Comments on: The Two Paths: No Self versus extended Self

By: What is a human "body"? | Dangerous Intersection

What is a human "body"? | Dangerous Intersection — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:51:07 +0000

[...] 2. The ecological body. Johnson asserts that no body can exist without an environment and that we must think of the body/environment as “one continuous process” in order to avoid the trap of mind/body dualism. We must be careful to note that the body is not separate from the environment and that “any boundaries we choose to mark between them are merely artifacts of our interests and forms of inquiry.” This point dovetails nicely with Andy Clark’s conception of “the extended mind.” [...]

By: piers

piers — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:52:14 +0000

i take your answer to mean that there are many tangential influences and life experiences outside of the brains control that shape all these disparate brains and spinal cords that commit all of these actions both for good and bad all over the world. My dilemma, is since there is no firm location to place moral responsibility, why should anyone be judged for actions they commit, whether they be good or bad? Furthermore, does any phenomenon that occurs, both positive or negative, really have any tangible significance if everything is essentially empty of a true essence or form? Why should anyone care whether anything happens? Does anything have any meaning on any level? Why should I care about anyone or anything, if no ones home to begin with?

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:17:43 +0000

piers: Who does the doing? “You” do, and “you” are confluence of all the relevant stuff that comes together in and around your body. The question, though, is how much of that stuff (both the workings of your brain and influences outside of your brain) is relevant when one tries to define “you.” The issue is one of trying to locate that source of responsibility, but biology is faltering in that search. That source of responsibility (the “self”) seems to be a convoluted social construct. That social construct, however, appears to be based on your brain PLUS an unwieldy physical reality, including many influences external to your brain and body. That is Andy Clark’s point and he has convinced me. For more on this issue, read Clark’s book, Being There.

By: piers

piers — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:15:04 +0000

So who chooses then to commit crimes, rape, pillage, or love, heal and serve others if there is no self?

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:20:35 +0000

Thanks, Nicholas. Those are good thoughtful ideas that resonate with me.

By: Nicholas Paredes

Nicholas Paredes — Fri, 04 May 2007 00:13:44 +0000

Buddhism doesn’t require that we relinquish the self so much as force us to admit that the self is a fragile base upon which to base an identity. It also allows, necessitates that we find our own path, rather than simply follow some established route. Tools for creating the trail are really what it is about.

Cognition, tools, and Buddhism are interests, and as we are simply feeling our way around the cave, the idea that cognition is based — bootstrapped/scaffolded — upon giants be they the tools we have created in the past, or the cognitive structures which allow us to forge ahead into uncharted territory is pretty interesting.

Whether we are alone building a singular reality, or one in a joint construct can be pretty bizarre. But, isn’t the world pretty bizarre? I also have read some material discussing the body as a cooperative structure of different organisms. Multi-cell systems can be constructed from different co-evolving and co-dependent life forms supplying unique functionality. The concept of a singular system is of our own making.

By: Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 21:17:55 +0000

For more on the extended mind, see this interview of Andy Clark by Natasha Mitchell of “All in the Mind.”

Andy Clark: And I kind of think of the biological brain as something like the boot program of human intelligence, it kind of gets the thing going but it’s job is to pull in all this other structure, to load up all this other stuff and that’s when we really become fully human.

Natasha Mitchell: Well let’s come to some of the disputes around that idea of the brain. There is plenty of resistance to this idea that our mind somehow extends outside of our bodies. I mean you reply that it comes from an ancient western prejudice, what is that prejudice about the mind?

Andy Clark: I’m not sure how ancient it is but I think it goes back at least to Descartes, to the idea that mind is some kind of special stuff that’s associated very strongly with the biological individual, it’s kind of individualistic, it’s kind of stuck somehow either by some sort of trans-dimensional gateway in Descartes’ case more or less, so that it somehow stuck to the biological organism.

One way to put it maybe is that we almost have the idea that there’s a “little us” inside of ourselves animating all the rest. So we can say something like you know, “well it’s my brain, it’s my hippocampus, it’s my arm” but of course there’s a clear sense in which you just are that mass of stuff. You know you don’t own your hippocampus, your hippocampus is just part of you.

And I guess the claim I’m trying to make is that when we co-evolve with our technologies in certain ways that’s the way that we should think of the relation between us and our technologies. Just like me and my hippocampus. It’s very, very hard to get rid of the idea of a wafer thin self that somehow is where the real action is, the final decider, the final chooser, but you go looking for that you in the brain and you can’t find it.

By: Josh M.

Josh M. — Mon, 08 May 2006 06:11:27 +0000

Very interesting, very interesting….
One thing that really “baffles” me as far as Buddhism is concerned, is the idea of “denying the self.” It is, to put simply, unlivable! That is why we see them at the airports, “gaining converts.” Why desire “another self” if you don’t wish to even acknowledge your own? Isn’t eating a desire in some form to acknowledge the self? Once again, it’s unlivable and illogical.