(This post is another in the Self series. Themed around explorations of what it means to be a Self, what its like to be a Self, and whether or not "Self" is a meaningful concept, we'll be thinking today about some social and philosophical components of self-hood)
This is not an essay where I'll be stating any kind of actual stance on something. To be honest, I'm working through some questions I have about the topics I'm going to raise below. However, rather than put up what was quickly becoming a too-lengthy post, I decided to bring up the background issues that are currently setting the stage for my thoughts on Self.
The Self has taken a front and center seat in our national consciousness. This is a strange thing to say. After all, have people not always been concerned with their selves? Well, they have...but the nature of Self as a problem; questions regarding"Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose?" have come to the forefront in an interesting way.
We are all at odds about what the Self is, whether we have one or not, what its nature is like, and how we should feel about it. Self has emerged as a crucial subject of not only concern but of outright confusion and interrogation in the realms of pop culture, ordinary philosophy, and politics.
I'll not dive into too many details. Instead, I'll simply highly recommend that you watch the show for yourself. Framing itself around a murder mystery (one in which the victim survived by having a backup copy of their mind downloaded into a spare clone after their death), the show adroitly explores the sort of class-based nightmare that one would expect to result in a consequence-free world where the rich can purchase immortality or engage in any behavior knowing that they can simply re-sleeve into a new body should something go wrong.
Sufficed to say for my present purposes, the show opens up philosophical questions of Self and introduces them into pop culture in a way that most philosophical topics never enjoy. There are, after all, very few shows that raise questions of abstract logic or metaphysics.
Altered Carbon invites its audience to ask: Who are we? What are we? What am I?
I know that I am a biological creature made of flesh, bone, and blood. But the "I" in statements like "I like to..." or "I believe that..." or "I remember that..." seems to intuitively not be synonymous with my body. Now, as an atheist I am not advocating for the existence of a soul which can survive the death of the body/brain. However, the information contained within that body, and especially within that precious brain, seems to be able to be extended past my body. It is not intuitively obvious that if my mind were somehow downloaded into a new body after this body's death that "I" would not still exist.
In the show, as I said, characters can have their "stack" (which stores all their mental content) installed in a different body. Were I able to do this in real life, would that mental entity (the "I") be the same I that is writing this now? Is the mental informational content sufficient? Or does the meat also matter? Put another way, can I still be me if all my mental content is in a radically different body?
In some cases, the characters who died lost several hours of information because they were killed in between moments where their stacks downloaded. This means that their stream-of-consciousness was radically interrupted. Does the loss of that consistent stream of consciousness constitute an actual loss of the Self? If so, then would one who undergoes a deep coma and then comes out of it be a different Self than the person who first went into the coma?
It was interesting to see these topics (which I think constitute serious thought-experiments and questions in their own right) explored in a show that was also genuinely fun to watch for the characters, dialogue, and action sequences. In short, the show delivered philosophical questions about the Self in a pop-culture friendly way.
There is a vast ground which I will not aim to cover here. Sufficed to say, the Self has been attacked from epistemic grounds (can I know all of my Self, or is some/most of it always hidden away in my unconscious?), ontological grounds (what is the Self? Is it just the brain? Nervous system as a whole? The entire body?), and metaphysical grounds (does the idea of Self as we conceive it make logical sense? Is it even possible? Could there be a soul?).
Though I am normally more interested in epistemology and metaphysics, it is actually the ethical aspect of Self that seems to have rocketed to the fore within philosophy. Questions here are things like "How should I treat myself?", "How should I treat other Selves?" and "What is the value of my, or any, Self?".
Right now, I think we are all aware that issues of justice are in vogue. Various movements are advocating for economic justice, medical justice, ecological justice, and the ever-present-and-vague social justice with which we are so well acquainted. Philosophers have followed suit, and are even now writing about ethics in light of the notions of egalitarianism and humanism that arguably form the core of these different movements.
However, at the same time various findings in both biological and social sciences are shrinking the island upon which the Self - as a rational sense of agency in control of its own being - can stand.
Biology has shown us for a long time that our cognition (and with it, our judgement and even beliefs) can be influenced with drugs, by lack of sleep, or even by our diet. So the Self, as a mental-object, has had to cede some ground to such things and give up some of its supposed supra-physical sovereignty. But then biology went further, and fMRI scans began to suggest (though by no means prove) that at least some of our actions are configured and set in motion by the brain before the information even reaches our prefrontal cortex and enters our conscious awareness. Our brains, then, retroactively lay claim to the action, calling it "our choice". One must then wonder, and shudder, at how many other things we might do beyond the simple tasks that these scientists studied which we only label as being our choices.
Meanwhile, social psychology has been steadily showing us more and more how absolutely permeated we are by social influenced when it comes to our decisions and beliefs. It has been shown time and again that people will rationalize away almost anything to fit into their group. Our beliefs about what's desirable are far from being rooted in purely rational utility, and thus our economy is fundamentally an irrational system of values subject to human whim as much as to market forces. Ditto for our political and religious beliefs, which are also highly group-determinate and which exercise immense influence over our decision making.
These social and biological findings cannot help but to give credibility to the notion of determinism; the philosophical belief that our minds are not free nodes of rational thought interacting with the world but are instead just elements in a system which is, as a whole, chugging right along with its own causes regardless of what we want or think. We're just cogs that happen to have enough of a spark of consciousness to be aware of their own turning.
Now, all but perhaps the most deluded libertarians will acknowledge that the Self is inextricably tied to its social world. Even if I were an auto mechanic who worked alone, lived alone, and shunned society as much as possible, I would still be largely defined by the social world. Whatever language I spoke would be obviously a social artifact I imbibed from others. Ditto for my ability to do mathematics. My role as "mechanic" would not exist without other people to make, purchase, and damage cars. I would have had to learned my mechanical skills from someone else and purchased my tools from someone else. Even if we assume that I somehow built my own shop, I would have had to at least buy the materials involved (like concrete, copper wiring, etc.) from someone else. Even my self-conception of a loner would be defined in relation to others as a negation; a negation which would make no sense in a vacuum without other people existing for me to be-alone-from. There is just no escaping our social enmeshment.
But there is also a phenomenon in society called "identity politics" (of which you are no doubt already familiar). In its strongest iterations, identity politics charges that the Self is absolutely more social than it is idiosyncratic. That is, I am less a "me" and more of an "us" in relation to my group.
From a radical identity politics perspective, I am my group. My Self is bound up within the groups I happen to be counted as part of. I am a white male, so my Self is bound up in whiteness and maleness. I am an atheist, but I grew up a devout Christian and live in a country where most people are Christian, so part of my identity is bound up in Judaeo-Christianity. I am from a middle class family, so I am bound up in middle class identity, too.
Americans are bitterly divided right now, and identity politics is both partially to blame and partially a symptom of that fact. Identity politics is a form of fatalism; a determinism, which posits that my Self is so bound up in my group/groups that I cannot be considered apart from them. My groups (whether I chose them or not) will always define me and constitute the bulk of who and what I am. The most I could hope to be is simply a good instantiation of my group.
Now, many who are involved in identity politics would say I'm over-stating the case. Fair enough. Most who believe in identity politics as a force for good don't suggest that it eradicates the individualism of a Self completely. I agree with them, so far as it goes. But there is a radical element to identity politics for whom group-identity is an essential, defining, and absolute characteristics of individual people.
Determinism makes the Self into a mere awareness-of-X, wherein we have no sort of rational agency. Politics, love, friendship, and any other form of interpersonal or social interaction are then not at all about two or more Selves genuinely engaging with one another. Rather they are simply instances of a mechanical set of interactions for which all outcomes are already predetermined. This is definitely true for "hard" determinism, for which there is absolutely no free will.
However, the "soft" version of social determinism still shrinks the individual Self down to a barely self-controlled herd animal. One who could, in theory, buck from the social trends, but who is unlikely to do so and who would suffer for if they did.
Identity politics is an extension of those sociological and political notions of Self that emphasize the group-belonging aspect as being the defining feature of what makes someone who they are. Here, the Self is fulfilled and valuable only insofar as it is part of, and representative of, a group.
Now, I've already said that the most interesting aspect of the current discussions around Self-hood are the ethical ones. In the follow up to this essay, I want to more fully share my thoughts on the the ethical implications of the social and philosophical conceptions of Self that I mentioned above.
As always, thank you for reading. I you have any thoughts about the Self in relation to these (or other) issues, by all means reach out to us and let me know. Feel free to write and submit a guest-post as well.
Thanks!
This is not an essay where I'll be stating any kind of actual stance on something. To be honest, I'm working through some questions I have about the topics I'm going to raise below. However, rather than put up what was quickly becoming a too-lengthy post, I decided to bring up the background issues that are currently setting the stage for my thoughts on Self.
The Self has taken a front and center seat in our national consciousness. This is a strange thing to say. After all, have people not always been concerned with their selves? Well, they have...but the nature of Self as a problem; questions regarding"Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose?" have come to the forefront in an interesting way.
We are all at odds about what the Self is, whether we have one or not, what its nature is like, and how we should feel about it. Self has emerged as a crucial subject of not only concern but of outright confusion and interrogation in the realms of pop culture, ordinary philosophy, and politics.
Pop Culture and the Self
One of the shows that has most thoroughly captured my attention in recent years has been Altered Carbon, a Netflix program based on a book series of the same name. In brief, the show is set in a future wherein people have figured out how to download their mental content (memories, beliefs, preferences, fears, etc.) onto small devices called "stacks" implanted in their skulls. So long as the stacks are not damaged, a dead person can be "re-sleeved" by having their stack inserted into another body, be it a clone body or a natural-born body without a current occupant (one whose stack has been removed).I'll not dive into too many details. Instead, I'll simply highly recommend that you watch the show for yourself. Framing itself around a murder mystery (one in which the victim survived by having a backup copy of their mind downloaded into a spare clone after their death), the show adroitly explores the sort of class-based nightmare that one would expect to result in a consequence-free world where the rich can purchase immortality or engage in any behavior knowing that they can simply re-sleeve into a new body should something go wrong.
Sufficed to say for my present purposes, the show opens up philosophical questions of Self and introduces them into pop culture in a way that most philosophical topics never enjoy. There are, after all, very few shows that raise questions of abstract logic or metaphysics.
Altered Carbon invites its audience to ask: Who are we? What are we? What am I?
I know that I am a biological creature made of flesh, bone, and blood. But the "I" in statements like "I like to..." or "I believe that..." or "I remember that..." seems to intuitively not be synonymous with my body. Now, as an atheist I am not advocating for the existence of a soul which can survive the death of the body/brain. However, the information contained within that body, and especially within that precious brain, seems to be able to be extended past my body. It is not intuitively obvious that if my mind were somehow downloaded into a new body after this body's death that "I" would not still exist.
In the show, as I said, characters can have their "stack" (which stores all their mental content) installed in a different body. Were I able to do this in real life, would that mental entity (the "I") be the same I that is writing this now? Is the mental informational content sufficient? Or does the meat also matter? Put another way, can I still be me if all my mental content is in a radically different body?
In some cases, the characters who died lost several hours of information because they were killed in between moments where their stacks downloaded. This means that their stream-of-consciousness was radically interrupted. Does the loss of that consistent stream of consciousness constitute an actual loss of the Self? If so, then would one who undergoes a deep coma and then comes out of it be a different Self than the person who first went into the coma?
It was interesting to see these topics (which I think constitute serious thought-experiments and questions in their own right) explored in a show that was also genuinely fun to watch for the characters, dialogue, and action sequences. In short, the show delivered philosophical questions about the Self in a pop-culture friendly way.
Philosophy and the Self
While pop culture shows may only rarely deign to question notions of what is or isn't a Self, philosophy has been at it for a while.There is a vast ground which I will not aim to cover here. Sufficed to say, the Self has been attacked from epistemic grounds (can I know all of my Self, or is some/most of it always hidden away in my unconscious?), ontological grounds (what is the Self? Is it just the brain? Nervous system as a whole? The entire body?), and metaphysical grounds (does the idea of Self as we conceive it make logical sense? Is it even possible? Could there be a soul?).
Though I am normally more interested in epistemology and metaphysics, it is actually the ethical aspect of Self that seems to have rocketed to the fore within philosophy. Questions here are things like "How should I treat myself?", "How should I treat other Selves?" and "What is the value of my, or any, Self?".
Right now, I think we are all aware that issues of justice are in vogue. Various movements are advocating for economic justice, medical justice, ecological justice, and the ever-present-and-vague social justice with which we are so well acquainted. Philosophers have followed suit, and are even now writing about ethics in light of the notions of egalitarianism and humanism that arguably form the core of these different movements.
However, at the same time various findings in both biological and social sciences are shrinking the island upon which the Self - as a rational sense of agency in control of its own being - can stand.
Biology has shown us for a long time that our cognition (and with it, our judgement and even beliefs) can be influenced with drugs, by lack of sleep, or even by our diet. So the Self, as a mental-object, has had to cede some ground to such things and give up some of its supposed supra-physical sovereignty. But then biology went further, and fMRI scans began to suggest (though by no means prove) that at least some of our actions are configured and set in motion by the brain before the information even reaches our prefrontal cortex and enters our conscious awareness. Our brains, then, retroactively lay claim to the action, calling it "our choice". One must then wonder, and shudder, at how many other things we might do beyond the simple tasks that these scientists studied which we only label as being our choices.
Meanwhile, social psychology has been steadily showing us more and more how absolutely permeated we are by social influenced when it comes to our decisions and beliefs. It has been shown time and again that people will rationalize away almost anything to fit into their group. Our beliefs about what's desirable are far from being rooted in purely rational utility, and thus our economy is fundamentally an irrational system of values subject to human whim as much as to market forces. Ditto for our political and religious beliefs, which are also highly group-determinate and which exercise immense influence over our decision making.
These social and biological findings cannot help but to give credibility to the notion of determinism; the philosophical belief that our minds are not free nodes of rational thought interacting with the world but are instead just elements in a system which is, as a whole, chugging right along with its own causes regardless of what we want or think. We're just cogs that happen to have enough of a spark of consciousness to be aware of their own turning.
Politics and the Self
Politically, the idea that the Self is not really a Cartesian node-of-self-contained-thought has been catching on as well. We see this in the increasingly socially-oriented thinking of younger generations and the prevalence of identity politics.Now, all but perhaps the most deluded libertarians will acknowledge that the Self is inextricably tied to its social world. Even if I were an auto mechanic who worked alone, lived alone, and shunned society as much as possible, I would still be largely defined by the social world. Whatever language I spoke would be obviously a social artifact I imbibed from others. Ditto for my ability to do mathematics. My role as "mechanic" would not exist without other people to make, purchase, and damage cars. I would have had to learned my mechanical skills from someone else and purchased my tools from someone else. Even if we assume that I somehow built my own shop, I would have had to at least buy the materials involved (like concrete, copper wiring, etc.) from someone else. Even my self-conception of a loner would be defined in relation to others as a negation; a negation which would make no sense in a vacuum without other people existing for me to be-alone-from. There is just no escaping our social enmeshment.
But there is also a phenomenon in society called "identity politics" (of which you are no doubt already familiar). In its strongest iterations, identity politics charges that the Self is absolutely more social than it is idiosyncratic. That is, I am less a "me" and more of an "us" in relation to my group.
From a radical identity politics perspective, I am my group. My Self is bound up within the groups I happen to be counted as part of. I am a white male, so my Self is bound up in whiteness and maleness. I am an atheist, but I grew up a devout Christian and live in a country where most people are Christian, so part of my identity is bound up in Judaeo-Christianity. I am from a middle class family, so I am bound up in middle class identity, too.
Americans are bitterly divided right now, and identity politics is both partially to blame and partially a symptom of that fact. Identity politics is a form of fatalism; a determinism, which posits that my Self is so bound up in my group/groups that I cannot be considered apart from them. My groups (whether I chose them or not) will always define me and constitute the bulk of who and what I am. The most I could hope to be is simply a good instantiation of my group.
Now, many who are involved in identity politics would say I'm over-stating the case. Fair enough. Most who believe in identity politics as a force for good don't suggest that it eradicates the individualism of a Self completely. I agree with them, so far as it goes. But there is a radical element to identity politics for whom group-identity is an essential, defining, and absolute characteristics of individual people.
A Forward to the Second Essay
I think that all of the above share in a common cynicism regarding the individuality of the Self.Determinism makes the Self into a mere awareness-of-X, wherein we have no sort of rational agency. Politics, love, friendship, and any other form of interpersonal or social interaction are then not at all about two or more Selves genuinely engaging with one another. Rather they are simply instances of a mechanical set of interactions for which all outcomes are already predetermined. This is definitely true for "hard" determinism, for which there is absolutely no free will.
However, the "soft" version of social determinism still shrinks the individual Self down to a barely self-controlled herd animal. One who could, in theory, buck from the social trends, but who is unlikely to do so and who would suffer for if they did.
Identity politics is an extension of those sociological and political notions of Self that emphasize the group-belonging aspect as being the defining feature of what makes someone who they are. Here, the Self is fulfilled and valuable only insofar as it is part of, and representative of, a group.
Now, I've already said that the most interesting aspect of the current discussions around Self-hood are the ethical ones. In the follow up to this essay, I want to more fully share my thoughts on the the ethical implications of the social and philosophical conceptions of Self that I mentioned above.
As always, thank you for reading. I you have any thoughts about the Self in relation to these (or other) issues, by all means reach out to us and let me know. Feel free to write and submit a guest-post as well.
Thanks!