So, the illusoriness of the self doesn't cut against any of those obvious facts. So the sense of self that is illusory, and again, we might want to talk about self in other modes because there's just a lot of interest there psychologically and ultimately scientifically. The thing that doesn't exist, it certainly doesn't exist as it seems, and I would want to argue that it actually is just a proper illusion, is the sense that there is a subject interior to experience, in addition to experience.

So most people feel like they're having an experience of the world, and they're having an experience of their bodies in the world. And in addition to that, they feel that they are a subject internal to the body, and very likely in the head. Most people feel like they're behind their face as a kind of locus of awareness and thought and intention, and it's almost like you're a passenger inside your body.

Most people don't feel identical to their bodies, and they can imagine, and this is sort of the origin, the psychological origin, the folk psychological origin of a sense that there might be a soul that could survive the death of the body. Most people are what my friend Paul Bloom calls common-sense dualists, right?

The default expectation seems to be that whatever the relationship between the mind and the body, there's some promise of separability there, right? And whenever you really push hard on the science side and say, "Well, no, the mind is really just what the brain is doing," that begins to feel more and more counterintuitive to people, and there still seems some residual mystery that, you know, at death, maybe something is going to lift off the brain and go elsewhere, right?

So there's this sense of dualism that many people have, and obviously that's supported by many religious beliefs. But this feeling, it's a very peculiar starting point. People feel that, you know, they don't feel identical to their experience, right? It's a matter of experience. They feel like they're on the edge of experience, somehow appropriating it from the side.

You're kind of on the edge of the world, and the world is out there. Your body is, in some sense, an object in the world, which, you know, it's different from the world. You know, the boundary of your skin is still meaningful. You can sort of loosely control your body.

I mean, you can't control it. You can control your gross, you know, and subtle, you know, voluntary motor movements, but you can't, you're not controlling everything your body is doing. You're not controlling your heartbeat and your, you know, your hormonal secretions and all of that. And so there's a lot that's going on that is in the dark for you.

And then you give someone an instruction to meditate, say, and you say, "Okay, let's examine all of this from the first person's side. Let's look for this thing you're calling I." And again, I is not identical to the body. People feel like their hands are out there, and if they're going to meditate, they're going to close their eyes, very likely, and now they're going to pay attention to something.

They're going to pay attention to the breath or to sounds. And it's from the point of view of being a locus of attention that is now aiming attention strategically at an object like the breath, that there's this dualism that is set up. And ultimately, the ultimate promise of meditation, I mean, there are really two levels at which you could be interested in meditation.

One is, you know, very straightforward and remedial and non-paradoxical and very well subscribed and it's the usual set of claims about all the benefits you're going to get from meditation, right? So you're going to lower your stress and you're going to increase your focus and you're going to, you know, stave off cortical thinning and there's all kinds of good things that science is saying meditation will give you.

And none of that entails really drilling down on this paradoxical claim that the self is an illusion or anything else of that sort. But from my point of view, the real purpose of meditation and its real promise is not in this long list of benefits. And, you know, I'm not discounting any of those, though, you know, the science for many of them is quite provisional.

It's in this deeper claim that if you look for this thing you're calling I, if you look for the sense that there's a thinker in addition to the mirror rising of the next thought, say, you won't find that thing. And you can, what's more, you can not find it in a way that's conclusive and that matters, right?

And it has a, there's a host of benefits that follow from that discovery, which are quite a bit deeper and more interesting than engaging meditation on the side of its benefits, you know, de-stressing, increasing focus and all the rest.