RE: Book Recommendations
July 18, 2020 at 3:54 pm
(This post was last modified: July 18, 2020 at 3:58 pm by Porcupine.)
(July 18, 2020 at 3:49 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: and a sense of ‘self’, arguing instead that individuals are the sum total of their experiences.
That's Hume's 'bundle theory', right?
Do you know if he believed that our selves, as experiences, persisted across time or was he 'more buddhist about it', as it were?
I know that Derek Parfit, for one, original accepted the psychological continuity thesis: the idea that we are our memories. But later in life he decided, like Hume, that we are our experiences ... however he also did indeed not consider his past or future self to be his self. For Parfit, providential concern gets replaced with moral concern---in other words, when we help our 'future self' it's very much like helping somebody else.
I think it's more profound than it first appears. One example of that is it explains how people who greatly lack empathy and compassion, such as sociopaths, tend to be very reckless and tend to not care much about their future self---because it's as if their lack of compassion for other humans also makes them lack compassion for their future.
It would also explain why people like Trump tend to not give a shit about the consequences of their actions.
"Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes." - Alan Watts