The Banana Peel Project

[What follows is a work in progress.  More to come.]

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has a rather amazing article in November’s The Atlantic magazine discussing how recent research suggests that we may not be alone in our brains.  Instead, he suggests that “each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another.”  Bloom describes several ways of thinking about the ways that our many selves cooperate and compete, using examples from psychiatry (dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia), social psychology (heuristics and context), virtual worlds (avatars in games like World of Warcraft), psychopharmacology (Adderall), neurology (hierarchical systems), and self-help (dieting and putting those cookies “just out of reach”).

Bloom acknowledges that the idea that each individual consists of multiple distinct selves is one that dates back to antiquity, citing Plato as well as more contemporary thinkers such as Scottish philosopher David Hume and American poet Walt Whitman.  In The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, Michel Foucault identifies this aspect of Plato’s thinking, pointing specifically to a section of the Republic in which Plato specifically describes the ongoing battle between selves.

The expression self-control seems to want to indicate that in the soul of the man himself there is a better part and a worse part; whenever what is by nature the better part is in control of the worse, this is expressed by saying that the man is self-controlled or master of himself, and this is a term of praise. (p. 68)

So in this view, which self is gifted with the recognition of being the “real” one–the winner or the loser?  Foucault argues that in classical Greek thought, “with regard to the victory or the defeat of oneself over oneself, the speaker places himself on the side of the first.”  As philosopher Jerry Fodor wrote, when it comes to the winner of this intramental battle, “by God, it had better be me.”

As Bloom writes, we do–most of the time–talk about ourselves in a way that points to the existence of a more or less consistent self.  While our perceptions and goals may be scattered across a variety of temporal and spatial dimensions, we do tend to refer to our morning pre-caffeinated selves as ourselves.  Here’s one simple and schematic way to think about this tension between our multiple selves and our long-term, coherent selves: Your response to the simple question, “What are you?” is going to depend greatly on the context in which I ask the question.  You might answer, “I’m a veterinarian” or “I’m a woman” depending on where and when I’m asking.  But does this mean that you’re either a vet or a woman?  Of course not–you’d say that you’re always both, and that you’re merely identifying the aspect of your self that you perceive to be the object of my query.

This tendency to refer to oneself as a long-term self even while acknowledging the relative relevance or irrelevance of particular aspects of that self points to what I believe to be the underlying factor in all this talk about the mind as a “community of selves.”  How can we account for the diversity of fields–philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, etc.–that provide evidence for such a multiplicity of individualities within a single person?  It is, ultimately, language that unites these fields.  Philosophers and historians have offered some powerful ways to think about the relationship between language and the experience of subjectivity that might shed some light on the assumptions at work in all of these disciplines.

Although they are far from the only ones to have written about it, and although they are the products of very different eras and disciplines, both George Herbert Mead and Daniel Dennett have offered interesting ways of working out the relationship between language and subjectivity. Writing around 1913, sociologist Mead used linguistic metaphors to describe the process by which the self arises out of social experience in his essay entitled “Self.”  Mead argued that consciousness was natural and automatic while self-consciousness arises only when the individual becomes “an object to itself.”  The adoption of this “objective perspective” can only occur when the individual takes the attitudes of other individuals toward himself by interacting with his social group through play and games. For Mead, therefore, the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness is identical to the linguistic difference between subject and object, or “I” and “me.”  The “I” is the active agent of consciousness which cannot perceive itself without the (socially generated) “me:” “I cannot turn around quickly enough to catch myself” (p. 229).

Philosopher Dennett, for his part, describes a fascinating thought experiment, a game that we can play with ourselves that reveals the contextual dependence of our notions of selfhood.  In his famous and extremely readable essay “Where Am I?”, Dennett imagines that his brain has been surgically removed from his body and shipped to Texas, where it sits in a vat of fluid and controls his body via radio remote.

“Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain.  The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’”  So here we all are: Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett.  Now, where am I? And when I think “where am I?” where’s that thought tokened?  Is it tokened in my brain, lounging about in the vat, or right here between my ears where it seems to be tokened? Or nowhere? Its temporal coordinates give me no trouble; must it not have spatial coordinates as well? I began making a list of the alternatives. (p. 220)

The closest Dennett comes to offering an answer to these questions is in his discussion of the role of perspective in shaping our perceptions of self.  He proposes that one possible answer is that “[a]t any given time a person has a point of view, and the location of the point of view (which is determined internally by the content of the point of view) is also the location of the person” (p. 221).  Yet this idea is not, he argues, without its problems–the location or status of our selves can, in many cases, prove remarkably resistant to shifts in points of view.

Point of view clearly had something to do with personal location, but it was itself an unclear notion.  It was obvious that the content of one’s point of view was not the same as or determined by the content of one’s beliefs or thoughts.  For example, what should we say about the point of view of the Cinerama viewer who shrieks and twists in his seat as the roller-coaster footage overcomes his psychic distancing?  Has he forgotten that he is safely in the theater? (p. 221)

Of course not.  Our selves are not merely points of view; but neither are they merely set in stone, flesh, or blood.

As it turns out, economics actually offers a pretty useful way to think about this fundamental relationship between perspective and embodiment.  Bloom’s article pays close attention to Thomas Schelling and John Ester’s idea of “self-binding,” the way that “the dominant self schemes against the person it might potentially become.”  Undoubtedly, we are all familiar with the strategy of making “undesired” activities difficult, impractical, or impossible in order to prevent ourselves from performing them.  Hiding cigarettes, not buying junk food, turning off our cell phones, disabling our wireless cards are all, in this way, self-binding activities.  But we can bind our selves in positive ways, too: promising a teacher that a paper will be in at a particular time, putting on our gym shoes, and–perhaps most poignantly–taking drugs.  Of course, there is a broad array of problems that arise when we try to describe the individual as some kind of rational economic actor; this discussion will have to wait for another time.  Nevertheless, self-binding does point to the materiality of the negotiations carried out between our immediate and long-term selves.

Bloom writes that psychopharmacology can allow us to “chemically boost the long-term self” in a way that serves the interests of the self that physically consumes them.  It is in this perceived relationship between the immediate self that opens the bottle and swallows the pill and the long-term self that is being produced in that consumption, that Bloom’s “community of selves” emerges.  It is this kind of binding, this kind of agonistic interplay of selves that drives a whole series of questions about the relationship between selves and technologies of self.

So what is this long-term self?  Remembering Mead’s and Dennett’s attention to language and perspective, I wonder if perhaps there is something more to be said about the role of narrative in providing the contours of a “meta-” self.  Certainly, there is no getting outside language when it comes to human experience.  But it’s just as important to remember that language–the negotiation between Mead’s “I” and “me” as well as the relationality of embodiment and perspective that Dennett describes–is always (not “also”) a material practice whose semantics and pragmatics are always intertwined.  Technologies of self that allow us to bind our selves selectively and in different ways–whether exemplified as drugs or narratives, material or linguistic technologies–are this relationship between self and self, as they simultaneously render self-control both possible and desirable.

(Thanks to Mind Hacks for the original link.)