Physical and Metaphysical Complications
For our first full theme, we wanted to look at a topic which touches both upon explicitly philosophical issues as well as deeply personal aspects of our being.
And what is more personal than the self?
So, if we want to understand ourselves in a more philosophical light, then a natural place to start is to ask what the self is. This question, as we are used to hearing, is a difficult one. Those who would tell you otherwise are merely dull to the profound difficulty that comes with trying to precisely define what is true about the experience of billions of people.
By the very nature of selfhood, the investigator who would pry into its being is limited to a test-case of only one; namely, themselves! Any given self cannot get beyond its own strictly limited being so as to take account of its perceptions "from outside itself". This has to do with the metaphysical nature of selfhood. To be a consciousness is to be conscious of something. But this comes with a perspective; a singular, subjective awareness that is constituted by the difference between a consciousness and all that is beyond itself. This means that any attempt at a truly objective description is doomed to subjectivity from the start. But I digress, this is a topic I wish to discuss more at a later date.
Of course, if you have no taste for metaphysical problems, then the sheer number of subjective selves in the world (7.6 billion and counting) will provide you with a perfectly sufficient physical problem regarding getting a precise definition. There are simply so many selves operating in the world right now that you'd never have a chance at capturing an exhaustive account of what selfhood is "like" for everyone. Even if you interviewed millions of people, you would still be stuck going off of their subjective self-report for you inquiry...not to mention the fact that you'd still be stuck trying to interpret these reports through your own sense of selfhood. These problems would bungle any effort at a universal, final, and absolute understanding of selfhood being reached solely through observation and mass testing.
For both of the above reasons, I must confess that I haven't a clue what a self really is. I do, however, think that I have some ideas based on some broad possibilities of self. This is the biggest reason I wanted to discuss the notion of selfhood over the next few months. My hope is that perhaps I'll be able to finally figure it out! Or, at least, I'll finally be able to narrow my options a bit.
But before I start pulling apart my understanding of selfhood, I think that there is an even more fundamental problem plaguing this topic which I must address. I need to defend the very concept that the self exists.
There are some who argue (either explicitly or implicitly) that the self simply does not exist. Some of them argue from a spiritual perspective, saying that the self is a misperception of our actual spiritual "oneness". I confess, I dismiss this option out of hand and see no need to address it further. Others argue in a more scientific, reductionist vein that the self is a leftover bit of pop-psychology...a "folk hypothesis" which has run its course and needs to be retired now. Instead of the "self" there is only the neural structure of a brain; instead of having thoughts, memories, or beliefs, there are only specific patterns of neurons firing in synchronicity with other neurons. Patricia Churchland comes to mind as someone who advocates this sort of startlingly reductionistic view of the self, whereby we would say that the very term 'self' points towards nothing.
As I said above, I suppose that before I explain my own views on selfhood, I had better explain why the assertion made by some that the self does not exist strikes me as so fundamentally mistaken. The answer is, in some ways, very simple: it is because often what we are discussing when we talk about the 'self' is not what they mean (or think that they mean) when they argue that such a thing does not exist.
Gestalt Entities and Basic Entities
I typically hate metaphorical examples, as I think they are often more obscuring than helpful. However, I do think that in this instance it would help to think about sandwiches.Imagine a very basic ham sandwich: bread, mayonnaise, ham, and a slice of cheddar cheese. The sandwich is, obviously, and identifiable object in the world. Once you know what the word "sandwich" means, it is clear that you can identify them, discuss them, manipulate them, and use them. This is true despite of...or rather, in some way, because of...the fact that the sandwich exists as a result of just-so-arranged components. The fact that it is made of other, more basic things doesn't negate its existence; it just is a part of a total description as to what a sandwich is.
For the sake of our (silly) metaphor, the sandwich is comparable to the self. A singular entity, recognizable and discussable in its own right, but obviously composed of other elements to which it is reducible but not wholly identical. It is a gestalt; a sum which is something over its individual parts. To deny that a self is a real thing, one would have to likewise deny other gestalt entities, like cars, planets, dogs, trees, their own body, and even sandwiches.
In truth, any given thing that you point to is going to be made of other things. Cars and computers are made of mechanical parts and digital software; both of these are, in turn, made of molecules and patterns of information. The molecules are made of atoms, and the atoms are made of...and so on and so forth.
Really, the argument being made by those who want to eliminate the self on scientific reductionist grounds is that anything which is composed of other things, and ontologically explainable by them, is itself not a fundamentally "real" entity. Ontology is the philosophical study of being; questions about what exists, what existence is, etc. The eliminative reductionist claim is that the status of "real" belongs only to those things that are indivisible and final; the most basic things which cannot be further reduced.
Now, some might want to bite the bullet, and both deny that self exists and commit to saying that cars, computers, dogs, trees, planets, bodies, and sandwiches don't exist either. Perhaps they are willing to agree that the only things to which the predicate "real" can actually be attributed are fundamental entities (perhaps quantum strings? perhaps individual quanta of pure information?). All other things, they might argue, are abstractions or, worse, illusions.
So what can we make of that? Is the self an abstraction? An illusion? Let us look at the claim that it is an illusion first, for I think that we can remove it from the board entirely and the discussion will be clearer for it.
The Self as Illusion
What is an illusion? I know, I keep having to digress from our inquiry on selfhood to ask other questions, but I truly believe this one to be vital.An illusion is when we perceive wrongly; when we interpret what we see or hear in a way which does not correspond to what is really happening. When we see and hear a magician saw their assistant in half, we are not really seeing or hearing that. We are seeing and hearing the well choreographed trick of what it might look like to see someone stoically sawed in half.
Now, those who say that the self is "only" an illusion usually follow it up with a second remark (either implied or stated explicitly) which is that there simply is no such thing as a self; its illusory nature means that it doesn't exist. Oh, if only they had stopped! Better a half mistake than a whole one!
The simple fact is, where we find an illusion we do not find a nothing. We find a something; namely, a something which is appearing to us in a manner that belies what is really happening. Still, it is a something, and not a nothing, that constitutes the illusion.
This may seem like a petty, semantic sticking point. I assure, it is not. It is a truth regarding the nature of conscious perception rooted in the philosophical branch of investigation called phenomenology, which looks at the nature of consciousness as it manifests in the world. One thing that the phenomenologists settled on early on is that consciousness is always "about something". This is a feature called "intentionality"; it means that consciousness is always a state of being-conscious-of-some-particular-thing. We never have just consciousness. From the moment you wake up to the moment you return to sleep (and even then, when you dream) your consciousness is always structured by what it is "about". This is usually determined by what you are looking, feeling, tasting, hearing, etc. When I am drinking coffee, my consciousness is consciousness of the taste, feel, smell, and so on.
Of course, given the nature of intentionality, consciousness can never be conscious of nothing. Nothing would give consciousness nothing to be about! No qualities or characteristics to be right or wrong about. Consciousness is limited to only encountering something, so where there is a conscious perception of anything, there is a definite something behind it. Now, we might be utterly mistaken about what that something is, or what that something is like. But this does not at all suggest that the something in question is not real.
Think again of the magician and their assistant. It is clear that the illusion is not caused by nothing. Something is causing it: two people, a trick box, a fake saw, some cleverly placed mirrors, etc. These are all somethings.
For us to perceive, there must always be a thing perceived, even if we are wrong about what it is. We never encounter nothing and mistake it for something. We only encounter something and sometimes mistake it for...something else!
Again, I know this might seem like a petty, semantic sticking point, but it is not. It is a fundamental feature of how consciousness exists. If we get the nature of consciousness wrong at the start, then all the rest of our inquiry about self (or anything else) is going to get off on the wrong foot, and we'll end up with erroneous conclusions.
So, to those who say that the self is an illusion, I say that they might be half right. There is so much about the self that is occasionally illusory. Now it is here, then it is there; first hidden from us, then opened up to us in moments and flashes of insight; now scheming and secret, now open and honest, now known to ourselves, now know best to those who know us. There is much of the self that evades our thoughts and words, and leaves us fumbling over how to describe ourselves as though we were trying to persuade a judge. But there is no one to persuade...except ourselves!
It is only when the reductionist goes too far in saying that the self doesn't exist that I must disagree. To suggest we are deceived by a nothing is to suggest a phenomenological impossibility. We simply do not perceive nothing; we only perceive where there is something.
The Self as Abstraction
But what of the claim that self is an abstraction instead of an illusion? Here we may be closer to the truth. The self may be some type of narrative structure, abstracted and imposed by a brain which is driven to make coherent sense of the world it encounters. Consciousness, as I said above, is essentially a mode of being that is characterized as being aware of such-and-such, and this awareness is given form by the brain which gives rise to it. It is thus shaped and colored by the memories, perceptions, and experiences of that same brain. Perhaps all those mental things jumble together under the unifying eye of consciousness, and that is the self?If that is true, then this abstraction is just the tip of a pyramid of memories, current perceptions, ongoing calculations about the future, emotions, feelings, and that ever-present brute conscious awareness. It is the vanguard of lessons learned, and it is the locus of the calculations made in advance of imagined future scenarios. If all this is true, then "self" is a far polite term which we place over the far more daring, ghastly, and bizarre thing which I call the soul; the totality of what we are, grown and experienced through time, wedded absolutely to our material being, shaped by our conditions of experience, and divorced from what we might call our purest sense of "self-awareness".
But if the self is just the abstraction of so many experiences, rolled back into one handy word, then is it not, in fact, a nothing? Have we come back around to saying that the self isn't real, just with more pomp and circumstance?
No, not at all! Just as a planet is a planet by means of its being a just-so-arranged set of smaller parts, a self is a self by means of its being a just-so-arranged set of more basic operations, like perceptions, memories, imaginings, desires, emotions, feelings, and so on and so forth, all combined under the unification of consciousness. The mistake was never in supposing that there is such a thing as the self, just as there is no mistake in me supposing that I do have a physical body or that I live upon a planet. The mistake lurked only in assuming that the self was something straightforward, simple, and easy, just as it would be a mistake to assume that my body was all the way through just the same sort of thing as the exterior flesh which I see, or that a planet is the same as its surface soil.