There is no 'I'

[The Grey Man]

over and above the fortuitous synthesis of sense-data that we call the present. The past and the future are not extensions of 'myself' in two 'imaginary' space-like directions like the indefinite twofold extension of a Euclidean line, but interpolations of the present that the analytical, rational mind uses in abstracto to construct a linear narrative of the life of some atomic 'person,' with bifurcations to represent practical contingencies. Notwithstanding such 'block time' narratives, time is not linear, nor even spatial at all. Time is the eternal recreation of the present, the immortal spectacle of mortality. We all say "now," and we are always right, whether we said it in the 20th century or the 21st, the third millennium of our era or the third before Christ. Where, then, or when, is the present? Is there one, true present at all? and, if no, how can there be one, true 'I?'

Wherever "I" is said, there I am; wherever "now" is said, so it is.

 

[Rebis]

Linearity is just another tool to categorize progression. All the tools we know are associated by a cause and effect, linearity supports a causal understanding.

Present is just our closest reference point to the physical world.

 

[Black Rose]

There is no 'I'

The worst mistake of Buddhism.
The I need not be material.
It is just an extension of awareness of the self.

There may be a feeling of selflessness.
But it only lasts so-so long, an eternity of no-self.
But it returns because even eternity is temporary.

 

[DoIMustHaveAnUsername?]

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/

 

[ZenRaiden]

Do you by chance experience psychosis lately?
Just saying if you got them take them. Its no shame taking meds.

To take your post seriously well. Yes there is I. The ego does exist. The person that is is truly there. You could possibly say that given different parameters we are insignificant as agents over the environment. We are often just victims to the environment.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

Do you by chance experience psychosis lately?
Just saying if you got them take them. Its no shame taking meds.

To take your post seriously well. Yes there is I. The ego does exist. The person that is is truly there. You could possibly say that given different parameters we are insignificant as agents over the environment. We are often just victims to the environment.

where do you draw the line between I ( the agent ) and the environment and is i the agent or can you say that the environment is the agent.
i might be having psychosis lately i am not sure if this kind of language is allowed?

 

[ZenRaiden]

where do you draw the line between I ( the agent ) and the environment and is i the agent or can you say that the environment is the agent.

goal/ target is what makes an agent agent. If you have no specific enough goal then you are merely a blob of meat and water. The whole point of your brain is to know the target or goal. That is when you become the actor the agent.
If you do not have a goal or target in life then there is no point for your brain to exist. The brain gets sad and depressed, because it feels useless and as consequence it starts trying to figure out how to be happy. Since the brain is smart enough to know there is no real goal it becomes frustrated and starts looking for the next good thing. Something to do like biting nails, surfing the net or just plain doing nothing productive at all.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

plain doing nothing productive at all.

So these types of thoughts are meaningless?
does a goal need to have a meaning ?
can agents be non living too?

 

[ZenRaiden]

So these types of thoughts are meaningless?

Perhaps. Simply if you have information, but you make zero use of them then they are indeed meaningless. However that is the paradox. You cannot make use of information until you have it. So sometimes it is hard to tell what is useful and what is meaningless.

 

[The Grey Man]

Do you by chance experience psychosis lately?

lol

To take your post seriously well. Yes there is I. The ego does exist. The person that is is truly there. You could possibly say that given different parameters we are insignificant as agents over the environment. We are often just victims to the environment.

Where is 'there?' Every time I go looking for myself, I always turn out empty-handed. It seems to me that the 'I' is always doing the looking and is never what is found. Consciousness acquaints us not with the conscious ego, nor the material objects of which it is conscious, but a bare "occasion of experience," a 'there-ness' or Dasein that is interpreted in abstracto as an intentional relation between the two. The 'I' itself is never observed nakedly, nor are the substances that it ostensibly observes, which is why we always seem to run into Kantian antinomies of phenomenalism vs. materialism, pluralism vs. monism when we try to speculate on what the world is like independently of our perception of it.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

Perhaps. Simply if you have information, but you make zero use of them then they are indeed meaningless. However that is the paradox. You cannot make use of information until you have it. So sometimes it is hard to tell what is useful and what is meaningless.

WOW
You have a brilliant framework for navigation

 

[ZenRaiden]

Where is 'there?' Every time I go looking for myself, I always turn out empty-handed. It seems to me that the 'I' is always doing the looking and is never what is found. Consciousness acquaints us not with the conscious ego, nor the material objects of which it is conscious, but a bare "occasion of experience," a 'there-ness' or Dasein that is interpreted in abstracto as an intentional relation between the two. The 'I' itself is never observed nakedly, nor are the substances that it ostensibly observes, which is why we always seem to run into Kantian antinomies of phenomenalism vs. materialism, pluralism vs. monism when we try to speculate on what the world is like independently of our perception of it.

I mean you can always find ways to not acknowledge certain things for various abstract ideas, but that does not mean they do not exist.
The I is an abstract idea a symbol of the existing human. It is not like the surgeon actually can do open brain surgery and find a letter I. Not sure what you are trying to say.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

It is not like the surgeon actually can do open brain surgery and find a letter I. Not sure what you are trying to say.

obviously it doesn't, wont compute ( i )

 

[The Grey Man]

I mean you can always find ways to not acknowledge certain things for various abstract ideas, but that does not mean they do not exist.
The I is an abstract idea a symbol of the existing human. It is not like the surgeon actually can do open brain surgery and find a letter I. Not sure what you are trying to say.

Is the 'I' an abstract idea or a symbol? These are two different things.

The symbol "triangle" represents a triangle, but it is not a triangle in that it doesn't partake in the idea of a triangle, of an area enclosed by three lines. That the symbol "I" is present in empirical reality, I do not question. What I question is whether there we can find the idea of the 'I' in nature, as you seem to think. I think it's impossible because the 'I' is the synthesis a priori of sense-data, the hidden 'stagecraft' that makes aesthetic experience of the present possible in the first place. I have visions of colours and changes in the natural world, of bodily sensations and the movement of my limbs, but I do not have visions of myself qua Cartesian ego.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

aesthetic experience

you and your experience two things , what you experience is a different nature then yourself ( i )
now if you want your experience to tell you who you are or ( i ), it might not be possible unless your experience has a person ( another i )
look at him and you know what you are that is the maximum you can know, but to fully understand ( i ) you have to see ( i ).
but somehow ' i ' seems dependent on the experience to say "i", so maybe it makes it a paradox which "i" cannot solve

 

[DoIMustHaveAnUsername?]

Where is 'there?' Every time I go looking for myself, I always turn out empty-handed. It seems to me that the 'I' is always doing the looking and is never what is found. Consciousness acquaints us not with the conscious ego, nor the material objects of which it is conscious, but a bare "occasion of experience," a 'there-ness' or Dasein that is interpreted in abstracto as an intentional relation between the two. The 'I' itself is never observed nakedly, nor are the substances that it ostensibly observes, which is why we always seem to run into Kantian antinomies of phenomenalism vs. materialism, pluralism vs. monism when we try to speculate on what the world is like independently of our perception of it.

There is a difficulty in thinking in terms of "I" as the unmanifest looker that look towards experiences. The difficulty becomes clearer when we ask what does it exactly means to "look", is the "I" looking at "experiences" (if if the experiences are already happening, what is the need of looking at them - and how does the experiences happen then without anyone looking at them?), or is the "I" looking at unexperienced objects and bringing it to experience? But how does one look at things that are unexperienced, and in a sense outside consciousness? Also if we think in terms of there being some hidden conscious ego who is having its own 'experience' of the experience then we can run into an infinite regress or admit that experiences do not need to be looked at. Of course, there could be some synthesizing and transforming faculties which you may call as 'the I" that doesn't manifest but make things manifest by trasnforming stuffs into proto-phenomenal or phenomenal forms and connect to it through intuitions and infuse forms of understanding and sensibility and synthesize it together into a unity to bring the processed experience. But it isn't "looking" in a simple sense. It is engaging in a productive activity where in the occasion of experience is product of participation of self and reality. But in the experience itself, it doesn't further makes much sense to invoke a further looker. It also lacks a true intentional structure. There is no subject-object division in experience - experience is "non-dual". The subject-object intentional structure is made to exist only through imagination.
The noumenal synthesizing and productive activities as self could be anything, I guess, it may not be some simple substance but a plurarity of interconnected causal processes which can be designated as one "I" only for convinient conventional usage.
However, there is another "self" to be found beside that, which is in the nature of experiences itself - rather, the 'ground' of experiecne - what one could say as the mode-neutral awareness, or the "nature of seeing", a pure-form-of-phenomenality through which things appear, and in which the manifold is united in time and space. This is where the "witness" is found - not as something purely behind experience, but something at the very root of experience. But even these may be a plurarity dieing and birthing every few moments, appearing to be continous through the act of memory. But to make sense of temporally thick consciousness (it's impossible to think of a consciousness of an instant - a durationless consciousness), we have to consider the persistence of this witness consciousness for at least some duration, in which consciousness is spatio-temporally united with different contents - representing "one unit of sense" which is later stitched together with other similar experiences and memories. Otherwise hard to imagine anything to make sense by heavily processing a series of moments of some confused durationless instants of consciousness where in the witness does not persist for any duration.

 

[DoIMustHaveAnUsername?]

I think it's impossible because the 'I' is the synthesis a priori of sense-data, the hidden 'stagecraft' that makes aesthetic experience of the present possible in the first place. I have visions of colours and changes in the natural world, of bodily sensations and the movement of my limbs, but I do not have visions of myself qua Cartesian ego.

The sense of being an ego - a subject of experience - should be a priori, yes, because it's hard to see how that can be derived from sense-data whether you come accross the gaze of other people or not. Rather the root of this sense and idea is probably an intrinsic predisposition in our cognitive makeup which comes to fruition at a certain maturity of cognition.

 

[The Grey Man]

Of course, there could be some synthesizing and transforming faculties which you may call as 'the I" that doesn't manifest but make things manifest by trasnforming stuffs into proto-phenomenal or phenomenal forms and connect to it through intuitions and infuse forms of understanding and sensibility and synthesize it together into a unity to bring the processed experience.

I think this is the only credible justification of our reference to the 'I.' Even by saying "I think," I'm relying on analogies with specific phenomenal representations of cognitive processing (animal sensing, thought, and speech) to create a representation of the self that is having or 'looking at' phenomena in general and making judgments about them a posteriori. Like xerservx said, we only see the 'I' from the outside, as it were, as an image in a mirror or another person.

 

[DoIMustHaveAnUsername?]

Not sure what you are trying to say.

http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/kant-first-critique-cambridge.pdf

 

[Rebis]

Regardless of your philosophical underpinnings I think we can all agree there is no "I" in Team.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

is the "I" looking at "experiences" (if if the experiences are already happening, what is the need of looking at them

i = agent for not making confusion.

agent is the first thing and then it divides into agent and its experiences

agent will move in the environment ( its first experience )
if the agent wishes to understand what a agent is ( because we are not born with this answer ) it can either learn from its experience of its environment by looking at other agents.
now why i said its the maximum you can know about a agent
because the agent is always tied to the environment which gives it the awareness about everything including itself.
agent is a environment phenomenon.
now what the agent sees, either it can see agents navigating the environment or it can see the environment

now it wants to see the agent that it is, but guess what agents can only have experience of what an agent is through its experience which is generated by the environment.
which when it does try to see it sees only itself navigating to navigate itself to experience itself navigating to navigate itself to experience itself navigating to navigate itself to experience itself navigating to navigate itself to experience itself .............................................................. bhoom
XD XD


when referring to experiences i also mean the environment you navigate through and your interaction with it.
experiences only happen when you navigate the environment ( mentally and physically ).

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

on second thought i think its total nonsense i just made that up, while i was seeing myself at the edge of thoughts
probably will read and laugh on it someday or maybe not

 

[ZenRaiden]

Is the 'I' an abstract idea or a symbol? These are two different things.

The symbol "triangle" represents a triangle, but it is not a triangle in that it doesn't partake in the idea of a triangle, of an area enclosed by three lines. That the symbol "I" is present in empirical reality, I do not question. What I question is whether there we can find the idea of the 'I' in nature, as you seem to think. I think it's impossible because the 'I' is the synthesis a priori of sense-data, the hidden 'stagecraft' that makes aesthetic experience of the present possible in the first place. I have visions of colours and changes in the natural world, of bodily sensations and the movement of my limbs, but I do not have visions of myself qua Cartesian ego.

Our existence in the world is possible by us being able to fit into order of things. The world is order. Our mind is chaos, but must make order in order to fit into order. It is the function of the mind to find order that correlates with order outside world is it not?
Sensation is known, because sensation works. Ergo there would be no concept of sensation if the sensation did not correlate with the outside order.
Order is mere sequence of happenings that are time bound with in the framework we experience the world.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

meaningless

will there be 2 different types of meaninglessness such as
meaningless for us or meaningless in itself ( one plus point would be without a experiencer there will be no experience )

 

[Black Rose]

The center of awareness contains unity. Unity can shrink or grow as a tree. Unity manifest through selective attention. It contains all evolutionary mechanisms. The web of links makes Unity bigger. But Unity began as one. It could be that memory may lose everything but it could be that memory is stored forever. When we become individualized we may be able to select out the life we wish to live.

 

[Ex-User (15237)]

individualized

that and unity at this point are no more in unity
am i missing something?

 

[gilliatt]

For the coming of that day shall I fight, I and my sons and my chosen friends. For the freedom on Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor. The battle cannot be lost, its the spirit of Man's freedom. The only way freedom can be taken away from Man is other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That is nothing else. Man has been enslave by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from hi,, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. All this blood that has been spilled. I stand on that threshold of freedom. Do not give up what has been won. INTP's, keep your reason, do not get on your knees in shame & submission. Not for the worship of "We".

 

[BurnedOut]

The past and the future are not extensions of 'myself' in two 'imaginary' space-like directions like the indefinite twofold extension of a Euclidean line, but interpolations of the present that the analytical, rational mind uses in abstracto to construct a linear narrative of the life of some atomic 'person,' with bifurcations to represent practical contingencies.

It is precisely your 'sense-data' that renders time as being timeless to human beings albeit not always because repeated recall of memories can make some of your attributions in question seem time invariant but other than that, we all have a sense of what time feels like: unidirectional.
We end up perceiving time nevertheless because not all of the memories can be recalled at all times. Therefore, the unique combination of

1. Anticipations (the future),
2. Your experiences (consolidated patterns derived from memories of the past representing the past),
3. Your memories (the memory recalls in the present and associated activated memories in the here and now)

make time perception a little confusing for all of us. The ability to feel in the now and not in the future and in the past is a result of our limiting processing and memory storage and also because of the process I mentioned above which is quite based on the present. The unique aspect of all this is that the present, the past and the future preserve their essence in human behaviour.

The conclusion is that, yes, there are multiple splits of you, a contiguous array of the past yous.

We all say "now," and we are always right, whether we said it in the 20th century or the 21st, the third millennium of our era or the third before Christ. Where, then, or when, is the present? Is there one, true present at all? and, if no, how can there be one, true 'I?'

Leave that to linguistics. The fluidity of philosophy sometimes lead to combinations that really confound with impossible questions and the question of 'I' here is one of the examples which fails in its attempt to create a coherent dialectic.

The answer to your question is rather simple. You are what you right now. And you were you in the past, therefore, it is all you all along. The problem you are talking about seems like the dilemma present in the 'Ship of Theseus' conundrum.

You feel that the self needs to have qualities which are indefinite and you have it. The qualities you preserve are the qualities you chose to remember in your life. When time exists, being constant is not an option. The essence is not time-independent, it is more situational. However, this probably descends into a religious debate of sorts so I will end it here.