Monday, June 16, 2014

The Bullshit at the Heart of Humanity






Our Problematic Selves







That’s easy: To bullshit themselves! 


  • Lies about how a person has disappointed the others around them

And there are two kinds of Freudian lies:






Goals Beyond the Legacy Self














Boris Kazachenko said...

I basically agree, Ben, but you could make it a lot briefer:

- Growth & joy are ill-defined & superfluous,
> the drives for pattern, creation and information.

That's one drive: for sensory & motor pattern discovery: value-free curiosity.

- If people lose their problematic selves, they won't be distinct individuals anymore. Not a bad thing: basically an equivalent of emergence of life, in which specific quanta of matter & energy became dispensable / metabolized.

But human "bulshit goes deeper than that: it's rooted in our ridiculously glacial NN "learning" (actually training) mechanism.

Unknown said...

'detached from your autobiographical self', might not mean 'no self at all', only no autobiographical self, just a biological self or some pan-self.

LME said...

I enjoyed reading your ruminations. I absolutely agree with you that the natural urge to find pattern, create novel order, and similar inherent characteristics of sentience are what minds will do, free of struggling with the evolutionary and developmental conflicts you analyze so clearly. We have a good example of this in plain sight: childhood.
Thanks for your work and your writing, Ben. I enjoyed Hidden Pattern, and I follow your activities in the intellisphere.

Stephen Paul King said...

The challenge that I see is how to achieve "effectively rewire our mind-brains to NOT be reflexively caused unhappiness when we act against our goals/desires, disappoint others, violate social expectations, or balance self and group in tribally inappropriate ways" without being a full blown sociopath!

Sanjeev said...

The delusion that this dynamic pattern of behaviors and thoughts is the "self" or "me" is a major problem indeed.

As most of it is survival related, once the basic needs of the human organism are met, it results in odd things like suffering (for both self and others) and a feeling of purposeless existence.

It may be possible to get rid of this problem by brute force techniques, such as some kind of intense mental training or perhaps, in future, surgical procedures. But its not the best way, as it can have some consequences, such as zombiefication of entire society.

The best way is to develop a witnessing mechanism which simply witnesses the activities of the "self", not interfering in it or trying to control it. The "self" simply runs as a subroutine somewhere in the corner of a vast witnessing space inside the mind.

It can wake up and come to foreground for the tasks related to survival. Rest of the time it returns to the subroutine level. A tiny number of humans have already achieved this, especially in the East.

This does not make one without a personality, as some may assume. It frees the mind for more important stuff like creativity and innovation. The thing is most of the people who achieve this state are not interested in doing the hard work, as the content free state of mind is so blissful. And it seems there is nothing more to be done, everything looks so perfect. So there lies the scope for further evolution of humanity - to take advantage of this new evolved state of being.

Stephenovinci said...

"The map is not the territory." As Gregory Bateson once said.

The inspiration from Buddhism is clear and nicely done in this article. It seems this model of the self is a kind of convenient fiction. Selflessness might be better thought of as a lack of attachment to a singular narrative or model of oneself.

Why do mystics get 'stuck' in emptiness? Because it's comfortable and fits their model? In 25 years of working in computer support I've seen how people hold onto their models and narratives of self and technology. The people by and large who adapt to changes are indeed the more creative ones. In my own experience with art, writing and dance I've found those practices are helpful in experimenting with different self models-narratives.

With that said, it took psychedelics and meditation to help me and others I know to have that initial and power experience of witnessing our self models 'objectively' for the first few times.

From the standpoint if my meditation practice, this self model is a kind of fiction, a convenient fiction built around the convergence of facial muscles, somatic memories, ideas and feelings. This is not to say this self is not real, just that it is constructed and changeable, depending on stress and a spectrum of somatic-emotional states. This fictional or simulated self seems to be reinforced by selective memories, objects, people and environments that we inhabit. They remind us who and what we are.

Is this model of self and this capacity for self consciousness a kind of meta organ? A highly concentrated cluster of stimulus networked together into a kind of mask or persona?

I'll think about this more.


dustproduction said...


Yeah, I have a problem fitting in also so I changed my goals, eliminated others in my life so that I can violate social expectation when I'm alone. Now you're my only tribe so don't be too disappointed in me.

dustproduction said...

Re: "the map is not the territory"

Not Bateson, (but the punctuation here threw me off a little).
"The expression "the map is not the territory" first appeared in print in a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1931:[1] In Science and Sanity, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram "the map is not the thing mapped" was published in Numerology."

dustproduction said...

Re: "The delusion that this dynamic pattern of behaviors and thoughts is the "self" or "me" is a major problem indeed."

In most psychological research that addresses self model this would be the "I" that you are addressing and not the "me." The difference being that the "I" is our subjective experience of a self and the "me is the objective experience others hold of us.


Hendy said...

My first reaction was "that's why people need to repent..." :-)

Anonymous said...

Of course the map IS the territory.

Territory is itself a map.

Reality is identical with the appearance of reality.

Universe is what would be if there could be anything at all.

Universe is the map of timespace process, Flower of Nothing in the Void of Perception.

- Louis Kauffman (

Anonymous said...

Ha, Ha, Ha . . . Perhaps what is needed is a little unifurcation . . .

( (

Why do I always seem to get lost in a timeless world whenever I venture over to Kauffman's website?

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