Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
You have just got me interested in a philosophical point here:
I have always presumed that my “self” or “mind” is the totality of (or set of) all the thoughts and feelings as well as the totality of (or set of) all the potential thoughts and feelings that could be that have one thing in common; There exists a “sense” (which I sense i elf” is, then what do you believe is your “self”? How would you describe what this “self” is?
Ah, the old search for “self”. I searching for, or wondering about—
[/b]I[/b].
An analogy: If I look into a mirror, I see a reflection of myself—that is, of I—and I recognize it. But I do not confuse the reflection with the actual I that is looking at it, that is—I. Nor do I think it is some extended part or expression or aspect of I, the actual I, that is looking at its reflection (my reflection) in the mirror.
But all our “I-thoughts” are like that reflection in the mirror. Every thought of “I” (or me, or myself, etc.) is no more than a mental reflection in the
mind-mirror(s). And if one tries to find the “real I” in such reflection, there is just a bottomless recursiveness: reflections in the mirror of reflections in a mirror of . . . .
[Some might be tempted to end that recursive regression by fiat, and posit something like a “soul”. But that is just stopping at a reflection and deciding to call that one, or the next one, real. (This is like an internalized cosmological argument: there must be an end somewhere; let’s call it the “soul”.)]
I
is what/who is looking, thinking (including thinking, “I” ), doing, experiencing, etc.—and remembering. I am just the one who is writing this now, while being aware that I am writing this now. At
this moment, there is no other I. There is not
first an I that
then thinks, acts, feels, is aware, sleeps, dreams, remembers, has insights and experiences, etc. That all
is I. (And that I is always
vis-à-vis an environment; this is what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset means by his formulation "
yo soy yo y mi circunstancia", or what the Buddhists mean by “mutually arising”. One might say that I is always “an immediacy in process”, aware).
We all know this I: we know I just by being I, aware—we just sometimes get lost in the mind-mirror reflections. Such as—
“
I label such a ‘source’ as ‘
self’; more specifically ‘
myself’.” In reality, this says no more than “
I label such a ‘source’ as I; more specifically, I.” If “the source” is I, the self is I—and I is who/what is doing this labeling. The rules of our grammar aid and abet our getting lost in a tangle of alternate labels for just—I.
What you refer to as “unconscious” is just when I is not focused on its own reflections. Note that I am
not saying that the reflections are not reflections of I, in its own mind-mirrors. I cast my own reflections of I in I; and those I-mirrors, being I reflecting I, are not objective. That is why the recursiveness—the self-looping—is bottomless, and difficult to express. In a sense, we can’t get away from I long enough to reflect on I from some other (objective) perspective. I have no view of I from somewhere else (some perspective of not-I).
Just as there is no way out of the inter-looping of ourselves and the totality
in which and of which we are—no “view from nowhere” into the universe—there is no way out of our own self-looping mind from which to view “I”. The best I can do is allow someone else to see I, and feed their reflections into my own loop. As we learn, our loop expands. But we are never out of the loop.
Be well.
Notable Quotes, Part Too
01 Oct '10 13:45
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