So do I. That’s an irritatingly large question, but it’s one I’d like to underline my project with. I have been privileged to speak with, I think, an astonishingly wide range of people in my life. Enough people to understand just what a variety there exists of paradigms, rationalizations, mindsets, cultures, etc.
It is more than confusing.
And despite the advanced social and cooperative abilities of our species, we have not yet developed a reliable way to teach ourselves that our perspectives are fallible. My perspective is fallible. Untrustworthy. Psychology and neuroscience have made strides in recent decades in realizing that memory does not work the way it feels like it does. It is not a digital capture device. The sounds, images, smells, emotions, what I did, what the other did, causalities and streams of consciousness, and what we were so certain of, and how that has changed. It is all blurry. Fuzzy, and subject to change. We have all had the experience of remembering together, and having the impression change due to feedback. And yet, what choice do we have but to continue remembering, and basing our decisions on our experience?
Our ‘minds’ are not a command-and-control system operated from somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears. Our experience of ourselves, and thus of the world, depends on whether or not we’ve eaten lately – and what it was. It depends on the climate, on the day’s weather, on whether our parents and grandparents and so on and whatnot had good lives, and how they spent their days and weeks and years.
Most people feel strongly that they are in control of themselves. They sense, intuitively, that their decisions are wholly theirs.
I don’t believe this is a socio-cultural schema. I think it has to do with perspective. So, here’s our first thought experiment: If some kind of wizard snuck into your room tonight and swapped your face for someone else’s, how long would it take for you to notice?
I mean, how important is your face to you? It’s hard to think of a body part we rely on more for a sense of identity. And yet, primitive humans, genetically identical to you and me, except with no mirrors, might never have known, might never have had a chance to really inspect their own facial features.
From my perspective, the side of my nose is visible. I can see my tongue if I try really hard (don’t ask me to speak at the same time), a bit of my eyebrows, and some of my mustache. I can technically see the inside of my eyelids, but it’s not a super interesting view for very long.
So, how would you know? You would need someone else to tell you. You would need their help. This is a useful analogy for many other questions of self-identity.
I would like to take an aside to emphasize that this is not a trivial subject. Outside of situations requiring immediate and utter attention, usually in order not to die, most people spend the majority of their time worrying about what they look like, and what the other people they encounter throughout the day think of them. If you spend most of your time alone, chances are you wish you didn’t, and you still obsess with what other people think of you. In situations of extreme isolation, it isn’t considered an illness to start hallucinating yourself some company. You tell someone that’s happened to you, they’ll probably just understand.
And yet, I didn’t choose the colour of my eyes, or my hair. Not my height, not my body hair, not the proportions and ratios of my limbs, or the base functionality of my proprioception or immune system. I didn’t choose my parents’ professions, their ethnicities, their social abilities, their cultural background. I had no say in the religion I grew up in, where I went to school, the music I was exposed to, how my friends behaved.
How do you know what foods you like, or who you’re sexually attracted to, or what style of clothing you like to wear?
You don’t get to make those choices, and yet how important are they to your sense of yourself? How important was your basic municipal infrastructure to how you see the world? Have modern plumbing, electricity, educational opportunities, and supermarkets played a role in the making of you?
How many of us feel closely connected with an utterly fictional character, and yet have never even heard the name of the human being who first conceived of that prototype? The mannerisms of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean have really influenced me. That’s not a choice I made, it’s a form of entertainment that still makes me laugh.
These are not examples of injustices and outrages that need to be corrected. We do not need to attack a social institution or burn down a bureaucracy in order to take back control. This is not new, it did not happen because of the internet, or the theories of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, or Milton Friedman, or because modern-day humans are full of micro-plastics. This is just the way we are.
You and I are part of what is around us. When I think of the whys and the meanings (gawd, humans love their meanings), I try to think of them as about 50% me, and 50% my environment. It is almost certainly not that ratio, I don’t think it is actually 50/50. It’s just a mnemonic, a useful concept.
After all, I wouldn’t need to figure out how to respond to my child’s temper tantrum if they weren’t having one. How I manage my work relationships depends on how my co-workers behave, and the ’emotional health’ of generational farming families has a lot to do with climate and weather and animal behavior and geology and the availability of fertilizers like urea, diammonium phosphate, and potash.
We have to be humble. And if we want to see ourselves, and understand the nature of the reality we are experiencing, we need mirrors. We literally cannot do it alone, for basic physical reasons. Even if my eyes were on stalks, I still wouldn’t be able to see the eye I was seeing with, would I? That would throw a real wrench into my instinctive existentialism, but I digress.
There are many voices. This one is mine. I hope you’ll join me as I continue to try to understand.
