ideas of Deism that God sets the world in motion, a first mover, but just watches there after.
It doesn't sound right does it? And yet how can we have this "watcher" occasionally intersect with the world? How do they do it, when do they do it, and what is the difference between this mysterious being intersecting with the world and not, given that the world is apparently quite capable of even thinking by itself.
There is SRH and Godel here. We are looking at the incompleteness of the world. But lets leave that and return to the questions.
Personally I pursued this odd conclusion and ended up with the conscious world being a model created by a "self" that lies outside the whole of consciousness in another mysterious plane of existence. The Noumena shall we say. Which is all very Plato and unsatisfactory. Multiple worlds leads to the problem of a new world to house them all ad infinitum.
So where is the mistake?
What I was not extracting from the picture was the "model self." It is true that "I think" but I have the wrong "I" here. The "I" I am probably talking about is the visible one with hands that type and which gets into a lift and which takes a seat in a restaurant to eat. Importantly this self is built and made up by our perception system. A simple question raises this: if I am sitting at the restaurant table, then who knows that I am sitting at the restaurant table. Instinctively we say they are the same! Ah ha. The problem. So you are saying that the person sitting, is also not just sitting but also knowing they are sitting?
Break this apart in the mirror. You are saying that the person reflected is also looking at the reflection? How can you be in two places at the same time. Either you are looking at the mirror like a viewer in an art gallery, or you are the person in the painting. You can't be both?
Some hocus pocus of the mind going on. When asked who is in the picture of my parents I naturally go "my parents" but they aren't really my parents? How can they be if my parents are sitting in the room with me?
This is to do with time. We link entities in the Past with entities in the future as though they were the same. Here we enter the whole Heraclitus with his toe in the river. Perhaps better to ask: is the person at the end of a marathon the same as the one at the start? Clearly they are different. The one at the end has run a marathon, the one at the start has not. If they are the same then why not just give the award to the one at the start? We give the award to the one at the end because we know they are different. But because things evolve in time, and humans only rarely split into other humans (child birth), so chances are if a human starts, a human ends and we link them with an "identity." I mean suppose humans really could divide en route? Jane starts the marathon, divides, half goes to the pub and the other half completes the marathon? Did Jane do the marathon? We'd need a new way of thinking about people and names here. Anyway Jane cannot do this so no issue in current English language.
In a mirror then we know perfectly well that we are doing the looking. After all we walked up to the mirror to have a look at ourselves. This is the true self. The reflection despite appearing like a rabbit hole of self reference, it just a flat empty image of ourselves. Don't get confused! However deep down the rabbit hole of "do I really look like that?" we can step out at any moment because we know that the true self is thinking this!
Ah so we have the idea of "true self" now. The problem however is that true self is not a nice image in a locket we can wear around our neck to know it at any moment. The true self is existence right Now. You want to know what the true self is doing right now? It is seeing a computer screen, it is reading a blog entry. Now this is a very different "self" from what we probably think we are which are the legs below us, and the arms to our side. This is the conscious image of our body. That like the mirror image is just an image. It is not us. So Descartes is right in a way: "I am thoughts" when I am thinking. But and this is the point that "I" means thoughts. The mistake is to think there is an image of "me" that is doing the thinking. The thinking IS me. Any idea that "I" am doing the thinking comes about because of this belief I am an image of myself: perhaps the idea of person sitting at a computer. Proof is I can see my legs and arms, I can feel the weight of the chair so "I" must be sitting in the chair at this computer. But no! Feeling the weight of the body itself IS you, this is what you are doing: feeling! You are sensing the weight. That is what you are. You are not the idea of a body sitting in a seat which has weight! In the mirror analogy that is like saying you are the person being reflected. But wait who is actually doing the seeing right now! It can't be the reflection, and even less it can't be the "person" reflected. That is just an idea. And you definitely cannot reflect the "seeing" if you could then the person in the mirror could look back! I mean be trapped in a mirror world! Nonsense. All crazy thoughts. Step out to the person who IS the thinking, right now.
So this involves finding this idea of a self that is separate and populates our consciousness and thoughts. This is a doll, an invention of the mind. Great leave it there, but don't go through all the mental gymnastics to try and make this doll into "I."
So there we go problem solved. There is no one lying "behind" or "inside" what we do. The world unfolds through the laws of nature, there is no God involved. There is no "self" involved as a separate entity. Instead as it unfolds we meet ourselves in what is happening, what is thought, what is sensed, what is done. After that it is all thinking, analysis and story telling. So Deism and Epiphenomenalism are just stories that we tell, myths, to try and elevate the imaginary "dolls" of our minds to reality. But who is doing the story telling? That is the question always!
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Now in my musings I was always troubled by the practical implications. Its all very exciting exploring the world and coming up with radical reinterpretations of existence. I imagine may drug users fill their time being wowed by the other worldly experience of tripping. So why do we do this explorations? Perhaps its entertainment. More so I always felt it was an existential desire to prove my self, to become someone by discovering something new, not necessarily to be famous, by to satisfy myself that I could do it. Of course the problem when we achieve our goal is what next. Did any explorer ever go home and say great I have found, it is job done? No they go searching for more. Only a few ever stopped. Buddha and Jesus for two examples. When Buddha got to the end he said "the spiritual path is complete." When Jesus came to die on the cross he said "it is accomplished."
Now this finality is what we want. How do we come to a satisfactory closure on life and existence? How do we find peace and satisfaction?
Modern thinking says this is impossible. You must educate until you are useful, work till you retired and consume your pension until you die. There is no mention of satisfaction or closure. Of course this is because that thinking is driven by Capitalism and the desire to grow indefinitely the portfolios of the rich. We can ignore Capitalism immediately as it is devoid of any truth and is pointless.
So what is the practical implication of the above. Buddha calls it the "double arrow".
Imagine the worst possible thing. We are involved in a car crash and the car is smashed, crushing our body and killing us.
How exactly do we picture our self lying here? Well presumably we think that the physical damage to the body becomes physical damage to myself and when the body dies then I die.
Wrong.
There is physical damage to the body, and the body dies.
Correct.
What we exposed above is that the "self" we are accustomed to thinking about is not real. It is a mental doll or construction that is used to think about the world.
So when we imagined this doll getting crushed and killed that is mental modelling.
When it actually happens what is it like? Probably slow motion events, things here, things there. There is no single event here, but a confused mass of events. And there is no moment of dying for the person dying. A paramedic may make the call for the body and declare "dead". But for the "self" there is no moment of death. And the reason is from above: the self is not a "doll" in our consciousness, it is the consciousness and more. You cannot watch things happen to you: you are the watching. So when the body is crushed you can watch this as long as you have consciousness and awareness still. And then there is darkness. At no point does a thing called the self die. There is nothing there to die.
Still unsatisfactory we say. I am dying but I just don't know it.
NO! This is still belief in a doll. We are just imagining the doll outside consciousness now, but still a doll is watching and being conscious.
How does consciousness happen? If we say it is because I am conscious then we can start reading the whole blog again. The point is that it happens through the laws of nature. The "I" is a mental construct within all this. The "doll" happens through the laws of nature! So when we think "I" it is not "I" that is thinking this. That is SRH, Godel etc. I cannot think "I" that is chicken and egg, and infinite loop. I do not think "I" in that the I that is thinking is in no way the "I" that is thought, in the same way we are not the same as our reflection (which is just a flat dead image of light in a mirror).
The point here is that there is no "I" that we could recognise outside the doll we imagine is us. The "true self" is just part of the vast cosmos and has the ability to create a Matrix (like the film) in which it creates a representation of the body that we very readily confuse with the true-self that is doing all this. In the 1999 film it is as though Neo realises he is none of the people called Neo--neither the one in the Matrix nor the one we are led to believe is the true him--he realises that he is the things that happen that drive the story of the film.
Modern world has elements of this with belief that freedom lies in what we do. But it fails immediately by attributing all this to some representation of the self that we hold on to as our self.
Buddha's "Second Arrow" is this. When we think about the car crash there is the real car crash which is unlike anything we can image, and most importantly does not happen to anything we can image. We are welcome to model it and imagine us going through the event, but the mistake comes when we think we ever will go through the event. No one ever had a car accident and no one ever died--not the way we think about it anyway. Those crash test dummies we imagine going through all these things, are just dummies and dolls we invent. No human is really a doll, and least of all our self. We are the one doing the imaging. Now try and imagine how our imagination would fare in a car crash ;-) It wouldn't even be there! The reason we think one day we may be in a car crash is because we really do believe we are like a doll, and when we put the imaginary doll through the car crash we imagine somehow we will do the same. We are nothing like the doll we are the "imaginer" of that doll! Really very very different! Even if we are afraid, there is no one being afraid, the only thing being afraid is the fear. It is this belief that there is a separate doll or self for which all this stuff we are imaging is coming is what causes the "second arrow." Sure it is worth imaging what we would do in a car crash, perhaps it will make us wear a seat belt, and drive more carefully, and perhaps even prime us to some extent with what we might do. But if and when it really happens it won't happen to "you" or what right now the doll you think you are. It will just happen, and no "doll" or "self" will be there to experience it: it will just happen. Certainly with disasters we only really take on board what happened afterwards. And if we survive there is a long process of trying to fit a doll into what we remember. "I was there?", "I did that?", "That really happened to me?" we say incredulously time after time. And the reason we don't believe it is because only your "true-self" was there, and the dolls you expected to be there were not there. You have to add them later. And that is because we don't understand our true-self yet. And going to the top that is why we have odd thoughts like "I know how to think", "That was my thought" when in fact the true-self is all this, and we only try to add a "doll" called "me" in afterwards to try and continue the illusion that I am this mental construct of myself, and not the person constructing it. The harder we fall in love and believe in this doll we make, the more egotistical, psychopathic, narcissistic and probably sadistic we become. But unfortunately becoming a doll as detailed above rather limits life.
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