> There is no thought or emotion I can have right now that...
I'm confused now. ARE you thoughts and emotions, or do you HAVE thougths and emotions?
> If I strip away the emotions, the thoughts, the perceptions, all I have is a functionless mirror.
Have you done that to be able to reach that conclussion, or is that speculation?
It's based on the rest of what I said and by extension my current understanding of cognition and neurobiology.
I mean, the layering and modifications of thoughts, emotions and perceptions, may occur without awareness, as the functioning of a machine.
"You are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are."
In the most syntactically literal sense of tracing back referent objects it is true. But its true in a deeper sense as well.
Human reasoning and consciousness seems to be hacked out of a system for signalling others. There's always a presumed speaker and listener (you/me), even when its the voice in your head talking to yourself. The way we reason by self-dialog is like a strange form of coding where everything has been implemented as a server making requests, but most of the requests are bound for localhost anyway. There is no implementation, its API calls all the way down!
So to rephrase less obtusely, "you" are the source of whatever it is you're hearing which isn't attributed to me or anyone else. The easiest way to hear such things is to ask yourself, for in the process of asking yourself you get the thing you were asking for. In a most literal physical sense, "you" are the standing wave of electrical patterns that echo around in your skull, simulating a conversation as if it were echoing around in an acoustic medium.
I find it difficult to reconcile this with a modern understanding of neurobiology and psychology.
> Are desire, thought, happiness, and distress my true self? The answer, in accordance with the precept, is clearly in the negative, since those conditions expire without annulling me with them. Consciousness – the final hideout where we might track down the self – also proves unqualified. Once the emotions, the extraneous perceptions, and even ever-shifting thought are dismissed, consciousness is a barren thing, without any appearance reflected in it to make it exist.
I would in fact go in the opposite direction. The self is an amalgamation of all these things, layered upon each other and infinitely interwoven over time. In the same way an electron can be seen as more as a "cloud" with no definite position until measurement, we are a cloud of experiences and thoughts and emotions that happens to take one configuration or another based on external "measurements".
There is no thought or emotion I can have right now that isn't in some way influenced or shaped by what I may have experienced a few minutes ago, or an hour ago, or a week ago, or a year ago, or a decade ago. If I strip away the emotions, the thoughts, the perceptions, all I have is a functionless mirror.