You are a self-sustaining pattern. You change over time, but you have no intrinsic identity. In that sense, you are - like consciousness - an operator: You react to and interact with things, but if I were to clone you, you would exist twice both with increasing divergence to your previous self and from eachother. The initial conditions are never the same, though.
Self is the temporary commitment to a perspective
The perspective always matters: Who is the observer (observer relativity), what kind of questions are you asking?
“You are the same person as you were X time ago”: Nobody cares whether you have same atoms / cells. You can expect a consistent behaviour / relationship.
Joscha Bach’s definition of “self”
Model of aggregate agency.
“Downstream from deviations”
Shapes agency via identification
Discovery that contents of model drive behaviour of attention → First person perspectiveThe self is the result of all the identifications you are having.
An identification is a regulation target – a dimension that you care about, where you are in disagreement with the universe.
If you let go of all of your identifications, you become free and can enter nirvana :)
The Ship of Theseus
The ship is not the boat, it’s plan and the mind of the machinery that keeps up the ship, the pattern in the minds of the engineers, of where (new) nails and planks go.
Link to originalBiology depends on the idea that the substrate will change (cells mutate / die). Your memories are messages from your past self to your future self, your context and environment constantly change, and you re-interpret them dynamically. We are like a continous dynamic attempt at story-telling, constantly reinterpreting our memories to construct a coherent story of what we are and what we think about the outside world. “Constant process of self-construction”.
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Link to originalSelf-control / discipline
You are not fully in control of these sub-systems. You are so many levels of abstraction away, that you can only steer with high-level signals (we don’t have control over optical illusions, for example if we know an image is not moving, but we still see it moving).
Though you can of course train your mind / agency / awareness to be more in control of your body, emotions, … I guess that’s what self-control really means: Having a strong conductor / general that is able to enforce order.
You are an ensemble - or rather a chaotic mess - of many different sub-processes. While you’re usually under the naive conception of “I’m me, I’m one person”, when you stop to reflect / meditate, all these conflicting selfs / sub-windows / drives / … come to surface. Learn to feel them, learn to understand them, learn to work with them, but also to assert your dominance over them.
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We are reinterpreting the story of our entire life every few hundred miliseconds.