Every morning, you wake up with the unshakeable conviction that you are you—a distinct, autonomous entity navigating a world of other separate beings. This feeling is so immediate, so visceral, that questioning it seems absurd. Yet what if this most basic intuition about your existence is fundamentally mistaken? What if the sense of being a separate “I” is less like discovering a truth and more like running buggy code that’s been executing for so long we’ve forgotten it’s just software?
Modern neuroscience has begun revealing the constructed nature of selfhood. Studies of the Default Mode Network—the brain’s “self-referential” circuitry—show that what we experience as a unified self is actually a patchwork of neural processes generating a compelling narrative. Split-brain patients, whose corpus callosum has been severed, demonstrate that consciousness can literally be divided, with each hemisphere generating its own sense of agency. The “self” that feels so solid turns out to be more like a user interface: useful for navigation, but not the underlying reality.
Here’s what makes this particularly fascinating: two radically different philosophical traditions—separated by continents, millennia, and methodologies—arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about this illusion. In 17th-century Amsterdam, Baruch Spinoza, wielding pure geometric reasoning, concluded that individual minds are merely temporary modifications of one infinite substance. Two thousand years earlier, the Buddha, through contemplative investigation, taught that the self (ātman) we cling to simply doesn’t exist as we imagine it.
This article explores how Spinoza’s metaphysical substance monism and Buddhism’s anātman doctrine represent convergent philosophical solutions to the same fundamental problem: our misidentification with a separate, autonomous self. Both frameworks systematically deconstruct the ego while offering paths to liberation through recognizing our fundamental interconnection with all existence.
For a tech-savvy audience, these aren’t merely abstract philosophical curiosities. Understanding these frameworks has profound implications for how we approach artificial intelligence and consciousness, design distributed systems, conceptualize digital identity, and perhaps most importantly, address the mental health crisis of our hyperconnected yet deeply fragmented age. As we’ll see, ancient wisdom and rationalist philosophy converge on insights that systems theory, network science, and cognitive neuroscience are only now beginning to formalize.
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, written in geometric form with definitions, axioms, and propositions, builds one of philosophy’s most audacious metaphysical systems. At its foundation lies a deceptively simple definition: substance is “that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” In other words, substance doesn’t depend on anything else for its existence or explanation—it’s ontologically and conceptually self-sufficient.
From this definition, Spinoza derives a shocking conclusion: there can be only one substance, and that substance is infinite. His reasoning is elegant. If there were two substances, they would need to differ in some way. But substances, by definition, have no external causes or dependencies. Therefore, nothing could differentiate them except their own nature. Yet if they differed in nature, they would limit each other—but an unlimited substance cannot be limited. The logical conclusion: only one substance exists.
Spinoza calls this substance “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura)—a formulation that got him excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community and made him one of the most controversial thinkers of his era. But Spinoza’s God isn’t the personal deity of Abrahamic tradition. It’s the totality of existence itself, the infinite system from which everything emerges.
Think of it this way: if reality were a computational system, substance would be the underlying substrate—not the hardware exactly, but the fundamental layer that makes computation possible. Everything we experience—thoughts, bodies, galaxies, emotions—are processes running on this substrate. They’re not separate programs installed on different machines; they’re all threads executing within a single, infinite system.
Spinoza’s system operates on three levels: substance, attributes, and modes. We’ve covered substance. Now, attributes are the infinite ways this one substance expresses itself. Spinoza argues that substance has infinite attributes, though finite beings like us can only perceive two: thought (mind, consciousness, ideas) and extension (physical space, matter, bodies).
These aren’t separate substances—that would violate substance monism. Rather, they’re like different APIs for accessing the same underlying reality. The mental and physical aren’t two different things interacting (Descartes’ problematic dualism); they’re the same thing viewed through different lenses.
Modes are where things get personal—literally. Modes are finite modifications of substance, temporary configurations within the infinite. Your individual mind is a mode of the attribute of thought. Your body is a mode of the attribute of extension. Crucially, they’re not two separate things that somehow interact; they’re the same mode expressed in two different attributes simultaneously. When you decide to raise your arm (mental) and your arm rises (physical), these aren’t two events causally connected. They’re one event in the system, expressed in parallel through different attributes—what Spinoza calls “psychophysical parallelism.”
Imagine a distributed system where data is replicated across multiple databases with different schemas. A single transaction updates all replicas simultaneously, but each database represents that update according to its own structure. The mental and physical are like that: parallel expressions of the same underlying modification in substance.
Here’s the crucial point: modes are entirely dependent on substance. They don’t exist “in themselves”—they exist in substance and are conceived through substance. Your mind and body are temporary patterns, like waves on an ocean. The wave appears distinct, has a particular shape and trajectory, but it’s never separate from the water. It’s the ocean, temporarily configured in a particular way.
So why do we feel like independent beings? Spinoza’s answer involves his theory of knowledge. We experience reality from a necessarily limited, first-person perspective—what he calls “inadequate ideas.” We perceive effects without understanding their complete causes. We see our thoughts arising and assume they originate from an autonomous self, not recognizing that each thought is determined by an infinite chain of prior causes stretching back through the entire system.
Spinoza distinguishes three kinds of knowledge:
Most of us operate at the first level. We experience ourselves as separate agents making free choices. But this is epistemological limitation, not ontological truth. It’s like a process running on a computer thinking it’s autonomous because it can’t see the kernel scheduler, the power supply, or the vast network of dependencies that enable its execution.
Spinoza’s system is rigorously deterministic. Every mode is determined by prior modes in an infinite causal chain. There’s no “free will” in the conventional sense—no ability to have done otherwise given the exact prior state of the universe. This isn’t fatalism (which implies external fate imposing itself on passive beings), but necessitarianism: everything follows necessarily from the nature of substance itself. We are free only insofar as we understand and act from our own nature rather than being passively affected by external causes we don’t comprehend.
One of Spinoza’s most psychologically astute concepts is conatus—the striving of each thing to persist in its own being. Every mode, by its nature, endeavors to continue existing. This is the foundation of desire, motivation, and self-preservation.
But here’s the paradox: conatus operates without requiring a substantial self. The wave strives to maintain its form even though it’s not separate from the ocean. Your body’s immune system fights pathogens, your mind seeks pleasure and avoids pain, your ego defends itself—all of this is conatus, the system maintaining its temporary configuration. But there’s no independent “you” doing the maintaining. It’s the universe maintaining itself through the particular pattern that you are.
This is crucial for understanding Spinoza’s ethics. You don’t need a separate self to explain self-interested behavior. The system is self-organizing, self-preserving, without a central controller. It’s distributed processing all the way down—what complexity theorists would call “emergent order without a commander.”
Buddhism takes a radically different methodological approach from Spinoza—not geometric deduction but empirical investigation through meditation—yet arrives at strikingly similar conclusions. The Buddha taught that all conditioned phenomena share three characteristics, called the tilakkhana or three marks of existence:
These three are interdependent. Impermanence makes the existence of a permanent self impossible. The absence of a stable self, combined with our instinctive clinging to one, generates suffering. Understanding these marks experientially—not just intellectually—is the foundation of Buddhist liberation.
The Buddha’s teaching on anātman was revolutionary in his context. The Brahmanical tradition of his time posited ātman—an eternal, unchanging soul or self that transmigrates through reincarnation and is ultimately identical with Brahman (universal consciousness). The Buddha systematically rejected this, arguing that careful investigation reveals no such entity. This wasn’t mere contrarianism; it was based on direct observation of experience.
Buddhism’s primary analytical tool for deconstructing the self is the five aggregates (skandhas in Sanskrit, khandhas in Pali). According to Buddhist psychology, what we call a “person” is actually five categories of constantly changing processes:
Rūpa (form/matter): The physical body and material elements. This includes the four classical elements (earth, water, fire, air) and their derivatives—essentially, the material substrate of existence. In modern terms, this encompasses all physical phenomena, from subatomic particles to biological organisms.
Vedanā (feeling/sensation): The affective tone of experience—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Every moment of consciousness has a feeling tone, though we’re rarely explicitly aware of it. This isn’t emotion (which belongs to the fourth aggregate) but the raw hedonic quality that colors all experience.
Saṃjñā (perception/recognition): The cognitive function that recognizes and interprets sensory data. This is pattern-matching, labeling, conceptual overlay on raw sensation. It’s what allows you to recognize this as “text,” that as “coffee cup,” and categorize experience into meaningful units.
Saṃskāra (mental formations/volitions): This is the most complex aggregate, including intentions, habits, dispositions, karmic tendencies, and all the mental factors that shape and condition experience. Think of it as the configuration files and state variables that determine how the system responds to inputs.
Vijñāna (consciousness/awareness): The basic awareness at each sense door (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind). This isn’t a unified consciousness but six types of consciousness corresponding to six sense bases. Visual consciousness is distinct from auditory consciousness, which is distinct from mental consciousness.
Here’s the crucial insight: none of these aggregates is the self, and neither is their combination. Each aggregate is impermanent, constantly arising and passing away. Each is conditioned by causes and conditions—none exists independently. And each is ultimately unsatisfactory as a basis for lasting happiness because it’s unstable and beyond our ultimate control.
For a tech audience, think of the aggregates as microservices in a distributed system. There’s no monolithic “self” service orchestrating everything. Instead, you have:
These services communicate and coordinate through message passing (dependent origination), creating the emergent behavior we call “a person,” but there’s no CEO microservice, no central controller. It’s a self-organizing system with no self—which is precisely the point.
The Buddha’s teaching methodology was empirical and experiential. He instructed his students to investigate their own experience directly. In a famous dialogue with his attendant Ananda, the Buddha asks him to examine each aggregate and determine if any of them is the self. Is the body the self? No—it changes, decays, can be injured, gets sick. We don’t have complete control over it. Is feeling the self? No—feelings arise and pass involuntarily; we can’t simply decide to feel happy and make it so. Is perception, mental formation, or consciousness the self? Each examination reveals the same thing: these processes arise due to conditions, change constantly, and aren’t under our ultimate control.
The Milinda Pañha (Questions of King Milinda) contains one of Buddhism’s most famous analogies. A Greek king asks the Buddhist monk Nagasena about the self. Nagasena asks about the king’s chariot: Is the axle the chariot? The wheels? The frame? The reins? The king says no to each. Is the collection of parts the chariot? Is there a chariot apart from the parts? The king realizes that “chariot” is a conventional designation for a functional arrangement of parts. There’s no chariot-essence beyond the parts in relationship.
Similarly, “self” is a convenient label for the five aggregates functioning together. It’s useful for communication and navigation (“I’m going to the store”), but it doesn’t refer to an independently existing entity. The self is a process, not a thing—a verb masquerading as a noun.
This connects to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda): all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions. Nothing exists independently or self-sufficiently. Your consciousness right now depends on your body, which depends on food, which depends on agriculture, which depends on soil, rain, sun, and ultimately the entire web of existence. Pull any thread and the whole tapestry is involved. This is Buddhism’s version of radical interconnection—what systems theorists call “holism” and what ecologists call “interdependence.”
It’s crucial to clarify what Buddhist no-self doesn’t mean, as it’s frequently misunderstood:
It’s not nihilism. Buddhism doesn’t deny that you exist in a conventional sense. You’re reading this article. There’s experience happening. Consequences matter. The point is that the mode of existence isn’t what we intuitively assume—there’s no permanent, independent, unchanging self-entity behind the flow of experience.
It doesn’t deny consciousness or experience. Some critics think anātman means there’s no one experiencing anything, leading to absurdity. But Buddhism affirms consciousness; it just denies that consciousness requires a substantial self as its owner. There’s seeing, but no seer behind the seeing. There’s thinking, but no thinker apart from thoughts. Experience happens without an experiencer.
It operates on two levels of truth. Buddhism distinguishes between conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya) and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya). Conventionally, you exist—you have a name, a social security number, preferences, and a life story. Ultimately, investigation reveals no unchanging essence. Both levels are valid in their contexts. This isn’t contradiction; it’s recognizing that different frameworks are useful for different purposes.
It’s a middle way. The Buddha rejected both eternalism (belief in a permanent self that survives death) and annihilationism (belief that death is complete cessation with no continuity). There’s continuity without identity—a stream of causally connected processes, not a persistent entity traveling through time. It’s like a flame passed from one candle to another: continuity of process without identity of substance.
The striking parallel between Spinoza and Buddhism is their shared compositional analysis of the person. Both traditions decompose what we call the self into constituent elements and find no unified, independent entity.
Spinoza’s modes are temporary configurations of the one substance, determined by infinite causal chains. They appear distinct but are wholly dependent on substance and the totality of other modes. A human mind is a mode of thought; a human body is a mode of extension. Neither exists independently—they’re modifications of the infinite, like ripples on water.
Buddhist aggregates are temporarily co-arising processes, each conditioned by causes and empty of inherent existence. A person is a conventional designation for the five aggregates functioning together, but no aggregate or combination of aggregates constitutes a self. Each aggregate is itself composite and impermanent.
The parallel is profound: both systems explain why the illusion of separate selfhood is so convincing while simultaneously demonstrating why it’s illusory.