The Self. But the Other Self

P: “Were you napping?”

N: “God, yes. Being virtually twice your age has its disadvantages.”

P: “I keep going back to the difficulties of the »mind«. I think my nights are getting worse. I lie there and look for the »me«, but it really eludes, well, ME! So is there a »me« after all?”

N: “One viewpoint is that the syntactic »me« is just a position in a sentence without which it would fall apart. Language cannot express itself without it. Languages have needs to.”

Either she found that funny, or she needed Nell’s help to release the tensions.

N: “Are you really having trouble sleeping?”

P: “Well, not trouble, but anxieties or something. Why can’t I find the »me«?! It should be there. I have felt like that all my life. Talking about it just reminded me. The closer I feel to »me« the more it feels like sorrow or yearning, and not at all the »me« other people seems to allude to.

The more I lie in wait trying to watch out for it, the more it strikes me that the »me« is not me, but something that seeks to graft a story involving »me« into the fabric of ‘my’ everyday life.”

N: “I have given some consideration to last night’s conversation. Do philosophers muddle the waters around the subject too much? Is it an experience? Is it the grammatical subject? Is it irreducible and its own substance? Does it follow the rules of the brain that thinks? Does thinking follow the neurological rules at all?”

P: “I know! Imagine me lying in my bed in the middle of the night, tossing and turning and speculating like mad. I needed answers, but philosophy feels more like monkeys trying to ascend from a slimy swamp. Everything they grab on to is surely being dragged into the mud rather than them pulled out of it.”

Nell couldn’t help picturing Patricia in bed. She stumbled for a brief second, but her empathy overcame her. Patricia was a bright, attractive, but drowning girl. Conventional wisdom would have her spoon fed with platitudes like finding her true self, having faith in her self and the likes. But Nell had an inkling about the battleground this girl’s mind constituted.

N: “May I make an analogy that I’d like to hear your thoughts on?”

P: “Go ahead.”

N: “You know the famous double slit experiment in the early 1900s’ physics? It spelled the end of classical mechanics and led to quantum mechanics?”

P: “I know of it. It’s about the behaviour of light, is it not?”

N: “The behaviour of all particles. Light is electromagnetic waves, so waves. You can tell, because of the diffraction pattern on a wall you get, when you direct a light beam through two narrow slits less than a millimetre apart.”

P: “That one, yes, I am acquainted with it. When you shoot one particle at a time towards the opening, those particles that get through will necessarily be limited to passing through one of the slits. The photographic screen behind the slits build up a diffraction pattern spot by spot whenever a light particle hits it, like the particle knew we were observing it in such a way that we expect it to behave like a wave. It behaves like a wave because we design an experiment where it needs to have wave-nature. If you change the experiment to gain knowledge about which slit it passes, the question makes it behave like a particle instead, and the pattern changes.”

N: “Very good. Okay, somehow the particle has the properties of a wave even though it is a particle. Now change the wording a little bit. Imagine a puzzle. Every piece of the puzzle contains sort of a rough outline of the complete picture. Stem cells in the body have that property. Imagine we apply that principle to »mind particles«.”

P: “To what?”

N: “Every word you say contains or triggers a faint shadow of the complete picture. When you just express a single idea or two, you won’t notice the huge, fat monster on the wall. But when you talk long enough, something larger starts to loom over the philosopher. Each word he utters condemns him to experience the self. It even strikes him as inescapable real to the extent that thinking it unreal amounts to absurdity.”

P: “Excellent suggestion, Nell! And it ties directly in with a neurological hypothesis we can build for the purpose: That some neurons code for this ‘ghost’ if you will. Many simple ideas could theoretically connect to this self-perception. If neurological excitation could also accumulate over time, then it would mean that the more we thought in a certain way, the surer it would be that the mythical Self manifesteded itself.”

N: “Ah, now I think I see what you mean, when you talk about neurons and ideas. If neurons coding for four different ideas fire simultaneously, you think the result will be an animal consisting of all four ideas, right?

So in that case, the Self becomes real when we talk using subject-relating words and ideas. It’s the accumulation of ideas that finally causes the Self-neuron to trigger full throttle. I’m just throwing things on the table now.”

Patricia felt the energy in their shared universe now.

P: “Okay okay, perhaps we can get our neurological cake and feed the analytic hunger too. I got one: The way this process manifests itself in our mind (as in Hume’s impressions or Berkeley’s ideas) is by way of analytic necessity. Thinking the contrary strikes us as being absurd.”

N: “Interesting. This SEP article on Dualism lists several arguments in a long back-and-forth between arguments for and against dualism. I can read from some notes I made.”

P: “Hume really means that sense impressions can float around freely?”

N: “Frankly I don’t know. When I have read Hume, I will answer. Sorry, dear.”

P: “Just another book we will have to read together.”

N: “In this psychological arena, analytical thinking becomes a strange animal. It is as if we all agree that once the brain chemistry has done its work, we might as well deal with the resulting mental state and ignore the physical state. Is it okay if I call them MS and PS for short? Mental and physical states.”

P: “Sure.”

N: “I just wanted to say that we treat MS as different in every way from PS. We even apply MS to the analysis of PS no matter what. How could we not? Back to your Self-neuron that slowly warms up. We philosophise as if there exists a bunch of those neurons coding for ideas of Perfect Lines, Mathematical Precision and so forth. When you see a super straight laser line, where in the whole makeup of the visual cortex does perfect line show up? And yet we can admire its precision. The World Out There is kind of the siren’s song each MS whispers in our ears. How could we do anything but hold it as truth?

The article quotes Geoffrey Madell:”

But while my present body can thus have its partial counterpart in some possible world, my present consciousness cannot. Any present state of consciousness that I can imagine either is or is not mine. There is no question of degree here. (91)

P: “It must be so! And nothing - i.e. no PS - compels it to be so. Note how almost visceral it feels: Your thoughts are yours, not mine, and my thoughts are mine, not yours. Like we are almost ready to defend the proposition with aggression. Perhaps identity is just that: The application of an animal instinct to discern between yours and mine. But no matter how many times I read Geoffrey’s quoted statement, it amounts to the same thing: Something about it seems glaringly necessary. Except for the fact that that I he writes about seems to elude me.”

N: “It makes all the difference if we start with the MS and approach the PS or the other way around. Specifically: If we initially postulate that ideas come from neurons, wouldn’t we have to disband all assumptions that seem analytically necessary?”

P: “Yes! That’s exactly what confuses me.”

N: “And yet we cross-examine concepts like they should adhere to the lawfulness that the concept itself suggests. And here’s the kicker: Mathematics seems to be just as consistent as the ideas it represent. Show me the physical states that can provide the basis for that. Recall all our discussions on analytic and synthetic a priori.”

P: “And yet: When we talk about PS, we can only obey the Berkeleyan ideas or Humean impressions of said ideas. WE apply the image of wet, spongy neurons to be a mismatch against mathematical rigour, and argues that perfection can’t come from spongy wetware. But all we do is mix images and thus, ideas.”

Nell sighed. Two flies drowning in a microscopic pool of water with no way to break free or alter their faith.

N: “You sound cheerier now.”

P: “Talking with you shines a small ray of light in an all too vast dark void. I think I came across those thought experiments earlier, those about the conceivability of our own non-existence.”

N: “It feels cold, right?”

P: “Yes! Raw and brutal existential nakedness. Hume’s bundle is like holding on to the edge of the ledge with one hand. Each finger in the bundle seems to come loose when you contemplate it. Nothing guarantees ‘you’. When no fibers are left in the bundle that can tether you to the current world, current love, current passionate existence, something falls. That something is the thing writhing in agony when you disassemble the ‘me’ that we talked about.”

Nell felt rotten. Everything about this girl’s desperation made her own body throb with desire for the poor girl. And yet, if she ever would have lived out her desires, they all would have amounted to a deeply felt hug and a stray hand accidentally touching her lively young body. Nell disciplined herself to rise to the occasion and be the friend Patricia needed right now. But she wondered about nature’s cruel way of intertwining fates. The two of them did not perfectly complement each other completely, but the asymmetry resulted in an existential engine which kept propelling the team forward and forward.

Then Patricia spoke again. Never stupidly, never primitively. Somehow this girl mistook her rare sensitivity for inability to play the academic game. She was doomed to make a fool of herself in any group dynamics, but let her sensitivity unfold, and she turned wonderful and worthy of protection.

P: “You know those experiments in cognitive science where they examine how infants appear to have concepts so early that they are almost innate. They monitor if babies spend extra time looking at some situation rather than others. The hypothesis is that wrong situations make them gaze longer than right situations. An example could be that they stare longer at the odd situation of an object that disappears while occluded by something. Physical objects must persist even when hidden behind something.”

N: “Okay, yes. I can imagine a rich research program along those lines. Probably we should discuss the conclusions. I mean, post-applying a conclusion using a language that the infant doesn’t have seems wrong to me.”

P: “Absolutely. And you hit the nail on the head. Thought experiment coming up.”

N: “I’m ready. Shoot.”

P: “This pre-linguistic notion of a persistent object, could you envision an experiment devised in such a way that it was the pre-linguistic Self that was proven to be innate, or given long before we learned about ourselves.”

N: “Okay. So this Self is… it’s there before my own self. »I« am not this …

Patricia, what the hell are you suggesting?”

Now it was Nell’s turn to stumble and fall in the web that is Patricia’s insanity.

N: “I see it. The Self is a muscle reflex. Order a Self, and the brain flexes its muscles in that direction, long before we have one developed. Later in life — because this Self remains stable — we garnish and envelop it in a verbal version — the proverbial Me.

Ah, but wait a second. This is a thought experiment. The thrust of it comes from the fact that it may not be true, but I can imagine it to be true.”

P: “Yes. That is what makes me sick with confusion: That our world can change, not by facts, but by thinking something the relativises our concepts. Just by thinking we can change our world!”

N: “Now we understand the calm tranquility that is dualism: What persistence, what peace of mind it is to know that all we know is anchored in objects that can’t change, because they consists of physical matter.”

P: “But you and I will never know that peace of mind again, will we?”

N: “No, Patricia. But whatever frothing sea you feel you are struggling in, I want to be there with you. Please, can’t I?”

P: “I want you to, I really do. You are my best friend in these endless nights.”

Nell knew the rest: Those undercurrents were strong and the water was dark. A self, a rudimentary, ordinary, earth bound self. A protection against the forces that produces the very same Self as a cognitive act when the infant or adult human monkey needed it. What a wonderful protection against those forces taking back what it contractually owned.

Patricia had lost her protection.

•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•