How do things happen?

    

So here is the problem. When we look at the Present moment we see the Past (in memory) and we expect the future and in between is ME, outside the stream of events, observing, thinking and deciding. We feel we can dip into the stream of events linked Past to Future and direct how things turn out.

But this contradicts what science says. On the Quantum level it is random, And on the Macro level there is conservation of energy and cause and effect. Things do not happen without a reason and never has that reason been some non-physical "ghost" dipping in to the world.

Cutting to the end the solution is that the "ME" is actually part of the stream of Past to Future. It is a model created by the brain. So when we think about what is going on we invent this "me" to explain things. While Past and Future are aspects of reality, the ME is created within this reality. The problem occurs when the ME is understood to have its own reality and it is forgotten that it is just an understanding of reality rather than being the reality. The ME is a mistake similar to thinking the film of a bird is an actual bird. The ME exists in a film that reality is making to understand itself. The ME cannot get outside the stream from Past to Future.

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It is more like this. The idea that "I" have anything to do with the stream of events is a mental construct, a model to help organise and think about things. But this modelling is being driven in time by physics that underpins the entire conception of self. Afterall what is the key feature of "self" it is that it is known. I know what I am doing, I am responsible for what I am doing, I am the source of what I am doing, I like/think/know this and that. This "I" is a symbol not in physical reality but in modelling and narratives about reality.

And why do we have this model? Well this is already well understood. In order to respond to the world in a way more complex than knee-jerk reflex the nervous system needs some form of "conditionality" where if/then decisions are made. So that if "there is a tiger in the room" then "panic and get out" type decisions and this conditionality is the model.

"The world we experience consciously is this model."

And now that statement needs a full unpacking. The classic problem is infinite regress. As written it suggests there is a "me" who is experiencing a model of the world. But wait a second wasn't the model supposed to be my experience of the world? In which case who is this new "me" who is experiencing the model, which itself is supposed to me experiencing the world? That is a logical mistake.

This is the truly extraordinary thing that goes to the heart of the first part of the "me" myth. When we experience something... that IS me experiencing! So when I see a mountain in the distance, for an experience to be had I have already seen it. It is comically simple, but we often reflect on this and think there is a "me" at the centre of the world who is experiencing the conscious mountain. That conscious mountain has already been seen, it does not need seeing a second time. Which means the person I "think" is at the centre is not the real me! It is just a model me. This is the heart of the "Headless Way" method of reflective meditation.

Yet in that experience there is no me, there is just the experience. The physical "me" that I experience of seeing my body, and feeling it, and perhaps hearing and smelling it, thinking, emotions: all the things that I "think" are me are actually parts of my experience like the mountain. And the "me" is exactly that part of the thought.

In the East that is broken down into the schema of 6 senses. The familiar 5 senses and the sense of mind which adds all the perception, thoughts and analysis. Where "perception" is the part that decides what things are, that is adds the language and naming component. So the mountain experience occurs through eyes, and this then gets added to it thoughts like "mountain" and the cascade like "wonder which mountain?" etc. There are other things here like whether the experience itself is pleasant or not, but not important for this. And the subtle one that divides even Buddhist schools is whether there is a "real" mountain discoverable from the experience. "Mind Only" say don't even bother: there is just experience. If you start thinking about this then its just philosophy and thoughts. But for deep meditation only apparently the experience can be seen as a hand shake between object and sense. That thought should anchor us away from pure monad idealism which as discussed elsewhere in the blog is really just a projection and grasping of the self idea. The eyes can see the body. But other senses also bring about other experiences of the body and real self. But they are just experiences. And for those experiences to have happened means the real self has already interacted with the objects and it's job is done. When Descartes says "I think therefore I am" he is correct if treated very subtly. He himself was at pains to point out that the "I think" and the "I am" are synonymous: two sentences for the same thing. But it is also not tenable. If we understand that any thoughts occur because a thinker has thought that is fair enough. Thoughts do not occur in a vacuum, they are bound to an individual. I do know what I thought and you do not. But let us not put the cart before the horse. This all begins with a thought emerging. That thought may go on to trigger other thoughts in which a self gets attributed to this thought emerging. But this attribution is not necessary at the start: there is just a thought. Like there is just a mountain. There is nothing in this to suggest a self. Afterwards we can work out an eye was needed to see the mountain, and a brain was needed to make this conscious, as indeed a brain was needed to have the thought: but an eye and a brain does not by itself make a self! This is the whole point. The "self" that we imagine is so fundamentally involved in this process is not there. It is a "Terminator" style flip up display on experience after the event, nit instrumental in it.

So we get back to the diagram. That self that we think joins the party of physical causation, that someone side loads into the brains neuro-chemistry is a "category mistake". That is to say we are mixing physical and mental things. This is the same mistake as the camera swinging round as the actor walks off set. One minute they are in the context of the film and are some character, and the next they walk into the role of being an actor (and in reality they are an actor doing both). The character literally steps between stories. The "self" is a story, not an ordinary story like Winnie the Pooh, but an ontological story like matter itself that we take to fundamentally inhabit the world. And we also have other part of this story like cause and effect and time. We like to place all the ontological things together and this is how we can time marching forward and physics playing out in cause and effect and also a self stepping in to direct the action. But like the 2nd picture above this is in the wrong order. The brain is in time with cause and effect. This creates experiences and it creates thoughts which form a model of the world. Into this model we create a self. But that self is part of brain processing and it is subject to cause and effect. Obvious case if when we sleep. The processing shuts down. Where does the self go? It vanishes. However so fixated on self are we that when we wake we "imagine" that self was somehow there but silent. NO! Self was gone! But we protest "but who was sleeping then?" And that gets back to Descartes "who is thinking when we are awake?" Logically we can see that to answer that question we need some more thoughts. Yet the question is asking who is having those thoughts. We can't get outside thought stream to see! It like like getting into a river and being swept down stream and trying to be the river at the same time. Physics decides what thoughts we have and how they are created and the path they take. And inside that river we have all kinds of games like deciding we are the river and we deciding where it flows... when obviously it is the flow that is deciding those thoughts.

It gets us into a nasty and uneasy struggle. We do not want to let go this idea that we are the river and we are deciding where it all goes. We want to think we are a drone flying overhead not actually in the river, not actually subject to the forces of nature. Turning everything upside down. When the river flows left we go left, but we turn it upside down to say that we went left so the river went left. But of course even those thoughts are part of the river flow! There is no getting out of the river.

This struggle ends when we stop imagining a self in the flow who is trying to command what is happening. We look closely and see there is just a river and no cork is bobbing around. It was a mistake to take every little turn and twist it to make it looks like the imaginary cork was pushing the water around. There is just the river!

That is the second diagram. The physics is what makes the past become the future, and all the noise and struggle is processing fighting to make sense of this.

Now one part of this has been totally ignored by the Blog and that is likely due to the blog's own struggle with self. So this is new.

If we understand that in reality there is just the physics and the natural unfolding of the world then we understand that the future and how we get there is really just the unfolding of the Past. And that means that the ideas and thoughts that emerge are not self-existing but really the product of what went before. It is no mystery to psychology that to understand a person now we look at their Past. To understand how these words got onto this page we need look at the whole history of IT and language. It is written in English, the dominant language of the world due to the British Empire, it is typed into a computer because of the evolution of writing from hand written to typed, and it is on a blog in the cloud due to developments in information processing and computing. And then it has subject matter that is caused by a culture of enquiry I was brought up in, but also some experiences that I have long tried to understand. And if we examine that very likely the result of events before I was officially born.

This last bit seems fanciful to a Western ear but actually the West is no stranger to the idea of things have happened a long time before the present like dinosaurs and events then like mass extinction have shaped the world today to be dominated by mammals. But we struggle to think the "self" has an origin before even the present really because we are holding this limited fixed conceptual model discussed above. We do at least allow the idea that this fixed self started at birth and so much end at death, but can't really fathom how something solid suddenly starts and stops. So we have either the idea of soul which is getting near Past Lives, or we have some idea of self evolution but in he West none of it makes sense. Science has moved ahead here and pretty universally has decided there is no self now (no more weighing bodies at death to see if something leaves - American (obviously) Dr. Duncan MacDougall between 1900-7), but popular thinking is way behind.

To say "before I was born" already looks like a fixed self came into existence at birth "I was born." This is how language tricks us and supports this idea of a fixed self. Since we say "I was born" we think nothing could come before the "I". But this "I" is just an idea, a placeholder to bring together a baggage of things in the stream, which when treated wrong becomes a cork and a fixed reference point that we then incorrectly measure the river by. It is okay for short periods of time (when the tangent to the curve approximates the curve) but soon this fixed point diverges from the stream and we suffer and need to update or better let go.

Now when we see that the Present is an emergence from the state of the Past then we can understand that things we do in the Present will go on to determine the Future. This then begins the processes of classic Buddhism (and indeed all religions) where we step by step seek to do good and act less self centredly. What this does is set up future Present moments where we find this sense of self is less.

The mistake of this blog is to think that by unravelling all this like an equation we can solve the problem. What we can do is start to unravel the mess in our processing by pointing out the absurdities and contradictions. But what then happens is less confused thinking and acting, which goes to make a less messy future Present.

The key caution is not to turn that exposition into more faulty thinking. There is no real Past and Future there is only Present. Past and Future are ideas we are mixing into our thoughts to literally straighten out this mess.  Present is the space of experience which is reality. This means there is no Time. But we are introducing the ideas of time to link the Past and Future. What there is in reality however is the clear reality of things undergoing change and being born when things are right. For example in the kitchen we can bake a cake and see moment by moment the process unfolding that leads to cake. This flows through the Present Moment and we can recall memories and have thoughts about this process to model and examine it. That should help improve our model and point fingers at the mistaken self image. But what is absolutely NOT happening here is a self is sitting in a drone looking at the stream and figuring out what is wrong! You cannot suddenly get a view of the whole thing from afar because there is no self to go out there afar. There is a river that is mistakenly flowing around an imaginary cork and so thinking a cork is deciding how the river flows. It is a mess. The cork is a mistake so it absolutely is not the bedrock on which to build a peaceful present (Jesus' teaching) and the river can't just flow differently suddenly because it flows according to the physics of flow. BUT this is not hopeless. The physics does make the rover (brain and body) sensible (it can process things into a model which is the whole problem) and this system can work it out like a oyster processing sand into a pearl. Indeed understanding that is what is happening is already undoing the mistake of thinking a cork is directing it all!

The final check however is to see that this narrative above is just new thoughts for this river to flow with. Buddha would strenuously recommend dropping the idea that the self is a brain or processing or even a river when the time is ready because really this is just a new cork, although probably a more useful cork than the dominant idea of a solid fixed self sitting at the centre directing our life and the world.