The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self (33 page)

The criticism highlights the challenges neuroscientists and philosophers face in explaining the subjectivity of self-consciousness. It’s
no wonder, then, that some philosophers simply attribute subjectivity to consciousness itself (keeping aside the hard problem for now). They think that underlying all our experiences are conscious states that have the property of self-awareness. Note, they are not saying that there is a subject, or someone, who is experiencing. Rather, that consciousness has the property of subjectivity. Consciousness is reflexive, in philosophical jargon. “Reflexivity is something automatic, pervasive, passive, something characterizing consciousness from the start,” philosopher Dan Zahavi of the University of Copenhagen told me.

So, in this way of thinking, the brain must somehow take these moments of self-awareness, or moments of reflexive consciousness, and construct a self that appears unitary and solid. But neuroscience is far, far away from explaining how reflexivity of consciousness may arise. However, if you take this property of consciousness as given, some no-self theorists would say that there is no self, just moments of reflexive consciousness.

Jonardon Ganeri, a philosopher of mind at New York University, thinks that if you accept consciousness as being inherently reflexive, that’s as good as saying there is a self. “You wonder what this denial of self is meant to be doing,” he told me. “Why not just say that what selfhood consists [of] is the reflexivity of consciousness. That seems like a pretty good account of self to me.” But Ganeri acknowledges that even if consciousness is reflexive, it does not disprove or negate the existence of a self that stands on its own, alongside reflexive consciousness.

Zahavi argues for such a self: a minimal self—which, he says, provides the mental structure to make an experience seem like
mine,
to give it a first-person perspective. Such a minimal self has to transcend or linger for longer than any given moment of subjectivity—such that
many such moments can be experienced as belonging to the same subject.

Take the case of people with schizophrenia, who lose sense of ownership of their own thoughts at times. “Something minimal has to be preserved to even make sense out of the disorder,” said Zahavi. In all the experiences of people with perturbations of the self that we encountered, the sense that something minimal survives is hard to dismiss—whatever the experience, whether of depersonalization or being out-of-body, the associated sense of
mineness
of experience remained. “It’s really hard to think of a scenario that could potentially give us a case of experience completely devoid of any kind of minimal ownership,” Zahavi told me. “How should it even be reported in the first person?”

It’s in order to answer that latter question that Zahavi posits his minimal self. But that then brings up other questions. Explaining the subjective character of the minimal self is no easier than explaining how consciousness arises (in fact, Zahavi rejects the idea that the “self is something separate from and independent of consciousness”; he told me, “We cannot understand and do justice to consciousness without operating with a minimal notion of self”).

So, how does this minimal self, which provides synchronic unity, get extended to form one’s entire selfhood, with diachronic unity? Zahavi thinks that we need something in between these two extremes of the minimal self and the full-blown extended, narrative self: a form of interpersonal self that is built up from the minimal self during early childhood as the infant interacts with its mother and others, when there isn’t a full-blown narrative self yet but nonetheless the infant is developing a self in relation to others.

At another end of the spectrum of theorists are the Indian
Advaita (non-dualist) thinkers. They argue that there is an underlying, un-individuated consciousness that is the subject of all experiences—not just of yours or mine, but of all experiences—a consciousness that is witness to everything. An impersonal experiencer. It’s the denouement of Adi Shankara’s six-stanza poem.

So, while Advaita philosophers concur with the no-self idea, maintaining that the individual self is not real, they eventually diverge from their Buddhist brethren. The Buddhist version of the bundle theory says that
our “
mistake lies in taking there to be one thing when there are really only the many,” or mistakenly perceiving the bundle as real when there are only many interacting psycho-physical elements. The Advaita philosophers argue that “our mistake lies in taking there to be a many when strictly speaking there is just the one”—the consciousness that experiences everything.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that neuroscientists and philosophers (both past and present), in their arguments over whether there is a self or not, are converging—or, dare I say, splitting hairs. There’s very little they are at odds about. Descartes’s dualism is passé. No one is arguing for a self that has an independent ontological reality, something that could exist even after the brain and body are gone. No one’s arguing either for a single privileged place in the brain as the sole custodian of the self. Yes, there are some brain regions that are more important than others for our sense of self—such as the insular cortex, the temporoparietal junction, and the medial prefrontal cortex—but none that can be said to be the singular domain of the self. There’s also little argument that our narrative self is a fiction—a story without a storyteller. In fact, anything that can constitute the self-as-object—including the sense of body ownership—can be argued as being constructed, sans a constructor. Instead of Cartesian dualism, which
relegated the body to the status of a mere vessel, we now have a picture of the sense of self as the outcome of neural processes that are tightly integrated with the body—processes that combine brain, body, mind, and even culture to make us who we are. What remains to be satisfactorily explained is the self-as-subject or self-as-knower, and that’s where the differences arise. The subjectivity of experience: just how does it come to be? Whether that subjectivity is due to some neural process that Zahavi would call the minimal self, or is due to an inherent reflexivity of consciousness, or is something that appears to be so because of the interaction of psycho-physical elements (à la bundle theorists or Dennett or Metzinger)—that’s where the mystery of the self now resides. Most likely, solving the mystery will require making sense of consciousness itself.

Besides the intellectual and philosophical wrangling, there is human suffering. From the perspective of the experiences of people we met in this book, understanding the nature of the self is crucial. If, as the Buddhists claim, it’s our delusional attachment to a seemingly solid self that causes suffering, then realizing its true nature could ease suffering (and as we have seen, the various aspects of the self that make up the self-as-object really appear because of brain dynamics, something that one can get dissociated from). Ganeri pointed out to me that the Buddhist take on the suffering of individuals with maladies of the self would be to say that we set the benchmark for the self too high in the first place. So, the disturbances appear as deficits, and everything else—the coping mechanisms, the treatments, and the therapies—ensues from that understanding. But what if the disturbances were seen as the outcome not of deficits of self but of an
obsessive attachment to the idea of a self? Letting go could have therapeutic benefits.

I am reminded of my discussion with Jeff Abugel, who has endured periods of depersonalization since his late teens, and whom we briefly encountered in chapter 5. Abugel told us how his whole life had become an exercise in trying to figure out—on a moment-by-moment basis—what was wrong with him, why he felt so estranged from himself. Medication helped, up to a point. “The medication for me is just to reduce the way of fragmented thinking, the way of thinking that was very uncomfortable, simply because I didn’t feel integrated, I felt detached, I felt broken up,” he told me. “The medicine has helped to integrate my sense of self, but it didn’t restore the sense of self that I had when I was eighteen.” To make sense of his disintegrated state, he turned to writings of philosophers who were suggesting that the dissipation of the ego and a breakdown of its perceived unity brought about a new state of being. “I think in very ancient cultures there are parallels that are very easily drawn between the depersonalization as we experience it and how these other people either sought it, or looked for it, or felt it, and then tried to make sense of it,” said Abugel. He has, in some sense, let go of aspects of his former self, or at least stopped striving to get it back. “From the patient’s standpoint, you have really got two choices: you can keep trying every kind of medicine and therapy until you regain the sense of self and ego that you had before it all started, or you can say, ‘OK, I got fifty percent of it back, let me see where the other fifty percent goes. Let me see what it’s all about.’”

It’s been a somewhat beneficial journey. “To me the big question is: Do you view [depersonalization] as a disorder, or do you view it as a different state of mind? Do you view it, for a lack of a better word, as some kind of beginning on a road to some kind of awakening?” Abugel
told me. “In time, I have come to view it as simply a change in perception. It’s changed my view of the world, seeing as how fleeting and small it actually is, compared to all of existence.”

Of course, being able to do what Jeff is doing presupposes some amount of cognitive ability. Someone who is suffering from severe schizophrenia or autism, or is in the throes of Cotard’s syndrome, unfortunately cannot escape his or her phenomenal self: all the talk of the self being a construction sans a constructor will have no effect. Their suffering is real. It’s also unrealistic to expect a person with Alzheimer’s to cope with the loss of the narrative self by focusing on the fact that there is no narrator to begin with.

But some—those with mild forms of schizophrenia, depersonalization, or BIID, perhaps—may find therapeutic succor by gaining insights into the nature of the self. However, it’s not just those with maladies of the self who could benefit from such insights.

There must have been a time in our evolutionary past when the first glimmers of the self-as-knower appeared. It must have been a momentous biological event. And it gave our ancestors a survival advantage. To be aware of one’s own body, to be able to direct one’s attention to it, must have been an evolutionary leg up. But this self-process—a complex interaction of the activity of various brain regions—was still meant to control one’s body. As we evolved further, we developed the various forms of long-term memory, a narrative self; we could learn from our mistakes, and we could plot and plan our future. Thoughts about our past and future selves were added to the mix that was the self-as-object. We went from creatures that lived in the here and now to creatures that inhabited a mental time line. However, no matter
how ethereal our thoughts, the feedback as to whether those thoughts were good or bad for one’s conception of oneself was still mediated by the body. It could be a sense of elation, or a sinking feeling in the pit of one’s stomach, or myriad variations on the theme, from ecstasy to depression. These feelings and emotions were meant to make us act, to move us toward pleasure and joy, away from pain and sadness. Except that where we once felt these emotions because we moved toward a source of food in the forest or fled a predator, we could now feel them because of the contents of our thoughts, even when they had no direct bearing on survival. This has, of course, made us the species we are, with society and culture and art and technology and all that’s beautiful about being human. It’s also turned us into a species that cannot stop from wanting more. For most of us, imagining having more makes us feel good and safe, imagining having less has the opposite effect, and we act on these feelings. We are now beholden to the survival of the conceptual self and not just the bodily self—and this imagined self has no limits to its grandiosity. So, while the vexing nature of the self has given us ascetics and monastics, who have enquired into its nature with all their being, this runaway process has also given us narcissism and overindulgence. It would not be a stretch to say that many of society’s ills can be attributed to an unbridled conceptual self, which wants too much or fights to preserve reified identities: the ideological stubbornness of religions; the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor; the hegemonies of powerful, militarized nations over smaller ones; or the continued plunder of natural resources.