Mach's Ego Inspecting itself.

Indeed, why should tactile sensations be privileged, as opposed to visual ones? . . . .”The object that we perceive consist merely of bundles of sense-data linked together in regular ways. There exists no further object independent of our sensations -- no ‘Thing-in-itself’ . . . We thus know only appearances, never a Thing-in-Itself -- just the world of our own sensations. Therefore, we can never know whether there exists a Thing-in-Itself -- just the world of our own sensations. Therefore, we can never know whether there exists a Thing-in-Itself. Consequently, it makes no sense to talk about such notions.”

And this leads us to the next unsettling thought: I do not exist any more than any other thing does: “Among the relatively long-lasting patterns of memories, moods, feelings, etc., there is one pattern that is attached to a special body, and that pattern called ‘I’, or Ego….Yet this Ego is just a transient as are all other things.”

This was a topic that Mach would take up again and again. A striking experience had once left an indelible mark on him: “One bright summer’s day in the open air, the world with my Ego in it suddenly appeared to me as nothing but one tightly bundled mass of sensations, just bundled together more tightly in the Ego”

Had Mach been a mystic, he would have taken this as a flash of enlightenment. However, being a hardnosed physicist, he merely drew an ironic sketch back in his study, calling it “The Ego Inspecting Itself.” The ego consists of sensations. Behind them, there lurks -- well, nothing. Nothing at all. And nothing more remains to be said about it: “ ‘I experience green’ means that the element of greenness occurs within a certain pattern of other elements (sensations, memories). When I can no longer experience green -- when I die -- then these elements will no longer occur in their usual familiar groupings. That is the whole story. . . No Ego will remain. The Ego cannot be saved.” ~ Page 21

The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was known primarily for his scientific advances, but he produced some important philosophical writings in the early 1880s. He made substantial contributions to the philosophy of science, and he was an early proponent of logical positivism. For Mach, the primary aim of science was to predict and describe, and only secondarily to explain. Epistemologically he was strongly empiricist.

Mach developed a neutral monist philosophy in which the primary substance of existence was neither mind nor matter but rather “sensations.” That led him rather suddenly to a panpsychist conception of reality. “In adolescence,” Hamilton recounts, “Mach was a Kantian, but then he reacted against the thing-in-itself, experiencing a panpsychic epiphany in which ‘the world with ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensation.” It was around this time, in 1863, that Mach wrote the following:

Let’s confess it straight away! We cannot reasonably discover any external side to atoms, so if we are to think anything at all, we must attribute an internal side to them, an inwardness analogous to our own souls. In fact, how could a soul originate as a combination of atoms in an organism, if its germ were not already contained in the atom? ~ Page 155