One of the goals of mindfulness meditation is the "realization" that your stream of consciousness—the output of the "self who is analyzing the event"—is essentially just a sensory stimulus like any other. There is an agent in your head, thinking—an agent you have raised and constantly train and identify with very much, sure—but then there is you, separately, observing that thinking coming out of that agent. You, the thing that experiences qualia, would still exist even if that agent didn't! You just wouldn't be able to ponder or focus-on or decide-to-react to anything; only to passively sense and experience things as they happen. From your perspective as the perceiving agent, it'd just seem that a sense was shut off.
Once you have this perspective, you become aware that you don't have to identify with the thoughts coming out of the thinking-agent, or even to listen to them. You, the perceiving agent, can "tune out" the thinking agent's train of thought, just as well as you can tune out a five-year-old babbling in your ear. (And, helpfully, the brain has feedback mechanisms that make tuning out the thinking agent cause it to "speak" less. Unlike the five-year-old.)
As someone who doesn't have a "speaking agent", that's not exactly how it works. I still have the thoughts, I just don't narrate them to myself. I can still think fine, the thoughts happen before the narration anyway. Your CPU doesn't stop processing just because you turned off the screen.
The "speaking agent", or the analyzing agent, is also the predictive agent, and the goal-biasing agent. These are all one "thing." That "thing" is the subsystem of the brain that gets woken up by activity on dopamine receptors, and attempts to model the world (with a bias toward predicting world-states it would like to see, and can make real by predicting a future that requires it to have enacted certain motor commands, which it then enacts to attempt to unify this prediction with reality. Further reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/book-review-behavior-t...)
We have drugs that lower the activity level of this subsystem—dopamine antagonists (i.e. antipsychotics) and, at a lower level, AMPA-receptor antagonists (i.e. anticonvulsants.) At high doses, these drugs produce a state called "delirium", where the affected person will just sit and stare at the wall (or whatever you put them in front of), doing something if they are coerced to, but otherwise doing absolutely nothing—not blinking, not changing their visual focus, not shifting due to discomfort. You can also get a state of delirium from brain damage, or in some forms of depression.
That is what I mean when I describe the effect of having your analyzing-agent cut out. "You" are still there—you are still conscious, and can still perceive the world!—but no thinking is happening. No predicting, no world-modelling, no goal-pathing or choice-weighing or executive-function-ing. You are a passive, judgement-less qualia sponge.
(Technically, this isn't even the "true" death of the thinking agent. These people can think; they can respond to direct questions, they can solve problems if you force them to do so with threat of immediate harm, etc. What's actually happening is that the goal-biasing is gone, so their perceptual-control agent is just attempting to predict the future that'll happen if it does nothing—and then unifies the motor-command stream with that future by doing nothing.)
(Amusingly, a Buddhist would say that a person in a state of acute delirium has attained enlightenment.)
No Buddhist would say that, so clearly there's some misunderstanding. There is no Buddhist claim that the true self is an inert observer. Fixating on any aspect of your experience as true or authentic is the problem, not the solution. Enlightened people in Buddhist traditions are functional, happy, active; they don't just sit and stare blankly.
Okay, maybe I didn’t use the right term. I wasn’t referring to spiritual enlightenment (bodhi), but rather spiritual emancipation (moksha).
Let me rephrase more clearly: a person in a state of (permanent) delirium has achieved Nirodha—that is, reached nirvana and thereby escaped dukkha and the cycle of samsara by no longer possessing any earthly desires, and so no desirous soul to reincarnate.
Delirium seems to be precisely the state that the Gautama Buddha was suggesting people attempt to achieve to escape human suffering: one where their soul has been erased while they still yet live. This isn’t the same thing as the state he was suggesting people achieve to become better human beings while yet they lived as one—the state of being a Buddha, essentially—but rather, was the state he advised people in the depths of suffering seek, to find release from their suffering.
Of course, the concepts are not so distant; spiritual enlightenment (bodhi) is simply the freedom and clarity that comes from the knowledge that one has ultimate control over the fate of one’s own soul—the knowledge that one is effectively free from samsara already, because one can be free from it (through nirodha) at any point in the future as one so chooses. Certainly, these people are happy and functional. But in nirvana they ain’t.
Delirium seems like quite a strange and unusual description of the refined mental states achieved through meditation and the subsequent extinguishing of suffering. Like this dictionary definition of delirium:
> an acutely disturbed state of mind characterized by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence, occurring in intoxication, fever, and other disorders.
That’s quite the opposite of jhana, nirodha, or nirvana, right?
Ah, well, that’s a dictionary definition reflecting lay usage of the term (i.e. how people use it in novels and the like), but it’s not the clinical definition. Delirium is a specific medical syndrome (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium).
The simplest way to explain it is a double definition-by-contrast:
1. You’ve got https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome, where people have thoughts and intent but (mostly) can’t translate them to motor commands. But these people are clearly trying to do things, as evidenced by the fact that they can often (learn to) move their eyes to communicate what they want.
2. You’ve got https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetic_mutism, which has similar symptoms to locked-in syndrome, but is due to a lack of will to move rather than a lack of ability. (Or—since that sounds a bit like a free-will thing—they have a lack of ability to induce the cognition required to conclude that movement is desirable.)
3. Then you’ve got delirium; delirium is a syndrome [cluster of symptoms] like akinetic mutism, and both have nearly identical symptoms in acute presentation—but very different symptoms when only in partial presentation, which is why they’re not the same syndrome. The syndromes are somewhat hard to tell apart, but once you’ve figured out which one someone has, it’s usefully diagnostic, leading you to a different etiology (i.e. helping you tell what the root of the problem is.)
The syndrome of akinetic mutism is pretty much only caused by specific physical brain damage (like a stroke.) You can think of it as some part of the brain necessary for the “thinking” and “wanting” process, just dying, breaking that mechanism irreversibly. Usually this is damage to a pretty large region of brain tissue, and may indeed involve loss of experience of conscious qualia as well. (It’s hard to tell, since an akinetic mute is hard to interview.) But they’re not in a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_vegetative_state, since they do autonomic things, often enough to keep themselves alive (but only barely.)
Delirium, meanwhile, isn’t caused by physical brain damage, but rather by some other organic (physiological) process that results in electrochemical changes to the brain which then result in a similar symptom profile as akinetic mutism. This is often reversible and doesn’t actually involve the death of any part of the brain, which is why it’s helpful to think of this as just a “state of mind” that is next-to-impossible to achieve without weird chemistry happening in the brain—sort of like the states of mind found under the influence of psychedelics.
But—and this is just me going out on a limb—I have a feeling that delirium is one of the many altered states of consciousness that can be achieved through meditation (since it can also be achieved by letting oneself sink into the depths of major depression, and that sinking-into is—in theory—an entirely psychologically-driven neurochemical process, just like meditation is.) And, if it’s possible for a regular, healthy human being to put themselves in an acute delirious mental state (recall, this matching the symptom profile of akinetic mutism—a complete lack of desire) then I do believe that this is an entirely sensible thing to “prescribe” to people as a technique for avoiding earthly suffering, if one is trapped in it (e.g. if one is a prisoner of war being tortured—as the samsara conceptualization of naraka is likely a metaphor for; or if one is born into famine, poverty, and strife, never knowing any goal beyond animal survival—as the preta realm is likely a metaphor for.)
In other words, delirium is a—perhaps healthier—alternative to entering a dissociative fugue state, as a coping strategy for intense trauma. Delirium involves neither depersonalization (feeling detached from yourself) nor derealization (feeling detached from reality), but instead just involves detaching oneself from one’s desires. “You” are still there, and “reality” is still there; you are mindful, there, in the moment. The only thing that is gone is the agent that was dissatisfied with the present relationship between you and your reality.
I think I see what you're saying. I wonder what you think about the descriptions of the deepening levels of dhyana which do involve "detaching from reality" in some sense. Even the one-pointed concentration needed to approach the first dhyana stage involves tuning out almost all normal perceptions, for example by sitting in a candle-lit room and concentrating fully on the breath in the nostrils. But you keep a strong and stable kind of agency in order to maintain your concentration and to progress in the dhyana series. It seems different from being a "qualia sponge" with a delirious lack of desire or intent. The Wikipedia page for clinical delirium describes distractibility and failure of attention as a primary symptom, whereas deep meditation is almost always described as a result of non-distractability and highly trained attention...
> you don't have to identify with the thoughts coming out of the thinking-agent,
I really have hard time with this . What is the difference between thinking and perceiving agents. Both entities are doing thinking and perceiving. One seems to be passing some sort of value judgement on the other self. Why would some thoughts be "invalid". They are coming out of you for a reason, why should those reasons be ignored.
How precisely is the self( the one we are strongly identifying with) coming up with validity criteria for other self's thoughts. Surely its your own ambitions. right? eg: Ignore the thought of eating icecream.
Wouldn't this process create some sort of constant internal conflict where two self are fighting and passing value judgement on each other.
One way to put it that I've heard from meditation teachers is that it's very nice and useful to have your mind be a bit more "spacious." So you practice a kind of distancing where you let everything like thoughts and perceptions sort of just glide by. One way is to anchor your attention to your breathing and then get into a relaxed flow state. Most meditators report that this does not impair their normal functioning but gives them a beneficial clarity and peacefulness. It doesn't mean that you need to constantly second-guess your thoughts in everyday life; you should rather just be as you are, with just normal self-restraint, not add more "knots" to your mind.
Something that happens in daily life can invoke emotions but it doesn’t mean one has to react with an immediate emotional response. Instead accept the input for what it is and choose how to act on it.
Sometimes it's not the content of a thought that is the problem, but the way a thought affects other thoughts. In other words, often the goal of controlling your perception of your train-of-thought, is to use the feedback mechanism of quieting and negatively-training ignored thoughts, to prevent and discourage your thoughts from spiralling (as in panic disorder) or to prevent thoughts detached from a referent (as in schizophrenia) or to prevent thoughts from over-staying their usefulness (as in OCD.) In each of these syndromes, the analyzing-agent is freaking out due to something, and the perception of the freak-out is painful for the perceiving-agent, just like having someone shout into your ear is painful.
As well, in some psychological paradigms that people tend to intuitively use (at least in Western culture), some thoughts that diverge greatly from the "motivational base" of other thoughts—thoughts that aren't coherent with the rest of the self—are deemed to be "intrusive" or "ego-dystonic." (This doesn't make as much sense when you model your self as containing multiple agents with distinct preferences, as in the Internal Family Systems model, but I digress.) In such cases, mindfulness meditation can be used as a tool to silence incoherent thoughts, since they often trigger a crisis of self whenever they occur (e.g. "I keep thinking about what would happen if I stabbed people; does that mean I want to stab people?" or "I keep thinking about stepping out into traffic; does that mean I want to die?" when often these are just the ramblings of an internal agent obsessed with not doing those things who really wants to make sure you're aware that the consequences would be bad if you did do them.)
In either case, there's nothing wrong with thinking certain thoughts. It's really just that your analyzing-agent thinks there's something wrong with those thoughts that it is thinking, and this makes it do very useless and annoying things (from the perspective of the perceiving agent), like repeating the same thought over and over, or being unable to focus on or interpret what's in front of it, etc. These are "bad" inputs to thought-perception, just like clashing, atonal noise is "bad" input to sound-perception. (It's really the thinking agent that notices that the perceiving agent is experiencing pain qualia due to its output, and who then decides to do something about it by modulating the perceiving agent such that the thinking agent gets less CPU-time to run. Other than autonomic stuff like breathing and hardware-accelerated stuff like forming phoenemes with the mouth, it's only the thinking agent that ever "does" anything at all. But it's helpful to model the things it does because of the preferences of other agents, as being done by those other agents.)
There is me, the wise guy who set the alarm so I can wake up early tomorrow and is distinct from the lazy me who won’t wake up the next morning.
Then there is me, the nice guy who deserves to sleep in this morning and is distinct from the malicious beast who set the damn alarm last night and is intent on ruining my morning.
I completely concur with dual-think/multiple selves, but your example talks about two different selves at two different _times_, not at once as OP assumes.
If I understand correctly, you don't need to think these two (or more?) selves as mutually exclusive. It's just that when in certain contexts, e.g., when one is setting the alarm, this self has the appropriate conditions to be the dominant one (the laziness feeling bundle is not yet present). The other self, the lazy one, is still there, but its voice is not strong enough to overpower the first.
By contrast, in the morning, the reverse is also true, only this time the lazy voice is completely empowered by the comfy environment -- the other self just not having enough power to break through through the thick wall of comfort attached feelings the body is experiencing at the moment.
To put more simply, both (or more?) are there at the same time. but one is active, the other latent.
I was looking at it as time causing neurotransmitter changes (leading to sleep) and the resulting self being manipulated due to being in a sleepy state, but I see now how your explanation makes sense too.
It is actually even better. The "Samkhya System" from Hindu philosophy posits a three-layer mental model as follows;
1) Buddhi - This is is discriminating and reflective part of consciousness. This can be called as the "observer".
2) Ahamkara - This is the individual ego part of the consciousness. This is the "I" which gives you identity.
3) Manas - This is the part of consciousness which takes in the sensory inputs, forms the impressions and feeds it to "Ahamkara".
"Samkhya" is THE oldest of the ancient Hindu philosophies and hence its mental model has influenced Vedanta, Buddhism, Yoga etc. which all came after it.
No, i don't think so. But, dictionary definition, popular opinion, respectable / appreciated opinions. I can identify the impossiblity of objectivity inherent in the question, but doing so is dismissive. Sometimes sure, people are immature, unreasonable, careless.
I can't understand the mentality that acts with malice to others out of what comes from hatred of the self. Your statement does not imply the this but it suggests it.
The philosophy of self acceptance is pure torture, but it would be less so if thought - obvious effort - was itself valued. It being non obvious affects some, not others. Someone said preaching is moral violence, once.
A puzzle with no solution, or identification of solutions yield, possibly, equivalent problems. Tautological to suggest the solution can not be identified by the observer, but, provably incomplete, yet, believed to be the standard to measure against.
I think the wording should be taken literally. It isn't that there actually are two selves, it's that there are considered to be two.
Obviously on some level you know the selves are one and the same. The idea is: don't apply this knowledge within the thought process about whatever issue you're trying to decide.
In other words, you can integrate / resolve all this knowledge into one cohesive whole (person X needs to decide whether to buy a new car, person X is me --> I need to decide whether to buy a new car; what should I do) or you can block that resolution process and proceed as if it is not yourself (person X needs to decide whether to buy a new car --> what should person X do).
It touches on the connections between mindfulness and modern understanding of the mind. Most important, it talks about this problem, that you are not aware of the amout of decisions and input/output data is hidden from you, and how much of your life is narrating outcomes, rather than deciding them.
Fascinating stuff. Makes me feel like a batch of hidden layers struggling for consensus with one tiny human-interaction module that tells a consistent story about why certain outputs are weighted, and that story is called "free will and personality".
Sam Harris's Waking Up is actually a great short read about both the neuroscience behind the self and meditation and how meditation can help you become more aware of how the self is more a useful fiction than an irreducible thing.
I have hard time following this, how can there be two selfs in a single mind.
Is the observer more nobler entity with higher self restraint than the entity being observed who is more emotional and lower self control?