[mystique]

Ancient Hindu monks have pondered on the question of consciousness forever. Ancient Hindu texts elaborate on differences between Self, Consciousness, Experiences, Knowledge. Some of this is intertwined with the Hindu concept of souls. All of Hindu philosophy is based on the concept that Self (pure consciousness) and Brahman (total reality, universe) is the same if we dig deeper and our goal as a human being is to find that union. In Sanskrit, the term itself is similar to "same yet different" - Advaita Vedanta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta)

Lot of spirituality and even if you do not believe in those religious teachings, monks who wrote those texts thousands of years ago were conscious and questioning their consciousness.

[jerf]

So I just poked briefly through Wikipedia on the dates; your link suggests a time of ~200-300 BC for those writings, the Iliad ~760-710 BC. Given the slow rate of diffusion of ideas at the time, it strikes me as just as likely that even if this idea is true and the Iliad was written by humans with a profoundly different psychology than ours, it was some peculiarity of Greek culture rather than a universal human condition. The spread of consciousness at this time in history can hardly occurred that quickly.

(By no means am I claiming that these areas are entirely isolated from each other, but note the bandwidth of the cultural communication from the travel between them is so low that the net effect is that the various areas of the ancient world were basically unaware of each other. Even if some travelers occasionally made the hikes they didn't amount to much at the civilizational scale.)

And I find it far more parsimonious an explanation that this is just a crazy idea from a too-close reading of a work of literature that thematically chooses to be about "the gods" to imbue the work with mythic power, just the fact our culture has Star Trek does not mean that we have warp drive or that Gene Roddenberry's vision of happy coexistence has been realized. A fun idea, a great idea to build some sci-fi on, but not really a serious idea supported by the totality of the evidence we have from history, in which humans have been musing about the nature of consciousness for basically all of recorded history.

[coldtea]

>So I just poked briefly through Wikipedia on the dates; your link suggests a time of ~200-300 BC for those writings, the Iliad ~760-710 BC. Given the slow rate of diffusion of ideas at the time, it strikes me as just as likely that even if this idea is true and the Iliad was written by humans with a profoundly different psychology than ours, it was some peculiarity of Greek culture rather than a universal human condition. The spread of consciousness at this time in history can hardly occurred that quickly.

It didn't. The very idea that Ancient Greeks didn't have an inner self-consciouness (as proposed in the book) is invalid (even the article says so).

That said, what ancient civilizations didn't have, and was developed culturally and through time, is the kind of complex self-introspection we have now.

In a way the Ancient Greeks (and other people) were more like James Stewart (straightforward and simple) than Woody Allen or Orson Wells (full of clashing thoughts, ideas about guilt, sin, self-introspection etc). Their inner thoughts they externalized to some degree (which is also the basis behind the book). E.g. guilt was seen as external entities "haunting you" (e.g. "furies" in ancient greek tradegy). Of course in a degree they understood it was coming from them, but they didn't have a fully developed framework to talk and introspect those feelings.

A lof of those ideas only developed fully in the 2.5 centuries since then, and Christianism played some role in that, as did religions like Zen Budhism etc in the East, that re-examined and explored lots of things about the "inner self".

[coldtea]

>in the 2.5 centuries since then

That would be "millenia".

[jnem]

I could be wrong on this, as I'm too lazy to fact check, so I will offer these two "factoids" as hearsay for now:

1. I recall that the events described in the Illiad did not take place in Homer's lifetime, but much earlier.

2. The Bahagavad Gita, which is one of the texts the previous poster alluded to, is likewise a tale of events that allegedly unfolded long before its writing (some 5000 years ago allegedly).

[nitrogen]

A fun idea, a great idea to build some sci-fi on, but not really a serious idea supported by the totality of the evidence we have from history, in which humans have been musing about the nature of consciousness for basically all of recorded history.

Unfortunately this brings us to a bit of a circular argument, that recorded history began because consciousness began, and vice versa.

[code_reuse]

And then Buddha arrived on the scene and argued that the Hindu concept of Self (Atman) doesn't even exist. The Buddha argued that no permanent, unchanging, "Self" can be found. All conditioned phenomena are subject to change, and therefore can't be taken to be an unchanging Self.

Instead, the Buddha explains the perceived continuity of the human personality by describing it as composed of five attributes (skandhas) none of which contain a permanent entity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha

[sls]

In the Sabbasava Sutta of the Pali texts ( http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.002.than.html ), the Buddha says that there are six types of wrong view about the self:

> As he attends inappropriately in this way, one of six kinds of view arises in him: The view I have a self arises in him as true & established, or the view I have no self... or the view It is precisely by means of self that I perceive self... or the view It is precisely by means of self that I perceive not-self... or the view It is precisely by means of not-self that I perceive self arises in him as true & established, or else he has a view like this: This very self of mine — the knower that is sensitive here & there to the ripening of good & bad actions — is the self of mine that is constant, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change, and will stay just as it is for eternity. This is called a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. Bound by a fetter of views, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person is not freed from birth, aging, & death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair. He is not freed, I tell you, from suffering & stress.

So while it is important to continue to examine things to realize that each thing under examination isn't a self, isn't me, isn't mine, isn't unchanging, isn't eternal, that doesn't mean that there is a doctrine that there is no self. The Buddha explicitly refuses to answer the question of the existence of a self, and says that to hold either of the views "there is a self" or "there is no self" is unskillful, a fetter, an impediment to freedom.

cf "Selves & Not-self: The Buddhist Teaching on Anatta, Thanissaro Bhikkhu" http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/selves...

[kranner]

The Hindu concept of Self (with a capital S) denotes Brahman. That is different from the more personal self (with a lowercase s) or Atman that the Buddha demolished. At least that is the convention that I've observed in books on Hinduism and Buddhism.

edit: I looked this up and now I'm more confused than when I started. There is a distinction made between the lowercase self and capital Self all right; I'm just not sure I understand the details.

[Gnewt]

I think I can shed a little light on that distinction -- here's how I understand it. No serious formal study here, but a few classes and a lot of reading of Hindu texts under my belt:

The human "Self" -- capital S -- generally refers to Atman. Atman is a "shard" of Brahman. So Self does denote Brahman, but with the tacit understanding that Atman is itself composed of Brahman, like a small patch of a flowing stream. It's not its own separate entity, but rather a piece of the whole that is also representative of the whole (look up "Tat Tvam Asi" for more on this concept).

The self -- lowercase s -- is generally used to refer to the dual self that humans have: Atman and Jiva. The Atman is the Self as we discussed before (but the Self is also the divine, as Krishna claims throughout the Gita). The Jiva, however, is the discrete part of the self -- the ego, all wants/desires, attachments to sense-objects and the physical world. When in casual conversation we discuss ourselves, a Hindu would likely claim that we are in fact discussing the Jiva.

[kranner]

Thanks for the explanation.

[code_reuse]

sigh This is one of the problems that comes with trying to map these traditions into our common English vernacular. We end up inventing new words (like capital Self vs lowercase self) or worse (as is often the case in buddhist circles) we borrow terminology from Freud (ego) and reuse it in ways that would have the Austrian neurologist flabbergasted.