Self as a Linguistic Error

Spiritualists, including Mr Jaggi Vasudev, like to argue that to say "My Body" is proof that I am not the body.

But then, people also say "My soul is attracted to this.", or "I love him with my body and soul."

So, to continue the argument, "I" am not even my "soul" (whatever that might be).

But that would be mistaking a linguistic convention for the proof of an entity's existence. 

It is easier, however, to just understand the "my" adjective as referring to "this".  In fact, vedantins of some sects are fond of referring to themselves as "this body" instead of "I".

As Chomksy writes in his outstanding essay on Mysteries of Nature:

Priestley urges that we also dismiss arguments based on “vulgar phraseology” and “vulgar apprehensions,” as in the quest for an entity of the world picked out by the term me when I speak of “my body,” with its hint of dualism. “According to this merely verbal argument,” Priestley observes, “there ought to be something in man besides all the parts of which he consists,” something beyond both soul and body, as when “a man says I devote my soul and body,” the pronoun allegedly denoting something beyond body and spirit that “makes the devotion.” In Rylean terms, phrases of common usage may be “systematically misleading expressions,” a lively concern at the time, based on a centuries-old tradition of inquiry into the ways surface grammatical form disguise actual meaning. Like Priestley, Thomas Reid argued that failure to attend “to the distinction between the operations of the mind and the objects of these operations” is a source of philosophical error, as in interpreting the phrase “I have an idea” on the model of “I have a diamond,” when we should understand it to mean something like “I am thinking.” In an earlier discussion, the Encyclopedist César Chesneau du Marsais, using the same and many other examples, warned against the error of taking nouns to be “names of real objects that exist independently of our thought.” The language, then, gives no license for supposing that such words as “idea,” “concept,” “image” stand for “real objects,” let alone “perceptible objects.”

Momentum

It was dawn and he hadn't slept all night.

He was riding, without permission, on a cross-country freight train.  The noise wasn't letting him sleep.  The train had passed through thousands of miles of terrain: desert, mountain, lake, forest, rock...

The train had killed many a wild animal straying on the track.  It had killed many birds in its hurtling motion.  It had gone over carcasses and boulders and fallen trees and snow and sand...

The momentum of the train was immense.  Against its momentum, nothing lasted for long.  No view was eternal, no horizon remained a horizon, no cloud was permanent, no object was an obstacle.

It was dawn and he hadn't slept all night.

The sun was coming up far in the east, and the silence and softness of that early hour was in sharp contrast with the thundering roar of the train.

On a whim he jumped off the train.  The momentum continued to thrust him forward, dragging and bouncing him by the tracks, injuring and lacerating and scraping him all over his body.

Eventually he came to rest.  The train had disappeared in the distance.  He looked around him and saw tiny leaves, flowers and dewdrops on the grass.  The sunlight was shimmering on the drops and he dared not move, afraid to disturb those precarious beads of water.

He remained that way for what seemed to him an eternity when another freight train leaped up from behind him and deafened him with its roar.  This train was filled with cattle and sheep and monkeys who were all asleep at that hour.

As the train was passing him, he gulped a mouthful of air, stood up, faced the tracks, picked up a big rock, and with all his might, threw it under the train.  He had a perverse impulse to derail it.

The wheels of the train came in contact with the rock, and crushed it to powder.  No animal on that train even registered what had happened.  In all that noise of that train, that incident was as-if silent and non-existent.  The wheel smoothly passed over that powdered rock without experiencing even a minor bump.

He laughed aloud at his own ambition and foolishness, turned around, and vanished into the forest.

The Suspicious Indian

India ranks pretty much at the bottom of the world when it comes to contract enforcement.  This doesn't mean that people are honest and only in the rare case that the contracts are breached that there is a problem.  It also points to the fact that contracts might be being broken with impunity without fear of consequences.  With an understanding of behavioral economics, it stands to reason that without a strong disincentive, people will try to gain unfair advantages over others.

That means, not only is there no justice in India, there is no incentive to being ethical in India.  And hence, being ethical is an exception rather than a norm in India.

This has some curious consequences and corollaries which I will explore in this essay.

1. The vast majority of Indians live in a state of terror.  They are afraid that they will not get their due.  They are in a constant state of insecurity and risk-avoidance.  They are apprehensive that they will be cheated and short-changed.  They don't venture out of the familiar because who will protect them if things go wrong.
   


2. Indians do not trust and respect each other.  Trust is predicated on whether there are legal consequences for breaking that trust.  In India there is no real consequence.  Hence, there is no trust.  Indians see others as out to cheat them.  Therefore, they see no harm in cheating them first.


3. Indians are blank-faced and not very expressive in day-to-day interactions.  They do not betray what they are thinking inwardly.  They are hawk-eyed, gawking and staring at others, but not expressing much themselves.  They only react in extremes.  Extreme anger, extreme pity, extreme sorrow, ... make them suddenly explode with emotion.  Mild emotion is kept repressed.  Expressiveness is a sign of a trusting society.  To express is to be vulnerable.  To be vulnerable in a society of cheats is to be suicidal.


4. Indians are perceived as untrustworthy and opportunistic by more educated and trusting societies.
    


5. Indians are pleasantly surprised when they travel to a trusting society.  They are amused that people are following rules and laws without any overt enforcement.  They find it a bit comical though they grudgingly admire this vision of "paradise".


6. Indians are hypocritical and sociopathic.  Their cheating persona (which is a consequence of, and which feeds, the cheating atmosphere) makes them incapable of being congruent and wholesome.  They rail against other Indians' corruption while turning a blind eye to their own corruption.  They have a huge "secret self" full of shame which expresses itself in anonymous groping, shoplifting, petty thievery, bad hygiene, decrepit underwear, shabby dwelling spaces, ... In general, an impassive, moralistic public persona and a shameful private persona.

FAQs on the "Self"

Q: Who am I?

A: You are a carrier/propagator of DNA inherited from your parents.  You (as a carrier of a unique DNA) came into existence at soon after the moment of your "conception".  You were ejected out of your mother's womb (or equivalent) at the time of your "birth".  You cease to exist at the moment of your "death".

You are many things:

(a) A physical body which has an aggregate continuity through its lifetime, and which can be identified by its unique DNA.  This disintegrates at death.

(b) A set of memories stored in your brain cells.  Since these memories are stored as patterns in physical cells, they cease to exist as-such when your body disintegrates after your death.  It is possible for you to transcribe/describe these memories to other people or to other media and they can thus outlive your physical body.

(c) A set of external characteristics (especially your name, your face and your voice) that other people recognize as yours.  There are also certain higher level characteristics, such as your educational credentials, your credit history, your criminal history, your citizenship, etc. which are useful to certain institutions.  You can change or update some of these characteristics as you go through life, but taken together they are your "identity".

(d) A set of internal characteristics which exhibit themselves as patterns of thinking and behavior.  These characteristics usually derive from a combination of your DNA traits, your upbringing and your experiences/memories.

Q: What about consciousness?

A: Consciousness is a general term for denoting the "feeling" of brain activity when the brain is processing information or otherwise "buzzing", or "experiencing".  As a corollary, there is negligible consciousness in deep sleep.  There is only autonomic activity and no conscious activity at that time.  (see http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/sleep/articles/2012/brain-activity-during-sleep/)

In consciousness, there can be experiences of sensory inputs, as well as of one's thoughts and memories and internal body phenomena.  As a human infant grows, its brain becomes capable of higher-order experiencing: linguistic/abstract thought, thinking about thinking, thinking about consciousness, and so on.

Q: What is self-awareness and isn't that unique to humans?

A: Self-awareness is to think about oneself and is primarily a consequence of the capacity for abstract thought.  To think about one's past or future, or to reflect on one's present affairs, or to think about mortality, the "self", one's identity, one's reputation, etc. are all abstract activities, which animal brains are not sophisticated enough to indulge in.  There is nothing called "pure awareness" without there being an object of awareness.  All awareness is of something.  An awareness of almost-total brain silence (e.g. in a long meditation session) happens concurrently with the thought of "what silence!" or something similar. 

It is conceivable in near future that an advanced computer, by scouring internet literature about computing machinery and by analyzing its own logs, deduces a few things about itself and makes an improvement in its functioning.  For example, by discovering that a bug has been discovered in its web server software, it starts running that web server in a sandbox high-security mode.  Or by discovering that a new, faster, network interface card is available in the market, orders it from the factory and logs a ticket for the technician (could be a robot) to install it.  Such self-improvement and self-reflection is not far from human self-awareness.

Self-awareness is, till now, quite uniquely human, but it is not a mystical phenomenon.

Follow the Heart, but How?

Spiritual and self-help literature often advises people to "follow their heart". What it means is: go with your feelings.

This advice bears some close investigation.

In an infant, feelings are, to borrow a phrase from the visual field, monochromatic. They are of a single flavor.  Either the infant is happy, or sad, or fearful, etc.  There aren't multiple conflicting feelings which have to be resolved.

As the infant grows up, and even in some advanced mammals like a pet dog, it is possible to have multiple feelings at the same time, usually as a result of learning.  The child or the pet dog might be desirous of a candy, but might be apprehensive of what the parent/master would do or say.

In fact, growth or domestication are synonymous with restraining one's instincts, or in moderating the expression of one's feelings.

The more a man gets socialized, the more stops are put on just acting out on one's feelings.  A man might want to make love to the beautiful woman he just saw on the road, right then and there, but extensive socialization tells him to behave himself.  An overweight woman might want to eat another tub of ice-cream, but her knowledge about the calories she would consume and would need to burn via exercise, makes her give up the idea.

A pet which acts out and has no fear of the master, or a human which does not restrain himself, is called wild or a brute.  The unruly pet is taken away and put down, and an unruly human ("a law unto himself") is imprisoned.

The advice to follow one's heart assumes that there is a dominant "pure heart" whose voice one must listen and act upon.  That one should disregard the "mind", and the socialization-caused "fears" and just follow one's "inner truth".   But it is logically obvious that if the "pure heart" is  indeed dominant, or if the feeling is without its opposite, one will act it out without the master's advice or the self-help literature. 

It is only in cases of conflict that one seeks guidance.  In cases of conflicting feelings, it is generally true that one feeling is the instinctual one, and the conflicting one is due to the force of socialization.  The self-help advice is to act out one's instincts and disregard the "imaginary" consequences (they won't be imaginary for very long, unfortunately).  The fear of imprisonment if one steals an attractive watch from a shop window is about an "imaginary" future, but that imagination is not without a foundation.

Some seemingly intelligent and educated gurus like Mr Jaggi Vasudev or Osho were fond of extorting their followers to see their fears as born of their past and projected into their future, and hence unreal (!).  Yes, they are unreal now, but try to disregard your fears, and see how soon the law or the society catches up with you.

To follow one's heart is good advice only if one has become over-socialized, is overly scared and worried, and is hesitant to take even little risks.  But for the vast majority of humankind, to live with conflict between the instincts and the social influences is a form of discontent (ref Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents") that has to be endured.

Self-help and Spirituality advise a regression to the id, when its conflict with the superego becomes too much to handle for the ego.  In such cases, the id and the superego are both strong and constantly in opposition.  It is important to lessen this friction (e.g. by sublimating one's instincts, or by finding valid avenues for their natural fulfillment) but it is not recommended to want to be free of this friction altogether.

Everybody wants to revert to the simplicity of childhood and to the way of heartful living.  But one forgets that a child had the protection and supervision of its parents.  The parents were an externalized superego.  An adult, to protect himself, has to internalize his superego.  He can no longer depend on his parents to guide or protect him throughout the day.  And therefore, he is comprised and burdened with both the child-nature and the parent-nature.

This burden and this friction is entirely natural.  To seek to be free of this burden is to misunderstand our nature and to indulge in fantasy.