No-Self, Antonio Damasio, and NonDuality

Non-Duality is the term for a view or experience of the world as not two and not even one—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead that which is neither subject nor object nor a  unity.  The term derives from Eastern teachings, principally Hindu advaita, which literally means without duality. It also finds support in Buddhism (Zen, for example, in which the Heart Sutra declares that form is emptiness, emptiness form). The teachings are that we live in nonduality right now and we can find out for ourselves but not through intellect. (Zen koans are designed to teach the futility of intellect and reason in understanding it.)

A central tenet of non-duality is that self—that which we call our self—does not exist. The evidence is offered by a methodology.
The student is told to look for his self, and to do so relentlessly. Eventually, he concludes that he cannot find it. Only thoughts, feelings, and sensations are perceived. Eventually he may understand that nothing can be said about them except that they arise and pass away. Nothing can thus be said about their "source." In that sense, all is "subjective" but that too is only another word, another perception, according to the non-dual view. Nor can "external" objects be validated. As for the chair in which he sits, that is also subjective. The pressure of his body against the seat is sensation. His visual perception of it is sensation. Etc.

The reader would be unwise to dismiss all this as so much balderdash. Neurologist Robert Burton has written an interesting book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, which posits that essentially we operate on assumptions derived from involuntary mental sensations rather than fact.  In history, quite able intellects, including philosophers George Berkeley and David Hume, were unable to disregard conclusions they reached. Hume, for example, concluded that insufficient evidence can be found to prove the existence of self. Bishop Berkeley said that without the perception of it there is no self.

Speaking only about self, Antonio Damasio has a different take on the situation. Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Southern California and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. In Descartes’ Error* he offers another way to look at the phenomenon of the self by discussing the brain. As an example of his point, he refers to neural signals from the elbow joint. Of these signals he says, they "will happen in the early somatosensory cortices in the insular regions [of the brain].”

Of them he also states, "Note again, that this is a collection of areas, rather than one center.” With this comment Damasio offers a point of view as to why the self cannot be found when we introspect for it, either through deliberate search or with meditation. We gain a simple inference from his remark. Introspection requires focus, and focus implies search for isolated neural phenomena. The self is not part of isolated phenomena. It is part of a collective. Picture consciousness as the focused beam of a flashlight. Self cannot be found with such a search. The beam lights up only a narrow part of the darkness and doesn't reveal the rest.

By again referring to the early sensory cortices in the brain, he elaborates and makes an observation regarding the self. In his build-up to his points on the self, he explains that the early sensory cortices generate topographical representations. That is, the cortices represent sensory input to other areas of the brain. But if that were the end of it, ”I doubt we would ever be conscious of them as images. How would we know they are our images? “

He states that they would mean nothing to us, these representations. We would not know what to do with them. He says something would be missing, subjectivity—a subject to make meaning out of them. Something else is needed. Here is his first point: "In essence, those neural representations must be correlated with those which, moment by moment, constitute the neural basis for the self."

That is, without a sense of self they offer no utility for the organism, which must use them to survive in the moment or to plan ahead. It must make meaning out of them.

With his second point he lays to rest the homunculus, the little man inside as intermediary who somehow bridged Descartes’ gap between mind and the world outside. He says, “self is not the infamous homunculus, a little person inside our brain, perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms. It is, rather, a perpetually re-created neurobiological state. Years of justified attack on the homunculus concept have made many theorists equally fearful of the concept of self. But the neural self need not be homuncular at all. What should cause some fear, actually, is the idea of a selfless cognition.”

Although he moves between a discussion of the brain (neurobiology, cortices, and neurons) and commentaries on the mind (self, subjectivity, and homunculus) his point nonetheless provides an "intuition pump" as Daniel Dennett** would say.

Damasio says, cognition cannot occur without a self to cognize things. Introspect, meditate, all you want but, according to Damasio, don’t use your findings as evidence of no-self. Given his explanation, the attempt to find a self implies cognition at work, with a self involved in the effort. Even though self cannot be found—because cognition involves focus and self is non-focused—the neural self is involved in the very attempt to find itself.

This observation does not conflict with nondual teachings.  Nondual teachers such as Shenzen Young, Adyashanti, and many others point out that one loses belief in the self as an entity, a thing, but self as an activity of body/mind remains.  A person will still step out of the way of an approaching automobile. The falsity of self as a thing can be likened to the falsity of color as a thing. Instead, color is a property of something.  The red of a building can be seen but the color does not inhere as essential to the building.

This blog article said nothing about the liberation ensuing from realization of no-self.  Afterward a sense of normalcy and ordinariness abides while all that went before is understood as abnormal while accepting all as the way things are.

A Wikipedia article titled "Neural Basis of Self" provides further explanation.

* Full title: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and The Human Brain

** Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking