SL #641: Because, most unfortunately, the non-particle view involves several types of magical thinking. It entails making a division of the world into two radically different kinds of entities (experiencers and non-experiencers), it involves two radically different kinds of causality (downward and upward), it involves immaterial souls that pop into being out of nowhere and at some point are suddenly extinguished, and on and on.
SL #642: You are so bloody inconsistent! You
SL #641: Touché! I admit that my stance has a definite ironic tinge to it. Sometimes the strict scientific viewpoint
SL #642: Taoism and Zen long ago sensed this paradoxical state of affairs and made it a point to try to dismantle or deconstruct or simply get rid of the “I”.
SL #641: That sounds like a noble goal, but it’s doomed to failure. Just as we need our eyes in order to
SL #642: What kinds of regularities are you talking about?
SL #641: Oh, for example, swings on a playground will swing in a very predictable way when you push them, even though the detailed motions of their chains and seats are way beyond our ability to predict. But we don’t care in the least about that level of detail. We feel we know extremely well how swings move. Similarly, shopping carts go pretty much where you want them to when you push them, even if their wobbly wheels, rather predictably, lend them an amusing trace of unpredictability. And someone ambling down the sidewalk in your direction may make some slightly unpredictable motions, but you can count on them not turning into a giant and gobbling you up. These sorts of regularity are what we all know intimately and take for granted, and they are amazingly remote from the level of particle collisions. The most efficient and irresistible shorthand of all is that of imputing abstract desires and beliefs to certain “privileged” entities (those with minds — animals and people), and of wrapping all of those things together in one single, supposedly indivisible unity that represents the “central essence” of such an entity.
SL #642: You mean that entity’s “soul”?
SL #641: Pretty much. Or if you don’t want to use that word, then it’s the way that you presume that that thing feels inside — its inner viewpoint, let’s say. And then, to cap it all off, since each perceiver is always swimming in its own activities and their countless consequences, it can’t keep itself from fabricating a particularly intricate tale about its
SL #642: So it’s the fact that the system can watch itself that dooms it to this illusion.
SL #641: Not just that it
SL #642: And why can’t we get rid of our hallucinations? Why can’t we attain that pure and selfless “I”-less state that the Zen people would aim for?