Could be
I only sang because the lonely road was long;
and now the road and I are gone
but not the song.
I only spoke the verse to pay for borrowed time:
and now the clock and I are broken
but not the rhyme.
Possibly,
the self not being fundamental,
eternity
breathes only on the incidental.
What makes each human being unique? No other species of animal has such diverse individuals; each person presents a different set of appearances and abilities. Some of those traits are inherited, and some come that person’s experiences—but in every case, each of us ends up with different characteristics. We sometimes use ‘Self’ for the features and traits that distinguish each person from everyone else.
However, we also use Self in a sense which implies that all our activities are controlled by powerful creatures inside ourselves, who do our thinking and feeling for us. We call these our Selves or Identities, and sometimes we tend to think of them as like separate persons inside our heads.
Daniel Dennett: “A homunculus (from Latin, ‘little man’) is a miniature adult held to inhabit the brain … who perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the commands to the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an infinite regress … since we can ask whether there is a little man in the little man’s head, responsible for his perception and action, and so on.”[180]
What attracts us to the queer idea that we can only think or feel with the help of those Selves inside our minds? Chapter §1 suggested some reasons for this:
Citizen: Whether or not you believe that Selves exist, I’m perfectly sure that there’s one inside me, because I can feel it working to make my decisions.”
Psychotherapist: The Single-Self legend helps makes life seem pleasant, by hiding from us how much we’re controlled by goals that we’d rather not know about.
Pragmatist: The Single-Self concept helps make us efficient by keeping our minds from trying to understand everything all the time.
The Single-Self view thus keeps us from asking difficult questions about our minds. If you wonder how your vision works, it answers that: ‘Your Self simply peers out though your eyes.” If you ask how your memory works, you get: “Your Self knows how to recollect whatever might be relevant.” And if you wonder what guides you through your life, it tells that your Self provides you with your desires and goals—and then solves all your problems for you. Thus, the Single-Self view diverts you from asking about how your mental processes work, and leads you to wonder, instead, about these kinds of questions about your Self:
Is an infant born with anything like what an adult would call a Self’? Some would insist on answering with, “Yes, infants are persons just like us—except that they don’t yet know so much.” But others would take an opposite view: “An infant begins with almost no intellect, and developing one takes a sizeable time.”
Does your Self have a special location in space? Most ‘western’ thinkers might answer, “Yes”—and tend to locate it inside their heads, somewhere not far behind their eyes. However, I’ve heard that some other cultures situate Selves between the belly and chest.
Which of your beliefs are your “genuine” ones? The Single-Self view suggests that some of your many intents and views are your “sincere” and “authentic” ones—whereas the models of mind discussed in this book leave room for a person to hold conflicting values and attitudes.
Does your Self stay the same throughout your life? We each have a sense of remaining the same, no matter whatever may happen to us. Does this mean that some part of us is more permanent than our bodies and our memories?
Does your Self survive the death of your brain? Different answers to that might leave us pleased or distressed, but would not help us to understand ourselves.
Each such question uses words like self, we, and us in a somewhat different sense—and this chapter will argue that this is good because, if we want to understand ourselves, we’ll need to use several different such views of ourselves.
Whenever you think about your “Self,” you are switching among a network of models,[181] each of which may help to answer questions about different aspects of what you are.
For example, some of our models are based on simplistic ideas like “All our actions are based on the will to survive,” or “we always like pleasure more than pain,” while some other self-models are far more complex. We develop these multiple theories because each of them helps to represent certain aspects of ourselves, but is likely to give some wrong answers about other questions about ourselves.
Citizen: Why should a person want more than one model? Would it not be better to combine them into a single, more comprehensive one?
In the past, there were many attempts to make ‘unified’ theories of psychology.[182] However, this chapter will suggest some reasons why none of those theories worked well by itself, and why we may need to keep switching among various different views of ourselves.
Jerry Fodor: “If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be Me.”[183]
Cosma Rohilla Shalizi: “I have been reading my old poems, and they were written by somebody else. Yet I am that selfsame person; or, if I am not, who is? If no one is, when did he die—when he finished this poem, or that one, or the next day, or the end of that month?”
§9-1. How do we Represent Ourselves?
How do people construct their self-models? We’ll start by asking simpler questions about how we describe our acquaintances. Thus, when Charles tries to think about his friend Joan, he might begin by describing some of her characteristics. These could include his ideas about:
The appearance of Joan’s body and face,
The range and extents of her abilities,
Her motives, goals, aversions, and tastes,
The ways in which she is disposed to behave,
Her various roles in the social world,
However, when Charles thinks about Joan in different realms, his descriptions of her may not all agree. For example, his view of Joan as a person at work is that she is helpful and competent, but tends to undervalue herself; however, in social settings he sees her as selfish and overrating herself. What could lead Charles to make such different models? Perhaps his first representation of Joan served well to predict her social performance, but that model did not well describe her business self. Then, when he changed that description to also apply to that realm, it made new mistakes in the contexts where it formerly worked. Eventually, he found that he had to make separate models of Joan to predict her behaviors in other roles.
180
181
Here we use
183