According to Sam Harris, the self is an illusion. There's no one point behind the eyes, no identity lurking anywhere in the brain. Besides, identities change over time. I think one should allow people to label them, but not label themselves.
notion of oneness is that at no place can inside or outside be divided - notion of selflessness is that at no place can self be divided from not self - the 'four pillars' of buddhist thought teach that there is no eternal unchanging, no total nihilistic emptiness, not both and not neither - these four pillars are meant to produce a clear mind free from bias - the point is not to name the items inside and outside the house but to clean the window
I use vague labels all approved by the USDA and the American Bar association. The more vague they are, the better. In fact, some of them are so vague linguists debate whether they are technically labels.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but yes they do. Other creatures may not refer to labels by names, but its clear that a dog is able to label a distinction between its ball and its owner. However, different animals have different capacities to "unpack", or to look deeply into these labels. Dogs are able to sense a portion human emotion by looking deeply into a persons behavior fairly well. On the other hand, bees can label flowers and the hive easily but are far inferior at looking deeply into human emotion. Humans are able to look deeply into things far more easily than many other creatures though, and this has no doubt played a large role in human evolution.
Sure, If we generalize both label and language, what you are suggesting makes sense. My response to BlackBillBlake's question was under the assumption that he was not automatically assuming that they do in fact use labels.
Studies have also shown that dogs have the capacity to build a vocabulary of names; "labels", for their toys/items and some are able to make the leap to inference and correctly identify a new item/label combo. IE: the dog could pick out a new toy it had never seen before by inferring that the name/label it was told does not belong to any of it's familiar toys. so that does indicate that some mammals at least can and do make use of labels to identify and categorize items in much the same manner as humans, the only thing that human interaction in this instance does is associate a verbal label to the item. Whether or not the same process takes places sans human interaction, who knows, but it stands to reason it does occur at some level/degree. it is easy enough to test, my dog knows the difference between his ball and his rope. now do animals attach complex emotional significance, history or qualities to labels in the way humans do, I doubt it.
We are necessarily going through our own process of using labels and associations when attempting to describe animal behaviors, which makes it difficult to be sure as to what extent the animal is using labels, particularly if we don't grant them language. Like in conditioning, Pavlov's dog for example, the conditioned response that the dog displays is based on abstractions of labels the human sets. I don't know to what extent the learned response of salivating to a neutral stimuli like a bell, from the dog to get food, could be considered it utilizing "labels".
yes, but the example I cited, the dog picking out a new item based on nothing more than the label, does indicate an understanding of how labels are used on the part of the dog. So conditioning really isn't at work here as the dog has to make the connection between the new label and the new item. and the dog I saw in a documentary had a "vocabulary" of over 3,000 "labels" in that he had that many toys and could retrieve any of them by name and any new toy/label combo is accurately remembered with only the one introduction. Actually it was/is a pretty friggin' impressive pooch!..LOL
here is a 60 minutes segment about it. Chaser is the dog I was thinking of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhseg979EQk I have also seen him on a BBC documentary and one other by Brian Hair, the guy on the 60 minutes piece that was done later and Chaser had about 3,000 words by then.
I find that highly suspect. Literally, there may not be "one point behind the eyes" or "identity lurking behind the brain", and identities do change just like our physical bodies. But to say they have no existence is simply Buddhist dogma talking. Self is, to most of us, including Buddhists and Sam Harris, the most important thing in the world--the only thing which we can be intuitively sure does exist. "I think, therefore I am." What is "I'? And integrated organism tied together by common organs, circulatory, endocrine and nervous systems, and a above all a sense of identity formed by a common memory bank and shared experiences of pleasure and pain. Change does come, but usually it's gradual and continuous. Enlightened thinkers like the Buddha rightly conclude that attachments and cravings are the root of suffering, and are closely associated with ego. And neuroscientists like Harris have discovered that our brains are a collection of neural modules performing specialized functions and integrated by a constructs that give us an illusory sense of unity. But the literal belief that the self is an illusion is an illusion. Atheist Sam Harris is quite gung ho about his Buddhism! But I agree it's usually impossible to capture a person's essence by a label or stereotype because of the complexity of human identity. Blacks are this, Irish are that, Atheists are something else, etc., but there are so many exceptions. I sometimes try to use labels for myself to help others understand me, but they often don't fit: "Okie existentialist", "Progressive Christian perennialist panendeist agnostic", Christian free thinker, etc. They usually just draw flack. But they at least make clear what I'm not. I have a friend who describes himself as an "atheist" He then goes on to say "that tells you what I don't believe", "humanist tells you what I do believe". And that narrows it down and gives people something to go on.
i think the thing to remember about labels, even like the names given to dieties and religeons, catagories of physical and non-physical things, is that they've all been made up by fellow humans, however long ago or otherwise. sometimes they're useful, and we need to use them for everyday things, like shopping, or the name of someone we're trying to say hi to. but they are and do create often the illusion, that we know more about something then we do, because we can say a name for it.
Sure labels don't capture the totality of features or essence of what they represent but for those of us who can recognize that, I might contend that's actually one of their strengths. One of the things with language in general, which borders on paradoxical, is that we use it to be more descriptive, giving us a better understanding of reality, but in doing so, we're also abstracting reality (including qualia, personal bias, memory recall, etc) with language which can often become pretty far removed from the phenomena. I think that perhaps this is a reason why people like gameshows such as Pyramid and Jeopardy. The reconciliation of the descriptive language with the label provides a complete feel of knowledge and understanding.
Knowledge is strength, I agree, but that goes without saying. Your explanation is particularly relevant to the monetary society where what we do, and what we say is equated with our "power", our assets, our property, our resources.
Labels only serve to arbitrarily define, divide, and circumscribe us...but without them, I'd never get my mail.