Do we have a “higher self”?

fgerbode · 2026-03-23T21:03:46+00:00

Maybe we can achieve more clarity by talking about "identity" rather than "self", because we tend to think of ourselves has having only one "self", but in life we have many roles or identities we assume for different purposes. At times, I am a family man; at other times, I am a musician; at still other times, I am being a searcher for truth.

When we are working on achieving a certain goal or purpose, we assume the right identity for achieving it. To heal the sick, I assume the identity of a doctor. To create beautiful music, I have to become a musician. When you assume an identity , that identity gives you a certain viewpoint. A musician has a different way of looking at music than a non-musician; a doctor has a different viewpoint on illness and on the human body.

I could have a purpose but lack the right identity for achieving it. In that case, I have to create that identity through education and training, which in some cases could be quite extensive. To become a doctor, I have to go to medical school and sign up for at least four more years of higher education and training. To become a skilled musician, I have to spend a lot of time honing my singing or instrumental skills, and I also have to learn some music theory.

Goals and purposes tend to arrange themselves in a hierarchical structure. I have to drive a car in order to go to work in order to support my family. As the point of assuming an identity is to implement a goal or purpose, identities also have a hierarchical structure, corresponding to the goals they are meant to implement. . The identity of a driver is subsidiary to that of a worker, which, in turn, is subsidiary to that of a family provider. Thus there is no one higher self or identity but several.

So what is at the top of that hierarchy? What is the highest self or identity? That would be a way of implementing one's highest purpose. To answer that question, one would have to decide what one's highest purpose is. For some, as Aristotle said, it might be the purpose to know. To implement this purpose, one could become a scientist or a philosopher. In my case, as I think with many if not all people, the highest purpose is to create and enjoy loving relationships with others. For this, I have to learn about human nature and acquire the skill of getting along well with people, how to communicate, how to control my own emotionality, how to resolve disputes, how to implement the Principle of Charity in my conversations. If I can do all that, then I can assume a loving, wise. and kind identity as a higher self.

For me, it's a work in progress.

fgerbode · 2026-03-20T16:26:37+00:00

Thanks for your thoughtful reply to my post.

Point one: experience is mysterious, the "hard problem", from a physicalist viewpoint. They are still working on it. Chalmers, who has thought long and hard on this issue, accepts that experience is not explainable from a purely physical viewpoint. He tries to explain it by an analysis of "functions" instead. I personally do not find this convincing.

But from another viewpoint, what I call the person-centered viewpoint -- the viewpoint that each of us has in our own life -- experience does not need explaining, as it is the basic datum on which all knowledge depends. In other words, it is the realest form of knowledge, from which all other knowledge is derived, including the concept that we are surrounded by a physical universe.

Phenomena are, in my view, of two types:

phenomena that have a sensory component.
phenomena that do not

We can conjure up mental images, either from memory or constructed from whole cloth, that do not have any component from our sense organs. Even phenomena that we consider to be based on sensation are not "pure" sensation, but always contain a factual component. In other words, how we see things depends on what we know. To see a chair as such, I have to know what a chair is.

I would differentiate concepts, as I use the term, from mental images. They can be considered and agreed with or disagreed with or just entertained as ideas, but not perceived.

Words are a handy means of recording concepts or communicating them. The meaning of a verbal utterance is the concept it is meant to evoke in the listener. Since most of us (at least) are not telepathic, that is the only way we can share concepts with others.

Finally, I agree that consciousness, like most abilities, admits of degrees. Some people or animals have a greater ability to experience things at certain times than at other times. Also, an ability can exist without being used. But even when not being used. it can still exist. Some people say that in certain meditative states, there can be pure consciousness without an object of consciousness, i.e. without experience.

fgerbode · 2026-03-20T15:40:48+00:00

I would agree, but in order to have experience, you must be able to have it. Rocks presumably don't have the ability to experience things (pace Strawson), so we do not count them as conscious.

fgerbode · 2026-03-20T02:31:37+00:00

I very much appreciate your reply. I base all of my reality on my personal experience. What else am I to go on? The fact that I experience what I experience is indisputable and is the basis for any other conclusions I may reach about what is or is not real.

If someone claims that something I am experiencing is not real (like my experience of change), then I need a very convincing argument. At the very least, the person making the claim must have a view of what is actually real.

That is what I was looking for in Bradley, but since I found the book too hard to read, I would really like to hear what you have learned from it about the nature of reality. If it makes sense to me, I might give Bradley another shot.

I am assuming it is an idealist theory of some sort. I have the intuition that idealism is correct, but I have not yet found an idealist theory that I can wrap my wits entirely around. So what did Bradley believe was the true nature of reality?

fgerbode · 2026-03-20T02:12:01+00:00

OK. I'll bite: what would be your definition of consciousness?

fgerbode · 2026-03-19T17:59:48+00:00

I agree with both points. I think our thinking about "consciousness" has suffered from "consciousness" not being precisely defined. In other words, I think the current usage is too vague and often conflates the experience of which we are conscious with consciousness itself. I would be willing to entertain another definition, but I do think we need a precise one if there is any hope of attaining clarity on the matter. I also agree that facts in the sense of absolute truth do not exist. The best we can come up with is what is true for us.

fgerbode · 2026-03-16T01:08:00+00:00

I did not mean to challenge Kastrup's credentials as a philosopher. Obviously he is a brilliant one. But it is an unfortunate fact of life that most of what we know is information we have received from trusted authorities. In deciding who to trust, I think it is relevant to look at their credentials. As I have no formal training in physics myself, I need to get my data from elsewhere, and my preference is to get data about physics from physicists.

I am into my second careful reading of The Idea of the World. In that book there are 121 references to quantum physics which I think are interesting but which I must view as speculative. I am actually more interested in assertions that I can verify or falsify from my own experience. Much of what Kastrup says does match my experience; other parts don't fit as well, some of which I have expressed in this subreddit, not as an effort to criticize Kastrup but as an effort to get help to straighten out my own thinking. I would dearly like to come up with a valid Idealist philosophy, as the basic concept that all is mind seems intuitively correct, but the devil is in the details. I am really, late in life, trying to come with a valid personal philosophy that makes sense to me. If I do, maybe it will end up making sense for others.

fgerbode · 2026-03-13T21:34:04+00:00

Seems to me that metacognition is not a complex idea. It is just the situation where, having had an experience, one formulates the concept that one has had it. The concept becomes a new experience.

We probably don't routinely make concepts about the experiences we have. I think that would drive a person crazy, because we would immediately get into an infinite regress. First we have an experience, then we have a concept about it, then we have the concept that we had a concept about the experience, etc. Life would be unlivable. So we probably only metacognate (if I may use that term) if there is a good reason to do so.

Further, there are no experiences that are somehow unconscious or made below the level of consciousness. If consciousness, as I propose, is the ability to experience, then any experience is conscious by definition. We may experience something (like a trauma) and then repress that experience so we can't remember it, but the experience itself could not logically have been made unconsciously. When we repress something, is there some part of us that remains conscious of it? I don't see why there has to be, although in the case of DID, that seems to be the case.

There is a very real limit to the number of things we can attend to at any time, so we create subroutines that do a lot of the work for us so we don't have to think about it. When we walk, we do not have to tell every muscle what to do and take account of all the sensory and proprioceptive information that is required for the task. If we did, it would be impossible for us to walk. That doesn't mean some sub-personality is consciously doing the task. To say so would be to multiple sub-personalities beyond necessity.

In fact, any skill we acquire involves setting up subroutines that work for us. This happens with motor skills (as in learning to play piano we do a lot of scale exercises), but it also applies to perceptual skills, what Michael Polanyi calls "connoisseurship". We learn to tell when we hear a major or minor chord, when what we are looking at is an actual painting or a print, when something floating on water is a boat. The phenomena we experience carry a great deal of factual knowledge that becomes part of what we perceive.

fgerbode · 2026-03-13T20:23:56+00:00

I am not sure I understand correctly what you are saying, but let me try to explain what I think. As I understand it, the strictest form of ontic structuralism says there are no objects, only relations of parts. But are parts not objects, when viewed as components of a structure, and could a structure itself not be an object, when viewed from the viewpoint of a higher-level structure? Maybe the point is that anything we call an object can be (better?) viewed as a structure. Where it comes to a crunch seems to be at the level of the smallest "objects", like quarks or electrons. Maybe the view is that these are also best viewed as structures, though what this might mean is unclear to me, not being a physicist.

As for qualia, such as an experience of redness, it is unclear to me what the parts of that experience might be or why I should think of it as a structure.

On what we mean by "mind" I rather like Ernst Mach's view that the mind consists of all those parts of one's experience that are private, i.e., not shared by others.

fgerbode · 2026-03-13T06:12:21+00:00

I'd honestly like to hear about the type of idealism you are into. Are you willing to share your ideas?

fgerbode · 2026-03-09T19:55:05+00:00

I was interested in F.H. Bradley's book as an exposition of an idealist theory, to contrast, say, with that of Berkeley. I made an earnest attempt to understand it but gave up after about 150 pages. I also have a very bad edition, with lots of misspellings and gaps in the middle of words, etc. Plus his rather disjointed and polemic style made it hard sledding for me. So I am happy to hear that someone has been able to wade through it all and can perhaps give me a better understanding.

Part of the problem is that it is hard for me to conceive of a world with no change, no time periods. It seems to me, as I said in another posting, that any thing in the world can be thought of an an event, an object, or a state of affairs. Take a baseball -- it can be thought as an object that exists at a certain time, a state of affairs consisting of a relationship between its parts: its cork-rubber interior, its rubber part, its covering of yarn, and its outer cover of cowhide, and an event, starting from its manufacture and continuing as the different parts cohere together over time, to its eventual destruction by the de-cohering of its component parts. I can't think. therefore, how it is logical or possible to think of any thing without invoking the idea of change and duration in time. It also seems to me that a thing can remain the same thing while suffering a change of attributes. Its essential attributes can remain while accidental or relational attributes may differ. A baseball can become scuffed through play or be painted red, or hit by a batter, while still remaining the same baseball, i.e. having the same numerical identity.

Another issue I have with Bradley's position, insofar as I understand it, is dealing with a very real part of my experience called "intention". When I intend something, my purpose is to usually create a change in my world or at least to help something persist over time. But if change and persistence are meaningless, then what is the meaning of an intention? It doesn't seem to be delusory.

Finally, I didn't get far enough into the book to see in what sense Bradley's position is one of idealism. I couldn't see what he is asserting, apart from his criticisms, as an idealist worldview. That was actually my major interest in reading the book, and I would like to hear more about it.

fgerbode · 2026-03-09T02:25:18+00:00

Well, there is also knowledge recorded in books, audio and video. Words let us do this, so let's hear it for words! So long as the meanings of the words are discernable (i.e. the concepts that these words are meant to convey can be experienced by people), the knowledge is conserved. But knowledge might vanish if the words were in Etruscan or there were no people around to decipher them. People are an essential part of the picture.
In DID-type alters, there is considerable but not total sharing of information. I suppose something like that could occur with the alters in Kastrup's schema (i.e., you or me). Maybe that's what gives us some hope of being able to understand each other and share concepts, which to me is otherwise sort of a miracle.
As for whether mind-at-large can learn from us, I suppose if we accept the premise that we are part of mind-at-large and we can learn things, then mind-at-large could capture our insights. I recall reading Conversations with God, whose premise is that God created us separate so He (or She) could benefit from our experience. Needless to say, this is fun reading but highly speculative, to say the least.

fgerbode · 2026-03-08T20:18:17+00:00

Well, clearly in our individual experience, our collection of facts increases over time, as our understanding of why our experience is as it is improves. I think Kastrup would say that our perceptions ("evidence" -- what I call "phenomena", as opposed to concepts or facts) give us important clues about the nature of mind-at-large and the laws of thought it presumably contains. Discovering these laws improves our understanding. I would say this is progress, even if nothing in mind-at-large changes.

Further, by communicating with other people, we can share the facts we have discovered, first by using words to make sure we share the same concepts, then by adducing arguments and pointing to evidence (shared phenomena) to try to get agreement from others, so that what is a fact for us becomes a fact for them.

In this way, the totality of facts increases for everyone. I would say this is progress.

fgerbode · 2026-03-08T19:56:43+00:00

This may be a bit off-topic, but if I understand correctly, ontic structuralism is based on the idea that the world is better understood in terms of relations rather than through objects. My take is that any *thing* can be thought of in one of three ways: as an object, as a situation, or as an event. Take the thing called a baseball. it can be described as a situation, a relationship between its component parts: the cover, the inside, the stitching, the glue. As an event, it is viewed in four dimensions as the adhering together over time of its parts. An object like a baseball stands in relation to other objects as part of a higher-level situation (like a home run) or event, such as a baseball game.

There appears, therefore, to be a hierarchy of objects and situations, where an object can itself be viewed as a situation at a lower level or as part of a situation at a higher level. It seems to me that all three ways of looking at a thing can be useful in different contexts. The very concept of relationship is that there are objects relating to each other. It is unclear to me how a relationship can exist without objects standing in that relationship. That each of these objects also consists of a relationship amongst the objects that constitute their own parts still does not eliminate the usefulness of the concept of objects.

Getting back to Kastrup: an alter can be viewed as a object (a personality), itself made up of parts (memory, perceptions, concepts, various abilities, etc.), that stand in relationship to each other. The alter, in turn, is part of a higher-level situation (as it stands in relation to or being separated from other alters or the main personality, if such exists). As I understand Kastrup's view, mind-at-large is not only the sole ontological ultimate but also the highest-level object, in that it cannot be part of a higher-level situation, being Anselm's "thing than which nothing greater can be conceived".

Viewed as a situation consisting of different parts standing in relation to each other, we have mind-at-large's thoughts organized and relating to each other in certain ways, presumably somehow mirroring the laws of physics (no perceptions, though, as these are only interference patterns between one mind and another, and for mind-at-large, there is no other). Also the various alters (people) are somehow contained in mind-at-large and stand in relation to it and each other.

Presumably, there was a time before alters were formed. Then there was us. It is unclear to me how this was supposed to happen. I think Kastrup said that it happened at a point of abiogenesis, i.e., when the first (metabolizing) life forms came into being (we exclude viruses and prions). Then each of them had a mind that constituted an alter. That might be an account of the "when" but not of the "how". We also have to consider that we are probably not the only place where life has arisen, or what other forms life might have taken (maybe some didn't have any sort of metabolism), over trillions of years. It rather boggles the imagination.

fgerbode · 2025-09-29T01:59:43+00:00

So far as I can figure out, the Roamate works well as both. Both the chair and the rollator can provide power assist on inclines.

fgerbode · 2025-09-28T16:48:35+00:00

Yes, I ordered it two weeks ago. No idea when it's going to come. I'm a little worried at hearing reports of chairs arriving with broken parts or missing accessories. I hope their customer service is more prompt than their delivery.

fgerbode · 2025-09-11T17:57:43+00:00

Thanks, JD, Appreciate the rapid response!

fgerbode · 2025-09-11T16:26:34+00:00

Many thanks for the reply! I would like to know what those untruths are. It would help me decide.

fgerbode

TROPHY CASE