Video: Part 1 - Losing Yourself:How to be a Person Without a Self with Jay Garfield (DocDrop)

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wow welcome everyone we'll be starting in a minute once the last few people show up hmm there's still a last

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few people straggling in in the waiting room and we'll start in a minute or two okay it looks like we're all in

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maybe we'll uh we'll start welcome everyone my name is william edelglass i'm director of studies here at the barry center for buddhist studies where we offer a

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wide variety of study retreats and some special events and courses which due to covet are all online and many of them are freely offered as this one is and

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we're really glad that you're all here and i'm really pleased to introduce jay garfield i think for many of you jay needs no introduction though

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i may share a couple things you may not know about him jay is a wonderful photographer he's been a serious ultimate frisbee player and he is

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incredibly generous and supportive of many others who work in buddhist philosophy i first met jay myself when i was an undergrad and a graduate student he offered to read any of my work and give me

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feedback and he still does and there are so many other scholars in the field for whom he plays a similarly supportive role um i think many of us who do work in

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buddhist philosophy are particularly grateful to jay because as much as anyone perhaps more than anyone he's established a space in the academic study of philosophy for

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serious work that engages the great buddhist intellectual traditions of asia and he himself has collaborated with and studied with many asian buddhist colleagues more than most

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academics and he's been instrumental and the change that's happened in the last couple decades as buddhist thought has become more and more significant in the broader academic

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study of philosophy jay has also done a lot of work in many other areas of philosophy including the foundations of cognitive science and philosophy of mind ethics

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epistemology and the philosophy of logic and he's also done work in the methodology of cross-cultural interpretation it's also done a lot of really

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interesting empirical research and done some wonderful translations and commentaries of buddhist texts and if you're interested you may want to look at his cv on his smith website

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he's also published a lot of books and two things that strike me from looking at these books one is that they cover such a broad range of expertise which is really remarkable

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and the second one is how many of them are collaborations with so many different people um jay and i have done two books together but he has done books with so many scholars and it

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points to something which is very true about jay he loves to talk to engage to learn from others and to work with others and i am so very grateful jay that you are here to talk with us and i'm looking

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forward to this these four weeks together so thank you so much jay and welcome to everyone oh thank you very much william for a far too kind introduction um don't believe a word of

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any of that um i'm just an old guy who likes to talk about ideas that's the way i like to think of myself um but i want to thank everybody who's here i mean there's almost 500 of you

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here now um which is kind of astonishing and heartwarming that people are willing to forgo binge watching the crown on monday night to um listen to some philosophy i think that speaks well for you

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maybe not too well i mean the crown's pretty cool but we'll see what we can do um i want to talk a little bit about what i'm going to do and how i'm going to do it and then i want to do it um i'll be talking to you for four weeks

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um about what i call losing yourself that is really understanding the idea of no self of selflessness not in the moral sense specifically though that will get there but not having a self

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and of what it is to exist as a person uh without a self and i'll be doing this um from a variety of perspectives and one of the things that might make this

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set of talks different from a lot of the talks that the barry center supports is that it won't be specifically or uniquely buddhist doctrine i will be relying on a lot of

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buddhist arguments because i do that but also addressing a lot of western arguments in western literature and i won't be interested in doing a lot of textual work in fact i won't do any textual work at all even though i love doing that this will be really about the

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idea about really how to understand the idea of not having a self and the idea and how to understand what it is to be a person so i'll draw on buddhist ideas and non-buddhist ideas on western ideas

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but i won't be specifically giving a course in the history of buddhist thought about no-self nor will i be talking about practice this will be a very theoretical um set of lectures um but i think what i have to say will

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be relevant um to those who are coming here in order to enrich their practice but i won't be specifically talking about that um most of what i'm doing will be based on a book that is

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now in press called losing yourself how to be a person without a self that i hope will be out sometime next year it's just i'm not shilling the book right now i'm just telling you that what i'm doing is working on stuff that i've been working on recently um which is what i

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like to do um now a lot of people when they give talks like to talk for about half the time and then take questions for about half the time i don't like to do that because then i

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end up boring you for half the time and then you're asleep when you should be asking questions um because i'm not all that exciting as you can see right now um instead what i would like is for people to ask questions using the chat

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function in zoom as i go along and i won't be able to see those questions because i'll be working from a presentation presentation software but um william and our able host sarah will

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be monitoring that chat and when there are important questions or places where i really should stop and clarify um they're going to stop me and make me do that so it may well be that what you ask never gets to me and then you can raise

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it during the discussion session but if so you should blame william and sarah for ignoring you in favor of somebody else because they sometimes do that but what they're going to be trying to do is to make sure that the most relevant questions that need to

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get asked at that moment um go in there you're also free to say something like i didn't understand what you just said could you slow down and repeat that and do that more clearly and that's a very reasonable thing to ask because

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sometimes i can be very obscure or i can talk too quickly nobody can understand a word that i'm saying so if that happens you should slow me down make me go back that we're not racing through anything we've got four four nights together and

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we'll be able to um to talk about all of these ideas so please do feel free to through the chat interrupt me and that way we can have more of an interchange even though there's a lot of people in the room um

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than me just droning on and on and on so with that i'm now going to share my screen as we say now in the zoom world

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and i'm going to be doing a powerpoint presentation for which i apologize because i know you're probably sick and tired of these in the zoom world but we do need um to do that in order to

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make things work so now if everything is working you're seeing the title slide is everything working beautiful okay so the this is the title for the four

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for the four sessions losing yourself how to be a person without a self and we're gonna have as i said four classes and this is the title for each of those four classes so you can see where we are

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tonight we'll be talking about selves and persons and i'll be arguing that you are a person but not a self um in the second session we'll be considering the poor vapes the opponents

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people who are arguing that that yeah yeah jay whatever you said they're still a self and considering their arguments carefully and refuting them decisively and hopefully in that class we drive a wooden stake through the self heart

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ideas heart um in the third section we're going to focus on the ethical implications of all of this because i think that's really important that's why we do this and then in the fourth part we'll be

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talking about what life looks like as a person as opposed to a self and why we should take all of this very seriously i should say that there's one thing about me that's very peculiar among philosophers and that is that i don't

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work on ideas for their own sake i'm not really interested in that i work on ideas that i care deeply about and that i think make a difference to my life anyway and i hope that they make a difference to yours and

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i've found that my reflection on no self and on personhood has made a difference in my life and so i hope that it makes a difference in yours so one of the things i like to do before i start is just to set motivation

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um and i'd like us to have a common motivation that our motivation really is to understand who we are in order to become better people and able to more effectively um benefit others

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and that's the motivation i'd like to go into this with sometimes there'll be sharp argument and debate but the goal should always be to make ourselves instruments for general welfare and so

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like to collectively set motivation in that direction so now we're going to start tonight's talk selves and persons why you are a person and not a self that's going to be a very important distinction for us and

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we will get to that distinction later so if right now you're saying what's the difference between a person and the self i say stay tuned you're going to find out soon and you'll find out why it's important and interesting

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so this has a few sections the first section i call who do you think you are what a self is and why you really do think you have one no matter how long you've been practicing

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second why you really don't have the self you think you have third an exploration of what you are and that's where we'll really talk about personhood so we're going to begin with a section that i call who do you think

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you are and this is where i really want to identify the idea of a self that we're going to be uh trying to refute and try to eliminate um and this has a few sections we're going to first talk about snakes and

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elephants then about this idea of the atman it's the sanskrit name for itself the self that's the english word and the soul or suitcase we might say in christian theology then i will introduce

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you to my favorite illusion because it's fun and it will help us to get a fix on what we're doing and then i will argue that in fact you do really think that you have a self so there is a point to all of this there

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would be no point if we didn't think we had self there would be no point in refuting them and then we'll fight try to ask why you think you have a self so that's what we're going to do in the first part of tonight's talk so first

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snakes and elephants um and i'm going to begin by telling you a story that the 7th century buddhist indian buddhist philosopher chandra kirti tells in his great text

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introduction to the middle way for those of you who think in sanskrit that's my jamaica avatara or if you think in tibetan that's yupa um and sean vakiri when he begins his discussion of the

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self and personhood in the sixth chapter of introduction to the middle way tells a great story says there's this guy um who is pretty sure he's got a snake in the wall of his house and in india um

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that's still a problem and it was a much bigger problem back in the 7th century that snakes especially crates but also cobras would in order to get warm take up residence in the nooks and crannies of the stone wall of a house so this guy

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is afraid that he's got a snake in the wall of his house and he's in order to dispel his own fear he walks around the house convincing himself that there's no elephant there and chandra charity says wouldn't this

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guy be a public laughingstock who tries to assuage his fear of the snake by convincing himself that there's no elephant and what's the point of this weird story

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you might ask well the moral of the story is this the snake is the self it's the self that you really do john vacardi thinks believe that you have and

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the elephant is all of the things you might convince yourself that you don't have or that the self isn't um in order to really convince yourself that you're a really cool no self person so you might say hey i know my body's not a

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self i've really got no self down pat or i know my mind isn't the self i've got myself myself i've got myself really on the right track here or all of these things and chandra kiriti thinks that a lot of the time when we think that we're refuting

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the idea of a self we're actually refuting something else and so that the first important thing to do is to identify what that thing is that is the target of

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our critical inquiry the great tibetan philosopher from the fourteenth and fifteenth century some kappa refers to this relying on this passage as identifying the object of negation

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and says that that's the first step of any inquiry if you're going to argue that something doesn't exist that it's not real that it's illusory the first thing you've got to do is figure out what the thing is that you're arguing

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doesn't exist so you don't miss aim on your analyses so that you hit the right target so what we have to ask is what is the snake what is lurking in the wall of our house that we need

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to go after and what we're going to see is that that snake is this self the atman as we say in sanskrit it's not my body it's not my mind it's the thing that has the body and the mind in

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sanskrit literature um we think of that as the subject of all of our experience that's never object the knower that's never known the witness that stands outside the world and sees the world the

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agent that acts on the world the enjoyer of experiences and lest you think that's antique sanskrit anybody who's read kant will recognize this as the transcendental subject of the first

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critique the free transcendental agent of the second critique or the completely free aesthetic subject of the third critique so you don't have to be indian to think that there's an atman you can be prussian as well but the real moral

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of the story is you can be anybody chandra charity thinks that we all have this idea that we are something that lies behind our experience that we are

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enduring that we are subject witnesses agents um and the important thing to point out is that when we think of the self this way the self isn't my body or my mind i don't take my body to be myself and

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we're going to see that in a moment but i think of the self the target of this analysis the snake in the wall as the thing that has a body the thing that has a mind and of course if we were

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operating in india and taking a doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth for granted we would think of it as the thing that in different lives appropriates different bodies and minds um and

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but remains the same through those lives but if we're not in a kind of reincarnation and rebirth kind of mood um then we might think that it's just the thing that endures through our entire life while everything else

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changes that is um the thing that was me when i was an itty-bitty baby when i was a young handsome guy when now that i'm an old guy um that it's there's something continuous there and we think of that as

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the self um the question is what's the elephant if that's what what the what snake is and the idea of the elephant for chandra kirti is the elephant is when we

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identify ourselves with any one of our psychophysical constituents like maybe our body or maybe our thought process or maybe our perceptions or sensations or our emotions or our personality trait or

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our possessions or something like that when we say okay i think that's what the self is and i'm going to convince you that i'm not that that's what the elephant is and we want to avoid refuting the elephant when it's really

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important to refute the snake the other way to think about the elephant is it it could be the conventional person and we're not going to want to argue that our bodies don't exist that our minds don't exist that the person doesn't exist we need to

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argue that there's no snake in the wall that the self doesn't exist so let's talk a little bit about that self about that object of negation before we go about deliberately convincing you first that you believe you've got one and then

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uh refuting it so first of all we've been talking a little bit about how the atman is conceived in the orthodox indian philosophies against which buddhism counterposed itself

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it's a transcendental object it's not something that we actually experience it's the thing that does the experiencing it's not something we act on it's the thing that is the agent that performs the actions

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um and as i said it's the thing which is reborn from life to life the in the bhagavad-gita um the self is it is described through a beautiful analogy this way krishna tells arjuna hey you

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know how it every night you take your clothes off and go to bed and then in the next the next morning you put on new clothes well it's just like that with the atman in your body in mind for each life your atman picks up a new body and

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mind and then at the end it throws them away and then it's reborn with a new body and a mind and it's that persistent thing that remains not just through a single life but through all of these lives it's taken to be the atman as i

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said it's the witness the agent the enjoyer most importantly it's distinct from our body and mind it's their uh it's their owner and it's a permanent continuous thing unlike our bodies and minds which

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are changing from moment to moment so they've got this kind of momentary impermanence but also as you may know they each come to an end we die um but the idea is that the self just

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persists and goes on and on um and most importantly most most importantly when we identify the atman we're identifying what you are your essence or your core and so we might

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think i change a lot my thoughts change my political preferences change my food preferences change my friends change but i remain the same as a self or an

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outline um and there are some quick arguments that we're going to encounter for the reality and i want to give you just some warm-up arguments we'll talk about more detailed arguments later but you know

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one argument is an argument from sensory integration so right now you know if i if i'm looking at an object you know say an apple and i see that it's round and it's red and then it's sweet smelling and so forth i

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don't have a number of different objects something smooth and round something red something sweet smelling i have a single object that has the properties of being red round sweet smelling slightly heavy

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and so forth each of my senses gives me different information but i represent them as a as pertaining to a single object so one argument is in order to bind together the information i get from

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different sensory modalities there's got to be a self to which they all refer that's doing the experiencing there's an argument for memory since i can remember what i did yesterday and i

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can anticipate giving the second talk next week i remember that i thought about this talk yesterday and i anticipate that i will give a talk next week in order to

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have those memories as memories of me doing something or anticipations of me doing something in the future there has to be some me that endures from past to present to future as the subject of

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those states one might think now these are all so far indian ideas but we have much the same idea in the christian tradition the idea of the suke um or the soul

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um it's a moral center that is it's the thing that really is sinful or pure that's good or bad as opposed to something adventitious and changing it's the thing that knows it's the thing that

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um that perceives the world and and stands a subject in christianity just like in in the hindu tradition it's eternal because even though my body will die as we know in the christian tradition i

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will be resurrected to eternal life or sent to hell for eternal life more likely in my case um we also have views about the self that we get in early modern philosophy views from descartes who argued that

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we've got to posit the existence of a self why well because um i know that i think and if i think i know that i have to exist as a thinker and so that thing

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that exists as a thinker is not something that i i'm casually related to but it's me the thinking thing the self and descartes of course thought that that self was also very different from my body because i

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can immediately know that i have a self but i only know my body through the um doubtful operation of my senses um so that's what the self is and now i want to introduce you to my favorite

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illusion which is going to be important because i'm going to use it as a model for everything that we're going to talk about later when we talk about the self and that's the mueller liar illusion so here we have two lines with little arrowheads and

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those two lines those two parallel lines are exactly the same length as one another you can sort of line them up visually and see that um but the arrowheads on each side make the

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top line look much larger than the bottom line and the amazing thing about the mueller liar illusion one of the reasons i like it is a it's really easy to draw and b um even if you know that it's an

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illusion you're totally sucked into it so um and i'm just always amazed by that right you can just draw this illusion for somebody draw the parallel lines the same length they see that draw the

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arrowheads and all of a sudden the lines change in apparent length and i use this because it um it illustrates an important thing about an illusion and this is something that we find again from india as a definition of

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an illusion an illusion is something that exists in one way but appears to us in a different way or for being very technical we would say something whose mode of existence and mode of appearance

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are discordant but that is just atrociously technical and sensibilitic um so these two lines exist as equally long but they appear to be of

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unequal lengths and that would that's what makes them an illusion a mirage exists as a refraction pattern of light but appears to be water so whenever we get that difference between a mode of appearance and a mode of existence we

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have an example of illusion and i say that because i want to argue that the self is an illusion that we exist in one way that is as persons but we appear to exist as selves and so we have to come to understand

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that illusion in order to begin dispelling it all of this is still whiffing on chandragiri snake the other important thing to note is that even knowing that an illusion is an

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illusion doesn't get rid of it as a an old psychoanalyst friend of mine said of his craft it just adds insight to injury um that is we we can know that the

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illusion the mueller liar illusion is an illusion we can draw it ourselves a hundred times but knowing that doesn't make it go away and that's because that illusion is perceptual not conceptual it's a we're

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absolutely wired to see things that way and it may well be that we are wired or badly wired um to see ourselves as selves instead of as persons but we'll think about that later what i do want

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you to constantly think about though is the mueller liar illusion as a model or an analogy for the illusion of the self so i want to convince you now that you

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really do think you have a self no matter how many years you've been practicing okay first thing we're going to do this with a couple of thought experiments and the neat things about thought experiments that i like is you can imagine

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impossible stuff um just like you can dream impossible stuff you might never not be able to see impossible stuff but you can imagine stuff that makes no sense at all and that's what i'm gonna ask you to do right now

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um and thought experiments are sometimes taken to show that something's possible i don't think that's true i don't think you could ever show that something is possible by imagining it but what you can show is something psychological

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namely that you could believe that it's so even if it's not so and so now i want to do the first thought experiment to help you convince yourself that you've got a self and this one can get a little bit personal and i'm not going to ask you

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any personal questions though i'll divulge something deeply personal about myself um what i want you to do is to now imagine somebody whose body you would like to have

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as your own either for a few minutes or maybe long term i'm not going to ask you why you want that body i don't want to get that deep into your psyche and that might be very personal um

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but i'll tell you whose body i'd like to have and for how long just to give you a warm-up feel for this i really would like to have usain bolt's body of a few years ago for 9.6 seconds

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because i would love to know what it feels like to run 100 meters that fast now when i form that does i think it's a coherent desire how do i why do i think that because i really do desire it i would love it i'd pay a lot of money to

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do that um but what i don't want is to be usain bolt because usain bolt is already the same bolt and that doesn't do me any good um what i want is to be me

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j with usain bolt's body so i can know what it feels like to run really really fast now i'm not claiming that this is a coherent desire i'm not claiming that it's

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possible for me to remain jay and have usain bolt's body but i am claiming that i can desire it and if you are anything like me for some body or other you can desire to

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have it for some time or other if you can form that desire then you in deep in your gut don't believe that you are your body you believe that you have a body and that

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you might have a different body just like you might have a different hat or a different cat and if you believe that then you really do believe that whatever you are you are not your body

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now you might think well that's obviously true i've never thought i was my body um but maybe on my mind i don't think you really believe that either and i want to do the same thought

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experiment to convince you of that now i want you to think about somebody's mind that you'd really like to have maybe not for a long time maybe only for a few minutes um i'll tell you mine again i'm really

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big and divulging you know hyper sharing over sharing personal secrets um i would really love to have stephen hawking's mind when he was still alive of course not now um and i'd like to have it only for about five or ten

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minutes because what i would really like is to be able to really understand quantum gravity and i can't really understand it but if i had stephen hawking's mind for a few minutes then i could understand it now i obviously

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don't want to be stephen hawking for one thing he's dead for another thing he was already stephen hawking and it didn't do me a damn bit of good what i want is to be me jay with his mind so that i can

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use it to understand quantum gravity um i think that'd be really cool again i'm not claiming this is coherent i'm not claiming that it's possible but i am claiming that it's a

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psychologically possible state to be in to crave somebody else's mind and if you like me can form that desire then you like me deep in your gut do not believe that you are your mind

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you believe that you're something that has a mind just like you have a body um and that you possessed that mind and you could still be you with another mind and another body i mean just imagine having

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the same bolts body in stephen hawking's mind that would be totally cool then i could understand quantum gravity while setting a new record for the 100 meter sprint um but that's not going to happen alas

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um the moral of these experiments um takes us right back to chandragiri serpent i think the moral of these experiments is that deep down at an atavistic gut

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level we believe that we are something that stands behind our minds and our bodies that thing is the self the thing that is not the mind in the body but possesses the mind in the body that's the thing

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that sean decurity identifies as the serpent in the wall our arguments are going to be aimed at that not at our bodies not as our minds not as our personal identities they're

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going to be aimed at that self that we really atavistically believe stands behind all of those that's the illusion that's the thing that causes us to be incompetent morally that causes us to be

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confused about our own identities and to be confused about our role and our place in the world so much buddhist analysis is directed against that but also some very good western analysis

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so much indian orthodox argument is aimed at showing that it's real as is so much western argument and so this is a real debate to have and the one that we're going to have so i think chandra charity was right that there is a difference between the

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serpent and the elephant and that we do atavistically think that we are something other than our minds and bodies and i think that the serpent is real that is the serpent is the illusion illusory self that we need to get rid of

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and so even if it's crazy to think that we are such a thing and when we say it out loud it sounds stupid and incoherent that doesn't stop us from believing it because we are stupid incoherent kinds

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of beings wired for stupidity and incoherence with the task of somehow trying to unwire ourselves into something approaching inside so

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why do you think you've got this self that lurks behind that that's that's that's our next topic um son kappa who i mentioned earlier identifies in his great book on the essence of hermenetics two different

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kinds of self-grasping two different attitudes that you might have towards yourself he calls them innate self-grasping and self-grasping due to bad philosophy um

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and son kappa argues there that philosophical self-grasping is really an attempt to make really good intellectual sense out of a deep illusion you can imagine

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that as somebody saying gosh what i'm going to figure out is how drawing arrowheads on lines makes one line longer and one another line shorter right that's a dumb idea right but you can imagine people trying to do that or

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somebody's saying i wonder how deep the water is in that mirage over there that's what sankampa thinks we're doing when we're really philosophically arguing that there's a self we're trying to make coherent and atavistic primitive

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illusion but there's also that innate self-grasping that gives rise to that illusion it's on campuses it's actually really easy to get rid of philosophical self-grasping philosophical

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self-grasping arises from bad philosophy and you can cure it by doing good philosophy so by the end of these four lectures you'll never believe in a philosophical argument for the self i'm sure of that but innate self-grasping he

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thinks requires very long time of practice to try to effectively rewire the way that we understand the world um late uh earlier than that in india but a

00:35:22

lot later than chandra kyrie um philosopher named shantideva who um like chandra charity taught at the university you're seeing in my virtual background nalanda university um argued in his wonderful text called

00:35:34

how to lead an awakened life bodhichary avatara um that the fear of death is really um deeply implicated in our urge to posit itself and the 20th and 21st century um

00:35:47

sociologist um ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened

00:36:00

life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva

00:36:13

argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as

00:36:24

a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is

00:36:36

deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that

00:36:48

but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self

00:37:02

it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been

00:37:13

insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind

00:37:27

of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride

00:37:39

attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of

00:37:52

you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand

00:38:04

that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the

00:38:16

idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts

00:38:29

our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what

00:38:42

that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection so

00:38:56

now we'll turn to the second part which is arguing that in fact you don't have a self let me pause and ask um william and sarah are there any questions or requests for me to go over anything since this is a nice juncture

00:39:09

when i could um talk about things i've talked about are no questions yet to review anything that you've gone over there's an interesting question about non-duality but i'm not sure it fits

00:39:23

into the trajectory of your talk at this point we will hit duality and non-duality later but we're not going to hit it quite yet we will uh be talking about that probably in um the

00:39:35

second uh lecture a lot and then also in the fourth lecture i promise we will get there can't do everything and can't do everything first but thank you for that but we will get there i promise okay let's talk about why you've got no

00:39:47

self now we're going to start the real refutation work um that we hope to do yes there is a request to slow down a little bit oh

00:39:58

okay thank you i will do that um do me a favor william since i can see you out of the corner of my eye if i start going too quickly just do this like a nice metronome and get me back to 60 beats

00:40:12

per second okay if i can go at about andante it's probably about right and i've probably been going allegra so try to keep me at andante okay i'm gonna rely on you great

00:40:26

there's also one quit one request to see the previous slide the slide just before this one absolutely that slide right there that's true okay so this is the summary

00:40:38

of the reasons that i think that that people psychologically um have this atavistic innate self-grasping um one is a way of coping with the terror of death and those ideas come from shantideva and

00:40:51

from becker and then the general idea that the self is constructed not out of reason we don't sort of think and reason our way into the self but deep in our affective lives which is why it's so powerful

00:41:04

and i pointed out that both hume and shantideva identify things like pride shame anger and attachment as the kinds of affect that lead us to positive self

00:41:19

jay there is a a question that addresses something that you talked about and that is that there's someone who's thinking well when i imagine myself as having stephen hawking's mind

00:41:30

i'm no longer imagining myself as myself that seems like an important part of your argument do you want to address that yeah i will address that um i think there's two different kinds of imaginings or two different kinds of

00:41:44

desire and i really would prefer to think of this in terms of desire than imagining desires are kind of more interesting um attitude sometimes um i have never desired to be stephen

00:41:57

hawking for a host of reasons one is that i've been happy that stephen hawking was stephen hawking um another is that you know stephen hawking had other difficulties in his life that i'd rather not have and so forth

00:42:10

but if i think of my mind which i sometimes do if i'm just not thinking clearly but just being pre-reflective as this kind of cognitive instrument by means of which i know the world

00:42:23

just like my eyes are perceptual instruments by means of which i know the visible world or my ears are auditory instruments by means of which i know the sonic world if i think of my mind as a cognitive

00:42:36

instrument then i think i've got a pretty lousy one and hawking has got a really good one and i'd much rather have a good instrument than a lousy instrument and what i want isn't for stephen hawking to understand quantum

00:42:49

gravity because stephen hawking understood quantum gravity just fine when i'm desiring it i'm desiring that ij understand it by having his mind for a

00:43:01

little bit i think i can form that desire coherently now i must say that i do have friends who say they can't form that desire that they can form the body desire but not the mind

00:43:14

desire but my experience is that most people can form the mind desire um i'm not claiming that it's coherent or that it makes sense but that i can desire that thing

00:43:26

um it might be fun um in the chat to do a quick poll you want oh we can do a zoom poll right william why don't you do a zoom poll how many people no matter

00:43:38

how embarrassed they are can form the desire to have somebody else's mind or notice that they can have that desire even if they know that it's stupid how many people say yes and how many and how many say no

00:43:53

sarah do you know how to do that we can do a zoom pull okay here so um repeat the question the question is can you form the desire

00:44:08

however weird it might be to have somebody else of mine for a little bit any form of desire to have to be you with somebody else someone that's his mind so sarah i've got this

00:44:23

yeah cool so yes or no um everybody vote you gotta vote or i won't let you come to class next week what do the polls say william

00:44:41

or sarah i've never done this i'll see uh i'll see if so have you done something like this

00:44:53

um i have but i'm not i'm not seeing an option too right now but right now we're getting a lot of answers into the chat um saying yes a couple no's sprinkled here and there but

00:45:06

it's uh yes it's all better overwhelming yeah okay i rest my case there might be some people who are just too profound to be able to form this desire but they are few and far between if you are one of

00:45:18

those count yourself highly realized jay yeah jamie hubbard is up in kyoto in the middle of the night and i can't resist ass asking his question what are the technical terms in sanskrit

00:45:35

or tibetan for innate verse philosophical self-grasping um in um in tibetan uh it's k nardzin for innate self-grasping

00:45:48

and tower king arts in for philosophical self-grasping i don't know this i don't know the sounds it was suggested maybe place of verana and janna verona but that would make perfect sense but i

00:46:00

won't vouch for that okay okay should i move on yeah why don't we move on i'll move on thank you very much for those questions and keep the questions and responses coming and i'm always happy to stop at

00:46:17

any point to respond so why you have no self i'm going to offer three kinds of discussions here for some buddhist arguments then some human arguments

00:46:29

um and then we'll talk about the self as an illusion so one other thing i should confess about myself um is that my mind tends to orbit around very particular philosophers and in india it orbits very

00:46:43

tightly around chandra kirti um and in the western tradition around david hume and so you're going to see a lot of chandra charity and a lot of hymn coming out in these lectures i apologize for that for those of you who don't like

00:46:56

those guys as much as i do so first we'll talk about some buddhist arguments against the self um and i want to begin with king melinda's chariot this might be familiar to many of you

00:47:08

but it's um worth reminding ourselves of how it goes um the melinda pena the questions of king melinda is a wonderful text from early in the present millennium probably first or second century

00:47:22

um and it's a written as a kind of dialogue between a possibly fictional monk named nagasena and a definitely real ruler um of a bactrian a greek kingdom in uh

00:47:34

in gundara um named in in the text in pali melinda but in in greek his name was menander and um it's a very large and wonderful text we're only to talk about a tiny piece of it

00:47:47

and at the beginning near the beginning of the dialogue nagasana shows up with a bunch of friends at uh menander's palace and the king asks nagasena a really

00:47:59

obvious and simple question he says who are you right who are you what you're doing here man um and that's a kind of question we ask each other all the time but nagasena being a character in a buddhist dialogue

00:48:12

says well i'm called nagasena but that doesn't really refer to anything there really is no thing that i am there's nagasain is just a name

00:48:24

and the king rolls his eyes and says oh come on um you can't tell me that you don't exist that all you all there is is a name if you don't exist who am i supposed to offer robes to at the end of this audience who are we supposed to be

00:48:37

giving alms to who are we supposed to have respect for who am i talking to in the first place who are you even to say that you don't exist right give me a break you've got to be something more than just a name

00:48:50

and nagasena says well king let me ask you a question how did you come to the palace today did you walk on foot over all of those hot hard paths and stones or did you ride in a chariot and

00:49:04

the king said well i'm a king so like i came here in a chariot and melinda says well okay king i want to find out what that chariot is is the chariot identical to its wheels

00:49:17

king says no the chair is not identical to its wheels is that identical to the shaft no not to the shaft so they're going to go to the seat no not to the seat and so on and so forth and melinda says okay so it's not identical to any of its parts

00:49:29

is it identical to say all of those parts put together and until the whole collection of the parts and the king says no it's not the collection of the parts because if the parts were all on the ground it wouldn't be a chariot and i always say anybody

00:49:42

who's ever bought a sears garden cart knows that for sure right you open it up and all those parts are on the ground you do not have a cart you have a day of hell right that's really different um so the king says no the place can't be

00:49:55

identical to the parks and no uh nagasana says well how about all the parts put together and the king thinks that i can't be that either because you know you can replace the parts i could take the wheel off and put

00:50:08

a better wheel on i could re-upholster the seat and i'd still have the same chariot and so like i said well is it something different from the parts well no it can't be anything different from the parts because if you take away all

00:50:21

the parts you don't have anything left um and so nagasegna says so your chariot's not identical to its parts it's not different from its parts it's not the parts assembled just so um i can't figure out what it is it

00:50:34

sounds to me king like there's no chariot there but there is a chariot the chariot's just a nominal designation a way we have of talking about all of these things and when they work just so

00:50:46

in our life and similarly king there's no me that i'm not identical to my body or to my mind i'm not different from my body and my mind either identical nor different there's just a designation just a way of talking just like chariots

00:50:59

are just a way of talking then the king says yeah yeah but if that's so how could you possibly exist through time how could you be something that's reborn because of course this is happening in india in the context of a

00:51:11

doctrine of rebirth but we could ask the same thing how could you be the same person you were this morning um in this evening how can you plan to be the same person tomorrow and nagasana gives a

00:51:23

different analogy he says hey kings do you keep a little lamp by your bedside at night a little night light so you can you know get up at night and find your way around if you need to and the king says sure but of course back then in india there

00:51:35

were these little tiny clay lamps that had a small amount of oil and so if you were a king you had somebody whose job it was when that flame was burning down to use that flame to light a new lamp and put it there when that one was burning down to light a new flame so

00:51:48

this is a kind of you know a possible uh life as a servant for a king and melinda says so you have a a flame and when that's like when you go to sleep and that flame is burning is the lamp still burning when you wake

00:52:01

up in the morning and the king said of course it is i've got good servants but melinda says but no single lamp is is burning through the entire night the flame is passing from

00:52:13

one lamp to another lamp to another lamp to another lamp he says that's how it is with us i don't need to have a single eye that's going from moment to moment to moment to moment we can think of each moment of me

00:52:26

as passing the flame on to the next moment in a causal series without us thinking that there's some single flame some single bit of glowing gas that persists through the entire night or

00:52:38

some single self that persists through my entire life rather we can think of me as a sequence of little bits of light or little bits of fire buddhism of course it's full of fire metaphors that's a topic for another day

00:52:52

so the idea here is in the questions of king melinda that we can understand the fact that we exist conventionally um but as

00:53:05

neither the same nor different from the various constituents that we have that we can lack any core or self but still have a perfectly good existence just like chariots do and that that kind

00:53:17

of existence is enough to account for our existence through time without positing a persistent self or a soul that is strung along through all of those moments

00:53:30

now chandra kirti my buddy takes that metaphor up the chariot metaphor in the text that we were talking about earlier majama avatara introduction to the middle way and he does a little riff on it he makes

00:53:44

it a little bit more tight and sophisticated um and introduces what we often call in the mud yamaka or middleweight tradition of buddhist philosophy the seven-fold analysis of the

00:53:57

seven-fold reasoning um having to do with the chariot and john vakiri argues look when you think about the relationship between the chariot and its parts as we're invited to do in the questions of

00:54:10

king melinda we don't want to say that the chariot is different from its parts because of course if it were then if you took away the parts you could still have a chariot and that doesn't work

00:54:22

moreover you don't want to say that the chariot is identical to its parts um because there's no single part to which it's identical and if it's identical to all of the parts then you have hundreds of chariots

00:54:36

or moreover when the chariot was unassembled you could still ride it that you would still have a chariot when you took it out of the sears chariot box we don't want to think of the chariot as the possessor of the parts as something

00:54:50

different because that would be a version of it being something different we don't say you don't order when you order a chariot or a garden cart from sears you don't say i need two things i need the cart and then i need to put the parts of the cart

00:55:02

right when you get the parts of the cart you've got all you're going to get nor do we want to think that somehow the chariot is something that comes into existence as dependent upon the parts because for one thing to depend on

00:55:14

another they've again got to be different from each other um nor as sean security points out do we want to think of the chariot as the parts arranged just so right

00:55:27

arranged chariot wise because we would still have the same chariot if we replaced a bad axle or if we inflated a tire that had gone flat or something like that

00:55:40

um so chandra charity also argues we don't want to think of the chariot either as identical to or as different from its parts but he also argues that we don't want to

00:55:52

think of it as this kind of thing that emerges in the parts right it says it's not in the parts either and what he means by that is that when we try to understand what it is to be a chariot we can't do that

00:56:05

just by talking about chariot parts we have to also talk about our linguistic conventions our cognitive conventions our transportation conventions our social conventions that

00:56:17

make it the case that that chariot is one thing that it's a conveyance that it's the kind of thing that we pay excise tax on and so forth so the chariot doesn't just depend upon

00:56:29

the narrow base of parts it depends upon our conceptual imputation which is an essential idea for child security that what there is in the world depends not only on things

00:56:42

outside of us but also on how we think about things i call that broad super veniance if the chariot doesn't just depend on its parts it depends on the whole scheme in which chariots figure as

00:56:57

objects a really nice example for this i don't like chariots so much i like to think about this in terms of money i call this the dollars and cents example

00:57:11

dollars are real things one dollars one dollar notes really are worth a dollar twenty dollar notes really are worth twenty dollars um and you know that because if you try to buy something that costs twenty

00:57:24

dollars and give somebody a one they won't give you the merchandise you know this because if you don't have money you feel the need of it and if you have a lot of money you feel the overpowering urge to give it away

00:57:35

so you know that um the dollars are real but dollars have a funny relationship to their instances suppose for instance that william and i are at a cafe

00:57:48

and we have a couple of cappuccinos and i suddenly realized that i left my wallet in the car so i say hey william can you lend me two dollars for the coffee and he does and he hands me two one

00:58:01

dollar notes and i pay for the coffee and then the next day i stomp up at barry and i'm gonna pay william back and i do that by handing him eight quarters and i say here's your two dollars

00:58:13

um i've given him the two dollars that he lent me the day before but i haven't given him the two paper notes that he left me i gave those to the white person i've given him eight quarters which he

00:58:26

never gave me now if we ask is the dollar when william gave me two dollars um with the two dollars he gave me identical to those two dollar notes well of course they weren't because when i

00:58:38

gave them back i gave them back in quarters and the quarters and the notes aren't identical to one another and by transitivity then neither of them is identical to the dollar on the other hand were the two dollars

00:58:50

different from the two one dollar notes that he gave me did he give me three things two one dollar notes and then two dollars no by giving me the two one dollar notes he gave me two dollars by

00:59:02

giving him the eight quarters i give him two dollars so we might say that while dollars are real they're not identical to the paper notes or the coins that constitute them or the electronic records in my bank

00:59:15

account nor are they different from them and we can do the entire child security analysis and it makes total sense moreover and this is something we can see very clearly in the case of money the clays of

00:59:27

dollars dollars are broadly supervising phenomena it's not the intrinsic value of the paper in the ink that makes a dollar note worth one

00:59:40

dollar and a twenty dollar note worth twenty dollars the ink and the paper are have exactly the same value rather it's something very different it's the set of conventions we have for

00:59:51

using those notes for giving change and for purchasing it's the way the federal reserve works it's the way the banking system works it's the way the commercial system works if you took away the banking system if

01:00:04

you took away the federal reserve then one dollar notes wouldn't be worth anything at all twenty dollar notes wouldn't be worth anything at all you can see this if you think about confederate currency we don't think a 20 confederate note is

01:00:18

worth 20 times as much as a one dollar confederate note to a collector they're probably worth about the same and all depends upon their condition whereas even a raggedy twenty dollar note is worth twenty times as much as a crisp

01:00:31

new one dollar note what gives them their value is the role they play in a much larger system that's what we mean by dependence on conceptual imputation that's what we mean by broad

01:00:44

supervision that does none of this means that dollars aren't real it means though that we can't understand dollars as identical to their instances as different from their instances as in

01:00:57

their instances as dependent upon their instances or any of those other alternatives that the melinda panya and the majama gov suggest rather we think of them as conventionally real conceptual

01:01:10

imputations that we create but when we create them we create them as real the self is like that the self is like thinking that there's

01:01:22

something that is really underlying the chariot or underlying the dollar that gives it its value and there are some very nasty consequences of the self-illusion of taking ourselves to be

01:01:34

selves one of those is self-centeredness once i think that i'm a self then i think that i've got a very different relation to me than i have to anybody else that is the relation of

01:01:46

identity and i think that i occupy a very special place in the moral universe namely the center of it where i have a very special concern for me and only an indirect concern for others

01:02:00

another nasty um consequence is what i call self-alienation that is if i think that i'm a self but i'm really a person that i really don't know who i am just as if i thought that a dollar had

01:02:13

its value intrinsically in the value of the paper and the ink i wouldn't understand anything about finance currency or purchases and third is the illusion of independence

01:02:25

part of what it is to be a self part of what it is to me this underlying transcendent atman is to be independent of the world standing against it acting on it but not being acted on by it

01:02:39

taking it as object but always being subject and so we get this illusion of independence and of transcendental freedom that really mistakes who we are and gives us very strange moral

01:02:51

attitudes of praise and blame and anger and pride and so forth so i think the self-illusion unlike the mueller liar illusion is not only an illusion but but it's not

01:03:03

harmless like a mueller liar illusion it's an illusion with real consequences and so it behooves us to take the illusion seriously to understand what it is and to try as hard as we can to

01:03:17

dispel it now i want to talk about some humane arguments against the self but let me first pause because what i went just went through is a heavy line of philosophical argument and there might

01:03:30

be some questions so jay there are a handful of questions that came up that have to do with function is is money or a self

01:03:44

something that functions in a particular way i think that's a good way of putting it but we have to be careful about the relevant notion of function

01:03:57

money doesn't function autonomously here's a crude way of putting that it's not like here's a really bad story about where we got money from we wandered around the world and we saw

01:04:09

all these stacks of currency and coins around and wondered what we could do with them and then suddenly realized that they were worth a dollar twenty dollars fifty dollars twenty five cents and said wow now we could form a banking

01:04:23

system now we could start purchasing things with faith that we know they've got money we didn't find an intrinsic function in quarters nickels dimes and banknotes and then say wow finally we've

01:04:34

got something that can do that let's start a banking system instead we started a financial system and created currency to fit into it so we can only understand

01:04:46

the function of money extrinsically that is we can only understand it as determined by the entire financial system similarly when we think of the function

01:04:58

of a person with a function of a chariot we can't just look at the thing itself and ask what's it good for we've got to ask look at the whole context in which it figures and ask how it figures in

01:05:10

that context so the function is always function in a larger system function relative to a set of interests extrinsic not intrinsic great and there's another really

01:05:25

interesting question kind of about methodology noting all of the metaphors that the buddhists authors are using and also metaphors that you are using yeah and a question

01:05:37

based on the metaphors like okay so if reincarnation or rebirth is a flame being passed from lamb to lamp how does one account for that drawing on metaphor do you want to say something about

01:05:50

metaphor and how it's operating here i'll say a very little bit because that's really a topic for for a different evening um i'll tell you two things one is of well one ship one thing is

01:06:01

just a fact about buddhism and buddhist literature it's just metaphor upon metaphor upon metaphor buddhist almost almost every single technical buddhist term

01:06:13

is a metaphorical term nirvana is a metaphorical term it's the extinction of a lamp or a candle skanda the psychophysical aggregates is a metaphorical term it refers initially to

01:06:26

the wood on a funeral pyre hence the idea of samsara being being on fire as we see in the fire suit hence the nirvana metaphor there's just metaphor after metaphor after metaphor you never escape them um

01:06:39

it's just the way that buddhism articulates itself and i think that's a really nice way second i'll tell you what my my teacher in graduate school said was very fond of saying in one way or another

01:06:50

he said philosophy consists in stacking metaphors one on top of each other like a house of cards until the house of cards becomes too big

01:07:02

to sustain itself and then it collapses and we start building again from new metaphors now of course that was a metaphorical way of explaining the role of metaphors in philosophy which i think just beautifully makes the point

01:07:16

i think that thinking philosophically is thinking metaphorically and that metaphors are some of the richest tools that we have for understanding reality and a lot of what i'll do over

01:07:27

the next um four weeks or three weeks after this um is to think through metaphors with you there's nothing wrong with a good metaphor great now to david hume who gives us more metaphors which is really kind of

01:07:42

wonderful lots of them um and i'm going to quote a little bit from the treatise um hume says in uh in book 1 part 4 section 6 paragraph 1

01:07:54

that's how we read those numbers he says there are some philosophers and here he has descartes primarily in mind um who imagine that we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our

01:08:07

self and those caps are his that we feel and be really outlining the idea that this is kind of a concept right it's an idea you might think that we feel its existence and it's continuance in existence right notice

01:08:20

that we looked at both of those ideas in the king melinda dialogues right its existence like the chariot and its continued existence like the flame and are certain both of its perfect identity and simplicity the idea that

01:08:33

it's a single thing underlying the multiplicity of our lives and hume replies two paragraphs later for my part when i enter most intimately into what i

01:08:45

call myself into what i call myself note that give very carefully i always stumble on some particular perception or other that is a cognitive state of heat or cold lighter shade

01:08:58

love or hatred pain or pleasure and again you can see the skandas here right sensations perceptions dispositions um they're all there right um i never catch myself

01:09:11

at any time without perception and i never observe anything but the perception so hume is really trying to focus on chandra kerry's snake though humans never heard of chandragupti

01:09:25

and saying you know these people think there's this self that they're aware of that they've seen that they experienced it's a thing they know best and he's inviting you to introspect something that you often might do on the meditation cushion and asking when you

01:09:38

look inside what do you find well you find sensations you find perceptions you find personality traits or emotions but you don't find a bearer you don't find the thing that's supposed to be the

01:09:52

self so human um thinks that you actually don't even know what a self is because it's something that you believe is there but you've never actually seen that you've never experienced and hume

01:10:04

human has a very radical view that we might have a word self but we don't even know what it means because none of us have ever seen it he offers another analogy um very much like the melinda's flame

01:10:16

that i've always loved and it's the analogy of a church let me heal after all it's a scot not a buddhist and he says you know imagine you've got this church a group of people who come together maybe a dozen or so

01:10:29

and they build a little church out of wood and they hire a pastor and then gradually they start dying off they get buried in the great churchyard new people join the church it gets a little bit bigger the pastor quits they

01:10:41

hire a new pastor the church starts outgrowing its buildings so they build a new stone building more people join new pastor and hume says now some hundred years on when we

01:10:54

look at this church do we want to say that it's the same church that was once a small wooden church with only a few people but has now grown can we say this church is really a hundred years old

01:11:06

um he says of course we do we talk that way but there's no single thing that has endured through that time the parishioners have changed the pastor has changed the building has changed the graveyard

01:11:19

has changed every everything that's constituted it has changed nothing has remained the same but we still have a convention for identifying it because of the continuity the causal continuity and

01:11:33

the verbal conventions we have for identifying things otherwise we could never say we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of the church at every moment we'd have to say we've got a brand new church we've got a brand new

01:11:44

church we've got a brand new church which we don't do um and of course that's very similar to what chandra charity is doing when he argues that we try to posit an underlying continuity or an

01:11:57

underlying substantial identity that holds things together through change when all we've got is change and our conventions for identifying it just like when i've got change in quarters i identify them with dollars

01:12:11

with dollar notes and i think that's really nothing but a convention the differences between human chandra kitty are small but interesting i'll just point those out

01:12:22

john security is really keen and that's what the serpent analogy was meant to do to convince you that you really do have an idea of a self it's just that it's an illusory idea

01:12:35

that it's an idea that doesn't have anything that actually corresponds to it just as we might have an idea of the difference in length between the parallel lines in the mueller liar illusion there's just no difference in

01:12:49

length that corresponds to hume on the other hand wants a slightly more radical conclusion he wants to convince you that you're using a word self and you think you have an idea that

01:13:00

corresponds to it but you don't when you try to imagine what it would be what it would look like what it would feel like how big it would be what it would be doing how you would make sense of it you

01:13:13

end up talking nonsense and so hume thinks that this is one of those many cases where we've got a word that we suppose corresponds to something in the world or corresponds to an idea but we

01:13:25

don't as though for instance i were to tell sarah hey i just got this really cool toy yesterday it's a round square sarah says what are you talking about

01:13:39

and i say well it's both round and square isn't that cool and sarah would say to me you're using words jay but it sounds like total nonsense to me and she'd be right

01:13:51

similar or if i said william you know what i did today i counted to the highest natural number william would say jay there isn't one i'd say of course there's one i counted to it william would say jay you're talking

01:14:03

nonsense hume thinks that when we use the word self we're talking nonsense in exactly the same way and i think that's a slightly different take on the self-illusion um that it really is the

01:14:16

part of the illusion as far as humor is concerned is the idea that we even mean anything by the words chandra kirti on the other hand thinks the illusion consists in the fact that we mean something by

01:14:27

the words but nothing corresponds to that meaning so it's worth pointing out that difference so we come back to the snake and the elephant once again um hume is also asking us to pay

01:14:41

attention to the snake and the elephant the elephant isn't our perceptions and our sensations he thinks we stumble on those all the time the elephant isn't our body it isn't our mind hume's not denying the reality of

01:14:54

those things the elephant is not our person that is the fact that we actually move through the world and do things jay yes if i could interrupt really quickly earlier there have been a couple people

01:15:06

who were wondering if you could remind us once again of the snake and the elephant they hadn't quite followed it oh sure i can okay just this seems like a relevant time to this doesn't quite remind us

01:15:19

this is a great time so now we're talking about chandra kirti in chapter six of introduction to the middleweight i think it's verse 141 but i could be wrong about that um where

01:15:32

shaun vikirty says imagine a man who is worried that there's a snake in the wall of his house and in order to dispel the fear of that snake he assures himself that there's no

01:15:45

elephant in the house wouldn't that man be a public laughingstock that's the verse and so what sean vacarity means is this we have this atavistic sense

01:15:59

that we have a self and we tend maybe to try to convince ourselves that we don't really believe that we have a self by saying hey i don't think i'm identical to my body

01:16:12

hey i don't think i'm identical to my mind hey i i know that i really exist and selves don't really exist so i don't really think that i'm a self um and when we do that sean bacardi thinks we're whistling in the elephant

01:16:25

dark we're telling ourselves hey no elephant in my house nothing to worry about whereas the self that we really think we have is that self which is always

01:16:36

subject never object always agent never patient that self that is the enjoyer that stands opposed to the world and experiences it that acts on the world

01:16:49

the self that has a mind and has a body but is not itself a mind or a body that's the serpent and chandra kerdi thinks that if we don't pay attention to that serpent if we don't understand what

01:17:02

it is we believe ourselves to be in our heart of hearts we will never succeed in dispelling the illusion and hume also is trying to identify here

01:17:14

the serpent and he's identifying it as the idea that the word self even means anything so very close to john pecary's position but slightly different

01:17:27

very important to point out is that hume is not in book one arguing that persons do not exist in fact in book two he's going to spend most of his time explaining what persons

01:17:41

are he when instead what he's claiming is that persons don't have selves just like chariots don't have chariot essences

01:17:52

um persons don't have selves so we need to distinguish the self from the person in order to understand this so now i want to talk about that serpent and really focus um firmly on what the

01:18:05

self illusion is this will be the last part of this little section that self is supposed to be something that stands outside of the world not something embedded in the world

01:18:17

it's the wittgenstein um the austrian philosopher of the first half of the 20th century um expressed this beautifully in his book the trektatus he said that the self stands to the world

01:18:30

like the eye stands to the visual field we don't see the eye but the fact that we have a visual field lets us know that there is an eye behind it but not in the field

01:18:42

the self he said is just like that we see a world we experience a world we act on a world and that tells us that there has to be a subject that stands outside of that world and experiences it just like the

01:18:56

eye stands outside of the visual field that's one of the worst things about the self-illusion is the illusion that we're not even in the world that we're totally transcendent to it that's really weird right i mean when you realize that

01:19:09

that's what you believe in your gut um that is it's like the eye and the visual field um that the self is continuous it doesn't stop as hume said talking about descartes

01:19:22

that it's always present to us that it's conscious it's the thing that's aware of everything else that it's free from causation that we can act freely on our motives without being caused so when you go to the

01:19:34

notary public to have a document notarized and she asks you those beautiful questions is this your free act and deed and if you said no i'm being caused to

01:19:46

do this she wouldn't notarize it would you so you say yes this is my free act indeed and i always just have my fingers crossed behind my back i don't believe in free acts and deeds but

01:19:59

we do take have this ideology about ourselves that we're with our free actions aren't cause we just do them as can't put it spontaneously that we are independent not

01:20:11

interdependent that when your mom tells you you've got to learn to stand on your own two feet that somehow that makes sense that ourselves can stand on our own two feet as independent objects

01:20:24

and mostly the self is what i am i am not my body my body is constantly changing my body was once young and fast now it's old and has a new knee um i'm

01:20:36

not my mind my mind was once sharp now it's dulled and beaten into submission by years of overwork but that i the jay who was once young is still here in this old man's body

01:20:49

so when we think about that self-illusion the self-illusion is partly bad because it's only a root illusion that leads to a whole cascade

01:21:01

of terrible illusions so now i want to really dump on the self-illusion by showing you just how dangerous it is one is this was a question that came up earlier it leads to the illusion of subject object duality

01:21:14

because the moment i think of myself as a self then i think that there's me a subject and then there's my objects there's the i and there's its visual field and they're totally different from one

01:21:26

another and that the basic structure of experience is there's me the subject who's always a subject and never an object and then all of those objects and i take that to be primordially given to

01:21:39

be the way experience just is instead of being a construction or superimposition so that's one illusion there's an illusion of immediacy descartes was big on this one

01:21:51

and udio takara was big on this one in india that somehow i know my own mind my own states my own being immediately directly without anything standing in

01:22:04

between but i know only know other things through the mediation of my sensory apparatus and my sensory organs nobody thinks that when i look at an apple that that redness and sweetness are

01:22:18

immediately available to me we think they're mediated by my eyes and my visual faculty by light hitting my eyes causing stuff to happen on the back of my retina electrical stuff happening in my occipital cortex and i see the apple

01:22:31

that's a lot of mediation right and we think the same thing about every external object but then if i ask my own feelings my own thoughts my own emotions do i know those through the mediation of

01:22:44

something they think no i know them immediately because they're just part of me and we forget that we know them through the mediation of our introspective senses which are just as mediating just as subject to illusion as

01:22:57

any of our external senses um we get the illusion of agent causation something that augustine makes very plain in the western tradition the idea that somehow our actions as the notary public

01:23:11

suggested are uncaused are free and that there's a big difference between things that happen to us and things that we freely do forgetting that our actions are caused

01:23:23

by our desires and our beliefs and our desires and beliefs are caused by our emotions and our values and our and our va and all of that and that if our things were uncaused we'd be these weird

01:23:35

random objects but we think of ourselves as standing somehow outside of the causal nexus even if we know that that is simply insane there's an illusion of unity this idea

01:23:48

that myself is completely simple and singular even though my thoughts and my experiences and my sensations and my actions are plural but there's a unity behind that that there's no that this i

01:24:01

am exactly the same thing that i was when i began this lecture and we know that that's an illusion so these are all of the reasons to shed the self-illusion and why we think of the self-illusion as crazy

01:24:15

and that gets us through the second major part of what i wanted to do tonight now i'm conscious that we have five more minutes and i'm also conscious that the third part takes maybe a half hour or so

01:24:27

to do um so what i'm going to propose is that i'm going to glom the third part on at the beginning of next time we're not in any great race here and i'll use the final five minutes of our time together

01:24:40

to ask if there are any questions about the things i just said or anything else field a few questions and promise you that i will i will resume right here and eventually we'll catch up

01:24:52

or we won't questions stuff you want me to talk about again jay i think there are a lot of questions that you are going to address in the next couple of weeks yeah but

01:25:10

one one question that has come up um is could you remind us about what self-alienation is and why this is so pernicious okay i will i'm gonna

01:25:23

take us back to this slide in order to remind us of that because this is what i really mean by self-alienation by self-alienation what i mean um

01:25:35

is our being in profound confusion about who and what we are about having an idea of what we are that is totally at odds with our actual mode

01:25:48

of existence or nature that's what i mean so i'm alienated from myself when i think that i'm one thing but i'm really something else and these are various ways

01:26:01

of understanding the content of that self-alienation i think that i am toto generally different from the objects of my experience that there's me as pure subject that's one

01:26:14

kind of thing and there's that all of that stuff including all of you folks my computer screen that i'm looking at now my dog lying right next to me all of those things are merely object and i'm subject

01:26:28

so i think of myself as pure subject is like the eye in the visual field i know that that's not what i am i know that i'm an embedded embodied being in a network of dependent origination but i

01:26:40

don't experience myself that way that's a dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a being that i know immediately that i know my sensations

01:26:52

just by having them i know what i think just by thinking it i know what my emotions are just by experiencing them and that none of that introspective experience none of that awareness is

01:27:04

mediated by anything and that's stupid because i know that the only way that i can know myself is through an introspective activity and that introspection is conceptually laden and that i can be self-deceived and that

01:27:18

my psychiatrist might know me much better than i know myself that my wife knows me better than i know myself and that my dog knows me better than i know myself so i know that i don't have that immediate awareness but i think of

01:27:29

myself as having it that's another dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a free agent who can act in a way that's totally uncaused just by doing things because i will them

01:27:43

that i've got this free will that is unconstrained by causality i know that that's crazy i know that i'm a biological organism and that everything i do is caused by previous causes and conditions

01:27:55

but i don't experience myself that way that's another dimension of self-alienation i know that i am a plurality that i've got a brain with lots of different centers of activity lots of different

01:28:07

kinds of cognition happening at the same time of which i'm totally unaware visual processing auditory processing language processing emotions that are subliminal and so forth

01:28:18

sensations that i barely register i know that there's inner complexity but i experience it as a subject of unity that's another dimension of self-alienation all of these are ways that we fail to

01:28:31

know ourselves and all of them cascade from the illusion that we ourselves does that help i hope great so there are a variety of questions

01:28:45

which it's about nine o'clock now on the east coast so then um is there one quick one or should i say good night and that will pick up here next time your called why don't we uh pick up next time we'll

01:28:58

pick up next time thank you all very much for joining me this evening if we'll pick up next time and continue this um this little um story and our next task as you can see is to figure out

01:29:12

what you are instead of being a self before we consider all of the foolish rejoinders to this obviously true position jay before you uh take off i think we put up the readings that you put

01:29:26

together on the web and so if anybody wants to read in a slower at a slower pace yeah um what jay has put together i know jay if

01:29:38

you want to say one yeah a couple words let me say what that is what that is is a few excerpts from this book called uh losing yourself um and my publisher

01:29:50

gave me a stern limit that i couldn't exert more than 10 percent of the book so um it's a little choppy and it's really just samplers but it's a way of reading some of my ruminations on this

01:30:04

stuff um and it's up on the website and you are welcome uh to to read that and to ask me any questions you want about it and i wish i could have given you more but my publisher was mean and started talking about copyrights and

01:30:18

lawyers and things like that so that's what we've got and is it clear is it clear what to read for next week if someone asked a question about um which sections to read it is you'll be able to tell

01:30:31

from the titles of the chapter excerpts what we're doing i've been really talking this week about the uh the first two chapters into the third and uh first three chapters well we only

01:30:44

got to the first two but we're going to talk about the third chapter next time and then the fourth and fifth so if you look at those sections you'll be fine but you don't need you don't need to read it because i'm talking through

01:30:56

everything that i would want to talk about and sarah just put the link to the readings in the chat and she also noted that the recording of jay's talk

01:31:07

will be available in the next um 24 to 36 hours for those who want to relive this experience at a slower pace that's terrifying thank you thank you very much and i'll see you all next week have wonderful

01:31:21

weeks until then please stay safe please stay healthy and uh we'll be convened bye