The Nature of Self

[Robert Arvay]

For the past few days, I have been reading an old science-fiction novel that (up to now) has been exploring the definition of the individual, the person, the self. The story includes a character who is purely a simulation in a computer, a software program that can be moved from one computer to another, without losing its sense of identity, mission and purpose. This particular character has never been embodied in flesh and blood, which is in contrast to another character who, just before the death of her physical corpus, was (so to speak) downloaded into a simulation program, by the first character.

In my view, these two fictional characters challenge the notion of the individual as a soul. The concept of the soul is that of a sovereign entity, separate and apart from all others, having an absolute identity, permanent and indivisible, and indissoluble. The soul does not emerge from physical reality, it is a spiritual entity. The story’s author seems to disagree with that concept.

In this story, the second character seeks to find a way to be downloaded into a physical body; exactly how is at this point uncertain. The idea is that, the downloaded software will once again have become a genuine person, not a simulation. One cannot miss the implication that the author views the brain as a sort of computer, which is programmable, and which can give human identity to software / information.

In my view, this second character, whose physical body has already irretrievably died, is not the same one in the simulation, but rather, is a soul who has journeyed on into the afterlife.

The two simulated human characters, in my view, cannot be conscious, cannot be alive, and cannot be independent causative agents with free will. They are simply ones and zeroes, nothing more.

Comparing this to BK’s Idealist idea that individuals are fragments of a sort of super-consciousness, I find both similarities and differences. In my view (which I regard as Christian), the individual is an entity created in the image and likeness of God (so far compatible with Idealism), but God transcends consciousness, life, free will—He transcends any description of Him that we can imagine.

Idealism is a very good way of showing that physicalism is a false, even dangerous, paradigm. There is more, much more.
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[SanteriSatama]

Sovereign does not necessarily imply separate and apart from others. Or solipsism and solipsist theology, being mere subject of a sovereign solipsist god.

Whitehead's theology of dynamic Indra's net and co-creation is sovereign in the sense of interconnected peers, each perl both part and whole.

[Starbuck]

Comparing this to BK’s Idealist idea that individuals are fragments of a sort of super-consciousness, I find both similarities and differences. In my view (which I regard as Christian), the individual is an entity created in the image and likeness of God (so far compatible with Idealism), but God transcends consciousness, life, free will—He transcends any description of Him that we can imagine.


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Not sure BK would disagree with any of that. The uniquely salvific, historical significance of Christ might be an issue, as it is with me.

[SanteriSatama]

Not sure BK would disagree with any of that. The uniquely salvific, historical significance of Christ might be an issue, as it is with me.

Each can be and are unique in their own ways. Any monopoly claims are highly problematic, and in my view plain evil.

[Starbuck]

Not sure BK would disagree with any of that. The uniquely salvific, historical significance of Christ might be an issue, as it is with me.

Each can be and are unique in their own ways. Any monopoly claims are highly problematic, and in my view plain evil.

Isn't that a monopolistic claim itself?

[SanteriSatama]

Not sure BK would disagree with any of that. The uniquely salvific, historical significance of Christ might be an issue, as it is with me.

Each can be and are unique in their own ways. Any monopoly claims are highly problematic, and in my view plain evil.

Isn't that a monopolistic claim itself?

Not really. More like empirical observation.

[Robert Arvay]

[AshvinP]

Comparing this to BK’s Idealist idea that individuals are fragments of a sort of super-consciousness, I find both similarities and differences. In my view (which I regard as Christian), the individual is an entity created in the image and likeness of God (so far compatible with Idealism), but God transcends consciousness, life, free will—He transcends any description of Him that we can imagine.
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If God were to "transcend" consciousness, as in phenomenal experience, then how could we ever experience His activity or know that He exists? Such a God may as well not exist for any of our intents and purposes. That, of course, is not the portrait of God we get from the Christian scripture.

[AshvinP]

Not sure BK would disagree with any of that. The uniquely salvific, historical significance of Christ might be an issue, as it is with me.

Each can be and are unique in their own ways. Any monopoly claims are highly problematic, and in my view plain evil.

I wonder if you guys have taken a look at Barfield's essay on Philology and the Incarnation? Since it is in your area of expertise (SS), I am curious as to what you make of his argument. The following is an extract I took for Incarnating the Christ essay, but the full text is at the link.

https://www.rsarchive.org/RelAuthors/Ba ... nation.php

It is impossible to give much attention to words and their meanings, and more especially the history of words and the history of the changes which those meanings have undergone, without making a number of interesting discoveries. Moreover, in my experience the discoveries one then makes are of a kind which it is impossible to make without being forced by them to reflect rather intensively on the whole nature of man and of the world in which he lives.

Let me give you a very simple example. Has it ever occurred to you, I wonder, that the epithet charming, as people use the word today, has certain very odd features about it? In the first place, it is the present participle of a very active verb, namely the verb “to charm.” Grammatically, therefore, when we speak of an object, a garden, for instance, or a landscape, or perhaps a person, as “charming,” we make that object or person the subject of a verb which denotes an activity of some sort. That is what we do grammatically, but it is not at all, or it is only very rarely, what we mean semantically. When we speak, for instance, of a child as charming, we do not mean that the child himself is actually doing something. On the contrary, as soon as we notice that anyone, a child or a woman, is “charming” us in the verbal sense [in which case we rarely use the simple verb by itself, but we find some other expression such as “putting on charm” or “exerting charm” so as to ring out the notion of a willed activity, when that happens, the charmer who is charming in the verbal sense generally ceases to be charming in the adjectival sense!

Well, you could say the same thing about the word enchanting. I mention these two words because they're good examples of a whole class, quite a noticeable group of words in our language which possess the same peculiarity. One has only to think of such words as depressing, interesting, amusing, entertaining, fascinating, and so on to realize that we tend to allude to qualitative manifestations in the world outside ourselves by describing the effect they have on us, rather than by attempting to denote the qualities themselves.

The next thing that you find about this little group of words, if you go into the matter historically, is that these words, when used with these meanings, are all comparatively recent arrivals. Most of them first came into use in the eighteenth century — none of them is earlier than the seventeenth, I think. The kind of question one is led to ask is: is this just as accident, or has it any wider significance? That is just the kind of question which the philologist, the student of language in its historical aspect, is led on to ask himself. Is the appearance of these words at this comparatively late state just something that happened to happen, or is it a surface manifestation of deeper currents of some sort? So you have a linguistic habit, one must say, arising in the West in the course of the last few centuries, of describing or defining or denoting the outer world in terms, as it were, of the inner world of human feeling.
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Can we go still further and, at least in some cases, observe the transition taking place? The answer is that in some cases we can. You see, if in the case of any word of the immaterial language, we can lay our finger on a period in its history when the older material meaning had not yet evaporated, if I may put it that way, while the later immaterial meaning had already appeared, then we shall have located the transition itself.

Now let me take one of the examples which Emerson himself gives, where he writes: “spirit means primarily wind.” I imagine that is as good an example as any you could choose of an immaterial meaning which was originally a material one. In this instance we have the best possible evidence that there was a particular time when the material meaning and the immaterial meaning still operated side by side in the same word. Not only so, but we know that that time was the time, about the beginning of our era, in which the New Testament was being written. Because in the third chapter of John's gospel you read in the account of our Lord's encounter with Nicodemus, first the words, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.” But in the Greek it is the same word pneuma that is used, whether it is wind or spirit that is being referred to. In rendering the two phrases, which occur in one and the same verse, “the wind bloweth where it listeth,” and “every one that is born of the Spirit,” the translator has to use two different words for what in the original text is one and the same word. The two meanings, the material and the immaterial, were present side by side, or mingled, in the one Greek word.
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So we see, reflected in language, a curiously equivocal relation between this outside world and the inner man, the self or ego of the human being which experiences it. But we see something more than that. If you survey that equivocal relation, as I've called it, historically, you can't fail to be struck by the fact that there has occurred in the course of ages a change of emphasis. One could really say a change in the center of gravity, a change of direction in the way in which this equivocal relation operates. Looking back into the past, we observe an external, an outer language, a material language referring to the outer world of nature, which becomes more and more used in such a way that it becomes an inner language or an immaterial language, as Bentham called it. And this is clearly a very important process, for it is only to the extent that we have a language in which to express a thing that we can really be said to be properly conscious of the thing at all. That may sound a controversial proposition, but I think it's an experience which we all have as children, when our learning to speak on the one hand, and on the other our whole awareness of our environment as a coherent and articulated world, increase side by side as correlatives to one another.

What then was the thing of which this gradual historical development of an inner or immaterial language out of an outer or material language enabled mankind as a whole to become aware? The answer is clear, I think. It was none other than the existence, hitherto unsuspected, of an inner world in contradistinction to the outer one. In other words it was the existence of a man's self as a conscious individual being. Clearly, it was with the help of language — it was through the instrumentality of language — that individual men first began discovering themselves.

But now, what do we imply when we say that something has been “discovered”?
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there is one case where we can be absolutely certain that the discovery was not of the first kind, and therefore was of the second kind [the discovery of something which did not exist until it was discovered]; and that is the discovery by man of his own existence as a self-conscious being. The reason is plain enough. It simply does not make sense to say that at one time self-consciousness was an existing fact which had not yet been discovered. You can be unaware of many things, but you cannot be unaware of being aware. In this case, therefore, the discovery and the birth of the thing discovered are one and the same event.
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I have, it is true, given only a single indication of this last, namely, a particular small group of words. There are, in fact, plenty of other indications of what I am saying, but it would take too long to go into them. I'm not, and I should like to make this very clear, attempting to argue a case. I can go no farther than stating it.

Now, a change of direction is, by its very nature, a change which must have taken place at a definite point in time. The moment of change may be easily observable, may be easy to determine or locate, or it may not. In the case of a billiard ball hitting the cushion and rebounding, it is easy enough. In the case of a more complex phenomenon, it may be very much harder. The waves, for instance, keep on coming in even after the tide has turned. And an extra large wave may make us doubt whether it has turned yet after all. In the case of an infinitely more complex phenomenon, such as the evolution of human consciousness, it is even less likely that the actual moment of change will be easily observable. But that there was such a moment, even though we are unable to locate it exactly, is a conclusion to which reason itself compels us; for otherwise there could not have been a change of direction at all. Moreover, if the moment of change or reversal cannot be exactly pin-pointed, that does not mean that it cannot be placed at all. I don't know the exact moment at which the incoming tide changed to an outflowing one, but I do know that it is an outflowing one now, and that five minutes ago, let's say, it was still coming in.

And now, if I may leave my analogy of the turning of the tide, and return to this change I have been speaking of, this reversal in the direction of man's relation to his environment, this change from a period, in which, with the help of language, man is drawing his self-consciousness, as it were, out of the world around him, to a period in which he is, again, with the help of language, in a position to give back to nature something of the treasure he once took from her, then a student of the history of word-meanings can certainly be as definite as this: he can say with confidence that the great change of direction took place between, well, let's say between the death of Alexander the Great and the birth of St. Augustine. Indeed, there are indications which would tempt him to be much more precise.

And so, if it were possible [and of course it is not] that a man should have pursued the kind of studies I have been speaking of, without ever having read the gospels, or the epistles of St Paul, without ever having heard of Christianity, he would nevertheless be impelled by his reason to the conclusion that a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity must have occurred certainly during the seven or eight centuries on either side of the reign of Augustus and probably somewhere near the middle of that period. This, he would feel, from the whole course of his studies, was the moment at which the flow of the spiritual tide into the individual self was exhausted and the possibility of an outward flow began. This was the moment at which there was consummated that age-long process of contraction of the immaterial qualities of the cosmos into a human center, into an inner world, which had made possible the development of an immaterial language. This, therefore, was the moment in which his true selfhood, his spiritual selfhood, entered into the body of man. Casting about for a word to denote that moment, what one would he be likely to choose? I think he would be almost obliged to choose the word incarnation, the entering into the body, the entering into the flesh.
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Lastly, let me further suppose that, excited by what he had just heard, our student made further inquiries and learned that this man, so far from being a charlatan or lunatic, had long been acknowledged, even by those who regarded his claim to have come down from heaven as a delusion, as the nearest anyone had ever come to being a perfect man. What conclusion do you think our student would be likely to draw?

Well, as I say, the supposition is an impossible one, but it is possible — I know because it happened in my own case — for a man to have been brought up in the belief, and to have taken it for granted, that the account given in the gospels of the birth and the resurrection of Christ is a noble fairy story with no more claim to historical accuracy than any other myth; and it is possible for such a man, after studying in depth the history of the growth of language, to look again at the New Testament and the literature and tradition that has grown up around it, and to accept [if you like, to be obliged to accept] the record as an historical fact, not because of the authority of the Church nor by any process of ratiocination such as C. S. Lewis has recorded in his own case, but rather because it fitted so inevitably with the other facts as he had already found them. Rather because he felt, in the utmost humility, that if he had never heard of it through the Scriptures, he would have been obliged to try his best to invent something like it as an hypothesis to save the appearances.

- Owen Barfield, Philology and the Incarnation (1976)

[SanteriSatama]

I wonder if you guys have taken a look at Barfield's essay on Philology and the Incarnation? Since it is in your area of expertise (SS), I am curious as to what you make of his argument. The following is an extract I took for Incarnating the Christ essay, but the full text is at the link.

Ok, read the exceprt. Barfield's linguistic argument that "change of direction" is a singular historical Event is not at all convincing. We breath (spirit) in and out in every breath. Our characters are introverted and extroverted in various mixtures - and not only human characters. Languages employ various grammatical means for intransitive and transitive movements. Finnish asubjective verbs can have both intransitive and transitive meanings and take an partitive or whole object - transitivity does not depend from or require construction of European subject-individual-disassociation, colonization into such.

"Change of direction" speaks of consecutive movements, consecutive states depending from and conditioned by bivalent idea. What is noteworthy is that textual - and in that sense historical - Christ speaks much of "making in and out same", especially in Gospel of Thomas, which by philological criteria is considered closest approaximation of the hypothesis of the Q-source.

Thinking about "in" and "out" as reified substances is not very helpful. Thinking them directions and processes begins to clarify what could be the cruxial meaning. Instead of only consecutive directions and movements and the bivalence of consecutive process, movements in and out can also be and become simultaneously both-and and/or neither-nor, as in Meister Eckhardts quote of "one eye". Directions remain, but without consecutive switching. Ceasing of consecutiveness and in-and-out movements integrating into synchronicities can be observed in spiritual experiences and scriptures world wide. Tetralemma can help to organize thinking, as bivalent LEM and LNC are denials of 'both-and' and 'neither-nor', and force bivalent consecutivity of in and out over synchronous bidirections. Tao, Jung, Whitehead's theology, etc. etc.

Subject-individual-disassociation, which Jordan Peterson discusses with good insight as top-to-bottom movement emanating from Pharaoh, is essentially a sociological phenomenon of mathematical administration for scaling up in size. Subject-individual-disassociation is divide-and-conquer into administrative units, and Peterson's ongoing inquiry is genuine and helpful in that respect, from his European and colonzied point of view. However sovereignity of living and breathing spirits in our material costumes does not emanate from Pharaoh, it is a fundamental given, which is in constant creative tension with all sorts of metabolical phenomena and our codependence. In the story of Temptation of Christ, he makes the choice of an Anarchist, the way of the Heart, instead of the choice of the Pharaoh, the way of domination. The mess that Roman Empire and Church made out of Christianity, another story.