When I look inside myself I see nothing there. I don’t do it often. Even as I compose this, I’m giving my inner “self” a sidelong glance at best. The reason I can’t usually achieve such a moment of clarity is that my life is too busy and filled with distractions and duties, which are external things. In those times there’s an assumption of selfhood that makes everything easy. I like this, I don’t like this, I must do this, I can’t do that. The more accurate version would be “this moment’s instance of the various senses and processes of this pile of organs is compelled toward this or away from that.”
This is how “I’ve” thought of “myself” for some time now (alright no more quotes), but it’s not completely accurate. This article is an attempt at refining the idea. Yeah, I’m making it up as I go. We’ll see how that turns out.
Within that pile of organs and processes aforementioned, there is one function that could be reasonably termed a self. It is a program constructed over a lifetime of experiences and ideas. What is it? An idea of entity, of unity – that all the mess that comprises this body and mind are a singular being with inherent properties of desire, distaste, will / agency, etc. Functionally this is true, which is why I don’t see too egregious of a contradiction in using personal pronouns (possibly more often than I should). Factually, I don’t think it is true.
It’s the word “inherent” up there. Every desire or distaste and the will that chooses how to act on them, these are separable from the concept of entity, aren’t they? Simple artificial intelligences are told how to react to stimulus ahead of the stimulus being encountered. If this happens, then do that. We don’t think of those AIs as having a self, and we’re right. But who’s to say we have a self either? Let’s say my desire and distaste are like the roomba’s instructions to move toward this and away from that, and my will is the roomba’s programmed way of acting on those inputs. Where is the entity in this analogy?
I got meat like a roomba has plastic. That is a singular locus where all the sensations and imperatives that comprise me reside. That’s an observable self, and meets a reasonably basic definition of such. My problem is self as the ghost in the machine. I ain’t feelin’ it. Yes, one of the programs within me habitually acts the role of the self, constructs a narrative of entity out of disparate extremely destructible and mutable elements, but it seems so fake…
I don’t know if, in the course of writing this, I’ve gotten any closer to pinning my problem. Let me keep trying for a minute…
Naw. I’m running out of sauce for daily posting. Certainly, I’m out of queue. Let’s just see how much longer the pile of organs can keep this baloney rollin’…
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As Dennett put it, the self is the center of narrative gravity. (Almost your exact words.) But I think “fake” is too strong a word — it implies malice, or at least something that needs to be corrected. No, not at all! Again invoking Dennett, it’s more a kind of user illusion, like icons on a computer screen, there to do a job and (thankfully) hide all the gory details that happen behind the scenes. It’s as real as those icons — I’m looking at a few of them right now, so I’m happy to call them real.
A Roomba can operate without a narrative, I think — it’s not yet an edge case — but a human cannot. I believe it’s a mistake to insist on something more, to search endlessly for a literal ghost in the machine. Your narrative is the narrative of a human being, and that’s a wonderful enough thing in itself.
… “this moment’s instance of the various senses and processes of this pile of organs …”
This reminds me of a snarkasm from adjusting to the pattern of individuals using “they” as a personal pronoun: as a grammar purist, I thought [ahem] they should maintain consistency by also saying “we” and “us” (etc) rather than singular forms (e.g., Queen Victoria).
I have since more or less been beaten into conformity by the general decline in linguistic precision across the board. Can anyone report whether this applies to other modern languages besides English?
Oops – apologies for closetag fail! So much for (my) pretensions to precision…
fixed it for you! this isn’t the reason i favor they/them but it should be…
thx for the thoughtful comments!
“Decline in linguistic precision”, was language ever not a total mess build on whatever works well enough in a specific situation?
I agree that it’s all an illusion, a way to handle our awareness of ourselves. I’m not sure it’s wonderful, it’s just how the lump of meat has to work
It’s interesting looking at the cases where this starts to break down, like depersonalisation and plurality. When these illusions stop working it shows more about how our brains work. IMO, people who don’t experience these sorts of ways of thinking put too much faith in their internal states
Bébé Mélange @ # 4 – Thanks for the cleanup!
dangerousbeans @ # 5: … was language ever not a total mess buil[t] on whatever works well enough …
Language in general, quite so.
But when you compare, say, The New Yorker to, f’rinstance, The Guardian, or James Baldwin to damn near anybody, you can see what high standards look(ed) like. Basics like noun-verb agreement or making clear just who or what a pronoun or clause refers to elude even a lot of professional wordsmiths these days.
Were those high standards, or just white and wealthy? James Baldwin excepted obviously
Interestingly I ran across Baldwin’s work If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? which to my reading disagrees with your point. It also demonstrates a man too fond of a comma to have a clear sentence, but i get the vibe that was a deliberate choice, and serves to demonstrate that the reasons for language were never reducible to something as simple as precision, with an accompanying sacrifice of melody, or a single clear high standard separated from the people using it and their history.
i could see both sides, to an extent. as a they/them, my lean is obvious enough tho.
dangerousbeans @ # 7: … high standards, or just white and wealthy?
A fair question regarding The New Yorker – their umlauts in particular – but they do edit everything meticulously and consistently, if a bit idiosyncratically. You just don’t see slop there like, in my first draft of # 6 here, where I wrote “eludes” and only caught my plural subject on review.
… If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?…
Which I must confess I haven’t read (yet).
… i get the vibe that was a deliberate choice…
Baldwin seems to have chosen every word with care. I do/have done a lot of copy editing, and the little alarm in the back of my head which goes off when I see writing that could have been expressed better stays utterly silent when reading Baldwin. It clangs at FtB, even in slack mode (see #8).