A Sense of Doubt blog post #3651 - Reprint from 2018 Hey Mom #967 - The Self is an Illusion - Do Not Fear Death

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3651 - Reprint from 2018 Hey Mom #967 - The Self is an Illusion - Do Not Fear Death

Still in low power mode with reprints but an extra share here along with the reprint, which I often do when reprinting.

I am always looking for ways to come to terms with people dying and that we all die; I will die, too.

I worry when a friend does not reply to a message that they are dead.

I very much want to not fear death, but I do fear it.

I see it ahead, coming closer, and I have so much I want to do before it arrives.

I find the added article, the second below, to be limited in adhering to science for a definition of self or attempting to abdicate the self as a concept through convoluted logic rather than admitting to larger spiritual issues that are more difficult to define and for many difficult to accept.

I used to believe that our self in this life was a temporary thing and that our consciousness would be absorbed into the collective when we die. When we return, our "memories of past lives" are simply tapped in connections to the collective.

However, despite many new age psychics, mediums, and zealots being sure of what lies beyond our current lives, I believe that we don't know, and we cannot know.

Possibly the similarity of Near Death experiences is simply our brains way of processing something the mortal mind cannot conceive of.

And do we know of anyone with a Near Death experience like other such experiences from someone with ZERO cultural knowledge of what those experiences have been? Possibly. I don't know.

I like the idea of the Collective Unconscious, and I like the idea that the self has meaning and value and is not an illusion.

But then in the spirit of this blog being my study and not my teaching, I present ideas that I might not agree with.

Thanks for tuning in.




LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.

The link to the original post I am reprinting below:

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #967 - Do not fear death - the self is an illusion

Tibetan Buddhist monks in-exile pray during a Long Life prayer offerings ceremony to his Holiness the Dalai Lama at the main temple Tsuglag Khang on March 9, 2009 in Dharamsala, India. (Photo by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #967 - Do not fear death - the self is an illusion

Hi Mom,

This article caught my eye, Mom.

Though it might be interesting.

More original content on the way this week, but today, a straight-up share from one of the new sites I follow: THE BIG THINK.

http://bigthink.com/bps-research-digest/is-death-still-frightening-if-you-believe-the-self-is-an-illusion-an-astonishing-study-of-tibetan-buddhists

Is death still frightening if you believe the self is an illusion? An astonishing study of Tibetan Buddhists

·         February 27, 2018

 by CHRISTIAN JARRETT

Imagining ourselves as no longer existing is, for most of us, terrifying. Buddhism may offer some reassurance. A central tenet of the religion is that all is impermanent and the self is actually an illusion. If there is no self, then why fear the end of the self?

To find out if the logic of the Buddhist perspective eliminates existential fear, Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and his colleagues surveyed hundreds of monastic Tibetan Buddhists (monks-in-training) in exile in India, as well as lay Tibetans, Tibetan Buddhists from Bhutan, Indian Hindus and American Christians and atheists.

To their astonishment, the researchers report in Cognitive Science that fear of the annihilation of the self was most intense among the monastic Buddhists, and that the monastic Buddhists were less willing than any of the other groups to sacrifice years of their own life for a stranger.

The US participants were recruited online, whereas the monastic Tibetan Buddhists and other groups were given paper surveys to complete, translated by fluent bilinguals into the appropriate language. The hundreds of monastic Tibetan Buddhists who took part were from monasteries in Byalkuppe and Mundhod in India. The researchers also surveyed 30 Buddhist scholars about how devoted Buddhists ought to answer the different survey questions.

Two of the surveys addressed the permanence of the self. As expected, the monastic Buddhists showed the least belief in the continuity of the self – they thought they would be different in personality, beliefs, ambitions and other characteristics in the future. In contrast, the Americans, whether religious or not, showed the strongest belief in the continuity of the self (the other groups, including everyday, non-devout Tibetans, scored mid-way between these two extremes). Similar patterns emerged for beliefs about the existence of a “core self” that persists over time, with the monastic Buddhists again showing the least belief in the self.

Would the monastic Buddhists’ scepticism about the self have a bearing on their fear of death? More than the other groups, they said that they used the no-self doctrine to cope with the prospect of death, as the Buddhists scholars said they ought to do.

Yet, when the researchers surveyed their participants about their fear of death and especially their fear of self-annihilation (gauged by agreement or not with items like “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the loss and destruction of the self / destruction of my personality”), to the researchers’ surprise they found that this fear was most intense among the monastic Buddhists. This was opposite to how they ought to have responded according to the Buddhist scholars. Note, the Buddhists believed just as strongly in an after-life (though not, of course, for their current “self”), so this could not explain their more intense fear compared with the other groups.

Next, the researchers surveyed more participants from the same groups about how much they would be willing to sacrifice years of their own life to extend the life of another person (for instance, in the most extreme version of the thought experiment, they were asked to imagine they could take a pill to extend their own life by six months or give the pill to a stranger, similar to them, for whom the pill would add an additional five years to their life). The monastic Buddhists were the least willing to make this kind of sacrifice – in fact, over 72 per cent preferred to keep the pill for themselves in the above scenario, compared with 31.2 per cent of non-religious Americans.

Writing on Twitter, co-author Nina Strohminger at the University of Pennsylvania said that these findings were “probably the most bizarre and unexpected of her career“.

The researchers believe the paradox they have uncovered, between the Buddhists’ explicit beliefs and their fears, may be explicable by the fact that, despite their training and explicit claims, the monastic Buddhists still have a powerful sense of a continuous identity that stretches from the past and into the future. It is not easy to defy the illusion of the self even if you are taught to do so. This would seem to be borne out by notable Buddhist autobiographies that betray a keen experience of a continuous self. At the same time, Buddhists may succeed well in truly believing that the self ends at death (unlike other religious groups that preach that the soul is eternal), and this could account for the Buddhists’ exaggerated fear of self-annihilation at death.

One caveat to the findings highlighted by the researchers is that, although their monastic Buddhist participants meditated every day,  none of them were highly experienced, long-term meditators with many years of practice. Meditation is seen as one way to eliminate belief in a permanent self, so it will be interesting to repeat the research, not only with other Buddhist denominations, but specifically with highly experienced, expert Buddhist meditators, to see if they too would fear self-annihilation.

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

This article was originally published on BPS Research Digest. Read the original article.

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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
- Days ago = 969 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1802.27 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.

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Who do you think you are? Why your sense of self is an illusion

Most of us are convinced that we're coherent individuals who are continuous in time. There's just one problem with this sense of self – it can’t exist

By Catherine de Lange

11 December 2019

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24432601-000-who-do-you-think-you-are-why-your-sense-of-self-is-an-illusion/

LET’S be honest, it is what we think about the most: ourselves. What we want to eat or do, how we feel and whom we love. It is the essence of being.

This selfhood generally feels like a continuous “me” sitting somewhere in our heads: a me that is the same today as yesterday. “Most people feel that they are a coherent, integrated individual. They have free will, they are making their choices and they’re looking out through their eyes at the world around them,” says Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK, author of The Self Illusion.

And that is just what selfhood seems to be – an illusion. “You are actually a collection of conflicting messages and signals and thought processes,” says Hood. “And these are somehow brought together to experience as unified self.” Fine, so your self is just the “you” experiencing that, right? That becomes a Russian doll problem, says Hood. “There’s someone inside the head who’s having these experiences taking place inside their head and so on,” he says.

Neuroscience tells us that our subjective sense of self must be a distributed experience, involving various bits of the brain. Although experiments have taught us much about the brain areas involved in creating it, how exactly it is conjured up still eludes us.

We do know that a sophisticated sense of self and others only comes on us gradually. “Understanding that your thoughts are different from someone else’s and being able to reflect on your own thinking, that’s a higher order skill and it doesn’t emerge until you are 3 or 4,” says Megan McClelland at Oregon State University. Even then, the brain areas involved in our experience of the self don’t fully mature until we become adults.

The continuity of our sense of self seems to have something to do with autobiographical memory. Very young children have little sense of self and also very limited autobiographical memory, while the experience of people with amnesia lays bare the role of memory in selfhood. “If we suffer amnesia, the self becomes frozen in time because it can’t form new memories,” says Martin Conway at City University in London.

“Ironically, the self’s main advantage might not be for ourselves”

The unreliability of memory might help explain why even our illusory self isn’t very, well, self-aware. “Most of us have distorted self-images,” says Hood. “Most people think that people are more interested in us than they really are. Most people think they have an above average sense of humour, above average intelligence. We can’t all be above average.”

So why have a self at all? Because it is the interface between a complex outer world and a complex inner world, says Hood. Without it, we would be bombarded with conflicting information.

Ironically, the self’s main advantage might not be directly for ourselves. “Having your ‘self’ means you can behave as an individual and be part of a group,” says Conway. “But not just a mindless part of a group like an ant is, rather an individual who is in a group and can make their own individual contributions or walk away.” That ultimately allows us to form our complex human societies – making the self, if it is an illusion, an extremely useful one indeed.

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Cutting-edge science throws up all sorts of controversial, nebulous and mind-bending concepts. Here’s your guide to how to think about some of the fiddliest of them:

• In the quantum world, uncertainty reigns – or is it all in the mind?
• Think you understand how evolution works? You’re probably wrong
• Why information could be our route to the universe’s deepest secrets
• Homo sapiens? Genetic insights suggest we may not really be a species
• Big bang retold: The weird twists in the story of the universe’s birth
• Firms and governments use the internet to spy on us. Should we care?
• D’oh! Why human beings aren’t as intelligent as we think
• Extinction is a fact of life. Could we stop it – or even reverse it?
• No more goody two shoes: Why true altruism can’t exist
• Alien life could be weirder than our Earthling brains can ever imagine
• Why it’s time to call time on the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate
• Dark energy: Understanding the mystery force that rules the universe

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2502.15 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3516 days ago & DAD = 171 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.