One of the basic principles of Buddhism is that there is no such thing as the self. That can be hard to swallow since Americans put emphasis on individuals and pay attention to self-improvement and self development. The Buddhists argue that no part of the body or the mind is what is referred to as the self. Maybe the self is just a myth.
A statement of the Buddhist approach is available on the internet here.
From a Western point of view, it seems that “ego”, the affirmation that I exist and am important, significant is related to the part of us that fights to stay alive. In a sense, our desire to continue to live and avoid death works to support our awareness of our own past, present and future. Our continuance is the ongoing of us. So, there is a self, that which continues.
A couple of years ago, I came across the book A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Robert B. Laughlin. The second part of the title got my attention. How can you revise something from the bottom DOWN? If you are at the bottom, there is nothing further below to revise. The book is by a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics so that is a pretty good credential. The title refers to a very old Western approach: Get to the basics. Originally, the idea was that matter itself could not be infinitely divisible so there had to be a smallest possible unit, called the “atom”.
Today, we are familiar with sub-atomic particles, so the atom is not the bottom of things. As scientists have continued on their quest for the basis of everything, they have had to start considering “emergence”. In systems theory, one of the basic tenets is “More is different”. They mean that a group of 1000 people has different properties than a group of a billion people. Physicists and other thinkers have started noting situations where different possibilities emerge when enough basic units occur. Such an idea runs counter to the notion that things have a fundamental unit which more or less controls what they can be or do. Some properties or possibilities emerge from the group.
So, following Bill Bryson, who pointed out that our configuration of atoms will last for a while but will eventually dissipate, we can cling to a notion of a self, the one we think of and that others think they recognize, but it may be just a handy term for a temporary cloud.
