Tags / 191 quotes from 24 sources
#self
A Practical Guide to Mindfulness (Tessa Watt)
Befriending the person you already are
The kind of meditation we use in mindfulness training is not about going off into altered states, trying to get to some better place. It’s not about sitting in the lotus position in flowing white robes on a turquoise beach, as the advertising posters would have it – pleasant…
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Il vero cambiamento parte da noi stessi
Qui però parliamo di un altro cambiamento, e ho usato questi esempi solo per specificarlo. Il vero cambiamento, quello che interessa il downshifting, è fatto da noi stessi. E qui le doti di imprenditorialità di ognuno vengono al pettine. Non avendo mai ricevuto insegnamenti su…
La scuola non insegna a vivere
A scuola dovremmo già ragionare su quel che avverrà. Per tutta la vita saremo costretti ad affannarci per trovare un lavoro, fare soldi, garantirci le cose che ci servono e ci piacciono. Dovremo cercare il giusto work-life balance tentando di non farci fregare il posto di…
Non posti nuovi, ma occhi nuovi
«Per un vero viaggio di scoperta non occorrono posti nuovi, ma occhi nuovi», scriveva Marcel Proust. E credo avesse ragione. Chi fugge è invece convinto del contrario, e cioè che sta male dove sta per motivi esterni, ma che basti cambiare orizzonte premendo un tasto sul…
Il nemico è anche dentro di noi
Sta emergendo un fatto inatteso. Una vera sorpresa, non gradita: che il nemico non somiglia a quel che avevamo in mente e non è esattamente quello che pensavamo. Ammesso che ci fossimo fatti delle idee, sembra di capire che il nemico è sia il sistema fuori di noi, sia il nostro…
La palestra della solitudine
Nella solitudine si scoprono un mucchio di cose, per esempio che a fare questi esercizi non si muore, non ci si perde nulla, ma anzi, sulla Lat-Machine della solitudine si rinforzeranno i nostri pettorali dell’autosufficienza e dell’equilibrio.
Piccole occupazioni fatte con gioia
Un’occupazione minima, proprio minima, eppure fatta con gioia, con serenità, mettendo una buona musica di sottofondo, offrirà piccoli momenti di leggerezza e di gioia. Non solo: vi farà sentire molto più forti, sarete soddisfatti di voi stessi, incontrerete gli altri in modo…
Il male dell'epoca è la decadenza
Si dice spesso che nella società di oggi domina l’arroganza, la presunzione, l’eccesso di assertività. Non sono affatto d’accordo. Se siamo affetti da un male, tra i tanti, è la decadenza. Le uniche bandiere che vedo sventolare sono i guidoni del terrore, che schioccano su una…
La libertà è una barca già pagata
Bjorn Larsson rispose un giorno a una domanda su cosa fosse per lui la libertà: «La libertà è una barca già pagata, nessuno che ti saluta quando parti, nessuno che attenda il tuo arrivo dove stai andando». Sono persone che non hanno radici molto profonde, per mille ragioni, e…
L'avvenimento siamo noi
Attenzione, perché questo è uno dei limiti che troveremo lungo la strada: credere che non potete farcela, pensare che sia troppo per voi. Marguerite Yourcenar mette in bocca al suo personaggio Zenone una frase molto bella a riguardo: «L’avvenire è gravido di più occasioni di…
Il lavoro manuale e la perdita della poiesis
Nel work-life mix c’è anche un altro aspetto: l’attitudine al lavoro manuale. Consultate su questo punto l’interessante prospettiva del filosofo e sociologo americano Richard Sennet, che nel suo ultimo volume, L’uomo artigiano, rovescia il pregiudizio negativo sulla manualità e…
L'orgoglio di fare da sé
Quando compro un oggetto sono contento. Non era mio e ora lo è. Ma quando realizzo da me gran parte delle cose che mi servono, io sono ancora più contento, perché sono maledettamente orgoglioso di quello che ho fatto. Prima non c’era e adesso c’è. E l’ho fatto io. Mi ricordo un…
Stiamo poco con noi stessi
Il male di quest’epoca non è lo star poco insieme, non è comunicare poco, bensì il fatto che si sta poco con se stessi, e che dunque si comunica male. Sulla via dell’autenticità e della ricerca di senso c’è assai più il bisogno di riconnettersi con se stessi, ognuno con sé…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The self-model model of consciousness
The current thinking in AI is that consciousness is a self-model, which is a device (or mental model) that a machine or human uses to answer questions about how it interacts with the world. Dennett, for example, argues that the evolution of the self-model was driven by the…
LSD and ego dissolution
These drugs reliably induce states of altered consciousness, much like dreams or religious ecstasy. Daniel X. Freedman, a pioneer of psychedelic research on LSD, wrote that LSD enables “portentousness” of the mind, so that it can perceive more than it can tell, experience more…
The feeling of being separate from the world
This is in contrast to how we normally perceive the world; which is that the world exists outside of us and that we are separate from it.
Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina)
Introspection versus extrospection
These asymmetries originate from a phenomenon well established in the cognitive neurosciences. Any human behavior has many moving parts, roughly divisible into background and foreground elements. Background components involve our evolutionary history, genetic makeup, and fetal…
Core : Three Access Levels To Underpin Open Access
Green and gold open access
Apart from the growth of OA journals, providing so-‐called Gold OA, a cornerstone of the OA movement has been a process called self-‐archiving (Green OA). Self-‐archiving refers to the deposit of a preprint or postprint of a journal or conference article in an institutional…
Dio odia il Giappone (Douglas Coupland, M. Howatson and Anna Mioni)
Ogni momento di lucidità è anche tristezza
L’unica nota dolente di questa prima fase modaiola erano i lividi che mi ritrovavo sul torso a furia di picchiare contro i vetri. Ma anche quelli si rivelarono utili, perché le ragazze li vedevano e volevano curarmi. E forse mi hanno guarito davvero. Mi ricordo che ero al terzo…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Gli altri non esistono
“Non sei uno che ha bisogno di programmi, Piotr” ha detto lui. “Boh” ho detto. “Non lo so più, come sono. Almeno in questo momento.” “Ma di solito?” ha detto lui. “Come ti sembra di essere?” “Quello che penso di essere” ho detto. “Ma poi ogni tanto mi capita di vedermi dal di…
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are
We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are. In other words, the stories we tell about the things we take into our bodies reflect the stories we tell about our more mysterious selves. [...] This mirroring effect between substance and self…
Frbr: Object-oriented Definition And Mapping To Frbr-er (version 1.0.1)
Expressions (frbr)
This class comprises the immaterial realisations of individual works at a particular time that are regarded as a complete whole. The quality of wholeness reflects the intention of its creator that this expression should convey the concept of the work. Such a whole can in turn…
Golden Rule - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
The Golden Rule and the Silver Rule
The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a maxim, ethical code or morality that essentially states either of the following: (Positive form of Golden Rule): One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.[1] (Negative form of Golden Rule): One should not…
House Of Cards
Politicians
The identity of the next president of the United States is once again in the hands of a bunch of self serving, money-hungry, boot-licking, power-seeking politicians who can be seduced or sucker-punched or blackmailed into submission
In The Name Of Love | Jacobin
The do what you love mantra
There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Dio è ciò che sceglie di essere
Sperimentare pienamente la tua divinità vuol dire connetterti con la forza creatrice racchiusa in te. Dio è qualunque cosa scelga di essere. Tu sei quel potere diESSERE. La creazione non è esterna a te, è la tua esperienza di te stesso...
Nessuno può farti diventare ciò che non sei
Noi pensiamo sempre che sia qualcun altro a farci arrabbiare, qualcun altro a renderci depressi. Qualcun altro a farci diventare questo o quello. Nessuno puo' farti diventare qualcosa che non sei. Questo e' cio' che un uomo di comprensione arriva a capire: tutta la faccenda non…
La felicità come pace con sé stessi
La vera felicità è la pace con sé stessi. (Mario Monicelli)
Leielui (italian Edition) (de Carlo, Andrea)
Adattarsi all'altro fino a perdere se stessi
A pensarci in questa prospettiva le sembra di capire perché non si sente mai del tutto se stessa quando è con lui: dipende dalla sua determinazione iniziale a correggersi rispetto agli errori del passato, tagliare via le sue parti caratteriali difettose, essere una persona…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
Realizzare il Sé dimenticandolo
Ecco un altro spunto che il buddhismo giapponese farà proprio: studiare la Via del Buddha significa studiare il Sé. Il Sé è la base della rilettura nipponica del buddhismo: non se ne può fare a meno. Ciò non rinvia al soggettivo, bensì a una componente transpersonale…
Restare Buddha è più difficile che diventarlo
Voleva mostrare la superfluità delle prescrizioni buddhiste ai fini della liberazione. Con amara ironia affermava che una volta i grandi spiriti si trovavano nei monasteri, mentre ora ne prendevano le distanze. A suo avviso, i laici erano da preferire al clero. La pedofilia…
L'io si definisce in relazione all'altro
Si parla in modo diverso rivolgendosi a un proprio pari, un superiore, un subordinato o uno straniero. La gerarchia risponde, per grandi linee, a una esigenza confuciana. Ognuno deve stare al proprio posto: l’individuo scompare di fronte alle relazioni sociali. È la pedina di…
Tatemae, l'uomo di facciata
mente giapponese sembra vincolata all’elemento tatemae. Con questo termine si intende una posizione di facciata, un’attitudine ufficiale o pubblica contrapposta alla sfera privata del pensiero. Tatemae indica l’uomo sociale. Nei diversi periodi della storia del Giappone questa…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
The ghost in the machine
Each mind is an immortal soul. Bodies, as physical entities, are determined by the laws of physics; but minds have free will. Each of us as a self is identical with his or her mind. As living human beings we are composite entities, comprising both a mind and a body, but for…
Is my body essential to my identity
But is this body really essential to my identity? It seems at least possible to imagine that I might, like Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka, wake up in a completely different body. But if the same body is not what makes me me, then what does make me me? What is the relation…
Hume finds no experience of the self
Hume made devastating criticisms of the Cartesian account of the self and personal identity. There is no experience of the self, according to Hume; and the identity that we ascribe to ourselves through the changes in our lives is an entirely fictitious identity. It is a kind of…
Nishida Kitarō (stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy)
Self and other
Nishida maintains, the individual precisely as distinct entails a plurality of interrelated individuals. Where his previous analysis of individual self-awareness described it as a self- reflection of the universal of self-awareness, his description now incorporated the…
The world mirrors itself in everything
In a sense awareness is irreducible, but it has a logical structure that accounts for its connection to a world of objects. Structurally, awareness mirrors itself in itself, in a manner analogous to the way an infinite set mirrors itself in its equivalent subsets, or to the way…
Spiritual But Not Religious? You’re Not Alone | Life And Style | The Guardian
The self, spirituality and atheism
While denouncing religion in public, it turns out Harris spent years studying with gurus in India, going on meditation retreats, and using mind-expanding drugs to feel boundlessly at one with the universe. His new book, Waking Up, makes a powerful case that there’s no…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
An inner hunger for congruency and effectiveness
struggling with an inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and effectiveness and for healthy, growing relationships with other people.
Letting our son's personality emerge
We decided to relax and get out of his way and let his own personality emerge. We saw our natural role as being to affirm, enjoy, and value him. We also conscientiously worked on our motives and cultivated internal sources of security so that our own feelings of worth were not…
We see the world as we are
Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our…
Fromm on the automaton personality
In the words of Erich Fromm, an astute observer of the roots and fruits of the Personality Ethic: Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to…
Private victories precede public victories
The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others…
Private victory builds self-confidence
The net effect of opening the “gate of change” to the first three habits—the habits of Private Victory—will be significantly increased self-confidence.
Self-awareness is uniquely human
Think about the mood you are now in. Can you identify it? What are you feeling? How would you describe your present mental state? Now think for a minute about how your mind is working. Is it quick and alert? Do you sense that you are torn between doing this mental exercise and…
The social mirror distorts who we are
These visions are disjointed and out of proportion. They are often more projections than reflections, projecting the concerns and character weaknesses of people giving the input rather than accurately reflecting what we are. The reflection of the current social paradigm tells…
Covering up a mistake is a second mistake
But not to acknowledge a mistake, not to correct it and learn from it, is a mistake of a different order. It usually puts a person on a self-deceiving, self-justifying path, often involving rationalization (rational lies) to self and to others. This second mistake, this…
Making our honor greater than our moods
It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise—and keep it. Or we can set a goal—and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us…
Living scripts handed to us by others
In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle of Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family…
Rescripting ourselves
Because we already live with many scripts that have been handed to us, the process of writing our own script is actually more a process of “rescripting,” or paradigm shifting—of changing some of the basic paradigms that we already have. As we recognize the ineffective scripts…
Real success is victory over self
He records that he was almost loathe to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It’s not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.
Live out of imagination, not memory
Because I am self-aware, because I have imagination and conscience, I can examine my deepest values. I can realize that the script I’m living is not in harmony with those values, that my life is not the product of my own proactive design, but the result of the first creation I…
Security, guidance, wisdom and power
Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power. Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it. Guidance means your source of…
Everyone has a center
Each of us has a center, though we usually don’t recognize it as such. Neither do we recognize the all-encompassing effects of that center on every aspect of our lives.
Self-worth that fluctuates with status
If I’m in the presence of someone of greater net worth or fame or status, I feel inferior. If I’m in the presence of someone of lesser net worth or fame or status, I feel superior. My sense of self-worth constantly fluctuates. I don’t have any sense of constancy or anchorage or…
Self-centeredness stagnates like the Dead Sea
SELF-CENTEREDNESS. Perhaps the most common center today is the self. The most obvious form is selfishness, which violates the values of most people. But if we look closely at many of the popular approaches to growth and self-fulfillment, we often find self-centering at their…
Identifying your center
IDENTIFYING YOUR CENTER But where do you stand? What is at the center of your own life? Sometimes that isn’t easy to see. Perhaps the best way to identify your own center is to look closely at your life-support factors. If you can identify with one or more of the descriptions…
Roller coasting between centers
If you are... Self-Centered Security Your security is constantly changing and shifting. Guidance Your judgment criteria are: “If it feels good... “What I want.” “What I need.” “What’s in it for me?” Wisdom You view the world by how decisions, events, or circumstances will…
Centering life on correct principles
By centering our lives on correct principles, we create a solid foundation for development of the four life-support factors.
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Politics as psychopolitics
LOOKING BACK ON THAT time, what seems so incomprehensible is that we never took LSD more seriously. How was it we failed to grasp its importance? For the concept of deconditioning was at the heart of the New Left of the time. If any single feature set ’60s and ’70s radicalism…
Everyone you see is asleep
Personally, as a young Marxist, religion had always been anathema to me, and it was only because I was ill in bed and couldn’t find anything else to read that I opened Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, a book I had been sedulously avoiding for years. But the psychology I…
The Saturn Return
FOR ASTROLOGY THERE ARE two particularly critical junctures in the life of any individual, the first at the end of their twenties, and the second at the end of their fifties. Called the Saturn Return, these are the two occasions the planet Saturn completes its orbit around the…
Ego loss in the bath
Ego loss crept upon me without my even noticing. Several times, half-submerged amid mounds of foam sparkling like a Christmas tree, I realized I had completely forgotten who I was. Once I had to get a glass of water from the kitchen and wandered, dripping wet, through the…
Uncovering a buried sense of worthlessness
The session in which my personal story was to explode started in the same way as the others. Perhaps it was worse. Again I was twisting on the bed with the pressure building, until I thought I was going to burst. Never before had I seen nightmarish visions inside my head, but…
Advaita means not-two
Over the intervening years I had been surprised by the increasing number of people who were coming to feel the same way. Not only had Buddhism made steady inroads into Western culture, but so had the Indian tradition of Advaita Vedanta, of nondual philosophy. Probably Ramana…
God, the world and the self
Abruptly, almost with a pop, my mind cleared and I came back to myself. I was utterly calm and centered . . . ominously so. I felt I had acceded to a higher type of thought, something still in the process of evolution, and was thinking with a speed and urgency previously only…
The witness as pure consciousness
To what natural state will we revert? To the detached purely attentive consciousness, which has always registered everything we have ever experienced. To what Indian religion calls the witness—that is, the presence of consciousness itself in each individual. Pure consciousness…
Not-two with my underpants
When I came to I was standing beside the bath, with no recollection of how I had managed to get there. Nor did I have any idea what to do next. Drying myself proved impossible because I couldn’t figure out what was me and what was not. Perhaps hell has its own unio mystica. The…
Learning to read the story of my own life
It was during this time of abstention from acid that I first saw the drug was having an ongoing effect. Had I not been living such a placid and outwardly uneventful life, I doubt that I would have noticed, but the personal, biographical material, which I believed those last…
Overcompensation had made me a fool
All my life I had flaunted being a public school dropout, but now I saw that there was part of me that had wanted to go to university and to have lived a successful academic life. It was as though I had to think all the things about my life I had never allowed myself to think…
Life review and dissociation from the self
Somehow the acid had catalyzed a process that continued without further chemical action. Gradually this ongoing life-review began to bring about an increasing sense of dissociation from the self I had so blindly identified with. My life seemed to become ever more objective…
Religious experiences versus religious lives
Religious Import?” The text was well known and had been one of the most widely reprinted of all papers on psychedelics in the ’60s. Despite being in many ways unusually positive for an academic, Houston Smith had felt bound to draw a line under psychedelics, and his tentative…
Acid as an intelligent entity
No doubt it was reprehensibly primitive thinking, but I was beginning to find it difficult not to see acid as something akin to an intelligent entity, capable of autonomous action. Jung’s concept of “the Self ” was as close to making this intellectually acceptable as I could…
Drowning in collective pain
How come, I asked, you are so disgusted with yourself when you can’t even remember who you are? True, I had long forgotten who I was; let alone why I was so despicable. In a flash I understood that this was no longer my own pain. I had sunk through the bottom of personal…
Meltdown in God
As I write this, true recall of what I felt, the existential suchness of it, has gone. But like the other no-boundary states that summer, what I do remember perfectly is its overwhelming self-evidence. I was everything. It was as simple as that. Nor was this something I had…
Driving through myself
I LOOKED UP THE passage, the one I had remembered under the holly, from Suzanne Segal’s Collision with the Infinite: In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years…
I was everything
Turning a corner in the path, Step 4 struck with blinding clarity. I knew exactly what I was. I was everything. There was the same huge influx of energy as the previous summer. The same astonishment that all my life I could have overlooked the utterly obvious. The same roaring…
Nothing had been lost
I was leaving Judges Walk by a different route from the way I had come, down a tiny cul-de-sac. If you go that way the first thing you pass is a tall old red-brick wall, over the top of which you can glimpse some trees. At its foot were clumps of nettles, limp and dusty with…
Who are you?
Who are you? Ramana asked. Just that. Who are you? Find the quick of your sense of identity, of your most intimate sense of you-ness, and see what you consist of for yourself. “You are awareness,” he said. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no…
In the end there is only Grace
The bitterness and sense of betrayal (the recourse to smack or fundamentalist Buddhism) are totally in accord with Underhill’s descriptions of the Dark Night. For only true self-obliteration—the old medieval self-naughting—can leave us totally, unconditionally open for the…
The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)
Philosophy against the new sophistries
There has never been a more important time to emphasize this distinction between philosophy and sophistry. We are surrounded by countless new sophistries. Televangelists offer authoritative knowledge of the true word of God and perform miraculous cures in exchange for…
Against Hegel's westering as bestering
My approach is therefore deeply at odds with that of Hegel. I do not see the history of philosophy as the progressive logical unfolding of ‘Spirit’, which culminates in showing that it has its destiny in the Western philosophy of the present. This is ‘westering’ as ‘bestering’…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
The taboo of taboos: you’re it
But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or “pretending” to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it’s always the inspector. This, then…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Hume never catches himself without a perception
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound, etc. I never catch myself, distinct from some such perception. David…
The riddle of continuity in change
The central riddle I’ve set out to solve concerns the self’s continuity in change: how can we remain the same people over time, even as we change, sometimes considerably?
Selves are like paintings
The Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley once wrote, ‘Philosophers have raised a dust and then complain that they cannot see.’ The cloud that obscures our view of the self has been thickened by the trampling of psychologists, scientists, theologians and sociologists too. In…
A sudden disappearance of the personal self
‘In one moment, everything that I had ever taken to be my personal self completely disappeared,’ she later recalled. ‘It was just gone. As I waited for the bus to approach, something in consciousness was loosening somehow. And when it got there … this reference point of an “I”…
No centre of the self in the brain
The most important finding, which seems to be universally accepted by all researchers into the self and the brain, is that brain research has given up on the search for the pearl of self. As the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks put it to me, ‘We have this deep intuition…
Self assembled from many brain systems
So how does it all come together? It’s too soon to say that there is a definitive answer, but there are sufficient similarities between different researchers’ views to suggest that the outlines of an answer are in place. The central insight is that the sense of self is…
The self as a nested hierarchy
functionally, the self is indeed a nested hierarchy. This is because the higher functions of self, such as self-consciousness, are not independent of lower functions, such as basic awareness of…
Minimal self and autobiographical self
Different theorists use different descriptions, but most distinguish between what is variously called a ‘minimal’, ‘core’ or ‘implicit’ self and the ‘extended’ or ‘autobiographical’ self.8 The minimal self is the most primitive kind of self-awareness. Any creature which is able…
Foresight and the autobiographical self
As well as hindsight, foresight is a characteristic part of autobiographical selves. We can plan ahead with incomparably more sophistication than even the most cognitively advanced primates. Chimpanzees can at best anticipate only a few steps ahead;…
What neuroscientists agree on about the self
It would be misleading to suggest that neuroscientists speak with one voice on the self, but all the leading people in the field do seem to agree on a few key fundamentals: that higher functions of self build on and incorporate lower ones; that there is no part of the brain at…
Pathological cases shed light on ordinary selves
Broks has written eloquently about these issues, first in magazines and newspapers, and then in his book Into the Silent Land. His prose evokes the strangeness, mysteries and paradoxes of our experiences of self, usually starting from pathological cases, but using them to shine…
Spiritual selflessness as a freak pathology
The environment seems real but unfamiliar, but they know that they are. What is it that Descartes said? I know that I am, but what is this I that I know?’ This sounds very similar to Suzanne Segal’s far longer-term experience, and to the kind of state of selflessness that many…
Split brains and two centres of awareness
Because normally the corpus callosum allows the two hemispheres to communicate, this presents no practical difficulty for most people. But the corpus callosum had been severed in Sperry and Gazzaniga’s patients, so this information exchange could not occur. That meant that if…
The fragility of our seemingly essential selves
Writers like Oliver Sacks, Paul Broks and Todd Feinberg have vividly described numerous other strange cases, often with detailed neurological explanations. Reading them, one is struck by the fragility of what we take to be permanent, essential features of our selves.
The sense of a unified self is robust
Despite these enormous upheavals, ‘sense of self is generally pretty robust,’ says Broks. The split selves of the commissurotomy patients, for instance, only emerge in specific experimental conditions. In real life, they find ways of retaining a unified experience of the world…
A very persistent illusion
If the unified self is an illusion, it is a very persistent one.
Living as an ego theorist despite neuroscience
Broks says that, despite his intellectual convictions, he lives as a ‘soul theorist’ or ‘ego theorist’ who persists with the belief in a fixed core of self. ‘I think we probably all do, because that’s the way we’ve evolved biologically and sociologically to think and behave…
We are the same because we believe it
‘Physically we’re not the same, psychologically we’re not the same, genetically we’re the same but that doesn’t mean anything really; we may have certain patterns of brain organisation that predispose us temperamentally in certain ways, so we’re the same in that sense but then…
The story that keeps us together
Sense of self over time is therefore ‘the story that we tell ourselves that keeps us together.’
Belief in the enduring self as magical thinking
We may go through major transformations, not just brain injuries, but what psychologists call ‘emotional insult’, such as the break-up of relationships or a bereavement. ‘Are we the same people when we come through them? In some sense yes, in some sense no, but it seems we have…
Fragility is the strength of the self
So what could explain the strange combination of fragility and robustness that characterises the self? The answer is perhaps that the fragility is the strength. A pearl may be hard and distinct, but smash it and it’s utterly destroyed. A composite or amalgam, on the other hand…
Damasio: a changing self and a permanent self
Damasio believes that his view ‘resolves the apparent paradox identified by William James – that the self in our stream of consciousness changes continuously as it moves forward in time, even as we retain a sense that the self remains the same while our existence continues’…
The self is not a thing but a process
The fragility and robustness of the self is therefore no paradox, but another riddle that makes perfect sense when you understand enough about it. In short, the robustness of the self lies in the fact that it is not a thing at all, but a product of the complex interaction of…
A self flexible enough for constant renovation
This means that very few, if any, parts are critical to its existence, and so it can adapt to sometimes massive losses. However, self does still depend on that functioning brain, and the wrong kind of malfunction can dramatically change it or completely destroy it. To put it…
Mere constructs versus real constructions
idea of the self as a construction is one that many want to resist, because it seems to imply that it is not real. But of course constructions can be perfectly real. It is important to distinguish between ‘mere constructs’, which exist solely as ideas, and real constructions…
The limits of neuroscience for philosophy
The limits of what neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of self was made evident to me as I read more and more about how the brain constructs a sense of self. The findings I have reported here do seem to illuminate the issue, or at least shine a light different from…
No pearl at the heart of self
There are, however, two highly significant features of the self that scientific knowledge pulls into focus. Firstly it underlines very strongly the fact that there is no pearl at the heart of self. The apparent unity of self is the result of a highly organised play of parts…
Selective memory constructs the self
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that…
Knowing one's traits without personal memories
What seems clear is that H.M. did retain some sense of self. This is certainly the view Philip J. Hilts formed, having spent a long time with H.M. while writing his book Memory’s Ghost. This residual sense of self was a ‘sharply realistic’ idea of the kind of person H.M. was…
A man does not consist of memory alone
If there is a continuity of key character traits, there will be some, albeit a radically diminished, continuity of the self too. ‘A man does not consist of memory alone,’ wrote the psychologist A.R. Luria, ‘he has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral feeling – matters of which…
Dementia as peeling the onion to its core
This is closer to the view taken by Janet and her daughter Jackie, who run the care home where Linda is now a resident. Janet utterly rejects the common view that dementia is the slow death of the self. ‘I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so…
I am my baggage
it seems to me that a consistent set of personality traits is not a person. Janet’s metaphors seem to get it exactly wrong. I am my baggage. I am the layers that have grown on the onion, not the tiny core at the middle. We are precisely all the things we’ve accrued, the…
The soul as the pearl of self
However, there is one possible candidate for the pearl of self that we have so far ignored: the soul. Many people believe that a human being, in addition to having a physical body, also has a non-physical part which does not depend on oxygen and food and which can persist long…
Time to bury the immaterial soul
To switch metaphors, if the soil is not proving to be fertile, it is better to plant elsewhere than to continue in the hope that persistence will bear fruit. In all my years of reading and thinking about soul and self, I’ve yet to come across a single argument that is left…
Unity is the product of the self system
As has been suggested, but not yet fully explained, our unity is a product of various parts and processes working together. Unity is the product of the self system, it is not the basis of it. What this means, in broad terms, is that you, me and everyone else are in some sense…
A castle with eleven inhabitants
Once upon a time, in a castle on a large hill, there lived eleven strange, fractious individuals.
Robert Oxnam's eleven alters
The castle and all its inhabitants were contained within the head of one man: Robert B. Oxnam. Oxnam was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), more commonly, but anachronistically, known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In his account of his life with DID, A…
Dissociation as a coping mechanism
According to Smith, and many other DID experts, the vast majority of cases begin with severe childhood abuse. Dissociation is essentially a coping mechanism for tolerating the intolerable. In a strange way it is entirely rational. If you have the thought ‘this can’t be…
Multiple selves are possible in everyone
To put it in broader terms, the self is not a single thing, it is simply what the brain and body system does. If that’s so, then there is absolutely no reason in principle why the brain couldn’t do different things at different times. In that sense, as the philosopher Daniel…
From a singular I to a multiple we
The kind of extreme dissociation in DID may be rare, or even non-existent, but if the self lacks a fixed core and is flexible enough to in principle be multiple, then should we think of ourselves in ordinary life as having significant dimensions of multiplicity? Once the idea…
I contain multitudes
Although most people find the idea of multiple-personality disorder strange and alien, many, perhaps the majority, buy into a weaker idea of multiplicity. For instance, there is a reason why these lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ have become so widely quoted: Do I…
Postmodernism and the fragmented self
One of the most fashionable drivers behind the idea that we should all think of ourselves as multiple rather than singular is postmodernism. The nature of ‘postmodernism’ is hard to pin down, not least because it is in part a denial of the apparently old-fashioned idea that any…
The self constructed like a fiction
In their place we need a multiplicity of narratives, ones which capture the different, contradictory perspectives that people in different times and places have of the world. This analysis applies to the self as much as it does to anything else. The self has no immutable…
No fixed essence does not mean infinite narratives
it is true that the self has no fixed essence, that it is in part a construction and that the autobiographical narratives we tell ourselves invent an order and cohesion that real lives lack. But it is not good enough to revel in this in a kind of Dionysian frenzy. You have to…
Against the hyperbole of hyper-malleability
The hyperbole of hyper-malleability is refuted by the simple observation that human beings, postmodernists included, display a remarkable amount of continuity and unity, even though they have no fixed essence.
Not a character, just a mouthpiece for work
Nor did going to work require her to ‘get into character’, to become a different person. ‘It wasn’t really a character so much as just suppressing some things and bringing other things to the fore. It wasn’t really playing a character because it was me. I mean, I remember…
Too firm a sense of self fossilises you
‘I’d say if you have too healthy an appreciation for who you are, that leaves you open to fossilising yourself. Everything’s open to revision. I’m an atheist, but let’s face it, if there was a real God-created miracle out there right now, that would be open to revision. I’m not…
The fantasy of giving all of yourself
People have this fantasy of “I give 100 per cent of myself to the world, all the time.” And online they also have this fantasy of “when I choose to hide things about myself that’s completely…
Good Brooke and bad Brooke
‘My now obviously ex-boyfriend was very keen to represent me as though there was a good me and a bad me. Anything that I did that he liked – you know, I knit – that was good Brooke, and then if I behaved in a way he didn’t like that was bad Brooke, as if there were two of me…
A whole person has more than one side
To be a whole person is precisely to have depth and more than one side. This is why DID is a disorder rather than a fascinating, postmodern way to live: each alter does not actually…
Facets of a gem with nothing in the centre
it is true that we could talk of multiple selves or multi-faceted selves, but the former is just more truthful than the latter. She illustrates this with the analogy of the self as a gemstone. ‘If you accept the intuitive model, that of a many-faceted gem, a cut diamond…
The chariot exists but not apart from its parts
This is sometimes taken to mean that chariots do not exist, only their parts. But this is clearly nonsense. A cart is not an illusion just because it has no existence other than by the correct arrangement of its parts. The only thing that doesn’t exist is an object which is…
Multiplicity multiplies the mistake of reification
this is where I think talk of multiplicity repeats the error it is trying to correct. The problem with our intuitive sense of self is that it excessively ‘reifies’: it makes a singular thing out of it. Multiplicity does exactly the same, only at a lower level: making singular…
The singular self is still the better model
the singular self remains, for all its imperfections, a much better way of thinking about who we are than the hyperbolic claim that we are a multiplicity of selves. We are indeed less unified, coherent, consistent and enduring than we usually suppose, but we are still real and…
The social self
We been looking inwards, when perhaps all the time we should have been looking outwards. Is the key to identity to be found not in our minds, but in the social world? The idea that the self is ‘socially constructed’ has been rather in vogue in some intellectual circles for some…
When self-image and others' view diverge
First, it usually really matters to someone if there is a disconnect between how they see themselves and how others see them.
Middle-aged women disappear
A second, related way in which the social self matters is that if people are treated very differently depending on how they appear, that can change how they perceive themselves. ‘I’ve been finding that recently I’ve been learning to be unconfident,’ Jñanamitra told me. ‘I’m now…
Are we social constructions?
You can’t just live in your private reality. What this suggests is that, like the body, the social matters primarily for how it helps frame and shape our psychological sense of self. However, some claim that this way of putting it gets things precisely the wrong way round. It…
No real man behind the roles
if you take away all the roles, what is left of the so-called ‘real man within’? At almost every given time a man is in some kind of role, so if you strip these away, the real, inner man becomes the man only at times of solitude. This is not credible.
Self-knowledge needs the eyes of others
Many a person plays the role of great thinker when no one else is around to challenge their thoughts. The eyes of the world can force us to see ourselves as others see us. Alone, the image we may hold of ourselves may be no true reflection, but a flattering portrait produced by…
We are the sum of our roles
So the theatrical metaphor makes no sense if it posits the real self as the off-stage actor. The other interpretation is suggested by Jacques in As You Like It: that we are ‘merely players’. We are the sum of our roles, no more and no less.
No unedited self to present
since it makes no sense to talk about presenting an unedited, undirected self, it makes no sense to think of such presentations as
Mind is embodied and socially situated
any respectable theory will completely agree that mind is what it is because of how it is embodied and socially situated. To say that the social self matters to self-image therefore doesn’t undermine the idea we keep coming back to: our identity is essentially rooted in a…
Cultural variation in conceptions of self
There is, however, another argument for the social construction of self, based on the claim that notions of self vary enormously from culture to culture. And on the face of it, there does seem to be a lot of evidence that this is true. For instance, the philosopher Rom Harré…
Awareness of roles presupposes unity
the fact that the person acts and is treated differently depending on the social situation doesn’t threaten the fundamental unity which underlies those diverse roles. It could be argued that without an awareness of the different roles we play, we would be unable to fulfil them…
Four claims about the self
My argument so far supports four main claims: First, there is no thing or part of you which contains your essence. Your body, your brain and your memories are all very important for who you are, but none of these is the pearl of self in which your identity resides. Second, you…
Unified, material constructions
by themselves, these truths leave a lot of unanswered questions and problems. Together, they tell us we are unified, material constructions. Each one of these words is problematic. The degree to which we are unified is still vague. We say we are in some sense constructions, but…
The Ego Trick
you just are the collection of these thoughts, ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’.6 This is the heart of the Ego Trick. The trick is to create something…
The self is a function, not a substance
We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.
The systematic elusiveness of I
We do not observe the self in the same way that we observe the yellowness of a tulip, the smell of coffee or the thought that I really must book my train. The self is what is having those thoughts and perceptions – it is not itself a perception. And when you introspect, you…
Self-experience exists whether or not selves do
I may have to think of myself as having a unity over time, but that does not mean that I really have it. How we must think about things at certain times, for certain purposes, in certain ways, does not necessarily tells us about how they actually are. Kant recognised this: ‘The…
A singular self without a singular thing
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it. It…
Unity is an effect, not a cause
unity is not a cause: it is an effect of a remarkably disunified,…
No more than, but more than just, matter
The way I put it is that we are no more than, but more than just, matter. In other words, we are made up of nothing more than physical stuff, but to describe our true nature, you need more than just a physical vocabulary. You cannot fully describe what it is to be a person in…
The self as a verb dressed as a noun
It seems the only way to make sense of this is that mental events emerge from physical ones, without being strictly identical with them. As the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg puts it, ‘your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what your particular pack of cells collectively…
Ricoeur: selfhood is not sameness
Not all philosophers have suffered from this misapprehension, of course. The best, to my mind, are precisely those who manage both to be no less precise than necessary, but no more precise than is possible. Paul Ricoeur is a rare example of a philosopher who seems to appreciate…
Three central facts about ourselves
These are the three central facts about ourselves that we have to accept, if we believe that the Ego Trick has done its job and created unified individuals out of a bundle of mental, neural and physical activity. First, the unity of the self is psychological. Second, we are no…
Anattā, the Buddhist no-self
Like any other old and geographically dispersed belief system, Buddhism ceased to be a singular system of thought many centuries ago. It is therefore impossible to say what the Buddhist conception of the self is. Nevertheless, the central concept of anattā– traditionally…
Ātman and brahman
what is being negated in the word attā? To understand that, argues Batchelor, you have to appreciate the context of the Buddha’s time, fourth-century BCE India, where attā or ātman was very much the central idea of the brahmanic tradition. That tradition thought of brahman as…
Ātman as a depersonalised self
Ātman is a kind of depersonalised self, lacking individual personality and identity. So if ātman succeeds in becoming fully reintegrated with brahman, personhood is destroyed.
The Buddha rejected ātman as a fiction
According to Stephen Batchelor, ‘What the Buddha did was to reject that whole model altogether and declare that such an ātman effectively was a fiction, an illusion. So when he says anattā, he is rejecting the idea that there is an ātman, that there is a brahman, and focusing…
Wise people fashion themselves
Batchelor points to a very famous passage in the Dhammapada (verse 80), in which the Buddha says: ‘Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.’2 ‘In that usage,’ says Batchelor, ‘attā…
Illusory is only the idea of an unchanging self
the most coherent readings of its teachings on not-self are indeed remarkably congruent with more recent bundle theories. The self is not an illusion. What is illusory is an idea of self which sees it as an unchanging, immortal essence.
The five aggregates
Strip that away and you are left, in Buddhism, with the ‘five aggregates’: body, feelings, perception, mental formations and consciousness. The self, as Batchelor puts it, ‘is neither reducible to them nor can it be understood as existing independently of them.’ No more than…
The self is not what it seems
that is what the Buddha was saying – not that there’s no such thing as a self, because in many contexts he would say there is, but that the self is not what it seems to be.’
Dennett: the self as user illusion
The philosopher Daniel Dennett takes a similar line, calling the perception of a unitary controlling mind a ‘veridical illusion’. ‘It’s an illusion in the same way the desktop on your computer is an illusion,’ he told me. ‘There aren’t any little yellow files on your hard disc…
Ricoeur's great oscillation of the I
we must avoid what Paul Ricoeur called ‘the great oscillation that causes the “I” of the “I think” to appear, by turns, to be elevated inordinately to the heights of first truth and then cast down to the depths of a vast illusion’.
Hofstadter's marble in the envelopes
example of this given by Douglas Hofstadter, another writer who is keen to talk of illusions, describing the self as ‘a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn’t believe that it was perceiving a mirage’.6 He recounts an anecdote in which he pushed down on a pile of…
Stability without a core
‘There’s a stability and it’s actually like the stability of everything else in this world. It’s like the stability of the ship of Theseus. There’s no core of the ship of Theseus, but there are some parts that last longer than others and there’s an overall structure and if you…
The self is like a cloud
Perhaps the simplest analogy is with a cloud. From a distance it looks like an object with fairly clear edges, but the closer you get to it, the more indistinct it becomes. Get really close and you can see it’s just a collection of water droplets.
The solidity of self is the illusion
The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not. The Ego Trick is not to persuade us that we exist when we do not, but to make us believe we are more substantial and enduring than we really are. There may be an illusion as to what we really are, but not that we…
Agency unifies the self
agency is certainly something that is often missing from bundle accounts of the self. Just as there is no point in the brain where the self comes together, so there does not appear to be any one thing that unifies the self. Memory plays an important role, as can the creation of…
More than one way of being a self
Strawson’s counter points to what is perhaps the most important consequence of the bundle view. If the self is not a concrete, singular, stable thing, then we should not expect there to be only one way of being a self.
Bundles tied tighter and looser
If that’s right, then virtually every theory of self and personal identity has inevitably gone wrong, because they have sought a description of selves which neatly fits all cases. But bundles can be tied together differently, more tightly and more loosely. This does not mean…
Episodics and diachronics
Strawson is perhaps best known for his articulation of one such axis of variability in persons, between short- and long-termers, or what he calls episodics and diachronics. ‘Here what I think you find is that people fall along a spectrum,’ he told me. ‘At one end of the…
No narrative sense of self
He has a sense of his self, but he doesn’t identify this with this persisting human animal. He’s relatively indifferent to its past and future, and this is temperamental, it’s not philosophical. ‘I found these things in my diaries saying things like “I have no narrative sense…
Buddhist reincarnation versus no-self
I have found Buddhist philosophy to be a rich intellectual tradition. Yet its often profoundly rational thought sits alongside other ideas which seem to be no more than outdated superstitions. Conceptions of self are a case in point. Like many, I have been struck by the…
Reincarnation is not survival of the self
Akong and Ringu’s lack of any felt connection with their previous incarnations, the absence of any clear evidence that someone even is a reincarnation, and the no-self doctrine of anattā: all these suggest that, whatever reincarnation is supposed to be, it is not about the…
No distinction between self and other
Akong’s explanation starts with the assertion that on the Buddhist view of ultimate reality, there is no distinction between self and other. ‘Each individual is part of everybody,’ he tells me. ‘We are all the same mind, part of the same thing. We are not divided.’ How is it…
Buildings around the same emptiness
Akong offers a better explanation of what might survive death by use of an analogy. Ultimate reality is like an empty space. Individuals are like buildings occupying a part of this space. The end of a life is like the demolishing of a building, but then we build another – our…
Describing, not criticising, Buddhist claims
Reincarnation in the context of anattā, even if it takes place, is certainly nothing like survival of the self in any ordinary sense – and that is not in itself a criticism of Buddhism, but simply a description of its claims.
Different connections, different kinds of self
Where Greenfield gets a little more speculative is when she imagines the variations in types of selves which might emerge if different kinds of connections become dominant.
Someones and Anyones
a quite useful way of simplifying three forms of subjective experience. The first she calls the ‘Someone’ scenario, which is the normal case of ‘you being different from someone else’. This is how we almost all, almost always, feel ourselves to be. ‘In brain terms, the Someone…
Being Nobody: losing the self in ecstasy
We also sometimes live life under the third scenario, as Nobodies. ‘Human beings have stalked this planet for 100,000 years, [and] we have from time to time indulged in wine, women and song; or, drugs and sex and rock and roll, the modern equivalent. There are moments in most…
The future is Nobody's
Greenfield’s worry is that the future is Nobody’s.
Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney)
Trust versus mistrust
Erikson’s first stage of psychosocial development, which takes place during the first year of life, is trust versus mistrust. Babies’ task during this time is to develop a sense of trust in themselves, in other people, and in the world around them. Erikson wrote about trust as…
Autonomy versus shame and doubt
Erikson’s second stage of psychosocial development, which takes place during the second and third year of life, is autonomy versus shame and doubt. The developmental task of this stage is to acquire a sense of autonomy (independence) without suffering extremes of shame and…