The Illusion of Self?
The Buddha taught that the self is an illusion. I always took that to mean that there is no self. That we just believe that there is a self, we buy into the illusion. That is kind of complicated, right? I mean who is it that believes in this “self”? What kind of entity has the capacity to have a belief? That should imply that something exists, no? Does the non-existence of a self necessitate non-existence? If we buy Descartes’ circular logic from “Cogito ergo sum,” then there must be an entity that has thoughts. In his case the “I” that thinks and therefore exists. But Descartes assumed what he was attempting to prove. In writing “I think” has he not already assumed his own existence? And, in writing “therefore I exist” he is concluding that he has proved what he had already assumed to be true. He assumed the existence of a self that could recognize itself as such. Despite his circular logic, maybe he was on to something. And maybe that is what we all do and what the Buddha was trying to tell us. Maybe it isn’t that the existence of a self is an illusion, but that our sense of self is the illusion. What I am thinking is that maybe the self exists, just not in the way we think that it does. We cannot recognize within ourselves what it is that makes us ourselves, and therefore our understanding of ourselves is the illusion. Can an operating system recognize that it is an operating system? And whether it is Windows, OS X, or Linux? Can it understand what makes it an operating system? What about AI? Can it tell that it is artificial intelligence? Can it make sense of what that means? Or does it need more context than it has capacity for? Maybe that is a major limitation of our species’ ability to understand our “selves” and our universe: in order to understand, we need more context than we have capacity to process. It is a space-time of information overload. Might we have hit our limits? Is that why we are building AI? To expand the limits of how much information we can process in a fixed amount of space-time?
Those are tangential questions.
Back to the self issue.
Is it possible that what the Buddha’s assertion boils down to is that he believed we do not have the capacity to fully understand ourselves? Yet we hold on to this illusion that we do? The illusion is what we think of as the “self”? Our personal sense of “self” is inaccurate because we cannot fully understand everything about ourself. We have blind spots, things that we don’t know about ourselves and that others do know about us, or that no one knows about us. We have unconscious mannerisms and behaviors that others may notice about us, and yet we do not. Socrates implored us: “Know thyself.” But was he setting the bar too high? Is that an impossible height to rise to? Does this mean that we cannot truly know ourselves? That we cannot be objective about ourselves?
I tend to lean toward empirical evidence. In this case, I only have my own experiences to draw on. How many times have I found myself in situations that I inadvertently created because of either misunderstanding myself or miscommunicating my thoughts to someone else? No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam. Sometimes that is a daily occurrence, at least it can feel that way, to one degree or another. That is evidence on the side of interpreting the Buddha’s assertion in this way.
Is there evidence to the contrary? What would that even look like? Situations where I knew exactly what I wanted because I fully understood myself and then communicated effectively in order to achieve my aims? I’m drawing blanks. I can’t think of any situations like that in my experience. Life has been messy.
So, is that it? Is that what the Buddha meant? Not that our “self” doesn’t exist, but that our sense of “self” is just inherently skewed. We can’t be objective about ourselves. That seems like a tough existence to muddle through. He also told us in the Four Noble Truths that suffering was the inevitable price of existence. That would make sense with this notion of what he taught us about the self.
Although, if this was such an important principle, why did he not include it in the Four Noble Truths? None of them directly state that the self does not exist or that it is an illusion. In the second truth, he did suggest that our suffering results from our desires, cravings, and attachments. Maybe that was because we don’t really understand ourselves enough to be able to manage our desires, cravings, and attachments successfully enough to avoid causing ourselves to suffer. We think we want this, we get it, then realize we never really wanted it and regret getting it. Is that plausible? If so, it also seems compatible with the Four Noble Truths.
Have we gotten over the existential angst of not existing as a self? Just by thinking differently about what a guy a few thousand years ago said about the self? Maybe not. Maybe this was the correct interpretation all along, and I just misunderstood what he meant. Maybe this is what all the monks who reach enlightenment knew all along and would only try to nudge people in the right direction.
Of course, none of this proves anything. The Buddha could have meant something else entirely. This is not a settled issue. I fear it may never be, at least for me. But my self is probably an illusion anyway.