A Srinivas Rao June 2013
This article was written as a dedication to Sri Ramana Maharshi and was published by Sri Ramanasramam in their quarterly Mountain Path April Jun 2014.
“Since every other thought can occur only after
the rise of the ‘I’-thought and since the mind is nothing but a bundle of
thoughts, it is only through the enquiry ‘Who am I?’ that the mind subsides.”- Sri
Ramana Maharshi “Who Am I”[i]
Contemporary studies on the nature of the self, find significant
convergence about the illusory nature of the self, yet surprisingly they are a
divided house on the nature of consciousness. Despite the materialist
underpinnings of these studies often clubbed under the rubric of ‘consciousness
studies’ that are cross disciplinary and span the neurosciences, psychology
and philosophy, they offer fresh insights
into the ancient question ‘Who am I?’.
Please note that the term ‘self’ as used in the article refers solely to
the individual ego and not the transcendent ‘ground of being’. It would be
appropriate if the term ego is used as synonymous for self in this article.
‘No man ever steps into the same river
twice’ declared the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c 535- c 475 BCE), indicating,
like the Buddha, the constant nature of change.
Plutarch (c 46-c 120 CE), another Greek, in response to this formulated
a paradox called ‘The Ship of Theseus’.
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of
Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians
down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old
planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place...”.Plutarch Theseus[ii]
Plutarch’s question, which divides
philosophers up to this day is whether a ship that is totally reconstructed is
still the same ship. Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679), the British philosopher, added his own twist to the paradox of
Theseus. What would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they
were replaced and a second ship constructed?
Our experiencing self seems to be the
centre of the private world of which we are aware of at every point of time.
The notion of a self is the basis in which we construct our personal identity,
our social self as well as our sense of moral responsibility, and it is the ‘seat’
of desire, fear, agency and free will.
We believe that the self has diverse parts that are appetitive,
emotional and rational and yet is seemingly unitary and indivisible. Three
beliefs characterize our conception of our self, namely i) the belief that we
are continuous and unchanging, despite weathering the ‘seven ages’ of man; ii) the
belief that the self is the unifier of all experience, making coherent a
unified subject; and iii) the belief in the agency of the self as the thinker
and doer, who acts upon the world, and exercises control on it[iii]..
We shall examine each of these three beliefs below. Finally we shall then look
at self as an identity.
The Self as Continuity
The first belief,
the seemingly continuous nature of the self is what separates the ego and
bundle theorists. Ego theories are easier to understand with a belief in its continuity
of the self. Most people believe that they are more than their bodies and that
they reside within their bodies, i.e. that their self possesses a body. Such a
belief is usually associated with the duality of matter and mind (or soul) as
two different substances, though monist positions of some kind of idealism or materialism
are also possible. To use the metaphor of pearls on a string; if the self is
assumed to be a single continuous thread that underlies all experiences like a
string that unites all the pearls, it provides unity, continuity and an apparent
changelessness to each of our very varied and transient pearls of
experience.
Bundle theorists on the contrary assume
that there is no continuous self that exists but that the self gets
contingently generated. This position is counter intuitive and, to some people,
rather disorienting. To use the metaphor of a rope; if the self is assumed to
be discontinuous, yet providing coherence, it is more like a rope which consists
of overlapping fibres with no single continuous element other than itself.
William James (1842-1910), the father of psychology, declared that ‘thought is
itself the thinker’. He proposed that a passing thought remembers some of the
previous thoughts, appropriates some of them, in a stream of consciousness, and
disowns others, with no permanent ‘herdsman’ to chaperone the herd of thoughts.
In other words the ‘I’ itself is merely a thought, and hands over the baton in the
relay race to another thought on its expiry. James also makes a distinction
between a ‘me’, that is, an empirical self and an ‘I’ that is seen as the pure
ego or the felt central nucleus of experience.
The neurosciences now describe the self as
not a central agency but as myriad parallel neural processes, which give rise
to behaviours, memories and perceptions but no persisting self. Evidence comes from
mental disorders, such as Dissociative Identity Disorder, where the patient
seemingly has more than one identity; Depersonalization Disorder where the
patient experiences estrangement from their body or mental processes and
behaves like a zombie; Body Integrity Identity disorder where a patient
renounces ownership of a limb and feels an intense urge to amputate the ‘foreign
limb’; Alzheimer’s disease/Dementia where the patient experiences a loss of
memory of the autobiographical self, or has an outdated idea of a ‘petrified
self’; and Cotard’s disease where the
patient thinks that he or she is dead or has ceased to exist. All of which suggests
that the self is more fragmentary than we would like to believe.
Discursive psychology suggests that the self
is a continuous production and that it is generated by the discourses it is
involved in namely that the self is a product of the way the first person ‘I’
is used in the web of discourses. Daniel Dennet (1942- ) an American
philosopher claims that the self is a centre of narrative gravity, embedded in
a world of words,
“Our tales are spun, but for the most part
we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness and our narrative
selfhood, is their product, not their source”[iv].
Thus the ‘centre of
narrative gravity’ gives rise to an illusion of an self as a single source. Is the
self then a mere label, a linguistic convention and are all our complex
functions and behaviour merely products of distributed neural processes?
Self as Integrator
David Hume wrote, “The
mind is a theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance;
pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and
situations”[v]
The multiple
sensory information that we receive, at varying speeds and distinctiveness is
evaluated and coordinated by the mind, to give us a unified picture of the
state of the world at any point of time. Our intuitive view of the self is
therefore like a cinema theatre where somewhere inside my head there is a cinema
screen where images, ideas and feelings are presented to my “mind’s eye”: the
show is my stream of consciousness and” I” am the audience. This view of
consciousness was called pejoratively the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ by Daniel Dennet
after Rene Descartes’ (1596-1650) influential dualistic view of mind and
matter. The key element in this theatre is the audience of one, the homunculus (little man, which in turn would presume another little man ad
infinitum) who sits at the centre as the self unto whom the cinema show of the
material world is displayed. While the metaphor is highly
intuitive, there is no centre in the brain and no single process which
corresponds to such a central HQ as the brain is a radically parallel
processing system. There is no central place in which “I” can sit and watch a
display of sensory inputs, thoughts, mark the moment of their arrival or issue
decisions. The different parts of the brain just get on with their job of
communicating with others when necessary with no central control[vi].
Continuity is persistence in time; however
the existence of the self as located in the ‘now’ can be thrown into
doubt. Information from different senses
does not arrive at the same instant but at varying speeds, needing time for
transmission and processing. Consider the following experiment where subjects
were shown a bright spot of light at the corner of a screen immediately
followed by another bright spot of light at the opposite end. Most people reported that the bright spot travelled down the
diagonal. Stranger yet, if the colour of the light was changed from green to red
at each end, they reported having seen
the shift in colour to red midway down the screen, that is, even before the red
light was flashed at the opposite end.
The mind, it seems, interpolated the data before presenting its result,
rather than representing things as they were. In another experiment a rotating
disc on a screen had an arrow pointed outward.
Beside the disc was a flash of light timed to flash exactly when the arrow
aligned with it . Most people reported seeing the light flash after a lag, that is, after
the arrow had passed the point. Even when the arrow became stationary at the flash, the flash
still appeared with a lag. The brain, instead of extrapolating into the future,
was interpolating events into the past to create a retrospective coherent
narrative[vii]
The
self as geographically ‘within’ may be contested by an interesting experiment.
A mannequin was fitted with cameras for eyes and what it was ‘seeing’ was
connected to a head mounted display, fitted on a volunteer[P4] . When the mannequin’s camera pointed to its abdomen and the
researchers stroked both the abdomens of the mannequin and the volunteer, many
volunteers identified the mannequin’s body as their own. The boundaries of the
self are drawn by the brain by integrating the senses of touch, vision,
proprioception (the internal sense of a map of body parts) into a coherent whole. Given conflicting
information, the brain resolves it by taking ownership of the foreign
body. In the same way one could also
simulate an ‘out of body experience’ by manipulating the sense of touch while
the subject is made to watch a volunteer similarly stroked on a video feed[viii].
Finally in much of our visual perception,
we often extrapolate into gaps, such as objects lying partly behind other
objects, assuming identical content in similar but not the same images,
assuming continuity despite blinking our eyes, and ‘filling in’ details covered
by blind spots. Ramachandran VS (1951- ),the eminent neuroscientist
demonstrates separate mechanisms that ‘fill in’ for colour, texture, and movement.
If parts of a picture are changed while the subject blinks or is shown a flash
of grey, the changes are not visually registered and this is called change
blindness. Vision therefore is not a process of building up a rich detailed
representation that we use to compare objects from one moment to another; it is
discontinuous, tentative and contingent[ix].
The Self as Agent
The most important
belief however is control by a sovereign self. We believe the ego/ self is free
to make its decisions and choices, a free agent unconstrained by external
forces or fate. The subjective experience of control that we have on a daily
basis in relation to our actions is also accompanied by an ignorance of the
causes of our decisions. Wegner and Wheatly [x] in 1999 conducted an experiment where two
volunteers sat in front of an Ouija board type (planchette)
computer screen with 50 different images on it. A small cardboard covered a
mouse that controlled a cursor that both could move and point to the objects in
the picture. One of the participants,
unknown to the other, acted as a confederate of the researcher and using their
respective private headphones each participant received words that indicated
the objects. The subject was given to understand that the confederate was given
different words than himself even though the confederate was given the same
words. However the confederate
participant was given the word before the true subject received the word
suggesting the object.
They were both to move the cursor and stop
every thirty seconds at the object indicated by a privately announced word. The
subject was given words that were timed at
thirty seconds, five seconds or one second before stopping at an object, as
well as one second after the stopping at an object. It was found in the trials
the subject had the highest proficiency for ‘I intended to make a stop’ when
the words were given one or five seconds before the stop and lowest for those
when the word was given thirty seconds prior to or one second after the
stop. Wegner calles this the ‘priority
principle’: that effects are experienced as willed when the relevant thoughts
occur just before them.. The mind does not reveal its operation
but produces a post hoc narrative ‘I intended to make a stop’ thereby rationalising
its choice. Our actions may not be based
on conscious thought but on an illusory experience of will.
In the 1980's a Californian neuroscientist
Benjamin Libet was working on neural impulses in the brain that generate the motor
action of the limbs. Libet reasoned that if a conscious intention or decision
must initiate action, then the intending, which is a subjective act, must precede or at least be timed at the
commencement of neural activity that initiates motor activity. Libet formulated
a simple experiment of pressing a button by the volunteer’s finger. He
formulated three measures. Prior to most voluntary motor acts such as
pushing a button with a finger there is the conscious urge or ‘will’ to push
the button by the subject which precedes
the actual activity. This conscious urge is perceived as a spike in neural
activity in the brain's motor cortex region which is called ‘readiness potential’
(RP). This spike in activity precedes
the actual finger pushing by a few seconds. Libet measured i) the readiness potential (RP)
of the commencement of neural activity that triggered the motor action; ii) the
timing of the conscious will or urge to push the button (W); and iii) the
timing of the act of pushing the button (M). He demonstrated that adults felt
the urge to push the button several milliseconds after the ‘readiness potential’(PR) was already triggered. Further, this interval was at least twice the duration between the
conscious ‘will’(W) and the actual finger movement (M ).
On an average W was triggered 200 ms before the action M, but RP started
surprisingly 550 ms before the action
M. This prompts the following question: if the brain could initiate voluntary
action before the conscious will, is there a role for the conscious intention? Conscious volition is either
superfluous or is merely a check post or verification in case the person wishes
to terminate the triggers initiated by the unconscious.
This is what kindles the debate on free
will. If the unconscious determines or is causally related to motor action,
what then is the role of conscious volition or free will? Is this sufficient
evidence to dismiss the idea of free will? Even if a middle path is chosen,
what is the role of conscious volition; is it to provide the option of a veto?
Libet himself has been very cautious and does not claim that it is proof of the
absence of free will[xi] He simply maintains that though a volitional process
may be unconscious, the subject does have a choice of vetoing the fulfilment of
action. As someone cheekily said, “There may be no such thing as ‘free will’
but there is a ‘free wont’” that does
not absolve us from moral responsibility.
Conscious intention will always precede
action but is that really proof of free will? One of the ways to examine this
is to explore whether the opposite of free will is determinism. Determinism
indicates either a mechanical or a divine predestination both of which seem inadequate
responses to the modern mind. Things are merely contingent. Contingency merely assumes
that the factors leading to our actions are myriad and unpredictable, namely,
genetic inheritance, planned goals, life experiences, acquired/innate
tendencies, psychological biases and environment. Free will presupposes that
there is a deliberate choice between plausible alternatives. It presupposes that
there is a self which is in control. It asserts the notion of a self that is
autonomous and exercises agency. If the notion of the self is viewed as
illusory, then the notions of autonomy and agency and a self who is in control all
collapse.
The Self as Identity
Finally our notions
of ourselves are socially constructed like our names. The self is thus
relational, a reflection of what other people believe. “I am not what I think I
am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am,” said
Charles Cooley an American sociologist in 1902 using the phrase ‘the looking
glass self’[xii]. [Gordon Gallup measured self recognition in animals
by applying a red dot on a chimpanzee’s r forehead while they slept and found
that apes and animals that lived in social groups tried to remove the dot when they
noticed it in a mirror[xiii]. Human infants cannot pass this test until
they are two years old.
Memory is central to our sense of an
autobiographical self. Injury to the delicate structures of the hippocampus
would place us in the terrible predicament of severe amnesia, leaving us
‘forever in today’ with no memories. In 1932 the British psychologist Fredric
Bartlett demonstrated that memories are not exact copies of past events, like a
film, but are reconstructed and change over time. Elizabeth Loftus the world’s
greatest authority on false memories herself, was not immune. On her fourteenth
birthday Loftus’s mother had drowned in a pool. Thirty years later her uncle
reminded her of how she found her body in the pool. Over the next few days
lucid and horrifying memories of her mother in the pool flooded her; except
that these were false memories. It was later revealed to Loftus that it was not
she but her aunt who had found the body. Memory is not a library of facts but
like a compost heap constantly reorganized and revised. In fact, completely
false memories can be constructed by asking leading questions or believing in a
false story that is retold often enough.
Identities are also cultural by-products
and construct a ‘geography of self’. A.
K. Ramanujam, the Indian folklorist, pondered on whether some societies have
overall tendencies to generate rules that are context free which others formulate
rules that are context sensitive.[xiv]
The West has always tended to formulate context free rules and
generalizations that tend to universals (e.g. the ten commandments). India, by
contrast, has favoured rules that are context sensitive and based on social
relations and structures (e.g. valour is a virtue of the Kshatriya). Identity
formation thus varies, based on how the self, embedded in its culture,
apprehends the world.
This brings us back to the ship of Theseus
where we started. If each of our body organs are transplanted, and if the brain
can also be transplanted, is the resulting ‘I’ the same or different? Is there
something that we can still call an inner essence of identity, the ‘real me’?
Are we subscribing to an essentialist position? Essentialism is the view that
there exists a universal truth beyond particulars that is instantiated in
particulars (e.g. the ‘dogginess’ of a pet poodle, or the ‘squareness’ of a
square). However it begs the question whether the ‘essence’ is real, or a mere
concept existing only in the mind or is a mere linguistic convention, or a
convenient and useful abstraction like the self
Conclusion
The self seems like the proverbial elephant
and the six blind men of Hindustan, with each person grasping only one aspect of
it and none having a comprehensive view, except that here we are persuaded to
believe that there is no elephant either. Our self is comparable to an illusion
but without any one to experience that illusion; the self is not just a useful
illusion but a necessary one. The paradox of the self making an effort to ‘liberate
itself’ is not represented by the image of ‘Ouroboros’, the snake that eats its
own tail, because there was no snake to start with. Two and a half thousand years
ago, the Buddha dismissed the existence of a self as a superfluous hypothesis later
called anattavada and choosing to
remain largely silent on what lay beyond the self..
“When
one turns within, and searches for wherefrom this ‘I’ thought arises, the
shamed ‘I’ vanishes and wisdom’s quest begins” Sri Ramana Maharshi, Upadesa Saram verse 19[xv].
[ii] Plutarch Theseus, Tr John
Dryden, The Internet Classics Archive, Retrieved 2013/11/18
[iv] Susan Blackmore (2004).
Consciousness: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN:
0-19-515343-X, pg 120
[v] Susan
Blackmore (2004). Consciousness: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University
Press. ISBN: 0-19-515343-X, pg 96
[vii] For a diagrammatic representation
see Jan Westerhoff, “What are You?” (2013). The Self,
New Scientist Volume 217 No 2905., pg 37
[viii] For a diagrammatic
representation see Anil Ananthaswamy “Where Are You?” (2013).
The Self, New Scientist Volume 217 No 2905., pg 40
[ix] Susan Blackmore (2004). Consciousness: An Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0-19-515343-X, pg 84
Susan Blackmore (2004). Consciousness: An Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0-19-515343-X, pg 134
Bruce
Hood (2011). The Self Illusion- Who Do You Think You Are? London: Constable
& Robinson Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-78033-872-9 pg 51
Bruce
Hood (2011). The Self Illusion- Who Do You Think You Are? London: Constable
& Robinson Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-78033-872-9 pg 53
[xiv] Ramanujam A. K. “Is there
an Indian Way of Thinking: An informal Essay” The Collected Essays of AK
Ramanjuam (1999) Oxford University Press, New Delhi ISBN 0195639375 pg 34
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