In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is antievolutionary.

The phenomenological approach projects a radical criticism of scientific naturalism,which assumes that the object of science is to find laws that govern reality, where the person isconceived as another object of nature.

helper.singleton_class.include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers

ArgumentError: arguments passed to url_for can't be handled. Please require routes or provide your own implementation

Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4 outperforms all state-of-the-art RLbaselines, trained for 1M steps, without any training.

Because if we do not work on our humanity, our humanity will work on us.

Kamatera is a very good option to run a mail server because They don’t block port 25, so you can send unlimited emails (transactional email and newsletters) without spending money on SMTP relay service. Kamatera doesn’t have any SMTP limits. You can send a million emails per day. The IP address isn’t on any email blacklist. (At least this is true in my case. I chose the Dallas data center.) You definitely don’t want to be listed on the dreaded Microsoft Outlook IP blacklist or the spamrats blacklist. Some blacklists block an entire IP range and you have no way to delist your IP address from this kind of blacklist. You can edit PTR record to improve email deliverability. They allow you to send newsletters to your email subscribers with no hourly limits or daily limits, whatsoever. You can order multiple IP addresses for a single server. This is very useful for folks who need to send a large volume of emails. You can spread email traffic on multiple IP addresses to achieve better email deliverability.

Modoboa is an alternative to those 3 options. It frees you from dependence on email providers and makes accessible to all the creation his own secure email server.

Self-hosting is when you---either using a computer on your local network at home or a remote "bare metal" server host you've purchased---host your own services for various purposes.

In many ways, mail server stacks represent a collision between the tools and values of the early internet — self-hosting open source software using well-defined standards and interoperable protocols — and the reality of the modern internet — a few centralized, trusted authorities.

the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist. To see that, it is useful to consider what it might be like to have the freedom to control what thought one had next.

the ability to do so is associated with recognizing the facts of “no self” as discussed in the opening of this section. Accepting the Bodhisattva vow brings in this way the possibility of expanding intelligence in a steady fashion—free from hesitation, disappointment, fear, and other such factors that can now be seen to arise from misperceptions of the nature of the project.

the Bodhisattva cognitive system is no longer constrained by the perception that one single self—i.e., its own self—requires special and sustained attention. Instead, Bodhisattva cognitive processes are now said to engage with spontaneous care for all apparent individuals. Thus, an immediate takeaway from non-dual insight is said to be the perception that oneself and all others are ultimately of the same identity.

According to the Bodhisattva model of intelligence, such deconstruction of the apparent foundations of cognition elicits a transformation of both the scope and acuity of the cognitive system that performs it.

Self is an illusory modelling construct created by perceptual systems of Agents

According to general Buddhist analysis, the individual that may be assumed to exist as a singular, enduring, and controlling self is mere appearance devoid of causal efficacy, and thus epiphenomenal [68]. In the case of a Bodhisattva, this understanding is carried forward so as to encompass a critique of the apparent foundations of cognition: object, agent, and action.

Another feature of this vision that aligns well with Buddhist ideas is the lack of a permanent, unique, unitary Self [68]. The picture given by the evolutionary cell-biological perspective is one where a cognitive agent is seen as a self-reinforcing process (the homeostatic loop), not a thing [69,70,71].

hypothesis is kind of easy to agree on after a couple deductive guesses so you 01:23:21 guys want to go through it and see if you're a simulation hypothesis that's what Elon Musk is all right first question to silently answer these do you think it's probable that our 01:23:36 descendants will have computational power that is vast compared to ours today presume the answer is probably [Music] 01:23:48 okay next question will that vast ability to simulate worlds result in any of them doing two or more High Fidelity or hyper realistic ancestor or origin 01:24:02 simulations that include fully realistic physics presume the answer is sure it's probably true that at least two out of countless trillions of our 01:24:15 descendants spread across every imaginable region of time and space will use their Advanced abilities to do origin simulations deducted conclusion in Elon musk's words 01:24:28 we're probably living in a simulation in my words it is more probable than not that we are in one of the simulated realities versus being so lucky we happen to be in the one real reality

your your self isn't 01:13:47 some permanent uh monadic structure that just kind of exists it's an active construction it's a process it's a you know it it's a constant information processing Auto police is that you know 01:13:59 of the mind doesn't stop during embryogenesis it kind of keeps going it has to and um and and it has these it has these interesting implications

an overview of the paper

the computational boundary of a self

less well known is that the same person was really 00:01:02 interested in morphogenesis

sentence and continue on until its last, allowing the argument to unfold as if Stephen King wrote it.

I do want to point out one more really significant implication here which is how it affects our experience of time

t the irony of course is that if this desire if this craving for money if this lack project and we could also call it reality project because another 00:13:08 way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole right 00:13:20 because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside that's going to secure this sense of self-insight the tragedy of the whole process of 00:13:32 course is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn it's never going to be enough because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem

if you ask about things like lack projects or reality projects on the individual level you know I was talking 00:32:01 about how the separation is a delusion it's uncomfortable we become preoccupied with trying to find something out here that'll fill up our sense of lack and you know we can Wonder is there 00:32:13 something comparable at the civilizational level and frankly I think that there is I think that it is our Collective preoccupation with progress

there's 00:08:43 nothing there that could be secured and here's the important point I think we experienced that we experience it as a sense of lack 00:08:58 that is to say the sense that something is wrong with me something is missing something isn't quite right I'm not good enough and the reality is I think all of us to 00:09:14 some degree have some sense of that some sense of lack even though we might ignore it or cover it up there's there's some sense of that but because it's mostly sort of unconscious in the sense that we don't 00:09:29 really know where it comes from

sense of self is a construct a psychological and social construct it's something it's not something that 00:06:42 infants are born with it's actually something that develops as we grow up our caregivers look into our eyes give us a name that we learned to identify with and also basically we learn to see 00:06:59 ourselves as they see us we inte

Our real challenge, perhaps, is in relearning what the “collective interest” actually means, and why it is so important, and how we got to this perverse situation where we have such monstrous distrust of each other, and of collectives in general, that we have assumed that, somehow, 7.8B people acting in their isolated individual, personal, and often trauma-influenced self-interest, will somehow be synonymous with an optimal collective interest.

when you see that the rates of domestic abuse among police officers in the United States is higher than the general average in the public. So, you know, when you think about why that's happening, perhaps it's that the job is making them a bit more on edge or causing them to behave in certain ways. I think what's more likely is that people who are abusive 01:32:41 are disproportionately likely to seek out a job in which you can abuse people. Now, this is not to say that police officers are bad people, but it is to say that, for the slice of the population that is abusive, especially the people who like to wield power and carry a gun and terrorize people, for them, as one of the police officers in London told me who's in charge of recruitment for the Metropolitan Police, she said to me, "Look, if you're an abusive bigot, 01:33:06 policing is an attractive career choice. It doesn't mean that police officers are generally abusive bigots. It means that for that slice of the population, they like the idea of being able to professionally abuse people."

Doraville, Georgia.

when we think about self-selection bias and survivorship bias in tandem, we have a really important understanding of how power actually operates

The same is true for power. People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, 00:14:51 are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us

self-selection effect

THE GREAT CONVERSATION

Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental.

Platform engineering is trying to deliver the self-service tools teams want to consume to rapidly deploy all components of software. While it may sound like a TypeScript developer would feel more empowered by writing their infrastructure in TypeScript, the reality is that it’s a significant undertaking to learn to use these tools properly when all one wants to do is create or modify a few resources for their project. This is also a common source of technical debt and fragility. Most users will probably learn the minimal amount they need to in order to make progress in their project, and oftentimes this may not be the best solution for the longevity of a codebase. These tools are straddling an awkward line that is optimized for no-one. Traditional DevOps are not software engineers and software engineers are not DevOps. By making infrastructure a software engineering problem, it puts all parties in an unfamiliar position. I am not saying no-one is capable of using these tools well. The DevOps and software engineers I’ve worked with are more than capable. This is a matter of attention. If you look at what a DevOps engineer has to deal with day-in and day-out, the nuances of TypeScript or Go will take a backseat. And conversely, the nuances of, for example, a VPC will take a backseat to a software engineer delivering a new feature. The gap that the AWS CDK and Pulumi try to bridge is not optimized for anyone and this is how we get bugs, and more dangerously, security holes.

I think we have a responsibility not only to ourselves, but also to each other, to our community, not to use Ruby only in the ways that are either implicitly or explicitly promoted to us, but to explore the fringes, and wrestle with new and experimental features and techniques, so that as many different perspectives as possible inform on the question of “is this good or not”.

the concern of phenomenology "to explicate its ownfoundation .. requires th¢ self-reflexiveness which characterizes a self·referential theory.

Self-reference effects are especially relevant for episodicmemory

Information related to the self tends to be better rememberedthan other information

Reference to self, other, and object as levels of processing in recognition memory

It often eliminates the only practical solution to unforseen problems or use cases.

It is quite “normal,” and human, to not enjoy making mistakes! That is why we often feel embarrassed, deny their existence, and/or blame others for our errors. We believe that the best way is to admit your mistakes, learn from them and take corrective action. After all, a mistake is a mistake – no more, no less.

winnicott once said you know there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone

responded with typical self-effacing matter-of-factness

it is a mental construct

repressed intuition "returns to consciousness in distorted form" as the symbolic ways we compulsively try to ground ourselves and make ourselves real in the world: such as power, fame, and of course money.

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

You need to be on top of your index. This is your main navigation system.

For instance, we used to think that the main cause of obesity was a poor diet at an individual level, leading to treatments focused on the individual. However, taking a networked thinking approach in a 32-year-long study with over 12,000 people led researchers to discover that the participants’ personal network had a great impact on their likelihood to be obese. “Discernible clusters of obese persons were present in the network at all time points,” write the researchers.

I find it very tiring haha. As I said in another comment, processing a single chapter can take me a full day or two. However, I keep reminding myself that I would rather spend a day processing a chapter well, and have literature notes to serve me a lifetime (potentially, at least), rather than reading a chapter in two hours and not remember a single thing the next day. When I REALLY need a reminder of this, I just look at my "Backlog" folder which contains old "notes" that are now pretty much useless: I didn't use a reference manager consistently during my first two years of PhD so there are a lot of citations which are unreliable; I didn't really summarise texts, I only read them and highlighted; I didn't use the cloud for a long time, so I lost a lot of notes; and I didn't have Obsidian, so a lot of my notes are just contained within the context of the place I read them, rather than being connected. Seeing three years worth of useless materials, and knowing that I read a couple hundred of articles/chapters but I have nothing to show for it, that makes me more patient when writing my literature notes now. However I also find it very exciting that I can future-proof some of my notes. I feel like I'm working for my future self.

The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)

“How to Write a Thesis,” then, isn’t just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice.

But the book’s enduring appeal—the reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mail—has little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, it’s about what, in Eco’s rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties.

Principle (Observables). States for which the value of an observable can becharacterized by a well-defined number are the states that are eigenvectors forthe corresponding self-adjoint operator. The value of the observable in such astate will be a real number, the eigenvalue of the operator.

If you aren’t visibly producing, you aren’t worthy. In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels greedy, even wasteful.

Confidence is the middle way between self-deprecation (deficiency) and arrogance (excess).

Beware the person, party, or project that claims to be the incarnation of the common good. The common good is imminent within the polis in all its possibility, but it is never the embodiment of any one version of the polis. That way of thinking, always tempting, often deployed, never ends well. The common good is not something extra added on to what other practices of right recognition provide for a society. Instead, the common good shifts the frame and changes the subject of political life from the declarative as is to the subjunctive as if—the corrected fullness of equality, justice, and interdependent mutuality that are already but not yet.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”

what are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10 year old 00:10:51 self will be so happy for but if he was in front of you right now he'd just be hugging you and high fiving you nonstop the things you're doing that he will appreciate in ten years and then what are a few things that he's 00:11:04 gonna say man i really wish you wouldn't do that right now

you have to 00:07:05 make that decision for yourself right and yet somehow we also have to transform society well i i think that that's it that's maybe the most 00:07:18 important the single most important thing that buddhi buddhism has to offer which is the ecosatur path frankly or sorry not not just regards ecology but let's call it the the bodhisattva path 00:07:31 or the new bodhisattva path that that what's what's so wonderful about that path is one has a double or dual practice you know we we continue to work on our own transformation but we know that 00:07:44 that's in itself insufficient it's still at a certain point that can actually reinforce the the root delusion of separation that my well-being is separate from yours and other people 00:07:56 so you know we also are engaged out in the world and and what i think one of the really important things about that i think is the way those two reinforce each other that um 00:08:10 it's not simply that they go well together but that if you are working and transforming yourself by being engaged in the world it's helping to overcome our kind of deeply rooted self-preoccupied habits so 00:08:23 i think that that's really important in fact given the kind of very critical situation we face right now may be the most important thing of all that buddhism has to offer

i'll be talking to you for four weeks 00:06:02 um about what i call losing yourself that is really understanding the idea of no self of selflessness not in the moral sense specifically though that will get there but not having a self 00:06:14 and of what it is to exist as a person uh without a self and i'll be doing this um from a variety of perspectives and one of the things that might make this 00:06:27 set of talks different from a lot of the talks that the barry center supports is that it won't be specifically or uniquely buddhist doctrine i will be relying on a lot of 00:06:40 buddhist arguments because i do that but also addressing a lot of western arguments in western literature and i won't be interested in doing a lot of textual work in fact i won't do any textual work at all even though i love doing that this will be really about the 00:06:53 idea about really how to understand the idea of not having a self and the idea and how to understand what it is to be a person so i'll draw on buddhist ideas and non-buddhist ideas on western ideas 00:07:07 but i won't be specifically giving a course in the history of buddhist thought about no-self nor will i be talking about practice this will be a very theoretical um set of lectures um but i think what i have to say will 00:07:20 be relevant um to those who are coming here in order to enrich their practice but i won't be specifically talking about that um most of what i'm doing will be based on a book that is 00:07:33 now in press called losing yourself how to be a person without a self

by self-alienation what i mean um 01:25:35 is our being in profound confusion about who and what we are about having an idea of what we are that is totally at odds with our actual mode 01:25:48 of existence or nature that's what i mean so i'm alienated from myself when i think that i'm one thing but i'm really something else and these are various ways 01:26:01 of understanding the content of that self-alienation i think that i am toto generally different from the objects of my experience that there's me as pure subject that's one 01:26:14 kind of thing and there's that all of that stuff including all of you folks my computer screen that i'm looking at now my dog lying right next to me all of those things are merely object and i'm subject 01:26:28 so i think of myself as pure subject is like the eye in the visual field i know that that's not what i am i know that i'm an embedded embodied being in a network of dependent origination but i 01:26:40 don't experience myself that way that's a dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a being that i know immediately that i know my sensations 01:26:52 just by having them i know what i think just by thinking it i know what my emotions are just by experiencing them and that none of that introspective experience none of that awareness is 01:27:04 mediated by anything and that's stupid because i know that the only way that i can know myself is through an introspective activity and that introspection is conceptually laden and that i can be self-deceived and that 01:27:18 my psychiatrist might know me much better than i know myself that my wife knows me better than i know myself and that my dog knows me better than i know myself so i know that i don't have that immediate awareness but i think of 01:27:29 myself as having it that's another dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a free agent who can act in a way that's totally uncaused just by doing things because i will them 01:27:43 that i've got this free will that is unconstrained by causality i know that that's crazy i know that i'm a biological organism and that everything i do is caused by previous causes and conditions 01:27:55 but i don't experience myself that way that's another dimension of self-alienation i know that i am a plurality that i've got a brain with lots of different centers of activity lots of different 01:28:07 kinds of cognition happening at the same time of which i'm totally unaware visual processing auditory processing language processing emotions that are subliminal and so forth 01:28:18 sensations that i barely register i know that there's inner complexity but i experience it as a subject of unity that's another dimension of self-alienation all of these are ways that we fail to 01:28:31 know ourselves and all of them cascade from the illusion that we ourselves

we're telling ourselves hey no elephant in my house nothing to worry about whereas the self that we really think we have is that self which is always 01:16:36 subject never object always agent never patient that self that is the enjoyer that stands opposed to the world and experiences it that acts on the world 01:16:49 the self that has a mind and has a body but is not itself a mind or a body that's the serpent and chandra kerdi thinks that if we don't pay attention to that serpent if we don't understand what 01:17:02 it is we believe ourselves to be in our heart of hearts we will never succeed in dispelling the illusion and hume also is trying to identify here 01:17:14 the serpent and he's identifying it as the idea that the word self even means anything

self-alienation that is if i think that i'm a self but i'm really a person that i really don't know who i am just as if i thought that a dollar had 01:02:13 its value intrinsically in the value of the paper and the ink i wouldn't understand anything about finance currency or purchases

self-centeredness once i think that i'm a self then i think that i've got a very different relation to me than i have to anybody else that is the relation of 01:01:46 identity and i think that i occupy a very special place in the moral universe namely the center of it where i have a very special concern for me and only an indirect concern for others

the self is like that the self is like thinking that there's 01:01:22 something that is really underlying the chariot or underlying the dollar that gives it its value and there are some very nasty consequences of the self-illusion of taking ourselves to be 01:01:34 selves

we can understand the fact that we exist conventionally um but as 00:53:05 neither the same nor different from the various constituents that we have that we can lack any core or self but still have a perfectly good existence just like chariots do and that that kind 00:53:17 of existence is enough to account for our existence through time without positing a persistent self or a soul that is strung along through all of those moments

ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened 00:36:00 life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva 00:36:13 argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as 00:36:24 a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is 00:36:36 deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that 00:36:48 but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self 00:37:02 it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been 00:37:13 insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind 00:37:27 of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride 00:37:39 attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of 00:37:52 you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand 00:38:04 that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the 00:38:16 idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts 00:38:29 our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what 00:38:42 that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection

son kappa who i mentioned earlier identifies in his great book on the essence of hermenetics two different 00:33:57 kinds of self-grasping two different attitudes that you might have towards yourself he calls them innate self-grasping and self-grasping due to bad philosophy um 00:34:08 and son kappa argues there that philosophical self-grasping is really an attempt to make really good intellectual sense out of a deep illusion you can imagine 00:34:21 that as somebody saying gosh what i'm going to figure out is how drawing arrowheads on lines makes one line longer and one another line shorter right that's a dumb idea right but you can imagine people trying to do that or 00:34:33 somebody's saying i wonder how deep the water is in that mirage over there that's what sankampa thinks we're doing when we're really philosophically arguing that there's a self we're trying to make coherent and atavistic primitive 00:34:46 illusion but there's also that innate self-grasping that gives rise to that illusion it's on campuses it's actually really easy to get rid of philosophical self-grasping philosophical 00:34:58 self-grasping arises from bad philosophy and you can cure it by doing good philosophy so by the end of these four lectures you'll never believe in a philosophical argument for the self i'm sure of that but innate self-grasping he 00:35:10 thinks requires very long time of practice to try to effectively rewire the way that we understand the world

there is a difference between the 00:33:06 serpent and the elephant and that we do atavistically think that we are something other than our minds and bodies and i think that the serpent is real that is the serpent is the illusion illusory self that we need to get rid of 00:33:19 and so even if it's crazy to think that we are such a thing and when we say it out loud it sounds stupid and incoherent that doesn't stop us from believing it because we are stupid incoherent kinds 00:33:31 of beings wired for stupidity and incoherence with the task of somehow trying to unwire ourselves into something approaching inside

now i want to introduce you to my favorite 00:24:20 illusion which is going to be important because i'm going to use it as a model for everything that we're going to talk about later when we talk about the self and that's the mueller liar illusion so here we have two lines with little arrowheads and 00:24:33 those two lines those two parallel lines are exactly the same length as one another you can sort of line them up visually and see that um but the arrowheads on each side make the 00:24:44 top line look much larger than the bottom line and the amazing thing about the mueller liar illusion one of the reasons i like it is a it's really easy to draw and b um even if you know that it's an 00:24:56 illusion you're totally sucked into it so um and i'm just always amazed by that right you can just draw this illusion for somebody draw the parallel lines the same length they see that draw the 00:25:08 arrowheads and all of a sudden the lines change in apparent length and i use this because it um it illustrates an important thing about an illusion and this is something that we find again from india as a definition of 00:25:21 an illusion an illusion is something that exists in one way but appears to us in a different way or for being very technical we would say something whose mode of existence and mode of appearance 00:25:33 are discordant but that is just atrociously technical and sensibilitic um so these two lines exist as equally long but they appear to be of 00:25:45 unequal lengths and that would that's what makes them an illusion a mirage exists as a refraction pattern of light but appears to be water so whenever we get that difference between a mode of appearance and a mode of existence we 00:25:59 have an example of illusion and i say that because i want to argue that the self is an illusion that we exist in one way that is as persons but we appear to exist as selves and so we have to come to understand 00:26:11 that illusion in order to begin dispelling it

the important thing to point out is that when we think of the self this way the self isn't my body or my mind i don't take my body to be myself and 00:17:39 we're going to see that in a moment but i think of the self the target of this analysis the snake in the wall as the thing that has a body the thing that has a mind and of course if we were 00:17:50 operating in india and taking a doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth for granted we would think of it as the thing that in different lives appropriates different bodies and minds um and 00:18:02 but remains the same through those lives but if we're not in a kind of reincarnation and rebirth kind of mood um then we might think that it's just the thing that endures through our entire life while everything else 00:18:15 changes that is um the thing that was me when i was an itty-bitty baby when i was a young handsome guy when now that i'm an old guy um that it's there's something continuous there and we think of that as 00:18:28 the self

snake is this self the atman as we say in sanskrit it's not my body it's not my mind it's the thing that has the body and the mind in 00:16:36 sanskrit literature um we think of that as the subject of all of our experience that's never object the knower that's never known the witness that stands outside the world and sees the world the 00:16:48 agent that acts on the world the enjoyer of experiences and lest you think that's antique sanskrit anybody who's read kant will recognize this as the transcendental subject of the first 00:17:00 critique the free transcendental agent of the second critique or the completely free aesthetic subject of the third critique so you don't have to be indian to think that there's an atman you can be prussian as well

tells a great story says there's this guy um who is pretty sure he's got a snake in the wall of his house and in india um 00:14:13 that's still a problem and it was a much bigger problem back in the 7th century that snakes especially crates but also cobras would in order to get warm take up residence in the nooks and crannies of the stone wall of a house so this guy 00:14:26 is afraid that he's got a snake in the wall of his house and he's in order to dispel his own fear he walks around the house convincing himself that there's no elephant there and chandra charity says wouldn't this 00:14:40 guy be a public laughingstock who tries to assuage his fear of the snake by convincing himself that there's no elephant and what's the point of this weird story 00:14:52 you might ask well the moral of the story is this the snake is the self it's the self that you really do john vacardi thinks believe that you have and 00:15:05 the elephant is all of the things you might convince yourself that you don't have or that the self isn't um in order to really convince yourself that you're a really cool no self person so you might say hey i know my body's not a 00:15:18 self i've really got no self down pat or i know my mind isn't the self i've got myself myself i've got myself really on the right track here or all of these things and chandra kiriti thinks that a lot of the time when we think that we're refuting 00:15:32 the idea of a self we're actually refuting something else and so that the first important thing to do is to identify what that thing is that is the target of 00:15:43 our critical inquiry

in the third section we're going to focus on the ethical implications of all of this because i think that's really important that's why we do this and then in the fourth part we'll be 00:10:51 talking about what life looks like as a person as opposed to a self and why we should take all of this very seriously