The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 161 of 254
Explaining versus explaining away
My inattentive acquaintance had failed to spot the difference between explaining something and explaining it away. The TV programme had done the latter: it had shown that what appears to be spontaneous human combustion is no such thing. There are those among both supporters and critics of bundle theories of the self who believe that such accounts do not so much explain what we are, as explain us away. Just as the wick theory explains the appearance of spontaneous human combustion but denies its reality, so bundle theories explain why it is we believe ourselves to be individual persons who exist over time, but deny that any such beings really exist. This radical idea has a history that goes back to the first bundle theory of all: that of the Buddha.