An Evolutionary Glitch?

A discussion about the "I" function from a forum incursion today (26/4/11)


Acc to evolution, development of speech, Language made us human.

Yep

As one saiad, we are homo grammaricus, we communicate as some mammals but we communicate with a language that has its own set of rules.

The illusion of "I",(owing to fault in perception of brain) is important in wide pattern recognition and matching.We are living in an illusion and that illusion has helped us to create our own reality apart from nature.

This is not true, the concept of “I” is redundant in pattern recognition, it arises because of it. In human communication, the pattern matching faculty communicates with the part of the brain responsible for language and as a result, this gives rise to an illusion of self. Part of the reason is because, we process reality in terms of cause and effect. Cause and effect is actually illusory as well but our brain just breaks down the world in to manageable chunks. Along with the language, pattern matching and this cause and effect view point, it gives rise to an “I” function.

Now there is evidence to say that it is a glitch (I used to think this) but there is also a conjecture that the “I” function was useful for the purposes of facilitating communication. We see that evolution propagates development of traits for survival at the expense of the organism's “comfort” on an individual basis.

 We need only look at cane toads in Australia to see this is true. As they evolved to move 100 times further in a day than they used to, their spines didn't keep up with this rate in development and unbelievably they encounter spinal problems!

There is an ongoing debate about how it appeared but the rise of the “I” function, is exactly that which you say; an illusion. It is not real, there is no “you”, there is no “I”.

Now there is nothing wrong with this in itself, there is an illusion of self and it gives the appearance that we have our own reality, that would be a good thing right? It facilitated communication and generally we see the world filtered through these thought patterns and it gives us a sense of separation.

This should be great right?

Unfortunately this is not the case. The problem that arises with this, is that it causes thought to feedback in to itself. We have a situation where there are thoughts about thoughts and literally they feedback in to themselves.

Whilst thoughts about thoughts are useful for skills like problem solving, thoughts about, “thoughts about the self” are not. Whenever we put a microphone by a speaker, we hear the sound feedback in to that horrible screech. This is because there is a closed loop and each soundwave multiplies in amplitude.

Now with the brain, we do not have this amplitude problem but... when we throw imagination and memories in to the mix, then we do get problems.

Have you ever imagined the future? Sometimes we can predict roughly what will happen but have you ever noticed that the future projection never matches the event?

Nothing exists outside of the present moment so whilst a predictive thought faculty is very useful, we can say any thought about the future that arises is technically illusory, even though it is part of a useful faculty.

However, because we believe an illusory thought means something, because we attribute it to being about an illusory self, we can get anxious about things for little reason at times. We have all been there. Even to the point where we can predict a catastrophe that never happened and beat ourselves up over it for sometimes days.

Well what about the past? What problems can this cause? Well you only have to look on this forum to see the problems I'm talking about. All it takes is a couple of dodgy core beliefs made in the past and these can be activated throughout life. Thank the pattern matching faculty for this. You see all these core beliefs are made about things that happen in reality, then there is a thought about it. Sometimes this process can go wrong.

There are thoughts about what this means to the illusory self and how this illusory self is perceived and then you have a negative spiral of thoughts. People frequently being depressed, low self esteem, feel the future is hopeless, simply because of this illusion we have been tricked in to believing all of our lives. This is another example of the engine of human dysfunction at work.

This whole engine is the core mechanism behind human dysfunction and needless suffering. This illusion is responsible for many of the problems we see in the world today and not just personal problems.

People talk about ego, so what is it? If you believe Freud it is a part of your “self”. This is just an attributing of thought patterns to an illusory self. The ego is not a real thing. There are thoughts that could be termed egoic in nature but no stand alone entity called ego.

 However these egoic thoughts are the product of the conditioning of an illusory self. We call it ego because it seems like there is a desire to be better than the next person, not come off worse in a verbal argument, do things to look good to other people the list goes on.

Whilst these are generally not harmless there are extremes of this. We only have to look throughout history, where people have taken it upon themselves to annihilate another race for their ideals, tried to wipe out another religion because they thought they were right, tried to take others resources and became responsible for the slaughter of innocents to forward their selfish agendas. These people are living in a delusion, yet they are guiding the destiny of the human race. Look at where we are heading right now, it doesn't look good.

Turn on your TV set now and look at the greed of corporations, look at Bophal in India, look at the oil slick in the gulf of Mexico, look at the financial crisis, look all around the world, you will see it. They say money is the root of all evil. No... money does not do evil things, it is human GREED. This greed is the product of an illusion of self.

All of this dysfunction

THIS THIS THIS

Is because of the illusion of self that we assumed was real from a young age.

When it is said that man is an social/politcal animal other animals live in groups but not society they live as animal societys(groups) whereas we live as social animals.That's why we need to have something larger than ourselves to hold on to.

Biological evolution and evolutionary psychology have developed humans to be social, the “I” function was maybe part of it but it was never supposed to be believed as a real thing.

In discovery channel they said that along with humans only a very few mammals are capable of self-recognition,Dolphins, Chimpanzees and Elephants.methinks, Self recognition is not only linked to intelligence but also living in groups and parental care and the way the animals relate ot the same members of the species, all these occurs only in mammals.What made us modern humans is actually a illusion of self due to some slight fault in brain during evolution in the course of early humans developing speech.

Yeah this totally makes sense. My dog recognised there was nothing worth spazing about after a while, it just made a pattern match regarding the location in the house, if it had of recognised itself it wouldn't have spazed out in the mirror at my friends house.

Whether it is an evolutionary glitch or not that the “I” function arose, it has become the engine of human dysfunction. For this reason alone, seeing the truth that there is no “you” can end the needless suffering and dysfunctional thought that arises.

Knowing this is not enough. It must be seen to have any effect. Basically the brain is conditioned to think in terms of a self since birth, once a behaviour is conditioned it needs to be undone. It is as simple as seeing in real life that there is no entity there, this requires some deep inner looking and it can be easily seen.

This does not take years of meditation or practice, it can be easily seen within a matter of a few days, once the person intellectually understands that the concept of self is completely illusory. 

In an expment shown in NGC or Discovery Chimpanzees could not cooperate to complete a task that procures them food for they don't share thier foods with strangers, they seem unable to develop mutual understanding.

Co-operation,sharing and mutual understading(among strangers not mother offspring) are the thing that makes us different from animals according to scientists.

We stood erect and We are mammalian and if any other mammal during the course of evolution stands and walks erect it too will become like us.

Agreed that sounds highly plausible to me.

Hey xxxxx have you seen no self? Or do you just understand it is illusory?