Mental Clarity; or How to Read Reality Accurately

I haven't downvoted this because it's already at -7 and that seems low enough, but: to my mind the (closely related) two worst things about this article are (1) that it says almost nothing -- "How to read reality accurately? Just practice the accurate reading of what's going on." and (2) that the great majority of it is taken up with rhetoric: rah-rah, truth is good, self-deceit is bad, yay for being right, boo to being wrong. The only part of the content that isn't obvious to more or less the entire human race is the observation that people are often irrational and don't check their models of the world carefully against reality. For sure, there's an audience that needs to hear that, but I doubt it overlaps much with people reading the discussion section of Less Wrong.

I thought this was a decent, if unexceptional, statement of the principle that anyone interested in reality should learn to pay attention to reality. But then I looked up your blogs and found that you're one of those people pushing the idea that "there is no self". All this talk about paying attention is just a step towards the real goal here - to pass on the perspective that "There is no me. There isn't a you either."

When I read statements like that, sometimes l feel like punching the author in the face. Or I feel like I need to vomit out what they have written. I want to say that this is a lie whose magnitude is unbelievable. But that would be going too far; this isn't a lie in the sense of a cynical statement whose author doesn't believe it. It's just a mistake. But something about it strikes me as amazingly pernicious. It's like a recipe for being unable to think correctly; the ultimate wrong assumption.

Earlier today I happened to visit the blog of LW contributor "Grognor"; and found a recent post by him called "You Do Not Exist". So I left a comment there too, berating this attitude. But I also remarked that contemporary assertions of the belief that there is no self tend to come in two forms, a "Buddhist" form and a "reductionist" form. The reductionists deny that there is a self because they believe in an atomistic universe and there are no "selves" in a place like that, just atoms. The neo-Buddhists take a Humean, phenomenological approach, and say, where is this self, show it to me, it's not there; there are experiences, but no "self" experiencing them.

Grognor is clearly in the reductionist camp, though he does also appeal to experimental evidence that people have false beliefs about themselves and their psychological causality. You are just as clearly in what I call the neo-Buddhist camp, though neo-Buddhist deniers of the self will sometimes assert a basic materialist perspective by saying e.g. there's no person there, just a body and a brain and a world, or something of that nature. So there is some crossover. Nonetheless, the two forms of anti-self-ism have distinct origins: reductionism comes from science and from a drive to see reality as it is, neo-Buddhism from a drive to end suffering. Psychological suffering (as opposed to sensory pain) is supposed to derive from attachment to the existence of the nonexistent self - that is the usual premise.

I understand why the reductionists deny selves - they are just trying to live the implications of their ontological beliefs, and scientific culture shows many other examples in which ontologically inconvenient aspects of experienced reality are denied, in order to preserve the belief that one's favorite scientific ontology is the whole truth about reality. The motivation of neo-Buddhists is more exotic to me - if they aren't clinging to a particular scientific doctrine, why on earth would they deny their own existence? But I think it must come back to the promised payoff, an end to personal suffering. It can be painful to not get what you want, and life is all about not getting what you want. Believing that you are not really there is somehow instrumental in weakening desire, and hence in attenuating the suffering that comes from desire denied by reality.

The critique of reductionist denial of self has two fronts. One may question it phenomenologically, and one may attempt to show that the scientific ontology which appears to be inconsistent with the existence of a self need not be the last word. Similarly, I would attack the neo-Buddhist denial of self on two fronts: I would challenge the argument that the self is nowhere to be seen or that it is possible to make sense of experience without an experiencer, and I would also call in question the very desirability of the psychological payoff that apparently supplies the appeal of the neo-Buddhist outlook.

I've often written on this site, without much success, against the various denials of reality motivated by adherence to a particular scientific ontology, and about alternative physical ontologies friendlier to the existence of a self. Articulating the exact positive phenomenological basis of belief in a self is also hard. On your blog, for example, you say that what seems to be a sense of self is actually a sense that an intention is at work. This is an attack on the notion of self from within the universe of psychological concepts. In strict physicalism, there is no such thing as an "intention". On the other hand, it is an everyday concept in "folk psychology", the informal understanding of everything mental that most of us share; but in that universe, every intention is someone's intention, it's always associated with a person. By saying that there can be an intention without a self or a person, you are ripping the concept of intention out of its original context and attempting to do without that context.

This analysis at least exposes what's at work behind the bland assertion that what one senses is only an intention and not a self as such. But it still doesn't say what is the phenomenologically and epistemologically correct approach to the existence of the self. Is the principal evidence for the self to be seen in the "unity of experience" - a reflective perception that the instantaneously perceived world is perceived as a single gestalt ("apperception") - the existence of this gestalt then being interpreted as an aspect of the existence of a self that perceives? Or is there sometimes a direct awareness that there is a perceiver and not just a perceived world? Such a direct sense isn't always present, but I do believe it's present sometimes... It's the knowledge that I still can't give a crisp and rigorous phenomenological rebuttal to the purveyors of no-self which accounts for some of the venom of my reaction to them - they're out there and I can't just efficiently shoot them down as they peddle their sophistries and superficial phenomenological analyses; I can only complain mightily and hope that I thereby keep a few people in touch with the hard-to-pin-down-in-words, yet plain-as-day, knowledge of their own existence as perceivers and as agents.

How about the supposed benefits of no longer believing that you exist? There is some genuine freedom to be obtained, not by believing that you don't exist, but by questioning attachments which may form a part of your "identity" in the broad sense. But this is mostly a matter of being attached to a belief or a desire. You can let go of something like that without espousing the ostentatious and metaphysically perverse line that "I don't exist". Similarly, it is possible to obtain philosophical distance from the disappointments of life just by being less self-involved; you shouldn't have to completely erase yourself from the ledger of Being in order to do that.

I would also take the critique further and question the general desirability of detaching oneself from beliefs and desires in favor of going with the flow. If a person is interested in exceptional achievement, this is certainly the last thing they should do; you should abandon a desire only if you have a way of transcending it for something more important, not just because abandoning it will lead to a life of greater ease or of happy indifference; that's my advice, not for everyone, but for people who think they have a destiny to catch. For someone like that, it's important to cultivate an identity, a sense of who you are, consistent with the purpose you have set yourself, because the more distinctive and original that purpose is, the less reinforcement the external world will provide you in pursuing it. So the reinforcement has to come from within, which is why it becomes important to remind yourself that part of who you are is "the person trying to achieve X". See Celia Green's writing on psychological "centralisation" for more on this topic.

This is an advertisement for your new web page, am I right?

put more simply many people have looked at this stuff so very deeply and critically and accumulated so much debate and literature and paradigms - some people will know a fair bit about what philosophers, sociologists of science, anthropologists, psychologists, scientists etc etc have said, written and argued in this area. it's complex stuff. it doesn't lend itself well to a pseudo-intellectual platitude format.

trying to think of nice ways to say what i want to say. for me i'm afraid this is glaringly full of holes - misunderstanding about the nature of the brain, of knowledge and ways of knowing, of the way we organisation information let alone getting into the more anthropological side of what we actually see - literally how our conditioning literally even effects 'what' we see.

it reads like teeny pop psych trying to sound like science or spirituality whilst not having enough knowledge or maturity/experience to do so and whilst massively underestimating one's audience.

IF you are genuinely interested in this stuff i would recommend learning about comparative epistemologies - go through all the phases and ideas about how we 'know', what is truth etc and have a grasp of what eons of very clever people at different points in history have had to say about it. i'd also recommend some anthropology.

this is just really full of holes, sorry.