A non-Western conception of Self

I will share a bit of personal experience that may help to elucidate a conception of the Self different from one we, as occidentals, tend to hold. I regularly engage in meditation. Specifically, I practice Buddhist meditation. Buddhism, in my opinion, is fundamentally concerned with the experience of consciousness. While pain is an inevitable consequence of life, Buddhists hold that suffering isn't. Suffering is an outcome arising from a psychological attachment between the 'self' and the pain. E.g. "I am hurting", "I am dying". Language here is somewhat ineffective, but they mean to describe a kind of unity, or oneness between the experience and the self, where selfhood, or consciousness, is constituted/indiscernible by the experience. Through rigorous practice, Buddhists believe that the various 'attachments' between the self and experience (several such attachments are usually enumerated) can be severed. Contrary to the Western expectation, this does not "liberate" the soul/mind/self, it obliterates it. Once these attachments to experience are broken, the mind is induced to a seemingly untenable condition of existence and non-existence. This they call 'sunyata'. My own personal trials with meditation suggests a certain plausibility to this view.

Here is a little anecdotal example: Imagine you're sitting on a bench in a park, when an attractive woman (or man) just your type takes a seat at the other end. Your heart beat accelerates, fingertips moisten--all sorts of physiological responses to her arrival. As you know, these physiological changes generally occur below the "level of conscious awareness". Consciously, you feel nervous, excited, and giddy like a school boy (girl). You actually feel somehow drawn to her physically, like something invisible tugging at your insides in her direction. "I like her!," you exclaim to yourself in an internal monologue. You're paralyzed, but hyper-focused on these feelings. Whatever you were thinking about is gone, intellect is debilitated, "hello" is at the tip of your tongue, but you cannot speak. From a Buddhist's perspective, your psychological attachment allowed an external event to transmit and exert a force upon your mind, momentarily generating chaos.

Richard Dawkins, of course, would tell you that these are your genes taking control of you for their own selfish purposes. You're being manipulated like a marionette on endocrinary strings to mate with this fit and fertile female. The genetic lingo is new, but more or less this is what Western philosophers have called 'passions', and have invented various philosophies and religions with the notion of mastering them, subjugating them to the rational mind and thereby restoring this drooling schoolboy to his 'free will'. Buddhism, I think, may be closer to Dawkins in that they see such 'passions' as an inescapable aspect of our nature. We can no more subjugate the passions than we can our need for oxygen or nourishment. But we can be aware of them, and their power over us understood as an external force. This is called 'mindfulness', and is the basic form of meditation, involving slow, methodical, and non-judgmental reflection on sensations from the body. One by one, each sensation is bracketed off as separate from the mind, a force acting on it, not out of it, and summarily released back to the ether from which it came. Contrary to the Westerns, when the less sensation is externalised there is nothing left: no purified soul-mind. Just sunyata, or emptiness.

In sum, I've explored some possible insights into a view of consciousness inspired by Buddhist philosophy and practice, as well as by natural philosophy. The position is that what we call 'consciousness' is really just a kind of visuo-linguistic account of the things we're doing and an essentially arbitrary sense of why (e.g., "I like her!"). It is such, presumably, because it served some adaptive function that was especially useful for a highly-social, savanna primate. Had circumstances (selective pressures) been different, perhaps the experience of consciousness would be quite different. This is, of course, essentially the same reason why we have difficulty recognising consciousness in other animals (perhaps aliens eventually), even ones we know are highly intelligent.