Anatta, science fiction and thought experiments

One of the basic tenets of Buddhism are "the three marks of existence": dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence) and anatta (absence of self). They are supposed to be the essential characteristics of all phenomena, which sounds a bit odd (of all phenomena?), and leads me to suspect that something's got lost in translation. Apart from that, why these three things go together and why it is precisely those three characteristics that deserve the honour of being called "the three marks of existence" I honestly do not know. It has always seemed somewhat arbitrary to me, but, hey, it's religion, what do you expect? In any case, the first two couldn't be more straightforward: yeah, sure, human existence is pretty unsatisfactory at some level, and everything is in constant flux. It's the "absence of self" that makes you go "Hang on a second! Absence of self? What self? My self? What are you talking about!?" It's also called egolessness, non-self, impersonality, ... So, yes, they really are saying that there is no self. But ... but ... I mean ... How can anyone say that? And what does it mean exactly?

Some teachers / traditions seem to mean it in the most radical sense: what you call yourself is nothing, you are nothing more that an unstable pattern of matter and energy. That is supposed to be a liberating realisation, but to me it rather feels like a kick in the stomach. Once, on a S.N. Goenka Vipassana retreat in Dharamsala, that brutal interpretation of anatta came at the worst time, when my grandma had passed away only a few days ago. Was this toad of a man telling me that my grandma was nothing more that an unstable pattern of blah blah blah? I then found myself thinking of friends, parents, girlfriends, other deceased grandparents, and weeping like a child. "Unstable configurations of matter and energy? Well, how about you are an unstable configuration of matter and energy speaking a load of rubbish!?" In case you're wondering, yes, I did quit the course.

Other teachers / traditions would say that anatta refers to the absence of a soul or some unchanging essence beneath our flowing sense of self. Of course we have a self; it's only that it has no fixed substance. Gil Fronsdal even says (I'm not sure how orthodox an interpretation that is) that the Buddha never taught that there is no self, but only that that (anything: your personality, your consciousness, ...) is not the self, thus leaving the question open as to whether there actually is something that can be rightfully called the self.

In any case, if there is any truth to anatta, I've always been put off by the simplistic way in which it is usually presented. It goes something like this: "No matter how hard you look for it, you're not going to find this thing called the self. Come on; show it to me. Where is your self? If you can't pin it down you'll have to accept that it is an illusion." Through that kind of reasoning you would eventually deny the existence of anything beyond concrete physical objects. For instance, where is that thing you call "history"? Come on; show it to me. No, no; that's a book of history, but it's not history itself, is it? Is history a book, or even the whole British Library? So where is it then? If you can't show it to me you'll have to face the fact that history doesn't exist. Where is syntax? Where is a logarithm? Where is probability? Where is energy?

I wouldn't be able to produce a neat idea of what the self is off the cuff. It does seem awfully complicated, and very much an open-ended question. I would personally start with my own sense of self, which to me is as good a proof of its existence as there can be. If I have a sense of green, green exists. It would be silly to argue that green is an illusion because it doesn't have an actual physical existence (in physical terms green is only a wavelength). My idea / sensation / perception / sense of green is enough for green to be an unquestionable reality. The same applies to the self. Our sense of self is so deep rooted that we can't even think of ourselves as other than, well, our selves! Doesn't that grant the self some kind of ontological status? Whether the philosophical beliefs that revolve around our sense of self are valid is another matter. In any event, would it not be more interesting to enquire into the nature of this mysterious feeling of being a self rather than doing away with the whole problem by decreeing it illusory?

Isn't all this kind of obvious? Why then have I never come across any Buddhist teacher who explained anatta beyond the simplistic "if you can't find it, it doesn't exist"? I mean, if you expect me to believe that there is no self (an idea which is often regarded as the most important realisation resulting from the practice of meditation) you'll have to present arguments that are a bit more compelling than that. Funnily enough, certain science fiction-inspired thought experiment that caught my attention a while ago provided me with such arguments.

The idea is attributed to British philosopher Derek Parfit and it goes like this (this is a third-hand account, so never mind the details): Imagine we had developed the technology for teleportation. You walk into a teleportation chamber, you press a button, your body is disintegrated and then reintegrated back in some other teleportation chamber on Mars. Neat, isn't it? But now imagine that the teleportation system has some failure during the process (Windows crashes) and as a result you reintegrate simultaneously on Mars and on Earth. Both you's are perfectly conscious and they both have the feeling of being you (they have your body, your memories, etc.). Now, which is the real you? Both? Neither? Is it an impossible situation? Do we have some kind of soul that cannot be duplicated and therefore one of the two you's would be something like a zombie? I believe that both you's would be you, which is shocking, but there's nothing too problematic about it. We'd have to broaden our understanding of the self so as to allow for self duplication, but I personally think that's almost something to celebrate!

The real trouble begins when we add the following twist to the story (and as far as I've aware this is not Parfit's idea anymore, but mine). After the duplication accident the you that is still on Earth is informed about the unexpected outcome of the teleportation process and he thinks that's a real pain in the arse. "How can we sort this out?" he asks to the teleportation assistant. "Well, it's very simple. You are already on Mars. The only problem is that you're on Earth as well. The quickest way to solve that is for you to kill yourself. Any conventional method will do. We would dispose of your corpse free of charge. Alternatively you can go home, spend a nice weekend (we would provide some gift vouchers as compensation), and come back to us once the system has been repaired in order to be disintegrated hassle-free." What the hell do you do then?

I don't have a problem with the idea of being disintegrated and subsequently reintegrated. My conception of selfhood is not threatened in any way by that. If, however, the me-before-disintegration and the me-after-reintegration overlap in time, even if it's for a few seconds, the alarm bells go off. What difference does it make? In both cases (succession or overlapping of the two me's) the original me is disintegrated, killed, call it what you wish. Would it not be better to disintegrate the original me after the new one has been successfully reintegrated, so that I'm sure that I'm not going to disappear in the process because of any accidents? Apparently not. What if there was an overlap but neither me knew about it until the disintegration was completed? Would that make a difference?

The point is not to find the correct answers (they may not exist) but simply to have our understanding of the self "exposed" as inadequate. It doesn't seem very logical for the overlapping to make such a big difference or to be so threatening. That suggests that my intuitive understanding of the self is flawed or at least incomplete in some fundamental way. Is the absence of ego the answer to this puzzle? It doesn't really feel like a solution to the problem (the bafflement is still there after anatta has been considered), and it does feel like throwing the baby out with the bath-water, for egolessness doesn't even attempt to answer the crucial question: what is the self?

Summarising, anatta isn't very convincing as a solution to the felt problem posed by the thought experiment we're looking at, but the latter provides a striking and effective argument to challenge our understanding of the self, which is as much as anatta could aspire to. Other challenges coming up soon.