Part 1 Here

The Conditions For Self hood

If we take the fear response we investigated in part II for example, we analysed this and discovered we did not control the process. We might see similar behaviour to our fear response in dogs, perhaps in response to fireworks or a gun shot.

At this point we might question whether or not a self was responsible for this. As we illustrated earlier in part II, we are inconsistent in the way we attributed the cause of emotions. On one hand we might describe ourselves as being afraid and attributing this to ourselves, yet on the other, we think of it as an automatic response that we have no control over.

As far as the dog is concerned we have to ask the question of whether we consider it as a rational agent in charge of its (dogged?) emotions, or as being subject to the changing environment? Naturally, the former sounds completely absurd. However, the latter description seems to fit both the animal and even ourselves.

We might go on to draw other comparisons between ourselves and animals. For instance, we can start to question whether or not the dog would have some extra ability to sense or perhaps even control the amount of glycogen that is synthesised into ATP, to quote an example from part II.

Whilst we certainly cannot know what the dog's experience is like, it is not beyond the bounds of reason to suggest that there are many processes that happen outside the stream of phenomenal experience that the dog is conscious of. Moreover, it again raises the question of whether or not the dog has any kind of rudimentary self that is aware?

The hard facts seem to suggest that dogs have no self awareness. For example they cannot pass the mirror test but chimps can. Whilst this is a contentious area of study it is certainly fascinating.

The implications that we have to look at are whether or not 'being aware' is a property of self hood. We might like to consider a range from the simplest single cell organism all the way up to humans.

We might ask ourselves at what point do we draw a line and say something is actually aware?

Is a virus aware that it is replicating?

Are insects aware of where their food is?

Is a gecko aware of whether the mosquito is looking the other way?

Is a dog aware of an intruder outside?

This leads us to question what we mean by 'being aware'. If we use it as a descriptive term we can say an insect is aware of where the food is because it is moving towards it. However, if we mean having a complex mental life consisting in being consciousness then we are talking about something else entirely.

Essentially, we can break down the meaning of the word 'aware' as being a predicate of descriptive language, or as being phenomenally conscious. When we use 'aware' as a predicate, i.e. the insect is aware of x, we need to distinguish between this purely descriptive use and what we mean by consciously being aware of mental phenomena - phenomenal consciousness. 

It is quite legitimate to believe that if we were to strip down the functions of the brain it would eventually lead to a more rudimentary kind of phenomenal consciousness. We might attribute this to chimpanzees but we may think twice before we attributed it to insects.

The key point here, is that these kinds of reasoning are nothing more than mere speculation. All we are doing is trying to validate our model of the world by means of inference. However, we have no means of validation for such inferences and we are left facing the aptly named 'hard problem' of consciousness (See Nagel, 1979). 

Whilst our inferences about consciousness fit our model they are always out of reach of empirical validation. In this sense the attribution of phenomenal consciousness is only ever theoretical and we are always at a loss when we are looking for certainty. 

In any case, taking a step back from all this talk of whether dogs and insects have consciousness, we might also ask what is the main difference between dogs and humans? We might say the ability to think, language, intelligence, and also inability to lick genitals, disdain for dog faeces for good measure too! Joking aside though, we might look at the kinds of criteria that we would use to make this comparison.

Dogs can communicate in simple ways, even if it is just scratching the door to be let out. Dogs can be taught to do tricks with repetition although I would draw a line quite quickly regarding intelligence as barking at passers by repeatedly does not do much for their case.

At this stage it is up to you whether you denote dogs as having some kind of rudimentary self or deny it completely. Its early days for you to make up your mind if you are just starting out in an investigation. Obviously it would be hard to say anything meaningful about the conscious experience of a dog, but what we can say is that we can witness quite a lot of processes going on that do not require a self.

In order to be a self of any kind, it appears requisite that some kind of self awareness is needed, such as monitoring of thoughts for example. But is it only thinking that presupposes a self?

The title of this article is 'Self requisite for causation?' and the point of this series was to highlight the internal contradictions of dualism and investigate our assumptions about causation. Now it seems we are in a murky realm postulating which beings have consciousness or not.

However, it is worthwhile in the sense that we have opened up some of the taken for granted assumptions regarding what self hood might consist of. 

We have highlighted the contradictions of how we identify with our emotions, whether we believe these are dualistic or not. We have also shown how dualism falls apart, when we try to stick to its model, in the face of howling contradictions. We have also seen how intelligence cannot be a criteria of other people having minds when we assume dualism is true. (Even monism has its issues regarding this [See Chalmers, 1996]). 

Evolution of the Self

Putting dualism aside for now, it should be clear at this point that if we are to postulate that there is some kind of self, we are going to have to account for its evolution in another capacity. Going down the evolutionary chain to single celled organisms such as amoeba, we are hard pressed to claim that some kind of self is going to be present. If we start scanning up the chain in terms of complexity of the brain and the like, we might want to insert it somewhere, but we might ask where?

We started to consider the possibility and we came up with a few candidates like awareness, consciousness, and intelligence. We could grant these things to dogs though, and this led us to start looking at the ability to communicate and think conceptually.

Communication exists to a degree in other animals but certainly not to the degree of complexity in which us humans do so everyday. There are examples of captive primates recognising symbols and the like if you do a web search on animal intelligence. Furthermore, other creatures show the ability for self awareness in the mirror test.

What we have to do is specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for self hood. The reason being is that we have to be able to state what the difference is between the amoeba and human having this virtue of self hood. If we cannot state what this difference consists in, then how can we be sure there is a difference? From our list of candidates we have:

Being phenomenally consciousness

Awareness of ones self and others

Possessing intelligence

Exhibiting intentionality

Ability to Communicate

By virtue of thinking abstractly

At this point I could walk you through each of these but it is probably better if you do the work to demonstrate it in your own experience. As a brief overview we know consciousness is a tricky one, but it seems absurd to suggest that your pet dog is not conscious in some capacity, and we can take that down to smaller animals like rats who have the ability to navigate mazes and solve very basic puzzles for food rewards. We have to remember the absurdity of displaying intelligence without a mind on the dualist account but here, we are postulating whether intelligence presupposes consciousness. 

Apes demonstrate awareness of the mindset of other apes around them before communicating, and I wrote an article about this research a few years ago. Other animals appear to communicate in more limited capacities. 
Apes are able to solve complex tasks as we illustrated with Kanzi the bonobo cooking marshmallows, and various other studies also demonstrate signs of inelligence. 

Thinking abstractly seems to be the strongest candidate here, but if we say this is the necessary condition, then we have to deny that anything that cannot think abstractly has no self.

This would be problematic in the case of a new born child if we were to try and say that there is some innate self in humans (viz. a dualist). Without the ability to think we would have to deny that they had any kind of self. If we were to admit this and say the self develops, then we would have to explicitly admit the self is constructed from experience and concepts - which is my argument.

However, if you want to reject this assertion you have to account for how a self exists independently from the very thinking that you believe is requisite for self hood. To compound this issue research has shown that it is possible that animals are capable of abstract thinking without having any kind of language, and that animals are capable of planning with episodic memory - just to muddy the water a little. 

Of course, these examples are extreme case formulations but the key is to notice that none of the candidates are sufficient to explain what has and does not have a self - in isolation and even in various combinations. We might argue that all of these are necessary conditions for self hood, but they are certainly insufficient to state what does have and does not have self hood. 

To demonstrate this to yourself you can pick away at the threads we have started here and see if you can unravel them to provide a suitable explanation for self hood on your own. I will save you the bother and tell you that these concepts are completely inadequate. 
What we do find is that we can give the vaguest definitions and then try and say that other facts are needed. We can also say that our current terms are derived from scientific study and therefore must be true. 

However, I cordially invite you to look in to scientific explanations of terms such as intelligence and consciousness. What you will find is that these are heuristic terms that mean a kind of phenomena we think we can intimately know but there is no objective grounding for them, nor any kind of satisfactory explanation for why they occur. Try defining 'intelligence' and you will see it is problematical. A starting point might be this.

Intelligence - capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc. 

Almost immediately, we open up a quagmire when we ask what does this presuppose? Many organisms can learn, where do we draw the line between those that can or can't? Define reasoning. Can we be sure that rats aren't reasoning when they navigate a maze, do they need to understand a problem and then solve it? How do we know there is mental activity ongoing in other animals, or for that matter other humans? - AKA the problem of other minds.

Of course, to follow all these threads would require tomes of reading but since we do not have a clear starting point, we are only capable of guess work. The point I am making is that we like to form a model of the world based on the foundations of these concepts. 
In practice though, the very terms upon which we are basing the model are merely sense making concepts that do not, in of themselves, give an explanation of the phenomena they supposedly represent when we try to apply them universally. In this instance they break down and we see that they are quite empty and lack universal application. 

In order for such an idea regarding the nature of creatures to have any traction, it must be universally applicable. If it lacks this universality we can question whether we are talking about some real phenomena, or an artifact of our way of making sense of the world. 
Were these ideas to possess the attribute of universality then they would be sufficient for us to make divisions according to our categories. 

The point here is that we are unable to do so.

This means our ideas about self hood, consciousness, and intelligence, to name a few, are inadequate for us to carve up the domain neatly and the boundaries are always going to be blurred. We are also left with the absurdity of accounting for a self that could not think at some point in our evolutionary past even if we could. 
The idea that self hood is innate is incompatible with evolution, and the prospect of accounting for 'selves' that did not think is difficult. 

We might ask for example when did self hood first appear? Unfortunately, we run in to the same problem providing any distinction that is not arbitrary. Moreover, we also have to admit that the self is the product of more complex brain functioning if we follow this chain of reasoning.

If the self is the product of the more complex functionality of the brain, the product of the mind as such, then we are left with the admission that the self is nothing more than the story the brain phenomenally experiences about its supposed place in the world.

In other words, it is a fantasy projection of thought. Although, I will grant this fantasy is coherent and exhibits a degree of predictability but on this view it cannot be anything more. 

Moreover, and most importantly, what grounds does this give us to make any assertions about agency and mental causation? 

If we are now a little sceptical about all our prior untested reasoning, which you should be, then how can we simply establish that a self is requisite for mental causation when we cannot even delineate what does and does not possess agency? 
If we cannot even make a division between ourselves and other simple species such as insects, then what grounds do we have for establishing facts about self hood being requisite for causation?

Of course, we have a couple of things not mentioned in the list above, for example, you may believe you have free will and volition over your actions and thinking. You might accept the idea that the ownership of emotions story may be beyond our control but you may be able to establish this argument in some other way.

If this is the case check out my thought experiments on the home page and you will see that our idea of what the self is, turns out to be insufficient to demonstrate that it is requisite for causation. 
We will of course explore this further in future posts but for now we can now be at least satisfied that our presumptions are quite groundless and, ultimately you will discover they are in fact completely empty.

As I have always said, you don't exist in the sense that you have the quality of essential existence, or are some kind of self sufficient entity. The reality is there is no division between the world and the brain processes that form the 'self'. 
Everything is all bound in the interconnected fabric of reality and the distinction made between 'you' and the 'world' is simply a conceptual distinction, nothing more. I invite you to take a look....

Part 3/3 Click here for: part I

Determinism

We can look at quantum mechanics to shed some light on this. In danger of going in to too much depth, it is important to outline current theory and gain a basic understanding.

The multi-verse theory allows us to instigate free will back in to the equation albeit in an illusory feedback loop, since a reality will exist for every choice made. Since we can already demonstrate that free will is an illusion, we are talking about choices made unconsciously. We are talking about different neurological states and synaptic firings, which cause actions to be taken (or not) on the level of an organism.

If we are talking about a multi-verse, that would have to mean by virtue that another branch of reality co – exists simultaneously. In each parallel universe, every outcome would play out and each 'quantum decoherence' causes a different branch of a reality to start, which would have to contain the Hubble volume (observable universe) and would be a real physical universe like this one. Heavy stuff I know but two things spring to mind. Firstly, it would be closed minded of us to assume that this was the only universe and secondly this accounts for our determined reality, when we take in to account the fact that free will is illusory.

The main problem with this theory, seems to be the fact that if this was the case, then something like the radioactive decay of an atom, could start a different branch of reality and hence every sub atomic interaction, could occur, or not, causing a separate universe. Stephen Hawkings conjectured that the quantum indeterminancy of particles averages out in large numbers of particles and quantum effects do not tend to affect classical mechanics. Hence, here there appears to be a solution to this problem, in the fact that the decoherence is unaffected by macroscopic events.

As any actions are generated from the accumulation of experience or reflex propagated by the environment in an organism, we can see how outcomes of these actions have causal consequences and will perpetuate changes in experience for other people down the line.

So if I had an interaction with someone for instance and we imagine that it was a meaningful conversation about thinking about things in a different way, with their new knowledge from the interaction, their planning faculty would take on board these new variables and factor these into their future decision making processes. In this case, the thought process is free to play out with these changeable variables influencing different outcomes, depending on the acquired knowledge of a particular organism.

Of course, the possibilities of potential outcomes could be seen to be finite but the number would be pushing beyond trillions upon trillions, or infinity minus 11.24, to be precise! This ensures that two people could never have the same experience. In this respect, to have a determined reality, the number of causal interactions from neurons firing in specific sequences and the knock-on effects throughout history, are not even worth contemplating, nor is the number of parallel universes required.

When we go back to Schrödinger’s cat, we can see that mathematically both possibilities of experience exist in this experiment, until we open the box and the wave function collapses. This gives us a paradox in terms of our Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, since we can demonstrate that both possibilities exist simultaneously. Demonstrating this for the totality of reality would be rather a hard task but what we could conjecture here, is that there are almost infinite opportunities for experience and we are just subject to the experience of the evolution of form as it plays out in the Hubble volume we appear to occupy, whether there are other parallel universes or not.

We can see that life evolves, thought evolves, the earth's geography evolves and the universe is itself in constant flux. Even the molecules and cells we are made of are not the same ones we were born with. In that respect, we know that nothing is static or permanent in nature. It would also be a mere assumption that the universe cannot replicate.

There are many interpretations of quantum theory, I quite like Von Neumann's idea that consciousness is required to collapse the wave function. That ties in nicely to the idea that consciousness is fundamental aspect of reality, although that is out of our scope for now.

Compatibility?

Anything like this can never be known to us in the phenomenal world anyway, I was never to keen on the deterministic explanation personally and I was sitting on the fence as a compatibilist for a while but without free will, it is inevitable that determinism would seem to offer the best explanation. It is not a bad thing to discover you have no free will, because the illusion of free will still exists after liberation, it doesn't just disappear!

So nothing is taken away from experience, if anything, experience is enhanced immensely. It may seem strange to say that but there again, believing in no free will through the false self would of course be detrimental to ones outlook on life.

The way I see it currently, life feels as though it is free to play out in its own way, yet 'we' as a causal agent do not exist. The universe contains almost infinite opportunities for experience and our illusory feedback cycle of free will on the level of the organism holds true, in the ability for an organism to experience choice because of its ever changing experience, even though that experience and the consequent choices are determined anyway.

We are merely aware of concepts regarding a choice that has already been made.

The anxiety from our choice, is a result of dissonance. When people say 'follow your heart', or 'go with your gut', it simply means the decision has already been made below your awareness. We are simply aware of the conceptualisations that result from this process and quite often, they are weighing up of the pros or cons. Yet at no point can we decide what our 'gut' or heart 'says'.

The influence that an organism can exert within our conceptual decoherence branch or point in space time is determined by the physical world and the experience we are subject to, which gives an appearance of free will. The quantum decoherence, as a fundamental aspect of reality, would allow this illusion to be possible, in the sense that another decoherence branch could appear when ruminating over some thoughts. Also in our other interpretations, both probabilities can simultaneously exist.

In that respect the compatibilist argument seems to play nicely in to this and proponents of this, will claim there is free will but it seems more likely that after looking at our feedback cycle, that really this free will is illusory and the hard determinist position looks stronger. Simply because when we take our causal self out of the equation, our libetarian free will disappears anyway and it seems that when we talk about compatibilism, we are just being apologists to these libetarians, or as Kant termed compatibilism; “a wretched subterfuge”.

We just have some homo sapiens running more sophisticated software and hardware than the other creatures on this substrate, to boil it down as simply as I can. Quite a reductionist stance to take but there again, we are evolved from animals. We are simply at the mercy of the environment and our acquired tool set of experience to draw from.

Here, our indeterminism enters the fray to makes quite a strong case too. Indeterminism suggests that the quantum world comes about through pure chance and thus there is no determinism or free will. Since there is no free will, we could simply assume there was no determinism either and our variables could be related to the fact that thought is free to play out but there is no one choosing these thoughts. An interesting proposition but that is going to have to be for another article, since we are only skimming the determinist/ free will positions.

Life lives itself

Upon seeing no self, we can verify experientially that self is an illusion and free will to boot. From here we can look at current theory and see how this insight connects up with it and it seems to dovetail nicely here. The exciting thing is, on the level of experience we can validate that self is illusory and this has blown this area wide open, among others. Western philosophers such as Sam Harris, Thomas Metzinger and Julian Baggini have come to the conclusion that self is illusory. RT has found a way to validate this experientially. Upon seeing no self, you are able to witness the self as an illusory feedback cycle that comprises the core mechanism of human suffering. The question is; which quantum decoherence branch do you want to occupy? Sorry I had to drop that in :) On a serious note, you can either be at the whims of your thoughts and emotions, or you can see them for what they really are and look upon them with open eyes.

Simply put, your internal dialogue is merely an abstracted commentary relating to the processing of the brain. It gives the illusion of free will, because it feeds back as a tertiary input to the brain, when in reality, life lives itself as it always has. There is awareness of thought that says there is a 'you' that is in control and labels these actions that arise as being caused by an entity that you call yourself.

It implies that there is an entity who is running the operations, but when we actually look in real life...

When we actually drop our façade for a minute and look with honesty...

It is plain to see that there is nothing there. 'You' do not exist in any shape or form; you never did and were never necessary for life to happen. Life lives itself - it is only an illusion that creates the belief that you exist as an entity who is responsible for making decisions and thinking. The plane is flying but it is on autopilot, the pilot was never there.

This can be demonstrated on an experiential level. It is nothing more than running commentary abstracted from an individual's unique experience. The thoughts that arise perpetuate the illusion of self through belief and this feedback loop of illusory free will.

This has massive implications but testing the hypothesis is pretty simple. Simply do the thought experiments on this blog (go to L@@K first and read the section on honesty and courage before you do the experiments) and then email me about your findings and tell me if there is a 'you'. Then you can take on the task of removing your conditioning of framing the world through the concept of self.

Could it be true that there is no 'you' and 'you' are nothing more than a thought; an illusion?

Part 2/3 - Click here for: Part I

Causal implications

This abstraction of our relevant experience can be analysed by our brain and cross referenced with previous experiences and our accumulated values, beliefs and ideas. In that respect, our unique experience of existence determines the possible outcomes of our future and we are aware of thoughts about such decisions, that can affect other people's futures as well as our own. The abstraction of the false self therefore, is updated constantly as new things are experienced. This is indeed what gives our abstraction the dynamic qualities that we perceive as a 'changing self', which enhances the quality of this illusion.

However, these thoughts have no causal properties in of themselves; they are abstract representations of a course of action that has already been decided unconsciously. We need only look at Benjamin Libet's experiments and the ones conducted by his successors. For instance, a clear pattern is emerging that the readiness potential for movement occurs before the subject is conscious of the decision to move. This negates free will or a separate agency to be responsible for these actions. Rather the illusion of separate agency is nothing more than an abstract formed from experience, that is telling the brain via this feedback loop that there is an external causal agent there. If you like, it is merely the running commentary of your internal dialogue which is buttressing the illusion of your existence as an agent of free will.

It is entirely illusory, just look in real life, there is no self there.

Free won't

We can illustrate how free will plays out in the real world using a “what if” scenario. I will have to use an example we can relate to and we are all familiar with. Let's say, for example, you had a choice to go on holiday. What factors would influence you to apparently 'choose' the destination? If I offered you a choice between Tajikistan or Ibiza, which would you choose? This conversation came up as I was chatting about free will with a mate. In my case, I have been to Ibiza and loved it. I have not really heard much about Tajikistan. I am quite open minded (luckily, I have been conditioned that way!) so I would be tempted to go and explore Tajikistan, but in this case, Ibiza is more appealing to me.

So I am in a position to look at what made me have this preference. In this situation, it is simply knowledge. Where lack of knowledge is involved, we can show that free will becomes redundant. I have only an approximate knowledge of where Tajikistan is located; I don't know what the capital is, what the terrain is like, what currency they use, what the weather is like – or, in fact, anything at all. I know merely the name of the place and it is near Kazakhstan. If the thought it was necessary to look arose, so the brain could perform a comparative analysis of the two places; there would have to be something special in the information for the brain to see Tajikistan as a more appealing destination than the party island of Ibiza. This, in turn, may or may not influence the feeling of wanting to go somewhere specifically.

In that respect the feedback loop of knowledge obtained would increase my pool of knowledge and then through the tertiary input of the brain, it would be factored in to making a decision below the level of my awareness.

The truth is, in no way can I decide which place I feel like going to.

You could check out the Wikipedia entry on Tajikistan, if your brain thought it would be of some benefit to increase your knowledge. What I know for sure, is the choice available to me is illusory, in the sense that the choice is an abstract representation, of a decision that has already been made below the level of my awareness. It could be influenced by increasing my knowledge on the other destination but what I would simply be doing, is increasing my knowledge and causing a feedback loop that gives the appearance of free will.

You may be thinking now that you have just chosen Tajikistan. Well if we start to look at why, you may find that you are not the party type, you are adventurous, or you have always been interested in go to Eurasia for instance. You may have decided just to assert your free will and choose Tajikistan as the place you would choose for arguments sake. The thing is, you always believed you had free will but beliefs can literally warp our reality, as we have discussed in other posts.

Literally the product of your experience now, is a belief generating thoughts, trying to assert that you have free will. In actual fact it is just a knee jerk response as a belief has been threatened. We have discussed the dynamics of belief before and we have demonstrated how these fixed positions will cause us to try and defend them, as the brain perceives a threat, when its model of reality is threatened.

If you really had free will, you would not have chosen which one you felt like going to, without actually making a conscious decision to do so. If you really had free will, you would not have automatically thrown up resistance to the challenge, when your free will was called in to question. I can see people now thinking this is crazy and this is all built on a supposition of 'no you' but all I have to say is; if you don't believe me, that's great.

Go and l@@k in real life, the truth is there, look at it and see if you can falsify a theory. Use the falsification principle, be ruthless with honesty; is there a you in real life, could it be true that self is an illusion?

Now the current reader will take the action of not looking at Wikipedia or try and demonstrate their free will by actually going to look, thereby proving to themselves that their experience is purely a given of environmental stimuli and their neurological state. The readers knowledge is simply the product of experience as it continuously plays out.

Maybe you were about to go to Wikipedia, but by using 'free won't' decided not to. Sorry, but Benjamin Libet's successors showed that inhibitory decisions were also made unconsciously. You just witnessed a representation of agency in your awareness, when in reality the decision was arbitrarily delivered based upon the variables of the brain's acquired knowledge. Or even, you have actually been to Tajikistan already. Then, of course, this knowledge has influenced the brain's processing and your current representation of this process, which makes looking at Wikipedia seem a) redundant or b) a reason to reminisce about your time in Tajikistan.

There is no you in real life

Simply put, your internal dialogue is merely a commentary relating to the processing of the brain. It gives the illusion of free will, when, in reality, life lives itself as it always has. There is awareness of thought that says there is a 'you' that is in control and labels these actions that arise as being caused by an entity that you call yourself.

It implies that there is an entity who is running the operations, but when we actually look in real life...

When we actually drop our façade for a minute and look with honesty...

It is plain to see that there is nothing there. 'You' do not exist in any shape or form; you never did and were never necessary for life to happen. Life lives itself - it is only an illusion that creates the belief that you exist as an entity who is responsible for making decisions and thinking. The plane is flying but it is on autopilot, the pilot was never there.

This can be demonstrated on an experiential level. It is nothing more than running commentary abstracted from an individual's unique experience. The thoughts that arise perpetuate the illusion of self through belief and this feedback loop of illusory free will.

Click here for: Part III

Experiment 0.5

For those of you that believe we have free will, you might like to try this quick experiment to demonstrate this to yourself. Thanks to Sam Harris for this efficient demonstration.

What I want you to do is think of a person who you know personally, it can be anyone, just picture them, whoever it is that springs to mind. Now, with this person in mind, I want to tell you about what we can observe:

1. I told you to think of a person, you thought of a person, simply because you were instructed to do so. Had I not told you to think of the person, the brain would not have had the required stimulus to invoke the memory recall.

2. You thought of a person and who you became aware of was, in fact, completely random. You had no choice regarding who it was you chose, a person just randomly popped in to your mind on cue.

We have just demonstrated how thought is propagated by a given environmental stimulus (this experiment) and you are not, in fact, in control of the contents of your thoughts. In no way were you able to choose who the person was that popped in to your awareness. Try it again if you like, use another topic other than people. If you are honest with yourself, you will be able to observe this is the case every single time.

From this experiment we have given ourselves a whole new conundrum. Not only does this have implications for all our thought, this lack of free will implies determinism. The fact that we are aware of choice on an experiential level implies that nothing is determined; so how do we reconcile this? Particularly as most of you reading this believe you are a causal 'self' being responsible for the thoughts and actions that arise.

Cause & effect

So, if there is no free will, what caused me to write this?

If I had no choice, what was the exact cause of me writing this?

• Was it seeing no self? 
• Was it the time that I had discovered RT and began looking? 
• Was it the fact that I was in another country, that led me to be on the internet at the time to discover RT? 
• Was it the fact that I learnt to use the internet 12 years ago?

We can not really find an exact cause. We have already debunked cause and effect (here) as a mechanism on which the universe operates. When we look at cause and effect, it is apparent that it is actually the nature of the brain to divide reality in to manageable chunks.

When we scrutinise cause and effect, it does not stand up as a usable premise. We can say that there is causality but we can not attribute a single cause to a specific event in time. This is where cause and effect breaks down, as it simply becomes an infinite regress. Rather, reality is a continuous flow of events, the accumulated unfolding of existence as it transpired which has delivered this very moment right now to us, exactly as it is. It is important that we state this before we consider determinism.

Nyeeps and tatties

In our experiment, we already showed how we are not responsible for what we think, it is a given of the environment and other internal criterion, that we are unaware of at a conscious level. If we think of the image of the person you thought of as a “nyeep” (packet of subjective information), these come from below the level of awareness or to put in old school terminology “bubble up from the subconscious”. In that respect there is no control over which nyeep will appear in our awareness and that is what we can see clearly from the experiment.

Our false self actually comes from the illusion that this process of calling up a nyeep, is something we can actually control and also the narration (internal dialogue) which results from these nyeeps on the level of awareness, telling the brain through a tertiary input, that this abstraction refers to a real entity separate from the brain and thought itself.

In effect “you” is simply a feedback cycle in thought, that is in turn generated from a cycle of cognition. Essentially “you”, your “self” or, whatever you want to call it, is nothing more than a thought. “You” do not exist, the illusion of self is caused by a feedback loop of thought.

Of course if you have just stumbled across this on the internet, you may well be bewildered, so I will say that everything is real except for “self”. The body is real, thought is real, everything is real but there is no you in real life, life is actually living itself, it always has done and never required a self to control it, that self is entirely illusory. What you perceive of as “you” is nothing more than a thought.

Heavy stuff but hang in there, lets dig deeper.

We are free in the sense that our experience causes an evolution in our thought patterns and rather than being restricted to 'only' a set of pre - programmed routines, the brain is like an adaptive learning computer that can update its model of reality on the fly. Programmed routines such as conditioning can not be undone by conscious thought alone however, our ever expanding database of experience increases our nyeep pool and as the saying goes, “we learn something new everyday”.

The feedback cycle of free will

One thing that complicates this, and actually installs a feedback cycle of free will on the level of an organism, is the fact that our awareness of consciousness forms a tertiary input into the brain. Along with sense data and our feelings, we also have an abstraction process where the brain is analysing its own cognitions and state. Basically, what is in awareness forms an input into the brain and, as such, this thought influences the brain in its decision-making processes. So, whilst we have no control over what that input is, our accumulated experiences can make us react differently in the future to similar events, so in a sense, we create a positive feedback cycle where accumulated wisdom factors into the decision-making process.

Depending on the outcomes of our actions in the past, the consequent input stimuli in to our conscious stream of thought from past experiences, constantly gives a new set of variables for the brain to work with. Our experience actually dictates our future actions and decisions but in that sense, it does feel uninhibited on an experiential level. The truth is, we are simply operating within the confines of our knowledge of the world, which is the product of our experience and the environment we occupy. We are simply aware of these decision making processes, which has been falsely attributed to a “self” being responsible for it. In reality they just happen.

Click here for: Part II

Looking at the process of mental causation, one of the areas you should investigate in your endeavours - Gh0$T 2014

First of all how do you actually go about the procedure of starting thinking?

I'm deadly serious, how do you start a chain of thought? This is something that you have very likely never bothered to consider before. In order to control thought, there must be some way in which you interact with thought. How exactly do you do it? Experience tells us that thoughts just happen, they naturally occur. What is it that enables us to start and stop thoughts, when they just arise from moment to moment? In other words, there seems to be no quantifiable set procedure, or way in which we can start our thoughts.

Our internal dialogue seems to be a constant flowing stream where new ideas or patterns appear and from these thoughts, new patterns are formed and often there is thought about thought. We could sit there all day lost in thought, it is self sustaining. Really it is just an ever changing flux, thoughts just seem to come and go and there is no real procedure involved in starting thinking. As I write this, the thought arises about what to write about and then I begin writing it. The thoughts that occur are mostly relevant to what I am writing, how to word it and so forth. In other words, attention is honed in on the task at hand. Occasionally, it wanders on to other topics and there are distractions that do occur but for the most part, my attention is focussed on this task.

Now we all know about our attention drifting. I am sure that you can remember a time when you have walked or driven home and got so lost in a day dream, that you actually forget about what you are doing and suddenly, the realisation occurs that you are walking or driving and you had better concentrate on where you are going! This, or something in a similar capacity has happened to everyone at some point in their lives. Our awareness is dominated by whatever is important, in the moment. This can even be to the point where we switch off from an important task and focus on the thoughts themselves. There is some degree of the body being on “autopilot” being involved here.

To say our attention can wander would be an understatement

When we think about ending thoughts, is there a procedure that we can use? We have all had the experience of not being able to stop thinking about someone or something in the past. Even when we decide that we should stop thinking about something, we know it is impossible to get it out of our heads, such is the anticipation, suspense, or drama, be this positive or negative. If it is some basic task, such as making a cup of tea, we know that there is no effort in stopping thinking about such a menial task, once completed.

Of course it carries no real significance in life and we often take something basic like this for granted. However, it is worth noting that in either case, there is no stop message that is being triggered. Either the thought is no longer of significance because the need has been met or, if the need has not been met, then the brain keeps it in awareness. This would make sense, as we are drawn towards goals as such. A goal seeking machine would be required to keep a goal in awareness in order to motivate itself. We may get distracted temporarily but sure enough, the thought will pop up again. Sometimes these thoughts can even be about something that is not relevant to making our lives better and is not a goal, but is something that impacted us be it a new film, the mortified faces of those affected by a natural disaster on the television or something totally random, like a picture of a gerbil riding a miniature unicycle.

Either way, there is no stop/ start mechanism for the whole equation. This is probably what makes us so different from animals, the fact that we have thoughts that are not entirely orientated towards survival. Whilst quite a few animals may have basic social cognitions in some part, it would appear that they do not have the capacity for mulling over thoughts about thoughts in the same way that we do.

So, to stop and start thought seems to be a little beyond our capabilities for the most part. It would probably be best to say that thought doesn't really stop or start, it just continues in a endless stream. It subsides at times and we can even try and focus on the present moment to shut thought out for a while but eventually, thought appears again. We can observe in reality that we can not definitively turn on and turn off our stream of internal dialogue at will, there is no control over that aspect of thinking. If you are responsible for thinking, then how can this be?

Could it be that there is no thinker and the idea of “you” is only illusory?

You don't exist, really there is no you it is an illusion

Test it out and see if it is really true in real life