“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?”
These words written by Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness may help:
As usual, I think we shouldn't skate too fast past the evolutionary explanations. If we want to know why we do agree on meanings, I think that's where it will be.
That said, it doesn't necessarily solve the philosophical question of how we should think about the self now. The ancient intuition of an indivisible unified entity that persists throughout our life, and maybe as many still hope, even beyond, doesn't seem to hold up well.
It gets even more strained when we remember that, even at a psychological level, we're often not unified. Put chocolate cake in front of me, and the planner in me worries that we shouldn't have it. It will affect our waistline and health. But the primordial part of me is like, "I want cake! Now! NOW! N O W!!!" The last part wins more often than it should.
Maybe the best way to think of this is, rather than as a sharp boundary, in terms of a spectrum of what is more or less part of ourselves. For this, I like your criteria of whether it's aligned with us, our desires and decisions. In that sense, my body, at least when healthy, is more apart of me than my car. But the car might be more part of me than the plane I last rode in. Or the city I live in, even though I help contribute, in a miniscule way, to what the city is, in its overall nature. But if we had a "self-quotient", it seems like it would skyrocket when we crossed the boundary between our body and the world.
I think ancient theories are actually far more sophisticated than our current theories. We tend to associate the self with personality or physical characteristics, which obviously change over time, whereas they tried to account for how the self could have parts that come into conflict with one another while also being constituted within and reflective of society, nature...the entire universe. No easy answers there!
"Maybe the best way to think of this is, rather than as a sharp boundary, in terms of a spectrum of what is more or less part of ourselves. For this, I like your criteria of whether it's aligned with us, our desires and decisions. In that sense, my body, at least when healthy, is more apart of me than my car."
Right, I like the continuum model too (and in general). It's interesting how this notion of self aligns with degrees of not noticing. For instance, when all is well, I don't notice my body is my own. It's when things go wrong that I start to want to distance myself from it, from its failure to align with what I want. This idea is nothing new; I stole it from Heidegger's readiness vs. presence at hand distinction, and he probably stole those themes from the ancient story of the fall. The tool is invisible when it works, it only becomes a "thing in itself" when it fails me. Like when something breaks and we throw it across the room and go, "Piece of shit!" Shit = dumb matter.
Definitely the ancients weren't uniform, particularly the pre-axial age cultures, like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians in their prime. I was more thinking about the Christian notions that dominate the west, and their lineage going back to a syncretization of early Christianity and some aspects of Platonic and Neo-platonic philosophy.
I see what you mean now. And today the notion of self is tied to the soul and life. I wonder how much of that has to do with the translation of 'psyche'. Not that I'm especially eager to get into that kind of scholarship.
Glad you liked the article. I thought it was interesting what the ancient Egyptians knew about the brain. It's also interesting how many cultures then thought of the heart as the more important organ.
I wonder if before the modern age of alienation people really thought about "other" minds as a problem?
I remember sitting with a patient, getting a very vivid picture of him as a 3 year old walking behind his mother, trying to keep up with her as she ignored him.
He had never talked about anything related to this before, but a few seconds later, he started talking about a memory that had just surfaced in which he was walking behind his mother when he was 3, trying to keep up with her as she ignored him.
Countless similar experiences pretty much inured me to the "problem of other minds," and studying the parapsychological literature (which in many cases consists of scientific studies with a far greater replication rate than most of the social sciences and even than some biological studies) pretty much helped me to shed other intellectual reservations about other minds being a "problem."
I particularly love the idea of a state in which all the Beatles songs are 'true"!
Thank you! That is a good question. I don't think the problem of other minds as we know it existed in ancient thought. It seems to arise from a Cartesian way of thinking that takes the self out of its relations and context. But for some reason we have a hard time getting out of that Cartesian mode. I guess it's just in the air.
Interesting story about your patient. Did you tell him?
I did not tell him, as it probably would have freaked him out! - but something like this has happened to me so many times I've come to take it for granted.
I suspect that the fact that it's virtually impossible, in cases of very vivid lucid dreams, to tell if one is awake or dreaming, is enough to overcome this problem of "other minds." If you and I meet somewhere in Barcelona, and realize we're both in a dream - and there's nothing "dreamy" about our experience - everything looks exactly the same as in waking, BUT we know we're both sharing the same "mind-created" environment, then we've just eliminated the problem of other minds!
We've also completely defeated physicalism.
Normally, what are we actually asking when we ask, "Am I awake or dreaming?"
If I'm "awake," nowadays that usually means I'm in a purely physical environment, and if all humans or creatures with any kind of subjectivity were eliminated, the physical environment would remain, unchanged.
Whereas, if I'm "dreaming," this means I'm in a mind-constructed environment.
Well, if there's absolutely NO way to tell if I'm dreaming or awake (at least, in some circumstances) then I've eliminated any reason to assume that apart from experience, there is some extra "thing" called a "physical" environment. I don't need that hypothesis, since everything one could provide as evidence for something "physical" - every scientific experiment ever conducted - could all be done in a conscious shared dream!
Your shared dream scenario reminds me of the simulation argument. In the video below (it's six minutes or so) you'll notice David Chalmers brings up a counterargument: imagine your spouse is cheating on you and you never discover it, so it doesn't affect you at all. He says, "A lot of people say that would suck, even though I don't know."
Of course there's a big difference between not knowing and not being able to know in principle.
Another fine thought provoking essay Tina. Helen Keller's account is insightful as well. I can't say I'm a fan of Whitehead because his choice of vocabulary does not resonate with my own experience I guess....
What I do believe is that an infant's sense of self is a threshold that coincides with its first encounter of control. Here is a short excerpt from my book:
An infant is attentive and corresponds directly to the fundamental reality of value. It could be inferred that if an infant does not correspond to value in a meaningful way no further development would take place. The infant finds itself exposed to a confusing array of sensory stimuli. Being guided by its meaningful relationship with value as a reference point, slowly, over time, the infant will soon make the connection between the complex correlation of chaotic patterns, the differences between patterns, then correlations between the differences, and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the infant is several months old that it is capable of using the power of its own reasoning to make sense of the enormously complex correlation of sensations, boundaries, and desires called an "object" to be able to reach for one.
It is this power of reasoning that gave the infant its first taste of control. The object, now firmly clasp in its hand is not the primary experience. It will be the infant’s relationship to the complex correlations of repetitive patterns derived from the experience that gives the infant its first connection to a patterned world and a sense of control. It is at this intersection where a sense of control merges with a sense of self. This sense of self coextensive with a sense of control coalesce into unity. The sensation of control and the sensation of self are two sides of the same coin, one cannot exist without the other.
Yeah, I hear you on Whitehead. I have only read Science and the Modern World and I found it at times completely lucid and at other times completely mystifying. But overall I get the feeling I'm on board with his views...whatever they are. :)
It sounds like we both agree on the fundamental reality of value—I can't see any way to arrive at it without presupposing it—and the nexus of self and control. Of course agency makes little sense without value, or desire, in other words.
Yeah, consensus is a rare commodity these days, so when two individuals can agree on a fundamental ontology that's pretty cool I think.....
I have the tendency to experiment with vocabulary and your choice of the word desire coincides with a feature of value that I use in reference to physics. As first cause, value is indeterminate intensity that tends. Indeterminate simply means we cannot account for it and the word intensity is just that, "it's intense". There's no other way to describe it.
Anyway, from a physics standpoint: as first cause, value is indeterminate intensity that tends and that tendency is toward motion resulting in form. With this rendition we now have a vocabulary that can account for the evolution, diversity and complexity we find in our universe without having to rely upon something as lame as a "big bang". And like you said, agency of any kind makes little sense without value.
I wonder if we couldn't apply the concept of resonance... Just as you can make a thing vibrate by playing its resonant frequency, perhaps emotions are transmitted in much the same way - we hear crying and it plays on the sad part of ourselves. We could link this back to Aristotle's idea of perception via the soul taking on the forms of other things. We naturally empathise with anything and everything, especially those most similar to us. But some things are more relatable and thus resonate more with us.
I think it's a mistake to view babies as selfish. It probably derives from Augustine, who took his own crying as a baby as proof of his sinfulness(!). In 'The Art of Happiness', the Dalai Lama pushes back against that by pointing out that babies, by nature, bring great joy to those around them. I think the idea that we are born completely selfish is completely backwards, and most likely very harmful to society.
What you are saying about the self being defined by the limits of our will lines up nicely with what I've been thinking about the self being defined by beliefs (an idea prompted by your last post, and which I am still working on fleshing out a bit more fully). But I think it's not just about what we can control or not, it's also about what surprises us. If solipsism were true, there should really be no surprises nor any impediments to my will. I should be omniscient as well as omnipotent.
We could tie this in to the free energy principle. The aim, according to the FEP, is to harmonise with the environment so perfectly that it does not surprise or disrupt us. We want to be at one with the world. But the world does surprise us, despite our best theories and our best attempts at manipulating it.
I think resonance makes sense. There's something musical about emotions, as if they're "in the air".
What I meant by selfish isn't the same as Augustine; I didn't mean they're sinful. In fact, I would have thought that sin would be impossible without rationality and the ability to choose otherwise. As for babies bringing joy...meh...I'll take dogs over babies any day of the week. According to the last pope and pretty much every drug commercial, I'm not the only one.
"If solipsism were true, there should really be no surprises nor any impediments to my will. I should be omniscient as well as omnipotent."
Right, for solipsism that makes sense. I was thinking of something that makes very little sense, though, which is why I called it the impossible dream—a communal dream where there is no resistance and everyone is perfectly satisfied. What sort of dream could this be? Not anything that's, well, possible. But yes, I think no surprises, or at least no bad or unpleasant surprises (since we might want to be surprised). Actual dreams are of course very peculiar because we don't feel like we're controlling them. Much of what goes on in my dreamland is a surprise.
I read something similar to your free energy principle idea recently, but I have no idea where. I'll send you the article if I come across it.
The resonance idea has me thinking: are we wrong to see emotions as essentially belonging to individuals/private? Maybe they are generally interpersonal or communal, or even ecological, and only individual in particular cases. I think happiness is roughly an experience of harmony, in which case interpersonal harmony or disharmony would play a big role in each person's emotions, and might allow some transference of emotions too.
And actually, looking beyond emotions, if we consider how we often think communally rather than individually, perhaps we similarly know other minds because they're already part of our own mind. Like, "of course they can feel, I can feel through them", and "of course they have thoughts, I think through/with them". Perhaps the problem of other minds really only occurs for philosophers who spend too much time on their own (does that fit historically?).
You're right about it being impossible for babies to commit a sin because they lack rationality. Augustine's point, iirc, was more that it was evidence of original sin and our fallen nature, even though it couldn't be an actual sin itself. Which is still a really crappy way to look at a crying baby I think.
I think many emotions are related to experiences with others and arise out of a social context. So does hiding emotion, at least for us. But babies don't hide their emotions, and neither do other animals. If partaking of the tree of knowledge is supposed to represent the fallen nature of humanity (as opposed to other animals), then I would think a better sign of that would be our emotional deception. Particularly our self-deception, from which we get a bunch of conceptual hangups and neurotic behavior.
Kant > Descartes; this I know. The rest is very thought provoking also!
Thanks for reading! I’m glad you found it thought provoking as that is definitely my goal.
“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?”
These words written by Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness may help:
https://scentofdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-soul-dawn-helen-keller-on-her.html
Wow, that is quite an account. Thanks for sharing it!
As usual, I think we shouldn't skate too fast past the evolutionary explanations. If we want to know why we do agree on meanings, I think that's where it will be.
That said, it doesn't necessarily solve the philosophical question of how we should think about the self now. The ancient intuition of an indivisible unified entity that persists throughout our life, and maybe as many still hope, even beyond, doesn't seem to hold up well.
It gets even more strained when we remember that, even at a psychological level, we're often not unified. Put chocolate cake in front of me, and the planner in me worries that we shouldn't have it. It will affect our waistline and health. But the primordial part of me is like, "I want cake! Now! NOW! N O W!!!" The last part wins more often than it should.
Maybe the best way to think of this is, rather than as a sharp boundary, in terms of a spectrum of what is more or less part of ourselves. For this, I like your criteria of whether it's aligned with us, our desires and decisions. In that sense, my body, at least when healthy, is more apart of me than my car. But the car might be more part of me than the plane I last rode in. Or the city I live in, even though I help contribute, in a miniscule way, to what the city is, in its overall nature. But if we had a "self-quotient", it seems like it would skyrocket when we crossed the boundary between our body and the world.
Actually, many ancients believed the self had parts. For example: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/consciousness-and-beyond/202306/ancient-concepts-of-the-mind-brain-and-soul#:~:text=There%20is%20evidence%20that%20Mesopotamians,afterlife%20in%20ghost%2Dlike%20form.&text=Unlike%20the%20neighbouring%20Egyptians%2C%20Mesopotamians,/soul%2C%20and%20the%20body.
I think ancient theories are actually far more sophisticated than our current theories. We tend to associate the self with personality or physical characteristics, which obviously change over time, whereas they tried to account for how the self could have parts that come into conflict with one another while also being constituted within and reflective of society, nature...the entire universe. No easy answers there!
"Maybe the best way to think of this is, rather than as a sharp boundary, in terms of a spectrum of what is more or less part of ourselves. For this, I like your criteria of whether it's aligned with us, our desires and decisions. In that sense, my body, at least when healthy, is more apart of me than my car."
Right, I like the continuum model too (and in general). It's interesting how this notion of self aligns with degrees of not noticing. For instance, when all is well, I don't notice my body is my own. It's when things go wrong that I start to want to distance myself from it, from its failure to align with what I want. This idea is nothing new; I stole it from Heidegger's readiness vs. presence at hand distinction, and he probably stole those themes from the ancient story of the fall. The tool is invisible when it works, it only becomes a "thing in itself" when it fails me. Like when something breaks and we throw it across the room and go, "Piece of shit!" Shit = dumb matter.
That's an interesting post. Thanks!
Definitely the ancients weren't uniform, particularly the pre-axial age cultures, like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians in their prime. I was more thinking about the Christian notions that dominate the west, and their lineage going back to a syncretization of early Christianity and some aspects of Platonic and Neo-platonic philosophy.
I see what you mean now. And today the notion of self is tied to the soul and life. I wonder how much of that has to do with the translation of 'psyche'. Not that I'm especially eager to get into that kind of scholarship.
Glad you liked the article. I thought it was interesting what the ancient Egyptians knew about the brain. It's also interesting how many cultures then thought of the heart as the more important organ.
What a wonderfully written column.
I wonder if before the modern age of alienation people really thought about "other" minds as a problem?
I remember sitting with a patient, getting a very vivid picture of him as a 3 year old walking behind his mother, trying to keep up with her as she ignored him.
He had never talked about anything related to this before, but a few seconds later, he started talking about a memory that had just surfaced in which he was walking behind his mother when he was 3, trying to keep up with her as she ignored him.
Countless similar experiences pretty much inured me to the "problem of other minds," and studying the parapsychological literature (which in many cases consists of scientific studies with a far greater replication rate than most of the social sciences and even than some biological studies) pretty much helped me to shed other intellectual reservations about other minds being a "problem."
I particularly love the idea of a state in which all the Beatles songs are 'true"!
Thank you! That is a good question. I don't think the problem of other minds as we know it existed in ancient thought. It seems to arise from a Cartesian way of thinking that takes the self out of its relations and context. But for some reason we have a hard time getting out of that Cartesian mode. I guess it's just in the air.
Interesting story about your patient. Did you tell him?
I did not tell him, as it probably would have freaked him out! - but something like this has happened to me so many times I've come to take it for granted.
I suspect that the fact that it's virtually impossible, in cases of very vivid lucid dreams, to tell if one is awake or dreaming, is enough to overcome this problem of "other minds." If you and I meet somewhere in Barcelona, and realize we're both in a dream - and there's nothing "dreamy" about our experience - everything looks exactly the same as in waking, BUT we know we're both sharing the same "mind-created" environment, then we've just eliminated the problem of other minds!
We've also completely defeated physicalism.
Normally, what are we actually asking when we ask, "Am I awake or dreaming?"
If I'm "awake," nowadays that usually means I'm in a purely physical environment, and if all humans or creatures with any kind of subjectivity were eliminated, the physical environment would remain, unchanged.
Whereas, if I'm "dreaming," this means I'm in a mind-constructed environment.
Well, if there's absolutely NO way to tell if I'm dreaming or awake (at least, in some circumstances) then I've eliminated any reason to assume that apart from experience, there is some extra "thing" called a "physical" environment. I don't need that hypothesis, since everything one could provide as evidence for something "physical" - every scientific experiment ever conducted - could all be done in a conscious shared dream!
Your shared dream scenario reminds me of the simulation argument. In the video below (it's six minutes or so) you'll notice David Chalmers brings up a counterargument: imagine your spouse is cheating on you and you never discover it, so it doesn't affect you at all. He says, "A lot of people say that would suck, even though I don't know."
Of course there's a big difference between not knowing and not being able to know in principle.
https://youtu.be/kmV0txWLQPI?si=5j4mjWv1Q5Yudr5c
Another fine thought provoking essay Tina. Helen Keller's account is insightful as well. I can't say I'm a fan of Whitehead because his choice of vocabulary does not resonate with my own experience I guess....
What I do believe is that an infant's sense of self is a threshold that coincides with its first encounter of control. Here is a short excerpt from my book:
An infant is attentive and corresponds directly to the fundamental reality of value. It could be inferred that if an infant does not correspond to value in a meaningful way no further development would take place. The infant finds itself exposed to a confusing array of sensory stimuli. Being guided by its meaningful relationship with value as a reference point, slowly, over time, the infant will soon make the connection between the complex correlation of chaotic patterns, the differences between patterns, then correlations between the differences, and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the infant is several months old that it is capable of using the power of its own reasoning to make sense of the enormously complex correlation of sensations, boundaries, and desires called an "object" to be able to reach for one.
It is this power of reasoning that gave the infant its first taste of control. The object, now firmly clasp in its hand is not the primary experience. It will be the infant’s relationship to the complex correlations of repetitive patterns derived from the experience that gives the infant its first connection to a patterned world and a sense of control. It is at this intersection where a sense of control merges with a sense of self. This sense of self coextensive with a sense of control coalesce into unity. The sensation of control and the sensation of self are two sides of the same coin, one cannot exist without the other.
Thanks!
Yeah, I hear you on Whitehead. I have only read Science and the Modern World and I found it at times completely lucid and at other times completely mystifying. But overall I get the feeling I'm on board with his views...whatever they are. :)
It sounds like we both agree on the fundamental reality of value—I can't see any way to arrive at it without presupposing it—and the nexus of self and control. Of course agency makes little sense without value, or desire, in other words.
Yeah, consensus is a rare commodity these days, so when two individuals can agree on a fundamental ontology that's pretty cool I think.....
I have the tendency to experiment with vocabulary and your choice of the word desire coincides with a feature of value that I use in reference to physics. As first cause, value is indeterminate intensity that tends. Indeterminate simply means we cannot account for it and the word intensity is just that, "it's intense". There's no other way to describe it.
Anyway, from a physics standpoint: as first cause, value is indeterminate intensity that tends and that tendency is toward motion resulting in form. With this rendition we now have a vocabulary that can account for the evolution, diversity and complexity we find in our universe without having to rely upon something as lame as a "big bang". And like you said, agency of any kind makes little sense without value.
I wonder if we couldn't apply the concept of resonance... Just as you can make a thing vibrate by playing its resonant frequency, perhaps emotions are transmitted in much the same way - we hear crying and it plays on the sad part of ourselves. We could link this back to Aristotle's idea of perception via the soul taking on the forms of other things. We naturally empathise with anything and everything, especially those most similar to us. But some things are more relatable and thus resonate more with us.
I think it's a mistake to view babies as selfish. It probably derives from Augustine, who took his own crying as a baby as proof of his sinfulness(!). In 'The Art of Happiness', the Dalai Lama pushes back against that by pointing out that babies, by nature, bring great joy to those around them. I think the idea that we are born completely selfish is completely backwards, and most likely very harmful to society.
What you are saying about the self being defined by the limits of our will lines up nicely with what I've been thinking about the self being defined by beliefs (an idea prompted by your last post, and which I am still working on fleshing out a bit more fully). But I think it's not just about what we can control or not, it's also about what surprises us. If solipsism were true, there should really be no surprises nor any impediments to my will. I should be omniscient as well as omnipotent.
We could tie this in to the free energy principle. The aim, according to the FEP, is to harmonise with the environment so perfectly that it does not surprise or disrupt us. We want to be at one with the world. But the world does surprise us, despite our best theories and our best attempts at manipulating it.
Interesting post, as always!
I think resonance makes sense. There's something musical about emotions, as if they're "in the air".
What I meant by selfish isn't the same as Augustine; I didn't mean they're sinful. In fact, I would have thought that sin would be impossible without rationality and the ability to choose otherwise. As for babies bringing joy...meh...I'll take dogs over babies any day of the week. According to the last pope and pretty much every drug commercial, I'm not the only one.
"If solipsism were true, there should really be no surprises nor any impediments to my will. I should be omniscient as well as omnipotent."
Right, for solipsism that makes sense. I was thinking of something that makes very little sense, though, which is why I called it the impossible dream—a communal dream where there is no resistance and everyone is perfectly satisfied. What sort of dream could this be? Not anything that's, well, possible. But yes, I think no surprises, or at least no bad or unpleasant surprises (since we might want to be surprised). Actual dreams are of course very peculiar because we don't feel like we're controlling them. Much of what goes on in my dreamland is a surprise.
I read something similar to your free energy principle idea recently, but I have no idea where. I'll send you the article if I come across it.
The resonance idea has me thinking: are we wrong to see emotions as essentially belonging to individuals/private? Maybe they are generally interpersonal or communal, or even ecological, and only individual in particular cases. I think happiness is roughly an experience of harmony, in which case interpersonal harmony or disharmony would play a big role in each person's emotions, and might allow some transference of emotions too.
And actually, looking beyond emotions, if we consider how we often think communally rather than individually, perhaps we similarly know other minds because they're already part of our own mind. Like, "of course they can feel, I can feel through them", and "of course they have thoughts, I think through/with them". Perhaps the problem of other minds really only occurs for philosophers who spend too much time on their own (does that fit historically?).
You're right about it being impossible for babies to commit a sin because they lack rationality. Augustine's point, iirc, was more that it was evidence of original sin and our fallen nature, even though it couldn't be an actual sin itself. Which is still a really crappy way to look at a crying baby I think.
I think many emotions are related to experiences with others and arise out of a social context. So does hiding emotion, at least for us. But babies don't hide their emotions, and neither do other animals. If partaking of the tree of knowledge is supposed to represent the fallen nature of humanity (as opposed to other animals), then I would think a better sign of that would be our emotional deception. Particularly our self-deception, from which we get a bunch of conceptual hangups and neurotic behavior.