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Originally Posted by Ramana
In fields of science there is no agreed upon interdisciplinary definition of self (and certainly not for hundreds of years), in fact there is a great deal of confusion about what self is. There is however a definition that is shared universally: it is expressed in the intimate intuition that I am a self, I am present in the here and now, that I am in fact the most certain fact of life and that I am operative in that I think thoughts, have memories, cause events etc. It is this universal intuition and the criteria expressed therein that is being targeted here.
Okay, so any adequate definition of the "self" in the sense you are interested would have to include these claims:
1) I am a self.
2) I am present in the here and now
3) I am the most certain fact of life.
4) I think thoughts, have memories, cause events, etc.
Your view (correct me if I am wrong), is that in each of these criterion, the "I" doesn't refer to anything real. So sure, thoughts happen, memories happen, presentness happens, etc., but they are not related in an important way to an "I."
My view is that the "I"
does refer to something real--it refers to the relations between the thoughts, memories, presentness (which are grounded in a physical brain) and so on such that they are experienced as connected. The most obvious manifestation of this is in memory, where I experience past thoughts in my brain as having been thought by the same mind as the one having the memory, or past events in my life as having happened to me.
However, the crucial point is that the reference of the "I" is not part of the intuition that you think is relevant. If I think it refers, then I have to point to something that can sustain the actions you think our intuitions associate with it.
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Without this intuition you wouldn't be talking about an intimate self at all and wouldn't be interested in defending your use of that word. Instead, you would be using "I" as relative to practical purposes only, such as a pronoun, or in referring to the relative autonomy or some kind of continuity of biological organisms, narrative identity, self-modelling, etc (all of which use "self" in a way that is completely different from its use in the intimate intuition). If you insist that a self as used in the latter ways exists, then I have no disagreement (although I think the use of that word is too vague and misleading). But if you reply to my claim "intimate subjective self doesn't exist" by saying "but I have other uses for the word self and can prove that the things I use this word for do exist", then I will reply that you then have simply missed the context that I'm suggesting.
I'm not really sure how these other uses of the word "self" differ from the intimate intuition. They seem to me much the same--although obviously they offer different accounts of how to make sense of this intuition.
It seems to me that I am just not getting what you mean by the "intimate intuition self." Here's one stab, is it the sense of "I" that Descartes was concerned with in the cogito?
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In fact most likely you still have an insufficiently reflected intimate intuition of being a self, but it appears like your other definitions deflect you from investigating its seeming existence. It is a common problem and one that I myself had to battle with. All I can suggest for now is to clarify the context and muster the courage and honesty to actually subjectively investigate whether YOU do exist. In the investigation that is being suggested here, intellectual reflection serves as a clarification of the problem and as a way to collpase intellectual barriers that prevent the investigation, but the looking itself is not intellectual. Upon completion of the task there will be a realization (a collapse of the deeply rooted belief that there is a self) that will inform the intellect in profound ways but is not in itself precipitated by the intellect.
I find this a little confusing. According to you, I don't actually believe in the intimate intuition self. Why should I investigate its existence if it doesn't exist? Seems rather pointless...
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If you define self as a variable collection of events, things and experiences, then I wonder how there can be a way to falsify the claim that you are a self.
People have offered various thought experiments meant to convince us that we are really immaterial souls or physical bodies. Others have claimed that the definition I am offering doesn't do justice to our intuitions about the permanence of the self.
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Let's say that instead of "self" we're investigating "fear". I will define fear as the intimate subjective experience of fear. You can define it as brain process or as a behavioral pattern of biological organisms. I have a framework to find out whether there is such a thing as fear in my subjective experience. I watch a horror movie and then verify that yes indeed there is the subjective experience of fear. You can analyze my brain and say that there is data which sugests that I experience fear. If however despite the data you've gathered I actually don't experience fear, then I simply don't experience fear. When you look at my brain you see only brain processes, not fear. When I experience fear I experience exactly fear, not brain processes.
I disagree. I think I can experience fear without being aware that I'm experiencing fear. Thus, I think that using subjective introspection about our mind is a limited methodology. Furthermore, the discovery of the unconscious and the role of pharmacology in therapy have both shown the limitations of introspection as a method of discovery about the nature of the mind.
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In other words, in the context that has been suggested, whether I am a self or not is not investigated by looking at my brain or body, it's investigated by looking at my own subjective experience. Objective evidence is not useless in this, it serves as clarification, but the problem itself is solved within subjectivity. So yes, from your point of view and relative to your concerns empiricism that is limited to the subjective is simplistic, but relative to my concern it is the only kind of empiricism that is a viable option. I can't say whether I experience a self merely by looking at data gathered from analysis of my brain or the behaviour of my biological organism.
Well, when I said that it was a simplistic form of empiricism I wasn't really thinking about it not including objective evidence (although that is a legitimate point). Mainly I meant that as a method of
subjective investigation (what philosophers call phenomenological research) it is extremely naive to think that all you do is just pay attention to what is going on in your mind. Just as in regular science we develop hypotheses and then use experiments to test them, you should do the same with your subjective investigation. Thinking that instead you just "pay attention" to your mind is like people who think that science is done by just "looking" at the world.