I’ve been examining anatta recently, and this article really helped clarify some thinking for me! It clicked when my training in computer science began framing the problem in terms of a Self class that gets instantiated each time a subroutine needs a Self object to manipulate for some project. If the brain doesn’t do a good job cleaning up old instances, or if multiple instances of the same class have a tendency to coincide and share memory space (perhaps they cross-link heavily to save RAM, as it were), it might lead to a sense of a continuous entity.
Decreasing the coincident instances of Self by reducing dependencies in the decision making processes on the craving subroutines that heavily depend on Self objects could lead to times where some processes looks for any current instance of Self but finds none available (because they’ve all been cleaned up for once), then returns a code for NO_SELF_FOUND. This could lead to a feeling of “there is no self” as an observation on the current state of the Global workspace. The calling process may also elect to work in Global directly. If another process then notices self-like code hanging out nakedly in Global it might start acting like Global is an instance of Self, leading to a sense of “all is self”.
If true, this would explain why there’s so much disagreement on the best translation of “anatta”, and also why teachers sometimes claim that no-self and all-self amount to the same thing in the end.
I don’t know if all that is functionally representative of what’s going on, but it seems worth playing with for a while. At the least, it gives a good sense of why we might pretend to “be the sky”!
I’ve been examining anatta recently, and this article really helped clarify some thinking for me! It clicked when my training in computer science began framing the problem in terms of a Self class that gets instantiated each time a subroutine needs a Self object to manipulate for some project. If the brain doesn’t do a good job cleaning up old instances, or if multiple instances of the same class have a tendency to coincide and share memory space (perhaps they cross-link heavily to save RAM, as it were), it might lead to a sense of a continuous entity.
Decreasing the coincident instances of Self by reducing dependencies in the decision making processes on the craving subroutines that heavily depend on Self objects could lead to times where some processes looks for any current instance of Self but finds none available (because they’ve all been cleaned up for once), then returns a code for NO_SELF_FOUND. This could lead to a feeling of “there is no self” as an observation on the current state of the Global workspace. The calling process may also elect to work in Global directly. If another process then notices self-like code hanging out nakedly in Global it might start acting like Global is an instance of Self, leading to a sense of “all is self”.
If true, this would explain why there’s so much disagreement on the best translation of “anatta”, and also why teachers sometimes claim that no-self and all-self amount to the same thing in the end.
I don’t know if all that is functionally representative of what’s going on, but it seems worth playing with for a while. At the least, it gives a good sense of why we might pretend to “be the sky”!
I’m not sure if I managed to follow all of this, but at least the first paragraph seems spot-on to me. :)