/lit/ - Literature

Nothing disappears

>i don't believe in any soul or spirit

Get a load of this guy. You have much to learn.

>>3615395
do you?

>>3615415
Very, very few thinkers in all history have ever argued for the non-existence of the soul or spirit. All of their systems collapsed.

A complete picture of a human being as nothing more than a machine with no "ghost" inside it will utterly fail to capture any notion of personhood, responsibility, or even action itself.

As good a place to start as anywhere on this subject is Aristotle's De Anima. Most works of modern philosophy tend to be centrally concerned with problems of the self or spirit as well.

“The Self, the I, and the Me,” Mead.
“Looking-Glass Self,”Cooley.

"The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self" by Thomas Metzinger

You say you don't believe in the soul or spirits or whatever. I think the "soul" and this "something" you refer to are the same thing, in whatever form this may be. I don't know, you don't know, that's what the philosophy is about, amirite?

>>3615440
Just go ahead and call it your mind and don't try to give it a supernatural twinge, and nobody will disagree with you.

>>3615457
This.

>>3615440
Stop bullshiting.

>>3615440
>Very, very few thinkers in all history have ever argued for the non-existence of the soul or spirit. All of their systems collapsed.
Lel.

>>3615440
well in a sense i don't see or feel that people have souls or anything. i don't know, it is incredibly foggy, but any sense of a self anyone can has i feel like can be removed or taken away, brought down to nothing.. to say who i am, or what i am, can be removed or taken away. thanks for the recommendation though, looks interesting..

>>3615448
>>3615454
thank-you, thank-you!

>>3615456
the "something" is just myself.. there is something doing interpretating, and that is my mind.. yeah. but i see nothing "transcendent" about any human actions or thoughts, in that the soul could be said to not be of this world..

>>3615466
>there is something doing interpretating
This is merely grammatical convention. What is doing the raining? It rains? What 'it'? There's no it, the rain is the raining. There's no being apart from doing. You are merely a grammatical convention, just like the it that rains. You're merely what you do. There's no you apart from the doing. There's no reason to fix some sort of permanent self to a series of acts.

read upon philosophy of mind.
descartes' interactionism is still relevant actually

>>3615391
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta

Go from here.

>>3615440
>ignoring all the buddhist masters throughout most of asia
First major wave were Buddhists.


>http://www.as.miami.edu/phi/bio/buddha/milinda.htm#There%20Is%20No%20Self

Try reading this OP. Its a very early (~100 BCE) Buddhist monk arguing/discussing No-self with a Greek king

>>3615477
i've always shyed away from buddhism, but i will look into it, thanks

>>3615473
but we're not just action based beings, we can think, hold concepts in our minds, process emotion, etc. there is a sense of interpretation being done, in that my emotional response to a situation is different from yours.

it rains because water evaporates, forms together to make clouds in the atmosphere, then when the weight or other conditions are met, the h2o then forms back into water, therefore cannot sustain itself as a cloud, and falls down to the earth.. there's no "it" that rains, it's just a system, or at least that's the picture i have just described. we aren't systems..? are we? there are no "inifite" ways it can rain, but there are, in a sense, infinite ways we each process information and emotion.

>>3615474
i've read parts of descartes, and have been following the berkeley podcasts which are interesting

>>3615463
>>3615494
Should have added the proviso of "within the western school". I'm fucking clueless when it comes to eastern philosophy. Thanks for the heads-up though I'll check it out.

>>3615474
forgot;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity
i.e. you need to read not only the classical (descartes' dualism) works discussing the mind/body problem but contemporary (such as interactionist dualism (essentially descartes version of it), epiphenomenalist dualism, functionalism, behaviorism, identity theory, panprotopsychism, different kinds of monism etc.) as well. then dig into consciousness: nagel's bat, qualia, chalmers, david lewis, kripke's modal arguments etcetc

>>3615466
>any sense of a self anyone can has i feel like can be removed or taken away, brought down to nothing.. to say who i am, or what i am, can be removed or taken away.

So can your hair, or your skin. Same with your dignity, your belief in angels, and so on, but these we would say have some degree of reality to them.

A soul or a self doesn't have to be a metaphysical "thing" that inhabits the body and then moves elsewhere after death. Your idea that the problem may not be one of ontology is probably correct. Another idea of the soul might be the unifying idea of the body, or the phenomenon that in another mode might be seen as the body, in a different modification (ala Spinoza). Kierkegaard as you probably know thought of the self as the mirror that reflects in on itself. Even if the self is not tangible and can be encroached upon and removed, that isn't a reason to reject any notion of it.

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/selfctr.htm

>>3615504
>there's no "it" that rains, it's just a system... we aren't systems..?

A brain can't love, it can't imagine, or speculate. A person or a mind does those things. In the same way, during a soccer match, the painting on the grass, the goalposts, the netting, they are not at Half-Time, or an FA-Cup replay - those things only a match can be. For a football match to take place, a huge physical system of things must be taking place, you could go into describing the force applied to sinews in the muscle, or the movements of atoms, but none of these things are viable candidates for being at "1-0" with ten minutes to go. However, any change in the status of the match (the score, whether or not the ball is in play, etc) can only take place if there has been some change in the physical make-up that allows the match to take place. This relationship is called supervenience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience

Look into Kant and (early) Wittgenstein. I found their treatments the most persuasive. Not satisfying...not satisfying at all really aha, but pretty persuasive imo.

>>3615568
early wittgenstein was a proponent of behaviorism.
how does that go with something like kant?

>>3615504
There is emotion and thought and whatever, but there's no self separate from that. There's just flux and some little waves have the feature of conciousness.

>>3615574
Who (or what) then posted this message? How are we to understand it if not it being the product of some person acting in a certain way? Should we view it in exactly the same way as an identical message of randomly selected words, posted in this thread due to some accidental misfiring computer program?

well, I think I know what you mean in saying that, even if it's not altogether accurate (Wittgenstein never said he was a behaviourist, etc).

The part in the Tractatus where Wittgenstein argues the self is (basically) a necessary logical postulate are quite Kantian, even though yes at other times Wittgenstein said things about the mind that aren't so Kantian.

>>3615580
>Who (or what) then posted this message?
No one. Events don't need perpetrators.

>How are we to understand it if not it being the product of some person acting in a certain way?
As one big flux.

>Should we view it in exactly the same way as an identical message of randomly selected words, posted in this thread due to some accidental misfiring computer program?
You're overthinking it. Things don't come from anywhere, things just happen. Even causality is the result of an arbitrary compartmentalisation of phenomena. It rains. A dog barks. Jack kills people and the stock marker plummets. Stuff just happens, there is no sufficient explanation.

>>3615594
>flux is overfluxing flux. flux doesn't flux from flux, flux justs fluxes. Even flux is the flux of an flux. Flux. Flux. flux fluxes flux and flux. Flux just fluxes, there is no flux.

Is what you meant to say, right?

op here, just went to get some lunch.

>>3615542
i've been reading descartes through phenomenology, but wow.. that's a lot of topics, thanks!

>>3615543
interesting.. thanks for the response. like i said, i'm still pretty foggy with this kind of stuff as i'm not used to any kind of debate with anyone. i'm just a regular guy who reads when he can. but surely death is an end to *something* though.. that's what i find quite interesting. in that making that argument, but then reducing it down so any concept of self can be almost denounced (even if they have degrees of reality to them). sorry if i'm not following what you are getting at though, but if the self is not tangible, and can be encroached upon.. isn't that right there a reason to reject a notion of it? the self can be seen as a concept, and that's it. our idea of self is purely self understood, so it's biased in any way too.

>>3615547
i've never gotten onto steiner and don't feel like i ever will given what i've read. does he have much to say?

>>3615563
i don't think a brain in itself can love or imagine.. well, actually i'm not sure. but i don't think it even takes a self-conscious being to do those things. animals and simple organic matter show at least a slight degree of thought processes at a cogent and coherent level..

supervenience sounds interesting though, i will check that out too! thanks

>>3615574
perhaps there is no seperate self, and that we are the emotions and thoughts and whatever. but i mean.. emotion and thoughts can be removed, or that, these things aren't exactly essential to be anything.

so, yeah. i half don't know what i'm talking about, but thanks all for the interesting recommendations.

>>3615612
Yes. Or maybe just WU.

bumping to see if there any other people on here at this time with anything to say