Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (20 page)

We should try thinking of self-consciousness some other way.
What way?

THE SELF AS AN ORGANIZING
PRINCIPLE

Imagine the problem in terns of artificial intelligence. Imagine a
robot, equipped with a video camera, and able to motor around a
room in which various objects are arranged. Suppose our plan is to
get the robot to deliver an output describing the arrangement of
the objects in the room. What kind of thing would we need to do?
If the robot simply directs its camera at an object, pixels fire up. It
has the kind of 'inner glow' that people sometimes link to consciousness. But if that is all it has, there is only what Kant called a
`rhapsody of perceptions, or what the pioneering American psychologist William James (1842-1910) later called a `blooming
buzzing confusion'. In other words, the robot still has to organize
its data, in order to interpret the scene. Suppose the screen shows a
round shape. Is it near to a small round object, or far away from a
large round object? Is it looking slantways at an elliptical object?'Co
solve these problems the robot might move, and obtain a new picture. But it then has to `synthesize' the various pictures together, to
build up a three-dimensional representation of the room. What abilities would be involved in this synthesis? How is it to unify the
different pictures obtained at different times?

The minimal ingredients would seem to be these. It needs some
way of telling whether it is itself moving. In particular it needs
some ability to distinguish whether it is moving, and getting new
views of stationary objects, or whether it is still, and the objects
around it are moving. To do this, it needs a memory of what the
scene was like, to compare to what it is now like. It needs to be able
to represent the order of different appearances, and then it needs
some way of integrating the past scenes and the present scene. In
other words, to solve for the position of objects in space, it has to
solve for its own point of view and for elapsed time during which it
can log its own movements.

What this suggests is that a minimal self-consciousness is a
structural requirement on any kind of interpretation of experience. If the programmer can solve this problem for the robot, it
cannot be by giving it just another ingredient on the screen (as if
the camera always caught a glimpse of one of its wheels, down at
the bottom of the screen). That would just be more `input'. It
wouldn't he part of the programming needed to turn input into a
description of the room and of the robot's place in it.

In fact the robot need never catch any glimpse of itself. The camera can be rigidly pointed at the scene in front of it. This is why
Hume would have been no nearer catching himself even if whenever he turned his eye inward he caught a continuing element of
experience, like a background drone. What the robot does need instead is a way of tracking its own route through the space, and the
time order of the appearances it gets. It is a requirement of the so lution that it has an `egocentric' point of view, or in other words
presents the space as centred upon `itself . Given that it can now interpret a scene as containing a table three feet away, it can also say
`the table is three feet from nte'-yet it need have no acquaintance
with its bodily shape, or long-term history. And it most certainly
needs no acquaintance with an internal ego or immortal soul.

If the room is chaotic enough, the problem might become insoluble. For example, if we unkindly put the robot into a kind of Keystone Cops environment, in which objects come and go at random
or with amazing rapidity, then it will be stuck with an insoluble
problem: just random pixels firing, but too little continuity from
one moment to the next for any program to get a grip.

So thinking in terms of an `I' now looks like a formal or structural requirement on interpretingexperience in the way we do-as
experience of a three-dimensional world of continuing objects,
amongst which we move. The`l' is the point of view from which interpretation starts. It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem
for which an `I' is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to
represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

DELUSIONS OF IMAGINATION

The line of thought I have just introduced is due to Immanuel
Kant. It is one of the great moves in philosophy, exploding in all
kinds of directions, some of which we return to later. But for our purposes its present interest is that it suggests a diagnosis of the
thoughts in list 2, at the beginning of this chapter.

These thoughts arise because I seem able to imagine myself in
different shoes, including the shoes of historical characters, dogs,
or angels. And I then think, I must have transported the mysterious
self, my very soul, into the imagined scene. And the soul becomes
something very strange, because part of my imagining may be to
imagine myself at a different time, with a different body, or different mental properties, with different experiences, and so on. In
other words, I abstract out from everything that gives me my identity as a human being, but still suppose that there is something, the
essence of Me, left. Hence, Descartes's `real distinction'.

But suppose instead I am not transporting anything in my
imagination. All I am doing is representing to myself what it would
be like to see the world from a different point of view, at a different
time, or whatever. If there is no essence of Me transported to the
different scenes, then the fact that I can imagine them gives no evidence that'!' might have experienced them, or might survive to experience them. By way of illustration, consider the first on the list:
I might survive bodily death. What imaginings lie behind this?
Well, perhaps I can imagine looking at the funeral, with my coffin,
and the family mourning. Perhaps I am skulking at the back of the
church. Perhaps I am miffed that the congregation does not seem
all that upset. Perhaps I would like to tell them that it is not so bad
after all. Perhaps being dead I have X-ray vision, so I give myself a
glimpse of my body lying inside. All very sad. How old I look. But
wait! Here are the pearly gates and there is grandmother waiting to
greet me ...

In imagining all this, I rehearse for myself the experience of
looking at my coffin and so on. And this I can surely do: I can understand what it would he like to see it, after all (not unlike seeing
othercoffins). I can understand what it would be like to glimpse inside it-a gruesome sight. But, and this is the crucial point, these
exercises of understanding do not transport a'me' who is doing the
seeing, whilst the human being Simon Blackburn is dead. It is I
here and now who am doing the imagining, but there is no I who is
being imagined doing the viewing. The only relic of me in the scenario is the dead body.

The point can he put like this. Kant's line of thought suggests
that there is an equivalence between `I can imagine seeing X' and'I
can imagine myself seeing V. But because this is a purely formal
equivalence there is no substantive self, no soul of Me, involved in
either imagining. Hence, it is wrong to take such imaginings as
supporting any `real distinction' between you as subject, as self or
soul, and the animal that in fact you are. So the imaginings of X do
not support the possibility that your biography might outrun the
biography of that animal, just because X is something that the anintal will not see.

Similarly, suppose I do what I might call 'imagining me being
Genghis Khan'. I picture riders and battlefields. I am short, and
crafty, and a wonderful horseman. God, the steppes are cold. All
this politics sometimes gets me down. `Another helping of fermented mare's milk,' I call. Whoops, I am supposed to speak Mongolian, and not English.

Here it should be more obvious that there is no soul of Me transported into the Genghis figure. In fact, in so far as there is anything of me left in the imagining, such as the lapse into English, the imagining is a failure. It is exactly as if an actor takes on a historical character, but brings to it anachronisms-Henry VIII looks at his
watch or talks about what is on at the cinema.

What I really do is to visualize battlefields, the cold steppes, and
so on, as if I were seeing them, and doing warrior-like things, like
commanding events and jumping on horses. I might be more or
less successful at doing this: some people are better at imagining
the world from different points of view, just as some people are
better actors than others. If my Genghis Khan is still speaking English, I haven't got very far.

Does this prove that all the thoughts on list 2 are illusions? It undermines the support that simple imaginings provide for them. If
they have some other support, well and good. But it is healthy to reflect how much the list depends on first-person imaginings. If I try
to suppose that you were once Genghis Khan, not much seems to
happen. You, slaughtering people from a horse? Unaware of supermarkets, motor cars, and aeroplanes? You with a different gender,
age, mind (for it is very unlikely that you think as Genghis did)? All
I succeed in doing if I try to think through this possibility is to substitute thinking of Genghis Khan for thinking of you. It is like replacing thinking of the oak tree with thinking of a daffodil, which
is certainly not thinking that the oak tree might have been a daffodil. I do not manage to think any kind of identity.

In short, I have to think of you just as a large human animal with
a personality. Other human animals with other personalities are
not you, and you could not have been one of them. How much of
your personality could you lose and still be you? Well, that may be a bit like the problem of the ships. Perhaps we allow quite a lot, but
eventually we say things like `Well, he's not the person he used to
be'. On the view suggested by Locke and Kant, this may literally be
true.

SCRAMBLING THE SOUL

There is a curious difference between the past and the future, when
we think of our own selves.

Suppose we lived in a world in which human bodies and brains
were easier to aggregate and disaggregate than they are. We could
take them apart and reassemble them as we can with computers or
automobiles. Suppose that these operations are called scrambling
operations. We can crank up the psychologies of people again after
these operations, rather like copying the software and tiles on a
computer. Or, we can change the dispositions, by changing the
software or files, retaining some old and adding some new. Scrambling operations are regarded as beneficial and healthy.

Suppose in such a world you were told that tomorrow you would
go into a scrambling operation. And you are given a glimpse of
who will emerge. Person A has a lot of your stuff in hinm, and a lot
of your qualities: he or she remembers things as you now do, looks
much as you do, and so on. Anyhow, person A is going to be sent to
the Arctic (perhaps you are army personnel). Person 13 is also a
good match with you, again incorporating lots of your actual physical stuff-brain and cells-in him, and having a lot of your qualities (software and files). Person 13 is going to the tropics.