UndercoverElephant
Pachyderm of a Thousand Faces
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The following is an article by Shaun Gallagher describing the various ways cognitive science has tried to get to grips with "the self".
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/tics2000.html
The following is my provisional response to the article:
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/tics2000.html
The following is my provisional response to the article:
How can we understand the claim that selves are fictions?
There are many senses in which the word “self” is used and many ways in which something can be a fiction, so there are many questions rolled into one in the title of this essay. I will start by a clarification of what we are saying when we identify something as fictitious, and I will draw on a 1994 paper by Peter B Lloyd called “The physical world is a fiction.”(1) Lloyd describes a “four sided pinkel triangle”, which, of course, nobody has ever actually encountered. The then argues that since nobody could ever encounter such an entity, it is indistinguishable from its fictional counterpart.
Lloyd’s summary of the argument:
1. It is intrinsically inconceivable that we can ever perform any experiment or observation to detect the presence of X.
2. Therefore any X is indistinguishable from a fiction.
3. Therefore any X is a fiction. If you disagree with this scheme, then I must ask you for a counter-example, or a contrary proof.
This is, I think, a fairly reasonable definition of what makes something a fiction, and is in tune with a typical dictionary definition such as of “anything invented or imagined.” However, we are already in trouble. Lloyd is a Berkeleyan idealist and the next section of his paper runs:
“Now, let this X be the entire physical universe and all physical things in it. I put it to you that you cannot be sure that X is really there.”
So we must be careful when we start talking about fictions, just in case we haven’t already unsafely reified something which may be strictly fictional according to the above definition, and then find ourselves having to fictionalise reality in order to accommodate our previous oversight. However, for the purposes of this essay, X is not the physical world; it is “the self”.
Shaun Gallagher(2) has summarised two important notions of the self which have been of interest to Cognitive Science:
“Minimal self: Phenomenologically,…a consciousness of oneself as an immediate subject of experience, unextended in time. The minimal self almost certainly depends on brain processes…..
Narrative self: A….self image that is constituted with a past and a future in the various stories that we…tell about ourselves.”
Gallagher’s definition of the minimal self is fascinating in it’s own right. He starts with the word “phenomenologically”, and this is no accident. The “minimal self” he describes is the subject itself. But he then follows it with a materialistically-inspired claim that “almost certainly” this minimal self has its root in brain processes. This is a highly contentious claim because it goes over and above a claim that the mind supervenes on the brain. Whilst it is quite clear that the contents of consciousness are dependent upon brain processes, that the subject of consciousness is also dependent upon brain processes is not clear at all. To confuse these two things would be to fail to distinguish between Chalmers hard and easy problems of consciousness. If this “minimal self” is to be declared fictional on the grounds that they “almost certainly” depend on brain processes then we have at least two major problems. The first is Lloyd’s claim that brains themselves are strictly fictional and the second is that even if they are not there is still no empirical evidence whatsoever to support the claim that the subject of experience is “almost certainly” dependent on brain process. If there were any such evidence, why would anyone advocate eliminative materialism? What would be the point? If there is a materialistic explanation of the subject itself, why should there be a ubiquitous problem with subjectivity in general?
His definition of narrative self is equally interesting. In this case we have cognitive science in total agreement with recent New Age classics such as Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now.”(3) The whole of this book is dedicated to making sure that the minimal self is not confused with the narrative self and that once they are clearly distinguished it becomes clear that the narrative self is nothing but a highly elaborate fiction. In fact the word “ego” is probably a better term for the narrative self, and it is the mental construct which many spiritual traditions deliberately set out to destroy. That the narrative self is a fiction can scarcely be doubted. It is continually open to revision and is always less, rather than more, coherent. It takes the form not only of fictional versions of our own past and projected future but of thought processes which endlessly repeat themselves. These thought processes can be self-reinforcing, serving themselves a bit like Dawkins memes do. They serve themselves, rather than serving the subject who is thinking them – which often leads their “owners” to the psychotherapist who will then spend several months attempting to unravel the self-reinforcing fictional self which has served as that person’s identity. So I think we can safely say this has passed the “Lloyd test” as it surely is intrinsically inconceivable that we could ever perform any experiment or observation to detect the presence of a narrative self.
Tolle’s book even goes some way to agreeing with Gallagher’s definition of the minimal self – which should have been obvious from its title. The minimal self, according to Tolle, exists in an eternal “now”. From a phenomenological point of view, it is always the present, in contrast with the narrative self which is forever concerned with the past and the future and has no interest in the ever-present “now”.
So what of the minimal self? Gallagher first questions the immunity principle, based upon the xase of schizophrenics suffering from thought insertion. I think the immunity principle is in no danger, as Gallagher himself has agreed elsewhere(3).
“His judgment that it is he who is being subjected to these thoughts is immune to error through misidentification, even if he is completely wrong about who is causing his thoughts. In the latter case, with respect to agency, he is in a position to make only statements in which he uses the first person pronoun as object--and in such cases the immunity principle is not at stake, and therefore cannot be violated.”
Gallagher then proposes two ways to proceed in our analysis of the minimal self. His first example is of an “ecological self”, and he describes a baby mimicking facial expressions of adults. This sort of behaviour is surely instinctive. Newborn infants also “know” how to suck a nipple. Is this evidence of a minimal self? I don’t think so. This is instinct, and I see no reason to believe that a human baby mimicking adult facial expressions is any different. The second choice is phenomenological, and describes Galen Strawson’s characterisation of the self as “the subject of experience”. Gallagher then goes on to say:
“This is a momentary self without long-term continuity, and thus, without a history – a ‘bare locus of consciousness, void of personality’”.
At this point I depart company with Gallagher, but not Strawson. The phenomenological subject is certainly void of personality. It has no identity. As already described, our sense of personal identity is maintained by the narrative self, so the minimal self, the subject, has no history of its own. But it is momentary only in the sense that Tolle describes it as momentary – for the minimal self it is always now. But to say it is “without long-term continuity’ would be to make a serious mistake. On the contrary, it is the sole continuity which unifies our entire experience of reality, from the moment we are born to the moment we die. The only times it is missing is when we are in deep (dreamless) sleep and when we are anaesthetised.
Gallagher’s account continues….
“On this view, a human being consists of a series of transient selves, each one lasting only as long as a unique period of experience lasts…”
I am not sure what to make of this. What is “a unique period of experience”? As long as it takes me to type this sentence, perhaps? How long is a piece of string? How long is a Now? There are no such things as unique periods of experience.
“…without continuity.”
At which point I must return to Peter B. Lloyd. Whilst I am not suggesting we adopt his suggestion that we are all disembodied minds, it nevertheless remains an epistemic possibility. Yet we experience an objective world. The “minimal self” (as the subject of experience) remains a continuous presence for the whole of our lives, whether we are conscious, self-conscious, semi-conscious or dreaming. The minimal self is the paradigm case of continuity.
Gallagher then goes on to re-assure everybody that Strawson is a good materialist, and that the minimal self is “manifest in terms of brain processes”, (whatever this is supposed to mean). This leads him to point of that it is possible to be “conscious of myself as a minimal subject of experience without being aware of the brain processes that may (or may not) generate the self” (whatever that is supposed to mean). Despite the total lack of any understanding of what we mean by “generate” or “manifest in terms of”, Gallagher then assures us that it may be possible to manifest/generate minimal selves in robots – but only if we drop Strawson’s definition of the self as the subject of experience. In other words, only if “minimal self” now means “ecological self” and has nothing to do with subjectivity at all. Indeed, “minimal selves” have now been reduced to “the conceptual level”. Unfortunately, since I am acutely aware that the subject of my own experiences (as opposed to my fictional narrative self) is not merely a concept, this isn’t going to get us very far.
Perhaps if we could move beyond the relentless attempts to defend materialism, we might see a different way in which the minimal self could be considered fictional, or at least non-existent. One could fill several shelves with books devoted to the relationship between Being and Nothing, but I will restrict myself to one quote from Hegel:
“…the Absolute is Nought. In fact this definition is implied in saying that the thing-in-itself is the indeterminate, utterly without form and so without content, -- or in saying that God is only the supreme Being and nothing more; for this is really declaring Him to be the same negativity as above. The Nothing which the Buddhists make the universal principle, as well as the final aim and goal of everything, is the same abstraction.”
The reason we can understand the claim that the minimal self is a fiction is nothing to do with it being reducible to brain processes, nothing to do with it being non-continuous and nothing to do with it being merely conceptual. Its non-existence is of a far more fundamental nature than that of Sherlock Holmes (or the four-sided pinkel triangle). It can be considered fictional only on the grounds that Being is intimately related to Nothingness.
1 Lloyd, Peter B., Philosophy Now, No. 11, 1994
2 Gallagher, Shaun, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol.4 No.1, 2000
3 Gallagher, Shaun, Self-Reference and Schizophrenia, Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-experience, ed. Dan Zahavi. (pp. 203-239). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/copenhagen.html
4. G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Vol. 1, translation by Humphrey Palmer, 1971, p
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