The Ego Trick summary

The idea that humans have an immortal soul exists in nearly every religion. The idea of the soul, eternal and separate from the mortal body, fascinated ancient philosophers too.

Persian philosopher Avicenna tackled the question of whether the soul is real by creating a thought experiment called the floating man. Avicenna asks us to imagine ourselves without our bodies, perceiving nothing of the world around us and floating in the air without feeling any sensations at all. In this state, would we still be conscious of the fact that we exist?

Once upon a time, there was a mysterious castle where eleven people lived together. This might sound like the scene for a fairytale, but it is also an apt analogue of the mind of a person with multiple personality disorder.

Multiple personality disorder highlights how subjective our experience of the world is. In 1990, Robert B. Oxnam was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (the scientific term for multiple personality disorder). It was as if there were different personalities using his mind at different times.

Have you ever been so consumed with a personal drama of your own that you completely missed an important event in the world around you? Just as it’s not enough to reflect on your own life to learn about the world, you also need to look outside of yourself to learn about the self.

Our sense of self is shaped by the way we’re perceived in society. This is why it’s vital that the peers of transgender people perceive them the way they perceive themselves – as belonging to whichever gender category they identify with. Society’s validation and acceptance are essential to a strong, stable sense of self.

As human beings, we’re terrified of our own mortality. Death marks the end of the complex identities that we feel belong to us. But what if these identities are ultimately illusions? The truth is that the ego is a trick of the mind.

In the eighteenth century, philosopher David Hume developed the idea that the ego is an unstable entity. Our minds, Hume argued, aren’t constant. Instead, they’re an amalgamation of passing ideas, thoughts and emotions.

Though the idea of the self as a construct is relatively new to Western philosophy, it’s been central to many other world religions for centuries. Ancient Buddhist wisdom teaches that the self is an illusion.

In the first blink, you were introduced to the concept of anatta, or “no-self.” Recent re-examinations of ancient Buddhist texts suggest that “non-self” might be a more accurate translation. The no-self interpretation implies that there is no self at all and that the whole universe is an illusion.

The idea that we actually have no hand in the decisions we make, whether we’re deciding between ice-cream flavors or career choices, is as relieving as it is devastating. If none of our “choices” matter, we can all stop worrying about making the right ones. On the other hand, this makes life itself seem pointless and empty.

Whether you believe in the empowering idea of human free will or not depends on which theory of the soul you find most compelling. If you accept the argument that the self is no more than a bundle of fragmentary thoughts and experiences, with your decisions and actions simply the mechanical outcome of the body and brain interacting with environmental changes in alignment with physical laws, you must also deny the existence of free will.

In many ways, science fiction authors don’t try to illustrate the future. Their real aim is to make sense of what’s going on in the present as changes leave our world looking less and less like the world of the past. Therefore, perhaps some science fiction exploring the present nature of the self is in order.

Today, the self is very different from what it once was. Society is moving away from the sense of a united, cohesive identity toward sets of multiple identities. Children’s lives used to be comprised of a series of relatively constant and uniform experiences, which led them to develop conventional personalities with a handful of specific cultural eccentricities.