[EscaCsamas]

Hello FBM,

Thank you for your reply. I was not arguing that there is such a thing as a permenant self, but highlighting the fact that if something is true of the parts that does not necessarily make true of the whole. For example, if the human cells are invisible to the naked eye, and humans are made up of human cells, its wrong to conclude that humans are invisible to the naked eye!

Thanks, Bundokji! Yes, I understand the fallacy of composition. The way I read your previous post made it seem that you were supporting the claim that the self is as real as water. I probably misread your intent. I tend to take things too literally sometimes. The curse of the philosophy major, eh?

While there are logical basis for the "no-self" argument, taking it to an extreme contradicts common sense. Bertrand Russell said "there is obviously some reason in which I am the same person as I was yesterday, and, to take an even more obvious example if I simultaneously see a man and hear him speaking, there is some sense in which the 'I' that sees is the same as the 'I' that hears." Russell's statement presupposes the possibility of personhood as a singular being. This is the commonsense conception of personal being, which is what the Buddha found fault with, I think. But that's not to say that the Buddha took the polar opposite (nihilistic) position, either. The way I think of it, there are perceptions of being an entity (contra nihilism), but necessary inferences based on those perceptions do not point to the commonsense definition of a person (contra eternalism). Hume's bundle theory seems to me to be the most coherent description of being, though it isn't perfect. (Insofar as it claims that there is nothing to an object except its properties, it is making an ontological claim that it cannot ultimately support. Whether or not there is anything more to an object than its properties cannot, as far as I can tell, be known. It must remain in the 'undecided' category, if one is to be intellectually rigorous.)


You might be familiar with the psychological continuity criterion which suggests that it is continuity of mental states that constitutes personal identity. One way of filling in the details of this theory is to adopt a Lockean memory criterion. On this approach, it is because I can remember things that my younger self did that ensure that I and my younger self are the same person.

One difficulty with the memory criterion is that there are many things that we have done that we can’t remember. If I go far enough back into my past, perhaps to events in my early childhood, then I cannot remember them; according to the memory criterion, it seems, because I cannot remember these events, it isn’t me that was involved in them.

The memory criterion, however, can be repaired to cope with this objection. I may not be able remember many events in my childhood, but I can remember a time when I could remember events in my childhood. Identity is a transitive relation; if a first thing is identical with a second, and that second is identical with a third, then the first thing is indentical with the third. The present me (which can remember being a teenager) is identical with the teenage me (which could remember being a child) which is identical with the child me; all are therefore the same person. That's a reasonable approach, and it's robust only as long as you presuppose a) the singularity/individuality of beings as more or less discrete entities embedded in an external universe (above), and b) the reliability of memories. I don't see memories as fixed quantities of information that one carries around in the brain. Memory is behavior, and when the brain produces a memory of event X, it is not the same memory of event X that she had yesterday. The new memory is a new behavior, a new event. Similarly, if I play a song on the piano today and play it again tomorrow, it's a new event, not a repetition of the same event.

That memories are unreliable is well documented. As you mention, memories fade, but people also have false memories of things that never happened. I have a few. Also, memories morph over time. Ultimately, the memory approach is no more robust an argument than the commonsense direct (naive) realism approach. Neither can quite pierce the epistemological veil to say what is actually true behind perception. We're left with perceptions and metaphysical constructs, I think, both of which obviously are, but neither of which match the conventional definition of a self or person.

As you know, philosophers spent hundereds of years arguing the existance of free will (which is a a common sense position that we grow up with) vs determinism. They also argued whether we can prove that our hands really exist (which is another common sense position) vs the dream argument or the brain in the vat. In this particular instance, i cant help but to admire Moor's approach in support of common sense when he said:

This is a hand.
Here is another hand.
There are at least two external objects in the world.
Therefore an external world exists

"Philosophy can be said to consist of three activities," Wittgenstein once explained. "To see the commonsense answer, to get yourself so deeply into the problem that the commonsense answer is unbearable, and to get from that situation back to the commonsense answer."

Please note that i am not implying that the commonsense approach will always lead us to the truth, but what i am trying to say is that it should not be underestimated for its simplicty. Thinking deeply and analyzing is a good habit that i personally try to use, but at the same time, i believe that making a mess is always easier than cleaning it up.

Finally, from my limited understanding of the Buddha's teachings,he attacked all attempts to conceive a fixed self, while stating that holding the view "I have no self" is also mistaken. This is an example of the middle way charted by him. In fact, the one place where the Buddha was asked point-blank whether or not there was a self, he refused to answer. When later asked why, he said that to hold either that there is a self or that there is no self is to fall into extreme forms of wrong view that make the path of Buddhist practice impossible.

Regards,
Bundokji Ooops. I think I got ahead of myself earlier. I got carried away and responded to the commonsense/direct (naive) realist approach above. Anyway, to sum up my position in a nutshell, I'm not saying that there ultimately either is or isn't a self, only that what is actually experienced does not match the commonsense concept/definition of a person.

I would only add that it appears that natural selection favored the sort of brain that makes this sort of representation of reality, but the telos of natural selection isn't ultimate truth, but survival.

Thanks for this exchange, Bundokji!