What is a self?

To me it looks like a question of degree. “I am” seems to be the important one, it’s like a deep-seated conviction or belief in a “me”. I assume this is what is referred to in the suttas when they describe assuming the aggregates to be “me” and “mine”, ie identification.

For me this identification is centred on “my” body, I assume because it includes the sense-organs and therefore what I experience via the sense bases. For example, I know that if I drop a brick on my foot it is going to hurt, I know that if I cover my eyes I won’t be able to see, and so on.

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Agree. Building on what you said. sakkaya ditthi must be the attributes we assign to this sense of “I”. Sri lankan, Male , lazy , stubborn…………………

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Yes, could be - the underlying sense of “me”, then ideas about what “me” is like. Actually I don’t find the suttas very clear on the distinction.
In a way the sense of “me” seems like a natural consequence of being an individual biological organism, though it also causes us problems. And we all have a unique point of view, both physically and mentally.
I don’t regard the sense of “me” as something “bad”, or even something to be got rid of - more like something to be properly understood, and perhaps eventually transcended.

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And as we improve our instruments and learn more about the internal structure of some bacteria (such as the microbrain and how it applies to such things as chemotaxis within gradients of repellents), it seems that sentience appears to extend down to at least some single cell creatures such as e coli.

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Three types of people ask the question “what is a self”: philosophers, spiritual practitioners, and crazy people. One needs to clearly know if one is still in the second category or starts aligning silly words.

There is no self, only a sence of self. Only 5 animals posses a sense of self. All others are like 2 year old humans.

I also suggest this topic, a truly unique experiment for a buddhist forum: An unique experiment - First time on a buddhist forum

As Buddha said, when people are questioned about why they believe there is a self, they all fall back to 1 single argument, that of a specific feeling that appears from time to time.

We cannot talk or understand about no self or not self if we do not know what is “self” or what do we mean “self”.

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Experiments with dolphins seem to indicate some sort of “self-view”. They seem to give themselves names by which they know to be adressed in a conversation by their peers; they also seem to recognize themselves in a mirror, begin to play funny games with that images, just making fun like young people would do. That has been reported recently in some scientific report, unfortunately I didn’t bookmark the source. If I find it, I’ll put the bookmark here.

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If one examines the etymology of the English word “self” one discovers something interesting. In its Indo-European origins, the contemporary word “self” (and its cognates throughout the Indo-European language family) is a reflexive pronoun distinguishing the first-person from the third-person. Succinctly, in Indo-European languages, one cannot conceive of oneself without reference to others. Or, to put it another way, an individual only has meaning when situated relative to others. Linguistically, there is no I absent a they.

Therefore, when Rene Descartes famously declared, “I think therefore I am,” assuming Descartes would assent to substituting “self” for “I,” he is declaring that the “I” who thinks only recognizes that “I” because it is situated relative to a “they.” Without them, I do not exist.

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Pigeons and birds from the Craw family recognize themselves in the mirror too. It’s interesting that cats and dogs do not, despite appearing to be quite smart.

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Very interesting. It seems to me that with clinging, one becomes a self (or oneself). Without clinging, one is simply that.

With clinging, one becomes the “I, my” in what one is clinging to. Self is one with possession or relation due to that clinging.

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@anon87721581 on SN 5.10 SuttaCentral

a convention, for a temporary functional vehicle; once it falls apart, or is taken apart, nothing.

A chariot repairman might see immediately if a part was damaged or not in good condition. :slight_smile: A truly exceptional one might see that the design is inherently flawed, or even if not… just temporary!

TY, love that sutta. What’s doing the loving? lol Just mind temporarily using this bag o’ meat.

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@Martin “I don’t think my body will be of much use to anyone else once I have finished with it. :yum:

lol it depends, perhaps; if you would like to be an organ donor, do let your next of kin know, and perhaps keep an indicator with your identification. On occasion i think of myself as unripe compost; i have suggested the remains be scattered in a forest i particularly enjoyed. (edit: but any dust heap would do “me” as much good.)

#D

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I agree, and the devil is in the detail here. If we’re proposing that something is a fiction or illusion, we need to start by clearly identifying what that something is. IMO the sutta are mainly concerned with the sense of “me”, the conceit “I am” ( mana ), rather than with questions of whether we have a “soul”.

Recently I have made a point of noticing this sense of “me”, which has been interesting. It seems mostly related to identifying with the feelings that I have, or how I react to experience. Roughly equivalent to the second and third frames of satipatthana.

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But is self-other only a conceptual distinction? We humans are individual biological organisms, so the self-other distinction is also a “physical” one - “my body” and “your body”.

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Are you talking about the red dot (and associated) mirror experiments?

If so, slightly more correctly, one might say:

At least one animal (humans) can detect that at least 5 other animals have a sense of self in a similar way to the way that those humans display their own sense of self.

Whether those five animals actually have a sense of self or by their innate actions they have inadvertently tricked the humans into thinking that they have a sense of self is currently unknown.

Whether there are more than five animals with a sense of self is also currently unknown. The ones that have been tested might be hiding it from the humans for a number of reasons or they might have a sense of self that is displayed differently from the way humans test their sense of self. Others have not been tested.

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I think it’s unsurprising that evolution produced beings with a “self”. Brains and nervous systems are a kind of control system. Evolution is all about replication and reproduction. You’d expect organisms with a brain and nervous system to have an advantage (able to react to and learn about the environment in complex ways). Survival and reproduction needs the organism to be able to differentiate between itself and the external world (distinguish between friends and enemies). The survival instinct needs the organism to perceive what needs to be protected, i.e. the “self”.

I think even fairly primitive organisms with a nervous system probably have some sense of self, e.g. a hierarchical/pecking ordering structure is very widespread. Animals tend to have a good idea (build internal models) about where exactly they lie in this hierarchy (there is some kind of self concept functioning there).

Of course, being able to recognize a reflection needs more sophisticated perceptual machinery, which not many animals have seemingly, but I wouldn’t say that not having it implies absence of a “self”.

I think it is completely unsurprising that evolution would produce animals with such a “self” mechanism (particularly as nervous systems become more complex and there are increasingly sophisticated social interactions between such beings, it’s very advantageous and even essential for the brain to be able to create models of the other beings it has interactions with and, if it is creating models of others, then why not of itself also? :slight_smile: ).

Of course, evolution isn’t completely about individual survival. Relatives share many of the same genes as ourselves. In terms of pure Darwinian calculus, sometimes it might be advantageous for a being to sacrifice itself as long as a sufficient number of relatives carrying its genes survive (a theory used to try to explain the evolution of altruism).

That gets carried to an extreme in insect colonies. Practically all the bees in a bee hive are genetically the same. Perhaps the sense of self of a bee is quite different to many other organisms? Bees seem to readily sacrifice themselves when protecting the hive etc. Perhaps it views the hive as its “self”? :honeybee:

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In Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual theory of metaphor, all concepts are metaphors that transfer sensory experiences (bodily experiences) to abstract ideas. So the abstraction of a “self” would necessarily be expressed as a conceptual metaphor based on bodily experiences.

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I don’t think that a nervous system is required. Work on single cell e-coli shows a structure of a microbrain and displays of self preservation based on learning and memory.

The scientists who carry out these investigations suggest that:

a) single cell creatures have had much more evolutionary weight to bear on them because they have been around much longer than multicellular creatures.

b) having a large seemingly complex structure such as a nervous system is not indicative of complexity of function. They suggest an analogy with computers. Older, say 1960s computers are very big and seemingly complex, whereas modern computers are much smaller, but they out do the functionality, speed and complexity of those 1960s computers. Miniaturisation in fact makes them better/faster. Maybe the same is true of the microbrain of e-coli compared to animal nervous systems?

Of course, we can never know if even other humans have a sense of self, let alone other animals, insects or bacteria. We can only see what they are displaying to us and make interpretations that they are either like us or not like us based on these external displays.

Yes. I guess we wouldn’t say that a blind person doesn’t have a sense of self because they are unable to recognise their reflection, would we?

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I’ve heard this argument, but just stop and think about it for a moment. Try to put yourself in their situation. Looking at yourself in the mirror, not being able to understand it’s not a different cat or dog but yourself. Having the capacity to see it, having the capacity to understand weather it’s a different dog or cat, being able to distinguish between numerous other dogs and cats, yet being unable to understand it’s you that is in the mirror.