Here I argue that our sense of self is an illusion and there is no “you” as you know it.
This time, I’m writing to explain a recurrent tweet that I’m automatically posting every week. Here is the very first one, from 2018 with:
Interestingly, I have a couple more of these tweets that will repeat every week as a reminder for me and my fellow tweeters, but this one seems to be more engaging. Especially during the last three months, I was asked to explain it, so here I am. You probably guessed already, a philosophical freakshow is open to diving in, and there are active, heated debates for centuries addressing the concept of self and personhood from different angles. Nope, I’m not an expert there so I won’t go even close to any of them. We, neuroscientists with our expensive brain imaging devices, jumped in at one point and provided the answer, empirically. It’s all in the brain and “you are your connectome”. So am I going to repeat the same things though? Compelling since it’s my comfort zone, but I try not to flood this post with jargons and anatomical names that makes no sense for others. What I want to do is to stay in an even more comfortable zone and give a personal example. But don’t worry if you’re here for the science, I have some cases too so let’s get into it.
It’s me, Kayson:
Alright so people who know me, including myself, mostly agree on one thing that I rarely get angry. I can’t remember any specific event that I lost my shit started shouting or even getting physical. This simply never happened. Sure, I remember just a couple of times that I got pretty angry, but I could keep myself together, and that’s it. I am known to be generally “chill” and good at controlling my anger. Something wrong happens to a group that I’m in, many of them usually get pissed off, some get angry, and then there’s me sitting there like I’m a piece of furniture or something. I was kinda proud of it thinking “look at this extraordinary boy who can make logical decisions in times of conflicts because he just won’t get mad enough.”
I was even curious how someone can be so furious that end up killing the other person, for example, over a parking space. “Bruh it’s just a parking space uh people are so not cool.” This is the image I have about myself in my mind, and in this particular example, others agree. Let’s stick to it then since it’s a strong case in which everyone has roughly the same idea. So, it’s me, chill and proud. This is one aspect of the “self” I have in mind when I’m thinking about myself — a person with a handful of features that are stable during the time.
This is also how I know others, try describing a friend for someone else (no I’m not a pimp, yet) I go first by some physical characteristics and then start talking about how kind and responsible they are or how easily you can put on a prank call and fool them, for example. What am I doing is providing an overview of that person that I gained over time. I know my friend is a cheerful person because he was like this most of the time and if one day I see him not smiling like always I know there is something wrong. I believe it works the same way for ourselves too; you remember yourself being preoccupied with stuff being clean, you’ll feel uncomfortable not taking the second shower of the day. Others probably agree because they saw you cleaning more than what they saw before with their own others, so you are a clean person in their eyes. You were like this, and everyone expects you to stay like this because, hey, this is you.
We also know how people change under the influence of drugs, alcohol, stress, or even hunger. I bet you all know a person who becomes pretty hard to hang out with when they’re hungry. Even that you can still rely on and add to the person’s characteristics database that you have in you, you saw it happen before many times, it’s reliable so even when they “change” you can pinpoint the cause and expect them to “change back” after it’s fixed. All these characteristics, transient or “stable” form a person for us. You know your mother will be pissed off if she comes back and the dishes are still dirty. You know your mom, and you can predict her behaviour.
It’s a me, Kayson:
So far I said we observe and form an image of ourselves and others in our minds, assuming it’s a “stable” image. Reliable enough that the whole goddamn human interaction is based on these images, haven’t you had hard times around a person who is moody and unpredictable? One day they smile at you kindly, and the next day they don’t even know you anymore wtf. Or all those heartbroken lovers who said “I don’t even know you anymore” before they leave the person who they thought they know better than themselves. Well, somehow Mario got it right, and we didn’t. He was introducing himself by saying: “It’s a me, Mario!” even though we all knew that poor little bastard. It’s not me who we think we know, it’s a me, it’s a you, adding that tiny “a” is implies all the other me and yous that we might end up being after a stroke or an acid trip. It’s not a single reliable core that stays like this forever or even a long time. All I’m trying to say is, you need to accept that “there is nothing guaranteed here”. Let me go back to my chill self to wrap up the personal story.
I was taking medications for my OCD for about seven years, and finally, my doctor thought it’s enough, and I can cut it out. I did, I slowly reduced the dose and one day I simply didn’t take any. I was expecting some withdrawal symptoms, and I started experiencing them, random brain-zaps, feeling dizzy, some sticky thoughts, but what I didn’t expect at all was being in a state of constant irritation. Holy shit I was so angry at everything for no reason, my backpack is laying there like a drunk redneck that motherfucker better be upright NOW or I’ll throw it out. I’m getting errors while programming (stealing people’s codes actually) and I so much want to smash the screen. When going out for shopping and why every single person in that grocery shopping became so annoying suddenly just fucking move.
Okay, so what just happened? I’m not chill anymore. Is this the real me who was chill because of the medications, or is this just another side effect of cutting the medicine? As I’m writing this post, I’m still not sure because the rage attacks are fewer but still there sometimes and actually, now it looks more normal. I feel annoyed by the stuff that people get annoyed by. But what about the “me” we all knew? That was the person I was referring to as myself, and even I’m confused by this new one. In my case, I’m still pretty predictable by others since it was just a tiny part of my self that is now altered. But it’s pointing to a terrifying fact, we change. We change so smoothly that we can’t even remember what we were thinking when posting that emo picture two years ago. This is the reason I’m having that tweet repeating every week. I wanted to have a reminder to look back and see what changed. I realized I’m coming up with something that makes so much sense, revolutionary, and after just one or two months when I look back at it, I just want to burn every evidence of its existence.
What just happened within these two months and you know what? I’m going to drop it now: It’s happening for all of us at every moment. This is the scary part because we love people, and we don’t want them to change. People love us, and they don’t want us to change, but every day, probably hour, we are slowly changing like a plant doing its stuff in an ultra-slow speed. This robust self that we rely on is just a high-viscosity fluid being pulled and pushed around by many unknown factors, including your biology. So where are the borders of the self you have in mind? At one point, it doesn’t feel like you are the same person, but you can’t remember waking up saying “oh girl from today I’m a different person.” Those events are rare but excellent examples of how elastic we are.
It’s a me, neuroscientist:
One of the most famous cases in neuroscience is a person called Phineas Gage. Just google and read his detailed story if you’re into this stuff but briefly:
He was a nice decent family man. He was a railroad worker, and that’s how he ended up being a complete asshole in less than a month. What happened was that he had a pole pierced his brain due to an accidental explosion and survived the whole event. As you can see below, after the incident, he became socially intolerable, reaching a point that he was “no longer Gage” according to his friends.
I don’t know if he knew that he’s changed, but there’s another interesting example coming from a neuroscientist who lost her mind. Barbara Lipska developed a brain tumour, and in her book, she described how she was thinking during those days. For her, she was the same; it wasn’t her who changed; everyone else was annoying. There are tons of examples out there, but we don’t really need to search for them, the most horrifying neurological disorder (in my opinion) shows us how this fluid personhood slowly changes as the disease gets worse — Alzheimer’s disease. Usually, what you see is a person who has problems remembering names, then they start wandering around and lose their way back home. They can’t remember their family members and confuse everything with everything. If you know anyone with Alzheimer (I’m really sorry then) or you heard the stories from your friends, you probably know that there’s a point that some of them become paranoid and irritated just like Barbara Lipska. Thinking that their children want to steal their stuff or poison them. It’s not a transient drug-induced change, and this is who they became. This is the new self that you don’t really know anymore, and it’s excruciating because, on the surface, they still look the same.
Conclusions:
Alright, let’s put everything back together and see if I could make myself clear by just scratching the surface and jumping around like a chimp. You read the general arguments, the self as we know it is an illusion. The key term is “as we know it”. I’m not saying there is no “self” what I’m saying is this rigid core that we build our interactions upon are, like many other concepts, something that is constructed by us to make everything more predictable. It is a dynamic thing that can be changed quickly in response to drugs, or slowly because of the brain shrinking, puberty, stress, trauma, literally everything even a dull life. It makes sense to be like this, our environments, our lives are dynamic we just can’t afford to stay the same. “you” is built-in and is maintained by your brain so yes you kinda are your connectome, but almost anything can reshape this connectome to some extent.
I say if you accept this dynamism, then it might release you from those expectations that you are having from others. They change, get used to it. You change, try controlling it yourself.
