Chapter §9. The Self.
Could be
I only sang because the lonely road was long;
and now the road and I are gone
but not the song.
I only spoke the verse to pay for borrowed time:
and now the clock and I are broken
but not the rhyme.
Possibly,
the self not being fundamental,
eternity
breathes only on the incidental.
—Ernesto Galarza, 1905-1984
What makes each human being unique? No other species of animal has such diverse individuals; each person exhibits a different set of appearances and abilities. Some of those traits are inherited, and some come from each person’s experiences—but in every case, we each end up with different characteristics. We sometimes use ‘Self’ for the features and traits that distinguish each person from everyone else.
However, we also use Self in a sense that suggests that we are controlled by powerful beings inside ourselves, who want and feel and think for us, and make our important decisions for us. We call these our Selves or Identities—and see them as staying the same over time, regardless of what may happen to us. Sometimes we even envision that Self as a minuscule person inside the mind; this is sometimes called a homunculus. (A similar premise was prevalent before the dawn of modern genetics: it claimed that every sperm already contained a perfectly formed little personage.)
Figure 9- 1
Daniel Dennett (1978): “A homunculus (from Latin, 'little man') is a miniature adult held to inhabit the brain … who perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the commands to the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an infinite regress … since we can ask whether there is a little man in the little man's head, responsible for his perception and action, and so on.”[1]
What attracts us to the queer idea that we can only think or feel with the help of those Selves inside our minds? Chapters 1 and 4 suggested that this concept helps to keep us from wasting time on difficult questions about our minds. For example, if you wonder how your vision works, the Single-Self view gives the answer that, ‘Your Self simply peers out though your eyes.” If you ask about how your memory works, you get the reply, “Your Self knows how to recollect whatever might be relevant.” And if you wonder what guides you through your life, it tells that your Self supplies you with all your wishes, hopes, and goals—and then solves all of your problems for you. Thus, the Single-Self view diverts you from asking about how your mental processes work. Instead, it leads you to ask questions like these:
Is an infant born with anything like what an adult would call a Self’? Some would insist on answering with, “Yes, infants are persons just like us—except that they don’t yet know so much." But others would take an opposite view: “An infant begins with almost no intellect, and developing one takes a sizeable time.”
Does your Self have a special location in space? Most ‘western’ thinkers might answer, “Yes”—and tend to locate it inside their heads, somewhere not far behind their eyes. However, I’ve heard that some other cultures situate Selves between the belly and chest.
Which of your goals and beliefs are your “genuine” ones? The Single-Self view suggests that some of your intentions and values are ‘authentic’ and ‘sincere”—whereas the models of mind discussed in this book leave more room for conflicting views.
Does your Self stay the same throughout your life? We each have a sense of remaining the same, regardless of what may happen to us. Does this mean that some part of us is more permanent than our bodies and our memories?
Does your Self survive the death of your brain? Different answers to that might leave us pleased or distressed, but would not help us to understand ourselves.
Each such question uses words like self, we, and us in a somewhat different sense—and this chapter will argue that we do this because, whenever we try to understand ourselves, we may need to use several different views of ourselves.
Whenever you think about your “Self,” you are switching among a network of models, each of which may help to answer questions about different aspects of what you are.
Here, as we said in 4-3, we’re using the word ‘model’’ to mean a mental representation that can help us to answer some questions about some other, more complex thing or idea. For example, some of our models are based on simplistic ideas like “All our actions are based on the will to survive,” or “we always like pleasure more than pain,” while some other self-models are far more complex. We develop these multiple theories because each of them helps to represent certain aspects of ourselves, but is likely to give some wrong answers about other questions about ourselves.
Citizen: Why should a person want more than one model? Would it not be better to combine them into a single, more comprehensive one?
In the past, there were many attempts to make ‘unified’ theories of psychology. However, this chapter will suggest some reasons why none of those theories worked well by itself, and why we may need to keep switching among different views of ourselves.
Jerry Fodor (1998): “If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be Me.”
Cosma Rohilla Shalizi: “I have been reading my old poems, and they were written by somebody else. Yet I am that selfsame person; or, if I am not, who is? If no one is, when did he die—when he finished this poem, or that one, or the next day, or the end of that month?”
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
§9-1. How do we Represent Ourselves?
“O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”—Robert Burns
How do we make our models of ourselves? Let’s start by asking simpler questions about how people describe their acquaintances. Thus, whenever Charles thinks about his friend Joan, he might use descriptions that he has made of some of her characteristics. These could include his ideas about:
Joan’s motives, goals, aversions, and tastes,
The appearance of her body and face,
Some ways in which she is disposed to behave,
Her abilities in various social realms.
However, when Charles thinks about Joan in different realms, his descriptions of her may not all agree. For example, in their professional work, he might view Joan as helpful and highly competent—whereas in social settings he sees her as selfish and overrating herself. What could lead Charles to make such different models? Perhaps his first representation of Joan served well to describe her business self, but failed to make good predictions about her performance in more social realms. Then, when he tried to change that description, it made new mistakes in the contexts where it had formerly worked—and he ended up by making separate models of how Joan behaves in each of several different domains.
Physicist: Perhaps Charles should have tried harder to construct one single, unified model of Joan.
Such attempts will usually fail, because each of a person’s mental realms may need different kinds of representations. Indeed, whenever a subject becomes important to us, we tend to build multiple models for it—and this chapter will argue that this ever-increasing diversity appears to be a principal source of our human resourcefulness.
To more clearly see what leads this variety, let’s consider a simpler situation: Suppose that you find that your car won’t start. Then, to diagnosis what might be wrong, you will find that you need to switch among several different ways to think about your car:
If the key is stuck, or the brake won’t release, you must think in terms of mechanical parts.
If the starter won’t turn, or if there is no spark, you must think in terms of electrical circuits.
If you’ve run out of gas, or the air intake’s blocked, you must think about how your car consumes fuel.
It is the same in every domain; to answer different types of questions, we often need different kinds of representations. For example, if you wish to study Psychology, your teachers will make you take courses in at least a dozen subjects, such as Neuropsychology, Neuroanatomy, Personality, Perception, Physiology, Pharmacology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Mental Health, Child Development, Learning Theories, Language and Speech, etc. Each of those subjects uses different models to describe different aspects of the human mind.
Similarly, to learn about Physics, you would need to study subjects called, Thermodynamics, Calculus, Electromagnetic Fields; Quantum Mechanics, Optics; Solid State and Fluid Mechanics, Theory of Groups, and Relativity. Each of those subjects has its own ways to describe the events that occur in the physical world.
Student: I thought that physicists seek to find a single model or “grand unified theory” to explain all phenomena in terms of some very small number of general laws.
Those ‘unified theories of physics’ are grand, indeed—but to apply them to any particular case, we usually need to use some specialized representation to deal with each particular aspect of what all the scienti