But it is highly profitable for the economy.

I feel this article is neglecting a lot of psychology. Sense of self is very important to maintain mental stability. The brains thoughts and pathways are largely connected to the concept of the self.

The main obstacle to finding your true nature, true "self" if you'd like to call it, is obsessing over it. Same with finding happiness.

The article has this line that embodies a similar logic: "Don’t follow the cliché of “love yourself”, instead, love what you do. If you are doing something truly great and proud of, how else would you not feel loved?"

So to find yourself, you simply need to stop looking?

no argument was made that the self isn't important.

the argument being made is that too much importance placed on such an insignificant part of the whole isn't valuable.

in essence there's nothing wrong with being personally successful and happy. but if that success and happiness is based on the entire system bending to your personal needs then you have overstepped your significance.

so its about having a little humility.

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Reading the passage about Nazi made me think you have completely missed the point. Nazis are exactly about not caring others, our interdependence and expanding a unitary self (thinking it is the right and important thing). That's why I also mention solidifying "self", "us", "One true God" are similarly dangerous.

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Also, you seem to have developed a strawman subconsciously for the sake of winning the argument. I never once mentioned that everyone is Hitler, I just wrote it is clear that one of the factors that contributed to Hitler's insanity is self-importance and glorifying his own way of thinking. The latter is dangerous, not just in Hitler's way, but also manifested in narcissistic, anti-enviromentalist behaviors... the list goes on.

You also seem to have conflated that giving importance to "self" means one is a thinking, responsible person, whereas if we focus on our actions, we "stop thinking" anymore. Caring about your actions exactly makes you think about the right thing - the consequence of your actions, As humans we always think, but we need to prioritise thinking certain things over others.

>...the attachment to something impermanent and untrue must cause suffering. Jay Garfield

while tangential to the subject of the article this is pure gold. it strikes me as a foundational statement to what we call "cognitive dissonance."

>The modern world romanticizes finding yourself, your style, your type, etc.

>Ironically, dwelling on this image of “self” neither helps you find your true nature, nor to find your role in the larger world.

I'm a bit confused, couldn't "your true nature" just be taken to mean "your true self"? The vibe I'm getting from this article is "there is no true self, that's an illusion, but if you acknowledge the self is plastic and changes over time it's actually totally real, also be nice to people."

It seems like you're just saying "the true self isn't static like many think, but evolves over time" which I would agree with, but you've muddied the point by using obfuscatory language to shoehorn in an attempt at dunking on ignorant, vain, shallow westerners (low hanging fruit) and glorifying Buddhism - and, ironically, it comes across like your own ego stroking. Not saying this is what you intended or that I 100% understood what your article is about, but this is what this comes across as to me.

In my view, given that at the end of the day everyone just wants to be satisfied with their own life, "finding your true self" just means finding the version of the self that is most satisfying now and putting yourself on the path to be satisfied even as the self evolves. (Of course the lay public fails miserably at that task, because they fail miserably at everything that requires careful contemplation - but that's not an indictment of whatever philosophy they're attempting to carry out IMO). And in this context finding the "true self" would then be extremely important. Of course we should attempt to experience the holistic world as it truly is - but are we not a part of said world? Can we truly understand the world if we don't understand ourselves, and vice versa?

>attachment to something impermanent and untrue must cause suffering

I totally agree with the Buddhists here. But the self doesn't need to be defined only in terms of who we are at the present, transient moment, which can result in suffering (not that I believe all suffering should be avoided, but that's beside the point). The self can also be defined in terms of our past (including the old "false" self that we were) and who we want to be and at one point wanted to be in the future, and whoever we end up being. Instead of arguing against the concept of self, perhaps we should be advocating a more holistic view of the self instead?

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> ...the futility of glorifying the “self” (giving it too much importance)...

and there are many great real world examples of this hubris in front of us right now.

i.e. world leaders who have wrapped the future of their political constituencies around themselves (without any thought given to what happens and who takes over after they die.)

i.e. corporate leaders who scrape every last bit of profit out of every market they can get their hands on (without any thought given to who is going to be able to buy anything if all the money is in a few bank accounts owned by the wealthiest people.)

pure hubris.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

You do need some amount of faith that it is, actually, a guava that you're smelling, if you were blindfolded and made to smell a variety of fruits, would you confidently be able to pick out whether any of them is guava? Or more specifically, which one it is? If you ate them all, or better yet, took the blindfold off, then you'd know for sure, but you'd actually have to look, which is the leap of faith, not a big one by any means in this case, but if you were trying to pick out, say, a political ideology that you believe in, you wouldn't be able to find it by believing that all politics are dumb, and a waste of time, youth average to take the leap and entertain the idea, whether you find what you're looking for within it or not. You've gotta open the box to find out what exactly is inside, this extends to emotional boxes as well.

>Well, I don't think so, that collection of organic matter is called a person or individual. I have never heard people use "self" to refer to that.

I literally quoted a dictionary definition which referred to the "body".

It is a slightly flawed interpretation of reality, not a guess. And we use the scientifc method to measure things, even obvious ones, to better understand the world. Our perspective is not limited at all, illusions are fun and they show our brains can be tricked, but we are still pretty damn good at experiencing the world.

From a scientific perspective, the world as you experience it is unambiguously made up by your brain. There's no directly experiencing the world. Only taking the electrical and chemical inputs from your sensory organs and interpreting them to create a model of what the world most likely is. It is a flawed and imperfect guess at reality based on the best available data. That is why illusions exist.

It's....honestly just better to have never included that. The argument of "Do you know who ALSO shared <this attribute>? HITLER!" is a tired one that has little validity, and your paper would not suffer from its exclusion. It doesn't help that this came out of relative nowhere - I certainly wasn't expecting to be hit with that - and then was never referenced again.

The paragraphs before this considers the ideas of working with bad data which when processed without consideration of its validity would paint an incorrect picture. The next paragraph considers the importance of what you do, rather then how you think-

-Do you know how had a solid sense of self? Hitler!-

-The paragraph after the reference refers to how humanity is well, fucked, if it doesn't recognize the concept of interdependence. Which ignores the collectivized thinking of the Nazi system, considering how it disincentivized individual thought over what was for the supposed good of the whole....which to them was the supposed German race. Which is interesting to consider, in that the man on top could very well be a megalomaniac, but the millions that supposedly held his ideals had their individuality and self crushed into something that another wanted, rather than allowed them to come to such conclusions about who they are themselves.

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Taking a very common personality trait (The formation of a solid ideal of the self) that can be found in the broad majority of people and associating it to one man who, outside of his speeches, book, and third-party sources we know relatively little about how he thought, and linking the two together isn't a very solid foundation.

Now, there's megalomania (which Hitler likely possessed considering his mannerisms) in which does require the exaltation of the self to a point beyond simple egomania, but the vast, vast majority of people do not exhibit megalomania (nor even garden-variety egomania) just because they've decided on who they are.

Well, I don't think so, that collection of organic matter is called a person or individual. I have never heard people use "self" to refer to that.

Self usually means that sense of self, that awareness/agency owning your thoughts.

>evolutionary scientists aren't writing books called "the selfish gene"

correct. only one scientist wrote that book. had you read it you might have understood that Dawkins uses the term "selfish gene" as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution (as opposed to the views focused on the organism and the group)

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>being social just a tool to selfishly pass on genes.

so you admit that taking out the "social" part (so no genes are passed on) would end the human race? or how did you expect to continue? because, by your own admission then, being social is fundamental to human existence.

>About Alice's case, the individual exists,

Exactly, there is a "coherent thing" Alice, which is what most people actually mean.

>exactly what "self" image this person has or claims to have is irrelevant and unimportant (and arguably doesn't exist except in Alice's head).

Exactly, this Buddhist idea of self, is irrelevant, unimportant and which has no application to reality.

There is no reason to every use this Buddhist definition and every time anyone uses it they will get incoherent conclusions.

If you want to talk about this mental construct then call it consciousness or whatever.

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Glorifying the self, also called vanity, is seen as detrimental in most cultures. But what about strengthening the self or discovering yourself? You must have some minimum amount of selfishness in order to have self confidence. Otherwise you will not have the confidence to do anything. Without any sense of self, you are a slave to any whim or fad that comes along (ie. climate alarmism)

What did I just read?

About Alice's case, the individual exists, exactly what "self" image this person has or claims to have is irrelevant and unimportant (and arguably doesn't exist except in Alice's head).

The article exactly calls for focusing on the consequence of your action (verb) and worry less about your "self" (noun), are you serious with this response?

>What do you mean by "fundamentally social"?

You first used it in the context of us being fundamentally social not selfish.

So I took it to be a definition which excludes the real reason being selfish. So I oppose the idea that they are mutually exclusive.

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>Do you want to say we aren't fundamentally cooperative/altruistic/empathetic towards others? (somewhere along these lines)

It feels like we are getting at psychological egoism.

>Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by self-interest and selfishness, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It claims that, when people choose to help others, they do so ultimately because of the personal benefits that they themselves expect to obtain, directly or indirectly, from so doing.
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>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

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