NorthOfNorth wrote on Nov 14^th, 2012 at 7:40am:


yes , seems to be the buddhist concept of "no permanent self, no permanent soul" 

NorthOfNorth wrote on Nov 14^th, 2012 at 7:36pm:



We don't say 'I am beating my heart' because we would come across as numpties.


We say 'my heart is beating'.

While we often imagine the self/ego/I to have substance, we nevertheless and paradoxically, have a very arbitrary perception of where 'I' stops and 'Other' starts.

While we often claim good luck to be good management (i.e. the 'I' acted upon the other to create favourable circumstances), we often dismiss bad luck as something that happens to us and only begrudgingly accept that 'I' may have caused 'bad luck'.

We imagine 'I' to be a controller residing somewhere in the brain, always facing forward, but only consider this controller to be partially acting on the body to cause events.

But, of course, as personality disorders (such as bipolar, obsessive-compulsive) or more serious disorders (schizophrenia) indicate, the perception of the independence of 'I' and its control of its world is easily challenged.

In the case of dementia or Alzheimer's (where the sufferer may not necessarily even imagine they're suffering any loss of 'I') its easily demonstrated that the 'I' must be, ultimately, illusory and with no substance.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on Nov 15^th, 2012 at 10:41am:

'The Other' is that which the 'I' has determined the 'I' can't control.

NorthOfNorth wrote on Nov 15^th, 2012 at 6:38am:


This seems little more than saying that freedom and self-directedness are deformities like Alzheimer's of schizophrenia. To have a mental state is best explained by a disease analogy.

This is a fallacy.

A disease is such from the perspective of non-disease only. You need to acknowledge a vantage point of mental health.

Otherwise every mental state, including self-directing, autonomous mental states -  are diseased, which is absurd.i

Soren wrote on Nov 19^th, 2012 at 9:04pm:

It indicates that the 'realm' of the 'I'... Its 'substance', is entirely arbitrary... And extremely fragile...

If it had substance, it would not erode so easily... Stroke victims also present symptoms of unusual and unwilled perceptions of self...

Where does the 'I' go as dementia erodes it?

Soren wrote on Nov 21^st, 2012 at 5:20pm:

Stopping at red lights is a very good example of where we often act entirely subconsciously and often without any memory at all that we stopped at a red light. We simply often assume, after the fact, that we stopped at red lights. How many people can recall all the red lights they stopped at on any given day while driving to work? The 'I', it seems, can be completely disengaged from the actions of driving and yet the 'non-I' still operates the vehicle entirely safely and within the law.

There's little doubt that we arbitrarily determine what is an act of the 'I' and what is not. This is highlighted most graphically in law, where the defence will often make the argument of 'diminished responsibility' - i.e. the accused should be found not guilty because the 'I' did not cause the events, leaving, in the wake of that being a successful defence, the mystery of who or what did.

Another interesting example of what is clearly a more definite boundary of the 'I' is the phenomenon of 'blind-sight' ('movement sensitivity'). In humans this is almost unobservable until a patient with a brain trauma is rendered blind (due not to damage in his eyes, but with damage to the visual cortex). In some cases these patients can detect movement but have no awareness at all of how they can do it. The reason? The optic nerves send signals to at least 2 parts of the brain - the visual cortex (the result of which we are certainly aware of) and also to a more primitive part of the brain which detects movement but which does not interact with the cerebral cortex. This area of the brain is more developed in reptiles and much less so in humans. The result being is that, in patients with this peculiar and specific damage, they have no sense that the 'I' is doing the detecting of movement and yet they can still respond appropriately.