Think out 1,000 or 10,000 years; it’s obvious to everyone that human civilization (if it lasts) will make unimaginable leaps in science and technology in that time. On the other hand, there’s a general sense (judging from the way we imagine the future) that our worldview won’t (or shouldn’t) change in any meaningful way. Is that really true?
This podcast looks at the idea that I think most desperately needs an update, our collective understanding of selfhood. The update I lay out is actually quite an ancient idea; it just needs to be dusted off and re-examined in light of new science and a new era. Here are some places it’s appeared before, most notably in Hinduism and Sikhism:
Upanishads- 2000 or more years old, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads
Advaita Vedanta- 1500 years old, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita...
Guru Granth Sahib- ~500 years old, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Gr...
Alan Watts, “We are God playing Hide and Seek with Itself”, https://youtu.be/tmFxDy8S8Lo?t=194
Bertrand Russell on Heraclitus, ~500 B.C.: “"Mortals are immortals, and immortals
are mortals, the one living the other's death and dying the other's life." There is unity in the
world, but it is a unity formed by the combination of opposites. "All things come out of the one,
and the one out of all things."” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Histo...
Many other traditions in this vein are discussed in Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Per...
Bill Hicks: https://youtu.be/VnwFmaLiKl4?t=88
Virginia Woolf: https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/0...
Erwin Schrödinger in "Mind and Matter" https://books.google.com/books/about/...
The Pew Research studies mentioned early in the podcast are:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...
https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/a...
0:00 Introduction
0:51 Reexamining selfhood
5:18 Who am I?
9:33 Why should this all matter to you?
(Excerpt from Schrödinger's "Mind and Matter"):
"The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it. But, of course, here we knock against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world however is only one...
There are two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic from the point of view of present scientific thought (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly 'Western'). One way out is the multiplication of the world in Leibniz's fearful doctrine of monads: every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them; the monad 'has no windows', it is 'incommunicado'. That none the less they all agree with each other is called 'pre- established harmony'. I think there are few to whom this suggestion appeals, nay who would consider it as a mitigation at all of the numerical antinomy.
There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads. The mystically experienced union with God regularly entails this attitude unless it is opposed by strong existing prejudices; and this means that it is less easily accepted in the West than in the East."
