Tags / 38 quotes from 6 sources
#unity
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Dennett's Cartesian Theater and multiple drafts
Dennett does not share the view that consciousness is decomposable. In other words, he thinks that our feeling that we have a unitary conscious experience is an illusion. He calls this feeling the “Cartesian Theater”—the place in the brain where all of the information…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Simple unity and composite unity
We may distinguish two types of unity or system , namely a Simple Unity or a Composite Unity. When we bring forth a Simple Unity we bring forth an entity characterised as separable from its domain of existence in terms of its properties. It is totally characterised by its…
Distinction
Any operation that we may enact which results in the separation of an entity from a background, i.e. which simultaneously distinguishes a unity in its domain of existence. Thus we see that the existence of all phenomena is brought forth through making the appropriate operations…
Composite unities have organization and structure; organization; identity
Composite unities have Organization and Structure. Organization refers to the manner of composition that defines the unity. Organisation refers only to the relations between components that must always be present so that the composite unity will be a unity of a particular type…
For any system there are four initial questions which we may ask:
(1) What type of System is it? How is it defined? (2) What is its Organisation and Structure ? (3) Am I interacting with it as a Simple or Composite unity? If I am in the domain in which the system is a simple unity, I interact with the system through its properties as a…
Composite unity; the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts"
With the composite unity we do something more. Firstly, we distinguish a simple unity and then we decompose it and separate its components and relations. In the Universe we would claim that the composite unity composed itself, independently of us and what we do. We would assume…
Lo Spirito del Giappone (Leonardo Vittorio Arena)
L'uno è uguale ai molti
L’uno è uguale ai molti, ed è diverso dai molti. Leibnitz non esprime altro nella Monadologia: ogni sostanza rappresenta tutte le altre e ne è rappresentata (§56).
In ogni momento c'è tutto il tempo
In ogni cosa si concentrano tutte le cose, in ogni momento c’è tutto il tempo. La pratica può cominciare solo con questa consapevolezza.11 È il principio fondamentale dell’estetica giapponese: la tazza da tè rappresenta il mondo intero. Ogni cosa rappresenta la totalità. È uno…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Grof's dual unity
THE NEXT MORNING I opened my copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious, laughing aloud at myself as I did so. Really, this is getting to be too much, I thought, thumbing through the pages . . . but there it was! Dual unity, Grof calls such moments, and they figure largely among…
Problems can only be transcended
For a moment I saw into the mind of God. Everything was equal—that was the secret. All creation was of a piece. Problems, and this was as clear as a bell, can never be solved, they can only be transcended. All you can do is step back into a larger and more inclusive frame; and…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
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…
An inner experiencer can't explain unity
You cannot explain the unity of experience by simply positing an inner, unified experiencer. That simply begs the question: how is unity of experience possible in the first place?
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 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.
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…
We don't miss what we can't access
Michael Gazzaniga explains one aspect of this when he discusses why it is that a split-brain patient ‘does not find one side of the brain missing the other’. His simple answer is that ‘we don’t miss what we no longer have access to’.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
Kant's transcendental unity of apperception
Cassam follows in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, who argued that for experience of the world to be possible, there has to be a fundamental unity within the subject of experience which allows the world to be perceived. Kant calls this the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’…
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,…
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…
Unity of agency needs stable intentions
No matter how jumbled my brain is in some ways, unity of agency only requires a reasonably stable set of intentions, and the ability to carry them through. By a combination of retrieval, reconstruction, adaptation and thinking anew, I am creating this book, and that has helped…
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…
My soul is not me
Aquinas, for instance, believed in the existence of immaterial souls but wrote, ‘Soul is not the whole human being, only part of one: my Soul is not me.’2 Little wonder that the future Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, could write nearly 800 years later: ‘We have…
Thesauri Of Historical Periods – A Proposal For Standardization.
Identity criteria for historical periods
Identity criteria are types of reported phenomena or the kinds of their observable traces that determine the unity and identify the cultural continuity of a period. We distinguish an instance of a period from another by a defining, unique property. By this property, any…