The Essential Self
The self can be thought of as something at the core of someone’s existence. This is sometimes referred to as the essence of who someone is. People often refer to a person’s essential properties – what they are really like. In many ways, the self illusion could become an argument about whether the essential self really exists. This notion of essence is worth considering further.
Imagine that I take your wedding ring or any other object of sentimental value and, using some futuristic machine, I replace it gradually, atom by atom, until it no longer contains any original material but it is indistinguishable from the ring that existed before the processing. Would it still be the same ring at different stages? Most would accept that a ring with a few atoms replaced was essentially the same ring. A ring with everything replaced was essentially different. But at what stage would the ring transform identity and why would one atom alone make the difference? Also, if this process was gradual, most people would be inclined to say that it was the same ring maintaining identity over time even if it contained none of the original ring. But imagine that we recombine all the material from the original ring so that we now have two rings. Which is the original? Does the identity of one object suddenly cease to exist when another is reconstructed?
Clearly the identity of material objects is called into question under these circumstances, but what about the identity of persons? Imagine we perform the same sort of replacement using a person. Philosopher Derek Parfit uses these types of scenario to challenge the reality of the self.96 He asks us to imagine replacing a person cell by cell so that the original person no longer contains any of the physical material before the process started. In one example, he asks us to imagine replacing our cells one by one with those from Greta Garbo. At what point do we become the famous Swedish actress? When does our self become her self? Using such logic, Parfit dismisses the notion of an essential self in the first place.
These are compelling thought experiments that challenge our intuitions about the nature of reality and identity. Frustratingly, there are no right and wrong answers to these questions, and the academic exchanges between philosophers highlight the disagreements that these scenarios generate among those who have pondered them professionally for years. However, to the man in the street, they reveal a common psychological intuition that there must be some enduring self that exists independently of the physical body – an essential self that defines who we are.
When we think essentially, we believe that an internal property exists that refines the true nature of things and this way of reasoning emerges somewhere around the third to fourth birthday. In her seminal book, The Essential Child, Susan Gelman97 makes a convincing case that essentialism is a naturally developing way of thinking, that children use to chop up the living world into all the different species. When children learn that all dogs are members of the same group, then they do so on the basis of assuming that all dogs must have some form of doggy essence inside them that makes them different from cats which have catty essence. They understand that if you change the outward appearance of the dog so that it now looks like a cat, it is still essentially a dog and will behave like one.
In truth, this distinction could be made at the biological level when it comes to considering the DNA sequences of both species, but few children are ever told about genetics and yet they assume there must be an invisible property that differentiates the animals. Essentialism operates initially in young children’s reasoning about the biological world but eventually becomes part of categorizing the important things in their world in general. This is especially so when they come to see others as unique individuals with unique minds.
My colleague Paul Bloom argues that essentialism is also at the heart of why we value certain objects or experiences: we believe them to have certain essential truths.98 For example, we prefer and admire original works of art until we discover they are forgeries. Fakes are never worth as much as the original, even if you could not tell them apart. Most heterosexuals would enjoy sex with a good-looking member of the opposite sex until they discover that the person is a transsexual. For many heterosexuals, the thought of penetration with a member of the same sex is disgusting, even though they may never be aware of the true biological origins of their partner. Although the physical pleasure could be identical, the discovery that things are not what you believe reveals that our enjoyment depends on an assumption of authenticity. This is because we believe that a deception of identity has taken place. The same can be said for our common-sense notions of the self. The true nature of a person is their essential identity and when they are not true to their self, we call them fakes, cheats and hypocrites, lacking strong core values. All of this language betrays a notion of some internal truth or self that has been violated.
This core self, wandering down the path of development, enduring things that life throws at it is, however, the illusion. Like every other aspect of human development, the emergence of the self is epigenetic – an interaction of the genes in the environment. The self emerges out of that journey through the epigenetic landscape combining the legacy of our genetic inheritance with the influence of the early environment to produce profound and lasting effects on how we develop socially. These effects, in turn, can shape the way we interact with others and raise our own children. These thoughts and behaviours may seemingly originate from within us but they emerge largely in a social context. In a sense, who we are really comes down to those around us. We may all be born with different biological properties and dispositions but even these emerge in the context of others and in some cases can be triggered or turned off by environmental factors. The extent of these reactions and how they happen, is what scientists are trying to discover. We may feel that we are the self treading down the path of life and making our own decisions at the various junctions and forks, but that would also assume we are free to make our choices. However, the freedom to make choices is another aspect of the self illusion.
Memory Test
Were the following words present in the list of words you read?
a) needle
b) river
4
The Cost of Free Will
We must believe in free will – we have no choice.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
For ninety-six minutes on a hot summer’s day around noon in 1966, ex-marine Charles Whitman, positioned high up in the tower building of the University of Texas in Austin, fired 150 rounds killing fourteen people and injuring another thirty-two before he was finally shot dead by the police.1 The University of Texas massacre was one of the first examples of a modern-day phenomenon of mass shootings. Dunblane, Columbine and Virginia Tech are just a few of the recent atrocities in a growing list of senseless killing sprees that beggar belief. Every time one of these horrors happens, we are left asking the same question – why? In the case of Charles Whitman, we have an answer. He probably wasn’t his usual self.