Reddit mentions of On Having No Head

> thousands of people may not use 'self' in the sense you and Harris are using.

Just to be clear: I'm talking about the ego. The feeling that one is the experiencer of one's experiences. This is generally what is referred to the philosophical context. That is what I'm talking about. That is what other authors in this mode are talking about. From a definition Dictionary.com :

> 4. Philosophy.
the ego; that which knows, remembers, desires, suffers, etc., as contrasted with that known, remembered, etc.
the uniting principle, as a soul, underlying all subjective experience.



> As i said, self-image, or some set of sensations related to self may vanish or be changed during meditation, but that has nothing to do with actual existence of actual self — the one that is able to perceive.

no, this is incorrect. The feeling of the ego engenders the feeling that it is the one doing the perception. When this feeling of ego disappears, perceptions remains. The image of the world continues - sights, sounds, moods, sensations, etc, but the sense of one doing the perceiving of these things is gone.


> I asked you how you deal with absurdity of your proposition

It's not a proposition. It's not a hypothesis about anything. It's just a fact about subjective experience, analogous to the optic blind spot. If you can turn your attention upon itself, if you can look for the perceiver of your perceptions, the ego will vanish. This truth does not depend on any conceptual understanding.



> and you just escaped behind "listen to Harris", thousands authors can't be wrong and some meditation instructions.

I'm not escaping behind anything, I just have limited time, and since I value my time, I don't want to write a whole book for you when many fine books have already been written on this subject. All the questions you have are answered in several books. Harris' is just the latest contribution to this vast literature. I recommended his because I think he writes very clearly, but there are many other authors that will answer these same questions. One example is Douglas Harding's On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious

> What we are referring as self is at least able to have subjective experiences and first person point of view.
> If you want to avoid 3 you need to dissociate self from ability to have subjective experiences and first person point of view

That's not right, since when the self vanishes, subjective experience remains. Consciousness continues, but with no observer.

> If you keep insisting that self is vanishing but experiencing remains while not dissociating self and subjectivity — you are being irrational.

I'm not, because the experience is real and can be had, in principle at least, by any normal, healthy person.
There's nothing irrational about anything I've said above.

Is it irrational to notice that one has an optic blind spot? Most people think that their visual perception is a continuous field of awareness, which covers the external world continuously over the field of vision. You don't realize it until you look for it in the right way, but you have a spot in each retina that doesn't transmit any information. This is where the optic nerve traverses to retina. At that point, there are no rods & cones to detect light. You look for it by putting two dots on a piece of paper and looking at one of them while maneuvering the other to land at you blind spot. When you do this, you might find it surprising that your visual field is skipping over part of the world in front of you. The brain somehow just skips over this spot, either by ignoring it or filling it in, no one really knows, and we perceive what seems to be a continuous field of vision showing a continuous image of the external world.

The discovering the non-existence of the self is a bit like this. Our minds develop the ego over time from birth. It is an illusory construct of thoughts and identifications, some of which are very subtle. The ego, the self, the 'I', is a point around which all the contents of our consciousness - sights, sounds, moods, sensations, thoughts etc - appear to be constellated. This point itself seems, from our normal mode of subjectivity, to be located in our heads (somewhere behind the eyes). But this point does not, in fact exist. When closely examined, it disappears, and consciousness remains, shorn of self.


Anyway, we're just going over the same arguments again. If you want more answers, I suggest you turn to the established authors on this subject. The Harding book I linked above is a good place to start, or you can try Harris. Most of the other authors writing about the illusory nature of the self, and how to transcend it, are to be found in section of the bookstore usually called Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, or 'Eastern Relgion/Philosophy'. Harris will probably be most readable to you, since he doesn't deploy any religious metaphysics, and does it all from the point of view of modern, secular philosophy and science.