by Jay Garfield
di baca maybe around waktu mulai libur sekitar mei sampe 31 Juli 2022.
highlight and notes
But I will argue that we exist not as selves, but as persons
this is the goal of this book
the view of the self that he took as the object of negation in his argument (an argument we will explore in chapter 2) is the view that to be sentient being is to be an atman. This term is usually and appropriately translated into english as self or soul.
this is the self that we want to negate. the self that define itself as some kind of a soul, persisting across time and space, existing in another domain
They also argue that the self is necessary in order to explain the possibility of memory: my remembering today what I did yesterday requires that the subject of the remembered experience and the subject of the memory are identical.
this is an argument for the existence of self
they argue that it is necessary in order to account for moral desert, since the one who is to be praised or blamed for any action must be identical to the agent of that action. Our minds and bodies, they concede, change from day to day, violating the condition of identity. So, neither mind nor body, they conclude, is a candidate for the self; the self must be something that stands behind both mind and body as the locus of our identity.
this is an argument for the existence of self(as some kind of a soul, again that’s the self we are trying to tackle)
the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self.
the things he tried to do, that we don’t need self. those argument doesn’t lead to self. In my kindle I wrote, “a subtask he try to achieve”. tapi keknya ini main task deh.
The psyche, like the atman, is held to be distinct from and to be the possessor of the mind and body; the subject of knowledge; the agent of action; the object of moral approbation or disapprobation; and the enjoyer of sufferer of reward and punishment
this is the responsibility(atau hak maybe?) of a self
I will use the word self to only refer to this kind of self, reserving the word person to denote the complex, constructed, socially embedded psychophysical complexes in which I will argue we really consist.
there is a definition of person in that quote
The philosopher Jonardon Ganeri correctly emphasizes that when we deny that there is a self in this sense, we are not re-identifying the self with the body and the mind (there is no self; just a body; or just a mind); nor are we saying that the self really is the mind-body complex. We are denying that anything answers to the definition of a self.
in my note, I wrote, “I don’t understand”
My best guess right now is that the definition self, is wrong. well it means that the self is wrong
diachronic identity-identity over time.
new diction
synchronic identity, or identity at a single time.
another new diction
both diction above is the issue yang harus di miliki oleh sebuah identity. it has to be distinctive at a single time with any other identity, but the same across time with that particular identity. so the person has to be able to tackle this requirement
tackling the synchronic identity
primarily, by the fact that we have a convention of talking that way. kita nganggep something to be something(misal, this group of atom to be ‘a chair’) is because we have a convention of talking that way. there’s no alesan lain. karena emang kita menyebut that group of atoms as chair. not because of something else.
this is conventional existance.
tackling the diachronic identity
It seems like the right thing to say is that the identity and continuity of the flame are constituted in part by causal continuity, in part by common function, but in the end primarily by the fact that we have a convention of talking that way.
and we have a convention of calling distinct members of such sequences by the same name. So, in one obvious sense, I am not identical to the person called by my name yesterday. We are alike, causally related, but numerically distinct. In another sense, though, we are alike, we are the same person. We share a name, many properties, a causal history, and a social role; and that, while not involving a self, is enough.
I am still me across different time, I have the same diachronic identity, because that’s our convention.
we can make sense both of synchronic identity (the chariot) and diachronic identity (the flame) in the absence of anything like the self.
yaa kesimpulan ae.
we are, on this view, causally and cognitively open continua of psychophysical process.
hem, this is another way of seeing the ‘conventional existence’. ini keknya ngespesifikin conventional existence e.
Candrakirti argues that we are not selves, but persons. And this person, he argues, is neither identical to nor different from the psychophysical processes; but unlike the self, which is supposed to be an independently existent entity, there is no reason to believe that a person needs to exist in one of these ways. It is instead a socially constructed designation, posited on the bases of those processes, but not reducibly to them.
Person is a socially constructed designation, posited on the bases of psychophysical processes, but not reduceable to those processes.
conventional existence = socially constructed designation
a chair to it’s atom is analogue to a person to it’s psychophysical processes
he thinks that when we used the word self, we use it in roughly the way I characterized its use in chapter 1, this core that is neither identical with the mind nor with the body, but which possesses mind and body.
again diulang lagi, this is the self which we don’t have.
we might ask, “Is this the same church that was founded decades ago, or a different one?” The parishioners are different; the minister is different; the bodies in the churchyard are different; the building is different. Nonetheless, since it makes sense to say, “This church is fifty years old, “ in the most important sense, the church remain the same. So, while it is not some entity different from its parishioners, minister, building, etc., nor is it identical to them, it exists conventionally, and that is enough for it to be real, functioning church. One again, just so for persons.
This is his answer to the ship of Theseus
The idea is this: People instinctively regard themselves as selves in a very specific sense: they take themselves to persist through time as numerically identical subjects and agents, distinct from their minds, bodies, experiences, and traits. They do so even though they acknowledge that these minds, bodies, experiences, and traits are constantly changing and that they are only contingently connected to their selves. This is to say that people reflexively locate their identity not in their psychophysical characteristics, but in this hypostasized self. That is the serpent in the wall, and that is the target of Hume’s and Candrakirti’s respective analyses. Neither of these two arguments suggests that we are nonexistent, any more than they suggest that chariots and churches are nonexistent; each instead addresses our mode of existence. That is each suggests that it is irrational to claim that we exist as selves while affirming that we exist as persons.
we have encountered four principle conceptual ingredients to the idea of self: priority, unity, subject-object duality, and agency.
when we think of ourselves as selves, we assume that our existence is independent of that of our objects, and that we know ourselves more directly, more clearly, more immediately than we know other objects. That is, when I think of myself as a self, I can imagine that even if the entire world outside of me disappeared, I could remain as a center of subjectivity. I take my self to be the basis of my ability to experience the world, not as a part of the world.
pantes ada afraid of death
The cartesian Theatre
The world we experience is instead, as philosophers since Vasubandhu in India and Kant in Europe have recognized, a cognitive construction, and its independence of our sensory and cognitive faculties as a reality to be detected and reproduced in consciousness is an illusion.
Nor is our subjectivity independent of this construction of a world of objects awareness. Our subjectivity is not a blank screen or a clear mirror waiting for objects to impinge. It is not a bare awareness or pure subjectivity, waiting for an object to turn up.
gaisa bedain 😟
ini quote lanjutan persis abis yg atas
instead, subjectivity is always the awareness of those objects, including both the objects we experience as external to our minds, such as trees and turtles, and those we experience as internal, such as hopes and headaches. So, our awareness of the objects we encounter—while it might present itself to naïve introspection as te experience of something other, dually related to ourselves—is in fact our nondual embeddedness in a world which we are a part
To my mind, that natural attitude of taking ourselves to be selves is a symptom of a profound instinct for self-alienation, and is the deepest form of what Buddhist philosophers call primal confusion.
we are collections of collections of processes, not unities; we are more like hives that bees in that respect.
(The) word person.
The termderives from the Latin persona, literally denoting a mask of the kind worn in the theatre, and metonymically denoting a role.
To be a person is to play a role; the person you are is constituted by the multiple roles you play, including family roles, professionals roles, roles in network of friends, and political roles.
the words fact and fiction are cognate, sharing the Latin root fingere-to make, or to fashion. Fictions create facts.
The point of this analogy is thus that to be a person is to be something like Hamlet, not to be like the actor playing Hamlet. Hamlet requires an actor to be instantiated-to be brought to life on the stage-as well as a literary context and a set of theatrical conventions that enable that instantiation or enlivening. In the same sense, we require bodies and collections of psychophysical processes to bring us to life on the stages in which we fret and strut our particular hours (to mix Shakespearean plays) as well as a social context and set of conventions that enable us to be recognized not merely as live human bodies, but as persons among persons. To the extent that we are single characters over our lifetime, we are, like Hamlet, played by a succession of actors: an infant; a toddler; a schoolchild; finally, with any luck, an elder.
our identity is constituted as well by the countless other dramatis personae in the play that is our lives, who together bring into exitance the context in which our own roles make any sense.
I think this is the important part. recognizing that I am molded by all the that has happen to me.
nor is the identity that transcends all of that difference constituted by our being identical with those institutions, relations, narratives, and embodiment. Rather it emerges from them, as a conceptual construct that they undergird, but which is neither identical to them nor reducible to them.
we were wrong initially abut the nature of the self—that it is not an essential core, subject, agent, etc., but instead this high-level conceptual construction?
The self is taken to be preexistent, primordial, unitary, and transcendent of the world of objects, independent of body, mind, and social context. The person is constructed; the person is dependent on the psychophysical and social network in which it is realized; the person is complex, embodied and embedded.
interdependence is a fact of life; and our identity as persons is a consequence of that interdependence, for good or for ill.
So, while the cogito argument and its dialectical kin may demonstrate that we exist—again, at least at certain moments—they do nothing to demonstrate the kind of existence we enjoy, and in particular that we are selves, as opposed to persons.
one might argue that the world is not as perfect as it is made out to be (in that it contains a lot of suffering, for instance, or cases of really bad engineering, such as human knees),
lol
I quote that just because kinda funny
empirical ego
basically soul
If I watch a person, dancing, I experience color, shape, sound, perhaps smell, and texture if I am close enough, and I am aware of all of this changing over time.
well if you can feel texture, that is too close to just be called ‘watching’ man
The fact that the field and the objects in it are experienced in introspection as unified does not entail that this unity is achieved by a unified subject of consciousness, any more than the fact a legislator passes a single bill entails that there is a single legislator, no more than the fact that a student earn a single degree entails that she taught only by a single teacher. It entails only that there is a set of processes robust and integrated enough to create a single manifold of experience. An organism may be necessary for this task, but not a self.
basically his answer kalo ditanyain ‘then what about this feeling of subjectivity in my blank screen of consciousness’. it just feeling.
still feels hard to grasp
a unified building does not presuppose a unified builder, nor does a single act of Congress presuppose a single legislator as its author, nor does a single graduate presuppose a single teacher. So, a unified filed of experience cannot be assumed to presuppose a self.
beating a dead horse here. same argument as the above.
He argues that our cognitive architecture reflexively creates what he calls a phenomenal self model, that is, a complex representation of a self. That model includes representations of our body, of our current sensory state, of our cognitive processes, and of our orientation to the world, as well as representations of our relation to the past and the future. It represents us as agents, as centers of experience, and as extended in time and in space. And this representation induces a first-person perspective on our experience through our identification with it. That model may have some value: it may help us to orient ourself in space and time, for instance.
this means that representing oneself as an agent, a subject, can be thought as a tool.
But that kind of identity, like the kind of institutional identity presupposed by institutional memory and anticipation, does not presuppose the identity of a self that persists through all of the changes **I suffer over that decade; it only presupposes psychophysical causal connectedness, that is, the identity and persistence of a *person*.
In each case, the only identity that follows from the premises—the only identity that is required to explain our experience—is personal identity, not the numerical identity of an enduring self.
Ga terlalu paham. Yang au dapet itu, bandingno mbe institusi ato benda mati ae. Mereka has the properties yang berusaha kita jelasin tanpa membutuhkan self.
To say that awareness is necessarily the property of a subject of awareness, while perhaps seeming to be an innocent grammatical point, in fact commits the very fallacy of reification that we addressed in chapter 2. That is the fallacy of going from the mere fact of awareness to the existence of a subject of awareness. To draw this inference is kind of like going from the claim that it is raining to the claim that there is something that is the agent of raining, that is doing the raining.
this argument is question-begging because, as we saw in the context of our discussion of Descartes’s argument in chapter 2, awareness can be the result of the cooperation of a number of psychophysical processes, and it can consist in a number of relations between aspects of a person and aspects of their environments. Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present—a person can be aware—without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or a corporation can act without there being any singular entity that performs that action.
what is awareness. this is his answer
now, we might say that if there is awareness, something is aware, e.g., a person, just as we can say that when a corporation sells a product, something, e.g., the corporation, is the seller. But it is plain in that case that we do not thereby implicate a localizable single thing that is a subject or an agent, only a broad set of processes and events. So even if we grant that awareness always has a subject-object structure, the defender of the reality of the self is not entitled to the premise that the subject is singular, and so cannot presume that it is a self.
it makes a great deal of biological psychological, and ecological sense instead to think of awareness as a constant modulation of the open interaction between an organism and its environment, of the adjustment of the state of the organism and attunement of the posture and goals of the organism as its senses and movements interact with the world it inhabits.
his explanation of awareness
embedded, embodied, enactive
he make a great deal about this. maybe its a good summary for him, but I can’t wrap my head around it yet.
it is one thing to say that we habitually thematize our experience through the framework of subject-object duality, at least when we are introspective, and another to say that we simply find that duality in experience itself.
he grants self as an illusion. not as reality
how memory works; it is not re-representation of a preserved experience stored and then reexamined when called to mind. Instead, it is a reconstruction of the past, or, in other words, a cognitive fabrication. Successful memory is not the careful preservation of an image, newsreel, or text in the mind, but rather a successful reconstruction of a past event.
what is memory according to him
innate self-grasping is harder. That powerful conviction that we are really selves arises not through careful reasoning, like that we have been discussing in this chapter, but instead because the illusion is so irresistible. We simply feel like selves. That is like seeing the mirage. No matter how much reasoning one offers a desert traveler, and no matter how much that person accepts that the experience is illusory, that experience and the illusion persist. The only way to eliminate that pre-reflective sense that there must be water there is to put on polarizing sunglasses: that is, to effect a deep transformation in the way we perceive the world.
When performing as a virtuoso, one is in what psychologist call a “flow” state. In such a state, one experience one’s action as spontaneous, not as planned or calculated; one’s own body, cognitive states, and the object around one are not object of reflective awareness.
This reminds us of another aspect of the nonduality of our experience. We don not exist outside of our environment, perceiving it as a subject, acting on it as agent; we are nondually immersed in it, with no clear boundary between ourselves and everything else.
even when their attention is fully controlled and no longer automated, that attention is completely absorbed in their task, not in their own agency.
when we are completely immersed in activity—whether the physical activity of carving an ox or the cognitive activity of thinking about how best to carve that ox—our sense of self, and with it, the experience of duality of subject and object in experience, vanish.
Novices who attend carefully to their own performance do much better at tasks such as putting in golf than do those who are distracted; self-conscious attention facilitates performance and learning.
This is why sport psychologists working with expert athletes often prescribe listening to music or some other distractor to remove attention from oneself, and so to deal with this problem.
an argument for the existence of background music
so, attention to what we take to be the self and to its activities—what we take to be self-awareness—has at best a limited utility, and even this explicit self-directed attention makes sense only in the context of a pervasive background of selfless attention to the world.
While it might sometimes be useful to think in dualistic terms, to do so without awareness of the artificial, cognitive origin of that structure is to fail in self-understanding.
so it is a tool
Heidegger has a nice way of putting this. He distinguishes between two different ways that the stuff of our world can show up for us in awareness. A thing may be part of my world in virtue of being ready to hand (Zuhandenheit) or it may be an object in my world in virtue of being present to hand (Vorhandenheit). When something is ready to hand, I don’t notice it as an object, or stand to it as subject to object. It is very much a part of immersed action, and not distinguished in awareness from me, the agent. As I am typing these words, my keyboard is like that; like Ding’s knife, it is experienced as an extension of myself, a tool that is seamlessly integrated with my thinking and my fingers. My fingers are also ready to hand. I don’t think of them as object, but rather as part of my agency, again reflecting the porosity of the boundary between person and environment.
When we are immersed in action, our conscious perspective includes that of the equipment through which we engage, just as a blind person experience her point of contact with the world at the end of a cane. Keeping this in mind helps to reinforce the idea that the imagination of the self is context-specific, and always a construction, not a discovery.
counterbalance to those very attitudes and relations. As Kant pointed out, if morality merely tracks my desires and preferences, it is no morality at all.
morality ≠ desire + preference
persons-as beings who come into existence in open causal interaction with the rest of the world, and whose identity is constituted by the collectively composed narrative in which we are dramatis personae.
An attitude of friendliness is one in which we wish well for others and strive to benefit them.
definition
to be caring is to act to alleviate others’ pain and suffering.
definition
sympathetic jo is the ability to take pleasure in the success of others.
definition
To be impartial is to adopt the same moral attitude, and to extend the same level of friendship, care, and sympathetic joy to all in one’s environment, regardless of their relation to oneself, regardless of whether one sees them as close to one, or distant, supportive or hostile. it is to forego both revenge and partiality.
the self-instinct and the free will instinct are hence two sides of the same coin.
what a conclusion. but I could not see how it came to be, maybe this,
planning feels like subject-object action, that is the self illusion. it also feels like you are an agent who freely control the output, and that is the illusion of free will.
We can only understand persons if we take a multidimensional perspective that takes all of these levels of description and their complex interactions into account.
to regard ourselves as selfless person is not to denigrate but to make sense of our reality, and to recognize that our lives are only possible and can only have meaning in the context of a world
we are essentially social animals, or, as Bernard Mandeville(1670-1733) would have it, complicated bees.
Narrative is perhaps the most important vehicle for achieving self-understanding.
we are constituted as characters through the telling of a story; we are absolutely real within the bounds of that story; we are created, not discovered; and we have no reality at all outside of the context of the stories in which we figure.
the roles we play are neccesarily instantiated by biologically real creatures. We, unlike literary persons, are embodied, embedded, and enactive **in our world.
For on this model, our understanding of our own minds and of those of others arises not from the discovery of primordial facts, but instead from acts of interpretation.
That is, moral valuation depends on seeing one another as together in a shared world. This does not require that we agree about everything, or that our projects are the same. We can respect and honor those with whom we share little the way of beliefs, values, or way of life.
For if the projects in which we see ourselves as agents—the project of life—is sufficient to give meaning to our own lives, it also sufficient to give meaning to those others who join us in that project.
He argues that we can only cultivate attitudes of friendliness and care for others when we are able to project ourselves imaginatively into their situations, when we can regard others as our mothers, when we recognize our thoroughgoing interdependence with them, and when we abandon the fantasy that we and they are the agents of independent, free action. When we do so, he argues, we come to see that suffering is bad not because it is ours, but because it is bad, per se, not matter who it is, and that happiness is good not just when it is ours, but wherever it arises.
we see one another as persons who share a world pregnant with meaning—meaning that we collectively create, and which in turn shapes our lives.
To see ourselves as interacting persons allow us to consider the causes and reasons for our own behaviour and attitudes, as well as those of others, and encourages us to resolve problems rather than to recriminate, to ameliorate situations rather than to punish, and to cultivate attitudes that make everyone more effective and happy.
4.5/10
feels like a neccesity to finish this book. I want to get the puzzle pieces together. This book feel like it has the missing piece, but it is still hidden in a puddle of mud. and I need to dig it down myself again to find it and clean it.