THE SELF AND THE NON-SELF: Entity, Relation, or Relational Ground?

Abstract

Contemporary cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence research share a common unresolved tension: the nature of the self and its relation to experience remains deeply contested. Cognitive science has largely moved away from substance theories of the self, yet it lacks a unified structural account of what replaces them. Philosophy oscillates between eliminativist positions that deny the self entirely and representationalist positions that reify it. Buddhist contemplative traditions have long proposed that the self is not a thing but a process, yet this insight has rarely been formalized in terms accessible to cognitive science or AI research. The result is a fragmented landscape in which the self is alternately dissolved, denied, or taken for granted, with little agreement on what the structure of experience actually requires. This paper addresses that gap. We propose the Triadic Non-Self Model (TNSM), a relational account of experience that reconceptualizes the Buddhist doctrine of non-self (Anatta) as the absence of independently existing poles within a triadic structure. Rather than treating the self as a substance or dismissing it as mere illusion, the model argues that all experience arises through a fundamental triadic differentiation of awareness into subject (S), object (O), and relation (P). These three poles are not independent entities but co-arising aspects of a single unified event. Ignorance (Avidyā) emerges when this differentiation is misrecognized as ontological separation, leading to the reification of the poles as independent substances. Insight consists not in eliminating differentiation but in recognizing it as grounded articulation within awareness. The paper develops a formal account of this triadic structure and demonstrates its invariance across experiential modalities—perception, cognition, feeling, action, and meta-awareness—within the M⁵ framework. It further introduces the concept of mutual immanence, wherein subject and object are understood as co-arising and internally related within a single experiential field. The model bridges key insights from Buddhist philosophy, non-dual Advaita traditions, and phenomenology, and extends them into cognitive science and artificial intelligence, where it identifies a structural criterion that current AI architectures do not satisfy.