The Self and The Real
And a Meditation on Harmony
This will be a short reflection, not particularly profound, but hopefully interesting. Next month, I plan to release two weightier essays – one on long-distance running and pseudoscience, and the other a further reflection on digital technology. Today, I just wanted to explore some ideas I’ve been musing recently.
The neuroscientist Sam Harris has argued that transcendental meditation ultimately proves that the conscious self is a myth. In other words, he quite literally argues that you and I don’t really exist, and neither does he. Consciousness is an illusion.
He uses this as part of his larger argument that free will is an illusion. Or, I would argue, his larger campaign to deny (the reality of) free will. In many ways, his arguments are the evolution of a case that was predicted by a diverse set of secular and Christian writers, including (perhaps most especially) C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Someday, I plan to write at greater length (perhaps not here) about free will – and I may touch on some of what we discuss today.
I would argue almost exactly the opposite case: not only is consciousness (and therefore our individual self) not an illusion, it is perhaps the only thing we can be entirely sure exists. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissaries, has made exactly that point. For all you know, I (and every other person) am a robot or a figment of your imagination. None of us can directly (telepathically) know another person’s thoughts (this is the philosophical “problem of other minds”) and we must rely on secondary source material (words, gestures, actions, etc.) to know another person’s thinking (and even then, only indirectly). McGilchrist’s insight was that you can say the same for everything else in the world – we must rely on our senses for information about it.1
Of course, we can’t go through life treating other people as robotic automatons (the word we use to describe people who do that is “psychopath”). For one thing, they aren’t.2 The key insight of individualism is that other individuals are just as real as you or I, and are as important in their own world as you or I in ours. What appears small to one person isn’t to another, and so on. Various collectivist ideologies seek to deny, do away with, downplay, scorn, or abuse that small world that each individual has (or they will disingenuously argue that individual liberty is about encouraging people to live solely in their own small isolated worlds). I think that’s wrong.
Of course, no human should live life solely inside his or her own head. Earlier this month, I published an essay scorning the “simulation hypothesis” – we can, in fact, be reasonably certain that reality exists and that it isn’t a computer simulation or a figment or your imagination or mine. Anything else is pseudoscience, no matter whether “sophisticated” statistical models are used or not.