Who am I?
Simple. I am Chirag Shetty.
That’s just your name. If I gave you a different name, would you become a different person?
No. I’d still be me. My body and my mind.
What if you had an accident and lost all bodily function and brain activity? Would you still be you?
I think so.
Let me ask it another way. If I wanted to replicate you as closely as possible, what would I need to replicate?
Interesting. Maybe my thoughts and actions.
If a robot were operated by your brain, would you consider it to be you?
Yes, I think so. If it did exactly what I would do in a given situation.
So I’d need to replicate your brain and thoughts, attach them to a humanoid robot that looks like you, and call it a day?
Perfect.
But can you control your thoughts?
Yes, I can.
As you read this sentence, is there a voice in your head saying the words?
Yes.
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Can you predict your next thought before you think it?
Umm… that makes me uncomfortable.
Let’s try something else. Stop reading this sentence in your head.
Did you stop?
STOP READING RIGHT NOW!
No? You can’t?
What’s going on? What does this mean?
Is free will a myth? Spinoza would say we feel free because we know what we want, but not the causes that made us want it. Maybe we don’t choose which thought appears next, but that doesn’t mean our choices are meaningless. It may mean freedom has less to do with being uncaused and more to do with understanding what moves us.
That process carries the imprint of our experiences, our bodies, and thousands of years of evolution. It helps us make sense of the world and decide what to do, often before we can explain why we thought or acted that way.
We like to think we’re separate from nature because we’re conscious. But what is the difference between us and an animal acting on instinct? Maybe our instincts pass through a more complicated process before becoming actions. But how much control do we really have over that process?
Are we separate from nature?
These questions have been explored in different ways by Advaita Vedānta and Spinoza.
In Advaita Vedānta, the self we usually think of as “me” is not the deepest self. Our thoughts, feelings, memories, and body keep changing. Advaita asks us to look at the awareness through which we experience those changes. It teaches that our deepest self, ātman, is not separate from Brahman, ultimate reality.
That doesn’t quite mean that every thought in our head is the thought of the universe. Advaita distinguishes the changing mind from the awareness through which the mind is known. The question becomes less “Am I my thoughts?” and more “What is the awareness in which these thoughts appear?”
In Spinoza’s philosophy, there is one underlying substance, which he calls God, or Nature. Everything that exists, including us, is part of this reality. Our minds and bodies are not two separate things, with one controlling the other. They are two ways of understanding the same individual. Our thoughts, like our bodies, belong to nature and are shaped by causes.
There’s a similarity between the two: neither treats the everyday, individual self as completely independent from a deeper reality. But they don’t say exactly the same thing. Advaita focuses on the identity of ātman and Brahman, and on awareness as fundamental. Spinoza focuses on one substance, God or Nature, expressed in different ways, including thought and physical extension. Advaita’s ultimate reality is not simply the physical universe, and Spinoza’s God is not a creator standing outside nature.
Maybe our thoughts are not separate from nature. Maybe they are one of the ways nature moves through us.
And if we experience nature, could that be nature experiencing itself? Wouldn’t you say?
