The elusive I
Here’s something you can try at home. Or on the bus, for that matter. You can do it with your eyes closed or open, in a quiet room or a noisy street. All you have to do is this: identify yourself.
I don’t mean stand up and say your name. I mean catch hold of that which is you, rather than just the things that you do or experience. To do this, focus your attention on yourself. Try to locate in your own consciousness the ‘I’ that is you, the person who is feeling hot or cold, thinking your thoughts, hearing the sounds around you and so on. I’m not asking you to locate your feelings, sensations and thoughts, but the person, the self, who is having them.
It should be easy. After all, what is more certain in this world than that you exist? Even if everything around you is a dream or an illusion, you must exist to have the dream, to do the hallucinating. So if you turn your mind inwards and try to become aware only of yourself, it should not take long to find it. Go on. Have a go.
Any luck?
Source: Book I of A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume (1739–40)
The moment you became aware of anything it would have been something quite specific: a thought, a feeling, a sensation, a sound, a smell. But in no such case would you have been aware of*yourself*as such.
You can describe each of the experiences you had, but not the you that had them.
But, you might protest, how can I be aware of me if I am the one being aware? For instance, it is true that when I looked at the book in front of me, what I was aware of was the book and not me. But in another sense I was aware that it was*me*seeing the book.
It just isn’t possible to detach myself from the experience. Which is why there is no special awareness of I, only an awareness of what I am aware of.
The self which has the experiences can be seen in exactly the same way. It is true that, if I look at the book in front of me, I am aware not only that there is a visual experience, but that it is an experience from a certain point of view. But nothing about the nature of that point of view is revealed by the experience.
The ‘I’ is thus still a nothing, a contentless centre around which experiences flutter like butterflies.
On this view, if we ask what the self is, the answer is that it is nothing more than the sum of all the experiences that are connected together by virtue of sharing this one point of view.
We have no awareness of what we are, only an awareness of what we experience. That doesn’t mean we don’t exist, but it does mean that we lack a constant core of being, a single self that endures over time, which we so often assume, wrongly, makes us the individuals we are.
The Theseus Ship
‘If you want to live, you’d better tell me which one of these is the real Theseus,’ demanded Ray.
‘That kinda depends,’ came the nervous reply. ‘You see, when we started to repair the ship, we needed to replace lots of parts. Only, we kept all the old parts. But as the work progressed, we ended up replacing virtually everything. When we had finished, some of the guys thought it would be good to use all the old parts to reconstruct another version of the ship. So that’s what we’ve got. On the left, the Theseus repaired with new parts and on the right, the Theseus restored from old parts.’
‘But which one is the genuine Theseus?’ demanded Ray.
‘I’ve told you all I know!’ screamed the guard, as the crony tightened his grip. Ray scratched his head and started to think about how he could get away with both
Source: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
In a way, are we not like Theseus too?
As we go through life, the cells in our body continually die and are replaced.
Our thoughts too change.
So that little of what was in our heads when we were ten years old remains when we are twenty, and these thoughts, memories, convictions and dispositions are in turn replaced as we grow older.
Are we then to say that there is no right answer as to whether we are the same people who we were many years ago?
If the identity of*Theseus*is not a factual matter, then can there be a fact about the identity of anything that gradually changes over time, human beings included?
As pointed out by David Hume, our thought, feeling, conviction, will or the five senses, none of them, alone is the self
As insinuated by The Theseus Ship thought experiment, our thoughts, feelings, personality, body structure all are in continuous flux.
There are certain times, when we don’t consciously control our thoughts (for example, thoughts conjured up during the approach towards slumber or the thoughts that make up the dreams) or feelings (for example, when you feel fear) or body (for example, sleep-walking and reflexive actions).
But there are times when it appears that we consciously control our thoughts, body or sometimes even feelings.
By controlling I mean, directing something in accordance to my intention.
But then, to control my intention I need to intent my intention but to do that I have to intent my intention to intent and so on. It thus becomes an infinite regression.
What we intent or will or desire depends on our likes, dislike, preferences, curiosity or something alike.
There are times when we do things that we don’t like or that we dislike. Such cases occur mostly due to external constraints or limited choice or our like or desire for some probable long-term consequence.
We feel curiosity for something if the thing feels interesting to us or matches some of our preferences, which again depends on our likes or desires.
What we likes or dislike depends on our feelings. Roughly speaking, we like what we feel good about and we dislike what we feel bad about. These feelings are mostly inherent in us or conditioned by society.
So our intentions ultimately depends on our feelings.
We may be able to control or change our feelings but in order to do so we need the intention or desire. But our intentions or desire also depends on feelings. Therefore it is simply a war amongst different feelings all of which in itself may be beyond the control of the self.
What we think also depends on our intent, will, interest, preferences etc. which again can be said to depend on our feelings which again may be beyond control.
In meditative states, it can be discovered that thoughts and feelings comes and goes without any control exerted by the observer.
Therefore, thoughts, feelings and the five senses none are really ‘the self’ when considered isolatedly. Plus, thoughts, feelings and all are pointed out to be inconstant and without any real control. So none of them should have any association with a constant self.
So we must find ‘the self’ if we remove all that is ‘not-self’ i.e, thoughts, feelings and the five senses. But when we do so, there remains no vision, no sound, no feeling, no thought, nothing at all.
So is there no real ‘I’? Is the self in actuality ‘void’?
No. If we believe so, then we are forgetting something. Awareness.
When we see, we are aware of sight, when we listen we are aware of the sound, when it appears that we think, we are aware of thoughts. The fundament of our subjective experience is thus awareness.
If we remove the five senses and thoughts, feelings and every object away from experience, not necessarily nothing remains but awareness without anything to be aware of.
Without awareness there will not be awareness of thoughts, feelings or sensations and thus there will be no experience. Therefore awareness is the necessary element for our subjective experience to arise.
Based on that reasoning, the quality of awareness itself can be considered as the subject of our experience and therefore ‘the self’.
However, it is also true that awareness independent of any object to be aware of, is practically nothing.
Plus there is also no control over our awareness. We cannot make ourselves unaware of pain in a whim.
Even if we can do it without some special mental training, we must need the intent to do so but again control over intention is quite doubtful as explained previously.
So in that sense ‘awareness’ is ‘just is’. It is simply ‘being’. It can be called as ‘self’ in the sense that it is the subject of experience but we like to believe ‘the self’ to be something more: a thinker, a controlling agent and a single consistent entity running the mental processes. In that respect, even awareness is probably a ‘no-self’.
Many of us intuitively believe in the existence of ‘one consistent controlling agent’ behind our thoughts, feelings and such. But from the philosophies mentioned before and even from actual scientific researches, reality appears to be counter intuitive. Internet is real but it is not a single object. Instead, it is a network of networks constantly changing. No single entity or computer ‘runs’ the internet. Our own mind is found to be similar to internet in that respect. It is a dynamic network of multitudes of neurons which determines how we behave but there is no ‘one’ entity behind it all. You may say that you are ‘the awareness’. But its more of ‘a quality’ than anything else;
‘A contentless centre around which experiences flutter like butterflies’.
