Whole lot of equivocation goin on (as performed by Jerry Lee Lewis)
There is no locus of the self. You are, we each are, a multitude. Tens of trillions of cells in your body. About 0.2 trillion of those cells are in your brain.
It is sometimes said that your brain is a monkey brain on top of a rat brain on top of a lizard brain. That is a somewhat colorful colloquialism, of course, but it describes a basic truth, that our brains are the culmination of billions of years of biological, and more recently, cultural evolution. Most of the brain processes we each have under way are not available for direct conscious awareness because the brain just does not have the pathways of connections to consciously monitor most of what the brain does.
So what exactly is "me"? If you are thinking it a somehow a point in space, or a single undifferentiated entity then you have a highly simplistic pre-scientific understanding of who you are.
The most obvious explanation for the hiddenness of god is that god does not exist. All manner of fanciful beings remain hidden to us for the simple reason that they are just things we imagine based on stories we read or were told or watched in some media.
Once you realize god is just figment of your imagination then you will not have to worry about all the seeming paradoxes and quandaries that arise from the speculation of god.
"If God is closer to me than I am to myself, how can he be hidden from me?
But don't I learn from Hume that my self is also hidden from me?"
Let's agree for the sake of the argument that God is indeed closer to me than I am to myself. In that case, the reason why my self is hidden to me is because it is not close enough to me. But since God is closer to me, even infinitely closer, God should not be hidden from me.
Hume has trouble finding the self among his ideas, but he is ironically pretty confident that his ideas are readily available for inspection. I myself find it hard to learn about my own hiddenness from Hume, who is, in any case, content enough with the hypothesis that there is no self to be unhidden. I learn about my hiddenness from Augustine.
SMS, "I learn about my hiddenness from Augustine." You won't find much useful information about the structure of the self by reading ancient men.
Yes, one can figure out a few basics with introspection, but that does not help much for the hidden part, now does it? I mean, that is like using your unaided vision to look for radio waves.
So, how does one discover things about anything that is hidden to our ordinary unaided senses?
There is a word for that. The word is not Hume, philosophy, Augustine, or god.
That word is science.
If you want to find out about your hidden self science is the only tool human beings have.
Oh, yes, you can figure out some things by philosophizing about them, and through introspection, but that has already been done for thousands of years so that methodology is almost entirely exhausted. The revelations one can obtain by philosophizing upon introspection are not hidden, we already know such things.
The metaphysics of form: the cells that are informed by my form are the ones that count as being in my body. As far as we know, there is no empirical way to tell which those are, but there is a metaphysical fact of the matter.
Whole lot of equivocation goin on (as performed by Jerry Lee Lewis)
ReplyDeleteThere is no locus of the self. You are, we each are, a multitude. Tens of trillions of cells in your body. About 0.2 trillion of those cells are in your brain.
It is sometimes said that your brain is a monkey brain on top of a rat brain on top of a lizard brain. That is a somewhat colorful colloquialism, of course, but it describes a basic truth, that our brains are the culmination of billions of years of biological, and more recently, cultural evolution. Most of the brain processes we each have under way are not available for direct conscious awareness because the brain just does not have the pathways of connections to consciously monitor most of what the brain does.
So what exactly is "me"? If you are thinking it a somehow a point in space, or a single undifferentiated entity then you have a highly simplistic pre-scientific understanding of who you are.
The most obvious explanation for the hiddenness of god is that god does not exist. All manner of fanciful beings remain hidden to us for the simple reason that they are just things we imagine based on stories we read or were told or watched in some media.
Once you realize god is just figment of your imagination then you will not have to worry about all the seeming paradoxes and quandaries that arise from the speculation of god.
lex
ReplyDelete"If God is closer to me than I am to myself, how can he be hidden from me?
But don't I learn from Hume that my self is also hidden from me?"
Let's agree for the sake of the argument that God is indeed closer to me than I am to myself.
In that case, the reason why my self is hidden to me is because it is not close enough to me.
But since God is closer to me, even infinitely closer, God should not be hidden from me.
Hume has trouble finding the self among his ideas, but he is ironically pretty confident that his ideas are readily available for inspection. I myself find it hard to learn about my own hiddenness from Hume, who is, in any case, content enough with the hypothesis that there is no self to be unhidden. I learn about my hiddenness from Augustine.
ReplyDeleteSMS,
ReplyDelete"I learn about my hiddenness from Augustine."
You won't find much useful information about the structure of the self by reading ancient men.
Yes, one can figure out a few basics with introspection, but that does not help much for the hidden part, now does it? I mean, that is like using your unaided vision to look for radio waves.
So, how does one discover things about anything that is hidden to our ordinary unaided senses?
There is a word for that. The word is not Hume, philosophy, Augustine, or god.
That word is science.
If you want to find out about your hidden self science is the only tool human beings have.
Oh, yes, you can figure out some things by philosophizing about them, and through introspection, but that has already been done for thousands of years so that methodology is almost entirely exhausted. The revelations one can obtain by philosophizing upon introspection are not hidden, we already know such things.
"There is no locus of the self. You are, we each are, a multitude. Tens of trillions of cells in your body."
ReplyDeleteHow are you determining what counts as "your body", not to mention which cells count as being "in your body"?
Don:
ReplyDeleteThe metaphysics of form: the cells that are informed by my form are the ones that count as being in my body. As far as we know, there is no empirical way to tell which those are, but there is a metaphysical fact of the matter.
Dr Pruss,
ReplyDeleteMy comment was directed at the metaphysics that is underlining the quote I referenced.