On Tuesday, July 21, 2020 at 12:16:09 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 21 Jul 2020, at 10:13, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > > > > https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-self > : > ... > Human beings, then, can have a vivid sense [though] of the self without > having any sense of it as something that has either personality or > long-term continuity. Does this improve the prospects for the claim that a > sense of the self could be an accurate representation of something that > actually exists – even if materialism is true? I think it does, although > the full argument would require a careful statement of what it is to be a > true materialist, further inquiry into the notion of a thing, and a > challenge to the problematic distinction between things and processes. > Perhaps the best account of the existence of the self is one that may be > given by certain Buddhists. It allows that the self exists, at any given > moment, while retaining all the essential Buddhist criticisms of the idea > of the self. It gives no reassurance to those who believe in the soul, but > it doesn’t leave us with nothing. It stops short of the view defended by > many analytic philosophers, according to which the self is a myth insofar > as it is thought to be different from the human being considered as a > whole. It leaves us with what we have, at any given time – a self that is > materially respectable, distinctively mental, and as real as a stone. > > > > That makes sense with materialism if the soul is made into an actual > infinite. > > That makes sense with Mechanism, if we abandon the idea that we have > ontologically existing bodies. In that case the selves comes from a unique > consciousness which bifurcate by scission, and fuse by amnesia. > > The machine have a 3p-self, which is their body representation, > and they have 1p-self (and of many different types) obeying to the laws of > extensional and intensional (modal) self-reference, which is a chapter of > mathematical logic/thepretical computer science. >
In my more ecologically tinged notes this notion of self is more like a portal to a web/multiplicity of relations to an unknown reality. It is membranous, not discreet, and the bifurcation/scission is a hallucination with the same kind of delusional character that would separate say an ant from its environment/histories/relations. That hallucination, useful as it was for survival, promotes discourses of a problematic kind of individualism, which, not unlike the caricature of an ant or the simplification of humans in comics, entails otherness. Doesn't this otherness enable and justify violence that further reinforces itself? Is this inevitable? When said portal confuses itself with such notions of individuality, doesn't it pursue the destruction/harm/deletion of perceived others in some hope/delusion for self-preservation? Violence never succeeds in this style of discourse as the damage is never isolated to the perceived delusional target but to the web/multiplicity of relations. Every violence would therefore equate to self-harm and self-defense would have no individualistic meaning; it would only have meaning as the absence of violence towards the whole. This kind of common ecological conception of self and individuals runs counter to reducing selves to their body representation. And while that hallucination of separation led us to war and science, an ecological approach to these questions would still pursue whether the violence entailed is absolutely necessary, and whether life could manage to at least mitigate the damage by moving towards stronger equalities that would stabilize the web/multiplicity and render the portion of it that we have some control over more resilient. Tl;dr is that discreet selfhood, strong forms of individuality etc. are problematic from pov of ecological, psychological, social, linguistic perspectives. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/88e8a8ab-bd47-4f62-bd67-dd29f5c1c7fao%40googlegroups.com.
