CHAPTER 7

Aspects of the Self

In this chapter we turn to an assortment of different questions of the will and of the self—questions of choice, responsibility, and of what sort of thing there is within us that can make choices, have responsibility, or can even “have” experiences in the first place. All this touches on some religious and some biological issues as well. Looking at the mind naturally brings up questions of the mind’s relation to the brain and to human evolution; it also brings up questions of the mind’s relation to the soul and our possible fate after death. As in previous chapters, the questions here may require you to play along with some assumptions. By turns, I’ll ask you to adopt, at least temporarily, assumptions of the evolutionary origin of the species, Judeo-Christian assumptions about God and sin, and assumptions of reincarnation from Asian religions.

Things are going to get pretty crazy by the end of this chapter. Have fun!

Why Minds?

Do you believe in the freedom of the will? Why?

What would your experience be like if we don’t have free will? Would you be able to tell?

The Philosophy

William James (1842–1910), an American Pragmatist philosopher and psychologist, considered the idea of epiphenomenalism—the idea that mental events, like thoughts, experiences, and intentions, are merely secondary effects that play no causal role. If this is true, all our decisions are made through unconscious processes, and conscious experience just hangs around making up explanations after the fact. The epiphenomenalist believes that mental experiences are like the smoke rising from a train: They are only a byproduct that is produced along the way. All the real work happens down below.

There’s something to be said for the view. Sometimes, when we are startled—as, for example, when hearing a sudden noise while walking through the woods at night—we react first and only find that we have the experience of fright once we have already begun to run away. James claims, though, that evolutionary biology indicates this view must be wrong. Surely, whatever you think about whether and which animals have minds and mental experiences, if you go back far enough in evolutionary history there must have been a time when no such things existed. So consciousness and thought evolved at some point, along with the nervous system. If consciousness plays no role in determining our actions, why would these things have come into being? In what way could they be evolutionarily adaptive, unless they are part of a feedback loop: Our consciousness is stimulated by the environment and, in turn, plays a role in determining our actions in that environment?

And yet couldn’t it be that the feedback loop is adaptive and effective, but our consciousness of it is still just an aftereffect? But if this is the case, then why wouldn’t we simply have brains, but not minds?

Vertigo

Most people believe we have a free will, but our choices are conditioned by circumstances, history, mood, and a variety of other factors. It’s best not to go grocery shopping while you’re hungry, for example. How can you tell when your choice is under some influence or another?

It’s not easy, is it? Even when we aren’t choosing entirely freely, we feel as if we are—at least while we’re making the choice. But aren’t there some circumstances in which you aren’t just influenced in your decisions, but really aren’t responsible for your actions?

If you said, “Yes,” isn’t it still true that you could have chosen otherwise in these “determined” circumstances? Isn’t your will always basically free, then?

The Philosophy

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) explored our experience of radical freedom in a variety of different ways. As a quick demonstration that we experience our will as entirely and radically free, he presented the experience of vertigo. Try this yourself, next time you’re a few stories up or near a cliff or something; you’ll see that he’s right.

Sartre says that the experience of vertigo is not a fear of falling. The feeling is one of excited agitation, not fear, and the experience is not notably more intense when there’s a real risk of slipping and falling (although then we may indeed experience fear in addition to vertigo). The experience of vertigo, instead, is the awareness that at the next moment we may choose to throw ourselves over the edge. It’s not that we want to, even secretly or subconsciously. It’s that, even though every fiber of our being shouts “No!” we are still aware that in the very next moment we could suddenly decide otherwise and that our current resolve does nothing to diminish our freedom in the next moment.

Along the same lines, he asks us to consider the gambler (although any kind of addict works equally well). The gambler may choose with full resolve not to gamble, but as soon as the question comes up again—perhaps friends are getting together for cards, or there’s merely an idle hour in the day and a casino nearby—that previous resolve counts for nothing. He must decide again, starting from scratch, every day and every moment that the question presents itself.

In this way, at the very least, we see that we always experience ourselves as possessed of a radical freedom; not only able, but condemned to choose.

Divine Foreknowledge

If you have free will, does God know what you will choose?

If God doesn’t know what you’ll choose, why not, if God is omniscient and omnipotent? If God does know what you’ll choose, why does He let you choose to do bad things?

If God lets you do bad things, when He could have stopped you, is it fair to punish you for doing what He could have stopped? Or, if it’s fair to punish you for your intention alone, why not stop you from doing something and just punish you for what you would have done?

The Philosophy

St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) took up the issue of divine foreknowledge and its seeming conflict with free will, and it really is a serious problem, if you think about it. If God is omniscient, it seems as if God must know what we are going to do before we do it. But if God knows what we’re going to do before we do it, then there must be some knowable fact about what we are going to do, and that fact must exist before we do it. But if there’s a fact about what we’re going to do before we do it, then we don’t choose freely, because there’s already a fact about what we will have chosen while we are choosing to do it. That seems to mean that we couldn’t have chosen otherwise; therefore, we don’t have free will. If we don’t have free will, then we’re not responsible for our actions, in which case surely it’s wrong to judge us on what we do. Which is to say that God’s judgment must be unjust.

Did you get all that? Do you see the problem? It’s weird stuff, but it makes sense once you’re in the middle of it.

The issue was actually explored brilliantly in “Minority Report,” a short story about “precrime” written by Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) in the 1950s. (You may be more familiar with the film Minority Report, which is less brilliant, but contains significantly more chase scenes, for whatever that’s worth.) How can there be free will if there’s foreknowledge of choices that will be made? And how can punishment for predetermined crimes be justified?

Anselm’s solution is very elegant. He claimed that the confusion is created by the false assumption that God exists in time. God, he says, exists outside of time itself, and so He sees all times as if they were present at once. The progress of time moves forward and the future is always open, and yet God can see the future even though (from our perspective, in time) the future doesn’t even exist and is entirely undetermined.

Moral Choice and Divine Punishment

One traditional response to the Problem of Evil (previously discussed in the chapter on God) is that God has to allow evil in order to let us have free will. Why would free will be so important to God?

Why not just let us choose freely, but have our bad actions always happen to fail?

Couldn’t we get the value of learning to make good rather than bad choices by just having free will when there’s not too much at stake? Like we could choose to lie and cheat, but it would never occur to us to murder?

The Philosophy

It makes some immediate sense to think that God would want us to choose to do the right thing—for us to have the option to do otherwise, but to do the good because we know and value the goodness of the good. But couldn’t God create us with the knowledge of good already? Maybe we only truly understand something when we learn it through experience, because we are of necessity not infinite beings, and so our reason and understanding is finite. And, additionally, we need to be responsible for our choices if God is going to judge us, and we don’t deserve praise for doing the right thing unless we could have done otherwise.

Of course, we might wish to ask why God chose to create a bunch of flawed beings that can make choices so that God can judge them. What’s the value in judging? But maybe the point isn’t the judging, but the understanding of the good—but if this is the case, it seems as if God should value those humans who “get it,” but not eternally punish those who don’t. What’s the point of the punishment?

It could be that free will in moral choices wasn’t God’s plan, but is the result of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the original sin that lays the ground for punishment if we fail to become good. But shouldn’t God have known that Adam would eat the apple? God starts to sound like an abusive parent: “Now look what you made me do!”

Søren Kierkegaard, whose ideas about Abraham we discussed in the chapter on God, has an interesting view on Adam’s choice. He considered that Adam had never known suffering or evil and could have had no idea of what a “consequence” would be. How could he have made the choice of whether or not to eat the apple when he had never experienced anything bad and did not know right from wrong? This experience of anxiety (or, in Kierkegaard’s Danish, angst) characterizes many of our choices today: It is the uncertainty of actions where we know the meaning of our choices will only emerge after we have made them.

The Responsibility of Objects

It’s often said that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Literally, this is obviously true. Objects don’t do things. But the phrase is supposed to be a response to a position that isn’t so obviously false. What’s the position this phrase is responding to, and what kind of responsibility does the gun bear according to that position?

It is clear in some cases that the things around us influence our choices. For example, if fast-food restaurants are required to put calorie counts on their menus, customers make healthier choices. How much responsibility does the restaurant menu’s information or lack of information bear, and how much responsibility does the customer bear in either case?

Organ donation rates rise if people getting driver’s licenses are asked if they’d like to be donors, rather than leaving it to them to seek out and check the box on the application form. What does this say about responsibility and influence?

The Philosophy

The argument about the gun’s responsibility in gun violence might seem intractable, but there’s good reason to think that it isn’t. Once we separate responsibility from blame, things get much simpler. The Actor-Network Theory of Bruno Latour (1947–), a contemporary French sociologist of science and technology, can help explain.

Latour talks about “scripts” that go along with the objects around us. The gun carries with it a series of intentions and scenarios, because guns do certain things and not others. This lays out certain pathways, which “translate” our goals and intentions. We end up thinking about ourselves and our possible interactions differently when we’re holding guns, even concealed weapons. Now, this doesn’t mean that the gun determines what we will do, but that it provides a context for action that would be inappropriate to ignore. As Latour puts it, although the agent may have intentions and goals, the gun has its script, and when the agent has a gun we can’t consider either the agent or the gun in isolation, but we have to look at the intentions of the agent-gun network.

Doesn’t this make it seem as if the “gun” has an intention? Isn’t that just crazy? Understood literally, it would be, but the gun does carry with it a series of intentions. The script of the gun gives us a series of roles to play, and it is easy to assume and play out those roles, not unlike how water flows into a riverbed rather than over the banks.

This can help us see the responsibility that things bear in our decision making, and you can see how the same analysis applies to the other examples discussed previously. But all this has left aside the question of blame!—and rightly so. We know full well that we make decisions in situations that influence choice, but that those situations clearly do not make us choose one thing rather than another. Not everyone with a gun makes the choice to shoot. Simply blaming the gun is wrong, as is simply blaming a person without considering the circumstances of choice.

Heart and Soul

Do you believe that there is a soul that survives death? What’s the basis for your belief?

What kind of thing is a thought? Where do thoughts come from, and what are they made of?

The Philosophy

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, French philosopher René Descartes gave an argument that he thought showed that the mind is separate from the body and that it survives death. The body, he pointed out, is “extended” (that is, it exists in space, has length and volume, and so on), but does not think. The mind, on the other hand, does think but is not extended. He thinks these characteristics can be easily verified through introspection. Consider a thought—where is it? How many cups of water would it hold if you hollowed it out? Imagine cutting it in half: What is half a thought like? How many would you need to make a coat? The other side of the matter seems clear enough as well. We’re made of meat and bone, and only a brief conversation with a steak should be enough to convince you that there’s not a lot going on in there.

If the mind is thinking and not extended, and the body is extended and not thinking, then they seem to be entirely distinct and separable. So the mind’s survival upon the body’s death is at least possible. But, further, can there be something like half a mind? Of course not; the mind doesn’t have parts—and so, Descartes argues, it cannot decay, and must therefore be eternal. So there you go: proof of the eternal soul!

The argument is pretty silly, of course. Just because things appear to us to be a certain way doesn’t make it so. It’s true today as it was then that we don’t really understand the connection between the brain as physical matter and the mind as we experience it “from the inside,” but we have plenty of evidence that damage to the one affects the other, and today we’re more likely to think that thoughts are “emergent phenomena”—not really things at all, but something more like processes that we call things for convenience.

Other Minds

What if what was called “red” was experienced as red by you but was experienced as green by others? Is there any way you could tell?

What if what you experienced as pain was experienced as soothing by others, and they just happen to enjoy pain and dislike being soothed? Is there any way you could tell?

What if some other people aren’t conscious and don’t have thoughts but are just very complicated biological mechanisms without a will or inner experiences? Is there any way you could tell?

The Philosophy

As far as I know, Descartes was the first to bring up this kind of question, and it makes sense that it would have arisen in the seventeenth century. At that time, automata, or self-moving machines, were a popular amusement among the wealthy—for example, when someone stepped on a switch hidden in a garden path a nude statue by the side of the path would turn to cover itself. Descartes asked his reader to imagine looking outside a window: We say that we see people going by, when in fact the senses only tell us that we see umbrellas and coats, which could as easily be a series of dressed up automata passing by. Reason, not our senses, tells us that they are people.

Now, Descartes’s point was just about how we know what we know—whether from reason or from the senses. The more radical question is how we can be sure that there’s an “inside” inside of other people at all. The most popular answer has been that we know this by analogy. We act a certain way, and mental experiences accompany those actions, so it stands to reason that others have similar mental experiences when they act in similar ways.

We can supplement this with some biological considerations. We know that colors, for example, correspond to different wavelengths of light and that our eyes and brains are constituted in definable and functionally equivalent ways, and this supports the idea that the experience of light with a wavelength around 700 nm should be not only consistently called red, but also consistently experienced as red.

The uncertainty of this, though, is still troubling. The what-it’s-like, or qualia, of a physical experience seems unrelated to the physical basis. There’s no “redness” in the wavelength, or in the eye, or in the synapses of the brain. Similarly, although there may be physical phenomena in the brain associated with the experience of pain, there’s nothing painlike to be found there—and consciousness itself isn’t something we can point to either.

Continuity of Self

What if you were a different person yesterday? Is it possible that the yesterday-you died, and you came into being this morning and just inherited yesterday-you’s memories?

Is it possible that there are two of you right now, but you’re unaware of each other, and you simply share the same memories as if you had each experienced them?

Is it possible that, five minutes ago, you switched bodies and memories with someone else? If you’re out in public, look to your right. Could you have been that person just a few minutes ago?

The Philosophy

The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) considered these questions, and his answer might be summarized as, “Sure, why not?” We have no way of knowing that each of us is a single self, or that we are the same selves that we were. The only clue we have about whether the self is constant over time is continuity of consciousness, and—past the present moment—that boils down to memory. But rather than concluding that all of these things are possible, Locke’s take-away point was that what we mean by “the self” and by personal identity is this continuity of consciousness. So if you remember being yesterday-you, then it doesn’t really make sense to even ask whether yesterday-you might have died, to be replaced by today-you (or, in other words, you-you). What you mean by saying that that was you yesterday is nothing else but that yesterday-you’s experiences belong to you as yours.

Locke gives a few more examples to show that it is consciousness that makes us who we are, not some underlying substance. If you lose a hand, there is no question that you continue to be the same person. If, on the other hand (so to speak), consciousness were located in our little fingers, if the finger were severed, we would rightly say that the finger remains the person no matter what happens to the rest of the body. Locke also considers the soul of a prince suddenly entering the body of a cobbler; today, instead, we might imagine a two-direction brain transplant. If consciousness and memory are continuous from the old bodies to the new ones, surely we’d say that the persons switched bodies, not that the persons switched brains.

Is the Self a Thing?

We were just considering whether the yesterday-you is the same you as the today-you. What does that even mean? What is the “you” that has your experiences?

Have you ever had an experience of your “you,” or just experiences of perceptions and ideas that you experienced as “yours”?

If yesterday-you might not be the same as today-you, is there any reason why you should care whether you-you dies tonight in your sleep, to be replaced by another “you” (who isn’t you) tomorrow?

The Philosophy

For Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), all of these questions would have been a load of crap. To even think that they make sense, you have to make a big metaphysical assumption: that there is some kind of permanent “self” that “has” experiences and hangs around behind the scenes through your whole life. But what basis is there for such a belief? We don’t have any experience of a self at all. Sure, everything we experience is experienced as our experience, but we don’t have any experience of being a thing that has those experiences—we only experience the experiences. “The mind,” Hume wrote, “is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance.” But even this analogy is flawed, because it implies at least a constant stage upon which these experiences appear. Hume added that “the comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.”

Hume had no patience for things we would like to believe, if there is no evidence to support them, and this is abundantly clear in this case. What else could we believe more strongly than that we exist as subjects—as things to which our experiences happen? And yet our experience is entirely and precisely devoid of any experience of the self: When we try to imagine the self that undergoes an experience, we find that is has no qualities or attributes apart from the experience it is undergoing. Worse yet, when we try to contemplate the “self” having the experience, we find that the self has already retreated! Try it—you’ll find that you are no longer the you having the experience. Instead you’ve become the you that is experiencing contemplating the “you” that had had the experience. And now that you’re thinking about that, you’re another step removed (and now, another [and now, another (and so on)] ).

Life of the Will and Death of the Self

Do you believe in any kind of reincarnation or transmigration of souls? If so, what kind, and why?

Most people don’t have memories of past lives, so it seems that if any kind of transmigration occurs, it usually includes memory loss. But if memories are lost, what is it, exactly, that is transferred?

Assume for the moment that after your death you will become someone else but have no memory of having been who you are today. Why would you care? Would that be any different to you than if you were entirely annihilated rather than reborn?

The Philosophy

In the nineteenth century, philosophical works from Asia were becoming available to Europeans, and Arthur Schopenhauer developed a post-Kantian view of the world very much in keeping with the German tradition but strongly influenced by Buddhism and by the Hindu Vedas. He thought that just as we ourselves appear in two aspects—to the senses and to science we appear as a thing, but in our inner experience we experience ourselves as thought and will—so too is everything in reality both matter and will. Will is the “inner truth” and reality of the world. The will, then, is not destroyed by death. Will continues on in the soil that our bodies become, in the plants that that soil becomes as they take up its nutrients, and in the animals that those plants become as the plants are eaten and digested, and so on. Individuality dies, but the will is indestructible.

Schopenhauer presented this in a dialogue, where he imagined the anguished reply, “I—I—I want to exist! That is what I care about, and not an existence which has to be reasoned out first in order to show that it is mine.” This, Schopenhauer thinks, is ridiculous. The “I” of the will, the “subject” that undergoes experiences and wills to live, is the least distinctive and individual thing about us! The will to live drives us as it drives all things, even against our own interests and happiness! The will traps us in an unending cycle of desire, and life becomes nothing but the constant cycle from the pain of desire to the boredom of satisfaction. We should seek instead, not that the “I” should survive death, but that the “I” should be destroyed within life—in a Buddhistic “negation of the will.” Even death does not quiet the will. Only ceasing the cycle of desire can free us from the will and from suffering.