Clear up of the blogs past discussions on experience and self.

One thing to clear up on self with reference to previous blogs.

So it was observed that we commonly imagine ourselves within the world like we are at the centre and the world is around us. Daniel Dennett called it the Cartesian Theatre. This view is highly influence by vision and what we see, When we feel touch or hear a sound we tend to over lay it on the world established by vision.

Suppose we are looking at a bird that sings, it really looks like the sound is coming from the bird that we are seeing.

But this is a bit weird if we think about it. The bird that we see is what we see with our eyes, and the sound is picked up by our ears. We then put it all together so the bird that we are seeing appears to make a sound.

The thing to note here is that everything that we experience is being sensed. When we see things that is sensing.

The problem is after sensing them we process which is going on and that usually involves understanding our self at the centre looking at the world around us, that must have been sensed already for it to be there!

So naïve realism makes an obvious mistake. It takes the seen world to be "reality" and then imagines a second stage of experience to what the self at the centre does.

The example used before is that when looking at a star or mountain far away, we think that is reality and then light makes it way from far away to us at the centre where we see it. But this must be wrong because for us to know that there is a star or mountain there in the first place we must have already seen it,

Now previously we concluded, erroneously, that if previously our self was in the centre, under this analysis our self must be "out there" where things are appearing in the first place.

This is the Tat Tvam Asi of Hinduism.

But there is a mistake in this. It is not just the seeing that gets moved to the centre when we analyse this situation normally, we also construct a centre of "appreciation" or "experience" which we call the self.

Normally we understand that seeing happens when light gets to the centre and somehow it becomes seeing. This is the idea of self. But it is just an idea!

As noted many times in this text now, the appearance of the world IS the seeing, it has already happened, and what is extraordinary is it happened without a self or anyone there to see it!

The idea of someone being there to see it is added much later when we rethink the whole thing to put an observer at the centre, a "me" at the centre who can check that seeing has happened, and make it happen. This is a nonsense fiction, given that we already can see and sense everything!

When the bird sings that is already sensing the bird singing, there is no need for anything else to happen or anyone else to be present! That bird is already singing!

But I wanted to clear something up here.

The focus here is on experience and we might thing that this places the whole world within consciousness which is just another Cartesian Theatre.

Okay I get it we think, so the whole bubble of consciousness with the bird singing and then me at the centre listening to it is all one bubble of consciousness.

But this is actually a subtle reformation of a self, but now as a consciousness unifying the sense world.

We can get all the way back to materialism by putting this bubble of consciousness in a brain.

So we win by avoiding identifying with the person at the centre of our experience, but we just redo them as the entirely of this experience. Actual no development at all.

And then we have the problem of multiplying this model out for everyone in the world. So there are 8 billion people with bubbles of consciousness somehow inside. Very fanciful and unrealistic, but we are probably so used to this that we just accept it. It is wrong.

The clarification I wanted to make is from a recent blog that experience is holistic. When we think about say seeing the bird singing we can get lost in whether this is a real bird singing, or a mental construct formed from vision and hearing. Or is it a concept developed much deeper in the brain. The answer is each and all.

If we close our eyes the bird disappears. This does not mean it is no longer on the branch singing, it doesn't experience a sudden extinction. It just means that a critical part in the chain to consciousness is gone. We need a bird singing, we need eyes, we need visual cortex and other parts of brain and then there is a conscious experience of a bird on a branch. It is quite magical.

The famous stereogram of a shark. Cross your eyes, or look into the distance so that you get two images and then adjust you eyes so that the vertical bars over lap. IF you do it right you get a shark. Magic!  

This just illustrates how vision is a magical thing that happens when you get all the right bits together. But close your eyes and it fails. In Buddhist terms this deeply demonstrates a key feature of the world that things only exist when the right things come together in the right way (causes and conditions it is called).

But what is also remarkable about this is when we are conscious of a singing bird on a branch we are able to inspect all the parts. We can becomes aware of the conscious components and see the bright awareness involved in the experience, but we can examine the visual part and the audio parts separately and we can go right back to the inception of the event and just the raw sensation. Now it is a point of contention whether we can experience the real singing bird.

If we could experience the real bird singing then why the complex set up for a conscious experience? Clearly this is impossible.

However the other extreme is where Western thinking goes. We accept that we cannot know what is not known. So the singing bird is real and if no one is there to experience it, it goes unknown. We place this unknown bird in a realm of Noumena which are the hidden things in the world before they interact with observers and create phenomena. Hmm this is a bit impossible too. How do we know noumena are there is can never know them. Surely we just have phenomena? That in fact is the Just Mind school in Buddhism. Lets just start with what we know so they start with Phenomena like Phenomenology.

But Buddhism is very into inter-dependence. Things absolutely do not exist by themselves. Immediate problem with thinking they do is that if something can exist by itself, then surely it always has and always will. How could it not exist? To not exist things need a push from outside, and if they need that to not exist, they need it to exist as well. So we immediately recognise that everything exists because forces outside it have made it so, and when they change so does the thing. We know this instinctively we all have parents! That is no accident it is the law of the universe.

So the likely correct approach is that the singing bird is incomplete by itself, and the conscious experience is incomplete by itself they need to come together. Although it is the reverse since we started with noticing the bird singing. Looking back into that experience we can see that there is a real singing bird, but it is not separate from the experience. Indeed it is the experience that has drawn our attention to it.

Two key things to get from this discussion.

(1) Quite extraordinary that the parts of an experience, while all needed to form an experience, exist separately in that experience. When we focus on the sound of the bird singing we can actually ignore everything else, or we can focus on the colours and shape of the bird if we are an artist, or we can examine the amazing fact that it is happening at all and there is a conscious experience. It feels like there is a little "me" that can skim around inside the experience looking at all the bits. And yet wait a second: we are talking about experience already. How can there be a second little camera running around inside experience itself. There isn't. This is our old friend the "self" being invented again. What is happening is just experience, but experience has parts and these parts come into existence when the whole comes together. It is their coming into existence that we think about as "being seen by a little me running around." We are so habituated to thinking that stuff that already exists needs to be seen again to exist that we imagine a little "me" running around looking at all the parts of experience. This is just pointless thinking. The take home is that when the parts of experience come into existence that IS them being experienced. Any idea they need to be see again is just the confused brain inventing stories.

Which leads into the second take home that there is no single point at which it becomes an experience. The whole thing comes together, but within it are parts. If the bird flies off then no longer a singing bird. If we close our eyes then no longer a singing bird. If we start thinking about something else then no singing bird. If we fall asleep then no singing bird. We tend to think that the experience happens in our heads or in the brain, but this is just a part of the process. There needs to be a bird as well! And eyes. And in fact you can't take anything out of the picture. If there was no air then the bird would be dead. If the sun did not rise then the bird would be asleep. If we were to pin point the place and moment of experience and consciousness it involves everything. And this means when we think about it there is no where for the self to be. Even if we make the self the whole universe, we then have the problem of where is the self when we are aware of the song, or the colour of the eyes, or the consciousness of the experience. It seems the self must be everywhere and then we realise it doesn't need to be there at all. Experience is exactly that: just experience.

So the  clarification was to argue that previous analysis have no managed to show the self as superfluous. They have shown that the self is not at the centre of consciousness, but they have left it float around elsewhere.

The critical step is to show that it is not needed at all.

Now this is not to say we can't fabricate a self. But the key skill is to then put it down again. The problem highlighted above is that it hangs around in everything, very needy and seemingly essential to everything. That is the mistake. Just put it down, it is only a mental story anyway, and definitely not actually involved to anything.