His book,God in the Bath,is published by O Books in October. ‘Curving’ by Christopher Truman The Once and Future Self Anthony Freeman gave this as a talk at the March 2006 SoF London Conference on ‘Is there a Me?’ Introduction Last month our imposing mediaeval church (Holy Cross, Crediton, Devon) was packed for the funeral of Julie, a 20-year-old who had died quite unexpectedly of an epileptic fit, and whose father had died equally suddenly of a heart attack only four years before. The two deaths were being discussed as I queued at the local supermarket check-out, and the assistant – a perfectly straightforward woman, I’d guess in her thirties – astonished me by saying, in a quite matterof-fact way, ‘Ah well, at least she’s up there now with her dad.’ Fortunately I did not have to reply. But the incident brought home to me in a very bleak way the gulf that has opened up between philosophers and psychologists – who blithely speak of the self as not existing, or a narrative fiction, or a series of momentary and disconnected entities – and the great mass of people, who still think of themselves and their fellows in much the same way as the fifteenth-century builders of the parish church.
Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who in 1994 published a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis, would not have been surprised by what I heard.
According to his book’s much-quoted opening paragraph:
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.
Many people reacted by saying it was not the slightest bit astonishing. In a scientific age it is just what we should expect. Crick disagreed. Interviewed for my journal, he insisted that many people who claim to be materialists, and deny they believe in life after bodily death, do in fact carry on thinking in the old ways.
Such crypto-dualists in the scientific community would indeed find his hypothesis astonishing, he declared, when it was set out in all its starkness. To see why, we need to trace the history of the self.
A Brief History of the Self Bible and Plato Francis Crick’s book was subtitled ‘The scientific search for the soul’, a word that carries religious overtones lacking from the term ‘self’, but surprisingly the soul is barely a biblical concept at all. In the Hebrew understanding of human nature, a living person was a live physical body, animated by an impersonal breath of life, and a dead person was a dead physical body, lacking the breath of life and destined to decay – ‘dust to dust’ as the Bible graphically puts it (Gen. 3:19) – with the possibility of post-mortem resurrection developing as the centuries went by. It was the ancient Greeks, following Plato, who by contrast saw the essential human being as a non-physical soul. For them a living person was an embodied soul, and a dead person was a disembodied soul.
The Christian Church (and eventually the whole of European and Western culture) was heir to both these incompatible approaches. For a thousand years and more the biblical resurrection of the body and Plato’s teaching on the immortality of the soul were somehow held together. Then came a more satisfying account, with the rediscovery of Aristotle, and the consequent rewriting of Christian doctrine by Thomas Aquinas.
Aristotle and Aquinas For Aristotle, the soul was not a non-physical self, whose association with the body was a temporary and unfortunate necessity. It was the functional structure or ‘form’ of the body, which enabled an organism to function purposefully. Unlike the Platonic soul, this soul was not immortal; it came into being with the physical organism, and it also perished with it. And this applied to plants and animals as well as to humans.
Thomas Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the form of a living organism, but he saw a crucial difference between the souls of humans and those of plants and animals. Humans could think, and so far as Aquinas could tell (this was his crucial advance on Aristotle), thinking involved no necessary bodily process or change. This opened up the possibility that human souls were immortal. First, if Aristotle the rational soul in humans could do things not directly related to bodily changes, it was not entirely implausible to think of that soul as continuing in existence even after its body had died and decayed.
Furthermore, according to Aquinas’s way of thinking, if the human rational soul really could survive bodily death, it cannot have come into being with its body, simply as part of the natural process. In other words, Thomas had been led to posit an immortal human soul, such as the Christian faith, rooted in Platonism, demanded; and he had achieved this while remaining totally loyal to Aristotle.
Aquinas had managed to have his cake and eat it.
More than that, he found it had icing on it. This rational soul was first and foremost the life-principle of a human body, not some free-floating spirit, so positing its existence in isolation from the body did feel awkward, the thinking process notwithstanding. This problem, however, enabled Aquinas to resolve the contradiction, which still existed in Christian teaching on the afterlife, between the Bible’s demand for bodily resurrection and the Platonic soul that neither needed nor wanted such a body.
Thomas deduced that the rational soul must be able to maintain some kind of existence after the death of its body, but it was a very unsatisfactory state for the soul.
It still needed a body in order to receive information, act, communicate with others, and so on. In short, what the soul needed was to have its body again, to restore the whole person. Here at last was a practical purpose, lacking in the Platonist version of Christianity, for the resurrection of the body. It would be the occasion for the reuniting of the body and soul of those who had died, ready to face eternity as complete selves.
René Descartes We now move on from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Brilliant as Aquinas’s synthesis had been it was not perfect. The doubt remained: Was this view really compatible with Aristotle’s notion of the soul as the ‘form’ of the body? Could such a soul really function – even temporarily – cut off from the bodily senses? The answer given by René Descartes marks the watershed between the later Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. Quite simply Descartes dispensed with Aristotle. It had been a mistake, he said, to suppose that the rational soul (that is, the thinking mind) and the physical body were bound together by any kind of necessity. There was a close working relationship between them, certainly, but each existed quite independently of the other. In particular, it was the mind and not the body that constituted the self, the human subject. The ‘I,’ of whom Descartes famously wrote, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ was his mind alone.
This sharp distinction between the non-physical mental realm and the physical world of which everything else was made enabled science to keep apart from the bloody religious conflicts of the times by claiming it was concerned only with the physical world. But the same division that allowed science to flourish without interference from religion also had a less happy result. It established the idea that consciousness, or subjective experience – because it relates to the mind – is not a proper subject for scientific inquiry.
It also gave rise to the Mind-Body Problem.
Descartes had moved decisively away from Aristotle’s view that the mind was dependent for all its knowledge on the bodily senses. It ‘does not need any place or depend on any material thing,’ he insisted. But there was one difficulty. It might be possible in theory for humans to function as pure minds, without bodies, but in practice none of us ever does. Our minds and our bodies are interdependent. Descartes knew this, and it bothered him. In a rare holistic moment he admitted ‘I am not just lodged in my body, like a pilot in a ship, but . . . so intermingled with it that I seem to compose with it one whole.’ Yet he still maintained that mind and body were quite different kinds of stuff, while never being able to explain how they might interact.
Despite the interaction problem, Cartesian dualism reigned supreme for 300 years until the mid-twentieth century when Gilbert Ryle, then Oxford University’s towering philosophical figure, undertook what he himself called a ‘hatchet’ job on Descartes’ ‘dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake’ Aquinas had managed to have his cake and eat it.
Thomas Aquinas The Self in Current Research Ryle had given a trumpet call to the academic world. For the first time since the Enlightenment the scientific study of consciousness was philosophically respectable, and with it a wholesale reassessment of the self. If the essential ‘me’ is not a ghostly agent presiding over my body, what is it? There are broadly speaking two aspects to self-awareness. One is our sense of personal identity here and now, sometimes called the minimal or core self.
The other is our sense of identity over time, which gives rise to the narrative or autobiographical self. We need to consider each of these.
The Minimal Self Having let go the notion that each of us is essentially a non-physical soul or mind, philosophers and scientists have had to go back to basics and ask, What is it in our experience that gives rise to a sense of self in the first place? One obvious element contributing to even minimal self-awareness is a sense of ownership of one’s own body and one’s own thoughts. This ties in with what philosophers call the immunity principle in relation to the first-person pronoun: when somebody says, ‘I think X’, they might be wrong about X, but they cannot be wrong as to who it is thinking X.
Asecond and related element of self-awareness is a sense of agency. When my arm goes up I know it is me who raised it, even if it was a spontaneous rather than a premeditated action. Or, if my arm goes up because someone else takes hold of it and moves it, while I remain passive, then I am aware of the difference, and my lack of agency in that case.
There do exist distressing clinical conditions in which this basic sense of ownership or of agency is impaired, but these unusual cases are the exceptions that prove the rule. They also enable psychologists and neurophysiologists to explore the abnormalities in brain function correlated with the loss of a normal sense of ownership of one’s own mind and body. This information then helps us understand the processes by which self-awareness is normally established. The case for our being at least minimal selves, on the evidence of ownership and agency, is quite strong.
One outcome of research into self awareness has been a realisation that perception and cognition are processes involving the whole body, not just the brain.
Not so long ago, the computational model of mind – brain as hardware, mind as software – was all the rage (recall the chess-playing computer that beat grandmaster Gary Kasparov a decade ago). Now that has changed. Self-awareness is increasingly treated as a feature of an entire organism, with the self not only embodied in an organism, but also embedded in its environment. Even the Artificial Intelligence community has switched emphasis from chess-playing computers to self-aware robots that interact with – and learn from – their environment.
Anotable feature of recent developments is the view that thought and movement are intimately connected, with an organism learning about itself and its environment by a twoway process. For instance, even at a non-conscious level, the brain will initiate a movement of the foot, and simultaneously note the sensory feedback to be expected from such a movement. When the feedback arrives, a good match with the prediction confirms ownership of the action and accuracy of current knowledge. Any mismatch leads to a rapid adjustment of the next movement (as when we recover from tripping down an unnoticed step). Mismatches also lead to a revision of the current state of knowledge of self and environment, and in extreme cases imply a lack of agency or ownership.
One bold proposal is that even thinking is best understood as a kind of action, and that we know our thoughts to be our own by the same kind of prediction and feedback matching as we use to recognise our own acts. If this is so, the symptoms of schizophrenic patients, who wrongly attribute their own thoughts or inner speech to other minds, might result from a failure in the matching process that would normally confirm ownership.
Such theories have developed out of biological studies of the way organisms, including humans beings, function. With the aid of computerised scanners, which allow functional brain imaging of mental and physical tasks, neuroscientists can monitor and compare the brain processes associated with different thoughts and actions. It was this ability that led Francis Crick to claim that our sense of personal identity is in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells. But others make the counter claim that identifying the neural correlates of consciousness (even if it can be done) does not justify the conclusion that self-awareness is nothing more than a biological process.
The Narrative Self I said just now that evidence for our being minimal selves is quite strong. But this falls a long way short of traditional, intuitively strong, belief in an enduring personal identity, that each of us carries right through this life and possibly even beyond it. Being confident that I myself exist here, now, at this moment, only makes more urgent the further question: how does this momentary ‘me’ relate to all the previous and future momentary ‘me’s?
René Descartes The answers fall into two categories, bundle theories and ego theories. The first are named after David Hume’s observation, back in the eighteenth century, that when he inspected his own experience he only ever found a bundle of sensations, and never an independent entity having the experience. For bundlers the self is an illusion; their task is to explain how and why we invent it. Ego theorists, on the other hand, do believe there exists an enduring self, or ego, of some kind. Their task is to show how the self is instantiated in the body, and in particular how it relates to the structures of the brain (unless they are Platonist or Cartesian dualists, when their task is to solve the old interaction problem).
The autobiographical self, whether real or imagined, is dependent on memory. Most of us think of our memory as a filing-cabinet-cum-picture-library of past events, from which we draw items stored over the years.
Such a view is at best oversimplified and may be totally false. There is increasing evidence that memory is a creative process. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, for example, drawing on work with split-brain patients, has shown that the left hemisphere will construct fictional accounts – in other words create false memories – to interpret elements of experience and integrate them into a consistent and continuous narrative.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett, who once studied under Gilbert Ryle, goes further; he proposes that our entire conscious experience is a narrative: ‘Our tales are spun,’ he says, ‘but for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us.’ He has even used the notion to coin a definition of the self: it is a ‘centre of narrative gravity’. Just as physicists simplify their calculations by imagining the entire mass of a complex object focused at a single point in space – the fictional centre of gravity – so each human organism simplifies the task of survival by imagining its complex of evershuffling perceptions and cognitions focused in a single stream of narrative – the fictional self, with its fictional stream of consciousness.
Dennett’s is a bundle theory that says the enduring self is an illusion. Yet Gazzaniga, despite having written a book chapter titled ‘The fictional self’, is in fact an ego theorist. In a JCS interview he declared that ‘The self is not a fiction. It is that which the interpreter creates.’ He went on to admit that ‘our personal narrative is a bit fictional’, but as a neuroscientist he does believe that the neurons he studies encode something real. And Francis Crick, with his prizewinning research on DNA, would also not have denied that something enduring can be encoded biologically.
He opposed dualism, but not necessarily all egoist theories.
Still the Best Show in Town It is time to pull the threads together. The soul, defined in a Catholic catechism quoted by Francis Crick as ‘a living being without a body, having reason and freewill’ would be accepted by very few scientists and philosophers working in consciousness studies (and would have caused even Thomas Aquinas to raise his eyebrows). The minimal self, an organism’s personal identity at a moment of time, would be accepted by many as existing and explicable as a function of physiology. The narrative self, our human sense of identity over time, is accepted as a fact of experience, but often regarded as more or less fictional or illusory.
At the practical level we all assume continuity in our lives, otherwise we could neither claim our own past nor plan our own future. And the whole of society, with its systems of contracts and property rights, rewards and punishments, rights and responsibilities, rests on the presumption that each of us is basically the same person yesterday, today, and next year. If we did not at least act as if selves existed over time, the inconvenience would be great. As someone said of freewill, it may not be true, but it’s still the best show in town. We all conspire to say the same of autobiographical selves.
As to my friend Julie and her dad, with whom we began, I am content that they live on in the hearts and minds of those who knew and loved them, and that the value of their lives as lived are diminished not one whit by their having died. But I have no claim to insider knowledge, and if others are able and desiring to believe in a self that transcends bodily existence, I personally have no wish to deny them that belief, though I do not seek it for myself (whatever my ‘self’ may turn out to be – or not be).
Gilbert Ryle undertook what he himself called a ‘hatchet job’ on Descartes’ dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.
Anthony Freeman is a priest in the Church of England and a long-standing member of the Sea of Faith Network.He has been editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies since 1994 and writes and speaks regularly on matters relating to consciousness and religion.His books include God In Us (2nd ed.ImprintAcademic 2001) and Consciousness:A Guide to the Debates (ABC-CLIO 2003).
A fully referenced copy of this article, with bibliography, can be obtained from the editor or the author.