Descartes: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I exist.
Buddha: Anatta (no self) doctrine. Show me the self. Interdependent origination: A chair is formed when wood and iron come together. A chair has no existence distinct from the wood and iron. The self/I is similar.
Both are formidable thinkers, but they’ve come to opposite conclusions.
We can think of the “I” of as a primary meme used to trained human bodies into policing themselves. That’s a playfully cynical rendition.
To me the no-self doctrine makes sense as the denial that this institutional-performed self is primary or set apart somehow from all other entities in the world as their “immaterial” witness.
Note though that “immateriality” is not a ridiculous approximation of a phenomenon that is temporal and so never perfectly present or fixed to any “material” aspect of that performance. The “immaterial” of number is a game with numerals with a temporal coherence. Likewise selfhood is not a ghost in the sense of ectoplasm but also not reducible to this or that little present “material” piece of the world.
Derek Parfit reduces the self to a relation between overlapping memories, intentions, and character. This relation is held together in various degrees e.g. by one’s thoughts and feelings about one’s past, present, and future.
That’s interesting. Is Parfit’s self Cartesian or Buddhaian?
Taking a Cartesian stance, I think so I must be.
Buddha argues that there is no self (anatman). Compares our self to a chariot, an aggregate of things, lacking an existence of its own. @jkop
@j_j Yes the self could be a meme. Do you know what memes do? Replicate itself and compete for space in our brains. This of course doesn’t include everybody, only a select few. 
I’d say Buddhaian. It’s a relation that varies in degrees, partially disappearing, being reconstructed, modified etc. Therefore it makes little sense to think of it as having an existence of its own.
Does that mean, if you don’t think, therefore you don’t exist?
That’s true but what does the Buddha mean by anatta? I don’t even know rhe source of this idea. Ajita Kesakambali preached the exact same thing.
I don’t know. What do you think?
Let’s consider a variant on that meme.
Imagine a society where every human body is understood to have seven souls, one for each day of a seven day week. When a body is born in that society, it is given seven names. These same seven names appear on the monument above that body’s grave.
If the body does something bad on a Tuesday, then it can only be punished on a Tuesday. The Tuesday soul is a locus of responsibility for an accumulating unity of claims and deeds performed by its shared body on Tuesdays. It’s important that only the Tuesday soul be held responsible, especially if the Wednesday soul, for instance, is an ideal citizen.
Why not this meme rather than that of the single soul ? Because it’s so impractical — and probably impossible — to train a single human body into performing seven alternating selfhoods. The economical solution is one soul per body. One name per gravestone. This meme is so dominant, so primary, that metaphysical-spiritual traditions, as far as I know, always speak of a singular transcendental ego. Or, more shrewdly, of the ego as a performed institution — a meme. Hence the conglomerate bard and the anonymous temple artist, submerged in the engraving of an unsigned collective insight.
A → B
not A → not B
not A
It follows not B
Just wondering if that is the case. A chair doesn’t think, therefore a chair doesn’t exist (from the chair’s POV).
Yes it does follow, the formalization is perfect.
A chair could exist but it depends on the wood and the iron nails that constitute its form.
So
Chair doesn’t think, therefore chair doesn’t exist; chair doesn’t think; chair doesn’t exist. Interesting, no?
@j_j that’s a very intriguing thought train. Nothing in my experience concords with it. It does seem connected to the issue I want to discuss though. However I’m not fully informed of Descartes’ theological beliefs. The Buddha, however, was an atheist, though he was firm on karma.
Memes replicate, that is their sole purpose. The sometimes pop up as meme-plexes, a mutually-reinforcing system of ideos. I suppose this is a particular instance of that general trope.
Well I wouldn’t say that memes have a purpose. I mean the cold way to look at it is like “crystals” that happened to be “shaped” so that they get themselves replicated.
If I’m speculating, there was probably a “preconceptual” tendency of bodies to lash out at other bodies that caused them pain. But longer-term strategies, a pattern of behavior unified in purpose, would seem to prevail. Hence the gradual institution of a “self” that endures as long as the body loves, reinforced by a language that only enlarges the “interior monologue” and the sense of a “spirit” that is other than the body. But I don’t want to reductively reduce spirit to body as if the body is some stupid thing. The body is smart enough to pretend to have a spirit, to put it playfully. Some might plausibly say that this “pretend” is more real than the material it orchestrates.
Interesting. Descartes and Buddha would’ve benefited from this knowledge. There is some kind of interdependence though, memetically speaking. A philosopher who passed on describes multiple ways memes and people interact. They’re very interesting relationships. However, replication is an essential characteristic of a meme.
No, sorry, that’s all wrong. A → B does not imply (not A → not B). It’s called “the fallacy of denying the antecedent.” Compare “If it’s hot today, it will be nice tomorrow.” “It’s not hot today.” It can still be nice tomorrow, right? What you’d need to get this implicature would be “iff” – “if and only if.” This is certainly not what Descartes meant. Why would he or anyone else argue that only thinking things exist?
Your logic seems incorrect. Hot day doesn’t mean nice day. Hot days can kill you with the global warming going on recently.
Wheeler: “There’s no smoke without smoke.”
Rovelli: “I have never been convinced by the idea, attributed to Descartes, that the primary aspect of our experience is awareness of thinking, and therefore of existing. (Even the attribution of the idea to Descartes seems wrong to me: Cogito ergo sum is not the first step in the Cartesian reconstruction, it is the second. The first is Dubito ergo cogito. The starting point of the reconstruction is not a hypothetical a priori that is immediate to the experience of existing as a subject. It is a rationalistic a posteriori reflection on the first stage of the process in which Descartes had articulated a state of doubt: logic dictates that, if someone doubts something, they must have thought about it. And that, if they can think, then they must exist. It is substantially a consideration made in the third person, not in the first, however private the process. The starting point for Descartes is the methodical doubt experienced by a refined intellectual, not the basic experience of a subject.)” [Rovelli, The Order of Time, p153).
Take care with your interpretation of Buddha’s anatta. He wasn’t saying there is no self in an unqualified manner – he was saying that the self has no inherent existence. And neither does anything else, so the self is not special in this respect. Things have only a conventional existence, and so the self has this too. But we default to conferring inherent existence on the self, and this is the root cause of our state of unsatisfactoriness (dukkha).
This isn’t about whether you agree with the premise. Change it to “If it’s hot today, it will be hot tomorrow” – same fallacy will occur. Denying the antecedent doesn’t falsify the conclusion.
Maybe this will help.
Your example in the logic is inappropriate because “it will be nice day” is a personal emotive judgement. It is not factual judgement.
But we were just exploring what Descartes cogito implies in the inferences.
We have been in the discussion many times before, and your point was found to be impractical and false from the real world situations and its applications.