I Climb and Other Problems With “Self”

Editor’s Note: What follows reflects the author’s thoughts and not necessarily the views of theDIHEDRAL. Due to the length of piece it was decided that releasing it in multiple parts would work best. When asked for a more salient, less detailed draft, the author responded “this is the less detailed draft”.

Click HERE for Part I

Part II

What are we?  What are you?  Questions about personal identity have been around for thousands of years.  These questions led to concepts of things like self, mind, soul, consciousness, and these ideas became anchored in language.  They are anchored in ways similar to expressions about the sunrise.  We know it doesn’t rise, but such is the power of our anchors.  Nicolaus Copernicus began writing about heliocentrism nearly 500 years ago, and we are still tied to the language used prior to his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. 

Shortly after Copernicus’ death, French philosopher René Descartes came on the scene.  Among Descartes’ insightful contributions to philosophy is the defense and promotion of what is typically understood as interactionism or mind-body dualism.  Descartes was far from the 1^st to acknowledge and endorse a distinction between mind and body, but his work went a long way in reenforcing and propagating the language of the ‘mind’.  Language that would evolve into terms like mental and consciousness.

Like the Ptolemaic or pre-Copernican models of the universe, our ideas about mind, self, soul, and consciousness remain largely unverified and unvalidated.  Worse yet, unlike the Ptolemaic or pre-Copernican models of the universe, our ideas about mind, self, soul, and consciousness are not testable.  They aren’t verifiable nor falsifiable.  They are simply the results of the way things seem, anchored in language at the expense of reality.

Questioning the existence of the mind, consciousness, the self, and subjective experience seems outrageous, preposterous, and silly.  But there we go, relying on the way things seem again.

So, what are you?  There are a number of ways to address this question.  One may consider themselves to be a body, their body.  Well, what happens if one loses an organ?  Are they no longer themselves?  Forget organs, we’re losing and gaining cells at an exponential rate.  The body that you have today isn’t the one you had a year ago.  We can easily question whether it was ever yours to begin with.  Your body, or rather the body in question is shared in near equal parts with bacteria. In fact, the human body is composed of approximately 30 trillion human cells and 40 trillion bacteria.  It turns out that the majority of what most people think of as their “self” is actually home to something else.

If we base what we are solely on the body, it becomes very tough to pin down. Alternative attempts to define ‘selfhood’ include things like memory, and time, as well as mind, and consciousness. Defining ‘self’ in terms of memory bumps into some strange metaphysical spirals. I may remember climbing at Red Rocks, NV in 2018, and conclude that because I remember that experience, I am in turn the person who had that experience. I am the culmination of my memories. If this is right, then who was the person doing all the things I’ve forgotten throughout the years? If all I am is the culmination of my memories, then who is it that sleeps in my bed at night?

Temporal definitions of ‘self’ tend to lead to unique metaphysical challenges as well, beginning with the issue of temporal relativity.  If time is relative, then how and whence am I to be defined?

Doing away with body, memory, and time as anchors for the self, leaves us with a mystery. Generally, when we are presented with the unknown, we do whatever we can to explain the phenomena. The ancients devised an entire way of life around this practice, and we are still stuck with the remnants of their explanations. Obvious examples include making a wish while blowing out candles, tossing coins into fountains, and embracing the guidance of zodiac signs. Some of these remnants are more ritual than anything, no one takes seriously the notion that Apollo and Artemis are chasing each other through the sky. However, many of these remnants are intertwined not only with our language, but with some of our most fundamental beliefs. Ask anyone if they have a mind, most will unflinchingly affirm. Ask them what mind is, or where it is, or how it works, and things begin to get a little murky.

I class things like consciousness and self among the mysterious.  Through generations of language modifications and adaptations, the decedents of terms like mind, self, and consciousness have been woven so tightly into our modes of communication, that we can barely think or speak without depending on their services.  Consider the following, ‘consciousness’ has bred terms like sub-consciousness, and unconsciousness.  From ‘mind’ we get terms and expressions like absent-minded, changed my mind, mind over matter, and mental.  ‘Mental’ then, has an array of language unto it, including mentally challenged and mental illness.  ‘Self’ carries a myriad of problems above and beyond the terms which it engenders.  From ‘self’ we get the entire rainbow of pronouns from I to you, and everything in between.

As a philosopher one of the most common questions I hear is “what difference does it make”.  If the thing(s) that make something a person are a mystery, then what harm comes from embracing entities like the mind?  This is an important question to raise, and I think it does make a difference in two significant ways. 

First, most of us value the truth.  Independent of where that value comes from, most humans prefer honesty over lies, and truth over falsity.  This isn’t universal, but we do place value on believing things that are correct over and above believing things that are incorrect.  Secondly, aside from any intrinsic value, there is extrinsic value on getting things right.  For example, if we continued to embrace a geocentric model of the universe, we would have never put a person on the moon.  We wouldn’t have satellites, or cell phones.  We wouldn’t have means by which we can track destructive meteors.  Copernicus’ discoveries allow us to have a better understanding of the universe by dispelling some of the mysteries within physics.  Similar progress is recognizable throughout human history.  Once we eschew our dependence on bad reasoning, i.e. reasoning that is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, then progress follows.  Aside from physics, we can note similar advancement in agriculture and medicine with no apologies to the disillusionment of rain dancing and bloodletting.

Neuroscience has been flourishing for the last 50 years, due in large part to applying methods found in physics and chemistry.  However, even within neuroscience, we continue to hear discussions of consciousness and mind.  Language remnants of an ancient way of perceiving the world based on the way things seem. Similar to speaking about a “sunset” when in reality it’s an earthspin, the way we talk influences the way we perceive.  If we were raised in a world in which people opened up a bottle of wine to watch the evening earthspin, then perhaps we would all have a little better understanding of physics, and arguably a better understanding of the universe.  In a similar fashion, if we stopped talking of self, and mind, and consciousness, if we stopped using mysterious language to account for things we don’t quite understand, then perhaps we would be much further along when it comes to our understanding of reality.

The question now turns to how we do this.  How do communicate about things we don’t quite understand?  How do we do this without employing phantasmic language? We can’t even replace something as simple as “sunset”, how are we supposed to replace bits of language that revolve around the self?

The first step is to identify and qualify the bits of language that we are unclear on.  It’s difficult to admit when we don’t know something. However, admitting our ignorance will help to illuminate our dependence on the deficient aspects of language.  Admitting ‘we don’t know’ opens the doors to inquisitiveness, curiosity, and learning. 

Unfortunately, regularly proclaiming our ignorance doesn’t come without issue.  If we declared our ignorance each time we were faced with uncertainty, it would make language unmanageably clunky.  Imagine the linguistic gymnastics we’d have to perform each time we referred to this thing that we call “self”.  A simple proclamation such as ‘I went to the store’ could become unbearably cumbersome in the absence of a suitable understanding of “I”.

Luckily, we have some experience in saving language from the grips of reality.  When writing on the problems of dualism, philosopher Edmund Husserl recommended using the Transcendental Phenomenological Epoche.  In short, the Transcendental Phenomenological Epoche can be used as a tool which allows us to bracket off anything that transcends our phenomenological experiences.  Anything bracketed off would be an admission of our ignorance regarding that object.  In essence the brackets allow us to set aside the question of existence regarding the contemplated object.

The contemplated object(s) in question here are non-verifiable “self” referential terms regarding consciousness and mind.  We don’t know what’s being referred to when we use these subject directed terms, and so using a tool that works similar to the Transcendental Phenomenological Epoche could help.  We can call it the “Self” Referential Mental Epoche (SME). Anything that is “self” referential or mental, we would bracket off, thus admitting our ignorance while at the same time saving language from a complete overhaul.

Using the SME, we can now take a look at what the intro from the climbing story (Part I) would look like, thus getting us closer to what actually happened.

{I} was working a fantastic line, it’s a tough route that was right at the limits of {my} ability.  {I} had confidence that {I} could send.  {I} tried it the previous year and wasn’t able to get through the crux, a short roof with a big throw to a crimp on the headwall.  This time the crux was hard, but {I} managed to stick the move and make it to the final section of the climb…

“Self” Referential Mental Epoche (SME) is not a solution to any of the problems raised.  It’s simply a stopgap allowing us to maintain our modes of communication regarding “self” referential language like mind and consciousness without ascribing to the restrictive non-falsifiable mystery-laden concepts employed by their use.