Nibbana tangent parts 1 & 2 (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 21, 2024, 23:38 (184 days ago) @ xeno6696

DAVID: And I feel my 'self' has been continuous from early childhood. It has had additions I controlled, good and disappointing. I decided to be a doctor at age three! Straight line development.

Matt: Where I'm coming from here, at least what I was trying to sketch out, is that the sense of self, that "feeling" of self, is an emotion, it's not constantly up in there in your head. It's there when you look at it, it's gone the rest of the time.

Like when I was talking before about maybe only controlling ~25% of my active thoughts in a day, (adding sleep would probably skew that easily to ~10%) I'd probably say my sense of self hits me even less than that. By this--I'm trying to be very specific--I don't mean thoughts about myself or my future or my past, but that actual "felt" sense of self where I'm feeling that sense of "I AM." But to be fair, thoughts about what I plan on doing or have done do fill in a great deal of the wandering, uncontrolled thoughts in the day. I'm distinguishing "I'm going to study some more Haskell today to get better at functional programming" from "I'm hungry." The former contains a stronger sense of self (though I didn't ask for that to surface) than the latter. As an aside: If I only control ~10-25% of my thoughts in a day, how much free will do I really have?

My argument is simply that if I'm not thinking about it or feeling it ALL the time, then it's not continuous.

I would say it is always there, waiting to be approached, so my attention to myself is intermittent, but as it is always available it is continuous. There are no gaps in that it always feels the same.