by Paul Singh
When we give narrative accounts to other people about the larger purposes we are undertaking, they can evaluate those purposes far more effectively, and they can understand whether they themselves can relate to some part of that larger purpose. My narratives help people see whether they can be involved too, or whether they should be involved at all. The people with whom I am continually related in family or community life appreciate constant updates about my narratives, and they have no problem with passing judgments on my performance. Children quickly learn that the main reason why parents demand accounts of behavior is so that parental judgments can be swiftly delivered. Did the child do well or badly? Did the child do something appropriate and helpful, or something inappropriate and possibly harmful? Once again, such questions call for an explanation, a narrative.
After full executive control is acquired and long-term memory is fully engaged, a four-year-old child will be able to recount brief narratives to account for behavior that has come under scrutiny by someone else. Narratives become both explanatory (how I did something) and often exculpatory as well (what I did was good, or at least excusable). By the time a child is six, some of its narratives can turn out to be complex deceptions, because the child has learned that an adult can be fooled if the false narrative is convincing enough. But the child already knows the difference between the true narrative (what the child actually thinks did happen) and the false narrative (the altered version that might excuse the child). That’s how the child can deliberately give misleading interpretations of events.
The ability of a child to hold an accurate account in mind goes back to earlier years, because certain cognitive centers must first be able to construct an inner narrative honestly believed by the child. Developing brains first become able to assemble the convincing account of what is happening for the child, so the child at least has a believable narrative of his own actions. It will always be partial and selective, just as our adult self-understandings never capture everything relevant or accurate, but that inner narrative must be explanatory and convincing. The reason why that first “draft” or primary narrative of one’s actions is so utterly convincing is because (a) our higher cognitive processes must have some fixed reference standard of what is going on and why, and (b) our brain won’t be supplying us with any more convincing account than this primary one—any rival account entertained in the imagination will simply be found lacking or less than accurate because it deviates from the primary narrative. And if anyone else tries to tell us about what we have “really” been doing, we automatically deny it, at least at first, because that rival account doesn’t match up with our inner final judge of the “true” story about what we have been doing.
Ordinary psychological development requires that our inner primary narrative serve as the convincing account of what we think we are doing, and why we are doing it. It is essential to our sense of stable personality and self-identity over days, months, and years. Severe mental disabilities and illnesses, such as schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorders, involve the brain’s difficulties with supplying this primary narrative in a reliable way. As essential to psychological health as this inner narrative must be, the way that it must be completely convincing is the key to comprehending why it can’t be very accurate in actuality. What we think we are doing isn’t usually the whole story about what we are actually doing. Mature self-reflection on past episodes can reveal to us how we had been deceiving ourselves or willfully distorting our perspective to suit short-term desires. Realizing how we can be short-sighted and stubborn helps us to lessen our implicit trust in our inner convincing narrative. It is a sign of wisdom that we go through life a little humbler about our self-certainties and rely on others more to help guide our narratives.
Psychological experiments have starkly exposed how our inner narratives are highly selective and often imaginative, even as they stay so convincing. Although certain parts of the brain do have more importance for creating this inner self-narrative, many parts of the cortex are involved, each contributing some crucial information, so that our “self” identity has many centers, not just one. For several decades, Michael Gazzaniga has been at the forefront of research of into the brain’s ability to assemble and employ our inner narratives. He began with split-brain studies, in which patients who had suffered a loss of connection between the right and left hemispheres of the cortex are shown separate items of information in the right and left visual fields, and then asked about what they are seeing. Because the right hemisphere can detect what is in the left visual field, but doesn’t control verbal communication by itself, a patient can’t simply say what has been seen on the left. Instead, a region in the left hemisphere, the “interpreter” as Gazzaniga labeled it, assembles a narrative from incomplete subconscious information and forges an imaginatively consistent story, which is then confidently asserted by the patient.12
In a way, we are all similar to a split-brain subject, because each person’s mental interpreter is always forced to assemble fast-changing and incomplete information. The brain’s extreme efficiency at producing coherence is precisely its deficiency for delivering accuracy. Our mental interpreter can’t entirely keep up, but it doesn’t care, and it won’t admit its creativity, in the absence of any other brain region available to contradict and override it. Only a degree of difference separates someone enjoying a fair grip on reality from someone convinced by unreasonable optimism, excessive self-importance, false memories, distorting confabulations, or firm delusions.13
Our primary interpreter must share heavily in the brain’s responsibility for both the continuities and the discontinuities of our ongoing self-narrative. It continually updates and revises an account of what is being done and why, permitting a general sense of continuity to prevail throughout our sense of self, without drawing any attention to the perpetual gaps and inventive leaps. This interpreter, when linked to the brain regions responsible for making verbal reports to others about what is going on, has little difficulty shaping how we depict ourselves to other people. Naturally enough, we shape our narratives in terms that make our perspective the most significant and relevant. Not only do we constantly harmonize our ongoing experiences to make us appear consistent to ourselves, we also twist our narratives to rationalize decisions and actions to make us seem rational to others. Psychologist Bruce Hood summarizes how our “self” is so “centered” around itself:
Our self-centered way of constructing the story means that we only pay attention to those events as we see them being related to us. This personal myth is constantly being revised and updated throughout our life by both conscious and unconscious processes, and it reemerges at times either through deliberate retelling to others to explain who we are, or at times of insight, when something from our past seems to be surprisingly poignant or relevant.14
James Lees-Milne captures this basic insight in the opening sentence of his autobiography Another Self: “My world was the only real world.”
Living Self-lessly
The intuitive evidence that each of us adults is a personal self, having our own self-identity and subjective mental life, is empirically overwhelming. As far as the brain sciences can tell, this experience of ourselves is pretty accurate most of the time. We are supposed to think of ourselves as being the same person throughout our lives, and as thoughtful persons possessing our own experiences, memories, and beliefs. If we have been fortunate enough to enjoy normal psychological development and good neurophysiological health in our lifetimes, then we should be able to naturally think of ourselves as individual selves. The brain sciences are yielding good explanations for the ways the nervous system assembles and sustains a stable personality, self-identity, and dynamic mental life. Those sciences are also explaining why disruptions or dissolutions of the personal self are caused by brain malfunctioning.
Many cultures have long taught that besides the empirical self we all take ourselves to be, there is a deeper self which is supporting our lively conscious life.
That self allegedly has properties and powers going far beyond the plain capacities we experience on a daily basis. No two cultures describe that self in quite the same manner. In some cultures, the self plays a mainly religious role, so that this self can fulfill hopes for an afterlife. Western religions emphasize both the personal nature of the self and the permanent identity to the self. Only a transcendent self (a self independent of the brain), these religions say, accounts for the way that one and the same person can have both a worldly life and a heavenly after life. Eastern religions agree about the permanent identity to the self which survives death, but they typically disagree about the personal self, instead teaching that the self acquires a different personality when reincarnated.
A few cultures add highly philosophical conceptions of the self to prevailing religious notions. Greek philosophy, inspired by Plato, pondered whether it actually is the objective mental life —the mind’s ability to use reason and know truth—which shows how a person’s mind is linked to the divine and natural world.15 Modern Western philosophy went in the opposite direction, holding that subjectivity is actually the essence of the self. If the self is fundamentally subjective, as this dualistic philosophy claims, then that subjectivity would supposedly support the personal character of the self as well as the permanent identity of the self. Subjectivity, especially in the philosophical traditions indebted to Rene Descartes, was something that could never be explained in any objectively natural terms, so it must therefore be unnatural (and presumably immortal).
Modern science, for its part, couldn’t discover any transcendent or unnatural self (the best example of which is the Cartesian cogito)—a self that exists independently of the brain. The burden of proof remains on those asserting that such a transcendent self exists, of course, and in the absence of proof, only skepticism is reasonable. Postulating a transcendent self (what Descartes refers to as a mental substance, a soul, and the “cogito”) is unreasonable because it misunderstands the evidence and overlooks a far simpler explanation.
Starting with our existence as an animal with a personal self, proponents of a transcendent, Cartesian self exaggerate our ability to speak about ourselves. Linguistically, someone’s ability to state facts about themselves is the way to make “first person” statements. But the ability to make first-person statements, by itself, cannot support the existence of a transcendent self. When I happen to say, “I feel like going for a walk,” I’m not trying to say that my transcendent self is going for a walk. My body is going for a walk, because I am deciding to do that. Yet we may ask, what is this “I”? Only because a person has learned to speak in this way, during a childhood in which executive control and language were acquired, can any reference to this “I” occur at all. Before language is acquired, there is no first-person referencing, and before executive functions emerge, there isn’t even a first-person perspective. The dependence of sense of self on the brain’s development is undeniable. Perhaps, both John Locke and David Hume should get some credit for correctly speculating about the nature of the self, based on their knowledge of the science of the day available to them. Their ideas of the self are different but very similar; more importantly they are both consistent with the findings of modern science. Our sense of self is nothing but our memories, consciousness, and perceptions—perceptions that are available to memories that are constantly evolving and giving us the illusion of our unfounded trust in the existence of a transcendent self independent of the brain.
Undeterred by developmental psychology and neuroscience, there are plenty of armchair intellectuals who think that being able to make a claim and prove a claim are practically the same thing. But just speaking of this thing called the “first-person perspective” doesn’t magically deliver immunity from scientific explanation. Among contemporary philosophers, there’s isn’t a better example of such magical thinking than the following statement by the philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker:
Any view that takes a person’s persistence conditions to be biological, or physical, or “somatic” leaves out— must leave out—what is distinctive about persons: the robust first-person perspective.16
The simpler explanation, instead of resorting to a mysteriously transcendent self, is to credit an organic brain with generating the cognitive processes capable of having a perspective on the world and to describe what that perspective is like. Appealing to the brain is simpler for two reasons. First, it doesn’t require any exaggerated sense bestowed upon “first person” statements as linguistic performances. No child is taught that the word “I” must refer to some undetectably unnatural entity like a transcendent self. Second, it doesn’t leave our ability to make first-person statements a complete mystery. If babies are persons with selves, then why don’t they easily talk that way? The answer that babies have to grow into having a self only repeats the mystery. If a self has to “grow” as a brain develops, then isn’t the simpler explanation that it is precisely the brain’s development that is responsible for bringing a personal self into existence?
It is precisely because a brain is a finite entity dealing (inadequately) with so much that is going on around it, that the brain’s higher cognitive processes must assemble a coherent perspective. That perspective is “virtual” in the sense that it must be constructed moment by moment from incoming information, so it can’t have any substantial reality apart from the brain. We can call our perspective a “self” or an “ego” or a “consciousness”—but whatever name we use, we are referring to the center of our mental life and, indeed, of all our bodily actions. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher who does follow what the brain sciences are saying about ourselves puts the matter this way:
Selfhood as inwardness emerges when an organism for the first time actively attends to its body as a whole. If a global model of the body is integrated into the space of attentional agency, a richer phenomenal self emerges. . . . The organism is now potentially directed at the world and at itself at the same time. It is the body as subject.17
The idea of a transcendent self is a myth; the truth is that the self is a constructed self.
We have a first-person perspective because our personal, constructed, selves are generated by limited brains which must demonstrate an impressive amount of control over all that they do. Why must we feel compelled to subordinate our brains to a transcendent and immaterial self? After all, if we were truly some sort of unnatural disembodied self not dependent on limited brains in finite space, wouldn’t our perspective actually be universal and omniscient, and not tied down to any first-person perspective?
The brain’s natural limitations also provide a simpler and better explanation for the kind of self-identity we actually possess. Proponents of the transcendent self first describe personal identity in exaggerated and unwarranted terms, and then presume that nothing neurological can account for that exaggerated identity. Our feeling that we are the same person over time isn’t the same thing as knowing that we are the same person over time. But it isn’t the case that our immediate experience of ourselves stays identical over long stretches of time. In fact, anyone reflecting back on what he or she was like many years ago can grasp how that earlier person seems pretty different in many significant ways, and that much about that earlier person has been completely forgotten. Just because you can now recall some of what it was like to be a younger person doesn’t mean that anything identical and unchanging connects you with that earlier person. Nothing like “identity” is really connecting the younger and older self; all the evidence in fact points to both loss and growth, and plenty of change. What has stayed exactly the same about yourself? There is nothing like personal “identity” that needs to be explained, and no extravagant postulate in terms of a transcendent self is therefore needed to explain anything. Modern science is able to thoroughly explain this phenomenon.
Here is a small distraction but good food for thought for anyone. It is known from medical science that your intestinal lining is only two or three days old, which means that ev
ery two or three days you have a new lining. Your old taste buds are gone and you have new ones every ten days, your lungs are new lungs every few weeks. Your skin is renewed every four weeks, your red blood cells every four months, your nails six to ten months, your bones every ten years, and your heart every twenty years.
Your brain, however, does not renew itself, except for the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus (center for your memory). Recent research shows that other brain cells are probably also regenerating. So the brain is not the same brain throughout your life either. Given that the body does not remain the same throughout life, where, one might ask, is there a place for Descartes’ transcendent self that supposedly never changes? Does that change too as the body changes or is each person assigned with one fixed soul for each person who is not the same person after a few years? The fact is that science has never discovered any transcendent self. It doesn’t exist.
