The Self Illusion

PROLOGUE

The Reflected Self

Last night I finished reading the biography of Howard Hughes – the tycoon, the aviator, the movie mogul, the socialite and finally the reclusive billionaire, housebound by his pathological fear of dirt. At the time of his death, Hughes was worth $2 billion but he ended his days as an unwashed recluse, dressed in rags with long, matted hair, curling nails and the remnants of five hypodermic needles embedded in his arms. Throughout his life he was a man of multitudes and paradoxes. He loathed social contact but then pursued and bedded hundreds or reputedly thousands of women. He would spend lavishly on fanciful movie projects and young starlets but then quibble over a few dollars on the expense sheet. He was a brash, fearless pilot who regularly placed himself at risk during the pioneering days of aviation when he set and broke many speed and distance records, and yet his obsessive–compulsive disorder compelled Hughes to be terrified of dying from germs. His close confidant and advisor, Noah Dietrich, explained in his memoir, ‘There was more than one Howard Hughes.’¹

This got me thinking. Are there people like that today? In recent years there have been Britney, Mel, Winona and Tiger: they all seem to have skeletons in their closets or at least dark sides to their personalities that are so at odds with their public profiles – erratic behaviours that seem so uncharacteristic. The gossip columns thrive on uncovering the hidden truths about celebrities, but are we mere mortals any different? Most of us believe that we are individuals making our own decisions and true to our self, but are we? We may not swing from one extreme to the next as Howard Hughes famously did, but are we more coherent? Is there a single you?

These questions may seem illogical to many. We are so familiar and comfortable with the experience of our self that to question it implies that we may be suffering from mental illness. Almost like asking if we are real or not? And yet, that is the question that is addressed here. Are we all mistaken when it comes to knowing who we are?

Each morning, we wake up and experience a rich explosion of consciousness – the bright morning sunlight, the smell of roast coffee and, for some of us, the warmth of the person lying next to us in bed. As the slumber recedes into the night, we awake to become who we are. The morning haze of dreams and oblivion disperses and lifts as recognition and recall bubble up the content of our memories into our consciousness. For the briefest of moments we are not sure where we are and then suddenly ‘I’, the one who is aware, awakens.² We gather our thoughts so that the ‘I’ who is conscious becomes the ‘me’ – the person with a past. The memories of the previous day return. The plans for the immediate future reformulate. The realization that we have things to get on with reminds us that it is a workday. We become a person whom we recognize.

The call of nature tells us that it is time to visit the bathroom and en route we glance at the mirror. We take a moment to reflect. We look a little older, but we are still the same person who looked in that same mirror every day since we moved in. We see our self in that mirror. This is who we are.

This daily experience of our self is so familiar and yet the brain science shows that this sense of our self is an illusion. The psychologist Susan Blackmore makes the point that the word ‘illusion’ does not mean that it does not exist – rather, an illusion is not what it seems. We all certainly experience some form of self but what we experience is a powerful deception generated by our brains for our own benefit.

But there is a real difficulty in discussing the self illusion. Throughout this book, the terms I, me, my, mine, you, yours, our, us and we are used, which all imply the existence of a self or multiple selves. (I also separate words such as ‘yourself’ into ‘your self’ and ‘ourselves’ into ‘our selves’ for the sake of emphasis.) You might conclude that the premise that the self is an illusion must be false because these terms already acknowledge the existence of the self in the first place. The problem is that there is no simple way around discussing the self without using these words that refer to this human experience most of us have.³

Second, understanding that the self could be an illusion is really difficult. It may be one of the most, if not the most, difficult concept to accept. Our self seems so convincing, so real, so us. But then again, many aspects of our experiences are not what they seem. Take the most lucid experience that you are having right now as you read these words. As your eyes flit across the page, your visual world seems continuous and rich but you are actually only sampling a fraction of the text one bit at one time, rarely reading all the letters in between. Your peripheral vision is smeared and colourless, yet you could swear that it is perfectly clear just like the centre of your visual field. There are two blindspots, the size of lemons at arm’s length, just off-centre from your field of view that you do not even notice. Everything in your visual world is seamless and unbroken, yet your visual world is blacked out for a fraction of a second between eye movements. You are not made aware of any of these imperfections because our brain provides such a convincing cover story. The same deception is true for all human experience from the immediacy of our perception to the contemplation of inner thoughts, and that includes the self.

In challenging what is the self, what most people think is that the self must first be considered. If you were to ask the average person in the street about their self, they would most likely describe the individual who inhabits their body. They believe they are more than just their bodies. Their bodies are something their selves controls. When we look in the mirror, we regard the body as a vessel we occupy. This sense that we are individuals inside bodies is sometimes called the ‘ego theory’, although the philosopher Galen Strawson captures it poetically in what he calls the ‘pearl view’ of the self.⁴ This pearl view is the common notion that our self is an essential entity at the core of our existence that holds steady throughout our life. This ego experiences life as a conscious, thinking person with a unique historical background that defines who he or she is. This is the ‘I’ that looks back in the bathroom mirror and reflects upon who is the ‘me’.

In contrast to this ego view, there is an alternative version of the self, based on the ‘bundle theory’ after the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume.⁵ Three hundred years ago in a dull, drizzly, cold, misty and miserable (or ‘driech’ as we Scots love to say) Edinburgh, Hume sat and contemplated his own mind. He looked in on his self. He tried to describe his inner self and thought that there was no single entity, but rather bundles of sensations, perceptions and thoughts piled on top of each other. He concluded that the self emerged out of the bundling together of these experiences. It is not clear whether Hume was aware of exotic Eastern philosophy but in the sixth century BC, thousands of miles away in much warmer climates, the young Buddha, meditating underneath a fig tree, had reached much the same conclusion with his principle of ‘anatta’ (no self). Buddha was seeking spiritual rather than intellectual enlightenment and thought that this state could only be achieved by attaining anatta through meditation.

Today, the findings from contemporary brain science have enlightened the nature of the self. As far as spirits are concerned, brain science – or neuroscience as it is known – has found little evidence for their existence but much to support the bundle theory as opposed to the ego theory of the self.

If the self is the sum of our thoughts and actions, then the first inescapable fact is that these depend on brains. Thoughts and actions are not exclusively the brain because we are always thinking about and acting upon things in the world with our bodies, but the brain is primarily responsible for coordinating these activities. In effect, we are our brains or at least, the brain is the most critical body part when it comes to who we are. We can transplant or replace many parts of the body but most people would regard the patient to be essentially the same person after the operation. However, if a brain transplant were ever possible, then even though the patient may look the same as they come out of the anaesthetic, most of us believe that they would be someone different – more like the person who donated their brain in the first place.

Some of the most compelling evidence that the self depends on the brain comes from studies of unfortunate individuals who have suffered some form of brain damage either through aging or accident. Their personalities can be so radically changed that, to those who knew them, they become a different person. At the other end of the spectrum, many deliberately alter their brains temporarily with a variety of drugs that affect its workings. Whether by accident, disease or debauchery, these studies show that if the brain is damaged, the person is different. If taking drugs that change functioning alters the brain, the person behaves and thinks differently. So who we are depends on our brain. However, we are not just our brains in isolation. One of the messages that I wish to relay here is that each brain exists in an ocean of other brains that affect how it works.

The second major discovery is that there is no centre in the brain where the self is constructed. The brain has many distributed jobs. It processes incoming information from the external world into meaningful patterns that are interpreted and stored for future reference. It generates different levels and types of motivations that are the human drives, emotions and feelings. It produces all sorts of behaviours – some of them automatic while others are acquired through skill, practice and sheer effort. And then there is mental life. Somehow, this 1.5 kg lump of tissue inside our skull can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, appreciate Van Gogh and enjoy Beethoven. It does this through the guise of a self. But the sense of self that most of us experience is not to be found in any one area. Rather it emerges out of the orchestra of different brain processes like a symphony of the self, just as Buddha and Hume said.

Some modern philosophers⁶ argue that these brain facts alone are sufficient to deny the existence of the self at all. One can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which brain structures are copied or replaced cell by cell until there is none of the original brain material left and yet people maintain an intuition that the self somehow continues to exist independently of all these physical changes. If that were true, then one would have to accept a self that can exist independently of the brain. Most neuroscientists reject that idea. Rather, our brain creates the experience of our self as a model – a cohesive, integrated character – to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout a lifetime, and leave lasting impressions in our memory.

Our brain constructs models of the external world. It can weave experiences into a coherent story that enables us to interpret and predict what we should do next. Our brain simulates the world in order to survive in it. This simulation is remarkable because much of the data that needs processing are corrupted. And yet, our brain fills in missing information, interprets noisy signals and has to rely on only a sample of everything that is going on around us. We don’t have sufficient information, time or resources to work it all out accurately so we make educated guesses to build our models of reality. That working-out includes not only what’s out there in the external world but also what is going on in the internal, mostly unconscious workings of our mind.

Who we are is a story of our self – a constructed narrative that our brain creates. Some of that simulation is experienced as conscious awareness that corresponds to the self illusion that the average person in the street reports. At present we do not know how a physical system like the brain could ever produce those non-physical experiences like the conscious self. In fact, it is turning out to be a very hard problem to solve.⁷ We may never find an answer and some philosophers believe the question is misguided in the first place. Dan Dennett⁸ also thinks the self is constructed out of narratives: ‘Our tales are spun, but for the most part, we don’t spin them; they spin us.’ There is no self at the core. Rather it emerges as the ‘centre of a narrative gravity’. In the same way that we can see a square at the centre of the arrangement in Figure 1, it is an illusion created by the surrounding elements. Take the context away, and the square disappears. In the same way, the self is an illusion created by our brain.

Occasionally, we get a glimpse of the illusions our brains create. We may mishear a comment, bump into things or mistakenly reach for a shadow that looks graspable. This happens when we misinterpret the physical world. The same mistakes also happen in our personal world – the world that our self occupies. We reinterpret our failures as successes. We think we are above average on good attributes and not like others when it comes to behaving badly. We sometimes do things that surprise us or at least surprise others who think they know us well. This is when we do things that seem inconsistent with the story of our self. We say, ‘I was not myself’ or ‘It was the wine talking’ but we still retain a belief that we are an individual, trapped in our bodies, tracing out a pathway through life and responsible for our thoughts and actions. Throughout this book, these assumptions are challenged by demonstrating that who we think we are is much more susceptible to outside influences than we imagine.

Figure 1: An illusory square we experience that isn’t really there

These influences work from the very beginning. Proportionally, humans spend the greatest amount of time in childhood compared to any other animal. This is not only so that we can learn from others, but also so we can learn to become like others. Becoming like others and getting on with them involves creating a sense of who we are – a participating member of the human species.

This development of the self emerges across childhood as the interplay between the modelling brain, constructing stories from experience, and the influences of other people. This does not mean that we are blank slates at birth and that babies are not individuals. Anyone who has raised children or ever encountered identical twins knows they can think and behave differently right from the very beginning even though they are raised in the same environment. Our dispositions vary from one individual to the next, a legacy of our genetic inheritance, no doubt. However, we all share a common goal to become part of the human race through our social interactions and that can only take place when people construct a sense of self.

That process of constructing the self does not end with childhood. Even as adults we are continually developing and elaborating our self illusion. We learn to adapt to different situations. Sometimes we even describe our self illusion as multifaceted as if we have the work self, the home self, the parent self, the political self, the bigoted self, the emotional self, the sexual self, the creative self and even the violent self. They seem to be almost different individuals but clearly there is just one body. We seem to switch effortlessly between these different selves but we would be wrong to think that there is an individual doing the switching. That’s part of the illusion. There is not one self or multiple selves in the first place. Rather, it is the external world that switches us from one character to another. This idea that we are a reflection of the situations is sometimes called the looking-glass self ⁹ – we exist as the reflection of those around us.

Initially as infants, we are bundles of self-interested activity but evolution has pre-programmed our self to emerge and attend to others. Our greatest influence during childhood moves from the immediate family that looks after our needs to the competitive world of young children. We learn to interpret, predict, anticipate and negotiate in the playground. Gradually over late childhood and adolescence we increasingly elaborate the narrative of who we are and eventually strike out to become a character differentiated from those who shaped us. For many adults, adolescence marks the turning point at which we ‘discover’ our true self. We use groups, possessions, tastes, politics and preferences to create the self – an individual that is different. At least, that is the story of self-formation in the West; other cultures provide a different framework that shapes a different type of self. Even hermits and outcasts from society are defined by their rejection of the principles that the rest of us accept. But whether we are distancing our self from the herd, or ingratiating our self as part of the herd, it is the existence of others that defines who we are.

If the self is largely shaped by those around us, what does that mean for our everyday lives? For one thing, it could change our fundamental outlook. Consider a modern day miracle about the self. By the time she was 15 years old, Liz Murray’s mother had died of AIDS and her HIV-infected father had moved into care. Liz found herself homeless and looking after her younger sister. In spite of all these obstacles, she excelled at school and won a scholarship to Harvard University eventually graduating in 2009. Liz’s ‘Homeless to Harvard’ tale is an inspiring account of the triumph of the individual self over adversity. It is the epitome of the American dream, which is why so many love her story. But think again. What is the take-home message? Is it that if we try hard enough, we can all achieve our dreams? Clearly that cannot be true. Homeless to Harvard is more a tale about the inequalities that exist in life. Liz Murray is remarkable, but that means that she is also the exception because most never overcome the hurdles that keep them from success. Many of us consider Liz to be one of life’s ‘winners’ but the flipside is that we all too easily regard others who fall down as ‘losers’. When did this game of life become so unfair that we blame individuals rather than the circumstances that prevent them from achievement? This is known as the fundamental attribution error in human reason¹⁰. When other people screw up it’s because they are stupid or losers but when I screw up it’s because of my circumstances. The self illusion makes the fundamental attribution error an easy fallacy to accept. Also putting all the blame on the individual self is tantamount to excusing all the policies that create inequality in our society. Maybe it’s time to redress this imbalance by rethinking success or failure not so much as issues of the self alone, but more of society in general.

Knowing that the self is an illusion cannot stop you thinking that it exists and even if you succeed, as Buddha and Hume did, then maybe it is best not to try in the first place. But knowledge is power. Understanding that the self is an illusion will help to reconcile the daily inconsistencies that you may experience in the way you think and behave. We are all too quick to notice how others can be manipulated, but we rarely appreciate how our own self is equally under the influence and control of others. That is something worth knowing and watching out for.