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Where is My I?

I’ve just finished Sam Harris’ book, Waking Up - an attempt to start the conversation of squaring ‘spiritual’ experiences with the growing fashion of reason and believing things only on good evidence. I’m very invested in this movement, having practised and read about meditation for some time.

Sam, with the backing of some excellent scientific research (I even went to the bother of looking some of it up), sold me on meditation. I was already sold in fact, having already seen some of the research, but the book gave me a renewed interest.

I like learning new skills, especially mentat-type skills, like mnemonics. So when it came to meditation, I could only think ‘Improved emotional control? Increased concentration? I could get more life-stuff done! Maybe general experience really would be more pleasant. Sign me up!’.

I’ve been meditating with this hope for some time. Some months pass with barely ten minutes’ practice per week. Others see twenty minutes worth of intense meditation per day. All in all, I’ve been meditating for far longer and with more intensity than I ever did while learning to juggle or perform magic tricks. The juggling’s pretty good, the magic’s so-so, the concentration? I really don’t know. It’s a tricky subject, but I have the nagging feeling that I should have achieved something at least noticeable after a few years of this.

Ego Death

What is meant to keep one on the straight path to enlightenment is ego-loss, a certain lack of belief in the self. This isn’t just an academic belief, but rather a reflexive belief - a belief held so deeply that one sees it in the world rather than reminding oneself of it from time to time. It’s this relation which I’ve had such trouble understanding, even in a theoretical way. To break it down, it seems Sam is saying that once someone deeply believes that the self is an illusion, they will then receive the benefits of enlightenment, which is a meditative state of mind. Whether meditation is purely suggested to help us reach this goal, or whether it is another thing altogether, seems unclear.

More worryingly, it’s entirely unclear to me what this no-self idea means. So I’m an illusion you say, Sam? I’m not sure how this could be the case. When I’ve had conversation about this with my Buddhist friends I get the creeping and distinct feeling of a No True Scotsman fallacy underneath all the talk. Clearly I’m here - clearly I’m not in Egypt. Clearly I’m not just a thing in the red king’s dream. Clearly while I might be mistaken about anything I think I can see, but to say that I am mistaken about the very I which is supposed to be making the mistake seems logically impossible.

‘But, but!’, the reply hurriedly, predictably comes ‘Nobody’s suggesting you’re not here, that you’re not speaking, that it isn’t rational to label one entity ‘me’ and another ‘you’ in order to know which clothes will fit which body and who’s to work at which job’. We’re meant to believe there are, it seems, two ‘I’s. A conventional one and some other ‘I’ about which we are mistaken. And here’s where I really fall down - I’m happy with the conventional ‘I’, but I need convincing that this conventional I has ever believed in another I. Here is the No True Scotsman fallacy. It’s where someone says ‘Okay, so the self is not an illusion, but the true self is an illusion.

One instruction we’re told is to look for this I. If you feel afraid, look for the ‘you’ which is feeling afraid. Apparently you won’t find it at the level of consciousness. ‘That which is aware of fear is not itself afraid’, we’re told. But here Sam seems to miss the point - this consciousness is the very thing which is labelled as ‘I’. ‘But where in consciousness is the I?’, Sam asks. This strikes me as asking ‘Where is your car?’, and when someone shows him the car, dead ahead, bright red and metallic, he responds ‘Okay, but where in the machine is the car?’.

I can think of nothing more than simply pointing again at the car. ‘That’s it’, I say. ‘That’s the lot. I don’t know what else you were expecting’.

All in all, this rather looks like more general metaphysical nominalism with an obsession for one’s own mind. Nominalists are already quite convinced that our words for objects are short-cuts - a simplification of a complex reality, symbols for things which don’t technically exist. We say ‘Time to feed the cat’ because that’s easier than specifying the exact chemical reaction we wish to occur with the cat-food-tin atoms and the cat-atoms. That’s not exactly like saying that the cat is an illusion, but technically there is no single object which is a cat. This is the world-view de facto held by physicists everywhere. They know that there are no cat-finding machines because there is nothing in the universe which is really a cat, and subsequently, there is no ‘catness’ to be detected by anything. Physicists, Philosophers and anyone who’s given the subject much thought are clearly more than comfortable with the idea that there is no unified, indivisible self in everyone’s brain. Despite this, it’s not clear that this belief allows them to not be ‘lost in thought’, ‘distracted’, ‘have conversations with themselves’ or receive any of the other benefits which supposedly fall out of meditation. It’s not clear that Physics leads to enlightenment in the Buddhist sense.

The Persistent Monologue

It’s also not clear why the ‘conversation’ element of thinking is a particularly bad one. Noticing why we have a thought is certainly a useful thing, so an argument can be made that thinking without awareness that we’re thinking is bad. Philosophy is often concerned with unpacking our instincts on any matter and asking why we think that, so Sam’s advice to notice that we’re thinking and notice what we’re thinking sounds like great advice to me. And if not thinking so much in the way of useless background chatter every moment of our lives is healthy or conducive to mental health then that’s great, but then why does Sam focus so much on the verbal elements of thought? I can’t report much on anyone else’s mental life, but for myself I think in images when tired and sounds about midday. I think in terms of emotions when stressed and in the shower tend towards thinking in terms of voices. Why the specific disparagement on the internal conversations? Why is it not bad to see a tree and having an association with a tree we loved in childhood, or smelling nice food and thinking about how nice it would be to eat? Are these thoughts ‘living in the moment’ because they’re not verbal or conversational?

If a lack of ego and a lack of internal dialogue allows certain benefits, does this mean that all animals are in a meditative state all of the time? I like to joke that my cat’s a Zen master, given how relaxed and conceited she looks while sitting down, but is it really the case that she has something with her consciousness which I can’t? Are all the mammals in the planet in a constant state of Zen mastery, unaware to us? Or do only human brains receive benefits when we lose the background chatter?

Of course, one needn’t be a cat to forget about oneself outside of meditative experiences. When people zone out to computer-games, look at lolcats on Imgur or watch an engrossing film, they really do forget that they exist for a period. There is no ego, there is no first-person perspective. Are these acts meditative? Do they really encourage the benefits of meditation? It seems Sam’s telling us that they do not, as he mentions that the enlightened state of mind is like becoming aware of oneself while watching a film - one moment we’re engaged in the story of the television, unreflectively, and the next we realise where we are and what’s really happening. Why should our awareness of ourselves be associated with ego-loss or realising that the self is an illusion?

There’s also the worry that this background chatter is useful. Granted, most of what I think is just the useless nonsense Sam’s described. Conversations past and possible fill my head. Half the time I’m thinking with other people’s voices rather than my own, for no apparent reason. I’ve never experienced the whole ‘narrating to yourself what you are doing while you are doing it’ as Sam’s mentioned, but the other white-noise which I fill my consciousness with is very familiar and plausibly useless or counter-productive. That said, a worry remains that constant chatter might have some function. Constant mental practice is a good way to improve a skill. If we are constantly practising conversations, doesn’t that mean we are constantly practising social skills? Being a less than sociable character, I like to run Philosophical arguments through my head. When going to the bus-stop I might run over the arguments for and against a particular type of Determinism. Sitting on the bus, I’ll be going over how this squares with certain types ethical beliefs. I can only imagine that Mathematicians are busy thinking about infinities and economists are squaring the signs in shop windows they see with their knowledge of advertising. Even physical skills such as martial arts can be practised in one’s head (albeit not as well as when training for real). All this suggests to me that constant self-awareness would be a great tool to focus on skills we really care about rather than as a tool for cutting our eternal vigilance of what is important to us. Plausibly many people are sitting on the bus thinking about the X-Factor and other prole-feed, but if there’s an improvement to be had, wouldn’t it be better food for the mind rather than attempting to fast?

Conclusion

The studies are conclusive - meditation delivers on the goods. Yet it’s unclear that a necessary part of transcendental meditation is a reflexive belief that we don’t exist in some sense. Here, people versed in the enlightenment rhetoric prefer to say ‘the belief that the self is an illusion’, rather than ‘the belief that we don’t exist’, but exactly why one wouldn’t automatically entail the other is never spelled out.

The vexing conclusion is that I don’t know what to conclude. Perhaps…

1. Perhaps I’ve never suffered from this illusion, so I can’t perceive it when it’s described. I’m always very aware of what I’m thinking, I don’t narrate what I’m doing and I usually spend my thinking time considering things I think are important. I can’t say I’ve ever understood what people were talking about when they say that we shouldn’t see ourselves as a subject, experiencing the world objectively and apart from it.

But if this illusion is as common as it’s supposed to be, this seems unlikely. And if piercing that illusion really does (as Sam claims) grant special states of mind, free from anxiety and confusion, it’s clear that I don’t have it.

2. Perhaps this freedom from the illusion of the self was a story told by one person, at one time, and everyone who engages in meditation uncritically absorbs this story, and thinks about not thinking, and enlightenment as automatic colleagues with the no-self part of the narrative. Perhaps it’s a pointless story - a meme which has attached itself to the more practical goal of a calm mind. Perhaps Sam has managed to strip away all the dogma and useless religious elements from meditative practices with the exception of one last, lingering myth about a common delusion which nobody can rid themself of because nobody actually suffers from it.

3. Perhaps there’s some very real and practical benefit from not being attached to one’s health, wealth and reputation, and this has simply been muddled up with a story about no-self.

Or perhaps I’m simply not getting it.

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Emptiness leads to less being trapped with emotion.