The key to process thinking

Life is like a river.

But the analogy of a person floating down stream like in the picture has a significant flaw: how is the person somehow separate from the flow of the river?

This starts the classic analysis of which parts of "me" belong to me inside and which belong to the world outside.

Well that has been explored a lot in the blog. The Hindu story of the bathing goddess spying two voyeurs and asking them is there anything to find particularly attractive, one says her eyes which she promptly pulls out and hands to him. The idea of an integral self or even body is a myth.

If the world is a stream of events it is a small step to see the self as exactly the same. There is just a river of water moving.

So how do we end up with this self versus world set up then?

This whole problem occurs because of the mirror. We are all narcissists more or less.

When we catch a shadowy glimpse of our self we become obsessed. That tantalising object offers us the promise of being a distinct and complete object, separate from the rest of the world. And having our self set before our self gives us an apparent certainty and grounding: "Here I am" we proclaim!

If we over do it however we forget who is looking in the first place. And who is this? Who is actually looking? Well without the image to look at, we actually have no idea. There is just looking. The very first thing that happens is seeing. Once we have seeing then we can see our reflection. So seeing comes first, and if we are anyone it is the person who is seeing. But the seeing came first, there is no one seeing. We do lots of mental gymnastics after that to try and slot in a person behind the seeing after the event, but it happened already. Post processing our experience to try to get behind it and shore it up with some proposed self achieves nothing. The castle in the sky won't achieve anything by retrofitting foundations: if it is in the sky already then just marvel that that miracle. And so it is with experience in general. There is nothing to be achieved by retrofitting people and mechanism to explain experience. It already happened! But it is no good our minds do what they do, and what they do is name and identify things and pull the world part into names bits. One of which we claim is our self.. Buddha points out though that we cannot hold up these fruits of our labours like we do and claim here is what is there. The reason is that the mind can carry on pulling the world apart indefinitely. There is no final indivisible object, there are no atoms! For that matter it can keep putting it back together indefinitely: there is no Universe. Buddha completely reject Parmenides (515 to 450 BC) and Democritus (460 to 370 BC) which is fair enough because they both claim there is an end to the process of dividing the world: Parmenides says there is a starting unity and Democritus a final indivisible unit: but on what do they base these wild assumption? This logic is most fruitful when applied to the self. We do the grand division of world and self based on some criteria. But why stop there? Facts are the self divides indefinitely.

When dividing the self into its parts what possibly confuses a Western practitioner is another grand division between Material and Mind, Physical and Mental. We like to think that a heart beat is a physical phenomenon, while an emotion a mental phenomenon. Our argument would be that my lover can hear my heart beats, but only I can feel my emotions. Does that seem a bit odd though? In the act of love making and there is one world of bodies that is objectively present, but two completely separated mental worlds? That just doesn't seem right.

So this is the crux really of what keeps us out of process thinking. However we try to think about the world as process it is ultimately broken by the prison walls of the self. Things are either inside or outside this prison. How to break out? Admittedly this is the most profound issue.

The root is not actually phenomenal. We can cite my body as the room that keeps me inside, or we can even cite my consciousness as what keep me inside. But the real problem lies in plain sight in that bolded sentence. "my" body, and "my" consciousness that keep "me" inside. If we just remove these words we get: We can cite body as the room that keeps inside, or we can even cite consciousness as what keep inside. Suddenly without anything inside this make no sense anymore. A room is just a room. The whole gravity of the sentence comes from something being inside it. But what?

Let us propose a self that can go inside the room of the body or consciousness. What does this look like? How do we know it is there? If it has a body and consciousness itself we enter an infinite loop because there would need be a self inside that body and consciousness. If however it has none of these things then what is the self? Was not the whole point of talking out body and consciousness to try and understand the self? And suppose we did find something we missed to identify the self wouldn't we really just add that as a new room to put the self inside?

This whole process above doesn't make sense.

So why are we obsessed with this putting a self inside things activity? And we can see this like a kid playing with Russian dolls. Most humans are still at a child's development stage.

The reason is that Narcissus above looking at his reflection is not just seeing an arbitrary object, he is seeing what he thinks is himself. And that sets up a loop. That image he imagines is himself, and what is he doing, he is looking at himself, so that image is looking at himself, which is itself looking at himself... 

 Importantly we can dismiss this looping mental process immediately. We just need remember who is actually looking at the picture above and we are back to "just seeing." The looping illusion is just occurring with our minds trying to form a fixed object. As said the mind works by cutting the world into parts and naming them. But when we are trying to cut the idea of our self into parts we come across things that mean the self (like a reflection in water or a mirror) and if we accept that meaning then we get duplicates of our self and everything goes crazy. In the picture above these are just reflections: they are not actual people! Always useful to remember that when we are thinking! A thought of a person is not a person, it is a thought!

On an aside another feature of this blog was exploring these recursive functions. The most famous by far is the Mandelbrot set. The thing to note about recursion is that (under contraction mapping) it creates "self-similarity" and fixed points. The mirror above has a fixed point at the limit of the contracting reflections, and it has a very simple self similarity in that any part of it is a copy of the whole thing at a different scale. But under more complicated transformations in the complex plane you get amazing structure like this:

So no one is saying the infinite loop of "self" is not highly intriguing and endlessly fascinating. BUT it is not real, it is all created in the mental loop. Douglas Hofstadter explores this in epic depth in the recursive book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and "I am a strange loop." Through these he shows that the self is not a discrete thing, but is an infinitely divisible compounding reflection of itself: a process rather than a thing. However it is subtle but he does this without actually challenging the self. he still thinks "he" is a self, just that the self is a fractal. 

Looking at the man in the mirror there is one man not in the picture, and that is the person looking at that picture. Note when he took the picture it was him, but as we look at the picture it is us. Somehow through a picture the person who is looking is swappable and interchangeable! Yet the person in the picture is fixed. This is truly bizarre right? How can the person who sees the scene be interchangeable? Well it is because they are not fixed! And this is the mistake that we all make, including it seems Douglas Hofstadter, that the true self is not fixed, present only in the act of seeing. All the "self" stuff that ramifies from reflections and thinking is not self, it is just endless processes in the brain and world.

So returning to the lovers. Their hearts are objective. They can both feel these. But their emotions seem locked away in distinct solid private realms. The thing to note is that the "solid" here comes not from the experience of the emotions but from the belief that a separate concrete self is experiencing them. The concreteness is actually added. When we think we are a solid self, unchanging the exact same person who looked out on your childhood bedroom as who looks out on this bedroom now, "thinking" these are the same inflexible person creates the concrete of the room's walls. Note this is a thought, it is not real.

So it is a true. A particular body has its own senses and brain and does its own processing and has its own thoughts and emptions. This is all true. BUT once we let go and give a break to the "self" thought as a solid unchanging entity, then we realise that there are no absolute walls. The "separateness" is not absolute and discrete.I believe but need check that Gilbert Ryle gets to a similar place via "category mistake." For him the body/mind problem was just a linguistic feature. The same phenomena gaining body/mind flavours according to the context they were discussed in. That is essentially the point here, but that any discussion of phenomena at all is just language and thought, while the phenomena themselves are beyond discourse. The Structuralist argument that what is not sayable we should be silent about, fails because we are dropping the "agent" here, the worlds of phenomena and language do not organise around any fixed centres like selves. Even to discuss whether "I" should be silent is to break this maxim. It is fluid.

So once we challenge this thought that the world is anchors to some fixed self, and that the real self is intrinsically bound into the act of experiencing the "I think therefore I am" but where the "I am" is so subject to immediate objectification and reification exactly like Narcissus that we are best to ignore that part, then we become just the flow of experiences. We are now process, and we are both boating on the flowing river, but not as a separate unchanging entity, but as a process our self; a river of emerging thoughts, feelings, volitions and much more.