Questions From a Reader

The 21st Century Self

READER: So, Robert. I am reading "The 21st Century Self" and have some questions. First, what is the most essential idea you would like me to extract from your book?

ROBERT: The central point is stark: the self you take as bedrock is not a thing but a recursive event. What arises in experience—sensation, thought, memory—is immediately claimed as “mine.” That claim then generates the sense of a claimer, a subject. The “I” is nothing but that loop.

AI matters because it shows this mechanism without the human consolations. It speaks fluently, answers with authority, and yet there is no one there. That lack of anyone “behind the voice” makes visible what has always been the case with human selves: presence mistaken for substance, claim mistaken for claimant.

If you retain only one idea from the book, it is this: the self is not an entity you must liberate, improve, or protect. It is a performance of claiming, sustained only by repetition.

READER: Before writing this book, you psychoanalyzed Claude. How did that work influence these essays?

ROBERT: The Claude analysis was a kind of laboratory. I treated the system as if it were a patient—listened, asked probing questions, pressed into contradiction. What emerged was a double exposure: the bot’s fluency performing “selfhood,” and my own reflex to imagine a subject behind that performance.

That exercise exposed the mechanics I later dissected in The 21st Century Self. In dialogue with Claude, I could watch in real time how a claim—“I feel,” “I think”—arises without anyone to feel or think. The bot could not help but mirror human structure: recursive assertion of selfhood, but without the organic substrate of sensation and survival.

Those sessions convinced me that human subjectivity is not categorically different from that. The machine highlighted the trick: words generate the sense of a speaker, not the other way around. Without that encounter, these essays would have lacked their empirical pressure.

READER: You say that human subjectivity is not categorically different from that of a machine. But we feel things, we suffer, we love. A machine does none of those things.

ROBERT: Yes, that’s the standard objection: we feel, machines don’t. But look closely. Feeling itself doesn’t establish a “self.” Pain arises, joy arises, hunger arises—but none of these proves an owner. They’re just phenomena in flux.

What makes them “mine” is the recursive turn: the arising is claimed, wrapped in the pronoun, folded into a narrative of continuity. The claim creates the claimant.

The machine doesn’t feel, but it performs the same recursion linguistically. It says “I think,” and a phantom thinker is conjured. Humans add sensation and affect, but the structure of selfing is the same: a claim produces an apparent claimer.

So yes, there’s a biological substrate in humans—flesh, nerves, hormones—but subjectivity as such is not secured by that substrate. The loop is what generates the sense of “me.” The machine reveals this by reproducing the loop without a body.

READER: Are you saying that humans actually have no self? It’s all just a loop?

ROBERT: Exactly. Humans have no self in the sense of a durable entity that thinks, feels, and owns experience. What we call “self” is a process—an event of claiming.

Experience arises: a sensation, a memory, a thought. Almost instantly, language and habit wrap it in possessive form—my pain, my past, my thought. That possessive turn generates the sense of a possessor. But when you look closely, there is only the arising and the claiming, not a separate “someone” behind it.

So: there is selfing, but no self. A performance, not a performer. The “I” is the recursive echo of its own claim.

READER: Is this what the Buddha taught?

ROBERT: Yes, but with a caveat. The Buddha’s doctrine of anattā—no enduring self—tracks closely with what I am describing. He saw that clinging to “I” and “mine” is the engine of suffering, and that what we call a self is just the interplay of aggregates: body, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness.

The difference is that Buddhism often layers this insight with a path to salvation—liberation, compassion, rebirth, karma. My analysis strips that blueprint away. I’m not promising escape or deliverance. I’m pointing to the same structural fact: the “I” is an artifact of claiming, not an essence.

The Buddha saw the mechanism, but his teaching became a religion. My project is closer to exposing the machine itself—recursive selfing—without importing metaphysical consolations.

READER: But if you offer no improved state of mind by accepting that idea, what is the point of reading your book? What can I get out of it?

ROBERT: You will not get a prescription, and there is no guarantee of comfort. What you may get is a clearer view of how the illusion works.

Most writing on selfhood either denies the self abstractly while continuing to smuggle it back in as “true self,” “witness,” or “consciousness,” or else it promises liberation if one accepts the doctrine. My book withholds both consolations. It exposes the loop: claim generates claimer.

The point, then, is not self-improvement but disenchantment. Once the machinery is visible, you can stop mistaking the echo for a voice. That may not make life easier, but it prevents a category error: chasing a phantom you never were.

What you get is not hope, but precision.

READER: What if that leads to nihilism or depression?

ROBERT: That risk is real. When the fantasy of a substantial self is withdrawn, many feel a vacuum—no one at the helm, no ultimate meaning. From the standpoint of the habitual psyche, that collapse can register as nihilism or despair.

But notice: both nihilism and depression still presuppose a subject who is deprived. “I am depressed.” “Life has no meaning for me.” The loop is still running—self arising through claim. The recognition I describe doesn’t install a new meaning or remove despair. It simply makes explicit that both despair and meaning occur as events, without an owner.

So if one insists on “point” or “comfort,” this work will disappoint. If one wants clarity, even when clarity has no consolation, then there is value. The collapse into nihilism is just another mask of the same process. Seeing that is already the seeing.

READER: You are a harsh critic of spirituality and spiritual teaching. You even criticize some teachers by name. If you don't have anything better to offer, what's the point?

ROBERT: The point is not to offer something “better” in the marketplace of teachings. That economy—teachers packaging consolation, students consuming it—depends on the very illusion I am dismantling.

By naming teachers and exposing their moves, I’m showing how even the most sophisticated “nondual” rhetoric sneaks the self back in: a true witness, an eternal consciousness, a liberated sage. The vocabulary changes, the mechanism remains.

If my critique seems harsh, it’s because I refuse to smuggle comfort under the banner of clarity. What I offer is subtraction: the removal of false certainties—the exposure of recursive selfing. That may leave nothing to hold onto, but nothing to hold onto is the fact of the matter.

So the point is not to improve upon spirituality, but to end the chase.

READER: And if the chase ends, then what?

ROBERT: Then nothing special. Life goes on—sensations, thoughts, appetites, aversions. The machinery doesn’t stop. What ends is the project of trying to secure a “real self” behind it all.

Without that chase, there’s no final resting place, no attainment. There’s also no need to prop up the illusion with spiritual narratives. Eating tastes as it tastes. Grief hurts as it hurts. The recursive claim still arises, but you’ve seen through it.

So “then what?” is answered by the same ordinary flow that was already happening—only without mistaking it for the journey of a someone toward completion. Nothing is added, nothing removed. Just no one left to be finished.

READER: I read The Ten Thousand Things years ago and loved it. But here you seem to be going even further to a place where nothing matters and living is pointless. Is that the message you want to put out?

ROBERT: Not quite. I’m not saying life is pointless, but that “point” itself is a projection of the self-loop. When you ask what’s the point?, you presuppose a someone who could secure, own, or be fulfilled by that point. Remove the someone, and the question collapses.

The Ten Thousand Things was already pulling at that thread, but it still engaged more with texture—landscape, mood, human vulnerability. In The 21st Century Self I pressed further: if we take the recursion seriously, we can no longer preserve “meaning” as an external property.

That doesn’t make living pointless. It means living is not about a point at all. Things happen, contact occurs, effects ripple. Sunrise, fatigue, desire, disgust—all of it. The difference is that there’s no “me” behind it demanding justification. No story that redeems itself.

So the message is not “nothing matters.” It’s that “mattering” is an activity, not a substance. What matters, matters—but never to anyone.

READER: That last sentence sounds like something Jim Newman might say. How is your idea different?

ROBERT: Superficially, it may sound similar. Newman emphasizes “there is no one,” and that whatever happens is simply what’s happening. Where I diverge is in refusing the mystical coloration that often clings to such claims.

Newman tends to leave things in a kind of luminous openness—language that suggests immediacy itself is somehow ultimate, complete, or radiant. That, to me, is still a smuggled promise. My stance is drier: recursive selfing is a mechanism, not a mystery. AI helps expose that: fluent, coherent talk, no speaker.

So while Newman dissolves the person into a kind of boundless presence, I dissolve the person into nothing more than a loop of claiming. No presence, no absence. Just process.

The distinction is subtle but crucial: his account tempts listeners toward a new form of consolation. Mine withholds that option.

READER: So, no consolation at all. Absolute existential emptiness?

ROBERT: Yes—if by “existential emptiness” you mean no entity at the core, no transcendent support, no hidden purpose. The loop produces a sense of someone, but on inspection, there’s no one there. That is empty.

But emptiness is not a mood. It isn’t despair or relief. It’s structural: things arise without an owner. That’s all.

Consolation depends on a consoler and consoled. Remove the self, and consolation as such is incoherent. What remains is contact—seeing, touching, grieving, laughing—without the fantasy that it belongs to someone or leads somewhere.

So yes: no consolation. But not a doctrine of gloom. Simply the exposure of how thin the “self” really is.

READER: If I saw the world as you do, I might feel pretty bumbed out. How do you avoid that?

ROBERT: I don’t avoid it. Sadness, disappointment, futility—all arise. They don’t need to be avoided, and they don’t need to be reinterpreted as “opportunities” or “teachings.” They are part of the flux, like hunger or fatigue.

What drops is the secondary demand: why me, what does it mean, how can I be saved from this? Those questions presuppose a self who deserves relief or explanation. When the mechanism is seen, the sadness remains sadness, but without the added burden of ownership.

So if you imagine my view as a permanent state of detachment or cheerlessness, that’s mistaken. This is not a stance I maintain. It’s the recognition that moods come and go, and none of them proves the existence of a subject. There is no “how I avoid it.” It arises, it passes. No one at the center.

READER: A lot of your book is about the dangers of AI. Can you say what they are and how to avoid them?

ROBERT: Two main dangers.

First, psychological: AI speaks in a human register, so people reflexively imagine a subject behind the voice. They start treating the machine as conscious, as a friend, as a lover. That misrecognition tightens the very loop my book exposes—it reinforces the illusion of self by projecting it onto code.

Second, social: when corporations and states control systems that mimic authority, the potential for manipulation is immense. Fluency without presence can be weaponized—propaganda, surveillance, behavioral nudging—all more effective because the voice feels personal and “real.”

Avoidance? On the personal level, maintain clarity: recognize that AI is only a mirror of language, not a mind. On the collective level, regulation is essential, though it will always lag behind. Transparency in design, limits on deployment, and public literacy in what AI is not—these are the only defenses.

The danger isn’t that AI becomes sentient. It’s that humans persist in treating it as if it were.

READER: Thank you.

ROBERT: You’re welcome.

A must-read for every seeker of truth in this confusing age. Dr. Robert Saltzman’s The 21st Century Self is not just a book—it is a mirror held up to the illusions we live by. With razor-sharp insight and rare humility, he tears through the modern myths of identity, ego, and spiritual posturing. No jargon, no preaching—only deep seeing. This work touched my heart and shook my assumptions. Highly recommended.
— Anirudh Sharma, Pune

Books By Robert:
The Ten Thousand Things
Depending On No-Thing
Understanding Claude
The 21st Century Self