Sounds pretty interesting, and like more than the usual neuroscience BS that passes for a study of mind. This vision includes the perceived world as the host of an embedded consciousness - with the Buddhist idea that the self does not exist. The reviewer is dismayed that the author seeks to use metaphor to suggest what science can only intuit - but the book sounds interesting. I'll have to read it to know for sure.
Brain science and the search for the self
- 20 March 2009 by A C Grayling
AFTER John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, he sent copies to various savants of his acquaintance, asking for comments and in particular for advice on whether he had left out anything essential - for if so, he could add it to a second edition. His correspondent William Molyneaux of Dublin replied that Locke needed to say something about personal identity: that is, what makes a person the same person throughout their life.
Belief in the idea of a substantial soul - a "you" that is separate from your body - was waning. In the absence of this metaphysical entity as a convenience for underpinning personal identity, what, asked Molyneaux, makes the retired general continuous with the eager subaltern of 40 years before, and he with the red-cheeked baby in his nurse's arms 20 years before that? In response, Locke added a chapter to his second edition which instantly caused a storm of controversy and has been famous ever since in the annals of philosophy.
In that chapter Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self.
The divines, represented by Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, took umbrage and attacked Locke for ignoring the immortal soul. In 1712 The Spectator magazine ran a front-cover demand that "the wits of Kingdom" should get together in conference to settle the matter of personal identity and selfhood, because the controversy was getting out of control. In 1739, when David Hume published the first volume of his Treatise on Human Nature, he stated that there is no such thing as the self, for if one conducts the empirical inquiry of introspecting - looking within oneself - to see what there is apart from current sensations, feelings, desires and thoughts, one does not find an extra something, a "self", over and above these things, which owns them and endures beyond them.
Thus in 50 years the unreflective idea that each individual has an immortal soul as the basis of their selfhood had changed utterly. For millennia before Locke, no one had so much as raised the question. But it was no surprise that the question should suddenly become urgent as the Enlightenment
dawned, with its central idea of the autonomous individual who is a bearer of rights and responsible for his or her own moral outlook; such an idea needs a robust idea of selfhood, and the philosophers eagerly tried to make sense of it.
Hume's sceptical view did not prevail. Kant argued that logic requires a concept-imposing self to make experience possible, and the Romantics made the self the centre of each individual's universe: "I am that which began," wrote Swinburne in Hertha, "Out of me the years roll, out of me God and Man." Without a deep idea of the self there could be no Freud or psychoanalysis.
So fundamental is the idea of the self to modern human consciousness that one would expect developments in neuroscience to have a direct bearing on it. And as Thomas Metzinger argues in his stimulating new book The Ego Tunnel, reviewed on page 44 of this issue, that is exactly what is happening - with surprising and often disconcerting results.
A C Grayling is a philosopher at Birkbeck, University of London
With that excellent introduction, here is the review of the book, which is now on my wish list at Amazon.
- Book information
- The Ego Tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self by Thomas Metzinger
- Published by: Basic Books
- Price: $27.50
- ISBN:
WHAT is the self? One answer is that it is the diamond in the rough that is you, the unique, immutable and indestructible jewel that makes each person who they are, the being amidst the becoming, the unfluxable within the flux. Kant called it the Transcendental Ego, which stands behind experience as the condition of its possibility. An alternative view endorsed by Buddha, Heraclitus, John Locke, David Hume and William James is that the self does not exist.
Naturalists tend to agree - we each have our own and only our own experiences thanks to the way organisms are designed. The consensus among contemporary philosophers and mind scientists is that the self is a forensic concept, not a scientific one, and therefore not a member of the ontological table of elements.
Surely, though, there is the experience of psychological continuity and first person-ness that makes me feel like I have a special relationship with myself. What lies behind this selfy feeling? In The Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger offers this explanation: "The phenomenal Ego is not some mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image... By placing the self-model within the world-model, a center is created. That center is what we experience as ourselves, the Ego." Our sense of self is a virtual simulation within a larger simulation of an external reality which is larger still. This idea is cashed out in the rather forgettable metaphor of the ego tunnel. "What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there... The ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality." All of this is created behind the scenes by the brain. If you think you have a self, Metzinger says, it is because you are tricked by your psycho-biology, which keeps track of your states, preferences, memories and so on.
This is pretty much the whole theory, "a stunningly original exploration of human consciousness", according to the book jacket. Given the consensus among scientists and philosophers that there is no self, one wonders why Metzinger applauds his own view as radical (authors approve book jackets). He adds that coming to terms with the non-existence of the self is required if we are to solve the philosophical problem of consciousness. This makes it sound as if consciousness researchers are in the grip of the self illusion - they are not.
Even if there are people who still believe in the existence of a self, I doubt they believe in the dopey idea that the self is an actual homunculus, the straw man in the skull whom Metzinger relentlessly targets. More widespread than the self illusion is the view that humans have souls, but Metzinger does nothing to explain how belief in personal immortality may or may not be tied to views about the self.
The best parts of The Ego Tunnel are those where Metzinger surmises about where and how our virtual realities are created in the brain. The worst are when he makes vague yet grandiose statements, weaving metaphor upon metaphor, then decorating it with an acronym or two.
Grandiose philosophy is so 19th-century, and it is particularly unbecoming at a time when the problem of consciousness requires the efforts of many worker bees, what Locke called "underlabourers". There is no need for a "stunningly original" theory for now, especially one that isn't the slightest bit original. Nothing is gained. Trees are harmed. And all for the sake of offing that little man in the mind who hasn't been spotted since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind back in 1949. Pitching the idea that "we are self-less ego machines" gets Kant off Metzinger's back, but the rest of us were already content with the notion that there is no transcendental ghost in our heads.
Owen Flanagan is a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University in North Carolina
No comments:
Post a Comment