Footnote np54

np54. Neitzsche, as quoted by Paul Edwards in Immortality (Prometheus 1997):

Behind the doing, acting, becoming, there is no agent, no "being." The "doer" has simply been added to the deed by the imagination -- the doing is everything. [Only the] snare of language ... blinds us to this fact.

Well, does not that make the imagination an agent?

Similarly, Russell, in spite of all his labors, was in the end a bundle theorist. Edwards cites Russell's My Philosophical Development (Allen and Unwin 1959), urging that "Russell always thought of the spiritual substance as well as its material counterpart as 'grammatical illusions'." Further, said Russell,

The subject appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation requires it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar.

Edwards points out that Nietzsche and Russell sound very similar to the fifth-century Buddhist scholastic Buddha Ghosa, who opined:

For there is suffering, but none who suffer.
Doing exists although there is no doer.
Extinction is but no extinguished person.
Although there is a path, there is no goer.

(I don't know the circumstances of the translation of those words from Pali.)

The "bundle" issue, I suggest, in part arises from the nature of perception as a negative feedback system, a subject I discuss in my paper

Toward a signal model of perception
https://footnotestoplato1.blogspot.com/2020/05/toward-signal-model-of-perception_88.html

I do not in that paper attempt to address many of the philosophical issues raised by it.

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For other footnoted information on Edwards, please see:

Footnote dh97
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-dh97.html
Footnote ds45
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-ds45.html
Footnote sf51
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-sf51.html
Footnote gk63
https://thetaman.blogspot.com/2020/05/footnote-gk63.html

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