from susan blackmore's The Meme Machine...
"Everyday experience, ordinary speech and 'common sense' are all in favour of the 'real self,' while logic and evidence (and more disciplined experience) are on the side of the 'illusory self.' I prefer logic and evidence and therefore prefer to accept some version of the idea that the continuous, persistent and autonomous self is an illusion. I am just a story about a me who is writing a book. When the word 'I' appears in this book, it is a convention that both you and I understand, but it does not refer to a persistent, conscious, inner being behind the words.
...This does not mean that there is no body, nor that there is literally no self at all, but that the self is a temporary construction, an idea or story about a self."
daniel dennett later tempered my curiosity on agency, to which i felt i could only really identify three specific factors:
-- an internal/external dichotomy survival mechanism, inherent in the evolving animal;
-- a 'higher-level' cognitive subjectification of the thought-of-thought (that is, to think of a thought), further enforced by the process of judgement deemed in an extreme form to emanate particularly from an essential (and basically independent) 'judge' (which william james often enough addresses in his philosophy of psychology -- see for example his Pragmatism);
-- and the resulting and substantiating "center of narrative gravity" (dennett, Consciousness Explained), a phenomenon of language and cognitive efficiency.
(my intention is to expand these criteria to get at the 'inner workings' -- get at a more concrete sense of the cognitive evolution and development involved -- and, perhaps more importantly in terms of practicality, attempt to determine its direct relationship with conceptual evolution.
in japan, i awaited any different explanations for the self and agency during my studies, and found (among the first) joshu -- who felt more comfortable with this explanation of things:
"Mu."
god bless zen.
5 comments:
For clarification's sake... does "mu" mean anything?
the beauty of the zen koan: yes, and no. some people have interpreted "mu" as "no" -- an answer to the question "does a dog have the Buddha nature?" of course, this isn't consistent with the nature of most koans, so this has become a less popular thing.
more likely, "mu" means to you no less than it does to me -- it is a non-attached answer, neither avoiding the question nor revealing anything (which could be said to be something incapable of being revealed anyway).
says Wikipedia:
"A koan (pronounced /ko.an/) is a story, dialog, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to Intuition. Koans are often used by Zen practitioners as objects of meditation to induce an experience of enlightenment or realization, and by Zen teachers as testing questions when a student wishes to validate their experience of enlightenment.
A famous koan is, "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?" (oral tradition, attributed to Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), considered a reviver of the koan tradition in Japan)..
Koans are said to reflect the enlightened or awakened state of historical sages and legendary figures who uttered them, and sometimes said to confound the habit of discursive thought or shock the mind into awareness or an experience of metanoia or radical change of consciousness and perspective, from the point of view of which the koan 'question' is resolved, and the practitioner's religious faith is enhanced."
to read the rest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_koan
Jaha. Cool. I like it.
A question for you after listening to your memetics presentation; can a case be made for an altruistic meme (as opposed to the selfish meme that gets so much coverage)? Or is altruism just another form of selfishness?
hey ben -- the term 'selfish' for replicators (genes or memes) is often mistakenly construed for our colloquial sense of selfishness. what richard dawkins meant by selfish is that the replicator, as a non-cognitive, intentionless entity, naturally functions on the sole basis of its conditions -- that is, without desiring or thinking, it merely functions for its own sake, with or without the collaboration of others of its kind. those in philosophy (and some social sciences) have often tried to pinpoint whether human beings do this as well (if there is really altruism concerning people) -- and there are many arguments for both sides. but it's important to remember that when we speak of altruism, we are talking really only about human beings -- to posit it onto other, nonsentient entities is an act of anthropomorphism, and is regularly reprehended. to look at a couple of cases of memes' relationship to human altruism, i recommend taking a look at blackmore's The Meme Machine; hers should be at least one account of many.
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