/lit/ - Literature

>>19240296
Bump

The notion of a human not being a “person”, but rather a mechanistically functioning phenomenal self-model that simulates a person is intriguing.

According to Metzinger, the the human brain manufactures the subjective sense of our
existence as discrete “selves", thus we are mere information-processing systems for which it is expedient - in an existential sense - to create the illusion of “being someone".

The above is paraphrased from Ligotti's "The Conspiracy Against The Human Race"

>>19240296
I have only listened to this talk by Metzinger which was fantastic and made a really strong case for his theory. Ray Brassier mentioned that he wrote The Ego Tunnel for average joes so pick up that. But I think this talk serves as a good introduction to him.

https://youtu.be/m2BJvlq91Ss

>>19240699
Thanks, will give it a watch

>>19240296
Metzinger: You do not see the Ego, you see things through the Ego. This Ego consists of memories, thoughts, perceptions, acts of will thoughts, we have no center of being but we mistakenly create an arbitrary sense of selfhood or identity based on this aggregate of mental phenomena I call the Ego

Adi Shankara: If you do not see the ego but instead see through it, how are you able to discern and identify in sequence its components? Nobody would take seriously a man who denies that he can see a bird while describing its visual features in detail

Metzinger: Uhh…. these thoughts and emotions and acts of will have their own awareness that they bring forward with them, these combine to produce to a feeling of being a singular and persisting presence, even though this is illusory

Adi Shankara: That doesn’t make much sense either my confused materialist friend, disparate and momentary flashes of awareness that belong to individual thoughts, sense-perceptions etc cannot combine to produce a united experience—the various senses are different from each other in nature and so one’s sense of smell cannot know one’s sense of sight or sound, much less thoughts and emotions; when they cannot know each other they cannot possibly combine to form a united experience unless they are all known at once by a separate witness who stands apart from them, and this is precisely what we find in our experience —that thoughts and sense-perceptions are known by the same awareness, for example when speaking to someone, at the exact moment we are considering what to say in response to them, we can still visually perceive them in the exact moment in which that thought is occurring. In that moment, that singular knowing awareness neither belongs to the sense of sight, not does it belong to that thought, which is concerned with the conversation and not engaged in any discursive thought regarding the color of the grass, sky, the person’s hair color, and so on. Hence, the awareness which knows both belongs not to any identifiable action of the mind, but is always-present witnessing awareness of the Self, the Atman

Metzinger: Okay, I agree that it doesn’t make much sense to consider mental functions as self-aware, what about if I say that the awareness is part of the Ego as another one of its functions, and that it observes the other components?

Adi Shankara: If you admit that Awareness knows all the contents and functions which you assign to the Ego, and that it’s neither identical with any of those other functions of the Ego, and that none of them possess the quality of Awareness but are invariably known by It, what is the purpose of grouping it with them if it differs from them by having a different nature from them?

Metzinger: You’re right, that doesn’t make sense either. Where can I learn more about this understanding of the real self of awareness?

Adi Shankara: Start with Guenon’s book on Vedanta and then read my Upanishad commentaries

>>19241600
>Nobody would take seriously a man who denies that he can see a bird while describing its visual features in detail
Couldn't this be a a case of Plato's allegory of the cave?

>>19242126
Can you elaborate on what that would entail in this context?

>Blablabla ego blablabla simulation blablabla material process blablabla let’s do cognitive science instead of philosophy blablabla

>>19240699
>repeats old philosophical conundrums through neurological diagnostic analogies.
what's the point? Seems redundant.

>>19240699
dude sounds like Christoph Waltz, but is totally insipid and seemingly lacks proper philosophical education outside of his nieche STEM field.

One therefore becomes dumber while listening to this guy by regressing to a Geist at an incredibly rudimentary time in philosophical history while also receiving a bastardized infecund image of the future.

>>19243830
A different perspective is never a bad thing.