In contrast to this ego view, there is an alternative version of the self, based on the ‘bundle theory’ after the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume.5 Three hundred years ago in a dull, drizzly, cold, misty and miserable (or ‘driech’ as we Scots love to say) Edinburgh, Hume sat and contemplated his own mind. He looked in on his self. He tried to describe his inner self and thought that there was no single entity, but rather bundles of sensations, perceptions and thoughts piled on top of each other. He concluded that the self emerged out of the bundling together of these experiences. It is not clear whether Hume was aware of exotic Eastern philosophy but in the sixth century BC, thousands of miles away in much warmer climates, the young Buddha, meditating underneath a fig tree, had reached much the same conclusion with his principle of ‘anatta’ (no self). Buddha was seeking spiritual rather than intellectual enlightenment and thought that this state could only be achieved by attaining anatta through meditation.
Today, the findings from contemporary brain science have enlightened the nature of the self. As far as spirits are concerned, brain science – or neuroscience as it is known – has found little evidence for their existence but much to support the bundle theory as opposed to the ego theory of the self.
If the self is the sum of our thoughts and actions, then the first inescapable fact is that these depend on brains. Thoughts and actions are not exclusively the brain because we are always thinking about and acting upon things in the world with our bodies, but the brain is primarily responsible for coordinating these activities. In effect, we are our brains or at least, the brain is the most critical body part when it comes to who we are. We can transplant or replace many parts of the body but most people would regard the patient to be essentially the same person after the operation. However, if a brain transplant were ever possible, then even though the patient may look the same as they come out of the anaesthetic, most of us believe that they would be someone different – more like the person who donated their brain in the first place.
Some of the most compelling evidence that the self depends on the brain comes from studies of unfortunate individuals who have suffered some form of brain damage either through aging or accident. Their personalities can be so radically changed that, to those who knew them, they become a different person. At the other end of the spectrum, many deliberately alter their brains temporarily with a variety of drugs that affect its workings. Whether by accident, disease or debauchery, these studies show that if the brain is damaged, the person is different. If taking drugs that change functioning alters the brain, the person behaves and thinks differently. So who we are depends on our brain. However, we are not just our brains in isolation. One of the messages that I wish to relay here is that each brain exists in an ocean of other brains that affect how it works.
The second major discovery is that there is no centre in the brain where the self is constructed. The brain has many distributed jobs. It processes incoming information from the external world into meaningful patterns that are interpreted and stored for future reference. It generates different levels and types of motivations that are the human drives, emotions and feelings. It produces all sorts of behaviours – some of them automatic while others are acquired through skill, practice and sheer effort. And then there is mental life. Somehow, this 1.5 kg lump of tissue inside our skull can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, appreciate Van Gogh and enjoy Beethoven. It does this through the guise of a self. But the sense of self that most of us experience is not to be found in any one area. Rather it emerges out of the orchestra of different brain processes like a symphony of the self, just as Buddha and Hume said.
Some modern philosophers6 argue that these brain facts alone are sufficient to deny the existence of the self at all. One can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which brain structures are copied or replaced cell by cell until there is none of the original brain material left and yet people maintain an intuition that the self somehow continues to exist independently of all these physical changes. If that were true, then one would have to accept a self that can exist independently of the brain. Most neuroscientists reject that idea. Rather, our brain creates the experience of our self as a model – a cohesive, integrated character – to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout a lifetime, and leave lasting impressions in our memory.
Our brain constructs models of the external world. It can weave experiences into a coherent story that enables us to interpret and predict what we should do next. Our brain simulates the world in order to survive in it. This simulation is remarkable because much of the data that needs processing are corrupted. And yet, our brain fills in missing information, interprets noisy signals and has to rely on only a sample of everything that is going on around us. We don’t have sufficient information, time or resources to work it all out accurately so we make educated guesses to build our models of reality. That working-out includes not only what’s out there in the external world but also what is going on in the internal, mostly unconscious workings of our mind.
Who we are is a story of our self – a constructed narrative that our brain creates. Some of that simulation is experienced as conscious awareness that corresponds to the self illusion that the average person in the street reports. At present we do not know how a physical system like the brain could ever produce those non-physical experiences like the conscious self. In fact, it is turning out to be a very hard problem to solve.7 We may never find an answer and some philosophers believe the question is misguided in the first place. Dan Dennett8 also thinks the self is constructed out of narratives: ‘Our tales are spun, but for the most part, we don’t spin them; they spin us.’ There is no self at the core. Rather it emerges as the ‘centre of a narrative gravity’. In the same way that we can see a square at the centre of the arrangement in Figure 1, it is an illusion created by the surrounding elements. Take the context away, and the square disappears. In the same way, the self is an illusion created by our brain.
Occasionally, we get a glimpse of the illusions our brains create. We may mishear a comment, bump into things or mistakenly reach for a shadow that looks graspable. This happens when we misinterpret the physical world. The same mistakes also happen in our personal world – the world that our self occupies. We reinterpret our failures as successes. We think we are above average on good attributes and not like others when it comes to behaving badly. We sometimes do things that surprise us or at least surprise others who think they know us well. This is when we do things that seem inconsistent with the story of our self. We say, ‘I was not myself’ or ‘It was the wine talking’ but we still retain a belief that we are an individual, trapped in our bodies, tracing out a pathway through life and responsible for our thoughts and actions. Throughout this book, these assumptions are challenged by demonstrating that who we think we are is much more susceptible to outside influences than we imagine.