Message-Id: <199904070210.WAA29241@websmtp1.bellsouth.bigfoot.com>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: A more
From: "joe dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 22:41:48 -0400
At Tue, 06 Apr 1999 16:42:44 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Amongst other points, Jake said:
>
>> Besides these same issues extend to matters of defining the "self", for very
>> similar and related reasons. We have a number of people into memetics, or
>> really trying to discover memetics, who are trying to say that the self is
>> "just an illusion". Even greater than any concerns about a culture of
>> individual freedom, treating "self" as "just an illusion", is a mystical
>> assault on our very language, and indeed on the activity of language in
>> general. Far from reaping any insight, this only guarantees that we will
>> soon be babbling incoherently should we endorse this postion.
>>
>> Imagining the self to be an illusion can at best be treated as a mystical
>> metaphysical performance - certainly not a mode that can be maintained for
>> any adaptive purpose - and indeed I have known none to do so. I can
>> appreciate people wishing to redifine "self" for greater understanding and
>> accuracy, but denying it as an illusion is as big a farce to me as watching
>> people who claim to be "speaking in tongues".
>
>I think that what you say here Jake is just an example preposterous
>narrow-minded scientism. You don't understand something, so rather than
>admit ignorance, you dismiss it as "farce".
>To say that self is ultimately an illusion is a perfectly valid
>statement.
>It is a conclusion arrived at by many people who have explored their
>own experience, meticulously and pragmatically, over a couple of
>millenia. For you to pour such scorn upon all those people is unworthy
>of your obvious intelligence.
>How you manage to leap from that to "a mystical assault on our very
>language"
>I don't understand at all. Bizarre logic.
>
>IMO, S. Blackmore explains the matter in a coherent and convincing way.
>
>Chris.
>http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/tao.index.html
>
The claim in contention is that the belief that there is a "self" is a delusion. However, delusion cannot exist in the absence of someone who is deluded. Either there is a self, or there is not. If there is a self, then there is no delusion. If there isn't a self, then there is no one to be deluded, so there is, once again, no delusion. Methinks that some fundamentalist Buddhists without an understanding of their own religious doctrines are nevertheless attempting to inject them into a scientific discussion. When Zen masters such as D. T. Suzuki and others such as Dogen and Hui-neng insist that the self is nothing, they mean it in the way that the existentialists mean it; as no-thing, i.e. not a static thing, like a rock, but as a dynamically recursive becoming.
>
>===============================================================
>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
>Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
>For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
>see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
>
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher
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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit