I - My eternal self or a trick of my mind?

There is an ‘I’ within my head.

It surveys each moment of my life. ‘I’ gives me bearing in the world. It remains alert ceaselessly. On rare occasions: under the influence of wine, indisposition of body, or sleep deprivation, it fleetingly turns groggy. I am then lost. Friends later tell me, I wasn’t myself in these moments.

Psychologists call ‘I’ my ‘self’.

‘I’ tells me I am a middle-aged anaesthesiologist, of an unremarkable appearance, married for three decades, father of two well-placed children, and fairly successful in life. It has strong views on my personality too; it declares me mild-tempered, but stubborn in opinions, obsessively fond of reading, a sceptic, and a recluse at heart.

‘I’ is the object on which every experience in my life acts upon; a fall bruises my shin, wind blows my hair about, rain wets my clothes. ‘I’ is also the cause – the subject – of every activity I perform, physical or mental; I cycle for an hour every morning, I have no patience with muddled prose, I think often about the working of human mind.

William James, an American philosopher and psychologist in nineteenth century, introduced the distinction between ‘me’ and ‘I’ selves. ‘Me’, he said, refers to self as an object of experience, while ‘I’ is the subject of experience.

What a wonderful organ nature has evolved in the form of human brain! An organ that not only experiences the world in its rainbow hues, but creates a subjective feeling of self, partaking these experiences. A mind within a mind?

What is the nature of this ‘I’? This self, which goes by my name in the world? It comprises my ever-changing body, my past, my present, my personality, my myriad identities, my aspirations, my fears, my anxieties, my failures, my modest triumphs, my bodily ticks, my mental obsessions. Is it real or an illusion?

David Hume, the most revered philosopher of the age of enlightenment, dismissed self as a myth woven by human brain. He said we can never see self however closely we may examine ourselves. We can only be aware of what we are experiencing at any given moment. The relations between our thoughts, impressions, feelings, and emotions can be traced through memory but there is no real evidence of a central core connecting them. Hume suggested, self is just a bundle of perceptions, like links in a chain. It’s a folly to believe that a chain has an independent existence beyond its links. Self is meaningless without experience of body that shapes it. Unlike the grin of the Cheshire cat, self will disappear when the body housing it melts away.

It’s worth quoting Hume on self, albeit at the expense of verbosity.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long I am sensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make a perfect non-entity.

Tufts university philosopher Daniel Dennett also feels that self is an illusion created by our experiences in the world. Our varied experience, continual though changing, need a linchpin, to hold all together. Concept of self serves this role. Dennett says self is an abstract construct like the centre of Gravity of an object, which is not an actual concrete thing. But it accurately explains various physical properties of the object.

I think Hume, and Dennett, and all other thinkers who decry self, ‘I’, as an illusion have got it wrong. I only reveal my dense ignorance when I say I disagree with Hume. But I can’t discount, even for a moment, the ‘I’ that is me. These thinkers may be right that present knowledge cannot pin down the seat of self in the brain or the ways it is born and functions. But this lack of knowledge cannot negate selfhood.

‘I’ makes our species, a large bipedal ape in most other respects, human. Without the knowledge of self, the whole edifice of humanness will come down like a house of cards. Capacity to think and to act on those thoughts is possible if I know them to be my thoughts, if I can connect these coherently. This is possible only if these ideas are stored in my brain and I can chronicle them in my memory. Without ‘I’ there will be no human ambition, no imagination, no past to rue or crave, no future to fear or covet, no science, no literature, no arts, no architecture, no knowledge.

I believe, self came to the mind of my distant ancestors foremost, before any other attribute that truly and decidedly made them Sapiens – one who knows – in the genus Homo.

Phineas Gage, an American railroad foreman in nineteenth century, survived a near fatal brain injury. A large iron rod was driven through his head, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe. Though Gage lived for eighteen years after the accident, his personality and behaviour were forever altered. Friends saw him as ‘no longer Gage’. Gage’s case influenced the nineteenth century discussion of mind-brain relation. Since then, innumerable case-reports have revealed how dysfunction of a particular brain area affects human personality in profound and diverse ways.

Mind emerges from the working of brain. Though vastly intriguing and nuanced, it is a physiological process like any in the body. As digestion, respiration, and circulation of blood have no independent existence removed from gut, lungs, or heart, mind cannot exist without brain that is its progenitor. My ‘I’ is grounded in my brain and will perish with it.

My parents suffered progressive senile dementia in their eighth decade of life. I saw gradual dismantling of their personalities. They became indifferent to aspects of life that had occupied them obsessively in past. Their thoughts were blunted, their attention became cursory and fleeting. I often remarked to my wife, ‘mummy and daddy are not as I knew them all my life.’ This was self, changing with the diminishing brain.

Most religions attribute an element of indestructibility to self; Soul in western religions, Atman in Hinduism. What is the Soul of a person? I can think of it only in terms of individual’s personality, moral values, dreams, and motivations in life. These are the manifestations of their mind, itself a product of brain. One which is born of matter, dies with it. Its beyond reason, at least beyond the rational reasoning of today’s science, to explain self, Soul or Atman, surviving after the death of the body which harboured it in life.

Self is invisible and intangible. Body’s gradual oblivion is observable and impossible to ignore. Death of an individual is the final negation of all they had stood for in life. Human concept of Soul or Atman, I think, represents man’s irrepressible longing to believe in a life that transgresses boundaries of death.

When I look back into my distant past, I can barely identify with a plump, gauche boy, singing prayers every evening, fervently waving his arms holding the lighted lamp. Or with a teenager who believed alcohol is a depravity and Ayn Rand’s books hold essential truth of human existence. But I have no doubt that those were the same ‘I’ as the thin, middle-aged ‘I’ of today, obsessed with rational thinking and physical fitness. Self is perpetual yet everchanging. It changes with my transforming body, still I identify all these different selfs as belonging to me. I have no hesitation in recognising that actions of my past self, influenced my present. I hold myself responsible, for the consequences my actions today will bear in future. It feels there is a homunculus ‘I’ in the deepest folds of my brain that is the seat of my self.

Every cell of my body barring a few, every molecule in the neurons in my brain are not the same they were in the past. But mind maintains continuity of self in an everchanging body. The most plausible, though far from exact, may be this explanation of self; self represents mind’s construct as it weaves diverse experiences of body into a united continuum.

I wonder at the uncanny similarities between the concept of time in universe and self in human mind. Both seem rooted in our world; time arose with universe at its inception about fourteen billion years ago, self evolved in a species of primates, two hundred thousand to a few million years back. Time is not essential for a universe; it is just an attribute of ‘our’ universe. No law in physics forbids existence of a universe which has no time. Self is also not crucial for life as is exemplified in million other species of animals on earth. Both time and self, science tells us, are not what we know them to be. And what science tells, my mind doesn’t or can’t believe. Great physicists believe time to be an illusion of human mind. Eminent thinkers of past and today, have similarly treated ‘I’, the feeling of selfhood, as a mirage, a trick of the versatile human mind.

There is also a possibility that like time, self is merely a baffling reality of our world, a concept which extant science cannot fathom but human mind grasps easily.

Evolution shaped life on earth; a unicellular bacterium, a trillions-celled polar bear, as well as the marvel of design, the human mind. Every biological fact, it is believed today, has to be tested on the touchstone of evolutionary science. Human perceptions of time and self, offer immeasurable advantage to our species. They build for us a coherent narrative in a world, with which we react incessantly, and thus enable us to navigate through life seamlessly. Without them, each moment of our existence, each perception of our mind, would be an orphan, like the fallen leaves adrift in autumn winds.

Howsoever convincingly science may discover the chimerical nature of my self, ‘I’ will remain the bedrock of my existence as long as my brain, which conjures this illusion, thrives in my body.