6 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
  2. Aug 2023
    1. 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
      • for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

      • paraphrase

        • sense of self is a construct
        • a psychological and social construct
        • it's not something that 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 ourselves as they see us
            • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
          • we learned to use language in certain ways
            • mine
            • you
            • yours
            • his
            • hers and so forth
          • that's all very essential to it
        • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
        • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
          • thinking
          • feeling
          • acting
          • reacting
          • remembering
          • planning and
          • tending
        • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
        • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
      • I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
        • because the sense of self is a construct
          • because it doesn't refer it
          • doesn't depend on it
          • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity
      • this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

        • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
        • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable
      • comment

      • question
        • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
          • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
          • reference
            • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
              • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?
  3. Jan 2023
    1. 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

      !- work on self : entangle with work on others - Loy acknowledges the fact that one cannot truly work on the self in isolation, - lest it actually increase the root separation that is the cause of the problem we have - working on breaking the illusion of the self-concept is also working on clearly seeing our entanglement with the other

  4. Oct 2022
    1. there's a second kind of cognitive illusion this first cognitive illusion as i've suggested is thematized both in buddhist philosophy and in western philosophy but the second 00:07:06 kind of illusion i find not thematized so much in the west though in some quarters it is some but not all but very much stabilized in in buddhist philosophy and that is the superimposition of subject object 00:07:19 duality um and when we do that um we take the nature of our experience to be primordially structured as subject standing outside of the world viewing an 00:07:31 object now we always know we know that on the slightest bit of reflection that that's crazy that we are biological organisms embedded in a physical world and that 00:07:43 all of our experience is the result of that embodied embedded and embedded experience in the world it's still however almost irresistible to have that kind of image of ourselves as wittgenstein put it as like the eye 00:07:56 to the visual field that we stand outside of the world as pure subject with everything else taken as object and that reflexive taking of experience that way is a very profound kind of cognitive 00:08:09 illusion one that is extremely hard to shake to overcome illusion though we first have to come to know that illusion better you need to know your enemy in 00:08:21 order to defeat your enemy and so i'm going to spend a lot of time trying to acquaint us with the nature of these illusions that is to say if we want to avoid a pointless trek through the desert uh for 00:08:34 water we'd better know that what we're seeing is a mirage and not an oasis when we become aware of that fact then we're able to redirect ourselves in the right uh in the right direction

      Jay talks about the depth of the second cognitive illusion, thematized in Buddhism but not so much in Western philosophy - the illusion of a self with respect to other.

      4E (Embedded, Embodied, Enactive, Extended) Cognition is based on an intuitive idea that we know from very simple experience - you and I are part of the world. We have bodies that are embedded in reality.

      We have a reflexive and profoundly entrenched embrace of dualism - that we are NOT of this world, but stand apart from it. This cognitive illusion is EXTREMELY hard to penetrate.

  5. Jul 2022
    1. 16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

      Adam Smith thought that there were two sides to us, one side is our concern for SELF, that gets what it needs to survive but the other side is our empathic side for OTHERS, we cares for the welfare of others. His economic design theory distilled into THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was based on the assumption that these two would act in a balanced way.

      There are also two other important and related variables at play that combine with Whybrow's findings:

      1. Death Denialism (Ernest Becker) A growing meaning crisis in the world due to the waning influence of Christianity and significant misinterpretation of most religions as an immortality project emerging from the psychological denial of death

      John Vervaeke's Meaning Crisis: https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/

      Glenn Hughes writes about Becker and Denial of Death: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

      1. Illusion of Immediacy of Experience Jay L. Garfield explains how philosophers such as Nagarjuna, Chandrakurti and Dogen have taught us to beware of the illusion of the immediacy of experience that consists of two major ways in which we mistaken conventional, relative reality for intrinsic reality: perceptual faculty illusions and cognitive faculty illusions. https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world
    1. so in this essay i'm going to explore the what i take to be the very most profound illusions diagnosed in the buddhist tradition and one and the most difficult to overcome and the primary one will be the illusion 00:08:58 that we have immediate access and vertical access to our own experience that we have a direct first-person access to our own minds that gives us our minds just as they are that the duality between subject and object that 00:09:11 structures our understanding is primordial this is the illusion that we're subject standing over and against the world rather than um interdependent beings in the world that's the conviction that we might know 00:09:24 the external world only through the mediation of our sensory and cognitive faculties but that we know the world only in virtue of immediate access to the outputs of those faculties

      Jay sums it up nicely. - the compelling illusion that we are subject standing in opposition to object instead of interdependent.