1)
The goal of this collection of essays is to deepen the dialogue
between Buddhism and Western science, two very different systems of
thought, by focussing on areas where their core concerns intersect.
The concept of self is certainly at their core, pervading daily
life and theoretical writings for millennia. Yet for both systems, self
remains problematic; there is much confusion over exactly what self
means, for ordinary folk and for the academics and professionals who
are supposed to be experts on it. Thus, self is a promising meeting
area to explore.
2)
I am writing as a neuropsychologist, without formal credentials
in philosophy or religious studies. Caveat lector! But these three
disciplines are entwined from the roots to the distal twigs, and a serious
student must venture into the thicket; it is difficult to stay within
disciplinary boundaries. Also, I acknowledge the limitations of conceptual
efforts to treat what many believe to be beyond concepts, beyond
self/object and self/other; this essay is for those who want to explore
whatever may be possible within these limits.
3)
My purpose here is to
map the relations and disjunctions between Western psychology and what I
understand of the Buddhist concept of self, or more properly, of “no-self”
(anatta). The idea of “no self” is counter-intuitive to most
Westerners. I believe there is a key point at which we can make contact
and begin mapping. Buddhist tradition holds that the root cause of
suffering is the Ordinary Man’s erroneous view of self as an unchanging
essence. Futhermore, the tradition holds that this error is inevitable in
the natural course of life because it is based on inborn patterns,
pre-theoretic and unreasoned (e.g.,Garfield, 1995, p. 88). It is this “erroneous”
view of self that is the focus of this essay. I propose that the Western
perspectives of cognitive neuropsychology and adaptive evolution may add
to Buddhist understanding of the inborn view of self, and of how
the “correct” view is attained.
4)
I will introduce the idea that person, self, and “I” are not
synonymous, but are quite different things, with person including more
than self, and self including more than “I”. Because I am proposing
extensive changes to Western concepts and terms, I will present at length
some of the current confusions and controversies that illustrate how the
old concepts are inadequate. Then I will highlight two cognitive
perspectives that reveal mechanisms by which the natural, pre-theoretic,
view of person and self operates. The first concerns the recognition that
metaphor plays an enormous role in abstract thought, and in particular, in
our thinking about person, self, and “I”. The second concerns the
human tendency to seek and find, or project, a simplifying pattern to
approximate every complex field. We simplify in two nonconscious automatic
ways: by lumping (ignoring some distinctions as negligible), and by
splitting (ignoring some relations as negligible). Splitting into discrete
entities is useful for manipulating, predicting, and controlling at the
sensori-motor level, and at abstract levels too. Unfortunately, splitting
can lead to serious errors when it imposes ad hoc boundaries on what are
actually densely interconnected systems, and then grants autonomous
existence to the segments it has created. This occurs in our experience of
our own “inner life”, and in our concepts of the structure of “the
person”. Thus we come to see the self as a bounded persisting entity,
rather than as a dynamic open network of relations. I will argue that the
view of self as entity or essence is maintained so strongly because it is
rooted in these basic nonconscious cognitive approximations. However, the
other side of our pattern seeking, which simplifies by lumping (unifying,
finding more relatedness), can be corrective to the creating of isolated
entities by splitting. I will suggest that this second type of
approximation may be the seed of the Buddhist “correct” view that all
things are interdependent. Perhaps these Western ideas could add to
Buddhist understanding of the difficulty of transforming the inborn view
of self and person.
1.
THE BUDDHIST CONCEPT OF NO-SELF (“ANATTA”)
5)
I will sketch my understanding of the generic Buddhist view for
those with little familiarity with Buddhism, drawing heavily on Collins
(1982) , Garfield (1995),
Hopkins (1983; 1987) , and Wallace
(1989; 1998) . In the Buddhist
“correct view”, the Self is seen, not as an entity, or as substance, or as
essence, but as a dynamic process, a shifting web of relations among
evanescent aspects of the person, such as perceptions, ideas, and
desires. The Self is only misperceived as a fixed entity because of the
distortions of the human point of view. Ultimately, no separation is to be
found between these dynamic processes and the universal frame of reference
or ground of being; all is interdependent and changing. Thus, in this
sense, there is no Self separable from a Non-self. This Buddhist
declaration is misunderstood in the West because “anatta” meaning
self-is-not-an-essence-or-entity, is taken as
self-does-not-exist-at-all by people who have not imagined any other
scheme of existence than entities or essences.
6)
The Buddhist tradition holds that Ordinary Man’s inborn
erroneous view of self as an enduring entity is the cause of his suffering
because he tries to hold on to that which is in constant flux and has no
existence outside of shifting contexts. Therefore, a new corrective
experience of self is needed. Buddhism takes a great interest in how
people experience their self, rather than just their abstract concept of
it, because Buddhist practices are designed to lead to a new (correct)
experience of self. It takes arduous training to modify or overcome the
natural state of experiencing the self as persisting and unchanging. There
is a great literature on the theory and practice of the three main paths
leading to a changed experience of self. One path is via meditation
trainings (changing mind processes or mind controls, e.g., attention,
awareness, arousal). Another is via theoretical argument (changing
structure of concepts, the contents of mind). The third path is
social-behavioral, the life of active service (Deikman, 1996; 1997;
2000). The three paths of
meditation, scholarly study, and service in the monkhood or wider
community, are usually intertwined in practice.
7)
My limited understanding of this enormous tradition has been
very much shaped by Garfield’s exposition of Nagarjuna’s
Mulamadhyamakakarika (1995), and by Collins’ book, Selfless
Persons (1982). Collins seeks to explicate the doctrine of “No-self”(anatta)
in social and historical contexts, as well as its usual religious (soteriological)
and philosophical roles. Although he draws mainly on Theravada
illustrations, his broader conceptual framework enables him to bring out
the features of the “No-self” view that apply to any Buddhist culture,
despite the differences among Theravada, Mahayana, and many other schools
that formed through theoretical development, schisms, and assimilation
into diverse cultures over 2500 years. To stress the centrality of this
doctrine he quotes three quite different contemporary scholars:
8)
Rahula (1967): What in general is
suggested by Soul, Self, Ego, or to use the Sanskrit expression Atman,
is that in man there is a permanent, everlasting and absolute entity,
which is the unchanging substance behind the phenomenal changing world.
... This soul or self in man is the thinker of thoughts, feeler of
sensations, and receiver of rewards and punishments for all its actions
good or bad. Such a conception is called the idea of self. ... Buddhism
stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of
such a Soul, Self, or Atman. ... to this false view can be traced
all the evil in the world.
9)
Malalasekera (1957): ...in its denial of
any real permanent Soul or Self, Buddhism stands alone. This teaching
presents the utmost difficulty to many people and often provokes even
violent antagonism towards the whole religion. .... yet it is the bedrock
of Buddhism.
10)
Nyanatiloka (1964): There are three
teachers... the first teaches the existence of an eternal ego-identity
outlasting death (the Eternalist). The second teaches temporary
ego-entity... annihilated at death (the Annihilationist, Materialist). The
third is Buddha, teaching... there is only to be found ... changing from
moment to moment, ... egolessness of existence. ... Thus with this
doctrine of egolessness, or anatta, stands or falls the entire
Buddhist structure.
11)
This doctrine of No-self has major theoretical implications for
two other central components of Buddhist doctrine; Karma, and Rebirth.
With not even a temporary self, how can we understand the apparent
continuity and coherence of personality in the present life? Without a
permanent self, just what is reborn in another life? If there is no self,
to whom or to what does Karmic ethical responsibility belong, and to whom
or to what is it transferred in a later life? These issues are beyond the
scope of this essay (see Garfield 1995; Collins 1982). But anatta
raises other issues, more pragmatic than theoretical or doctrinal: how can
the seeker go about developing “right views” of self and person,
particularly since the erroneous view is held to be inborn and
pretheoretic, particularly resistant to rational discourse or scholarly
philosophical argument. Buddhist schools differ in their beliefs as to the
effectiveness of simply quieting the mind and introspecting, vs.
developing intense and continuous attention, vs. non-rational dialogue and
interaction, vs. directing introspection with rational analysis and
conceptual framing (e.g., Japanese Soto and Rinzai Zen, Indo-Tibetan
Vaibhasika and Prasangika). My examination of the inborn views from the
Western cognitive neuropsychology point of view may suggest new ways to
look at Buddhist practices.
2.
IN WESTERN PSYCHOLOGY: MULTIPLE CONCEPTIONS OF SELF.
12)
To the Ordinary Man in Western cultures, as in Buddhist cultures,
the question, “What is a self?” may seem trivial; it is casually believed
that every person has one, or is one, and that it is the self which acts
or experiences. “Normal” folks have a vivid sense of themselves as
distinct from not-self, from objects, or other selves, and most
importantly, as single, unitary. Two elegant statements of this sense of
unity in the Ordinary view are quoted (in order to refute them) by Joseph
Bogen, the neurosurgeon-scholar most knowledgeable about separating the
two hemispheres of the human brain, in his papers on the unrecognized
disunity in normal people (Bogen, 1986; 1990):
13)
Sherrington (1947): “This self is a unity
... it regards itself as one, others treat it as one. It is addressed as
one, by a name to which it answers. The Law and the State schedule it as
one. It and they identify it with a body which is considered by it and
them to belong to it integrally. In short, unchallenged and unargued
conviction assumes it to be one. The logic of grammar endorses this by a
pronoun in the singular. All its diversity is merged in oneness.”
14)
Descartes (cited in Bogen 1986): “There is a great difference
between the mind and the body, in that the body is, by its nature, always
divisible, and the mind wholly indivisible. For in fact, when I
contemplate it - that is, when I contemplate my own self - and consider
myself as a thing that thinks, I cannot discover in myself any parts, but
I clearly know that I am a thing absolutely one and complete.”
15)
Consider the possessives, me and mine. “Me” seems to
refer to self, and “mine” seems to refer to objects: my car, my hair, my
hand, my thoughts, my intentions, my mind. But the boundary is not clear.
While “my car”, “my hair,” and “my hand” are all treated equivalently in
syntax as "mine", most people feel that their hair is a more substantive
part of "me" than their car, and their hand or mind more so than their
hair. Furthermore, they believe that if they were to lose their hand their
self would remain, that their essential nature as an entity would
not be diminished. William James referred to this as “the self of all
selves” (p. 297 James, 1950 (Originally published1890).).
16)
Thus the question arises, “Are there degrees of self?” When we
speak of self-development do we mean that there was a little self before
and now there is more self? Or that there was qualitative change? If self
varies in amount or quality, how do we measure these dimensions? Indeed,
what sort of losses do we have to sustain to experience a diminishment of
self, or for others to recognize it? And what do we mean when we say "I
just don't feel myself today"? If there is a difference between how you
usually feel and how you feel today, does that mean that there is a
qualitative difference in selves? Is the difference substantive or just a
trivial difference in appendages to the self, like a coat or a hairdo?
When a psychiatric patient says "I do not feel like it is me" or hears his
own thoughts but perceives them as external voices, is that qualitatively
different? Apparently, the concept is not clear. The idea of self is
elusive; lay people are surprised that they cannot easily articulate it.
But their conception of self as an entity, and as unchanging for life or
even beyond, is not really shaken.
17)
Professionals in psychology and its neighbor disciplines (cognitive
science, philosophy of mind, psychiatry, behavioral neurology) are no more
coherent about self than lay people. When I have asked psychologist
friends for their definition, many of them narrowed their eyes as if
suspecting a trick question. Although there seems to be a general
implicit endorsement that a person is in some sense “a whole”, just what
makes up this wholeness is rarely addressed, and the self is not
explicitly studied in relation to wholeness. Sometimes the professionals
use the term self synonymously with self-concept, with
self-awareness, with consciousness itself, and with volition. Sometimes it
is used in the sense of personality, or social roles. Different
disciplines have focused on different aspects of self; the literature is
voluminous. To mention just a few exemplars whose models of self have
little in common--- in psychiatry: Janet (1907), Freud and followers
(1953), Jung and followers
(1966), Mahler (1975), Kohut (1978), Deikman (1982); ….. It is the same in
personality theory: Allport (1968), Lewin (1936), Maslow (1971); ….. and in social
psychology: G. H. Mead (1962), Goffman (1959), Markus (1991). In “Western”
philosophy, of course, there are too many to cite; to illustrate this
overabundance, I will only mention that over the last year and a half the
Journal of Consciousness Studies, the currently most popular
journal bridging philosophy of mind and other humanities and sciences, has
published a series on “The Self”, featuring a lead article by Strawson of
Oxford, and four special issues of discussion and rebuttal to his
keynote paper (Strawson, 1997). At the end of this
series Strawson (1999) sums up, and attempts
to clarify; “The result was a festival of misunderstanding... Large
differences in methodological and terminological habits gave rise to many
occasions on which commentators thought they had disagreed with me
although they had in fact changed the subject.” See Parfit (1984) for a review of the
past centuries’ Western philosophical literature on person and self.
18)
In contrast to this plethora, the technical literatures of
neurology, cognitive psychology, or neuropsychology show only sporadic
concern with self, or with the wholeness of a person: e.g., Wm. James
(1890/1950), Kurt Goldstein (1939), R. W. Sperry and his
colleagues Bogen, Gazzaniga, and Zaidel (1969), E. Hilgard
(1977), O. Sacks (1973), J. Kihlstrom
(1993; 1997), and too few others. A
few exceptions do stand out in neurology. In the last generation, Kurt
Goldstein insisted on the importance of the organization of the whole
person in determining the symptom picture (1939). In the present
generation, Oliver Sacks has called for a less mechanical neurology which
pays attention to "the center, the living self, of the patients", in his
books Awakenings (1973), and The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). In A Leg to Stand
On (1984),
Sacks has movingly described how a neurologist can be oblivious to a
patient's complaint about disturbance of self or wholeness (following an
accident, Sacks as the patient could not recognize his own leg as his).
Even if a neurologist does take such a symptom seriously, he is likely to
refer the patient to a psychiatrist unless he believes that neurological
knowledge has something to contribute to the understanding or the care of
such patients.
19)
Some dramatic examples from pathology have become well known to the
public. From psychopathology there have been popular movies and books
about multiple personalities such as Three Faces of Eve, and
Sybil, who had 17 distinct "selves." From neuropathology there has
been much publicity about the "split-brain" patients whose cerebral
hemispheres have been surgically disconnected. After the surgery, each
hemisphere is separately conscious, and can perceive, learn, and remember,
without knowing what the other hemisphere is experiencing.
Nevertheless, both the patient and the patient's family report that they
seem to be as much "themselves" as ever (Sperry, 1968) (Sperry et al., 1969) (Sperry, Zaidel, & Zaidel, 1979).
20)
The studies of the split-brain patients by Sperry, Bogen, and their
colleagues demonstrate how interconnections at the neurological level
contribute to the wholeness at the psychological level . To understand
these observations it must be remembered that each hemisphere controls
feeling and movement only on the opposite side of the body, and sees only
the opposite half of visual space. Only the left can talk. One of their
dramatic films records a patient trying to match a colored design with a
set of painted blocks. The film shows the left hand quickly carrying out
the task; the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere which is
good at spatial relations. Then the experimenter disarranges the blocks
and the right hand (left hemisphere, poorer at spatial relations) is given
the same task. Slowly and with great apparent indecision it arranges the
pieces. In trying to match a corner of the design, the right hand corrects
one of the blocks, and then shifts it again, apparently not realizing that
it was correct: the viewer sees the left hand dart out, grab the block and
restore it to the correct position... and then the arm of the experimenter
is seen, reaching over to pull the intruding left hand off-camera. The
left hand repeatedly tries to intrude and the experimenter finally makes
the patient sit on the left hand while the right hand continues trying to
arrange the blocks.
21)
In another experiment, a picture is shown to one hemisphere and the
patient is asked to point to a matching object in a row of objects before
him. Both hemispheres can see the objects; only one was shown the picture.
In one case when the picture was shown to the right hemisphere and it
pointed to the correct object, the left (speech) hemisphere said, "I know
it wasn't me that did that!"
22)
In these incidents, just who are the "persons" involved? What has
become of the apparently unified self that existed before the surgery? Is
it now two, or was it always two, but now the duality has been made
obvious? Until now the language of Western psychology has been too fuzzy
even to formulate these questions clearly, and there has been no consensus
on a model which will describe the "I" who knows that "me" did not do it,
and who did do it. Furthermore, we need to account for the
testimonies of the patients that their experience of Self has not changed.
We also need to account for such phenomena as they occur in "normal"
people (Bogen, 1986; 1990) (1974; Galin, 1977) (Galin, Johnstone, Nakell, & Herron, 1979). Our present theories
of self do not address such phenomena.
23)
Now I will turn to another window on the panorama of confusion and
apparent paradox that pervades Western thinking about self and person.
This is a large body of research and theory by cognitive linguists on our
largely nonconscious intuitions of the structure of our “inner life”
3.
Cognitive Linguistics Theory of Metaphor, and the Folk-Model of
Person, Self, and “I”
24)
Over the last twenty years, cognitive psychologists and
linguists have carried out paradigm-busting work with powerful
implications for all of psychology. They show that metaphor is fundamental
to nearly all of abstract thinking. Many contributors could be cited; even
a partial list would include Mark Turner, L. Talmy, E. Sweetser, E. Rosch,
T. Regier, A. Ortony, G. Nunez, S. Narayanan, G. Lakoff, A. Lakoff, Mark
Johnson, D.Gentner, J. Grady, R. Gibbs, G. Fauconnier, C. Brugman, D.
Bailey. Representative citations for these authors can be found in two
influential books, Fire, Women, and Dangerous
things, (Lakoff, 1987)
and Philosophy in the Flesh, (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), which summarize much
of this research and theory. What concerns us here is their conclusions
about the underlying cognitive structure of ordinary people’s concepts of
person, self, and “I”. Understanding how metaphor
normally works in thought explains much that seems incoherent in common
and professional talk and thinking about person and self. Lakoff
and Johnson’s analysis of common speech uncovers a nonconscious complex
system of a dozen metaphors, many incompatible with the others, and quite
different from the consciously reported notion of self as unitary,
unchanging, and essential, like a soul.
3a.
How metaphor works
25)
We are not aware of how much of our thinking is based on metaphor,
even in science (e.g., in the concepts of number, time, force, and
category). Metaphor is the basis of reasoning by analogy. It gives our
thinking enormous power, because we can extend our knowledge of the
complex relations in a concrete domain to an abstract domain (e.g.,
thinking of a love relationship as like a journey, thinking of numbers as
like positions on a line). For example, consider our commonly repeated
physical life experiences with moving on a path from start to end. We
learn certain “logical entailments” that are true of paths, such as that
going from start to end entails passing through all the other points on
the path. Thus if love is a journey, we will have to pass through a series
of stages on the way to the destination. But analogies fit only partially;
love is not only like a journey, but also like a rose, and like an
invincible conqueror; numbers are not only like positions on a line, but
also like collections of objects, and like containers that hold
collections. Therefore our metaphors break down if stretched too far from
the original context, and must be replaced (usually unconsciously) by new
ones, more apt for the new context. Because we are not aware of how much
of our thinking is based on metaphor, we are peculiarly prone to take our
metaphors literally. Taking metaphors literally can have very serious
effects, as when we take teaching stories and fables as historical. Lakoff
and Johnson assert that many conflicts among the various schools of
Western philosophy from the Greeks onward can be understood by mapping the
metaphors which underlay their reasoning, and grasping that each
philosopher unconsciously reified his metaphor and then insisted it was
the “true reality”, i.e., always apt, independent of context (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999).
3b. LAKOFF AND JOHNSON ON PERSON,
SELF, AND “I”
26)
Limitations on space allow only a too condensed overview of this
complex body of data and theory. The material in this section is almost
all quoted or paraphrased from Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and
Johnson 1999).
27)
Our “inner life” includes
a variety of experiences that we want to refer to:
·
conflicts between our
conscious values and the values implicit in our behavior.
·
inner dialog and inner
monitoring.
·
disparities between what we
know or believe about ourselves and what other people know or believe
about us.
·
controlling our bodies, and
ways in which they "get out of control."
·
taking an external
viewpoint, imitating someone, or trying to see the world as they do.
28)
It is quite surprising that, although these types of experience
are so commonplace that they may be universal, we do not have any single
way of conceptualizing inner life that covers all these cases. But what is
most surprising is that we have a system of inconsistent
metaphorical conceptions of our internal structure, drawn from different
experiential domains: space, possession, force, and social relationships.
The same system of metaphors occurs in at least one case of a very
different non-Western language and culture: Japanese. Furthermore, when we
examine these metaphors, we find that several terms for ourselves as
persons with “inner lives” which we thought were synonymous (self, “I”,
me, myself) are not synonymous at all. Nevertheless, people seem to have
no difficulty intuitively understanding these metaphor systems and
switching among them.
3c. THE GENERAL “DIVIDED PERSON”
METAPHOR
29)
“It is not a trivial fact that every metaphor we have for our inner
life is a special case of a single general schema. This schema reveals not
only something deep about our conceptual systems, but also something deep
about our inner experience, mainly that we experience ourselves as split”
(Lakoff and Johnson 1999 p. 269).
30)
According to this unconscious schema, a person is divided into
an “I” and one or more Selves. The “I” is that
aspect of a person that is the experiencing consciousness (the subject)
and by its nature, exists only in the present. It is always
conceptualized as a human-like being and is usually but not always the
locus of reason, values, and from which will is exercised (the agent),
although acts must be carried out by one of the selves.
31)
A Self includes those parts of a person not picked out by
the “I”, such as the body, social roles, past and future states,
and actions in the world. There can be more than one Self. Unlike the
“I”, each self can be conceptualized metaphorically as an object, or
a location, as well as a human-like being.
32)
The general schema, then, contains a human-like being (the
conscious “I”), one or more entities (one or more Selves), and a
specification of who is in control and who judges whom. There are many
specific varieties of the general metaphor, grounded in types of everyday
experience such as: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space,
(3) entering into social relations, and (4) empathic projection (taking
other points of view). There is another important variety derived from the
Folk Theory of Essence: Each person is seen as having an “essence” that is
part of the “I”. The person may have more than one Self, but only
one of those Selves is compatible with their essence. This is called the
“real” or “true” Self. All these variations give rise to the extraordinary
richness of our metaphoric conceptions of our “inner life”.
33)
I will give illustrative examples of only a sample of the
various metaphoric types. Please note that in spite of their apparent
ambiguity, these sentences are all immediately understood in common
speech.
34)
Me And Myself Are
Not Always Synonyms: notice
the difference in meaning of these two sentences:
a.)
If I were you I’d hate me.
b.)
If I were you I’d hate myself.
In a.), me refers to the Subject(“I”) of
the speaker; in b.), myself refers to a self of “you”, the person
addressed.
35)
Judgment:
sometimes the locus of judgment is the “I” and sometimes it is the
self. Compare these:
a) I was disappointed in myself.
b) I disappointed myself.
36)
Self-Control
Expressed As Control Of Objects
: Holding onto and manipulating physical objects is one of the things we
learn earliest and do the most. It should not be surprising that object
control is the basis one of the most fundamental metaphors for our inner
life. When the self is seen
as a physical object, control means possessing it, or moving it:
Control as forced movement:
I held myself back; I
dropped my voice; You’re pushing yourself too hard; I’ve got to get myself
moving on this project.
Control as
Possession of an Object:
Losing control
can be positive as in b), or negative, as in c) :
a.)
I got a grip on myself. I didn’t let myself wiggle out of that.
b.)
I let myself go, and lost myself in dancing.
c.)
I was seized by anxiety, carried away by fear. I was possessed by
Demon Rum.
37)
Self-Control and
Location: When self
is seen as a location in space, self-control can be expressed as the
“I” and the self being together at the same usual place, or
inside the usual contained space, such as the body, home, or on earth.
Loss of self-control is expressed as the “I” or the self
being out of the usual place, or separated:
·
I did not get high;
I kept centered: I feel well-grounded.
·
I was beside myself;
ecstasy; out of my head: out to lunch: off in space:
·
I was scattered: I
must get myself together: He is all over the place.
38)
Other
Relationships of “I” and Selves:
When the self is seen as another human-like being, many other
relationships than control can be entered. This permits a remarkable
metaphoric richness, mapping our knowledge about specific social
relationships onto our inner lives. For example: master-servant,
parent-child, friends, lovers, adversaries, interlocutors, advisors,
caretakers.
39)
The
“I” and Self As Adversaries:
I am at war with myself over who to marry.
I am struggling with myself. He's conflicted. He’s giving himself a hard
time. Why do you torture yourself; being so mean to yourself; just making
yourself suffer. He’s his own worst enemy.
40)
“I” As Parent; Self As Child:
I weaned myself from whiskey. She pampers
herself a bit too much; You've earned the right to baby yourself. We all
need to nurture ourselves. I'll reward myself with an ice cream. Everyone
needs to mother himself now and then.
41)
“I”
and Self As Friends:
I'll just hang out with myself tonight. I
like being with myself. I need to be a better friend to myself.
42)
“I”
and Self as Interlocutors:
I debate things with myself all the time.
I talk things over with myself before I do anything important.. I
convinced myself to stay home.
43)
“I”
As Caretaker of Self:
You need to be kind to yourself. I
promised myself a vacation. He nursed himself back to health.
44)
“I”
as Master; Self As Servant:
I have to get myself to do the laundry. I
told myself to prepare. I bawled myself out for being impolite. I'm
disappointed in myself.
45)
The “I” Is
Obligated To Meet The Standards Of The Self:
I have a responsibility to myself to
exercise. Don't betray yourself. Be true to yourself. I let myself down. I
disappointed myself.
3d.
The Essential Self
46)
Lakoff and Johnson find another important set of metaphors based
not on near-universal perceptual-motor experiences, but rather on a
near-universally held belief system (what they call a Folk Theory; whether
such theories are embedded in the culture or are inborn “Kantian
categories” is not relevant to the present issues). According to the Folk
Theory of Essence, every object has an Essence that makes it the kind of
thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behavior. This
applies to human beings: each has an essence that makes him unique, that
makes him him. It is the essence that makes one behave like himself
and not like somebody else. (It was this same Folk Theory that was
formalized by Plato, and others. Lakoff and Johnson expose the metaphoric
foundations of the idea of essence itself in Philosophy in the Flesh).
47)
“We have in our conceptual systems a very general metaphor in which
your Essence is part of your Subject (the “I” ) —the locus of your
consciousness, thought, judgment, and will. ...it is your Essence that,
ideally, should determine your natural behavior. However, our concept of
who we essentially are is often incompatible with what we actually do.
This incompatibility {is dealt with in} the Essential Self metaphor. There
are two of these Selves. One Self (the “real” or “true” Self) is
compatible with one’s Essence and is always conceptualized as a person.
The second Self (not the “real” or “true” Self) is incompatible with one’s
Essence and is conceptualized as either a person or a container that the
first Self hides inside of.” (p. 282)
48)
Here are examples of three versions of the Essential Self
Metaphor system:The
Inner Self: In
this case, Self 1 (the Real Self), is Hidden inside Self 2 (The Outer
Self), because, as in a.), it is fragile and shy, or because as in b.),
it is awful and doesn’t want anyone to know it is there, or both.
a.)
He won't reveal himself to strangers. She rarely shows her real
self. Whenever anyone challenges him, he retreats into his shell to
protect himself.
b.)
Her sophistication is a facade. He is embarrassed to reveal his
inner self. She's sweet on the outside and mean on the inside. The iron
hand in the velvet glove. His petty self came out.
The Real Me:
In this case, Self 1,
the Real Self, who is quite nice, is outside and public, and Self 2, who
is awful in some way, is hidden inside. But when The Real Self lets its
guard down the awful Self comes out:
·
I'm not myself today.
·
That wasn't the real me
yesterday.
·
That wasn't my real self
talking.
The True Self:
In this case,
throughout life, the “I” has been inhabiting Self 2 which is incompatible
with The “I” ’s Essence. Self 1, which is compatible with the “I” ’s
Essence is somewhere unknown and the “I” is trying to find his “true”
Self, the one compatible with his Essence, with who he really is.
49)
Very little research has been done on the metaphoric systems of
inner life in other languages and cultures towards establishing whether
there are universal experiences of inner life. Lakoff and Johnson
originally believed that this metaphor system for the inner structure of
the person was a peculiarity of either English or the Western mind. But a
Japanese linguist pointed out Japanese examples that both look like, and
are understood in the same way as the English (see Lakoff and Johnson pp.
284-287). Anthropologists and social psychologists have written
extensively on the differences between the Western and Japanese
conceptions of Self, but what seems to be radically different is the
Japanese conception of the proper relationship between self and
other. Japanese conception of the architecture of inner life appears
remarkably like the American one, according to the clues we do have from
their metaphor systems and the way they reason and act using those
metaphor systems. However, much work remains to be done to justify
generalizing from the English or Western to “universal”.
50)
In
Summary:
Can this analysis of
metaphoric concepts tell us anything about what our inner lives are
really like? I emphasize that it does not mean that we are literally
divided up at a neurological or microcognitive level into a “I” and one or
more selves, or into essences. But these metaphors do seem to capture much
of the qualitative feel of inner life. When we use them to make statements
like, “I’m struggling with myself over whom to marry,” or “I lost myself
in dancing,” or “I wasn’t myself yesterday”, these statements ring true to
us. These metaphoric structures seem apt because they conform in a
significant way to the phenomenological structure of our inner lives, and
capture its logic and how we reason about it.
51)
Lakoff and Johnson conclude:
“What is philosophically important is that
there is no single, unified notion of our inner lives, not one “I”-Self
distinction, but many.... all metaphorical, {that} cannot be reduced to
any consistent literal conception... Far from being arbitrary, {they}
express apparently universal experiences of an “inner life” ... in
metaphors grounded in other apparently universal experiences. These
metaphors appear to be unavoidable, arising naturally from common
experience.” ... (p. 268).
4.
SOME PROPOSED CLARIFICATIONS: PERSON, SELF, “I”,
SELF-MONITOR, SELF-AWARENESS, SELF-CONCEPT.
52)
I have presented this review of confusion and controversy in
Western notions of the self in order to justify my call for some radical
changes in the way professionals talk and think about these matters. It is
necessary for professionals to go beyond the unconscious metaphors of
common speech, and the parochial formalizations of the metaphors by
particular philosophical or psychological schools. This is not just
scholastic word-play; terms are tools. A relatively easy first step is to
sharpen our terms, taking care to preserve the insights into structure and
function that these metaphors and intuitions are built on. The concept
person can be distinguished from the concept self, and self
can be separated from hyphenated derivatives with which it is often
conflated or confused: self-monitoring, self-concept, and
self-awareness. The concept “I” can be distinguished from
self and from person.
53)
I propose these definitions heuristically, without any
pretension to rigor for the time being. The purpose here is to arrive at a
set of terms consonant with the broad “scientific” frame of reference, and
in particular, commensurable with the dimensions of the cognitive sciences
and contemporary philosophy of mind. Rather than inventing totally new
terms or definitions for the tangled old concepts, I am trying to select
and highlight the most important meanings already present. Thus I believe
that what I am proposing is not only internally consistent, but consistent
with the intent of the most common usages. Well-wishers have advised me
that my plan is hopeless, because people are extraordinarly resistent to
changing their terms. Nevertheless, the need makes the gamble worth
while. I ask the reader to read this section through, inhibiting the “Yes,
but...” reflex, and perhaps she will find her objections handled a bit
further on.
4a.
Person
and self
A person is a complex
system, made up of component subsystems. Person is, in
principle, the entire self-organizing,
multilevel, causal thicket,
including bodily, mental, and social aspects, and representations of past
and future organizations (selves). This list is meant to be open-ended,
and other dimensions can be added as needed. Person, of course, is
embedded in a larger complex environment (the universe). My new incudes
all of these, always. It contrasts with common usage, in which just how
much is included by person and personal always depends on
the speakers’ conventions and on their purposes. Thus, under the common
definitions, sometimes person refers to the body (“touched his
person), sometimes to intimate feelings (“religion is too personal”), and
sometimes to social relations (“separate personal and professional life”).
Since this is not made explicit in ordinary discourse, it contributes to
the confusion.
54)
Our common speech sometimes distinguishes between person and
self, but with multiple, context-dependent senses, as illustrated by
Lakoff and Johnson’s observations presented above. I propose that we
formally designate that person is extended over time, and self
is the current organization of the person. That is, self is
the way all of the subsystems of the person are related to each other. I
emphasize that self is a characteristic of the person as a whole, rather
than just another subsystem or constituent as some psychological models
would have it. In discussing the complex we call person it is very
useful to be able to refer to its organization (self) in contrast to its
instantiation (embodiment). Organization is simply the set of all the
relations among the constituents of the system. This can include such
relations as membership, connection, and control.
55)
It is readily apparent that a person, like any complex system,
might be capable of several different patterns of organization (selves).
For example, it may be tightly organized, with all subsystems integrated,
so that the activity of each part is always affected by the state of all
of the parts. Another system may be more loosely integrated so that some
subsystems may function semiautonomously, within broad limits. A third
pattern of organization might have some subsystems tightly integrated,
acting like clusters, but only loosely coupled to other subsystems or
clusters. This sort of description applies, no matter what sort of
subsystems one is concerned with. A cognitive psychologist for example,
might be concerned with the connections and control relations between the
memory subsystem and the emotion subsystem; under some organizations
memory may function largely independent of mood, and under other
organizations might be greatly affected. To take an example from social
personality theory, occupational behaviors may or may not be affected by
drastic changes in family life (marriage, divorce). Defining the self as
the pattern of organization emphasizes that it changes over time; over a
period of years, as in the maturation of adolescence, or over minutes, as
in multiple personality disorders. By defining self as the
organization of subsystems rather than as just another subsystem, we
get a clear referent for common phrases such as "a more integrated self,"
or "a development of the self," or "a loss of self." The concept of self
as organization, varying dynamically in degree and quality, works
at the neurological level of description as well as at the psychological
level, and across levels.
4b. HYPHENATED DERIVATIVES OF SELF
56)
Self-monitor:
Many complex self-regulating systems that adapt to their environment use a
regularly up-dated map of their own state and the adaptations made. The
processes that keep track of the current state of the self in its
environment are likely to be hierarchically organized and distributed over
many levels, but for simplicity I use the term self-monitor in the
singular to refer to all of them collectively.
57)
We infer the existence of a self-monitor because we know a lot
about our present "mode" of organization, including such things as the
level and quality of our awareness and our cognition, and our status as
agent. For example, we know how aroused we are (drowsy or alert or
drunk); we can distinguish imagining from remembering, we can even
sometimes realize that we are dreaming and not awake. We have information
about our goals and actions; when the doctor taps our knee and elicits a
reflex knee-jerk, we can say "I didn't do that," or "I don't feel like
myself today."
58)
However, this monitoring subsystem is not the self; it is a
subsystem among many others. Like any other map, it can be incomplete, or
wrong. It remains to be learned what its inputs are, what aspects of
organization it can monitor and what it cannot, what sort of errors it can
make, how it can be turned on and off, how its functioning varies from
time to time or from person to person. The idea of self-monitor as
distinct from self and self-concept is useful in thinking about phenomena
such as hypnosis and hallucinations, and how the left and right cerebral
hemispheres relate to each other. In previous papers I have discussed self
and self-monitoring in the context of unawareness of deficits following
certain brain injuries (Galin, 1992), and how one of the
types of information present in awareness can serve a self-monitoring role
(Galin 1994).
59)
Self-awareness:
Please note than until this point, awareness (consciousness) has not had
to be mentioned in any of the definitions. It must be considered here, and
in discussing the experience of “I”, but beyond that I intend to finesse,
by referring to previous essays which discuss in detail the structure of
awareness, and what kind of a thing awareness may be ( Galin 1994,
1999)
60)
Self is often treated as synonymous with awareness, or even with
just self-awareness alone. Logically, self-awareness means simply
awareness of some information about the self (Galin, 1992). Since I have
defined self as the organization of the person, it follows that
self-awareness means awareness of some aspect of that organization. Only a
small part of the results of self-monitoring or self-concept ever enters
awareness. This should not be surprising; numerous experiments have
demonstrated that even very complex information processing can go on
without our being aware of it (Kihlstrom, 1987) (Velmans, 1991). Specialized modules of
our sensory-perceptual systems continuously acquire knowledge of the
world, and elaborate, evaluate, and incorporate it into plans and actions,
and only the final product appears in consciousness. At present, cognitive
neuroscience has only the most general hypotheses as to what sort of
additional process or factor is required to bring any content into
consciousness. We will return to self-awareness below when we consider
what “I” means.
61)
Self-concept:
The self-concept can be thought of as a
body of information consisting of knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, etc.
about "who or what one is" as an entity in the world. The
self-concept refers to the self, but is just a subsystem. It is
similar in form to our concepts of any other objects, e.g., our next-door
neighbor or the Washington Monument. Like any other concept we have, it
can be incomplete and in some respects incorrect. Some of it must come
from the self-monitor, but much of it comes from other sources, such as
the opinions of our relatives. As we shall see below, we can have many,
even contradictory self-concepts. Like any other concept, it can be
brought into consciousness from time to time, but it is clearly
distinguishable from self, from self-awareness in general, and from
self-monitoring of current states as defined above.
4c. THE “I”: ENTITY, KNOWLEGE, AND POINT
OF VIEW
62)
The new idea here is in
answer to the question, “what kind of a thing is the ‘I’?” To
develop this account, it is first necessary to define three other common
but uncommonly difficult terms: entity, knowledge, and point of
view. The first-person point of view in particular is a surprisingly
subtle concept. In a recent paper (Galin 1999) I have discussed at length
how first-personness has two senses, point of view and consciousness,
which are confused in Western philosophy and psychology. For our present
purpose, however, I will just set these three definitions as a foundation,
and then go on to propose that “I” is a kind of perspective, or point of
view. It is the perspective or point of view of the system
person, given by its present organization (self).
63)
Entity:
This is the key concept, whose meaning is almost always mistakenly assumed
to be naturally given and intuitively obvious. An entity (a unit, a
wholeness) is a group of bits or elements distinguished from those in its
environment by “belonging to each other” in some sense. It is the
relationships between the elements that make it an entity, not an edge,
shell, skin, or border that separates them from their neighbors. The
pattern of relationships among the elements creates an implicit or virtual
border. According to the analyses of Simon (1969 p. 209 ff.), and of
Wimsatt (1974, and 1976 pp. 242, 261), we call a set of parts an entity if
there is sufficient inter-relatedness among them.
“Sufficient” is decided by some criterion chosen for our purpose.
Functional relations, spatial and temporal relations, social relations,
are examples of aspects by which we commonly decide that some distribution
is an entity or not. For example, a group of people is an entity we call
“family” if the people have sufficiently close relations; whether or not
we set the criterion to include second cousins, adoptees, steps, and pets,
or only parents and their natural children depends on our purposes. Thus,
entiticity is a matter of convention as well as a matter of degree.
In general an entity does not have a sharp boundary. It depends on the
relative amount of inter-relatedness of its components (nothing in a
universe has no relation to anything else). I believe this greatly
softens, but does not quite extinguish, the usual hard self/object
boundary, which has been such a contentious point in Western and Buddhist
metaphysics and psychology.
64)
I stress the rather surprising conditionality of entities because
properties such as point of view, or knowledge, or consciousness belong to
a specific entity, and to understand the property we must be clear about
just what we think constitutes the entity which hosts it. According to our
usual view, an interaction occurs between two entities, and the
conditionality I am highlighting, may make it difficult to specify or
justify what we think are the entities involved. Problems arise when we
forget that what we are treating as an entity is only more or less an
entity, of limited duration, and only by agreement for the present
purposes (e.g., a marriage, a corporation, the Republic of Congo). Many
confusions about “person” and “self” arise here. Humans have a great
passion for entifying; we frequently turn verbs and adjectives into nouns,
and turn processes and relations into things.
65)
Knowledge, To Know:
The definition of this conceptual cluster has a very long history in
philosophy and is currently used in many senses: to perceive directly,
to be capable of, to be fixed in memory, to be acquainted or familiar
with, to be able to distinguish (Webster’s dictionary). Note that none of
these usages specifies consciousness; they all make sense for instances of
nonconscious as well as for conscious knowings. The sense that best
captures the phenomena that concern us here is one of the most general;
to know is to be able to distinguish.
66)
Know
implies a knowing entity, and that which is known. For an entity to
know something XYZ (to know how to XYZ, or to know that XYZ), is for
it to distinguish XYZ from at least some not-XYZ, to act discriminatively
toward XYZ. No consciousness is implied. The minimum discrimination is
detection; something happened, or didn’t; something is, or isn’t.
Knowledge is the capacity to discriminate, a potential to use
information.
It is a functional property, and it does not imply time-coded and
source-labeled memories or stand-alone representations in their common
senses.
67)
Point of view:
The terms “point of view” and “perspective” are metaphors taken from the
domain of visual-spatial perception and applied to the more general domain
of knowing. These metaphors express the intuition that people operate
within a frame of reference or coordinate system (analogous with a spatial
coordinate system) made up from their repertoire of concepts. Much of the
conceptual repertoire is quite abstract and not visual-spatial or
sensory-perceptual at all. For example, we can speak of having a
particular political, ethical, or pragmatic point of view. Thus point
of view applies to domains such as values as well as to domains of
spatial perception and action; an event or object is good or beautiful or
moral from my point of view just as an object is above or below, or
on the right or the left from my point of view. Note that as with
the previous concepts, awareness (consciousness) is not required for a
point of view (Galin 1999a).
68)
Like knowledge, a point of view belongs to a specific entity. A
point of view is the total set of possible discriminations that an
entity can make in its present state, or over some period of time
specified for our purpose. We are generally interested in dynamic systems
(i.e., systems that change), and at any one time some of the knowledge
that the entity has may not be available for use. For example, in an
enzyme molecule the critical receptor region may be temporarily folded
inside, unable to interact. Similarly, different capacities for
discrimination may be available to you in the context of a street mob than
in the context of your private study. Thus the point of view will vary as
the properties of the entity are affected by the time, place, and other
contexts of the entity.
4d. DEFINING
The “I”, The SUBJECT, AND THE AGENT
69)
With these definitions in hand, I propose that the “I” is
a kind of point of view. It is the point of view of the entity
person, given by the person’s present organization (its self).
Thus, “I“ is not equivalent to self. “I” includes both the
subject and agent. “Subject” is the input point of view,
that is, the set of currently available discriminations from which
perceptions are selected. “Agent” is the output point of view, the
set of currently available discriminations from which actions are
selected.
The psychological construct we call “the present” is a reference point in
“real time” or “clock time” (time that changes in one direction, at a
constant rate, for all entities). The self’s “I” must be in the present
because the self’s perception and action machinery must use the same
synchronizing reference point as the entities they perceive or act upon.
For example, speech is severely disrupted if you hear your own voice
through earphones with even a slight delay. I hypothesize that the process
of adopting the “real time” point of view is the basis for what we call
Subject and Agent. Subject and Agent can be lumped as a single entity
named “I” because they both share the “real time” point of view.
70)
Selves
other than the current one are reference models (representations of
possible states of self). They are either not in the present (like the
past or future states of “I”), or not in real time at all, like the
ideal self (what you should be like, but are not), the shadow self (what
you should not be like, but are), the longed-for self (desired), the inner
self (hidden from “I” or others), and the real or true selves (many
meanings, contextual). These are best thought of as multiple
self-concepts, named so that we can refer to the richness and
contradictions of our physical, mental, and social life that cannot be
denoted by the “I” anchored in clock time and action.
71)
This multiplicity would confuse
Aristotelian rationalists, but ordinary people do not notice any
difficulty in the course of daily life. As Lakoff and Johnson have shown,
in common speech the multiplicity is managed nonconsciously through the
Divided Person metaphor, discussed above in Section 3c. Beware that my
definitions, arrived at by analysis and for analytic purposes, are
different from the nonconscious heuristics observed by Lakoff and Johnson.
In that schema, the “I” is separate from the “Self or Selves”. Note that
what the metaphor names as “I” includes much more than my
subject-and-agent point of view. And what the metaphor names as “other
selves” is what I have identified as “self-concepts”(see Sections 3c and
4b above). In what follows, I will stick to my terminology, developed for
internal consistency.
72)
It is critical to note that the “I” point of view includes only
those discriminations made by the entity as such, not by one of its parts
acting for the time autonomously and without relation to the entity as a
whole. Consider for example, the knee-jerk reflex response that the doctor
elicits by putting the knee joint in a relaxed posture and tapping on the
knee-cap tendon. A person generally does not have a sense of agency about
the leg movement, does not feel that “I did that”, and claims that the
“leg” did that. In this posture the leg is less related to the
rest of the person and thus is interpreted as acting as an entity on its
own. In contrast, when the person is standing, the leg is integrated into
the rest of the superordinate entity, and cannot be allowed to act
autonomously; the reflex is much more difficult to elicit in this
position. Thus we see that the feeling of agency claimed by “I” is
associated with the superordinate entity person.
73)
“I”-Awareness: The definitions developed thus far
reveal a previously hidden conflation. “I” itself is not in awareness; it
is a point of view, not a content. The point of view “I” is
the total set of discriminations that could be brought to bear in
the person’s interactions, not only the ones actually in operation at the
moment, and certainly not only the few which the person may be aware of at
the moment. Because of the limited channel capacity of awareness, rather
little of the person’s total point of view could be in awareness at any
moment. The part that does get into awareness can be called experience
of “I”, or “I”-awareness.
Note that the term self-awareness must include more than just
“I”-awareness; it should cover any of the experiences related to the self,
such as feeling alert or sleepy, lonely or in love, healthy or sick, which
do not refer to the point of view per se. Self, defined as the
organization of all the subsystems of the person, includes much more than
the person’s point of view.
74)
The “I”(the point
of view of the person) may be changed as the total organization (self)
changes in response to the environment (e.g., if you see a police car in
your rear-view mirror), or to changes within the person system itself
(e.g., a high blood alcohol level). Notice that any particular changes in
self may produce large or small changes in the set of discriminations that
are available. Therefore, the “I” may change from moment to moment, or may
stay relatively “the same” for some time. Perhaps this is an aspect
of the “stabilization of mind” that is sought in the Buddhist meditative
practice of shamata (Wallace, 1998; 1999).
4 e. MISIDENTIFICATION OF THE RELEVANT
ENTITIES
75)
Now that we have clarified the concepts of “I”, Subject, and
Agent, as based on the point of view of an entity, we can untangle
confusions which arise from misidentification of the relevant entity, such
as in talk about “to whom” a perception or action belongs. Complex
entities may include relatively autonomous sub-entities with points of
view discrepant from each other or from the whole. The superordinate
entity must reconcile such conflicts; its point of view is not simply the
sum or the union or the intersect of the points of view of its parts.
76)
To illustrate the problem of assigning a “to whom” to a point
of view, consider our literally spatial point of view in three-dimensional
space; even that is not as simple as people assume. What we take to be
directly in front of us is sometimes determined with respect to our
body midline, sometimes with respect to our direction of gaze (i.e., how
the eyes are turned in the head, and sometimes with respect to the
direction in which our head and neck are turned (tonus in the neck
muscles), or by our vestibular apparatus (i.e., whether we are standing
vertical or lying horizontal)(see Vallar et. al., (1993) for extensive
references). The eyes, head, and torso midline can each have a different
front! That is, we have multiple frames of reference for 3D space,
which can give conflicting points of view. When we cannot reconcile them,
as in motion sickness or the hemi-neglect following a parietal lobe
injury, we have trouble (Bisiach, 1991; Galin, 1992). Similarly, we have
multiple frames of reference for values and we have trouble if we cannot
reconcile them (e.g., different ethical standards in business and in the
family).
77)
The superordinate entity (e.g., a person) may be able to
usefully combine the multiple points of view of its parts (sub-entities,
e.g., the two eyes). If the eyes are on the sides of the head as in a
rabbit, their two points of view can be added to give a wider field of
view. If, as in humans, the eyes both face front and their two points of
view overlap, then the discrepancy between them can be used for
information about depth. But when there is too much conflict all but one
may be suppressed (e.g., amblyopia, the loss of vision in one eye in a
severely “cross-eyed” person). Another strategy for conflict resolution is
to alternate among points of view (e.g., in multiple personality disorder,
or in contextual ethics).
78)
Ordinarily we are
good at keeping track of which of our multiple points of view are in
control at the moment. It must be very important to our species since very
young children can do it by age 18 months; they can take another point of
view in imaginative play without losing track that the new one (the
“pretend”) is nested inside of the usual one (the “real”).
However, even adults can lose track of a nested hierarchy of points of
view, as when one gets “carried away” at the theater or movies and reacts
as if it were real, or in hypnosis, where the “I” accepts the
hypnotist’s point of view as overriding the self-monitors.
79)
A similar analysis
untangles the confusion and paradox concerning subject and agent in
“split-brain” patients. Recall the experiment that I described in Section
2, above (Galin 1974, p. 573-576). A picture was shown to one hemisphere
and the patient was asked to point to a matching object in a row of
objects before him. Both hemispheres could see the objects; only one was
shown the picture. In one case when the picture was shown to the right
hemisphere and the correct object was selected, the patient said, "I know
it wasn't me that did that!" Since only the left hemisphere can mediate
speech, how can we sort out who acted, who knew, who protested, who was
the “I” and the “me” referred to? The confusion clears if we remember that
entiticity is a matter of degree, and that we name entities as discrete
for our convenience. Wigan observed 150 years ago that one hemisphere is
enough to sustain a mind in the larger entity person (Wigan,
1844, reprinted1985) . Possession of two
hemispheres makes possible two minds, usually unified by the 200 million
connecting fibers of the corpus callosum.
What is changed by the surgical splitting of the corpus callosum is the
manner and degree to which each hemisphere (and mind) is related to the
other and to the superordinate entity (person). This is a change in the
organization of the person, and therefore in my terms, a change in
self. Although this is a radical reorganization, there is still for
many purposes a single superordinate entity that we call “the patient”.
The two hemispheres retain many of their previous relations; they
still share the same brainstem connections, body, mouth, relatives,
history, and many other unifying factors (Sperry, 1968) . When the superordinate
entity patient says, “It wasn’t me that did that”, it is the
point of view of the left (speech) hemisphere that is being adopted and
articulated by the superordinate person through its shared midline
vocal organs. Who selected the correct object? We can attribute it
to the superordinate entity person making the discrimination from
the right hemisphere’s point of view. One might say that the patient’s
shift from adopting the one hemisphere’s point of view to adopting the
other is enough of a reorganization to call a change in selves; if we
apply Lakoff and Johnson’s linguistic analysis to the patient’s utterance,
that is what it seems to say. In any case, the terminology I am suggesting
makes it possible for one to refer unambiguously to each of the components
in this drama, and thus to resolve the debates among Sperry (1968),
Puccetti (1981) , and Nagle
(1979) .
5.
SPECULATIONS ON THE BASIS FOR THE ORDINARY MAN’SVIEW OF PERSON,
SELF, AND “I”
80)
Now, after this long detour to develop the needed technical
vocabulary, I can once more take up examining the inborn, pre-theoretic
notions of self. What follows is my account of just why the Ordinary Man’s
view of person and “inner life” has the surprising hidden structure
revealed by Lakoff and Johnson’s linguistic research, and why the hidden
structure is different from what is consciously reported. I will also
suggest how the basis of the Buddhist’s “correct” view can be found in a
part of the structure of ordinary awareness, usually neglected by
cognitive psychology.
81)
Although my account is highly speculative, it is woven around
widely accepted empirical observations that call for explanation. I
propose that the intricacies and apparent paradoxes arise from a series of
cognitive specializations, compromises, and checks and balances which have
developed and survived through evolution because they have important
functional payoff
82)
The central idea is that in order to deal with the enormous
complexity of the world, a mind/brain routinely and unconsciously makes
use of ad hoc approximations. Whatever complex field we encounter, we
simplify it to make perception, action, and abstract thought easier. It is
easier for creatures like us to take in, use, and store information in
the form of a small number of discrete entities rather than as
densely-connected arrays or continua. By applying our cognitive talents
for lumping and splitting, we are able to approximate isolated entities
of conveniently larger or smaller sizes. This strategy is used at all
levels of information processing, from the sensorimotor to the abstract
conceptual levels. Even the contents of consciousness are structured by
the need to limit information (Galin 1994; Mangan 1991; James 1890), and
to facilitate action (Deikman 1971). This results in the usual appearance
of the world to us as if it were made up of distinct independent objects.
We do not generally tidy up the approximations, truncations, and round-off
errors. They are made ad hoc, for the circumstance, and if they work
well enough, we do not look back and try to reconcile all the
quasi-arbitrary boundaries into a single, consistent frame of reference.
We only try to rationalize the differences when pressed.
83)
In the following, I will examine these ideas in more detail.
THE BASIS FOR THE OBJECT-WORLD
84)
Our experience of the world as full of separate objects does
not correspond in a simple way to “just what is out there”. It is the
result of complementary operations, some of which seek information and
some that seek to filter, reduce, and compact information. As information
flows through the mind/brain, these processes are repeated over and over
at the simplest and at the most complex levels of organization, from the
peripheral sensations and physical movements to abstract thought. For
example, the retina is built to report in terms of dots of light of a few
discrete colors in discrete positions. Even though the stimulus field may
be continuous, it is encountered in discrete terms. Afterwards, the
array of bits is segmented into a number of regions, in each of which the
bits are all considered as constituting a single entity (an object, form
or pattern). Thus a smaller, more manageable number of entities is
produced. In this way, the eyes of flies, frogs, and humans each greatly
reduce the amount of information flooding in, but they segment the
manifold quite differently, in accordance with their natural purposes.
Thus, the frog’s retina responds to four kinds of information relevant to
its life: small moving dark spots (like flies); large looming dark spots
(like predators); general brightness (like day/night or up/down); and
dark-light edges (like obstacles); (Lettvin, Maturana, McColloch, &
Pitts, 1959). In human vision,
information reduced and compacted from the retinal dots is again segmented
at the higher level, this time into shapes, locations, colors, and
movements, with each property in a separate region of the cerebral
cortex, and then once again compacted (in a way not yet known) such that
these properties are bound into the unified perception of a single
particularly shaped multi-hued object at a particular location moving in
a particular direction. Why do humans usually (but not always) construct
the world as we do?
85)
The way in which we segment the manifold depends on many
factors. For example, we are particularly sensitive to borders and
outlines, perhaps because we tend to interact with an entity at its edge
or surface; that is where we can grasp or bite it. Also, our action
(movement) systems are adapted to work with entities of a certain scale,
not to big or too small, so we tend to segment the manifold into regions
(entities) of manageable size. Large, medium, and small might be thought
of in terms of what you can walk around, what you can grasp and move, and
what you can bite and swallow.
88)
Lakoff and his colleagues (Feldman, Grady, Regier, Narayanan,
Bailey) hypothesize that the same neural systems that control operations
on physical entities (objects) contribute to mental operations on
abstract entities (concepts, categories)(see Lakoff and Johnson 1999,
appendix pp. 569-583). By this theory, for example, the same neuronal
systems that control the hand to transform the position of a berry from on
the bush to in the mouth would also play a role in mentally extracting a
single element from a narrative and putting it into an appropriate
category. They suggest it is more than a figure of speech to say that we
“grasp ideas” or “chew on” them. This notion, which can be called “The
Perceptual-Motor Basis of Abstract Thought”, has many important
implications for how we categorize the world.
89)
Categorizing may be our most basic mental process, underlying
all knowing and acting, and it effects how we think about person, self,
and “I”. Cognitive psychology has found that people tend to use two kinds
of categories
(Lakoff, 1987; Rosch, 1978). The Aristotelian category, the most familiar, is
described by the metaphor of a closed container, with an inside and an
outside (a bounded region of property-space). Any entity that has the
necessary properties is a member of the category (inside the container),
or else it is not a member (outside). Nothing is in between. This is
Aristotle’s famous Law of the Excluded Middle: a thing is either a type of
Experience or a type of not-X. All members are considered equal.
Although it is the basis of conventional logic, the categories of our
daily lives fit this idealized type only very approximately. In daily
life, most or all candidates for a category only partially fulfill all the
criteria (e.g., there is no such thing as a perfect mother). Our actual
experience most commonly fits the second category type, called Radial; its
metaphor is an open, unbounded space with a perfect exemplar of the
category (a “prototype”) at its center. For each property that the
exemplar has, a line radiates out from the center, representing decreasing
amounts of that property as greater distance from the center. Thus any
entity can be given a degree of membership in the category depending on
how similar it is to the prototype, metaphorically shown by its distance
from the center. Thus a radial category of Mothers would be able to
accept candidates who were less than completely patient or
self-sacrificing, who adopted rather than birthed their child, or who
birthed a child with someone else’s ovum. Rosch has shown experimentally
that people do primarily use prototypes in classifying (1978), perhaps
because radial categories fit the complexities and necessary
approximations of real life.
90)
In practice, we
seem to use a hybrid strategy in which we start with a Radial
categorization and then make an Aristotelian approximation or
simplification of it. It discards information about precisely how far the
candidate is from the prototype, and tells only whether or not the
candidate is close enough to be in. If it is close enough,
then any remaining differences are ignored. We do not seem to be
consciously aware of just how we actually classify, and when consciously
setting up categories, we tend to choose - or claim to use - all-or-none
categories. We can account for this tendency if, as Lakoff, Feldman, and
their group suggest, the neurological circuits of basic physical
manipulation are also used to mentally operate on abstract entities; note
that this process of segmenting the abstract field into categories is
similar to the sensori-motor preference for borders, edges, and outlines.
With categories of the Aristotelian closed-container-type, only the edge
or boundary need be considered in order to decide whether something is in
it or out of it. In contrast, classifying something by radial categories
would involve handling a lot more information. We would have to judge just
how similar or different it is from the central prototype (how far in or
out, and on what dimensions), and how much the difference matters for our
present purposes. Entification facilitates both literal and metaphoric
grasping and manipulating.
91)
It is natural that we
would use the same basic strategies of lumping and splitting, of entifying
and categorizing, to deal with the complexity of interrelations of our
“inner life”. It is not surprising that person, present self, “I”, and all
of the self-concepts and the “not-me” and others’ points of view (other
people’s “I”s) appear as discrete and independent entities, created with
boundaries that are computationally convenient for our day-to-day
purposes. Because our real experiences are only roughly approximated by
container-type categories, their convenience has a stiff price; we are
often surprised when our all-or-none rules break down over exceptions. But
we stay blissfully unaware that we are constantly approximating. If on
several subsequent occasions we create a different segmenting for an
abstract conceptual field, we ignore the differences if possible.
We do not generally tidy up the approximations. They are made ad
hoc, for the circumstance, and if they work well enough, we do not look
back and try to reconcile all the quasi-arbitrary boundaries into a
single, consistent frame of reference. This describes how Science actually
works, just as well as it describes how Ordinary Man deals with daily
life. We only try to rationalize the differences when forced, by two kinds
of circumstances. First, when our approximations fail seriously because of
an insuperable external or internal conflict, we may be motivated to go
back and examine what other choices of boundaries were successful in the
past. Second, when someone else confronts us and asks for an account of
just what we are doing, we try to come up with a socially acceptable and
linguistically comprehensible formulation. In both cases, we switch out of
the present-centered action orientation, and into what has been called an
abstract attitude, or reflective mode, operating on internal data. The
abstract attitude is not constrained by “clock time " (as any
philosopher’s spouse can testify), and thus we can access
non-present-centered points of view such as the “me”of past circumstances,
or the “me” of hypothetical circumstanses. In any case, our attempts to
reconcile our past ad hoc approximations often fail. Gallagher and Marcel
(1999), drawing on evidence
from brain damage rehabilitation studies, recently came to similar
conclusions. They argue convincingly that psychological laboratory
experiments on the experience of self limit the subject to abstract
attitudes and a detached stance, just as philosophical reflection does,
and that unless subjects are embedded in pragmatically and socially
contextualized situations, their reports about Self must be incomplete,
distorted, or mistaken.
92)
Although decomposition of a complex field into isolated
entities is powerfully useful, it sometimes leads to ignoring relations
that are actually needed. This over-simplification is often
associated with single-cause reasoning and its familiar disasters, and
some would say, leads to the atomization and alienation of modern life.
Only occasionally do we experience the world (and ourselves) primarily as
a densely interconnected manifold, or even as a continuum. This bias
against seeing the world as a pattern of relations (co-dependently
arising) can be understood in part as a result of the nature of language,
which has evolved to support our action-orientation, and in part due to
the structure of awareness itself.
93)
The Structure Of Awareness: Contrary to the customary
view, awareness is not monolithic, but includes several parts. The form of
the contents of awareness, literally the very stuff of our experience, is
determined by the same old need to approximate. In his classic
Principles of Psychology, William James described awareness as based
on two qualitatively different kinds of information (James 1890/1950,
chap. 9). One hundred years later Mangan revived and re-framed James’
model in cognitive terms (1991), recognizing that what James had described
were two complementary types of abbreviation made necessary by the limited
channel-capacity of consciousness. My thinking along these lines was
initiated by Mangan’s thesis (1991).
[15] I have discussed my critiques, revisions
and extensions of James’ and Mangan’s views on the structure of awareness
at length in a previous paper (Galin 1994); here I can give only the
briefest sketch to introduce terms and working hypotheses.
94)
The first type of abbreviation in awareness is to display
only those features of an object or event that are most relevant to our
current goal, the ones which maximally discriminate among items or
choices. I call it feature awareness (James called it “the nucleus”). For
example, on one shopping errand, color may be the feature that most
determines choice, and other features may not enter into awareness at that
moment at all, although they are perceived and processed nonconsciously.
Note that this is not just the selectivity of “attention” in general,
which applies to both conscious and nonconscious processes. Feature
awareness is the form in which this kind of selected content appears in
awareness.
95)
The second type of abbreviation is a large group of
awarenesses that explicate the bare features. They carry the context and
relational information that has been stripped away in feature awareness in
another form. I call them explicating awarenesses (James called
them “the Fringe”, and I previously called them non-feature awarenesses).
One type presents feelings of the relations among the features
(e.g., greater than; pair of; rhymes with;). Another type presents
value judgements. A third type presents feelings that implicitly
condense or summarize non-conscious knowledge that is related to the
selected bare features but that is too extensive to fit explicitly in the
limited capacity (e.g., as the feeling of the meaning of a word
condenses or summarizes the extended semantic network related to the
word's bare phonemes). These “explicating” awarenesses are felt contents
of consciousness, specific, often vivid, worthy to be called qualia as
much as any sensory content. They may or may not be at the center of
“attention”. This group includes many experiences; e.g., the feelings of
belonging-together (knife, fork) or being opposites (fire, water); the
feelings of logical relation such as “and”, “or”, “if” and “but”; the
feeling of familiarity; of being on-the-right-track; of knowing; of
intending a specific movement; the feeling of specific semantic meaning:
of waiting for something unknown; and (I add) the felt component of
emotions. I stress that both feature-awarenesses and explicating
awarenesses are usually present at the same time, may be brief or
persistent, and either one may be the primary object of attention. For a
full account please see my taxonomy of awarenesses (Galin 1994).
96)
When we introspect we tend to be drawn to the feature-awarenesses
rather than to the explicating awarenesses because of our preoccupation
with “doing”; the few features selected are the most discriminative for
our intended action. Trying to focus on the explicating awarenesses seems
to call up new and perhaps more salient feature awareness (Mangan 1991).
Thus, for the casual introspector, the explicating awarenesses may seem
harder to isolate and to stabilize. I believe the spiritual disciplines of
contemplation, devotion, and service (Deikman 1997, 2000), are all
intended in part to promote the explicating awarenesses. Meditation
training teaches stabilizing, focusing, and intensifying attention, and it
takes you out of the stream of physical activity which demands the use of
feature-awarenesses. A saying attributed to the Zen tradition is that an
enlightened man is an ordinary man who has nothing more to do. Explicating
awarenesses can also be made more prominent, sometimes inappropriately, by
some psychotropic drugs
,
rituals and ceremonies, and some brain injuries (e.g., de ja vu and
hyper-religiosity in temporal epilepsy (Geschwind, 1977) (Bear & Fedio, 1977) .
97)
Perhaps we do not often report the explicating awareness of
the world as a dynamic network of relations because language itself gives
more emphasis to features – nouns, verbs, properties. Furthermore, the
speaker’s words are just tokens or markers, like the features in
feature-awareness, and must be explicated by the implicit knowledge that
the listener already shares with the speaker. To communicate, the features
of the words must evoke the appropriate explicating awarenesses in
the listener; the words themselves do not convey meaning from the
speaker (Katherine McGovern 1999, personal communication). The
usefulness of language is in being just complete enough for the
situation’s purposes, not absolutely explicit.
Thus, we verbally report little more of our actual experience than the
name of the quale, but not it in its fullness, unless we are
gifted writers.
98)
Nevertheless, although for the Ordinary Man these experiences
of extended relatedness may be infrequent, transient, and incomplete, they
may form the basis for the Buddhist’s “correct” view, which stresses the
conditionality and interdependence of all things, person and self
included. This will be considered further in the next section. In another
essay I have discussed at length how the present analysis applies to the
concepts and experiences that people name as spirit, or
spiritual, and how the concept spirit can fit into and contribute to
our contemporary scientific framework (Galin, in preparation).
6.
Relating the present theory to Buddhist practices and
doctrines
99)
Summary thus far:
At the begining of this essay I proposed
that the concept of self is at the core of both Buddhism and Western
psychology, and is problematic for both in many different ways. The
Buddhist tradition holds that the suffering of unenlightened people is
caused by an inborn erroneous view of the self as a persisting entity or
essence. I suggested that we could begin to map the relations and
disjunctions of the Buddhist and Western psychological accounts of self by
focusing on this alleged inborn error. As background, Section 2 reviewed
some of the disarray in contemporary scientific thought about self.
Section 3 introduced the surprising observations and theory from cognitive
linguistics on how people actually use a rich and inconsistent system
based on the Divided Person metaphor in order to think about their selves
and persons as perceiving subjects making willful acts.
100)
In Section 4, I clarified the foundation concepts of
entity, knowledge, and point of view, and argued that person, self,
and ”I” are quite different kinds of things. I called for
professionals to go beyond sectarian formalizations in how they talk and
think about these matters and adopt a set of terms (preferably mine)
consonant with a multidisciplinary frame of reference, commensurable with
the cognitive sciences and contemporary philosophy of mind, still
consistent with the intent of the most common usages. I accounted for the
Divided Person metaphor’s fundamental separation of “I” from one or more “selves”(self-concepts).
Examples of how my terms and schemata can be applied to resolve apparent
paradox were drawn from neuropsychology, and in particular from
observation of split-brain patients.
101)
In Section 5, I returned to examining the “inborn” pre-theoretic
notions of self. I proposed that the central theme of ordinary human life
is its action orientation and the consequent focus on entities. Our
evolutionary adaptations for acting have shaped our nonconscious mental
life, and account for the structure of our consciousness itself as a
combination of feature-awareness and explicating awarenesses, which in
turn accounts for the limited kinds of communication that language is good
for. Thus we simplify immense complexity into manageable entities, and do
not tidy up the approximations if they work well enough. We apply the same
heuristics to the complexities of our “inner life”, and the result is the
view of Self as an object in a world of objects.
102)
Here, in Section 6, I will briefly consider how this account,
developed within the broad framework of Western cognitive science, relates
to Buddhist views and practices. According to the most basic Buddhist
tradition, the Ordinary Man’s inborn view of person, self, and “I” is in
error and this leads to suffering. The analysis I have presented expands
on this tradition. I will mention three areas: the necessary multiplicity
of Ordinary Man’s views and their pragmatic usefulness rather than their
error, the issue of absolutism in the Buddhists’ “correct view”, and the
centrality of the action orientation to human life generally and thus to
Buddhist practice.
103)
First, I have emphasized that there is not just one, but many ways
in which Ordinary Man frames the world, and thus how he sees self and
person. Because of the limited information processing capacity of the
untrained Ordinary Man, he cannot handle a single integrated view which is
comprehensive enough to deal with the richness and complexity and internal
contradictions of our physical, mental, and social lives. Thus, it is
necessary to use partial and approximate views which are changed as the
context requires. This is a wonderful pragmatic solution, although it
gives rise to a zoo of partially overlapping, partially contradictory
self-concepts: the subject and the agent; the conscious and the
unconscious; the real me; the outer- and the inner; the ideal; the
anticipated future me; the possibles; the many selves of the past; the
anima and the animus and the shadow, etc.
104)
Although it is recognized that Ordinary Man’s views are inborn and
useful, in some varieties of Buddhist discourse there still seems to be
some moral opprobrium clinging to these “errors”, although not as severe
as the opprobrium of Augustinian Christianity for the similarly
unavoidable Original Sin. This tone persists, even though Buddhist
traditions like Madhyamika hold that heuristics of entification and even
conceptual philosophizing are indispensible in the “conventional world”.
Perhaps more emphasis could be given to the multiple inborn views as
useful approximations rather than as errors. When suffering does arise it
is from misuse of these heuristics. Buddhist doctrine moves in this
direction when it declares that the danger is in the “reification” of
entities rather than in entification per se. It is only to the extent that
we reify , and in particular, reify the Self, that attachment,
selfish craving, and aggression arise, causing all suffering.
Unfortunately, I believe that reification itself derives from another of
our inborn, foundational simplifications, that of assuming
constancy as much as possible (see paragraph 88, above). Thus
in my view, reification is not just due to ignorance or perversity.
Nevertheless, according to some Buddhist schools, people who achieve
Buddhahood can actually experience the world without the illusions caused
by simplification, entification, conceptual designation, and reification.
Those of lesser attainment can recognize their experience as illusion, but
they will still experience the illusion, just as man who is familiar with
the desert may see a mirage but know enough not to chase after it.
105)
The most common misuse of approximations is the over-emphasizing of
features and entities and the neglect of explicating contexts and
relations. It is certainly the most common in Western “scientific”
culture. But suffering can arise from misuse of any of these heuristics,
even the inborn explicating awarenesses which give us our sense of mutual
relations among things (Galin 1994). I believe it is this sense that
provides the seeds of what may be developed into the Buddhist’s “correct”
view, the perception of the world (including ourselves) as a matrix of
dependently related events. Yet this too can be over-emphasized, and thus
Buddhist tradition warns against neglecting the entities by getting stuck
in “forest quietism” or “blissing-out” in a sense of oceanic
connectedness.
106)
Second, one of the most pernicious errors, ever so common in
Western thought, dominant among scientists and philosophers alike, lies in
failing to see that all our views are necessarily heuristics, not
absolutes. It is for this failure that Cognitive Science can refute
Rationalism and Naive Realism (e.g., see Lakoff and Johnson 1999, pp.
74ff., 94ff.). So pervasive is this misuse that even some Buddhist schools
and texts seem to take co-dependent arising as an ontological absolute.
There is a ubiquitous distinction in the texts between “conventional
reality” and “ultimate reality”. It seems that ultimate is sometimes used
in the sense of “better” as well as “final”; the ultimate is “more real”,
and has more authority and value than the conventional. Garfield notes the
debates over this interpretation in ancient and modern commentaries (p.
299). Collins attributes these debates to two different uses of the
doctrine of No-self, “...as the description of reality vs. as an
instrument of salvation”, i.e., he suggests it is understood as a
heuristic by sophisticates concerned with preserving and clarifying the
conceptual content of Buddhist theory, and in contrast is used as an
absolute by novice monks earnestly engaged in meditative reflection to
achieve nirvana. He also notes the subtle difference between “the ‘right
view’ of no-self, which opposes other ‘wrong views’, ... and Nagarjuna’s
‘no-view’ approach, a ...moral and epistemological attitude towards the
activity of conceptualization per se”, i.e., that right and wrong are
themselves conditional categories (see also Garfield 1995, p. 299,
304-305). Collins suggests that the same finessing of the issue may be
served by the Buddha’s refusal to reply to the famous “unanswered
questions” in the scriptures (Collins 1982, p. 131-138). The refusal “does
not mean that such an analysis is not possible, nor that Buddhism as a
whole rejects all speculation... What is rejected is harmful speculation
based on mistaken premises... This is not a universal recommendation to an
‘empiricism’ or practical anti-metaphysical agnosticism, but a piece of
advice given to an enthusiastic but misled admirer”. This is another
debate beyond my limited scholarship, but the beginning student should be
aware that it awaits her.
107)
Third, I want to highlight the importance of humans’ action
orientation, and how and why it is addressed in Buddhist practice.
Academics, in particular, seem to have little appreciation for how deeply
action is embedded in our human nature, and what a pivotal role action
plays in determining our mental life. The reader may find it instructive
to consider how different are the life challenges for a person than for a
tree, simply because we are highly mobile. It seems reasonable to presume
that evolutionary development necessarily proceeds from simple
physical mobility to relocating adaptively within the environment, to
finely differentiated ability to manipulate the environment, which in turn
provides an opportunity to evolve the ability to model future states based
on our possible acts , and to choose among them. Each succeeding level
incorporates rather than replaces the prior ones. In the previous sections
I have discussed how we segment the manifold into those entities which
afford possibilities for action, and how even our abstract conceptual
thinking is based on action metaphors, which perhaps grow out of the
underlying action neurophysiology. The paradoxes and inconsistencies of
“I” and self-concepts that derive from the central Divided Person Metaphor
were accounted for in part by the “I”/agent’s need to be in present time
for the action-perception-action loop. We are very much occupied with
doing, pressed into action by the imperatives of the changing world.
108)
Thus, since Buddhism
seeks to deconstruct the Ordinary Man's view of the world and himself in
it, and provide corrective experience, it is reasonable to find that many
Buddhist practices serve to modify the seeker’s action orientation. In
many ways, non-action is promoted. This is a subtle concept, found
in many contemplative disciplines, the subject of millennia of discourse
and interpretations. It is not simply immobility; Buddha preached
specifically against the Forest Quietists (see also D. T. Suzuki on Hui
Neng’s doctrine of No-mind (Suzuki, 1949), and Huston Smith
(1992) on Taoist problems with
slipping from wu wei (“no-action”) into Quietism). Non-action has
more to do with will, intention, and agency than simply with movement. The
intertwining of action with will, voluntariness, agency, intention,
motivation, and desire is a thorny thicket, not yet resolved by Western
philosophy. Clinical neurology has contributed important observations
(e.g., Lhermitte, 1983), and currently, there
is a growing and productive concern with will and agency in cognitive
neuroscience (Frith & Done, 1989; Goldberg, 1985; Jeannerod, 1994;
Libet, 1985). I note in passing that
the complex ideas of karma, so deep in Vedic as well as Buddhist
thought, concern these same aspects of action, not simply the physical
doing. Physicist John Wheeler also finds surprising links in a quantum
theory framework between future events and present choosing
(Wheeler, 1991).
109)
Sitting meditation, which is central to Buddhist practice,
particularly eliminates physical doing and progressively limits mental
doing. I suggest that in meditation the action-observation-action loop is
interrupted, which allows the explicating awarenesses to come to
more prominence than the feature-awareness. In the absence of an
action program, all that the explicating awareness can report on is the
state of the system itself. I suggest that the iterative re-parsing of the
self itself creates the opportunity for new more integrated structure to
form.This may be the core of the “corrective” experience of the self.
110)
Getting out of the action loop without slipping into discursive
thought or sleep is not a trivial achievement; this is one aspect of the
stabilization, focussing, and intensifying of mind that is sought in
shamata attention training (Wallace, 1999). But quiesence or
shamata by itself does not provoke or invoke the “corrective” experience,
and so other practices may be added. Meditation traditions differ in the
degree to which they stress passive observation. In some traditions, after
mental stabilization is achieved, didactic exercises may include an active
exploration and testing of states as discribed in the texts, just as the
Jesuits might encourage active philosophical exploration of doctrine.
Whereas in ordinary philosophical reflection one introspects within the
usual framework of categories, in meditation one is often asked to abandon
categories, or forced to abandon them by exercises such as the Zen koan.
The Madyamika school may make more use of exploring specific categories to
direct the explicating awareness to various parts of the system.
111)
Other traditional practices also serve to modify the action
orientation. The imperatives of the changing world are somewhat
decreased by joining a monastic community, or temporarily going into
retreat. Submitting to a community or to a Master to some extent shifts
the burden of agency to them (as seen most dramatically in hypnotic
suggestion). Performing compassionate service to others promotes a shift
in the “I” to incorporate the other’s point of view (Deikman 1996, 2000).
Repetitive group chanting also shifts the control of action to the group
and to the chant itself, and the repetitiveness loosens the connection to
present “clock” time. For a vivid example, see Deikman’s personal report
of the transfiguration of his experience as “his self vanished” in the
course of chanting during a prolonged Zen retreat (Deikman, 1997). All of these practices
seem to be ways of weakening the ordinary, action-oriented experience of
self, and therefore allowing a new experience and a new integrated
structure to emerge.
112)
However, it is important to note that, in general, the goal is not
to remain in a meditative state dominated by the explicating awarenesses,
but to achieve a new point of view and return to action in the world.
7.
CODA
113)
The central theme emerging in this essay is that humans are
situated as participant quasi-entities in the dynamics of the world
manifold. This circumstance mandates man’s action orientation. We adapt to
the constant change and information overload by heuristic approximations,
by entifying and simultaneously mitigating the oversimplifications with
the contextual knowledge presented in the explicating awarenesses. We
should consider renaming the human species as Homo approximatus,
sub-species pragmaticus. The same adaptive strategy, of course, is
also applied to the complexities of our “inner life”, and thus leads to
the confusion, internal contradictions, and paradoxes in our thought and
speech about the concepts of person, self, and “I”. A second theme
in this essay is my defense of the maligned Ordinary Man’s inborn view of
Person and Self. I suggest that it is better seen as an essential
evolutionary adaptation rather than as erroneous, as more complex and
multifaceted than simply ignorant. Although it is open to misuse, the
remedy of the misuse is to re-balance rather than replace.
114)
The re-conception that I
have been proposing is compatible with the main lines of Buddhist
concepts, and indicates several points of contact between Buddhism and
contemporary psychology. I have suggested a definition of Person
that is very long, and that may be conceptually challenging to some, but
it is much more explicit than the usual: a Person is a dynamically
changing, self-organizing, multilevel, quasi-entity without sharp
boundaries, and embedded in a causal thicket; Self is the current
organization of the person; and “I” is the Self’s point of view,
its set of possible discriminations. My account of
self-as-dynamic-organization resembles Buddhism’s whirling aggregate of
skandas, but may have more structure; I focus more on the various degrees
of stability rather than the stark dichotomy of ephemeral vs. eternal,
transience vs. timelessness. My definition of entity as always
conditional, dependent on our purposes, constrained by context, is
completely in accord with the Buddhist view of the phenomenal world.
However, I also note the degree to which invariance or stability does
occur. A state that persists within some range for an hour is different
than one which persists for a second or a decade, and the difference may
be worth our while to talk about.
115)
Both my schema and
Buddhist tradition situate persons in the rest of the natural world,
rather than considering them to be in some way unique (as for example, by
uniquely possessing a soul, or special essence). In the key Buddhist
concept of anatta, self is not an essence, not a substance, not
unchanging, not independently arising. As expressed by Nagarjuna (Garfield
1995), there is no independent being, only relationship and its dynamics.
The key idea in my schema is organization, which is also nothing but
dynamic relationship. As such, both systems imply the possibility of
transformation, of reorganization.
116)
Buddhism emphasizes meditation as the way to provide a corrective
experience of self and of the manifold in which self is embedded. I have
introduced the idea that meditation breaks up the action orientation and
trains the ability to focus on explicating awarenesses rather than on
feature-awareness. In all humility, this essay develops such bridging
concepts merely to begin translating into Western psychological
terms those experiences and underlying cognitive changes that occur in the
course of training toward enlightenment. A preliminary framework such as
this makes it possible to hypothesize about how transformational practices
like shamata, service and compassion, all-night group dancing, and drugs
might work in terms of cognitive psychology and brain subsystems. As much
as possible I have limited myself to discussing the processes and
experience of seeking transformation, and said nothing about the
experiences of transformation itself, whether by sudden insight, slow
reorganization, or other means. I hope this framework will be useful to
those who have personal knowledge of transformation. It is up to them to
distinguish the experiences related to transformation per se from the
secondary emotional and physical reactions to it, and further, to
characterize the experiences of living in ordinary contexts after that
reorganization.
117)
The doctrine of No-Self, Anatta, is often misunderstood as
yet another example of Buddhism’s alleged pessimissm and nihilism. On the
contrary, the Buddhist solution to the modern suffering of alienation and
anomie is to completely contextualize Self, not to simply erase it
. This seems to be remarkably consonant with trends toward holism in
Western thought that go beyond psychology. The West’s new appreciation of
context is shown by mounting interest in ecology, in sustainable practices
in relation to the natural environment, and even to society conceived as
an environment. There is a broadening emphasis on understanding the
relation of the part to the whole that seems to me all of a piece with
efforts more conventionally identified as psychological or spiritual work.
The exploration of Person and Self in this essay is intended to contribute
to it.
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END END
The
Pseudo-problem of Ineffability:
There is a pervasive confusion about ineffability although the
definition from the Latin is simply “not expressible in words”. On the
one hand, things which are said to be ineffable are believed to be
very special, On the other hand, when a person says that something is
hard to put into words, (e.g., love, or beauty, or
justice), positivist skeptics may suspect an evasion covering poor
observation, or muddled thinking, or that the “something” does not
actually exist, or at best, that it is simple vagueness and ambiguity
unacceptable in science. But it is important to note that even though
the word “dog” in itself expresses very little of the actual
experience of encountering a dog , we do not usually consider dogs
ineffable. Verbal accounts are ALWAYS incomplete, even when given at
great length by someone of great talent like Proust. The confusion
arises, as usual, when a matter of degree is treated as an absolute.
In fact, no experience is completely expressible in words;
neither something as mundane as a mouthful of mashed potatoes nor
something as “scientific” as an
electron or time.
But ineffability is also always only partial; verbal accounts can
communicate much or little, depending on the richness of the knowledge
structures already shared by the speaker and listener. When
people do have knowledge structures in common they can communicate
to some extent about dogs, electrons, spirit, even about wine.
That is why we have trouble communicating only some things in words,
and trouble communicating them to some people more than to others. The
availability or lack of a shared knowledge base (a common vocabulary)
is what determines effability. We get our basic vocabulary by pointing
to objects or by demonstrating actions, and then labeling them. Some
things, like abstractions and inner states, are harder to point to or
demonstrate.
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