Well, that is kind of already the case, in that there are also Buddhist-influenced people talking about “all-self” rather than “no-self”. AFAICT, the framings sound a little different but are actually equivalent: e.g. there’s not much difference between saying “there is no unique seat of self in your brain that would one could point at and say that it’s the you” and “you are all of your brain”.
There’s more to this than just that, given that talking in terms of the brain etc. isn’t what a lot of Buddhists would do, but that points at the rough gist of it and I guess you’re not actually after a detailed explanation. Another way of framing that is what Eliezer once pointed out, that there is a trivial mapping between a graph and its complement. A fully connected graph, with an edge between every two vertices, conveys the same amount of information as a graph with no edges at all. Similarly, a graph where each vertex is marked as self is kind of equivalent to one where none are.
More broadly, a lot of my interpretation of “no-self” isn’t actually that directly derived from any Buddhist theory. When I was first exposed to such theories, much of their talk about self/no-self sounded to me like the kind of misguided folk speculation of a prescientific culture that didn’t really understand the mind very well yet. It was only when I actually tried some meditative practices and got to observe my mind behaving in ways that my previous understanding of it couldn’t explain, that I started thinking that maybe there’s actually something there.
So when I talk about “no-self”, it’s not so much that “I read about this Buddhist thing and then started talking about their ideas about no-self”; it’s more like “I first heard about no-self but it was still a bit vague what it exactly meant and if it even made any sense, but then I had experiences which felt like ‘no-self’ would be a reasonable cluster label for, so I assumed that these kinds of things are probably what the Buddhists meant by no-self, and also noticed that some of their theories now started feeling like they made more sense and could help explain my experiences while also being compatible with what I knew about neuroscience and cognitive science”.
Also you say that there being no-self is a “nebulous” claim, but I don’t think I have belief in a nebulous and ill-defined claim. I have belief in a set of specific concrete claims, such as “there’s no central supreme leader agent running things in the brain, the brain’s decision-making works by a distributed process that a number of subsystems contribute to and where very different subsystems can be causally responsible for a person’s actions at different times”. “No-self” is then just a label for that cluster of claims. But the important thing are the claims themselves, not whether there’s some truth of “no-self” in the abstract.
So if I slightly rephrased your question as something like “how certain am I that in an alternate universe where Buddhism made importantly wrong claims, I would evaluate them as wrong?”. Then reasonably certain, given that I currently already only put high probability in those Buddhist claims for which I have direct evidence for, put a more moderate probability for claims I don’t have direct evidence for but have heard from meditators who have seemed sane and reliable so far, and disbelieve in quite a few ones that I don’t think I have good evidence for and which contradict what I know about reality otherwise. (Literal karma or reincarnation, for instance.) Of course, I don’t claim to be infallible and do expect to make errors (in both directions), but again that’s the case with any field.
(Upvoted.)
Well, that is kind of already the case, in that there are also Buddhist-influenced people talking about “all-self” rather than “no-self”. AFAICT, the framings sound a little different but are actually equivalent: e.g. there’s not much difference between saying “there is no unique seat of self in your brain that would one could point at and say that it’s the you” and “you are all of your brain”.
There’s more to this than just that, given that talking in terms of the brain etc. isn’t what a lot of Buddhists would do, but that points at the rough gist of it and I guess you’re not actually after a detailed explanation. Another way of framing that is what Eliezer once pointed out, that there is a trivial mapping between a graph and its complement. A fully connected graph, with an edge between every two vertices, conveys the same amount of information as a graph with no edges at all. Similarly, a graph where each vertex is marked as self is kind of equivalent to one where none are.
More broadly, a lot of my interpretation of “no-self” isn’t actually that directly derived from any Buddhist theory. When I was first exposed to such theories, much of their talk about self/no-self sounded to me like the kind of misguided folk speculation of a prescientific culture that didn’t really understand the mind very well yet. It was only when I actually tried some meditative practices and got to observe my mind behaving in ways that my previous understanding of it couldn’t explain, that I started thinking that maybe there’s actually something there.
So when I talk about “no-self”, it’s not so much that “I read about this Buddhist thing and then started talking about their ideas about no-self”; it’s more like “I first heard about no-self but it was still a bit vague what it exactly meant and if it even made any sense, but then I had experiences which felt like ‘no-self’ would be a reasonable cluster label for, so I assumed that these kinds of things are probably what the Buddhists meant by no-self, and also noticed that some of their theories now started feeling like they made more sense and could help explain my experiences while also being compatible with what I knew about neuroscience and cognitive science”.
Also you say that there being no-self is a “nebulous” claim, but I don’t think I have belief in a nebulous and ill-defined claim. I have belief in a set of specific concrete claims, such as “there’s no central supreme leader agent running things in the brain, the brain’s decision-making works by a distributed process that a number of subsystems contribute to and where very different subsystems can be causally responsible for a person’s actions at different times”. “No-self” is then just a label for that cluster of claims. But the important thing are the claims themselves, not whether there’s some truth of “no-self” in the abstract.
So if I slightly rephrased your question as something like “how certain am I that in an alternate universe where Buddhism made importantly wrong claims, I would evaluate them as wrong?”. Then reasonably certain, given that I currently already only put high probability in those Buddhist claims for which I have direct evidence for, put a more moderate probability for claims I don’t have direct evidence for but have heard from meditators who have seemed sane and reliable so far, and disbelieve in quite a few ones that I don’t think I have good evidence for and which contradict what I know about reality otherwise. (Literal karma or reincarnation, for instance.) Of course, I don’t claim to be infallible and do expect to make errors (in both directions), but again that’s the case with any field.