/lit/ - Literature

>>11398455
>anything that you can question the existence of coherently exists necessarily. if it didn't you couldn't refer to it.
No, you're conflating concepts with referents of concepts.
The CONCEPT of a leprechaun certainly exists. That says nothing about whether leprechauns themselves exist.
>>11398364
There's backing for the notion of "self" not existing outside of religious contexts, like with the Gazzaniga split brain experiments where people will reliably start reporting bullshit rationalization stories to maintain the illusion their behavior is something they knowingly decided on. The brain seems to always be running off of after the fact rationalization to perpetuate a story where the "self" is magically responsible for everything a person does.
So one take on this is the "self" exists as the main character in an ongoing narrative of convenience but doesn't exist as an actual causal mechanism for behavior in the way the ongoing narrative makes it out to be.

>>11221632
>the products of our subjective interpretation
That's the thing though, the ego doesn't really create anything.
It's the main character in a series of cartoons that simplify complicated physical processes underlying behavior by explaining it after the fact with the thought terminating notion of "I did it."
Here's a list of some examples where this "I" story telling mechanism reveals itself for what it really is:
1) Split brain experiments: Patients in those famous Gazzaniga experiments had two severed hemispheres each operating without the normal capacity to exchange information between one another. The patients still each believed they were a single, unified "self," but when tested it became clear behavioral output from the left hemisphere includes blatantly untrue rationalizations that cover up gaps in knowledge e.g. pic related where (because of the way hemispheres control sides of the body opposite to each's own location in the skull) the patient's left hemisphere view can see the right hemisphere selection but explains it in terms of a lie based on the left hemisphere selection.
2) Dreams: Most of higher cognitive brain function is not active and insane scenarios are almost always accepted as normal and true, yet upon awakening we behave as though the "self" that's awake and the "self" of the dream are both the same "me" i.e. it's all explained after the fact in terms of one unified ego.
3) Time: "You" 20 years ago is treated as though it shares an identity with "you" today.
4) Alien hand syndrome: Complex, apparently conscious arm movements but subject asserts it's not "me" doing it, pointing to the mechanism of "self" attribution for behavior being something that can be altered or even outright eliminated.
5) Right hemisphere stroke delusions: Common one is denial a paralyzed arm is paralyzed when it clearly is, with obviously untrue rationalizations when pressed on the issue like "that's not my arm, doctor, it's the arm of the patient sitting in the bed across from mine."
6) Ego death on psychedelic compounds: Also points to the role of "self" as a rationalization mechanism rather than the literal cause of mental activity given that certain mind altering drugs can result in the mechanism's suppression with mental activity still going on in the absence of a sense of "self" orchestrating the activity.