Who Am I and If So How Many? (6 page)

So the road to self-discovery has two separate paths. I can start with my thinking and figure out where my certainties come from. This is the path that Descartes, and hence modern philosophy, has chosen. This path of self-observation led to a highly reflective way of looking at things that brought claims about the world to their subjective origins and examined them. As scientific epistemology, however, this path has come up against its limits, and there is little new ground left to be broken. The second path explores man as though the observer and highly personal perceptions and ideas are not the crux of the matter. This is the path of the modern natural sciences. While less reflective, it is now producing exciting new results. The kinds of insights these two paths yield could hardly be more divergent.

Many neuroscientists claim that their route of access to the mind is the only valid one. Neurobiology seeks to assume the place philosophy once held. If man wants to know who he is, the logic goes, he has to understand his brain, and brain research replaces speculations about human emotions, thoughts, and actions with rational scientific research. But many neuroscientists tend not to notice that they are not on the path to an absolute truth either. Any science is itself a product of the human mind that it seeks to investigate with its own means, and the cognitive faculties of the human mind depend directly on the requirements posed by evolutionary adaptation. Our brains are the way they are only because they have apparently prevailed in the evolutionary contest. Their task in the rainforest and savanna was never to obtain completely objective knowledge of the world, so it is no wonder that they are not optimally tailored to this task.

Assuming that human consciousness was not developed
according
to the criterion of absolute objectivity, man can grasp only
what the cognitive apparatus that arose in the evolutionary contest enables him to grasp. Our understanding of science is subject to our cognitive constraints. If it were not, there would be no need for progress, opposition, or revisions in the sciences. The prerequisites for research, such as freedom to contest existing views, repeatability, and validity, are not autonomous criteria; they reflect the human cognitive faculty at a given time in a specific situation in which knowledge is presented. Information that scientists considered indisputable a century ago is now dismissed out of hand, and this pattern is likely to carry into the next century.

For philosophers, it still makes sense to proceed from the thinking ‘I,’ which deciphers the world one step at a time. In this regard, Descartes remains just as modern as he was nearly four hundred years ago. But of course, philosophers should realize that they are not thinking independently of and unaided by the brain. The brain thinks, and it also produces the self, which thinks that it thinks. Was Descartes right to have used the word ‘I’? Shouldn’t he have said: if it is indisputable that doubting requires thinking, thinking must occur? Instead of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ shouldn’t it have been ‘There are thoughts’? How did this ‘I’ get slipped in?

Once-in-a-lifetime experiences sometimes get buried in footnotes, as was literally the case back in 1855, when Ernst Mach, then a seventeen-year-old student of physics, went for a stroll on the outskirts of Vienna and had an epiphany:

The student was unaware of it at the time, but this moment was tantamount to the insight of the century. Fifty years after the fact, it was relegated to a footnote in his
Analysis of the Sensations
.

Ernst Mach was born in 1838 (six years before Nietzsche) in Chrlice, which was then part of Austria-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic. His family was in the German-speaking minority. Mach’s father was a farmer and tutor who educated his son at home. At the same time, the young Mach completed an
apprenticeship in carpentry. At the age of fifteen, this highly gifted teenager finally enrolled in high school, and then breezed through his college entrance examinations. He studied mathematics and science in Vienna and wrote his dissertation on electricity. A year later he became a professor and moved from Graz to Prague, and later to Vienna. His interests were wide-ranging; indeed, he was interested in just about everything. He taught physics and mathematics, philosophy and psychology. As a physicist he calculated the speed of sound, which was later named after him; supersonic aircraft fly at ‘Mach 2’ speed.

Mach enjoyed great renown in Prague and Vienna. He experimented with rocket projectiles and explored the dynamics of gases. His criticisms of Newtonian physics became Einstein’s inspiration for the theory of relativity. Einstein liked to refer to himself as Mach’s student, although Mach had never been his instructor. Politically Mach was a liberal who was increasingly drawn to the Social Democratic Party, which was then considered radical. He was also an agnostic who liked to take on the Church. Physicists and philosophers grappled with Mach’s theories, and Mach’s philosophy was much in vogue among Russian
intellectuals
; the young Lenin wrote a thick book about it. Sense physiology arose as a new discipline, and American behaviorism was inspired by Mach. But no matter how many sciences Mach had helped shape, his fame faded quickly after his death in 1916. World War I shook Europe to its very foundations, and physics now pursued a different path. In 1970, NASA commemorated the nearly forgotten pioneer in rocketry by naming a lunar crater after him.

Mach’s philosophical ideas were radical. He considered valid only what could be verified in experience or in calculations. In examining everything to ascertain its physical correctness, Mach dismissed nearly the entire history of philosophy. He found particular fault with Descartes’ dualism, because Mach was convinced that sensations in the body and ideas in the mind are one and the same. As a young man on that summer’s day,
everything had seemed to join together, and in that same spirit he merged the dualism of ‘I’ and ‘world’ into a monism in which everything in the world consists of the same elements. If they appear in the brain, we call them ‘sensations,’ but that does not mean they are demarcated from the world outside the mind.

The focal point of Mach’s theory of sensations was the death of the ‘I.’ For more than two millennia, philosophers, like most other people, had used the word ‘I’ to refer to themselves. But Mach deemed this usage problematic. What might this ‘I’ be? ‘The ego,’ he asserted, ‘is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity.’ There is no ‘I’ in the human brain, only a jumble of sensations in the animated exchange with the elements of the outside world. Mach quipped that a sensation could go ‘a-roaming by itself in the world.’ His most famous statement on the self is this: ‘The ego is unsavable. It is partly the knowledge of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious and philosophical absurdities.’

Mach was not the first to come up with the idea of eliminating the self or at least diminishing its significance. He had proudly believed that it took a physicist to arrive at his conclusions, but an unsuccessful lawyer and pensive merchant had done so long before him. The Scottish philosopher David Hume was twenty-eight years old when he published his
Treatise of Human Nature
in 1739. Hume’s quest for the self led nowhere, because soul and self were not tangible objects. Man does not need a self to perceive sensations, grasp concepts, and experience feelings; that happens all by itself. The self was nothing more than one idea among many. The only thing Hume could think of to rescue this self was to call it a ‘succession of perceptions’ – an illusion, though perhaps a necessary one, that gives man the pleasant (and indispensable?) feeling of having a supervisor in the brain.

Is that true? Is the self an illusion, nothing but mental hocus-pocus, even though we all think we have a self? Were Western philosophers fooling themselves for two thousand years when they confidently based their ideas on a self that grapples with
the important questions in the world? Isn’t our self the little attic room where all our intellectual, emotional, and intentional acts go in and out, the bastion that endures through all the vicissitudes of life, the uncut movie that guarantees I will regard myself as one and the same person throughout the decades of my life? Who in Mach’s and Hume’s name is talking to you right now, if not my self? And who is reading this book, if not you, who also address yourself as ‘I’?

So let us start by liberating the self once again from the stranglehold of oddball physicists and unsuccessful lawyers and ask the experts, such as psychologists, what the self really is. The psychologists nod their heads, knit their brows, and exchange meaningful glances and a few words, then knit their brows still more tightly. ‘Well, you know,’ says one, ‘we are not likely to do away with the self. But my colleagues and I disagree about what the self might be. We cannot regard the self as a certainty, because psychology, as you probably know, is a science, and scientists define as existing only what they can see, hear, or measure. And that is not true of the self. If there is a self, it derives from something; Mr Hume is correct on that score. The question is only: from what? Do we derive the self from sensations – is there a
sense
of self? – or from thoughts – an
idea
of self? We’re not quite sure about this. The self acts like a switchboard for our will and judgment. We like to draw a distinction between self-concept and self-esteem. The self-concept tells us how we perceive ourselves. In order to do so, we have to reintroduce the “I,” but just as a minor construct to function as a contrast to “me.” The two share a task: the “I” acts, and the “me” judges the action. And self-esteem is the very subjective evidence that documents the “me” to the “I.” We have observed and described hundreds of thousands of people having this soliloquy. But on behalf of William James, who came up with these ideas, we ask that you refrain from asking for proof. That is just the way it is. God – or Darwin, or whoever – knows why.’

That is as far as psychology gets us. Of course this depiction is greatly abridged, and psychology is a vast arena with many different
theories and schools. But it is also apparent that psychology cannot provide a clear and simple reply to the question of the self. The remaining option is to consult the neuroscientists, who have often weighed in vociferously in recent years. More than everyone else, it would appear, they feel that they are now best suited to answer the question. The answer of many (or even all) neuroscientists to the question of whether there is a self is ‘No! There is no self. No one has ever been or possessed a self! There is no actual core of the self. David Hume and Ernst Mach were absolutely right: the self is an illusion!’

To understand their answer, one must of course ask what kind of evidence it would take to persuade a neuroscientist that the self has been located. Would it be enough to find a region, an area, or a center in the brain that controls or generates the self? Most likely not, because then the scientist would examine the control mechanisms and ascertain that this center, like all centers in the brain, does not function independently but is connected to others. And he or she would examine the neurons, the transmission of electrical impulses, and the chemical reactions, and conclude that the self is nothing but a complex electrochemical mechanism, somewhat like the way a child might cut open a talking doll and find nothing but a mechanical device inside.

Now common sense wins out, and, fortunately, no such center of the self can be pinpointed. That is very good news, and certainly not disappointing, as many a neuroscientist enjoys pointing out. The famous anatomist Rudolf Virchow gleefully disabused philosophers of the existence of the self back in the nineteenth century with this statement: ‘I have opened up thousands of corpses, but I never managed to see a soul.’ Even those of us who are not religious would surely greet that finding with a cry of ‘Thank God!’ Not finding a soul or a self is of course far better than finding a self that could be picked apart and demystified.

So there we have it: there is no center of the self. That is hardly surprising, because who – aside from René Descartes with his pineal gland – believed so anyway? No noted philosopher in the
past two hundred years has claimed that the self is a material substance in the brain. Most skirted the question entirely. Immanuel Kant, for example, used vague language in describing the self as an ‘object of inner sense’ as opposed to the ‘object of the outer senses,’ the body. This hazy statement keeps the issue up in the air.

Philosophy thus leaves the question of the self largely
unresolved
. The basic idea is that you don’t talk about the self, you
have
it. It is not surprising that neuroscience cannot seem to find the self; the way neuroscientists examine the brain would not reveal it. In their world there is no self that could be pinpointed somewhere on a map of the brain, and hence the self does not exist.

But don’t we continually experience our selves anyway? Could it really be that these experiences are misleading us? Isn’t it indisputable, then, that there is a sense of self, albeit a nebulous one? Might the self extend over the entire brain – perhaps even throughout the entire nervous system – or at least through many key parts of it? Couldn’t a melody arise from the concert of neurons in the brain, a melody of the self, so to speak, which may not be ascertainable biologically, but indisputably exists on a psychological level even so? Just as the description of each individual instrument in a concert hall does not yield a symphony, one simply cannot get at the self with the methods of brain anatomy. Couldn’t we see it that way?

Perhaps. But neuroscience has a second way of getting to the root of the question: by examining people who deviate from the norm, patients with disorders that shut down, debilitate, or distort their sense of self. The famous British neurologist and psychologist Oliver Sacks spent forty years with patients in these situations. Sacks himself is a very colorful and high-profile personality, and his book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
describes the lives and worlds of people with identity disorders; Sacks calls them ‘travelers to unimaginable lands – lands of which otherwise we should have no idea or conception.’ One is a musician who suffers a tiny injury to the left hemisphere of the brain and begins to
experience profound visual agnosia, an inability to recognize objects. If he means to grab his hat, he reaches for his wife’s face instead. Another is a professor of music who pats the heads of parking meters, thinking they are children; and yet another patient, an elderly woman suffering from neurosyphilis (‘Cupid’s disease’), develops an insatiable appetite for younger men.

The phenomena that Sacks was able only to sketch more than twenty years ago have since been explored from many angles. Many neuroscientists tend to the view that there is not a
single
self, but rather many different
states
of the self. My corporal self makes me aware that the body in which I am living is really my own body; my locational self tells me where I am at a given time; my perspectivist self tells me that I am the center of the world experienced by me; my ‘I’ as experiential subject tells me that my sensory impressions and feelings are really my own and not those of others; my authorship and supervisory self makes it clear to me that I am the person who has to accept responsibility for my thoughts and actions; my autobiographical self makes sure I do not step out of my own role and that I experience myself throughout as one and the same person; my self-reflexive self enables me to think about myself and to play the psychological game of ‘I’ and ‘me’; and my moral self works as conscience to tell me what is good and what is bad.

There are disorders in which one or another self does not function correctly, as in Oliver Sacks’s stories. If these patients are examined using imaging procedures (see ‘The Cosmos of the Mind,’ p. 20), the areas of the brain that are apparently not working normally can be identified. The corporal self and the locational self, for example, are associated with the work of the parietal lobe, and the perspectivist self with the right inferior temporal lobe. The self as an object of experience is also linked to the right inferior temporal lobe, to the amygdala, and to other centers of the limbic system.

In this scheme of things, there are several selves, but there are other ways of sizing up the self. After all, the taste of individual
ingredients tells us nothing about the meal as a whole. No matter how neatly these states of the self are distinguished here, they blend within the brain; sometimes we notice one ingredient, sometimes another, and they mingle within our consciousness so as to become virtually indistinguishable. Some hover at the brink of our consciousness, while others remain front and center. And they seem to originate in very different ways; some are only felt, while others are simply known. I have little say about my perspectivist self, which is normally a fixed entity. The same applies to the corporal self. But my autobiographical self is clearly something that I create for myself, by speaking. I talk about myself, and in doing so I tell myself and others about my self, embellishing it in the process. The same is true of my self-reflexive self and perhaps of my moral self as well (if that really exists; we will come back to this issue in detail later).