by Greg Goode
First, try to divide the possibilities into two. They are a bit abstract, but they do cover all the bases. The inherently existent self is either related to the parts or it is not. These are the only two possibilities. Try to think about finding the self in both ways:
Consider: is the inherently existent self identical to the parts?
Consider: is the inherently existent self different from the parts?
Try to imagine what it would be like to find the self in either of these two ways. We will look more closely below. For now, try to generate a feeling in both cases about the self being something specific. For option (1), try to imagine that there is some part of the body or brain that houses the self or constitutes the self. And then for option (2), try to imagine something that is not a part, but which still seems like the self. We will examine both options more closely.
Is the Self Identical to the Parts?
This is the first option. What does it mean for my self to be identical to the parts? Is it perhaps identical to the entire group of the parts? If that were the case, then I can’t really lose a single part without losing my self. If my self equals the entire group of parts, then I can’t lose a limb, or even get a haircut or lose weight, with out losing my self.
Or maybe my identity resides in certain special parts? Through history, various parts of the body have been proposed as the seat of identity. Most recently, we like to think that the brain is the self or some part of the central nervous system, or at least that the self resides there. Let’s examine this.24
Mini-Meditation – Brain Swapping
Take a moment and imagine that we live in a society much more technologically advanced than exists at present. Imagine two people, yourself and a Person B, whose identity you do not know. Imagine that doctors are able to swap brains. After the operation, which person is you? The one with the B-body, or the one with the You-body? In other words, does your identity travel with the brain, or does it stay with the body? Do you have strong feelings about the outcome here?
Mini-Meditation – Brain Uploading
Now imagine that your brain has cancer. But there is a remedy! In this advanced society, your brain can be removed and replaced with a receiver. All the contents and traits of the brain can be uploaded onto a mainframe computer, which communicates seamlessly and wirelessly with the receiver in your head. Not only that, but the mainframe computer has a safe backup and archive copy stored in the cloud. You function perfectly now, maybe even better than before. But where are “you”? Are you now the receiver in the cranium? Are you the mainframe computer? Are you also the backup copy? What happens if your receiver and another person’s receiver are disconnected and then re-connected to different mainframe computers? Or does your identity simply stay with the body?
Mini-Meditation – Cloning and the Smith Virus
Imagine another scenario in our advanced society. This one is inspired by The Matrix movies, in which Agent Smith was a human who became a self-replicating computer virus. Imagine that your entire body and mind are perfectly cloned so that now there are one hundred copies. All of them are perfectly indistinguishable. New copies can be created from any existing copy. In fact, because of a change in staffing at the lab, the scientists have lost track of which copy was the original. And you cannot help them. If the scientists were to ask any one of the one hundred copies of you, you’d say that it was this copy (the one who is asked) which is the original; the other ninety-nine were cloned. All one hundred copies of you would say the same thing. If the scientists offer a million dollars to just one of the clones, won’t you prefer that it be this copy? What happens to your identity now?
Conclusion to “Is the Self Identical to the Parts?”
These outlandish scenarios are designed to elicit how we think about our identity in relation to parts of the body. Going through these mini-meditations may have the effect of not only helping us discover where we think identity resides, but also weakening the impression that there is any part that actually is the self.
Something might have happened as you went through the different scenarios. In the brain-swapping example, you might have felt that your identity followed the brain. But in the brain-uploading example, you may feel that your identity remained with the body. If this happened to you, it serves to show that we don’t even think about identity in the same way. The very idea becomes flexible and mutable, even though at times it seems inherently existent. This is itself a step towards the realization of emptiness of the self.
In the cloning and the Smith virus example, you may feel that there are now one hundred copies of you. Even here, the identity is not unique, but slightly different. If one of the clones will receive a million dollars, you hope it will be this one! This already serves to break up what seemed to be a unitary identity. If they were truly equal, perhaps you should say, “It doesn’t matter which copy receives the million dollars.” Or you might feel that identity is unique. Because of this, you may say, “There can only be one original and the others must be copies.” But let’s say that, while you were all sleeping, some pranksters changed around the bodies. So now, no matter how you try to distinguish the original, it can’t be done. But why does it matter?
We invite you to invent your own scenarios to further isolate how you may think about the body and identity. We feel confident that the more you play with these examples, the more it weakens any fixed conceptions of self that remain...
Is the Self Different From the Parts?
This is the second option. How can your self be different from the parts? This seems more intuitive. The most common way of feeling that we are different from the parts is to feel that we are somehow the owner or controller of the parts. This is in essence what neuroscience argues as the most common self-illusion: we think that we are something above and beyond the parts, something that functions and which may own or control the parts. Different people might think differently about just what the self or controller is. An experience? We already looked at that option above, in “Finding The Self In Experience.” You can look for the controller-self in experience.
Or perhaps you feel that the self is a part of the brain. In this case, you can (re-)visit the three mini-meditations above: Brain Swapping, Brain Uploading, and Cloning and the Smith Virus. You can see what happens to your thinking about the brain and identity as you go through the scenarios.
Or you might think that the self is more of a function than an experience. The function can be the owner or controller. It need not exactly be an experience. And it need not exactly be a part of the body. Both of these options have been examined above. What we are looking for here is a self that is neither an experience nor a body part. Let’s take a closer look at this possibility:
“The self is the owner or controller of the parts.”
We have narrowed things down now. We are looking for a self that is a function such as a controller, but which is not a body part or an experience. This is where theories rush in to fill the gap. We might think that the self is a controller as a subliminal part of the mind. We might think it is instincts, the unconscious, the ego, the superego or the id. Traditional Vedanta suggests the manomaya kosha, or mind sheath, as the residence of the controlling functions. There are many maps of the mind and many candidates to choose from. You might have your own scheme that appeals to you. Please consider that scheme in these meditations as well.
Mini-Meditation – Whose Unconscious?
Take a moment to see if you can bring up a sense of the self that seems to be the unconscious mind. By definition it is not an experience because it is below the level of the conscious mind. Now imagine you are trying to look into the subconscious as though into a dark mist. You can’t make out any details, but you keep looking... One thing to contemplate is this: there is now something trying to look into the unconscious, and there is the unconscious itself. In the midst of this experience, do you really get the sense that you are the unconscious? Or do you perhaps feel that it is “your
” unconscious? Think about how it is not your next-door neighbor’s unconscious. This very feeling sets you apart from the unconscious, from the very thing you are positing as yourself. The self now seems like an owning function, not as the object owned. Now try to repeat this very meditation using “the owner” as what you are looking for. Can you actually find the owner? Is it yours (or someone else’s)? What makes it you or yours?
Mini-Meditation – Functional Subject and Object
Take a few moments to consider – is there any function that feels like it is the self? It may be the unconscious. Or, for instance, it may be the chooser, the looker, the controller, or even something else that we haven’t covered. Let’s try to find that function. Imagine, or actually perform, an action in which this function comes into play... Now observe or remember this function. Perhaps it felt like you while it was happening. Now you are looking into it as best you can. You are trying to find a function that is the seat of the self. As you inquire into this function, in a way, you are looking “at” it. Between the subject/looker position and the object/ looked-at position, which one feels more like “you”? If your self actually is this function, how can you be looking at it? Has there been a shift? Has it been a shift from the controller to the observer?
Mini-Meditation – The Disappearing Function
Let’s continue looking for the function that feels most like the self to you. Now imagine or perform some action that brings up this function... OK, now let it subside. Did it feel like you while it was happening? And now this same function is no longer happening. But is the sense of self still present? If your self is actually the chooser or observer, then how can it ever subside without taking you with it? If you are that function, then why don’t you come and go with it? How can you be present when that function is absent? Perhaps you feel that the function that is the self is actually a kind of witness that sees all actions and thoughts. But is that witness still functioning in deep sleep? How about during a coma, trance, nirvikalpa samadhi or general anesthesia?
Conclusion to “Is the Self Different From the Parts?”
These scenarios are also designed to bring up our best intuitions of where the self is when we think of it as separate from the parts. We examined several candidates for the self, and several ways of testing whether any of those candidates truly is the self. You may be able to think of even more candidates and more experimental scenarios.
You may have experienced that what you take to be the self changed, depending on the scenario. This is actually a step towards realizing the emptiness of the self. What the emptiness teachings try to examine is the idea that the self is actually some particular object or phenomenon in an inherent, fixed, predefined way. And if you experienced the sense of self shifting around, sometimes seeming to be one thing, and sometimes another thing, this can weaken the sense that there is actually anything that is truly the self.
If we are comfortable with the self as empty, then we have no problem with shifting locations and candidates for the self. An empty self has no true home!
The Self as an Invention
Our brain consists of information processing systems such as an auditory system, a visual system, motor systems, and systems that regulate heartbeat and blood flow. To control and keep track of all the individual subsystems like an air-traffic controller would be impossible if each one had to be followed individually.
According to neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger, the self is the content of a model that has evolved to enable biological organisms to effectively interact with the environment. The self makes it possible for a person – a highly complex information-processing system – to regulate itself, as well as interact with the world as a whole.
We will explore Metzinger’s intriguing theory in more detail in a later section. Here is a first example of how to visualize the idea of the self as coming from a model.
Meditation – A Robot’s Self
Imagine a very sophisticated robot working in your office. You know it is “just” a robot, even though it looks and behaves like a human being. And let’s say that you are competing with the robot over a budget plan for the next fiscal year. Whose plan will be accepted by senior management?
Next week there will be a meeting where the two budget plans will be discussed, yours and the robot’s. All the senior managers will be there. So in order to prepare, you try to figure out what the robot is going to say and do. At first, you contact the robot’s designers and they send you a lengthy design document. If you knew how to read this, you might be able to predict what the robot would say at the meeting. But the design specifications are so low-level that you can’t get anything meaningful out of them.
Then you decide to take what Daniel Dennett calls the “intentional stance.” You decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent. You treat the robot as though it had goals, purposes, beliefs and desires. You aren’t thinking that the robot really has these features. Instead, you are treating them as convenient tools that will help you predict various outcomes. You look at the robot’s actions as though they were willed and goal-directed. You try to figure out its goals and desires. From there, considering what information it has access to, you try to predict the robot’s actions.
Armed with this strategy, you imagine what the robot might say at the meeting, and take this into consideration in your own planning. This intentional stance allows you to “outwit” the robot and gain approval for your budget plan!
Now imagine a world in which we are all robots walking around having to predict how other robots will act (for visual cues, think of the movie Bladerunner). After a while, these robots chose to treat themselves and the other robots as selves that have goals, intentions, desires, beliefs and other mental states. Eventually, they get used to thinking this way. They come to forget that everyone is a robot. Their model becomes transparent, no longer seen as a model. What began as a model becomes “reality.”
Would such a world actually look different from the one we’re in now? And if you can’t find a difference, then what is to say that we’re not living in such a world already? Thomas Metzinger argues that it is highly plausible that during evolution at some point a self-model – an inner image of the organism as a whole – arose as a part of the world-model the organism already had at that time. It served a biological, evolutionary function, allowing a complex form of life to manage its own behavior better and predict the behavior of other biological organisms. Metzinger calls the self a “weapon” developed by evolution to win in battles over resources. He admits that this is a somewhat unromantic view of the self.
Meditation – The Intentional Stance
Once again, bring to mind the sense of inherent existence of the self. Bring this sense forward so that it is tangible. Notice how your self seems to truly be there. Now contemplate the possibility that this self is simply a conceptual fiction for the purpose of simplifying and unifying the flow of information. Contemplate how the self is like a shadow projected within your conscious experience. Can you see how, if it is a shadow, it is actually causally inert? As something we think is there, it can’t really “do” anything. The shadow itself doesn’t make any decisions.
The Narrative Self
There is another way to make sense of how the self can be an invention. Following Daniel Dennett, Bruce Hood and others, we may think of the self as a “center of narrative gravity.” 25 The self arises as the hero or heroine of the story of our life. What makes it your life? Nothing – it’s just that this one story has a much more frequently recurring character than other stories. That character becomes “you.”
Let’s take a look at the story of your life. Where did you grow up? How did you become the person you are now? Were there some trials and tribulations along the way? Are you now growing spiritually? There are millions of details like this. You constantly tell and retell the story of your self. You add to it, take things away from it, forget some parts, and maybe even fill in blan
ks on some parts. Through story, you ascribe meaning to events and construct a sense of identity, continuity and development over time. This self can be called your narrative or autobiographic self. This self is empty.
So you have the narrative-self account of the self, and the familiar old inherently-existent-self account. We have been sketching some arguments for the conclusion that (a) an inherently existent self cannot be found among the anatomical and physiological elements, and that (b) the self has arisen as a content of an evolutionary model to assist in biological functioning. We will return to this theory below. For the moment, we would like to suggest the narrative-self account as an everyday, non-technical way to think about a self-model such as Hume’s or Metzinger’s.
If we think of the self along the lines suggested by the narrative-self account, there are several benefits, compared to the inherently-existent-self account. One benefit is that the narrative-self account makes more sense. We can see how it arose, whereas the inherently existing self is supposed to truly exist – yet we cannot find it anywhere. Another benefit is that the narrative self is loose and flexible. It allows for change and development. It allows you to realize the emptiness of the self and experience life in a lighter, freer, more peaceful way. With the self as a self-story, you are free to grow, change and be flexible.
For emptiness students, the narrative-self account contains a wonderful benefit: as an account of the self, the narrative idea sees itself as empty. It has a brilliant quality of reflexive self-awareness. The story takes itself as a story. On the other hand, the inherently-existent self account takes itself deadly seriously, and leaves no room for development or change of any kind.
With the narrative-self account, you can challenge and question certain parts of the narrative about the main character. Some sub-plots are handed down from your family, your school, religion, or other parts of the culture. They can be thought of as templates or set-pieces. Examples might include the claim that you must be a hard-working, long-suffering employee, or a devoted spiritual seeker whose only meaningful goal is enlightenment. These templates might have been copied into your story from other sources. They do not constitute inherent truths about your self.