pyluyten wrote: ↑Tue Feb 06, 2018 8:47 pm
I agree we can consider life to be programed, since world is determined by conditions.
Regarding your critique of the "wounded arm" argument, i'm not sure what you mean by the fact that, once dead, there is no more body. Obviously when one defines Self as life, as soon as death occur there is no more Self.
"The reality we can measure" - I mean we can measure how long people live, how long a baby needs to grow up, how much we eat, we can measure the fact the body fights against intruders like virus or bacteria. We can measure the capacity of the body to create new cells. We can measure how much close is my body to the body of Gandhi, Attila, or algae. This is the advantage of this definition : the definition might be challenged, so we can reply to what is the self this way : "a self takes that long to become a self", "it lives that long", "it consumes that quantity of its envrionment", "it does reproduce itself that many times", "it is capable of running at this speed for that time",.
Since generally people do not deny biology, this should lead people to critique and say the Self is to be found somewhere else :
This way there is a frontier for this debate, and actually i even belive defining self = body = life clarifies that real debate regarding self are
* dualist, that believe there is a physical world and a psychical world (i guess we can say nama rupa)
* free will partisan, who will reject that biology is the unique explanation for brain->decision.
If there is a debate regarding Self, here it is : the Self would be outside the material world (outside Science) and somewhat outside of conditions (once agan outside Science). Otherwise the self is just as i wrote, the body : this makes everyone bored to death =)
I find noting wrong in what you wrote, except for calling the organism a self and trying to change the common understanding of what people mean wen they say "self". Sure, the being is made out of 5 aggregates, they all work perfectly together, etc. but why should we call it a self instead of an organism ? In the same way, we can call an airplane a self. We can even call an ecosystem a self by this definition. But what would be the point ? It would only lead to confusion in comunication between people.
When people say there is a self, they reffer to a thing that is seeing all these 5 aggreates that make up a being. They feel that "this consciousness" or "this body" or "this organism as a whole" "is me" or "is mine". And this only happens in humans above age 2 and in 5-10 species of animals. It does not happen in airplanes or in computers, it does not happen in the vast majority o animals that do not posses self view.
The difference here is for example: In a human there might arise suffering. Then there will arise the thought "I am suffering". There will arise the taught that there is something that suffers. On the other hand, in a primitive animal that does not posses self view, there will be just suffering that arises. This suffering that arises in the primitive animal is just like a window popping up on a computer. There is no-one suffering, there is just suffering arising and that's it. But, in an adult human organism, when suffering arises, there might also arise the thought "it is me that suffers. There is a me that suffers, it is not just suffering that arises".
And why is it, that in adult humans we see this phenomenon happening ? Why does this thought that there is a self that suffers arise ? What could be the reason for the appearence of this thought ?