5 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
    1. Otherwise we’d be second-guessing ourselves at every moment: Who is deciding to buy a house or have a child? FV: That’s right. Every decision would be suspect. So evolution has designed you so that you just want to hurry on with your solidified self. That is what the sense of being a separate organism is all about.
      • for: self awareness of no-self, adjacency - evolution - no-self - Fransisco Verella, quote - Fransisco Verella, quote - evolution - solidified self, question - awakening to no-self

      • quote: Fransisco Verella

        • Evolution has designed you so that you just want to hurry on with your solidified self. They is what the sense of being a separate organism is about.
      • date: 1999

      • comment

        • Verella claims evolution has designed us to have no self awareness of no-self, the origins of the self.
        • even this phrase seems like an oxymoron 'self awareness of no-self!'
      • question
        • how would a less complex, more primitive life form even have self awareness? What does that mean biologically? At that most rudimentary level, I suppose it would mean sensory feedback signals,
      • question
        • Does this imply that (emotionally or affectively) awakening to your origins of self leads to second guessing ourselves as well? From observation of the behaviour of awakened individuals, this does not seem to be the case. Rather, authentically awakens individuals appear to be associated with much higher levels of wisdom and compassion, which would seem to confer evolutionary fitness
    2. : Why do you think it is so hard for people to awaken to the true nature of things, even after being told of scientific research or after having a personal experience of no-self? FV: My hypothesis is that evolution has shaped human beings to disregard the basic sources of our being. We were built to forget how we were put together.
      • for: evolution - forgetting our non-self nature, adjacency - evolution - non-self - Fransisco Verella, adjacency - evolution - no-self - Fransisco Verella

      • adjacency between

        • evolution
        • non-self
        • Francisco Verella
      • adjacency statement
        • Verella makes the interesting claim that evolution designer is to be blind to our lack of self
        • in fact, major evolutionary transitions in individuality embed the creation of a new higher order individual at each major stage of transition.
        • More fundamentally, major evolutionary transitions to individuals at each level need to define a biological self through a new physiological boundary between what constitutes a new unitary individual "self" (our inner world) and the rest of the environment ( our new outer world)
        • It will be interesting to see how Verella's claim reconcile with that
    3. In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is antievolutionary.
      • for: quote - Fransisco Verella, quote - evolution - no-self

      • quote: Fransisco Verella

        • In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is anti evolutionary
      • date: 1999
  2. Sep 2023
      • for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
      • title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
      • author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
      • date: May 16, 2022
      • source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

      • summary

        • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
        • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
        • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology
    1. According to general Buddhist analysis, the individual that may be assumed to exist as a singular, enduring, and controlling self is mere appearance devoid of causal efficacy, and thus epiphenomenal [68]. In the case of a Bodhisattva, this understanding is carried forward so as to encompass a critique of the apparent foundations of cognition: object, agent, and action.
      • for: emptiness, shunyata, non-existence of self, no-self, illusory self, deconstructing self
      • comment
        • this short description of the reasoning behind deconstructing the self is quite fresh and insightful, especially relating it to cognition.