I do exist, but not for long

November 2, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Social brain 

Years ago I was mountain walking in Wales. After about six exhausting hours we climbed to the second highest peak in Snowdonia. Just as we arrived, a middle-aged man carrying what looked like a very heavy rucksack dashed past us having clearly run the whole way. He didn’t burst our bubble of self satisfaction but he certainly deflated it.  

Writing and talking about how the brain works, I have often been reminded of that day. I struggle though the undergrowth of neuroscience, the winding paths of behavioural economics and the forest of social psychological research to arrive triumphantly at what I think is a new view of cognition, only then to find a philosopher of mind lying sunbathing on the peak having reached the same view by gliding through the thin air of abstract reasoning.

So I hesitate before sharing my excitement at a review by Thomas Nagel of Galen Strawson’s recent book ‘Selves: An essay in revisionary metaphysics’. The core thesis of the book, arrived at by a combination of phenomenological introspection and metaphysical inquiry, is this.

There are two meanings of the word ‘I’. There is an ‘I’ which is not fundamentally different to any other thing that we might describe. In this sense the statement ‘I went to the shops’ is no more problematic than ‘Fred went to the shops’ or, come to that, ‘the dog ate some biscuits’.  The other ‘I’ is what we mean when we say ‘I feel angry’ or ‘I don’t know’. This is the idea of something that is uniquely personal and internal, having an experience and exercising agency.

I have said in an earlier blog post that I am fascinated by the phrase ‘I said to myself’. If I get Strawson’s thesis right, the uncomplicated concept in this phrase is the ‘I’ while the ‘myself’ is the mysterious personal thing. The ‘I’ in ‘I said to myself’ is no more difficult than ‘I said to Fred’ or ‘the bus hit the curb’. ‘Fred said to me’ is also no more complicated than ‘Fred kicked the ball’. However, ‘Fred said to myself’ would not only be ungrammatical it also involves a completely different, non-material, concept.

Allowing again for the possibility that I have got this all wrong, Strawson’s dual track methodology of introspection and metaphysics leads him to two conclusions. First, that the myself in ‘I said to myself’ exists and is a qualitatively different kind of thing to other things (a point which many philosophers and scientists would reject). Second, and this is the bit that makes my brain hurt, that this ‘myself’ thing exists only in the moment.

In other words, while the ‘I’ which is the uncomplicated thing like Fred or a dog does have temporal consistency (I am the same person, more or less, as the person I was five minutes, five weeks or five years ago). The ‘myself’ thing only exists at the moment that I am having an experience. Selves do not exist through time. Once an experience has stopped being experienced it enters the realm of all other things. And the self I am at this moment lasts only until the next moment.

Strawson claims this not only on the grounds of metaphysics but because – he says – this on reflection is how he feels:

“ When I consider myself in the whole-human-being way I fully endorse the conventional view that there is in my case – that I am – a single subject of experience – a person – with long term diachronic continuity. But when I experience myself as inner mental subject and consider the detailed character of conscious experience, my feeling is that I am – that the thing that I most essentially am is – continually completely new’

If I wasn’t a chief executive, if I had a much bigger brain and if I could sit still for more than five minutes I would love to think for hours and hours and hours about this idea, and what it means for me and the world. But all I have is twenty minutes to bang out a blog post. And who knows who I will be by the time I read the comments.

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Comments

16 Comments on I do exist, but not for long

  1. Jonathan on Mon, 2nd Nov 2009 5:41 pm

    2. Strawson is a great – though quite difficult I’ve always found – philosopher. He’s been writing about this stuff for years and his work on the continuity of the self was standard reading back when I was a philosophy undergrad.

    So I wouldn’t want to take him on – but as an instant reflection I think there may be at least two ways into his argument.

    The first around how you separate the continuous ‘long moments’ that make up my consciousness of myself. He concedes that they are diachronic but still thinks they are separable. How?

    The second is that while there are two senses of ‘I’: the ‘whole-human-being way’ which he thinks is continuous and the ‘inner mental subject’ that isn’t – it’s not clear that these two forms can be separated even if they can be differentiated. Doesn’t the inner mental subject always hitch a ride on the whole human being? Why doesn’t that give it continuity?

    I’m sure he answers these in the book (like you I’ve only read the review).

    The more important question perhaps is where all this takes you. For centuries philosophers have problematised the notion of the self. Then psychoanalysts did, now neuro-scientists and social psychologists do (all with quite similar conclusions). Contemporary science may provide a better empirical basis for these doubts about the autonomy or unity of the conscious self, but can it achieve what philosophy has always struggled with and explain how this changes our lives as we live them? What in the end is the difference between a world in which we are who we think we are and a world in which we merely think we are who we think we are?

    I guess that’s what the RSA’s work in this area is trying to do. The failure of centuries of philosophy to pin this down with certainty is what makes that work so interesting but also what makes it challenging.

    By the way, Nagel himself is really good on this stuff. His best known essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is brilliant.

  2. Gareth Heal on Mon, 2nd Nov 2009 5:55 pm

    3. I’m a new subscriber to this blog but I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

    I’ll admit I’m more than a little out of my depth to comment intelligently on this subject but I’m enjoying trying to wrap my head round it.

    Am I correct in thinking that if we are the sum of our experiences we are ‘continually completely new’ because we’re constantly experiencing new things?

    Any suggested further reading is welcome.

    Hopefully this won’t keep me awake later…

    G.

  3. matthewtaylor on Mon, 2nd Nov 2009 6:44 pm

    4. Hi Gareth

    Thanks for your kind words. I don’t think it is that experience feels completely new is because we or the world has changed but because consciousness is defined in relation to a felt experience and that any felt experience lasts only until it is replaced with a new felt experience.

    Jonathan (see earlier comment) understands this stuff much better then me but I guess it’s like the difference between a journey on a train and a moment on a train. A moment by definition is momentary while a journey lasts for a period of time. We tend to think of our selves as like a journey so that the current bit of the journey is similar to the past bits and the future bits, whereas Strawson is arguing that moments are all different one from another and that the one we are having now is the subjective sense of self. What happened in the past and what happens in the future happens to the material us but it doesn’t’ happen to the subjective self that we are this moment.

    It is a different point. I know, but this reminds me of many forms of therapy and self help that advocate living in the moment. Human beings are machines for making meaning. We give our life meaning and then attach that meaning to the momentary idea of self hood, which generates an idea of continuous self hood. What would it be if we were able to separate these things. Recognising that we are a material thing with certain concrete characteristics but also that our experience of being is based more on the myth of the continuous self, and that we might get more from life if we gave less emphasis to the continuity of self (thus over determining what is possible for us) and more to being in and creating the context which is most continually conducive to the full expression of the momentary self.

  4. matthewtaylor on Mon, 2nd Nov 2009 6:50 pm

    5. Hi JCW. Great tip. I’ll find the essay. You are very consistent in your Tallis-esque questioning of whether any of this will change the way we are in the world. It is a very fair question. I find myself fascinated about insights into the inner life of people of the past. This does seem to me to suggest that different thinking about who we are and how we work as a species does have a wider impact. I wonder whether future shifts might occur in the wider context of behaviour shaping and a shift to a deeper more sustainable account of individual and collective well-being. But I agree with you that ideas like Nudge offer a much more realistic way for new bring and behaviour thinking to influence us that metaphysics (albeit not as interesting)

  5. Mike Amos-Simpson on Mon, 2nd Nov 2009 10:04 pm

    6. what I want to know is why it took you 6 hours to walk up that hill ;-)

  6. Gareth Heal on Mon, 2nd Nov 2009 10:40 pm

    7. Hi there

    Thanks for such a prompt and considered reply – really quite enlightening.

    I’m going to make the time to read through the other links you’ve posted surrounding today’s blog.

    It would great to be able to contribute more to the thread but I’ll have to wait until I’ve read quite a bit more.

    However, for the ‘moment’ I am engaged.

    Thanks,

    G.

  7. Abi Stephenson on Tue, 3rd Nov 2009 11:45 am

    8. I was at a philosophy conference a few years ago and one gentleman very bravely (and pretty intuitively) asserted ‘But obviously I am a completely different person now than I was when I was a child, or even 10 years ago…’ – and this led to mighty guffaws from the more traditional academics (not many continental philsophers were present), and a protest from me.

    I was very much convinced that we want to in some way prove that this is most emphatically *not* the case (that selves change) – that instead we are attempting to find some kind of continuity of identity that crucially *does* persist over time, complete physical change and varied experience, but that also incorporates those changes underneath the umbrella of a single ‘I’. So we are looking to characterise something which can undergo various ‘changes of mind’, countless altering experiences, and complete physical renewal, but which nevertheless is indubitably the same self it started out and will end up as.

    First year philosophy undergrads are treated to the story of the ship in Ancient Greece, which undergoes an annual ceremonial journey from x to y (insert names of Ancient Greek ports here..). Every few months one of the planks of the ship is replaced due to rot etc, until eventually the ship is made of entirely new timber, and nothing remains of the original apart from its name, the nature of its original journey, and the general conceptual framework of the thing.

    This basic identity problem (further complicated by the fact that all the original bits are put back together and rebuilt in a museum) of course doesn’t apply completely to the conscious, thinking, reinventing self – and this is where we might happily employ Kant’s theory of the transcendental unity of apperception, which I think is a really satisfying and helpful explanation of an idea of the united self which observes and synthesises objects and experiences the world, but which is certainly the basis for a much longer conversation….

    Matt, I’m sure you have thoughts…?

  8. matthewtaylor on Tue, 3rd Nov 2009 12:03 pm

    9. But why did your lecturers’ waste your time on ships when they could sinmply have shown you this…

    http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?hl=en&rlz=1T4ADBS_enGB280&resnum=0&q=youtube+trigger’s+broom&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=AhvwStndM6KZjAf19LXKCA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQqwQwAA#

  9. Lewesbusker on Tue, 3rd Nov 2009 3:55 pm

    10. Ah, Grasshopper. The answer you seek first appeared around 1500 years ago.

    What Strawson’s thing sounds very much like is T’ien-T’ai’s Buddhist doctrine of ‘Ichinen Sanzen’ – how every life moment [Ichinen] possesses 3,000 possible ‘worlds’.

    The ‘myself’ you refer to changes from moment to moment depending on which of ‘10 worlds’ (lifestates) you are in; which of ‘10 factors’ (ways) in which that lifestate expresses itself; which of ‘3 realms’ the myself is expressed in (self, society, environment). Since each of the ‘10 worlds’ contain the other, the 3,000 number is made up from 10 x 10 (worlds) x 10 (factors) x 3 (realms). More stuff at http://bit.ly/I_said_to_myself

    The idea of 3,000 different ‘myselfs’ is, admittedly, mind-boggling. The positive thing about Ichinen Sanzen however is that it means you’re never stuck, since life can change in a moment.

  10. Mike Amos-Simpson on Tue, 3rd Nov 2009 4:16 pm

    11. Triggers broom!! thanks for making my day, I feel like a changed man….

  11. Mike Amos-Simpson on Tue, 3rd Nov 2009 4:19 pm

    12. @Matthew you might want to check that link though I don’t think it goes where you intended!

  12. Chris Cook on Tue, 3rd Nov 2009 7:30 pm

    13. The way I look at it is that there is an objective “I” which is your quasi-Fred, ie it is the “I” the world sees, and which your subjective “I” sees in the mirror.

    Then there is the conscious subjective “I” which is what is recording the seeing.

    But I think that there is also an unconscious “I” which is intuitively making the value decisions which your subjective “I” then rationalises. This is the “I” that decides that the moustache has to come off when subjective I observes objective I in the mirror…….

    I have been attracted by Pirsig’s “Metaphysics of Quality” since I first came across it: and I think that it is the unconscious “I” which defines our relationship with reality.

  13. Jonathan on Thu, 5th Nov 2009 2:41 pm

    14. Oh dear… consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but if I have accidently been consistent, I don’t think I’ve been clear.

    I do think that new thinking about who we are will over time alter how we see ourselves and how we behave, but I think it’s challenging (though I’m sure not impossible) to manage that process to particular public policy ends…

    Anyway can we have a Levi-Strauss memorial lecture? This post from the LRB blog may convince you in which he talks about the duality of his self in extreme old age. “He said he felt like a ’shattered hologram’ that had lost its unity but still retained an image of the whole self.”

    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/

  14. Matthew Kalman on Mon, 9th Nov 2009 6:51 pm

    15. Shame I missed this blog post.

    You can *directly* viscerally experience a large number of your different ‘I’s if you try out the ‘Big Mind’ process – which is a mix of Gestalt therapy, Zen and Jungian ‘voice’ work. You can even do it at home – it takes minutes.

    It is pretty much idiot-proof – it worked for me ;-)

    Don’t philosophise about this, try it for yourself!

    One of the long-running East-West spiritual approaches is Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way’ – it revolves around the core idea that we are made up of a crowd of different, competing ‘I’s, and has plenty of experiments you can do to try to verify what’s going on (in your inner conversation of multiple ‘I’s).

    Prof Bill Torbert’s ‘Action Inquiry’ approach to organisational development draws strongly on this 4th Way work – so it’s not just ‘New Age’ woo-woo.

    Prof Kegan’s recent book from Harvard Business Press on ‘Immunity to Change’ also revolves around a way of identifying competing ‘I’s within oneself.

    My view is that modern progressives need to get to know all this stuff – not be faintly embarrassed about seeking this kind of self-understanding (or focused on it merely as a something to read about, rather than ‘do’!)

    As Kegan and Torbert show, it can be important to building resilient, capable ‘Learning organisations’ – just don’t expect a paper on this from IPPR or Demos…

    God I sound arrogant… ;-)

    Just one of my many ‘I’s, the humble ones sometimes go quiet when I write comments on blogs ;-)

    Cheers,

    Matthew

  15. matthewtaylor on Tue, 10th Nov 2009 5:46 pm

    16. Thanks Matthew. Some great tips here. i will get reading…

  16. matthewtaylor on Tue, 10th Nov 2009 5:50 pm

    17. Shattered hologram. Wow. That’s me the morning after six pints. You will no doubt be amused that this month’s New Humanist (edited by my old man) contains an article by Ray Tallis attacking neurological determinists like – well me (there even a picture of me!)

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