One way of [explaining what the Buddhist conception of no-self means], which I think should be mostly accurate, is that the state that is being a booed is a belief in the homunculus fallacy.
Dennett, Kurzban, and others have pointed out that there are facts about the way in which the mind and consciousness function which feel deeply counter-intuitive, and that even neuroscientists and psychologists who in principle know that the brain is just a distributed system of separate modules, still often seem to operate under an intuition that there is a single “central” self (as seen from some of the theories that they propose).
I’m not sure whether that’s the source of the intuition, but it also seems related that humans seem to have a core system for reasoning about agency which takes as an axiom the assumption that agents exhibit independent, goal-directed motion (as opposed to objects, which only act when acted upon). Which makes sense if you’re just reasoning about e.g. social dynamics, but gets you into trouble if you try to understand the functioning of the brain and feel intuitively convinced that there has to be a “central agent” (homunculus) there somewhere, and it can’t just be interacting objects all the way down. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Kurzban’s book had a bunch of examples about how neuroscientists who should know this stuff were still making hypotheses that had the homunculus intuition lurking somewhere.
So when Buddhists say that “there is no self”, they are saying that the intuitive belief in the homunculus is wrong; and when they talk about realizing that this is a delusion, they talk about actually coming to internalize this on a deep level.
I wonder whether long-term thinking is a smaller/partial example of this “no self” concept.
I mean, overcoming short-term desires (in order to better satisfy long-term desires) requires realizing that these short-term desires are not you. That e.g. “having your desire to eat chocolate frustrated” doesn’t mean that you are being harmed, because “the desire to eat chocolate” is not you; it is possible to frustrate the desire, while benefiting (the other aspects of) you.
It’s just that the typical method of breaking this identification is to replace it by identification with something else. Because it is easier to redirect the desire to identify, than to abandon it. So instead of identifying with your short-term goals, you are encouraged to identify with your longer-term goals. The “real you” is no longer the desire to eat chocolate, but e.g. the desire to be healthy, fit, and attractive. Maybe better, but not fundamentally different.
(To use an analogy, it is like abandoning a religion, by converting to a different religion. You no longer believe in god X, because now you believe in god Y instead. Now contrast it with atheism, which means you no longer believe in god X, but there is no replacement for him; you stop having the concept of god. Things that you previously attributed to gods, remain; but they are now seen as natural.)
So it seems to me that this “no self” means realizing that you are neither your short-term goals, nor your long-term goals, not your body, but also not your social group, or religion, or nation, or whatever replacements people use. There is a brain. It works in certain ways. It lives in a body. It generates the process of consciousness. It creates models of itself. It does all of this as a mechanism consisting of parts. One of the things it does, is that it generates a desire to appear internally consistent; it actually sometimes actively works to reduce some great inconsistencies (because regulating the body, which includes the brain itself, is what brains do). But there is no “true you” that this brain is trying to obey or approximate, other than its own content.
But realizing this doesn’t effectively turn you into a some p-zombie aware of being a mere zombie, just like being able to reduce your chocolate consumption doesn’t erase your propensity to like chocolate. The brain doesn’t stop working just because its contents represent the understanding of how it works.
This definitely sounds at least related to me. (obligatory link: Kegan stages presenting moral development as a process of learning to de-identify with more and more things in the manner that you describe)
I really liked the part where you pointed out that identifying with our long-term desires over our short-term desires, is equally an act of identification, and no more arbitrary than identifying with the short-term ones. Here’s something very similar that I wrote on the CFAR alumni mailing list three years ago:
(note that I wasn’t really able to make the kind of thing I describe here, into a long-term habit; my cognitive defusion skills weren’t developed enough, so I kept getting sucked into fusing / identifying with different desires again, and didn’t have enough things to remind me to keep this habit up. for that matter, my skills aren’t developed enough to particularly consistently maintain this now, either. need to meditate more!)
--
Briefly: most of us have probably had the experience where we know that we “should” do something, but feel too tired or otherwise unmotivated to do it. For instance, just before typing this message, I was thinking that I could go to bed soon and should therefore brush my teeth first. At the same time, I was feeling too tired to do so, and was trying to come up with excuses to avoid doing it.
The way I ended up brushing my teeth regardless was by noticing that I was essentially having two conflicting desires in my head: one to brush my teeth and one to go right to bed. And because I wasidentifyingwith the desire to go to bed, I wanted to resist the desire to brush my teeth. To some extent the desire to brush my teeth felt like “not-me”, an annoying burden I wanted to avoid even though I knew it was the right thing to do.
So what I did was to step outside the two desires, and stop identifying with either one. Instead of “being” the desire to go to bed, I was an external observer, watching two parts of me mutually figure out whose suggested course of action would be more useful for the organism’s overall well-being.
And then they came to an agreement that brushing my teeth would be better than not doing so, so I brushed my teeth.
How I got here: this kind of thing started happening some time after I’d come home from the UK workshop, and started trying to take seriously the idea of System 1 and System 2 being allies co-operating for the benefit of everyone. I mentioned in an earlier e-mail that at one point I felt a reluctance to do something, noticed that the reluctance was a valuable signal of there being a possible danger to my well-being, and then summoned a feeling of gratitude towards my System 1 for having provided that warning. I continued to work among similar lines, taking seriously every desire and emotional impulse that I felt and treating it as an informational message from System 1. (Of course, that’s not to say that I would have consistently remembered to do that, and I often still forget. But whenever I do remember to act so, I try to do so.)
At a certain point, I decided to take this further. Rather than just taking System 1′s input, I would trust System 1 entirely, and let it carry out most of the decisions. So for instance, if I would be out at a party and needed to wake up early the next morning, I’d just let System 1 decide when to go home and make the decision based on my feelings. No System 2 trying to force System 1 into going home at some particular time.
Naturally this raised a certain worry. If I was really just going with my feelings with very limited overriding control from System 2, would I ever go home on time? Or would I just end up partying all night?
My worries were assuaged when I considered that, since I was feeling worried about this possibility, and if emotions are the language in which System 1 communicates, then that worry was also something that was coming from System 1. So it wasn’t a question of System 2 being the reasonable one and System 1 being the unreasonable one: rather both motives were already contained within System 1, and if I just gave it a chance, I could trust it to take both motives fairly into account.
That was the point where I started to realize that I wasn’t modeling the whole thing right in the first place.
So far I had been treating this as System 2 having its own desires of what to do, ones which were very different from System 1′s (e.g. S1: party, S2: make sure we’re rested the next morning). But in actuality “System 2′s desires” weren’t really very different from “System 1′s desires”—the only thing that happened to make some desires “System 2′s desires” in my mind was that I was identifying with those particular desires. Rather than there being two systems with their own desires, there were many kinds of different desires and emotions, each with different motives.
Reflecting upon this, I also realized that there wasn’t a very consistent pattern to which desires I happened to identify with. Sometimes I would identify with a “temptation”, and struggle to find an excuse to succumb to it. At other times I would identify with some “virtuous” impulse, and struggle to resist the temptation. Which desire I identified with seemed rather arbitrary… suggesting that I could just choose not to identify with either, or maybe identify with both at the same time.
And it turned out that I could.
I could just treat both as pointing to some thing that would be of value to me (e.g. in the tooth-brushing example, getting rest vs. maintaining hygiene), consider both of them to have important and valuable messages, and then neutrally let the two of them work out which one had the highest priority.
Doing this has led to me having much less internal conflict—at least on the occasions when I remember to do it, that is.
This reminds me of a thing I formulated a little over a year ago and adopted as a “thought-resolution” (goal of changing some thought patterns) in 2017. I will also paste a thing I wrote back then:
---
“Instead of thinking about tradeoffs between what I WANT to do and what I SHOULD do, try to think about choices as tradeoffs between things I want and other things I want.
Examples:
- “I should go to sleep but I want to read this blog post and ALL the comments” --> “I want to read this blog post and ALL the comments right now. I also want to wake up on time tomorrow and have some energy.”
- “I should get up but I want to stay in bed” --> “I want to stay in bed. I also want to both get a good amount of work done today and finish work at a reasonable time.”
- “I want to eat this brownie but I shouldn’t.” --> “I want to eat this brownie. I also want [various good health outcomes].”
Why? Several reasons:
- Making the things that underlie the “should” more explicit might help me actually consider those things in my decision and ultimately make better choices. “I want outcome X” is more motivating than a general sense of unwanted obligation.
- The “should” framing makes me feel guilty when I do things I “shouldn’t” do—even though I don’t believe making these choices is actually *immoral*, which means guilt isn’t justified (and obviously isn’t pleasant). I’m not really making moral choices in these situations, I’m just making tradeoffs between various things I want, which means I shouldn’t feel guilty even if the tradeoff I make isn’t the best one.
- In general “should” is just shorthand for “this is a better choice for me than the opposite”. But this isn’t actually always true. If there is something unusually interesting happening at 2 a.m. one night, it might be worth it to stay up late and incur the negative consequences. I already do that, with the words “I should go to bed but I really don’t want to miss this”—but that makes it sound like a bad choice even when it’s not!”
---
which I guess can be reframed as “I should identify equally with my short-term desires and my longer-term ones; my future self is not a different person from me”. De-identifying entirely was not a goal (and I’m not sure it is a goal now, either, though in some ways I do want to move in that direction).
In general “should” is just shorthand for “this is a better choice for me than the opposite”.
I think it’s more complicated than this. In my experience many shoulds come from social pressure, so “I should do X” is often implicitly something like “if I don’t do X then the tribe will disapprove of me,” e.g. I should exercise, I should eat well, I should study, and so forth.
Cross-posting my comment from another thread here:
--
One way of [explaining what the Buddhist conception of no-self means], which I think should be mostly accurate, is that the state that is being a booed is a belief in the homunculus fallacy.
Dennett, Kurzban, and others have pointed out that there are facts about the way in which the mind and consciousness function which feel deeply counter-intuitive, and that even neuroscientists and psychologists who in principle know that the brain is just a distributed system of separate modules, still often seem to operate under an intuition that there is a single “central” self (as seen from some of the theories that they propose).
I’m not sure whether that’s the source of the intuition, but it also seems related that humans seem to have a core system for reasoning about agency which takes as an axiom the assumption that agents exhibit independent, goal-directed motion (as opposed to objects, which only act when acted upon). Which makes sense if you’re just reasoning about e.g. social dynamics, but gets you into trouble if you try to understand the functioning of the brain and feel intuitively convinced that there has to be a “central agent” (homunculus) there somewhere, and it can’t just be interacting objects all the way down. It’s been a while since I read it, but IIRC Kurzban’s book had a bunch of examples about how neuroscientists who should know this stuff were still making hypotheses that had the homunculus intuition lurking somewhere.
So when Buddhists say that “there is no self”, they are saying that the intuitive belief in the homunculus is wrong; and when they talk about realizing that this is a delusion, they talk about actually coming to internalize this on a deep level.
I wonder whether long-term thinking is a smaller/partial example of this “no self” concept.
I mean, overcoming short-term desires (in order to better satisfy long-term desires) requires realizing that these short-term desires are not you. That e.g. “having your desire to eat chocolate frustrated” doesn’t mean that you are being harmed, because “the desire to eat chocolate” is not you; it is possible to frustrate the desire, while benefiting (the other aspects of) you.
It’s just that the typical method of breaking this identification is to replace it by identification with something else. Because it is easier to redirect the desire to identify, than to abandon it. So instead of identifying with your short-term goals, you are encouraged to identify with your longer-term goals. The “real you” is no longer the desire to eat chocolate, but e.g. the desire to be healthy, fit, and attractive. Maybe better, but not fundamentally different.
(To use an analogy, it is like abandoning a religion, by converting to a different religion. You no longer believe in god X, because now you believe in god Y instead. Now contrast it with atheism, which means you no longer believe in god X, but there is no replacement for him; you stop having the concept of god. Things that you previously attributed to gods, remain; but they are now seen as natural.)
So it seems to me that this “no self” means realizing that you are neither your short-term goals, nor your long-term goals, not your body, but also not your social group, or religion, or nation, or whatever replacements people use. There is a brain. It works in certain ways. It lives in a body. It generates the process of consciousness. It creates models of itself. It does all of this as a mechanism consisting of parts. One of the things it does, is that it generates a desire to appear internally consistent; it actually sometimes actively works to reduce some great inconsistencies (because regulating the body, which includes the brain itself, is what brains do). But there is no “true you” that this brain is trying to obey or approximate, other than its own content.
But realizing this doesn’t effectively turn you into a some p-zombie aware of being a mere zombie, just like being able to reduce your chocolate consumption doesn’t erase your propensity to like chocolate. The brain doesn’t stop working just because its contents represent the understanding of how it works.
This definitely sounds at least related to me. (obligatory link: Kegan stages presenting moral development as a process of learning to de-identify with more and more things in the manner that you describe)
I really liked the part where you pointed out that identifying with our long-term desires over our short-term desires, is equally an act of identification, and no more arbitrary than identifying with the short-term ones. Here’s something very similar that I wrote on the CFAR alumni mailing list three years ago:
(note that I wasn’t really able to make the kind of thing I describe here, into a long-term habit; my cognitive defusion skills weren’t developed enough, so I kept getting sucked into fusing / identifying with different desires again, and didn’t have enough things to remind me to keep this habit up. for that matter, my skills aren’t developed enough to particularly consistently maintain this now, either. need to meditate more!)
--
Briefly: most of us have probably had the experience where we know that we “should” do something, but feel too tired or otherwise unmotivated to do it. For instance, just before typing this message, I was thinking that I could go to bed soon and should therefore brush my teeth first. At the same time, I was feeling too tired to do so, and was trying to come up with excuses to avoid doing it.
The way I ended up brushing my teeth regardless was by noticing that I was essentially having two conflicting desires in my head: one to brush my teeth and one to go right to bed. And because I was identifying with the desire to go to bed, I wanted to resist the desire to brush my teeth. To some extent the desire to brush my teeth felt like “not-me”, an annoying burden I wanted to avoid even though I knew it was the right thing to do.
So what I did was to step outside the two desires, and stop identifying with either one. Instead of “being” the desire to go to bed, I was an external observer, watching two parts of me mutually figure out whose suggested course of action would be more useful for the organism’s overall well-being.
And then they came to an agreement that brushing my teeth would be better than not doing so, so I brushed my teeth.
How I got here: this kind of thing started happening some time after I’d come home from the UK workshop, and started trying to take seriously the idea of System 1 and System 2 being allies co-operating for the benefit of everyone. I mentioned in an earlier e-mail that at one point I felt a reluctance to do something, noticed that the reluctance was a valuable signal of there being a possible danger to my well-being, and then summoned a feeling of gratitude towards my System 1 for having provided that warning. I continued to work among similar lines, taking seriously every desire and emotional impulse that I felt and treating it as an informational message from System 1. (Of course, that’s not to say that I would have consistently remembered to do that, and I often still forget. But whenever I do remember to act so, I try to do so.)
At a certain point, I decided to take this further. Rather than just taking System 1′s input, I would trust System 1 entirely, and let it carry out most of the decisions. So for instance, if I would be out at a party and needed to wake up early the next morning, I’d just let System 1 decide when to go home and make the decision based on my feelings. No System 2 trying to force System 1 into going home at some particular time.
Naturally this raised a certain worry. If I was really just going with my feelings with very limited overriding control from System 2, would I ever go home on time? Or would I just end up partying all night?
My worries were assuaged when I considered that, since I was feeling worried about this possibility, and if emotions are the language in which System 1 communicates, then that worry was also something that was coming from System 1. So it wasn’t a question of System 2 being the reasonable one and System 1 being the unreasonable one: rather both motives were already contained within System 1, and if I just gave it a chance, I could trust it to take both motives fairly into account.
That was the point where I started to realize that I wasn’t modeling the whole thing right in the first place.
So far I had been treating this as System 2 having its own desires of what to do, ones which were very different from System 1′s (e.g. S1: party, S2: make sure we’re rested the next morning). But in actuality “System 2′s desires” weren’t really very different from “System 1′s desires”—the only thing that happened to make some desires “System 2′s desires” in my mind was that I was identifying with those particular desires. Rather than there being two systems with their own desires, there were many kinds of different desires and emotions, each with different motives.
Reflecting upon this, I also realized that there wasn’t a very consistent pattern to which desires I happened to identify with. Sometimes I would identify with a “temptation”, and struggle to find an excuse to succumb to it. At other times I would identify with some “virtuous” impulse, and struggle to resist the temptation. Which desire I identified with seemed rather arbitrary… suggesting that I could just choose not to identify with either, or maybe identify with both at the same time.
And it turned out that I could.
I could just treat both as pointing to some thing that would be of value to me (e.g. in the tooth-brushing example, getting rest vs. maintaining hygiene), consider both of them to have important and valuable messages, and then neutrally let the two of them work out which one had the highest priority.
Doing this has led to me having much less internal conflict—at least on the occasions when I remember to do it, that is.
This reminds me of a thing I formulated a little over a year ago and adopted as a “thought-resolution” (goal of changing some thought patterns) in 2017. I will also paste a thing I wrote back then:
---
“Instead of thinking about tradeoffs between what I WANT to do and what I SHOULD do, try to think about choices as tradeoffs between things I want and other things I want.
Examples:
- “I should go to sleep but I want to read this blog post and ALL the comments” --> “I want to read this blog post and ALL the comments right now. I also want to wake up on time tomorrow and have some energy.”
- “I should get up but I want to stay in bed” --> “I want to stay in bed. I also want to both get a good amount of work done today and finish work at a reasonable time.”
- “I want to eat this brownie but I shouldn’t.” --> “I want to eat this brownie. I also want [various good health outcomes].”
Why? Several reasons:
- Making the things that underlie the “should” more explicit might help me actually consider those things in my decision and ultimately make better choices. “I want outcome X” is more motivating than a general sense of unwanted obligation.
- The “should” framing makes me feel guilty when I do things I “shouldn’t” do—even though I don’t believe making these choices is actually *immoral*, which means guilt isn’t justified (and obviously isn’t pleasant). I’m not really making moral choices in these situations, I’m just making tradeoffs between various things I want, which means I shouldn’t feel guilty even if the tradeoff I make isn’t the best one.
- In general “should” is just shorthand for “this is a better choice for me than the opposite”. But this isn’t actually always true. If there is something unusually interesting happening at 2 a.m. one night, it might be worth it to stay up late and incur the negative consequences. I already do that, with the words “I should go to bed but I really don’t want to miss this”—but that makes it sound like a bad choice even when it’s not!”
---
which I guess can be reframed as “I should identify equally with my short-term desires and my longer-term ones; my future self is not a different person from me”. De-identifying entirely was not a goal (and I’m not sure it is a goal now, either, though in some ways I do want to move in that direction).
I think it’s more complicated than this. In my experience many shoulds come from social pressure, so “I should do X” is often implicitly something like “if I don’t do X then the tribe will disapprove of me,” e.g. I should exercise, I should eat well, I should study, and so forth.