What is the self?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by water, Dec 2, 2005.

  1. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    1. Then you have to prove that the self is something that exists regradless of experience.

    2. You also have to prove that the self exists before experience begins, and after it ends.

    3. And you have to prove that the self of one person is not the same as the self of another person. You have to prove that selves are unique and distinctive.

    The floor's yours.
     
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  3. Harlequin Banned Banned

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    The answer to this
    you can't have missed -
    but let me ask for fun :
    To get the gist,
    to part the mist
    Have you known even one?

    Aaaah, and well spotted.
    At the very least, the end result is far less cluttered than it was to begin with. And there is also that you could claim as well a partial choice in the matter. But you aren't far wrong, and only just now touching on the meaning of futility.
    But don't go there, at least not too deeply, oh no... because you will regret it.

    I promise you.

    Why, nothing at all in the end. Only in the beginning does one believe they may find something - until it is too late. And I say that because, because, because....
    Have you ever wondered what it would be like to go back to high school, and all the fun you think you'd have knowing all you do now... but if you ever did, oh if you ever did.
    You'd be so very, very bored.

    Jehn-Yah:
    Blah?

    Answers are ultimately satisfaction. Without answers, satisfaction is fleeting, contrived... and those who can see through the contrived are never, ever satisfied.

    Quite sure about that, are ye?
    You might be right, up to a point. But then who ever made the claim that every brain born of woman was precisely, exactly the same?
    A little bulge there, a little change here... Some people are born with longer arms than others, you know. It helps when picking up pennies.

    Back to Water, under the bridge (and be careful of the troll):
    Ah , but I did. You have the air of one who will not see the bus she asked for because it isn't the right colour.
     
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  5. Jenyar Solar flair Valued Senior Member

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    Not regardless, but with no direct causality of. Causality alone does not define you, as quantum indeterminancy might show.

    Why do I have to prove it? One doesn't need to prove an arbitrary set of positives to rule out some of the negatives.

    If it wasn't true, "I" would not have had to prove it to "you".
     
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  7. beyondtimeandspace Everlasting Student Registered Senior Member

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    554
    After reading all of this, I can't help but to think, "what a bunch of asses."

    And of course, you will all now think the same of me. Well, at least our selves are all the same in that way.
     
  8. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    You're right, BTS.
    Sciforums is mostly a bunch of asses who don't take life seriously, and so they post in shabby threads like this, asking questions they know have no useful answer, not here, in a thread. Because fruitless endeavours, after all, leave one busy and blind to the true misery of their lives. That might be welcome sometimes.
     
  9. glaucon tending tangentially Registered Senior Member

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    True enough, most of the time.
    Yet, I think it would be a bit much to say that we can't accomplish anything fruitful here....
     
  10. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    6,442
    Oh yes, like getting me to leave the computer!
     
  11. Satyr Banned Banned

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    1,896
    What is Self? What is Self?!!!
    What is Self, the Self does ask.

    The Need itself showing itself to itself; the question responding to itself, without realizing it.
    The Self Being as a way of answering itself.
    The Self wanting to be more than just this, a mere question, a pulsating Need wanting to find satiation, a finality desired; Self wanting to end itself, thinking there will be something left over when all the layers of communal reflections are stripped away and it stands there naked, in its emptiness, and feels the terror of not seeing itself there.


    What is Self?
    Despair is the Self’s reaction to its honest answering.
    And here in this Despair, in the vision of the void, possibility rests.
    Despair is the mind tearing free from its own necessity; unfastening its mission from its destiny, unravelling its own facade and finding itself aloft in the void, with nothing to grab onto but…. itself.
    “The horror…………The horror…………”

    For a construct can only be raised in empty lots and void spaces.


    What is the Self?
    It is that which is itself in every instance; a continuum of energy congealing into an autopoietic unity to establish boundaries and order within the chaos; a self-contained entity distinguishing itself from the infinite to find stability.
    One cannot point to the Self, for in pointing one uses dimensional space.
    One cannot define the Self precisely, since in defining one uses external elements to the Self to define the Self.
    The Self is that which points and defines. It is Life animated by Need and underneath it all, nothing more but this.



    What is Self?
    That which sees itself in Others and comes to believe in the reflection there- losing its authentic identity in the “they”, falling out of authenticity by thinking, acting and believing in the “they”- the “they” but an ambiguous non-specific, otherness, finding definition in each others interpretations of each other, a communal house of mirrors creating reality through agreement; that which creates an imaginary ultimate Otherness, a Wholeness, a completion, a God, to find itself mirrored there and to find solace in belonging with no responsibility for ones own Becoming.



    How does Self love Self?
    By acceptance and awareness.

    What is loved or hated must first be known completely and honestly or else one loves the illusion or the hypothetical, idealized Other or Self (An Ideal being a communal myth defining the ultimate acceptable Self as it relates to a “they”), and not the authentic. For this reason only self-love can hope to be pure love, if full awareness and acceptance is achieved, and all others but inauthentic forms of self-love – projections of it. We love ourselves in others, if we love ourselves, or we love our lack of self in others, if we hate ourselves, but we never totally know the other nor do we totally accept them as they are to call it love.
    In most cases our love for others is really desire, the focus of Need upon an object which satiates it. We love the Other who feeds our Need(s) and we appreciate them for it by feeding their Need(s) in return.
    We gain access to the source of our Needs desire by offering access to them - an economic arrangement.

    Then, secondly - for there to be self-love - one must accept Self for whatever it is and realize that it is the Self’s Nothingness that offers it its potential for Willful Somethingness.
    If Self were something, to begin with, then this something would contain it and define it.

    The question of Loving ones Self is most often asked by those you seek self-love through the Other’s concurrence or the Other’s acceptance and awareness, because they lack self-awareness and self-acceptance. We seek love by making others love us, as we pretend to be so as to become desirable and lovable to them, on their behalf and for their Needs. We prostitute ourselves to find ourselves in the Other’s satisfaction with us.
    We seek love in the reflection of the Self in the Other.
    “Mirror, mirror on the wall…..”

    The question is: How can one not love ones Self, when Self is what gives us access to consciousness and the spectacle of living and when Self is the only thing we hope to ever know with any degree of totality?
    {Love being a word defined as that of awareness and of acceptance.}

    The only way to not Love ones Self is to seek, and thusly find, Self in Other’s and find there the nothing of Self seeking in you a satisfaction and completion.
    It is by losing yourself in the average “they” and being defined by a “theyness”; it is by being horrified by the vision of your Nothingness and striving to fill it with objects and relationships or by clinging to the Other so as to achieve the illusion of substantiality in the clinging, when love turns into self-hate or inauthentic love.

    In the end the Other(s) never love us but only what we have to offer.
    The more we offer, the more lovable we are, if we ask for less in return. The more we try to make ourselves conform to the ideal of the “they” the more desirable we become, losing our identity by turning into a caricature of an Ideal Otherness and we become prisoners to the Other’s opinions and judgments of us, because our sense of self is inexorably linked to that of the Other, whom we feed to gain ourselves in their good opinions of us.
     
    Last edited: Dec 5, 2005
  12. glaucon tending tangentially Registered Senior Member

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    Whoa.
    Someone's been reading too much Sartre...
     
  13. Satyr Banned Banned

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    I’ve never read Sartre.
    But I have read Nietzsche, Heidegger and I have eyes and a mind to think for myself.
     
  14. Prince_James Plutarch (Mickey's Dog) Registered Senior Member

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    Water:

    The self is a composite construct, composed of the following:

    1. The body.

    2. The mind
    a. Consciouness​
    b. Memory/experience​
    c. Sensory perception​
    I. emotional awareness.​

    The self, also, is in constant flux. It is a continuum, not unlike a river, which though keeping an identity from birth (its genesis) to death (its annhilation) despite the fact that it is never, at any moment, the same as the last. Every thought and sensation fundementally changes the self and this process does not cease until one expires.

    The self is also one of the most important things to prove, as well as something which is undeniable. Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" covers this nicely, in the fact that yes, thinking proves the self, as the thoughts must have a thinker/experiencer, thus one must exist.
     
  15. Harlequin Banned Banned

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    126
    The most amusing thing about most people is that they'll go on debating the exact nature of water until one of them dies of thirst.
     
  16. wesmorris Nerd Overlord - we(s):1 of N Valued Senior Member

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    Self?

    I am self.

    My self percieved your stuff, processed it and responded thusly:

    I am my ego, generated from my perspective. I garner experience because I am subjective. I have a POV unique to my senses/mind.

    I am my angle.

    When light is exposed to my eyes, only my eyes occupy the space-time that cause images of a particular perspective to pass through my eyes.

    Same for hearing, smell, touch.. blah.

    My internal dialog is similar in that I seem to be the only one that hears it.

    Self is I.

    Loving yourself is simply a helpful tool to an end which is different for each who undertakes it. A lot of people seek "happiness" or "contentment" and I think "loving yourself" can make that easier to find for most.

    My interpretation of "loving yourself" is the ability to treat yourself as you would others. Erm... basically. IMO, it's a saving grace from those who would hound themselves into insanity/uncontrollable neurosis. Of course there are opportunity costs.
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2005
  17. beyondtimeandspace Everlasting Student Registered Senior Member

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    Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who's the greatest self of all?
     
  18. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    I would know!
     
  19. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    How can you have an internal dialogue? Is there one self in you, ... or whom does this self converse with? Is the self polylogic in nature?
     
  20. wesmorris Nerd Overlord - we(s):1 of N Valued Senior Member

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    By not saying what I'm thinking out loud. Perhaps "dialogue" isn't quite as correct as "narrative" or "commentary". There are words that I don't say which are reflective of the activity in my mind.

    I percieve my thoughts similarly to percieving the words you typed here. When I experience the words you typed, they become part of my thoughts, which are what I percieve.

    I dunno if I'd use "polylogical" or not since the self isn't necessarily logical at all, but the idea of a bunch of domains is right on I think. I would think of the domains as concepts unique to the mind. It seems to me that the only logic that applies is really when "making sense" is demanded of one's conceptual inter-relationships. At that time "logic" will be construed within the framework of whatever context (and thusly whatever concepts are related to the context) in an attempt to satisfy the demand of "making sense". The stuff of the concepts however isn't necessarily logical.
     
  21. Spectrum Registered Senior Member

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    459
    Perhaps one of the domains, or a central domain that connects the others, as you described Wes Morris, is logical.
     
  22. wesmorris Nerd Overlord - we(s):1 of N Valued Senior Member

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    I guess that depends on how your circumstance and perception place a demand for "logical thought or action" onto your mind at a given time. I certainly don't think that "logical" is necessarily a central domain. Actually, I think what substitutes "logical" or "reasonable" from the individual's perspective is generally an "on the fly" solution (analagous to a resultant vector from a cross product or something) to whatever conceptual imbalance is created (or would be, were it not for the solution) by perceived circumstances.

    Do you see what I mean there? You have a "concept space" full of the stuff in your head, all inter-connected and junk. For the sake of simplicity, let's stick with a dumbed-down example.

    There is a red round thing on my table.

    "red" intersects with "round" creating a "vector" to "red ball" - which is a concept just sitting over there in the sub-conscious, linked to the stuff through pathways of potential use.

    Actually the way I usually think about it is something like: The brain's initial state is hundreds of millions of potential inter-connections. Say the first time you see a red ball (and don't know it as a name yet), the physical act of perceiving it "collapses" a random set of potentials into a reality. Then the stimulous "red" comes in auditorily, and is by the timing of it associated to the link of "round = ball". The pathways from each sense form somewhat randomly and independently, but the timing of them and the potential imbalance causes a connection between the independent stimuli. When you again experience a red ball, the same circuitry (by the fact that it got burned in the first time) is re-activated and burned in even stronger.

    Now take that analogish kind of thing, add emotion as a "weighter", add the sum of focus in real time (as demanded by the moment that preceded it) plus the larger scale of sensory stimulation acting in a manner similar to what is described above... and you'll find me probably pretty far off topic? Damn.

    pardon.

    (welcome to the forums by the way)
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2005
  23. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    Wes,


    By "polylogical" I mean that there are many "voices" in your mind, so a polylogue is going on. Like a comittee.
    This is esp. obvious when you are facing a complex decision (not necessarily serious though), and you find that your mind is suggesting all sorts of things, while it is hard if not impossible to identify with just one of the voices.
    So. The question is, which one of the voices is your true self?
     

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