I recently picked up a book left behind by someone titled What is Your “Dangerous” Idea? This book contains a collection of short and ultra-short essays by individuals with titles such as scientists, professors, and authors of academic books. The majority of the ideas presented in the book are quite controversial. Many of them deny the existence of God and make assumptions about the role religion or science will play in the near future. There are bold ideas, but overall, most of them are rather useless.
However, among the essays, I found a few that resonate with my own views and beliefs. For instance, the idea that we will never truly understand the universe, or that the mind is distributed evenly across everything existing on Earth, or another essay suggesting that, in essence, the universe is meaningless. However, I disagree with the same author’s postulate that we live and exist only to illustrate the process of the survival of the fittest.
I also enjoyed a few amusing essays, such as the one that argues we have no souls. Or another one, based on the tremendous development of Google, speculating about when the internet will become conscious. Or one that claims science must eliminate religion because only one of them will survive in the end. I found these ideas bold and thought-provoking, though I wouldn’t say I entirely agree with them.
But what I especially want to highlight is an essay by John Allen Paulos, in which he suggests that “Personality is nothing more than a conceptual fantasy (a chimera).” His essay is only half a page long, but in a few sentences, he clearly lays out the idea: personality is just a set of beliefs, that’s all. If everyone understood this, the impact on society would be immeasurable.
Why? It’s simple. We all carry our personalities around – individual sets of beliefs formed through the unique combination of experiences we’ve had – like written bags, spending our whole lives instead of living, creating things, including closeness, relationships, and love, trying to prove to everyone and especially to ourselves that we’re okay. If we all realized that all these “personal” struggles are just conflicting combinations of our life experiences, experiences that shocked us enough to make us invent explanations to simply “survive,” our realities might no longer contain such things as pretensions, personal dramas, low self-esteem, and similar issues.
I wrote to the author, To John Allen Paulos, an American professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:
About your essay “The Self is a Conceptual Chimera“.
It was a pleasure for me to read your essay in a book “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” It resonated with me, and I believe it’s the most brilliant idea of all those “dangerous” ideas in the whole book. Although I have contemplated on and liked few of them (I assume, you’ve read the book), yours is so valuable and perceptive, that I simply had to find you and send you this message, as I am still under impression of the idea.
I completely agree with you, there is no real Self, what’s being called that is not an entity or personality. It’s surely, unique, as possibility of the same combination of different beliefs, as all а them are based on the unique experiences of individuals being under unique circumstances.
Even identical twins that were raised by the same parents, in exactly the same environment, and have experienced the same events, will have different “collection” of personal experiences and, subsequently, beliefs.
I salute you for bringing this up in the book.
I however will take the liberty of making a point that this idea is actually being promoted in the society, although, I agree, it’s still not widely known by people. And just as yourself, I believe if everybody could only know that there is no Self, we would have lived in a completely different word where this simple awareness would simply cancel most of the inner and outer wars around the planet.
Thank you for this idea. If at least a small part of those that have read the essay, could come to the awareness of it, how amazing their lives could have become…
Sincerely, Natasha.