We all feel, instinctively, that The Self exists. However, The Self is no more than a story we tell ourselves and, in our current time of accelerating technological advancement, we should abandon the one true self, and accept that in the absence of a strongly singular “I”, there must be a weakly multiple “we”, writes Joanna Nadin.
The argument goes like this: each of us has to a greater or lesser extent that feeling of ‘me-ness’: of both existence as a separate being, and of the specific nature of that being – our ‘character’. And that me-ness is remarkably enduring, despite our ever-changing circ*mstances, tastes and relationships. But here’s the thing: that me-ness is not something the brain possesses, it is something the brain does; a ‘symphony’, as Bruce Hood describes it, played by the orchestra of processes in the brain.
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Self is not a monologue, constructed by our mind in isolation, but the product of an ongoing conversation; it is dialogic, born of our interactions with significant (and less significant) others.
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Julian Baggini calls this the ‘ego trick’; for Hood it is the ‘self illusion’, but both put forward the same idea that wholeness is effect rather than cause, as the mind quietly manages to convince us that we are unified. And it manages to do that because we are all masters of fiction, flicking through the snapshot album of memories and weaving them into a convincing narrative that helps us pretend we are one coherent person. It is this narrative that creates the feeling of unity, a feeling so compelling that we can’t help but perceive ourselves as solid objects, unchangeable as a brick or a bicycle, when in fact we are fluid and, crucially, malleable. Because this narrative isn’t an unchangeable text, but can be revised and rewritten, moulded like Play-Doh or Plasticine to absorb inconsistences and maintain coherence.
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‘Crikey,’ you might say. But wait, there’s more! We don’t even write this fiction all by ourselves.
Self is not a monologue, constructed by our mind in isolation, but the product of an ongoing conversation; it is dialogic, born of our interactions with significant (and less significant) others.
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We’re not driven exclusively from the inside out, as we vainly like to think of ourselves.
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The idea that we are partly what others perceive might strike you as the stuff of adolescent nightmare: a damning confirmation that looks matter, that labels stick, that we are what we wear, say, listen to. The evidence is, however, overwhelming. Hood and Baggini, and a myriad of others, cast those with whom we interact – our family, friends, idols, even fictional characters – in the role of meaning-givers. But, before you hit the self-destruct button, it’s important to point out that this doesn’t render us puppets. Rather, it simply reveals that we’re not driven exclusively from the inside out, as we vainly like to think of ourselves. Instead, the self we project onto the world is also a product of that world. So the people with whom we interact are, effectively, our ‘co-creators’. They help make us who we are. In other words, we think of our self, at least in part, according to what they think, or, more precisely, according to what we think they think. In simple terms, other people – and by extension, their opinions – matter. But, and this is key, this isn’t some sort of weakness, the sign of a withered or atrophied self, easily manipulated, able to do no more than follow the herd. First, because no one is doing any deliberate manipulation in this scenario; it occurs largely on the level of the subconscious. Secondly, because the fact that we subconsciously take on board elements of other people is actually favourable. A strength. Necessary, even.
Let’s look for a moment at ‘mirror neurons’.
Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that fire up not just when we do a certain action, for example when we eat an ice cream, but when we see someone else do the same action. The relatively recent discovery of these synapses was, at the time, likened in scientific significance to that of DNA. That might be overegging it slightly, but mirror neurons are undeniably important in our thinking about self. To understand how they work, let’s go back to a lab in the mid-1990s and a bunch of monkeys with electrodes implanted into their brains. When the monkeys handled food, a certain area of the brain lit up – the premotor cortex. But it’s what happened next that’s the game-changer: when the monkeys saw the researchers handling food, the same area of the brain lit up.
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For Hood this process is akin to resonance; he compares it to the hard striking of a ‘G’ string in a guitar showroom so that all the other ‘G’ strings begin to vibrate.
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It works the same way in humans. These pathways effectively ‘fire’ when watching other people, eliciting a mirroring action – a slip of our accent perhaps, or our experiencing an identical emotion as they recount a story. When we watch someone, for example, kick a football, the part of our brain that would fire if we actually kicked a football fires anyway. We don’t even need to see it; it works when just thinking about it as well – reading fiction is a great example of this, and a reason we should do more of it, as what it encourages is, of course, empathy. (I’ll come back to this later, but a side note here: this is partly why you’ll often hear stories used in speeches. They elicit empathy, they literally ‘move’ people – in some cases to the polling booth – which is, of course, the aim of any good rhetoric.)
For Hood this process is akin to resonance; he compares it to the hard striking of a ‘G’ string in a guitar showroom so that all the other ‘G’ strings begin to vibrate. And this unconscious or subconscious mimicry, this attempt to ‘fit in’, is not a fault, nor merely pleasing, but rather a survival method designed to bring us together, to help us get along. Self is socially constructed in order for society to thrive. Whether it’s unconscious mirroring, or the conscious drive to be one of the crowd (or, indeed, stand out from it), self is a two-way street.
Feeling better about losing your ‘self’ if it’s in the common good? Well, I hope so. But brace yourself, because that’s not all.
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‘Once the idea of the unitary self is fractured, should we not take this one stage further and accept that, in the absence of a strongly singular “I”, there must be a weakly multiple “we”?’
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So far I’ve established that ‘true self’ – a hard, immutable pearl of ‘me-ness’ – just doesn’t exist. It’s a trick of the mind designed to help us feel stable (a useful, if not essential survival mechanism) when we are anything but. Because self is a story, and stories are, as we know, easily rewritten, and sometimes not by ourselves but in a subconscious dialogue with others around us. But – and this is where you will need to breathe deep – even the word ‘dialogic’ is misleading, because it’s not one conversation, or negotiation, we have with the world but many (and in ever-increasing number, but I’m saving that joy for later). This leads me to what Baggini describes as the ‘obvious’ question, but which was, for me (a non-philosopher), revelatory: ‘Once the idea of the unitary self is fractured, should we not take this one stage further and accept that, in the absence of a strongly singular “I”, there must be a weakly multiple “we”?’ In other words, we all contain multiple selves.
SUGGESTED VIEWINGYour true self With Joanna Kavenna, Betty Sue Flowers, James Tartaglia, Bahar Gholipour
So the self has gone the same way as the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, Father Christmas and, for me at least, God, Jesus and any other vague deity. That ‘pearl’ as we tend to think of it – singular, impermeable – does not exist. Instead, it is a story (or rather stories), told and retold as we shape ourselves to a fast-changing world.
As a writer, and apparent chameleon, I was buoyed by the discovery. I no longer had to pathologise someone who had two sides (or more) to them. Nor did I have to force happily transforming characters to ‘revert to type’. However, I accept that it’s not necessarily an easy pill to swallow (my publishers certainly didn’t agree with me). The problem is, singular unified selves are appealing. They place us in the centre of our own world and in charge of it. And, especially in our current political and ecological climate, we need to believe that, if nothing else, we are at least in charge of our ‘selves’. Unfortunately, it’s precisely this egotistical belief that is causing so many of our current problems, and, as we head into the future, if we want to survive and even thrive, we’re going to have to not just accept that self is more nebulous, but embrace it.
Extract taken from The Future of the Self by Joanna Nadin, out now from Melville House UK availble via Amazon.co.uk, Bookshop.org or Hive.
