As I see it, the basic fact of ego is something that similarly cannot be fake: my mental life has a nexus called “me” at the center of agency, being a symbol for my own body, my desires and fears, etc. It’s no more an illusion than my cat meowing for food in the morning is an illusion. He’s there, he’s hungry, he wants food, so he meows.
It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it. There is no little you sitting in your head over the dashboard and making decisions. You don't decide when to decide to move your hand. It just comes to you. If we disconnect your hemispheres which one is going to be you?
There are books on the topic, I don't have a slightest hope to get the point across, but I think if you ponder it long enough then you can come to the conclusion even on your own. You can call this familiar pattern "myself" but it's not like there's any ego that you can find in there.
And what I mean here is not "let go of your self be free and enlightened". It's just that it's all more reasonable from purely rational perspective. There are a lot of patters that you can observe in and around you. You can call them all John Doe, but when you examine these patterns, you can exclude some as something that's "not you", just a thing that happens here. If you keep doing that I don't see how can you extract what you call ego. You could group some selfish behavior patterns and associate them with ego as in when we say somebody has a big ego, but I don't think that's what you mean here.
As a first approximation, let’s say I am my physical body. If you’re sitting in the chair across from me you can see me. If I wave, what you see is me waving. I’m a body in space with some peculiar characteristics called “life.”
Fine, but what happens when I die? My body is still there but it’s not really me anymore. I’m gone. The body left behind is just a husk. So it seems that I am not just a hunk of matter, but at least a hunk of matter imbued with a dynamic pattern of activity: breathing, perceiving, reacting, speaking, and so on.
Fine, but what about sleepwalking? In some sense it’s me who’s doing the things the sleepwalker does, but in some crucial sense it’s not really me. That’s a subtle and strange distinction, but we make this distinction in everyday life. I don’t blame someone for snoring, and when I feel annoyed I recognize I am being irrational.
And so on until you start to refine a picture of the person’s self as something like that body’s everyday nexus of thoughts, emotions, and decisions, being the result of socialization and growing to adulthood, especially within a narratively coherent life.
There’s no need for a homunculus ego in some infinite regress of ultimate causality—that is indeed a nonreal, fantastical kind of self, the kind of self that early Buddhists criticized the brahmins of their time for promoting as the true self.
Real selves are just developed, cultivated, socialized entities that arise as psychological realities. There might be more complex, nuanced structures than just “one body, one self.” But the insistence that selves are just nonexistent delusions seems to me like an unnecessarily provocative way of formulating something.
So you seem to try to define it based on "conscious decisions". But since I recognize your username I'm sure you know how the story with decisions and free will goes[1][2].
Or if it's "nexus of thoughts, emotions, and decisions" then maybe you think more about patterns of behavior. If you would call it just as a currently observed patterns of behavior and update it as behaviors change then I think it's just a matter of naming them or not, they are clearly there.
But my point is that there is no nexus. Thoughts, emotions and decisions are there but there is no single central point to them apart from maybe current point in time which is basically a story that allows you to reason about the world as explained in [2].
But even in common sense distinction you are talking about seems very vague. You "say something before you think" you do something "on autopilot" or you're coding while being so deep in the flow that you are not aware of yourself etc. You or not really you?
You can blame someone for an outburst of anger (he's not sleeping) to then realize he had a tumor in the brain pressing against the amygdala. It can be the same story with yourself.
So where is self? Naming people is useful. It's not about that. It's just that we tend to look and talk about some inner pattern inside that pattern without really ever finding it.
Even treating whole body and behavior as a pattern seems somewhat context dependent. Maybe I was part of Milgram experiment or fought in some war - "that wasn't really me".
I'm sorry if it sounds provocative. I know that "losing self" has some associations that don't necessarily promote rationality.
I'm just interested in how people organize it in their heads.
You can also say that the desk lamp in front of me is an illusion because if I take it into parts then there's no single atomic center that is truly the essence of the lamp.
That's how some Buddhist texts approach the question, typically with a horse cart or a wheel as the object they demonstrate lacks a fixed essence.
To which I say, sure, fine, there is no essence. There's still a table, a cart, a self! We don't need such essences. We don't need to be able to pinpoint the exact location or center of every entity we take to exist.
It is indeed interesting to look at edge cases and borders, like what happens to the self during states of deep meditative absorption, for example. Well, let's say it temporarily dissolves, like when you heat up a piece of wax. Maybe that's accurate, maybe not.
Buddhists do talk about the self like this, that it comes and goes, that settling into samadhi makes it calm down and fade into a more diffuse state, and so on. They also say that the self is ultimately an "illusion", but in the same sense that everything is an illusion: it is temporary, compounded, dependent, etc, while we sometimes are deluded to think otherwise, e.g. that our soul is eternal which is of course a common belief (that I do not hold).
Buddhists also always add that the teachings about "not self" are not to be taken as metaphysical claims, but as useful instructions for teaching a practice, the practice of meditation leading to liberation. Or in a lighter sense, you can practice having a less limiting self-definition, or to accept that your self is dynamic and expansive.
Still, people exist, and "self" is basically just a word I use to denote myself as a person. In my solitary flow states I am in a different state than in ordinary social situations; maybe I am a bit like a chameleon, too.
People are extremely complex and marvelous, so they exist in many different ways, within many different kinds of relations and environments, and they are constantly changing and adapting, but they are also constantly maintaining and preserving.
That's all a bit of a ramble, I didn't have time to organize these thoughts properly!
I enjoyed it. A bit hard to dive deeper in a HN thread. But your view doesn't seem that far from mine after all. Similar patterns just differently organized.
I agree. But you need to define that property. That's what I mean by pinpointing it. Describing what are we talking about exactly.
The fact that we are talking about it, is not enough for it to exist.
Let's say there is a ray of light from the sky. And people start talking that there's a white tower standing on the ground as high as the sky. Everybody knows what we are talking about, it's just that we go there, examine it, and it turns out it's just a ray of sun from behind the cloud.
Not such a great example because a white tower would still be much more clearly defined than the ego is, but that's what came to mind.
> It's less than fake. You can't actually pinpoint it. There is no little you sitting in your head over the dashboard and making decisions. You don't decide when to decide to move your hand. It just comes to you. If we disconnect your hemispheres which one is going to be you?
The way I see it, your perception of there being "a little you" is basically a self-referential part of your brain taking a bunch of status readings from all over your brain and using them to generate the sensation of the little you doing whatever it is that you're doing.
The homunculus is there in your head, but he's just a picture on the screen in your Cartesian theatre.
