Welcome to The Lethargist Newsletter, where you will find my irreverent perspectives on religion, metaphysics, philosophy, psychology, science, and spirituality.
In order to understand how our sense of who we are is actually an illusion, we have to consider the objective evidence provided by science, along with the subjective evidence that comes from an in-depth personal inquiry. Both lines of evidence point to an intersection between the neurophysiology of the brain and the workings of human consciousness. Although as yet not clearly delineated, what we have at this point is some interesting experimental data about the neural correlates of conscious experiences.
The activation of specific brain regions tells us how the brain processes conscious experiences, but it does not explain why certain neural activities are accompanied by subjective phenomena. This is known as the “hard problem of consciousness,” which questions why any physical processes in the brain should give rise to subjective awareness in the first place.
What the subjective exploration of consciousness can tell us, if we are willing to venture beyond its habitual limitations and cease identifying with our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions, is that our sense of being a separate self, one that stands apart from our experience, is actually an illusion. Who we think we are is not who we really are, but rather a well-constructed and well-defended figment of our imagination based upon the qualities of our personality with which we identify. Consider them glitches.
When we lead an unexamined life, we tend to remain oblivious to our blind spots. When it comes to recognizing those blind spots, no amount of explanation can ever take the place of a direct experience, as this exploration of the optic blind-spot makes perfectly clear.
A competent psychotherapist can help illuminate what we've been missing. So can guided introspection and meditative prescriptions that promote self-inquiry and provide us with glimpses of what it’s like to be without an ego. I could show you how to transcend the illusion of the self, but you will first need to show me the self that you wish to transcend. Who you think you are is not who you are; it is only who you think you are.
Characterization of the concept of the self as an illusion has its roots in ancient mystical practices and spiritual traditions such as Advaita Vedanta and Dzogchen. It has also been explored in modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Our sense of ourself as a distinct, unified, and enduring entity that can exist independently from our experiences, while at the same time witnessing them, is simply a mental construct.
What of the Immortal Soul?
The deeply held belief about who we are, while being a convenient social and psychological fiction, has been seized upon by religions to promote and affirm a belief in the existence of an immortal soul or eternal spirit that lives within and escapes death. However, there is no credible objective evidence for the existence of a discrete, personal consciousness that survives death. Imaging studies show that loss of consciousness due to coma or general anesthesia is associated with disrupted communication between important brain regions, particularly between the thalamus and cerebral cortex.
Damage to the brain's prefrontal cortex or temporal lobes can drastically alter someone’s personality, sense of self, and capacity for awareness. This implies that what we perceive as the self is highly dependent upon the brain’s intact structure and function. Altering brain states through anesthesia, psychedelics, or trans-cranial magnetic stimulation can lead to profound changes in perception, identity, and awareness.
A consciousness that exists independent of an intact brain is implausible, and highly doubtful. That is why religions inculcate such notions in the minds of children before they have developed a capacity for critical thinking, and why they insist that such assertions be taken on faith. If an immaterial soul were actually the source of consciousness, changes in consciousness would not result from physical changes in the brain. If true, consciousness would exist fully formed in newborns and infants, which it clearly does not.
Out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences are often cited as evidence for a soul. However, those experiences can be replicated by stimulating specific areas of the brain, such as the temporal-parietal junction. This suggests that such experiences are brain-generated, rather than evidence of an independent soul disconnecting from the body. Neuroscience shows that our mental states closely correspond to physical states in the brain, implying that consciousness arises from material processes.
Alternative, spiritual hypotheses remain untestable. For example, awareness can be conceived as a primordial and non-local state of consciousness (a “cosmic mind”) that supersedes the physical existence of individual brains. While neuroscience explains the workings of consciousness relative to a physical structure, the spiritual hypothesis suggests that ultimate awareness cannot be reduced to neural processes. We can let the philosophers and theologians argue about that all they want, while the scientists get back to work solving the “hard problem.”
Penetrating the Illusion
The sense we have of being a self that's separate from our experiences is habitually ingrained, and often serves as a useful metaphor. With practice, we can learn to recognize that what we think of as “I” is simply a collection of momentary experiences that are neither stable nor distinct from experience itself. Our self-image is actually a continually changing narrative that helps us intellectually understand our experiences. However, when we try to observe the self, as distinct from our ideas about the self, we discover that it perpetually eludes us.
The idea of the self being an illusion directly challenges René Descartes' famous declaration, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) because it questions the nature of the “I” in that statement. More accurately, Descartes could have said, “I think, therefore I think I am.”
A major critique of the Cartesian dictum, first suggested by Pierre Gassendi, is that it presupposes the existence of an “I” which must be doing the thinking. According to this line of reasoning, the most that Descartes is entitled to say is, “Thinking is occurring,” and certainly not, “I am thinking.”
Challenging the convenient, ego-serving psychological fiction of being a distinct and substantial self can feel somewhat disorienting, but doing so offers a transformative perspective on life that facilitates positive changes, feelings of interconnectedness, and a freedom from our rigid identities. Questioning our self-image can lead to profound insights into our mind and the human condition. Here's a way to see things from two very different perspectives simultaneously, both of which exist in objective reality:
What we learn from this classical physics demonstration is the description of the behavior of an object in motion depends upon the observer's inertial frame of reference. If both the object and the observer are moving at a constant velocity, the movement is observed to follow a vertical path. However, if the observer is stationary, while the object moves at a constant velocity, its path is parabolic.
Instead of conceptualizing a permanent essence within, divesting ourselves from this tenaciously held belief allows us to notice that we are actually a collection of ever-changing physical, emotional, and mental processes. In the same way that the brain fills in the missing visual data because of our optic blind spot, the brain also produces the illusion of continuity by stitching together sensory inputs and memories to create a narrative that gives rise to the sense of a stable, unified self. In reality, our personalities, preferences, and even our memories change over time.
The story we create for ourselves about who we are helps us make sense of our experiences and the ways in which we interact with the world, but if we look closely we'll recognize that it doesn’t correspond to any unitary, unchanging reality. Our brains integrate our past experiences, current perceptions, and future goals to maintain the illusion of a coherent self, but that apparent coherence is constructed moment by moment.
Split-brain experiments, in which the corpus callosum (the white matter connecting the brain’s two hemispheres) is severed, each hemisphere can act independently, suggesting that a unified self is a product of the brain’s integration, rather than an inherent property. Along with the illusion of the separate self is the illusion of having free will. Experiments have shown that people can be made to believe that they are controlling actions that they aren’t actually controlling, indicating that the sense of “I” as an agent of action is fabricated.
Why Let Go?
Because our self-concept is an illusion, clinging to this ego-centered identity can cause a great deal of unnecessary suffering. Buddhist traditions aim to liberate people from the self-imposed suffering that results from taking adverse events and interactions as personal affronts. There is an important distinction to be made between pain and suffering. The former is an inevitable part of life; the latter is self-imposed by our response to pain, or any other unpleasantness that we take personally.
Practices such as mindfulness and meditation can help dissolve our rigid sense of self by turning our attention to the arising and subsiding of thoughts, emotions, and sensations, without identifying ourselves with them. This can lead to an experiential realization that the perceived “self” is simply a collection of momentary experiences. If the self is not fixed, that means personal transformation is always possible.
This realization also fosters a sense of connection with others, as the boundaries between “self” and “other” become less rigidly defined. However, just because the self is an illusion doesn't negate our personal responsibility, nor our right to having an individual social identity. As the physics demonstration showed, it is entirely possible for us to embrace two different perspectives simultaneously, if we put our mind to it.
For those of you who might like to get a taste of what's involved in self-inquiry, “The Work of Byron Katie” might be a good place to start. My field research in shamanism resulted in the discovery of four penetrating questions that its practitioners would ask: Where are you from? Where are you going? Who do you think you are? What do you think you want?
Too many meditation teachers and gurus wrap themselves in spiritual trappings, and invoke ancient traditions that make absurd truth claims about the nature of the universe. I feel much more comfortable suggesting modern, secular adaptations those technologies as instruments for self-exploration, especially when they go right to the heart of the matter.
Please be aware that Katie only scratches the surface level involved in the explorations of human consciousness. If there is sufficient interest, I'd be happy to describe some more sophisticated methods for going deeper while investigating our inner landscape.