The Art of Narrating Ourselves into Being

In the Western religious myths, God spoke the world into being. There is no god, of course, and nature is a horrifically undead phenomenon that defies complete explanation, let alone an anthropomorphic one that downplays the world’s fundamental impersonality. No, it’s not nature in general that has a literary origin, but only the human world since that world begins with us as persons. As human animals we evolved by natural selection and by other such mechanisms, but as autonomous, encultured selves, we are indeed spoken into being—not by any extraterrestrial intelligence, but by our thoughts which comprise an inner voice that weaves itself into a grand fiction featuring characters that embody our ideals, with whom we’re free to identify to begin to salvage some meaning and dignity from the otherwise absurd flow of events in the wilderness.

We are just Characters in our Life’s Story

A self is not an immaterial thing, a ghost, and to think that what distinguishes people from animals or objects is that we have some such spiritual body is to reify and to fall victim to a cognitive illusion. A self is really a way of organizing thoughts. In so far as we identify with our bodies, we’re biological entities like the other animals, but in so far as our nature is defined by our thinking, we become morally-significant persons. What, though, is a thought? A thought is a generalization which simplifies for some purpose, which is to say a thought is a map or a model which manages the chaotic flux of experience by representing those parts of the world that interest us. The main purpose of our representations of the outer world is to predict what will happen so we can control the environment rather than be helpless to the indifferent forces and cycles and accidents of nature. We predict by generalizing across instances, inducing patterns by transducing and neurally binding sensory inputs, slotting experiences into conceptual boxes for memory recall so we can implement our plans for future projections of our identity. This allows us to respond with greater intelligence and autonomy than could those animal species that rely on preprogrammed, as opposed to learned, responses.

We also model the innerworld, which is to say ourselves. Through introspection, however, we have no knowledge of our brain that organizes our experience. So although we now know of the brain’s importance to ourselves, we have difficulty personally identifying with that squishy mass. On the contrary, even the notion of the brain seems alien and revolting. Instead, in our daily life we who have a personal level of identity prefer to think of ourselves as the character that figures in the lifelong narrative we tell to ourselves. This narrative is the overall model that organizes our private data, which are the otherwise confusing signals produced by the body that we sense through introspection, proprioception, memory, and other interior channels. Roughly, our reflexes, feelings, emotions, judgments, notions, ideas, guesses, and so forth are organized by a personalizing story we tell.

The story is what the philosopher Marya Schachtman calls a form of diachronic unity, meaning that like a sonata or a song, a story is a holistic structure that provides meaning to the sequential parts of which it’s made. A fragment of a song is meaningless without the temporal structure, which is the plan for the song that stretches across time, including the introduction, the verses, chorus, bridge and the end. That structure is defined partly by the genre and indeed by the lyrics which likewise tell a story, giving the song a personality. In the same way, from the raw bits of experience we assemble a narrative that connects our memories with our hopes and intentions, to form a satisfying, meaningful whole. The whole of that story amounts to our personal (as opposed to our biological) identity. A self is something like an entire movie or play with defined characters who take the stage at different times depending on which part of the story is presently being “read” or called for, by the rest of the world. Thus, we may occupy different perspectives or personas, according not just to what’s happening in the outer world, but to how we make sense of the environment with our inner narrative. The narrative assigns roles to enable us to socialize, to retain our dignity under trying circumstances, or to perform other functions.

The story that defines us is still being written while we’re alive, and we identify with different characters in different contexts. The meaning of each character, though, is given by the entire script. The script is composed of the inner voice that continually speaks its interpretations and organizes experience to preserve what the existential anthropologist Ernest Becker would call our “self-esteem.” Becker showed how the self is formed psychologically and socially as a defense against the angst suffered by every child who learns that the world doesn’t serve his or her whims. We tap into cultural reservoirs of meaning, or “hero-systems,” to preserve the self-esteem that acts as a buffer against anxiety. Similarly, Yuval Harari points to the collective fictions that sustain civilization, allowing the members to avoid conflict by defining themselves nationalistically, according to myths that justify the social power distributions. Both of these aspects of our existential story are relevant, as we’ll see, but the more immediate source of selfhood is the narrative that occupies our thoughts.

The narrative that distinguishes our inner voice, which artists excel at expressing in concrete outward forms, emerges as we choose at each moment how to interpret a particular experience. The personal pattern forms after certain types of interpretations accrue, because they support our pride or esteem. There is, though, no homunculus which reads or writes the story. The script writes itself as a result of the conflict between our clever animality and the indifference of the outer world which threatens all such creatures with anxiety that can be alleviated only by suicide or by resort to the magic of art. We create ourselves for the same reason we create the outer artificial worlds, because awakened beings require a refuge from the horrific wilderness. Where we are presently in the story, that is, the bookmarked page, as it were, is determined by the limits of the character we occupy at a particular time that has more or less understanding of the total story in which that character plays its part. Ultimately, we’re equal to the characters whose thoughts and actions are defined and contextualized by a series of meta-thoughts, by a narrative that provides our whole life with existential meaning.

Fictional Selves and Literary Morality

The philosopher Galen Strawson points out, however, that not everyone explicitly narrates their life. Strawson quotes from famous individuals who confess their memory is too poor to figure in worthy inner narratives; instead, they experience themselves as a confused series of experiences. If they take to writing their biography, as in the case of Montaigne, they do so objectively, drawing no distinction between the inner and outer worlds and thus modeling themselves, at best, for the sake of greater prediction and control, having no aesthetic end in view. Moreover, he says, in line with Becker and Harari, some such narrations may be traps that render ourselves inauthentic, as we adopt conventions that are only socially convenient. Instead of demonstrating finesse in creating our personal, existentially-noble self by gradually telling our story via introspection and meta-reflection, we may resort to clichés such as stock characters so that we play out only the roles that society assigns us. All of which seems correct, but contrary to Strawson, this doesn’t falsify the foregoing account of the self; instead, the account has unsettling, but non-disqualifying implications.

One of those implications is that there are degrees of personhood. Some biological humans are more personal than others. A character can be more or less distinguished, more or less the result of inward reflections and visionary projections of meaning which are the marks of superior artistry. Crucially, introverts are more personal than extroverts. This is to say that each of us attains greater personhood to the extent that we engage in introspection and meta-reflection. To the extent we’re focused only on acting, not on thinking about ourselves, we lose our self. In that case, we should be identified only with our biological humanity and with the roles we play as defined by the stories that otherstell about us to organize us as objects of theirmodels. If we haven’t thought about the meaning of our life’s stages, about what sort of story we’re living out, we have no right to speak of us as being authentic, self-made (spontaneously and privately-generated) persons. The word “person,” then, is an honourific title ascribed to someone who performs well at certain cognitive tasks.

Second, if someone engages in no inner modeling at all, she’ll have no self-understanding. She’ll have failed to know herself, that being the task sufficing to create a worthy self in the first place. Suppose, for example, you have no interest in inner narration, but you do reflect on your experience in the same way that you organize your encounters with the outer world. In that case, you do model your thoughts and feelings, but you objectify yourself; that is, you treat yourself as just another object: you generalize over your inner contents for greater predictive power and instrumental control. You take a pragmatic, impersonal attitude toward yourself rather than distinguishing your character in moral or in aesthetic terms. Still, you’ll understand yourself at some level; indeed, you may have greater self-control than the enchanted inner narrator. But if you don’t interpret your thoughts and feelings at all, not even to objectify them, your stream of inner experience must be quite animal-like. You may suffer from autism or from some other antisocial personality disorder, which renders you more like a robot than a person.

There are, then, two sources of meta-reflection, the private and the public. Private reflection is the stuff of introversion, of segregating yourself from society to question conventions in deep, philosophical investigations of what’s really happening. By contrast, culture is the product of collective reflection, and we tend to defer to culture in our moments of extroversion, when we’re absorbed with some activity or when our self-esteem is sustained by diversions that require others’ participation. Thus, interpretations and character roles can be narrated privately or publicly, and the typical self (that is, the human way of organizing thoughts) is a mixture of idiosyncrasies and artistic leaps of imagination, on the one hand, and politically-useful frauds, on the other. The more introverted we are, the more liable we’re to engage in subversive meta-reflection, and so the more the meaning of our inner narrative will depend on the latter’s opposition to the prevailing culture. By contrast, the more extroverted we are, the more we immerse ourselves in the ruling myths that bind the masses, by providing excuses for the power inequalities which are almost always objectively grotesque. In the latter case, our defining story may be bereft of existential authenticity or nobility. Think of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. If the extrovert only defers to cultural codes of conduct, without pondering them, being always lost in some business or other that leaves no time for meta-reflection or for the development of an inner voice that tells her life’s story to herself, she can hardly be called a person in the morally-significant sense. Her activities will be only implicitly meaningful, because the story that defines her will be told only in cultural forums such as churches, movie theaters, clubs, or political conventions. 

A third implication is that the morality that suits the nature of a self is wholly aesthetic. A self is just a work of art, produced mainly by cognitive mechanisms. We’re not born people, but must earn that title by thinking hard about what we are and what we should be in relation to the outer world as it really is and as we transform it. A self is the narrative structure that supplies the meaning of the characters we play at different stages of our journey. This meaning is ultimately the same found in any fiction.A story either excels in creative, artistic terms or it fails to delight or to inspire. Likewise, a person’s virtues or vices make sense only as efforts to live up to a literary ideal in the broadest sense. The relevant kind of story isn’t that which is written in book form, but it is linguistic, because words are likely key to conceptual binding and thus to the mind’s modeling functions. We become people, who are subjects that have dignity according to certain stories, only when we acquire a special way of organizing our thoughts as opposed to letting them flow with no autonomous control or understanding of them. We organize our mental contents by interpreting them in light of a cognitive map or model that takes the form of a narrative. All of these life-sustaining narratives are fictions, because they’re only simplifications rather than reproductions of what is modeled. Nevertheless, they’re fictions that have real impacts on the world, by preventing an epidemic of suicide and by driving us to achieve our guiding ideals.

A person is morally valuable, then, just in so far as she’s a literary object, a character whose greatness depends on the quality of the tale that captures the creative meaning of her life’s work and journey. You often hear an attempt to capture this tale in the eulogy offered by the relatives of a recently-deceased individual. The essence of a great life is the originality displayed in the struggle to overcome the existential absurdity which would otherwise entail suicide. But a great individual overcomes also the banality and instrumentality of the social myths that lend meaning to a life at the cost of turning the individual into a beta, into a follower who in carrying out her functions indirectly acts as a pawn in the scheme of a greater, more distinguished individual. Most so-called people are only barely personal beings, because their existential efforts are mediocre. They don’t struggle to exist as transcendent creatures, as human animals who acquire personality by accumulating the cognitive habit of interpreting their inner data according to a dawning vision of what a self should be; they don’t wrestle with the meaning of their life or with what sort of person they’ve become.

On the contrary, moral value has generally been construed as being non-aesthetic, on the assumption that the self exists without the need for much human effort. The self is presumed to be either a spirit created by God or a sort of rational agency that has natural rights. There’s been much talk, therefore, of moral laws as befitting the objectivity of personhood. On the foregoing account, though, an individual’s moral value is fittingly subjective, because we’re speaking of subjects that transcend the objective world, by resisting its absurdity with titanic acts of artistic will and vision. We think ourselves into higher being by writing the stories that animate us in our daily activities. The writing occurs in the narrations of our inner voice, which may or may not set the details of the story down as an autobiography, and in the publicly-available myths that serve political (civilizational) purposes as well as existential (artistic) ones.

The morality that survives the death of God, then, has more to do with beauty and ugliness than with any absolute commandment to love others or to obey some creed. Right and wrong are fittingly aesthetic, because these values apply to beings that are just works of art and that warrant, therefore, only literary assessments as far as morality is concerned. There are also pragmatic evaluations that should be made for social purposes, as in considerations of justice or medical health. But if we ask what we should be like, irrespective of mere utility or the social imperative to fit in for the sake of happiness, the answer is entirely up to our muse. The morally best self is just the one whose life makes for the greatest story. Period. All other moral questions likely reduce to pragmatic issues of self-objectification or to pseudoproblems stemming from obsolete religious narratives.

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Eldritch Revelations: The Mystery of Consciousness and the Fear of Death

[In his published monograph, Eldritch Revelations (One, Two, Three), the psychiatrist of the infamous Jurgen Schulz wrote that only short fragments of Schulz’s philosophical journal survived his escape from Borsa Castle. But after the psychiatrist’s mysterious death shortly after publication, longer fragments were discovered in the psychiatrist’s office, locked in a drawer. The publisher of ER herewith appends these longer fragments as they’re made available by the translator, beginning with this passage on the problem of consciousness.] 

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Perhaps the oldest fiction is that there are two worlds instead of one, the timeless, invisible, spiritual heaven that directs the material realm in which things come and go. And our unique dignity as enlightened beings is supposed to lie in our having a foothold in both worlds. Our consciousness belongs to the unseen utopia, to the hidden source of truth and beauty, while our body is plainly a physical object that emerges, evolves, and decays along with everything else in nature. But as physiologists learned how the body operates, the mystery deepened as to how ethereal consciousness, which used to be known as the spirit, could arise from matter. Our inner domain which seems like a sliver of supernature is full of mental contents, including tastes, smells, emotions, and thoughts, which are utterly unlike the stuff in which our body, including our brain consists. When you taste an exquisite dessert, you wouldn’t thereby be tempted to eat the neurons that are associated with that sensation, since the two tastes would be altogether different. There’s a philosophical mystery of consciousness, then, because there’s a mental blockage in our attempt to conceive of how a physical thing could have an interior point of view, a private world of meaningful mental states.

Less well known is that this problem of the apparent duality of matter and mind has two equivalent formulations, one of which proves more enlightening than the other. The common formulation is the evolutionary one, according to which we have difficulty explaining how mind emerges from matter. Notice, though, that the explanatory relationship can be reversed, in which case we might wonder how mind can be dissolved into matter. This latter formulation is just an abstract statement of the problem of death, as opposed to the question of how consciousness is created in the first place. How material compounds can cohere in such a way that they take on a conscious viewpoint which allows the material aggregate to act knowingly and creatively in what is mostly a lifeless void is one mystery. An equivalent mystery begins with the datum of consciousness and proceeds to the question of how consciousness fades away with the body’s eventual demise.

The second way of putting the problem shows why both mysteries appear to have no solution. The heart of the conundrum isn’t intellectual, but emotional. It’s not that we lack the brainpower to conceive of how mind can be merged with a material body; rather, we can’t bear to pursue the issue forthrightly, because we’re innately horrified by the inevitability of our personal death. Indeed, we’d prefer to live forever, but are confronted by the impermanence of all natural things. Thus, we’re blocked from understanding how a material thing can be conscious, because we’re disgusted by our future in which we’ll be no more, as our body deteriorates and expires. Were we presented with a theory that specifies the mechanics of how consciousness interacts with or inheres in matter, we would refuse to accept the implications as long as we still feared death.

That fear is in turn a consequence of our love of life. Every cell of our being drives us to live more and better, which is why the contemplation of death is morbid and taboo. To ponder what your death will be like is to betray the genetic compulsion and hormones and cultural conditioning that establish the norm of living with blinders to certain dark realities. Biologically, we perceive only that fraction of the universe which is useful to our survival, although science has entered us into the infamous Faustian bargain in which we dare to see further than is recommended to maintain our sanity. Death is despicable because we’re naturally driven to prolong our life at all costs, and this instinct is at least a precondition of the mind-body problem. Of course, the theoretical problem is agonized over by livingcreatures, by clever animals that figured out not just how to be self-aware, but that the self will apparently be extinguished at the end of a process of material dying. The certainty of death is apparent only to highly intelligent creatures that have learned to wrestle with complexities and abstractions that are unknown to lesser organisms. Nevertheless, the will to survive is universal in the animal kingdom and thus the terror of death persists even in the philosopher.

True, we can be depressive and suicidal, but even should we relinquish the zest for life and embark upon a plot to kill ourselves, we can experience only the act of dying, never the end of death. As long as we live, we live in bodies that evolved to protect themselves, to preserve and to transmit their genetic code. Once we die, the emotional component of the problem of how mind relates to the body is of course undone, since we then no longer exist and thus can no longer fear death or be compelled to endure. Suppose, though, that someone were somehow to have no fear of death and thus no love of life. Such a being would contemplate the prospect of dying with perfect neutrality. Were she biologically programmed to defend her life, she would be alienated from her body, since by hypothesis she would have no emotional attachment to her life. At most she would observe herself going through the motions of breathing, eating, and generally of preserving her life, say, by checking that the way is clear before she crosses the street, but she wouldn’t care about the outcome. However, these life-preserving instincts would be less effective without their emotive component. So such a being would more likely act neither for nor against her benefit. She would be as indifferent towards her life as would be the rest of the universe. To that extent, she would be an object rather than a living thing. What this indicates is that the mind-body problem arises only for a creature that’s at least minimally self-interested, who prefers to live and who thus loathes the thought of her passing into nothingness.

Fear of death isn’t just a precondition of the mystery of how a material body can be conscious; rather, that fear is what renders that identity a problem. Again, the problem isn’t that we can’t understand how material things can come together to form a subject, since at the subatomic level matter itself is as ethereal as any ghost. No, the problem is that we don’t wantto be bodies that face the certainty of losing everything we once had. We refuse to dwell on this agonizing certainty, because we’re intrinsically disgusted by it, and so we’re mentally blocked from picking up the problem from the other end, from imagining how a material thing can become conscious, since the two statements of the problem are philosophically equivalent. 

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The Irrelevance of Scientific Determinism

Freewill is a conundrum. We feel free, as though we can control ourselves and decide what to do rather than being forced along a certain path like a leaf blowing in the wind. But we can’t understand how we could be free, because understanding involves positing causes on top of causes and analyzing one thing in terms of something else. A fallen leaf moves along a certain path, because the leaf is blown by the wind. And why does the wind blow? That’s because of differences in atmospheric pressure. But why does wind blow this way rather than that? Well, that’s because the wind encounters objects in its path, including the curled-up shape of the leaf, which create pockets of turbulence and eddies. And why is the fallen leaf curled up so that it spins as it blows? That, in turn is because the leaf is dead, and so water and minerals no longer flow through its veins, preserving its former structure. And so on and so on until the process of understanding one event encompasses the history of life on Earth and the causes of our planet’s formation in the story of the whole universe. The one event of the leaf’s swirling in the breeze pales next to the immensity of what you have to know to understand why that event happened as it did.

Indeed, biologists and neuroscientists already have sufficient knowledge of how the body works, to render nonsensical our feeling that we have freewill. Yuval Harari summarizes some of the relevant findings in Homo Deus. Brain processes, he points out, are either deterministic or random. A neuron will fire either in response to stimuli or spontaneously due to the intrinsic uncertainty of the chemical factors involved such as the timing of the release of neurotransmitters. Virtually never-ending causal chains and randomness don’t leave room for personal autonomy. Moreover, although an action may be uncoerced, we don’t choose our desires. What we want is caused either by our genetic programming, by the formative environment in which we learned how to behave as children, or by the accumulation of our experiences. Desires have unconscious causes, as is shown by the fact that scientists observing brain activity can predict what a subject will do before the subject is consciously aware of her decision.

Also, with respect to what scientists can empirically confirm, there is no such thing as the single, essential self, let alone an immaterial spirit; instead, the brain is divided into regions that have different, sometimes conflicting functions. As Harari puts it, there’s the experiencing self, the part of the brain that processes moment-by-moment stimuli, and then there’s the narrating self, the part that gives meaning to experience by telling us what to think or feel and by ignoring most of the information processed by the experiencing self. We identify with our inner monologue because it adds meaning to our life. “It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas,” writes Harari, “and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death” (299). Finally, says Harari, we cling to the fiction of a soul, of a single self that bears ultimate responsibility for our actions, because we can’t bear the alternative that everything we do is in vain. “Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused” (300).  

Instead of challenging the scientific deconstruction of the self, I want to consider two meta-questions. First, is the notion of a scientific theory of freewill even coherent or is instead personal freedom naturally impossible from a scientific point of view? Second, what would a free creature look like in nature, speaking hypothetically? How would this creature’s internal components have to be arranged to liberate it from the rest of the world so that we could reasonably think of it as being both free and real? 

Why the Concept of Freewill is Unscientific

I’ve already suggested the answer to the first question. Just as a miracle is defined as being beyond our comprehension, whereas science is precisely the most rigorous form of human understanding, and so there can be no miracles as far as science is concerned, absolute freedom in nature is antithetical to the way the world works according to science. Indeed, “complete freedom from nature” seems synonymouswith “miracle.” If freedom is the ability to do what you want even if the world is attempting to compel you to do the opposite, you have the power to overturn the world, which is preposterous. Of course, this is a strawman interpretation of personal freedom. The idea of freewill isn’t that we can do whatever we want, including, say, taking flight by flapping our arms, or that we can resist the force of every natural cause. Even if the mind is willing, the body may be weak and so we may succumb to some temptation, for example.

Absolute freedom from everything other than the self (or other than the many parts that make up the self) should be distinguished from a more realistic, limited form of freedom.Absolute freedom would entail that the self alone—rather than anything else in the natural universe—is responsible for its actions, because this self operates according to supernatural laws and so the external web of causally-connected events has no bearing on what this self does. An absolutely free person in this sense would look something like a black hole: it wouldn’t be part of the fabric of natural reality, and so no account of natural mechanisms would be relevant to explaining what happens in this person’s inner domain or what might flow into nature from this estranged individual. A ghostly, angelic figure with a mandate from some supernatural realm might be absolutely free. Neo in the virtual reality of the matrix, who channels his knowledge from a higher reality, might likewise be perfectly free from the programs that dictate the matrix’s virtual causes and effects, which is why in the film he can perform miracles such as flying and dodging bullets.

By contrast, limited freedom would be an approximation of the absolute kind and would be due to some natural arrangement of mechanisms. Limited autonomy would require a dichotomy between self and world and even a conflict between them as the self struggles against external forces, controlling itself and the world as best it can and so breaking a prominent causal chain. Taking into account the free self’s relation to the rest of the world would thus necessitate an emergent, psychological or social level of explanation. For example, defying gravity and flying just by willing your body upward would be a case of absolute freedom, since this miracle would violate natural laws and the flight would be due solely to internal causes that are completely disconnected from your surroundings. Limited freedom that achieves a similar end would require a slow learning process, as you come to understand natural laws and how to exploit them. Thus, you might discover how to engineer an airplane that allows you to fly. In the latter case no miracle is performed, but there is an anomaly afoot, a partial disconnect from the environment as you live more and more in your head. Someone with limited freedom isn’t liberated from all physical limitations or from the limits of her mind or body, but this freedom does represent a Gordian knot of complexity so that the flow of outer causality doesn’t just wash through this sort of self; instead, she processes stimuli and meditates on her options so that the outcome of her reflections is dictated largely by the rules of her inner world, which is to say that she’s the primary cause of her actions.

Still, even if we discount absolute freedom as supernatural, limited freedom will likewise be invisible to scientific investigation. A scientist wants to know how events happen. Theories are added to theories as the complexity of causes requires an analysis, a breaking-up of phenomena into parts. The epistemic division can be temporal or mereological. We can explain later events in terms of earlier ones, and so a theory of how stars formed in the early universe can help explain why plants currently grow or why our sky looks blue during the day. We can also explain something’s capacities by examining its parts, and so the star’s current molecular composition can account for the star’s macrophysical characteristics such as its size and temperature. Science deals with facts in those respects, but limited freedom wouldn’t be a purely factual matter. To see this, consider the difference between freedomand independence. A distant galaxy is independent of ours, but it would sound strange to say that either galaxy is free from the other. Autonomy isn’t just the person’s relative independence from the world; the liberated self must be fundamentally at odds with everything else so that the self is thought of as having rights against being coerced even by natural forces, and so that the self’s opposition to the rest of nature has moral significance. For there to be even limited freedom, the world must be somehow in the wrong for abusing the autonomous creature. Scientific explanation, though, is indifferent to moral evaluation, and so “freewill” shouldn’t be part of any scientific theory’s vocabulary.

Harari shows that the concept of freewill is crucial to Western liberalism, but the concept may also help make sense of the earliest evidence of human cultures, such as the practice of burying the dead; any special regard shown to friends and family at the expense of hostile, indifferent, or rival others indicates a belief in limited freedom in the above sense. The belief would be that the loved one deserves to be buried rather than to have its decay be made a spectacle of, because the memories of that departed person’s specialness as a former moral agent should be honoured. Moreover, the idea of limited autonomy may be implicit in any complete account of animal behaviour, which is why illiberal hunter-gatherers attribute symbolic importance to the hunt and ritually thank the animal for sacrificing its flesh so that the hunters might live another day. There’s the sense that all living things struggle against their environment, since nothing cares more about a creature’s welfare than that creature itself, and the nonliving world cares not at all whether it lives or dies. People may be especially free in the animal kingdom, but all organisms are free to some extent, compared to the rest of nature which has no agency at all. Again, this means not that animals can perform miracles, but that they’re constructed in such a way that they can oppose the prevailing patterns in nature. Creatures aren’t supernatural; they’re antinatural: they oppose the world in so far as they make exceptions of themselves and fight primarily for their exclusive benefit.

The determinist may speak as though scientists have been open-minded about discovering a basis for freewill, but this underestimates the scientist’s methodological barrier to recognizing the freedom that might be hiding in plain sight. It’s not as though scientists explored the body’s interior and just happened to find no liberated source of ultimate responsibility for the person’s actions. To the extent that those latter terms carry moral weight, the scientist is professionally obligated to assume that they should be replaced with more operational, quantifiable terms so that the scientist can proceed with the instrumental business at hand of helping to engineer a modern civilization. The concept of moral obligation may be useful to the practice of living well, but science isn’t concerned with that kind of practicality. Scientists want empowering knowledge. In fact, Harari exposes this Faustian essence of modernity when he writes of “the modern covenant.” Modernity, he says, “is a surprisingly simple deal: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power” (199). Scientists strip nature of the illusion of meaning, in their act of explaining events in strictly objective, material terms. Liberalism, then, is the religion that compensates for this deadening effect of science. Despite science’s having shown that there’s no real basis for freewill, we persist in assuming we’re free, but that’s just a gratuitous act of modern faith, for Harari. Again, though, this is an understatement. Even if we were relatively free from the nonliving world, scientists would have no business speaking about that aspect of how we relate to the environment; that is to say, scientists would have no grounds to speak thusly of why we relate to the world out of self-interest, and thus why in the limit case we oppose everything but ourselves.

The Obviousness of Our Real Freedom

To see the difference between explaining the natural basis of freedom and recognizing freedom itself, consider what it would be like to create a partially free creature in nature.Again, the goal wouldn’t be to create a magical being that can perform the miracle of withstanding everything nature can throw at it. Instead, pretend there’s no life in the universe and think of what sort of design would be required to assemble the first natural creature that’s liberated in certain striking respects from the overall flow of natural events. To begin with, the creature would have to be shielded from the rest of the world to prevent it from being overwhelmed and to allow the creature to decide how to act by consulting the contents of its inner world. So we’d have to erect a barrier, dividing nature into two parts (from the creature’s perspective), the inner and the outer. Were that barrier impermeable, we would have two universes on our hands, like ships passing in the night, and were the barrier impermeable only in one direction, from the outer to the inner, the creature would be absolutely, miraculously free which isn’t the goal. So the barrier must be permeable in both directions, allowing the inner and outer worlds to affect each other while providing the creature some breathing room to decide how to respond to the environment.

Also, the world inside the creature which is (imperfectly) protected from everything else must be organized to allow the creature to act with autonomy. This means the creature would have to understand that it’s one thing in opposition to everything else and that it can act on a limited basis to further its interests but will be resisted in some ways by the environment. Its thoughts would thus have to be processed by a control center somewhere safe behind its barrier. The creature must be driven to assert itself, to seek advantages to make it happy even if that should entail disadvantaging competitors; otherwise, however free its thoughts might be from the thoughtlessness of purely physical processes, the creature wouldn’t have the audacity to challenge the outer world, say, by studying natural regularities and modifying them to its benefit. This self-directedness might be accomplished by introducing the capacities to feel pleasure and pain, to discriminate between experiences by learning to heed certain enticements and warnings. To more fully liberate itself from baseline causality, the creature should learn to recognize itself as a distinct entity so that it can mentally model itself as an agent in the indifferent world. The creature would be even more fully liberated were its body equipped to apply the thoughts and feelings at its core. Thus, the creature might be outfitted with organs that allow it to sense changes in certain dimensions of the outer world, and also with appendages that allow it to manipulate the causes of stimuli to help improve its experience and living standard.

Such a creature would be naturally real (not magical), detached from that which lies beyond its barrier, motivated to oppose the natural environment in certain respects, and also enabled to apply its self-interested intentions, to make good on its partial liberty by injecting the contents of its mental space into the lifeless or foreign one and even replacing the wilderness as much as possible with an extended barrier. Of course, this creature is precisely what’s evolved in myriad forms on our planet. Cells have membranes, trees have bark, and animals have skin along with fur, feathers, or scales. Cells have nuclei protecting genetic instructions, and an animal has a brain ensconced in its skull to direct its self-interested (if not necessarily selfish) cogitations, as well as wings, fins, or claws to help it get what it wants. Some mammals evolved opposable thumbs, bipedal locomotion, and an enhanced brain which produces self-awareness and the capacity for higher orders of thought. These latter creatures which we call persons are apparently as liberated as real creatures can be. To wit, people have reshaped the planet in the Anthropocene Age, replacing the wilderness with villages, cities, and civilizations; rival creatures with domesticated pets; and jungle law with ideologies and cultural pastimes and enterprises.

Let’s return to Harari’s case against freewill. At each point we can see that far from discounting limited freedom, the mechanisms in question are its preconditions. Brain processes must be deterministic or random or else the creature couldn’t discern its opportunity to systematically oppose nature amidst the chaos that would ensue without the natural regularities which it can nevertheless transcend at the mental and social levels. Every thought and feeling has some cause or other, but the longer the evolutionary history and the more complex the brain, the less tractable becomes any objective account of why a certain mental state arises; hence the need to shift to a perspective that posits the subjective viewpoint which is apparently our brain’s byproduct. In a deterministic universe, the complete explanation of any event would have to take into account every other event, which would be impossible for reasons given in relativistic physics, and which would be fruitless, given the prevalence of natural chaos. In any case, the universe is fundamentally indeterministic (at the quantum level), so the pursuit of complete explanations is wrongheaded. We must choose between models based on their utility, and so a model of organisms that’s consistent with the phenomenology (that is, with the feeling that we have some degree of self-control) can hardly be dismissed—even if the model is unscientific because it introduces a subjective factor.

How can there be a single self, though, if the brain is divided into modules that evolved to achieve different functions? This question can be turned around: How could limited freewill have evolved with no miracles, unless natural selection gradually lengthened the leash, as it were, by adding parts to the brain that make creatures more and more independent, that accrued layer upon layer of internal causes of the creature’s behaviour so that an objective explanation that discounts subjectivity becomes cumbersome to the point of being misleading? We don’t choose our desires if we think of ourselves as exclusively our conscious egos, but we needn’t think of ourselves that way. Evidently there’s an unconscious side to a personal self, as becomes plain when we dream in personally-distinctive ways without being consciously alert while we’re asleep. So neuroscientists have greater access to what’s occurring in the brain than the patient herself: before the patient becomes aware of her choice, experimenters can predict whether she’ll go left or right, by hooking her up to a machine that reads the brain’s electrical activity. This need imply only that her thought originates from one side of herself rather than another; her personhood, that is, her capacity to act as a person with limited freewill in a moral context encompasses her whole brain as well as her whole body. All are needed or are at least convenient in achieving her purposes. Moreover, objectivity and quantification don’t have the high ground when scientists know more about our choices than do their subjects. Strictly objective, impersonal processes didn’t devise scientific methods of inquiry or brain scanners in the first place; creatures that have opposed nature at every turn on moral grounds and that are thus manifestly free from their natural environment have done so.

Indeed, far from showing that freewill is an illusion, science and technology are themselves classic proofs that an anomaly is playing out in this corner of the solar system. Whereas natural systems tend to become more disordered, organisms struggle against entropy by eating each other, robbing the order found in each other’s bodies and ingesting it. Whereas natural processes don’t react to each other with any awareness or design, organisms do and their history isn’t fully explained without some understanding that living things seek to preserve themselves in an environment that can crush them in a billion possible ways and that even requires them to die to make room for more fitting adaptations, as the environment changes. Whereas the interiors of nonliving things, including rocks, planets, and stars, aren’t fundamentally different from their exteriors and can be explained in the same theoretical terms, biological, neurological, psychological and social patterns are irreducibly different from ones found in nature’s lifeless parts; the former require some appeal to subjectivity, to an inner-outer distinction that carries moral weight, or else there’s a crucial point being missed. And whereas natural transformations such as the evolution of star systems don’t indicate that the later forms are liberated from the earlier ones, the spread of extended phenotypes, that is, artifacts, demonstrates precisely the existentially-weighty fact that organisms set themselves against their environment for love of themselves (and perhaps also of their kind).

So if scientific investigation is instrumental in empowering our species to the point of making us infamous for wiping out most of the planet’s biodiversity and displacing lifeless and less-free nature with intelligently-designed cultures, machines, and cityscapes that serve as outer vessels for the contents of our minds, this rigorous search for knowledge further detaches us from the natural processes that have hitherto prevailed. Uncovering the mechanisms that enable us to process information with intelligence and with anti-natural intentions may show that we’re machines as opposed to immaterial spirits—unless you interpret “spirit” as a simplified image of the creature that’s strangely liberated and thus alienated from natural cycles and thus that seeks not homeostasis (that being the evolutionary purpose of less-free animals), but cancer-like growth of the mind throughout the lifeless void. In any event, what science certainly doesn’t show is that people are just physical objects like everything else in the universe. After all, why then wouldn’t rocks or stars practice science to achieve power over the rest of the universe in the name of all rocks or stars?  

The foregoing is what philosophers call a compatibilist picture of freewill, since it assumes that causality is inescapable in the sense that there’s no miraculous, absolute freedom from natural regularities. But these regularities develop something that opposes them, by evolving bodies that simulate foreign, unnatural worlds in the organization of their innards; that is, nature creates organic subworlds, from cells to animals to people and perhaps to societies, each complete with barriers so that we might have expected we wouldn’t miss the existential significance of this emergence. And here Harari may have a point against liberalism despite the ineffectiveness of his premises against freewill. Liberalism may be a modern religion championing liberty, reason, and personal empowerment, but limited freedom as I’ve represented it isn’t a godsend. Just as we can incur back pain for having evolved the ability to walk upright, so too we can suffer from alienation if we don’t retreat to an undignified state of childish delusion, for having been cut off from the world by our inner depths. Thus, another proof of limited freewill is the forlornness associated with grasping that we don’t belong to nature and might as well have been abandoned when we’ve been equipped with ultra-complex, self-isolating brains. Freewill is the ability not just to choose what we want—albeit often at an unconscious level, objective processes notwithstanding as complete causes of mental states, with no reference required to a subjective viewpoint. Freewill is the ability also to travel down the wrong path and it’s the mental space needed to understand that the moral and aesthetic evaluations of the culture-laden worlds we create are ultimately absurd. We’ve been liberated from nature only by accident, and our revolt against the mindless vistas is very likely doomed to be terminated before any absolute triumph has been achieved. Creatures revolt not because we know best but because we’re often selfish and are disgusted with the world as it physically is, so that we’re desperate to replace it with so many reflections of us.  

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Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress

Here's an article of mine that went up on Scott Bakker's blog. The article's called "Are Minds like Witches? The Catastrophe of Scientific Progress." It's about the full implications of thinking that the naive, quasi-dualistic conception of the human mind should be eliminated in favour of thinking that only material systems exist. Here are the article's first few paragraphs:

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As scientific knowledge has advanced over the centuries, informed people have come to learn that many traditional beliefs are woefully erroneous. There are no witches, ghosts, or disease-causing demons, for example. But are cognitive scientists currently on the verge of showing also that belief in the ordinarily-defined human self is likewise due to a colossal misunderstanding, that there are no such things as meaning, purpose, consciousness, or personal self-control? Will the assumption of personhood itself one day prove as ridiculous as the presumption that some audacious individuals can make a pact with the devil?

Progress and a World of Mechanisms

According to this radical interpretation of contemporary science, everything is natural and nature consists of causal relationships between material aggregates that form systems or mechanisms. The universe is thus like an enormous machine except that it has no intelligent designer or engineer. Atoms evolve into molecules, stars into planets, and at least one planet has evolved life on its surface. But living things are really just material objects with no special properties. The only efficacious or real property in nature, very generally speaking, is causality, and thus the real question is always just what something can do, given its material structure, initial conditions, and the laws of nature. As one of the villains of The Matrix Reloaded declares, “We are slaves to causality.” Thus, instead of there being peopleor conscious, autonomous minds who use symbols to think about things and to achieve their goals, there are only mechanisms, which is to say forces acting on complex assemblies of material components, causing the system to behave in one way rather than another. Just as the sun acts on the Earth’s water cycle, causing oceans to evaporate and thus forming clouds that eventually rain and return the water via snowmelt runoff and groundwater flow to the oceans, the environment acts on an animal’s senses, which send signals to its brain whereupon the brain outputs a more or less naturally selected response, depending on whether the genes exercise direct or indirect control over their host. Systems interacting with systems, as dictated by natural laws and probabilities—that’s all there is, according to this interpretation of science.

How, then, do myths form that get the facts so utterly wrong? Myths in the pejorative sense form as a result of natural illusions. Omniscience isn’t given to lowly mammals. To compensate for their being thrown into the world without due preparation, as a result of the world’s dreadful godlessness, some creatures may develop the survival strategy of being excessively curious, which drives them often to err on the side not of caution but of creativity. We track not just the patterns that lead us to food or shelter, but myriad other structures on the off-chance that they’re useful. And as we evolve more intelligence than wisdom, we creatively interpret these patterns, filling the blanks in our experience with placeholder notions that indicate both our underlying ignorance and our presumptuousness. In the case of witches, for example, we mistake some hapless individual’s introversion and foreignness for some evil complicity in suffering that’s actually due merely to bad luck and to nature’s heartlessness. Given enough bumbling and sanctimony, that lack of information about a shy foreigner results in the burning of a primate for allegedly being a witch. A suitably grotesque absurdity for our monstrously undead universe.

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How Horror Begets Mind from Matter

According to supernatural conceptions of the self, we’re not identical with the brain since we consist of a spiritual, immaterial and thus seemingly immortal substance. That substance portends an apocalyptic end of all of nature by a hidden, transcendent reality that’s thought of as the abode of the universe’s personal creator. The modern word for “spirit” is “consciousness,” since consciousness, too, seems like a ghostly presence, an invisible homunculi within the head. According to the science-centered view, though, the self is a congeries of programs computed somehow by the embodied nervous system; at any rate, the self is a natural thing or process, operating under physical laws. The opposition between these two conceptions sets up either the personal self or the natural body to be interpreted as an illusion subordinated to the other’s corresponding ontology.

But all of this is oversimplified. There clearly is a materialistic, animalistic, embodied self just as clearly as there is a subjective, personal, and thus potentially noble or transcendent thing as mind.

The Self’s Origin in Higher-Order Thought

Here’s how I see mind arising from mechanisms operating in the body. The brain evolved as a hodgepodge of modules, which are independent, specialized subsystems that carry out specific functions. Most animals receive inputs from one or another module and their training takes over, automating their behaviour. This is to say that they lack personhood, which is the awareness of being a self that processes perceptual inputs and can freely decide how to respond. Our species adapted to life after the eons in which dinosaurian might made right, by developing a capacity for high intelligence that’s generated by the cerebral cortex. Our Mesolithic and Paleolithic ancestors found themselves able to categorize phenomena to a high level of abstraction and to systematize their communications using the technology of linguistic symbols and rules. Instead of reacting automatically to stimuli, they could reflect and prepare their response, learning the most efficient techniques and preserving that information for future generations.

Consciousness arose as a special kind of higher-order thought. Picture a primate flooded with information from its environment which it could now customize by categories and access at will, thanks to its cerebral cortex which acts as a brain within a brain, detaching the emotion and motor centers from the environmental cues so that the primate’s behaviour needn’t be slaved to genetic programming. The primate could always investigate the outer world with its paws and outer senses, but now it could also organize the flood of data within its head. In short, it could think about its thoughts. For example, the primate could think roughly, “This pain feels bad, but it would be best not to wince, to avoid looking like a weakling.” Instead of being concerned just with modifying its outer environment, the sapient primate learned how to develop its cognitive capacities. It did so by rational detachment and by linguistic abstraction, which allowed for higher-order thoughts, which in turn enable the species to thrive and thus to continue to practice thinking in its free time.

But what is the selfthat is accomplishing these cognitive feats? There was no otherworldly monolith that intervened in the Stone Age and miraculously transformed animals into people, as in Kubrick’s film 2001. Instead, I think we should picture those early intelligent primates as being terrifiedof their cognitive powers and as inventing the self to manage that fear.Specifically, as their reasoning center gradually disentangled itself from the older neural subsystems, with the advent of their brain within the brain, and as those forerunners became more sophisticated in managing their thoughts, they would still have been exposed to fear of that enclosed inner space.

Primates in general are highly territorial, which means they react against invasions of their home space. When invaded, they display a fight-or-flight response, triggered by the amygdala which processes emotions associated with spatial proximity to others. Normally, home territory is defined in relation to the body: the nearer the threat to the body, the more threatening the invasion and the more likely the animal will fight or flee. But as I said, the cerebral cortex represented a brain within a brain, by enabling higher-order cognitive control of thoughts, not just of the rest of the body and thus indirectly of parts of the environment. Thus, the sense of home space that had to be defended would have been redefined to include the inner world of thoughts and feelings (memories, plans, lusts, doubts, fantasies, and so on). Just as the body’s private space can be invaded by others, including predators and dangerous but actually inanimate parts of the environment (lightning, volcanoes, floods), so too the modules that process abstract thoughts are invaded by all of that data in addition to the data of the lower-order thoughts, which is to say the more reflexive mental states that can be categorized and harnessed by the higher-order cognitive capacities.

When dominated by a predator that intrudes on an animal’s private space, the animal feels terror since it can neither successfully fight nor flee. To be sure, this isn’t claustrophobia since the fear isn’t irrational. Instead, the fear is nervous energy signaling that the animal’s situation is dire. The territorial fear is a mighty alarm bell that sounds when the animal’s home is violated and its body is threatened. This behaviour is reproduced in an irrational form, though, due to the creation of a global (holistic) cognitive system that sets itself increasingly apart from everything else, including the mental states it filters. That is, the plans and fears and dreams and memories that crowd in on the hypothetical primate’s intelligence are perceived as invaders of this newly-delineated inner home, and to the extent the primate can’t cope with the cacophony of conflicting voices and emotions, the amygdala triggers a fight-or-flight response. Physically fighting a thought is, of course, impossible, since even if you could punch an idea, it could just as swiftly return and anyway its logical status would be unaffected by such a crude reaction. Fleeing is likewise impossible, since you can’t literally run away from the contents of your head. However, simulated flight as well as combat is made possible by higher-order thought.

If you’re feeling bombarded by your thoughts which never end while you live, not even while you sleep, thanks to your dreams, you can flee to a level of abstraction whereby you quarantine the thoughts by taking symbolic ownership of them, attributing them to an imaginary container called the self. Thus, the intelligent primate copes with the constant invasion of its mental sanctuary, by reorienting its cognitive activity towards a higher intellectual plane. We symbolically step outside the lower-order boundary, by pretending that we’re not identical with the constant flow of thoughts, but are located instead at a higher level of abstraction in which there’s a unifying self that needn’t be threatened by the inner invasions as long as it retains the capabilities for intellectual detachment and reflection. To reflect on a feeling, from the abstract position of being a self that has the feeling is to flee to another order in psychological space. This is the equivalent of a rabbit running away or perhaps, better, of a turtle retreating within its shell, to avoid facing an intruder on its home turf. Since neural states are isolated within the skull and can only interrelate with each other rather than being subject to much useful manipulation by the body’s outer parts, the only recourse, when met with inner data glut, is to carve out an inviolate position in the space of mental programming, a sort of singularity that’s always safe because of its unique position.

Higher-order thoughts provide the illusion of a unified self by their potential, felt as a sort of anticipation, to follow upon any given lower-order thought. Indeed, with language the illusion is preserved by the mere use of the word “I,” which use seems to transport the same possessor of thoughts to each occasion of that word’s use in the interior monologue or outer dialogue—even though we know that, strictly speaking, we change from one moment to the next as do all other things. So for each lower-order mental state, such as a pleasure or pain, we’re aware of having the power to ascend to a point of abstraction, at which we can entertain a second-order thought about that mental state, such as, “I’m glad I’m having this pleasure” or “I wish I wasn’t enduring this pain.” Instead of ever finding a unified self, what we encounter within is an asymptotic relationship between the orders of cognitive abstraction: each assurance that a mental state is had by the self that occupies a higher order of mental space is attended by a feeling of potency since there’s a similar assurance with regard to that second-order thought which could in principle be followed by a third-order one, and so on to infinity. Instead of a real inner unity, there’s endless deferral from one abstraction to the next. We constantly wait for the presence of our self as though it were Godot.

Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” But as is well-known, the evidence permitted him to say only that since thoughts occur (including the doubt of the world’s existence), thoughts certainly exist. Descartes smuggled in the existence of a personal container of the doubts, the self that has them, because he was influenced by the intuitive medieval metaphysics of substances and their properties. The intuition which seems to form part of folk physics is that there are things and then there are their motions or the actions they take. In English, this distinction corresponds to that between nouns and verbs. At some point this intuition had to be learned by our prehistoric ancestors who studied their environment to survive. So foods were distinguished from poisons because of their effects of nourishment or sickness. The same distinction must have been applied to the inner world as it was opened up by the cerebral cortex’s role of being the rest of the brain’s overseer. Thinking and feeling are actions we take, while we must be something that performs them. Of course, biologically speaking, the thing to which we’re identical is our embodied brain. But the intuition long preceded that discovery, based as it likely was on the slowly emerging and terrifying powers of language and reason (the cerebral cortex).

Not only was there no monolithic origin point of the human self, but some elite primates would have created selves with their gift for abstraction, while others would have remained zombified like the other animals. The process in which everyone came to think they have selves could have taken tens of thousands of years. In particular, there were two dynamics at play besides the physiological difference between our prehistoric ancestors’ cerebral cortexes. First, there was the introversion-extroversion continuum, which meant that some of our ancestors would have been more sensitive to incoming information than others, whereupon they would have been more prone to retreat to solitude. The protohuman introverts would have led the flight to the abstraction of selfhood. Not only would they have been terrorized by the flood of information pouring into their cognitive center, but they would have worked the most with thoughts and so they’d have been well-positioned to take the needed leap of imagination, of positing a subjective position in mental space, an impregnable fortress to reassure the beleaguered thinker that she can survey her mental states from a psychological “distance.” By contrast, the extrovert would have been at home acting in the outer environment, not tinkering with the furniture of her inner space. The extrovert would thus have been less likely to think of her thoughts as being possessed by an invulnerable self, which is to say she would have had no such self since the self is nothing more than the entertaining of that higher-order thought. This continuum remains to this day, so that those who are more extroverted have a comparatively diminished inner life, while introverts can become imprisoned in themselves. Again, in all of our extroverted moments, when we’re consumed with completing a bodily task, we can feel at one with the outer world as we lose sight of our inner selves, while the opposite obtains in our introverted moments.

Along with that dynamic there would have been opposite pulls in the directions of faith and reason, fantasy and objectification. Whereas in technologically powerful societies, the stance of modern objectivity is commonplace so that we easily resort to analyzing a phenomenon in terms of its mechanical underpinning, in the Stone Age what Henry Frankfort called mythopoeic thought would have predominated. This means that the ancients would have given free rein to their abstractions instead of reserving their personification to themselves. So the retreat from the hyperawareness of the world that was sustained by cognitive oversight and by linguistic symbolization would first have happened on all fronts. The early hyper-intelligent primates would have fled to a fictive spiritual interior, but they would also have pacified the bustling confusion of an independent world around them by personifying every part of it. The ancients freely, which is to say childishly, projected their psychological capacities onto all natural processes, so it wasn’t just they who thought and who might have required an inner retreat; no, the natural elements were likewise considered alive and able to be dealt with on a social basis through prayer, sacrifice, and other magical relations. Mythopoeic projection of subjectivity onto the alien outer world would have mitigated the fear of being overwhelmed by thoughts, by making the world seem akin to us. As the aphorism has it, we fear what we don’t understand, what’s different from us. To compensate for our ignorance, we can pretend that everything has an inner world, a spiritual core, making it similar to us. Indeed, we catch a glimpse of this imaginative free-for-all in children who likewise interpret their surroundings as imbued with magic.

But this resort to fantasy was only one side of advanced cognition, the other being objectification, which amounted to protoscience. Objectification is the converse of psychological projection, in that instead of interpreting an external phenomenon as having a mental dimension, the protoscientist ignores her own subjectivity in the endeavour to divine that phenomenon’s impersonal nature. The protoscientist excels at reasoning, which means she adopts an emotionally neutral stance, putting aside her preferences and biases and following logic and the evidence where they lead. Now, whereas mythopoeic thought would have driven the creation of personhood by a theological codification of the initial abstraction, that is, by comparing the self to a god, objectification would have done so by intensifying the need for that abstraction. With mythopoeic freedom, the ancients would have indulged in speculation about the self’s spiritual properties, its ultimate destiny and so forth. So its separation from all particular mental states was interpreted as being due to the self’s immateriality, to its having entered the natural world from a transcendent plane. The self is invulnerable to threats because it’s immortal, having been created not by any human act of imagination, but by divine fiat. As the shamans of their day, ancient introverts, in particular, would have exceled at this religious speculation.

But objectification spoils that fantasy, by returning nature to its actual, horrific indifference to us in our vision of the world. The more we objectify, the more we learn that natural events happen for no psychological reason, because most things are entirely dead inside, having no thoughts or feelings at all. Moreover, the technique of objectification calls on the protoscientist to detach from her emotions and thus to depersonalize herself, which she can do only because she’s never actually presented with any personal self in the first place. She can ignore her preferences and work around her biases, because objective thought is only one cognitive routine working alongside others. Were there a real unifying subjective power within each of us, we could hardly think objectively about anything by disassociating from ourselves, since that act of detachment would derive from that very unifying power. It’s precisely because there’s no subjective unity underlying all mental activity, that objectivity is possible as the exercise merely of one module rather than another. This protoscientific confirmation that there’s no real singular, removed self heightens the fear of being overwhelmed by experience and so forces a compromise with the mythopoeic initiative, whereby that one act of imagination is rationalized as being intuitive and is thus safeguarded. Underlying the intuition that there’s a self that has its thoughts is the existential crisis, which is that what we actually find through introspectionis a void. Certainly, we don’t thereby discover our neurological self, the brain. But the despair of really being so empty or as transitory as a terribly fragile brain subsides when we imagine an emergent domain to call home, a mental or spiritual world of consciousness, meaning, and purpose. The image of that inner domain not only saves us from angst but catalyzes a technological enchantmentof all of nature by imbuing it with our creativity.

From Fear to Authenticity

Does all of this imply that the self is nothing at all? No, since illusions and fictions are real; they’re just not what we usually think they are. If the preceding speculations and hypotheses are on the right track, the self begins inauspiciously as a crutch to manage the fear of being confined to a newly-flooded interior space. The self thus begins as an accident, but so does every biological mutation. From fishes’ fins to birds’ wings to mammals’ claws, animals’ traits develop by chance and natural selection, but they’re nonetheless quite real for all of that. How else would godless nature create the myriad forms that evidently litter its dimensions than by such stumbling, fumbling, and happenstance? Human bodies are supposed to be especially beautiful, from our biased perspective, at least, but our evolutionary strengths evidently lie within, since those beautiful bodies are pitifully inadequate in the wild without our hyper-intelligent guidance. If the spider can spin an elaborate web of silk that only it can skillfully traverse, a human can conceive a network of ideas that we excel at seeing. There are psychological and intellectual niches which all species inhabit to some degree, but which we dominate with our unmatched brainpower. Other species categorize phenomena and communicate the results, for example, but only we depend primarily on more sophisticated versions of such mental exercises, such as on our fantasies, rationalizations, and other mental escape hatches, because we’re the only ones cursed with a superabundance of reason which calls for such desperate stratagems.

Granted, there’s no immaterial, immortal self that pops into being via the mere act of imagination that eases our fear of confinement. However, the cerebral cortex really does exercise unprecedented control over much of the rest of the brain, and linguistic symbols really do range over phenomena. Those symbols are meaningful in virtue of their common uses from one generation of language-speakers to the next, despite endless variation between their brain states. The intellect’s independence from the emotions and instincts gives rise to objectification and to protoscience, as I said, which in turn produce human technology that amounts to an artificial world threatening to replace much of the natural one. Technology, too, is all too real, and it indicates reason’s (limited) autonomy within the mind. That autonomy is supported by heroic capacities for abstraction and withdrawal, but also by vices of arrogance and by a savage lust for dominating whatever’s weaker than us. Of course, those capacities of cognition and character are also real.

As are mythopoeic religion, which showcases the fantasies of rampant subjectivity, and the depersonalization which leads to the existential crisis of discovering an inner maelstrom of competing impulses and biases rather than an elevated and invulnerable mental or spiritual self. Buddhists deal with that crisis by learning how not to care, renouncing the urge to identify with anything, including a self. And in the West, the Enlightenment was followed by the Romantic backlash, as poets and other artists realized the threat posed by uncompromising objectification, namely nature’s disenchantment. After the World Wars in which megamachines deployed cutting-edge technology to slaughter millions and turned much of the planet into a hellscape, existential philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre called for a postmodern (non-scientistic) kind of heroism, for personal authenticity which is a way of life that’s antithetical to delusions and that’s dedicated to creatively overcoming the horrors of our existential predicament. Rather than addressing that challenge head-on, we typically prefer to avoid it with subterfuges of ironic comedy and with sentimental and sanctimonious liberal demands for social equality regardless of manifest differences between individuals. For example, some live as psychopathic gods, others as slumbering slaves.

As I’ve said, the higher-order, imaginary and always merely expected self was likely a gambit to save us from fear of the enclosed inner space of hyper-intelligent cognition. Even as our command of our mental states grew, so did our claustrophobia because the tactic of employing the imagination as a back door only shunts the stream of mental activity into a narrower and more isolated space. The more abstract our thoughts, the further they are from ground-level reality and the greater our sense of alienation. As the saying goes, it’s lonely at the top. We isolate ourselves when we seek refuge in a network of abstractions, when we dwell on relations between our mental states to avoid the dread that our perceptions represent so many intrusions on our home territory from the outer world. We succumb to the perils of introversion and to the curse of reason. The greater the independence of our rational side from the rest of our personality, the less we’re inclined to identify with the sacred myths that bind society together, and the more crippling our loneliness and anxiety. The creation of the personal self spares us from the primitive urge to fight or to flee from the stream of intruding thoughts which are seen all the more clearly by the brain within the brain, but the self’s invention also ejects us from the real world into a mental space of simplifications, including corrupting fantasies and delusions. The worst of us are degraded by those mental substitutes for facts, our inner life indeed being little more than a dream. By contrast, the more enlightened among us use their purgatory in the cul-de-sac of their mind to meditate on those facts, dismissing feel-good myths and reconciling themselves to the objective truth of nature’s undeadness. Indeed, objectivity or protoscience is obviously a silver lining of higher-order thought, and it presents the beleaguered ascetic with the possibility of undead nature’s aesthetic renewal, since the aesthetic attitude overlaps with objectivity, as I explain elsewhere. 

My ultimate map of reality begins, then, with the following picture: mindless nature swirls with myriad forms, which are perceived by hyper-intelligent creatures that develop cognitive filters for transducing the sensations into symbolic conceptions. The wealth of that information overwhelms the creatures since they’re hampered by the primitive impulse to construe the data as so many despoilers of the sanctuary of their rational control center. The flow of information is neutralized through a kind of commodification, whereby an all-embracing self is imagined as owning or “having” its mental states. That self consists of a stream of higher-order thoughts that divides the thinker from the natural world which is now perceived as foreign to the detached self. Like the alpha fixed point of a Mandelbrot fractal, the emptiness of the withdrawn self, which nevertheless commands vast powers of fantasy and objectification, is the occasion for a stupendous recycling of nature into the dimension of artificiality. Natural forms are reflected in the symbolizations and simulations that flourish in our artificial microcosms, including our languages, cultures, and cityscapes. Moreover, there’s the ironic possibility that the fantasy of our immortal self is a self-fulfilling prophecy, since it preconditions the advent of technoscience which may yet produce the so-called transhuman, the self that has fully merged with technology and escaped the confines of the biological nervous system. Such irony is generally a prime indicator of the most profound truth, since nature has always been alien to us as soon as we retreated from it in horror, to occupy the psychological vantage point from which the world might be seen in all its strange glory: nothing has a greater capacity to surprise than the alien other.

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