Epilogue: Reinventing Ourselves

We have all been victims of a hoax, perpetrated on us by our own brains. Our brains are spectacular engines of improvisation that can, in the moment, generate a colour, an object, a memory, a belief or a preference, spin a story, or reel off a justification. And it is such a compelling storyteller that we are fooled into thinking that it is not inventing our thoughts ‘in the moment’ at all, but fishing them from some deep inner sea of pre-formed colours, objects, memories, beliefs or preferences, of which our conscious thoughts are merely the shimmering surface. But our mental depths are a confabulation – a fiction created in the moment by our own brain. There are no pre-formed beliefs, desires, preferences, attitudes, even memories, hidden in the deep recesses of the mind; indeed, the mind has no deep recesses in which anything can hide. The mind is flat: the surface is all there is.

Our brains are, then, relentless and compelling improvisers, creating the mind, moment by moment. But, as with any improvisation – in dance, music or storytelling – each fresh thought is not created out of nothing. Each fresh improvisation is built from the fragments of past improvisations – so each of us is a unique history, together with a wonderfully creative machine for redeploying that history to create new perceptions, thoughts, emotions and stories. The layering of that history makes some patterns of thought natural for us, others awkward or uncomfortable. But while drawing on our past, we are, none the less, continually reinventing ourselves; and by directing that reinvention, we can shape who we are, and who we will become.

So we are not driven by hidden, inexorable forces from a dark and subterranean mental world. Instead, our thoughts and actions are transformations of past thoughts and actions, and we often have considerable latitude, and a certain judicial discretion, regarding which precedents we consider, which transformations we allow. As today’s thought or action is tomorrow’s precedent, we are, quite literally, reshaping and reinventing ourselves thought by thought.

This is not a familiar story. It is not an intuitive story. It is a story that shakes our faith in everything we think we know about how our minds work – including what we ‘see’ and ‘feel’, the nature of memory, decision-making and personality. It is a story in which we cannot find ourselves, because there are no selves to find. So yes, it is a story of a hoax, a conspiracy, an illusion, which enfolds us so completely that we cannot see behind its veil – or even notice that there is a veil we might wish to lift. But it is also a story of how more than a century of scientific investigation of the mind has, step by step, allowed the hoax to be uncovered. Once the spell of the inner worlds, true selves, mental depths and unconscious mental forces is broken, we can see ourselves in a clearer light: we are astonishingly inventive ad hoc reasoners, creative metaphor-machines, continually welding together scattered scraps of information into momentarily coherent wholes. We are very different from the image we create for ourselves, and much more remarkable.

This is all very well, you may say. But surely we need beliefs and motives to explain why our thoughts and behaviour make sense, rather than being a completely incoherent jumble. Surely there are crucial inner facts about us, large and small, that set the course of our actions: the things we value, the ideals we believe in, the passions that move us. But if the mind is flat, despite the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, beliefs and motives cannot, in reality, be driving our behaviour – because there are no inner beliefs, and motives are a projection rather than a reality.

On the other hand, layers of precedents – the successive adaptation and transformation of previous thoughts and actions to create new thoughts and actions – can provide a very different, and more convincing, explanation for the orderly (and, on occasions, the disorderly) nature of thought. Moreover, moving from individual minds to society as a whole, our culture can be viewed as a shared canon of precedents – things we do, want, say or think – which create order in society as well as within each individual. By laying down new precedents, we incrementally and collectively create our culture. But our new precedents are based on old, shared precedents, so that our culture also creates us. Considered in isolation, our ‘selves’ turn out to be partial, fragmentary and alarmingly fragile; we are only the most lightly sketched of literary creations. Yet collectively we can construct lives, organizations and societies which can be remarkably stable and coherent.

The idea of continuous reinvention is particularly vertigo-inducing when we realize that, once the hoax is uncovered, the very idea of an objective, and external, yardstick against which to judge our behaviour as individuals, and as a society, is not just impractical, but also wholly unsustainable. There is, after all, no solid foundation upon which we can build. New thoughts, values and actions can only be justified or criticized from within a tradition of past precedents. Of course, which precedents should be applied, and which should dominate, may be matters of dispute, just as they are in the law. This does not mean that anything goes – but it does mean that the construction of our lives and our society is an inherently open-ended, creative process, and that the standards by which we judge our decisions and actions are part of that same creative process. In short, life is a game in which we play, invent the rules and keep the score ourselves.

This perspective might appear to be a recipe for a relativist nightmare: that any point of view is equally valid or equally dubious. But the reverse is true. If there are no ultimate foundations on which the good life, or the good society, is based, then the challenge in our own lives and societies is to explore and resolve conflicts in thought, whether within ourselves or between individuals. While holding onto old precedents can be seen as a conservative political impulse, the aim of bringing distinct traditions into contact, and ultimately perhaps into alignment, is the impulse behind the liberal political tradition. For example, the principle of freedom of speech is designed to allow public debate to link together momentary beliefs across time, individuals and communities; and such debate may be codified by mathematical and scientific methods. Free markets, money, trade and the modern economic system connect together our preferences by means of the exchange of goods, services and money. Democratic politics and the rule of law can resolve potential clashes between our actions (where a decision at one moment may encroach on a decision at some future moment, by the same person or another). In a liberal society, then, we do not merely dream our own individual dream or write our own particular story; rather, we continually strive to link our stories together into a single cohesive whole.

Yet, even in a liberal society in which preferences, beliefs and actions can be connected, precedent-based thinking appears inherently conservative. How, then, are perceptual reorganizations, sudden insights, religious conversions and conceptual and political revolutions possible? One answer is that memory is fragile; so that we can often end up starting again from scratch, and coming up with a different answer. We forget the old ‘story’ and create a new one.

But there is another possibility: that changing part of the story can lead to a cascade of far-reaching consequences. For all its focus on the authority of the past, we should remember that successions of precedents can, step by step, lead to remarkable metamorphoses. Legal and political systems can transform themselves over the generations, though at each step guided by the interpretation and reinterpretation of what went before. A mathematician may use past precedents in methods of reasoning in order to show that an entire theory is inconsistent – and may even conclude that a great swathe of apparent precedents (previous ‘results’ from that theory) must be abandoned. Individuals may gradually begin, or cease, to trust a cult leader, or a religious or political text; they may take up, or abandon, a cause, a project, a relationship – or in a million other ways transform their lives So what counts as a precedent can itself shift – and shift again. We hope to stumble towards better and better ‘stories’ – but we can only create new stories by starting with the stories we have.

We should, moreover, never assume that achieving greater coherence necessarily implies cultural or intellectual progress. And we must be ever-vigilant against allowing ourselves or our societies to ossify into coherent, but crushing systems of precedent. But we should also remember that we are not hemmed in by occult psychic forces within us: any ‘prisons’ of thought are of our own invention, and can be dismantled just as they have been constructed. If the mind is flat – if we imagine our minds, our lives and our culture – we have the power to imagine an inspiring future, and to make it real.