In my last post, The boundaries of selfhood and the problem of other minds, I talked about the self from a physical perspective and from an “inside-out” experiential perspective. In this post I’d like to try something different.
Beginning with the whole picture.
It’s pretty hard to assemble a bunch of strange-looking pieces with no knowledge of what they’re supposed to be.
Imagine trying to put together a puzzle without getting to see the picture on the box. Or without even knowing what a puzzle is. In everyday life, we grasp the big picture so readily we don’t even think about it. The big picture is: We live with others in the world. We don’t go about wondering, “Where do I end and you begin? How do I know you have a mind?” Most people will live their entire lives and never ask these questions. These are questions for people who have too much time on their hands.
What problem of other minds?
That the problem of other minds isn’t a problem in everyday life suggests something—maybe insofar as we know much of anything, we already know other minds. But how can that be?
Let’s try beginning at the beginning.
It seems unlikely we start out by knowing ourselves, then the world. We begin by feeling the world around us, and what we feel most poignantly are other beings. It would be ridiculous to suppose we came screaming and kicking out of the womb with an attitude of Cartesian skepticism toward our own mother. But I wonder, do we even have a sense of self at that point? We exist, of course, so someone must be experiencing something. But consider this: most of us can’t remember the moment we were born, not to mention the first few years or so of our lives. Why is that? How could we forget something as important as the beginning of our own story? Maybe memory requires a certain amount of experience to ground our sense of self in the world? Who knows. This is wild speculation.
Whatever the case, inference by analogy can’t be what’s going on at the very beginning since newborns can’t even hold up their heads up to see what they look like in a mirror. It seems more plausible that we learn about ourselves in such a way that no comparison to our own external appearance is needed.
A baby begins crying in the nursery; before long the entire room is drowning in tears. We might assume babies parrot others to learn social behavior. But it’s hard to imagine what their motivation would be in this case. Another problem is, if I want to copy you sticking out your tongue, that would involve knowing that I have a tongue too, where it is, and what it feels like when I’ve got my tongue outside my mouth the way you do. Which seems like a mirror would be required.
Besides, how do they know what to parrot? They don’t try to sound like the dishwasher running or the toilet flushing. And they would also have to know that crying means something, but why should behaviors mean anything at all? How did we come to know that Waah Waah + salty liquid oozing out of human eyeballs = "sad"? Or that upturned corners of the mouth, which may or may not reveal teeth, and a certain gleam in the eye means "happy"? Many behaviors seem completely disconnected from their meaning when you think about them from a removed perspective. Sure, when I reach for something, there’s a pretty good chance I want the thing I’m reaching for, but the meaning of most behavior isn’t self-evident, and not all behavior means something. You might think we know what’s meaningful by studying the intentional acts of living beings, but how do we distinguish intentional acts from non-intentional acts? What is it about the actions of other beings that’s relevant? Why should some things like faces, especially eyes, stand out to us, even as infants? How do we distinguish other beings such as ourselves from inanimate objects from features of the environment in the first place?
Hm.
Maybe emotional contagion is a sign of empathy, then? But empathy presupposes a rather sophisticated theory of mind that involves understanding the other’s situation and what they might be feeling. And yet crying can go viral even when the other babies couldn’t possibly have a clue what the first baby is crying about. Besides, you know how babies are—they think the world revolves around them! When they cry, they’re crying for themselves. Which makes it a bit far-fetched to say they’re empathizing, given the usual sense of that word.1
It could be that the loud noise upsets them. Few things in life are as annoying as the sound of crying babies, so why not? But there are not-annoying contagious behaviors as well, so the annoying-ness of the noise might explain some of it, but not the full story.2
You might be tempted to say we evolved this way, but when do we not? If we had teeth growing out of our eyebrows, you can bet your sweet honey buns someone would come up with a plausible evolutionary explanation for it. Labeling emotional contagion an instinct doesn’t explain much either. I think it’s better to say: Who knows? Somehow we pop into this world not feeling the need to sound like air conditioners, and we’re all pretty much in broad agreement about what’s meaningful.
This state of affairs is pretty wonderful when you think about it. It seems infants somehow pick out meaning in the world and take it into themselves so completely it’s as if they feel another baby’s crying as their own, and this without an obvious theory of mind or rational mediation, before distinguishing another’s interests from their own. Which would imply the moment we’re born, our sense of self must be minimal or poorly-defined, closer to Kant’s container Self than to a Cartesian Self.3 Perhaps our individuality precipitates out from the whole as time goes on, but in the very beginning, our experience is undifferentiated, we are the same as everything, there is no 'external' world and no ‘other minds’. Everything is fused together in an inherently meaningful experience.
But how do babbling blubbery beings blended into everyone and everything understand meaning with almost no theory of mind while also being completely selfish? By incorporating theories from the last post into a holistic primordial experience, we might “find our selves”. But we’ll have to open our minds to let in the full picture, since what follows can only be a “likely story”.4
Falling out of an impossible dream.
If you think about it, our agency would never become clear to us if we lived in an impossible dream where everyone gets everything they want, where every need is perfectly satisfied. But alas, we don’t always get what we want. In this world, the real world, our desires find resistance. Resistance from the world of physical bodies teaches us that, despite what Michael Jackson has to say on the matter, we are not the world.
Resistance teaches us what belongs to us and where our power ends. We notice that we seem to have quite a bit more control over our own bodies than other bodies. Which brings me to that boundary blurriness problem I talked about in the previous post. If we’re starting from the impossible dream, we have to say that when I’m driving a car, the car is me. The question is really: how can it not be me? It’s not me only insofar as it works against me rather than for me, and the same would be true of all physical things. We also get pushbacks from beings whose desires come into conflict with our own. Does my influence over others make them me? Given our starting point, I see no reason why not. Insofar as two beings have the same desires, they are, as we say, “of one mind”.
In the primordial experience, we mirror the universe while constituting it. Primordially, there is no disharmony, and just about every Beatles song is literally true. The moment of birth is a rude awakening from the impossible dream. Suddenly we find ourselves thrown into a terrifying fun house of jumbled, distorted images—a world of broken mirrors. Things no longer move to our rhythm. Indeed, it feels like a miracle when anything cooperates. Miracles do happen sometimes. But miracles, we soon learn, are unreliable. And they become less reliable as time goes on.
What’s worse, the disharmony we find in the world is irreversible. A broken mirror stays broken, and pretty much everything will end up like the broken mirror sooner or later. Eventually we learn even the broken mirrors will turn to dust. Nothing lasts forever. And we tend to think anything that’s not forever is not real at all.5 Because you are not me forever, you’re not me at all! Things break or fail me, so they are not me at all. My body will one day turn into dust, so it’s not me at all! I can see how a physical theory of self might arise from this situation, since matter, worthless though it is, seems to be the only stuff that lasts forever. I can also see how a theory of soul might arise from this situation, because to think we are nothing more than dust is unthinkable. There must be another kind of Substance, a not-dust Substance that lasts forever, even after the body turns to dust.
Plato said: “Love is the desire for permanent possession of the good.”6
Welcome to your Self.
Hey. What do you know. We may have stumbled upon a Kantian transcendental argument: The primordial experience is the condition for the possibility of selfhood. Maybe? Okay, never mind. We won’t aspire to Kantian transcendence. Let’s just say my agency is a fallenness from the primordial state brought about by your agency, which is also a fallenness from the primordial state brought about by my agency... You make my self possible and I make your self possible. But hold the kumbaya, ‘cause we are not in this thing together. Selfhood is the result of our not being in perfect agreement with each other. The slightest difference in our desires is all it takes to distort our reflections, and even the slightest distortion destroys the impossible dream altogether. We hang on to our idea of the impossible dream as long as possible. But the “real world” cannot be ignored. It barges in. You barge in. I barge in. Crash. Bang. Ka-pow. Only matter gets to remain above the fray, aloof, distant…meaningless.
Still, we never completely forget the idea of the primordial experience. Although we tend to express this distant memory through the warped medium of language, from time to time we can catch ourselves reverting back to that impossible dream, like when someone else’s laugh makes us laugh, even before we know why. It’s a bit embarrassing when you realize you’re doing this, isn’t it? Nobody wants to see themselves grinning like a moron long before the punchline lands. But maybe we shouldn’t be too embarrassed. During those moments your smile just IS my happiness, because in the primordial experience, it doesn’t matter who is doing the smiling or why.
Maybe the conceptual rift we imagine to be The Way Things Are, where it’s me over here and you over there, isn’t this broken mirror world, this not-very-funhouse we currently find ourselves in, but misguided theories about it that try to wrangle it into permanence. By supposing meaningless Matter is all there is, we try to grind our mirror fragments into immortal dust, and yet somehow we always end up with glitter, glimmers we re-collect. Recollections so subtly pervasive, removing ourselves from them requires college-level instruction (and a stove-heated room) which has us each pretending meaning exists only inside my own private dustbin.
Whereas those who don’t have too much time on their hands don’t even realize they might be recalling what it was like before we all fell apart into you and me and the world. They just smile without knowing why.
What do YOU WE think? ;)
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—Tina
This study calls it a precursor of empathy. Fair enough.
This study suggests babies are more sensitive to the cries of other babies their own age than aversive artificial cries.
Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception is not a soul substance, but a condition of experience. Whatever the self is empirically, in itself, cannot be known.
Myth, in other words. This is a reference to Plato’s Timaeus. Any inquiry into Becoming (the natural world) can only be a probable account.
Here I am the midnight before this post is scheduled to publish, but I really must include this quote I came across from the book I’m reading by
(more on this coming soon…stay tuned!):“On Whitehead’s reading, Kant privileges perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy” and ignores or at least marginalizes the deeper and more ontologically relevant perceptual mode of “causal efficacy”. “Presentational immediacy” displays reality in a way amenable to representational analysis, showing only the more or less clear and distinct surfaces of the extensive world as they are presented to a reflective subject here and now. It is the end product of a complex process of unconscious prehensive unification in our organism and nervous system. “Causal efficacy” unfolds behind the scenes of this Cartesian theater in the unrepresentable depths of reality, carrying vague but potent emotional vectors from the past into the present. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy provides us with a freeze-frame of the surrounding world (hence its relative clarity and distinctness), while perception in the mode of causal efficacy is transitional, always on the move (hence its vagueness). Presentational immediacy allows for intentional consciousness, the subjective capacity for attentional directedness toward the eidos of objects. Causal efficacy is prehensional, the proto-subjective capacity to inherit the affective influences of objects, which themselves grow together into a novel subject. The former mode requires that a mind remain at a distance from things, relating to their essence rather than feeling their causal insistence. The latter mode reveals the interpenetration of things, the intimate assimilation of their past being into our present becoming. Schelling and Whitehead’s alchemical distillation of consciousness uncovers an experiential dynamic deeper than reflective cognition, an ontologically basic and cosmically pervasive network of vector-feelings shared in by actualities of every grade. If anything is a priori, it is not the transcendental structures of human conceptuality as Kant argued, but the descendental processes of cosmic prehensionality.” [my emphasis]
After reading this passage I can’t help but feel I have been unwittingly channeling some bits and pieces of Alfred North Whitehead in this post, despite never having tackled Process and Reality. Truth be told, I was kinda hoping to avoid that notorious oeuvre by reading Segall’s book instead.
Symposium (206b).
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