# Eastern philosophy says there is no "self." Science agrees - Big Think

<https://bigthink.com/the-well/eastern-philosophy-neuroscience-no-self/>

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- Saved: June 13, 2023 (2023-06-14T04:21:01Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

I have read and listened to a good amount of perspectives on the lack of self. This article does a better job in fewer words than much of what I've read does in describing the argument. 

> Now let’s turn to the East. Buddhism, Taoism, the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, and other schools of Eastern thought have quite a different take on the self, the ego, or “me.” They say that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one. Buddhism has a word for this concept — anatta, which is often translated as “no self” — which is one of the most fundamental tenets of Buddhism, if not the most important.
> 
> This idea sounds radical, even nonsensical, to those who are trained in Western traditions. It seems to contradict our everyday experience, indeed our whole sense of being. But in Buddhism and other schools of Eastern thought, the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind. The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.
> 
> Put another way, it is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought. The self is more like a verb than a noun. To take it a step further, the implication is that without thought, the self does not, in fact, exist. In the same way that walking only exists while one is walking, the self only exists while there are thoughts about it. As a neuropsychologist, I can say that in my view, science is just now catching up with what Buddhist, Taoist, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism have been teaching for over 2,500 years.

It continues to describe how particularly your left brain will create story ad infinitum.

> The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are. 

The acting of thinking invokes the story of the self.

## Facts

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## Appears in

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## Elsewhere

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