The Self
You inside the brain
When we look at the course of evolution, wherein we have been promoted from biological machines to self-aware beings, capable of observing and dissecting the patterns of our own existence, it would almost seem as if this was the plan all along. While evolution has no goal in itself, the idea that we have been made self-aware to come to a point where we are now able to understand the true nature of what we are seems rather compelling and inspiring.
It would then follow that, considering our ingrained biological drive to understand ourselves, we would be naturally eager to make sense of and moreover adopt any new relevant scientific understanding of what we are.
The reality, however, seems to be strikingly different. Far from being a moment of jubilation, most people’s reaction upon hearing or reading about the notion that we are an ever-changing feedback loop of experience is one of apathy and absent-mindedness. They can often logically acknowledge the significance and scientific accuracy of what they’ve just discovered but still find themselves in a state of placid confusion, often wondering if this understanding is supposed to make them fundamentally rethink who they think they are or if it is just a particularly interesting insight that does not necessarily call for a change of paradigm.
Interestingly, this ineptitude to recognize the reality of our true self does not seem to be rooted in narrow-mindedness or dogmatism, but rather on a fundamental misunderstanding regarding consciousness that we are deeply conditioned with. A fallacy that most of us never verbalize or are even aware of and that sits at the heart of our misconceptions regarding our experience.
We believe there is a 'me' inside the brain. Even as you read this book, you've most likely concluded at least subconsciously that there is still a 'you' in the ever-changing feedback loop of consciousness. That while we are an unfathomably complex and rich phenomenon of continuous information processing and near infinite iteration and transmutation, that somehow at every instant and in every loop, a defining part of a single, unified self survives.
We believe this even though each second, the music, the consciousness that emerges from the grey matter mechanisms behind our eyes is different - sometimes unrecognizable so - from what it was a second before. We are never the same, not even for an instant, and yet our experience of the self, of an essential entity at the core of our existence, of an individual inhabiting a body, is so compelling, so inescapably real, that we cannot help but to succumb to its power. Sometimes we manage to get distance from it - while meditating or in those moments of complete awe -, but the feeling soon dissipates as the self triumphantly recoups and retakes our awareness, clouding once again our ability to experience ourselves for what we are.
Throughout the course of our life, we might have come to fixate on a faulty concept of what we are, on stories of a phantom that we define as the self, but we don’t have to keep perpetuating the delusion. In the next topics, we will begin by empirically defining the concept of our true self, proceed by explaining why is our experience of the self so compelling and conclude by revealing how, despite what might seem like an insurmountable feat, we can all develop an awareness where our self-image is in line with what we truly are.
Environment is part of us
As we've thoroughly explored by now, we are the end-product of what seems like infinite loops of neural processes. While, from a neuroscientific point of view, this definition is quite accurate and in line with our empirical observations, it is still nevertheless far from illustrating the grand complexity of what brings us about. To do so, which is to meticulously and scientifically define our true self, we need to consider that each manifestation of what we are is much more than a mere expression of our brain's neural activity - it is also the culmination of all the interaction that led to its emergence.
Consciousness does not emerge from the brain like a genie from a bottle. In fact, without any influence from society, in cases where children grow up in isolation, not raised by humans but among animals, the brain does not adapt to the use of language in its early phases and becomes forever incapable of speaking or even conceptually thinking in the ways we constantly do. So much of what we tend to label as intrinsic personality cannot even exist on a basic level without sufficient interaction.
Likewise, we cannot overlook the major influence that our close groups and the specific cultural setting we happen to be raised in have in defining the particular signatures of our neural activity. We will often learn values and adopt all kinds of different beliefs from our family and friends and be also susceptible to absorb cultural norms based on our gender, class or race, not to mention the many subliminal messages from social media, religion, books, and movies persuasively depicting how we should look like and behave. All of these influences leave their footprints in our nervous system, ultimately determining the kind of person that we become.
When defining the true scientific nature of what we are, we cannot, therefore, neglect our environment. By doing so, we experience a deluded disconnection. Consciousness emerges from the vast interplay of stardust becoming aware, eons of genetic mutation, thousands of generations laying the groundwork of language and culture necessary to form complex thoughts and finally, our current society's conditioning, education, social influences, and parental guidance. All elements combine to generate electrochemical fireworks inside our neurons to eventually create these instances of experience. All of it is interconnected.
There are no limits or borders in what is a part of our existence. Nothing is external. Even from a basic neurological perspective, everything takes place within our consciousness. This has been perhaps best illustrated by accounts of patients who, even after weeks (and months) of having one of their arms surgically removed, still reported experiences of pain, itches, and sensations of warm and cold in a region that was no longer there. These sensations were obviously not taking place in their actual physical body. They were instead being generated in the spatial representation of their body mapped within their brain circuits, suggesting that everything that we experience, whether that is body sensations, emotions or what we see around us, is not really happening externally but is instead a surreptitious creation of our mind.
Ultimately, the separation we perceive between ourselves and our environment is only a conceptual practicality that it's helpful to make sense of the world. When we analyze the whole myriad of processes that have given rise to our particular conscious experience, including but not limited to the evolutionary path of the brain and our cultural background, we come to the natural conclusion that our environment is an intrinsic part of who we are, we simply cannot see ourselves as separate from it.
It comes then as no surprise that the most intellectually and emotionally satisfying programming that our brain is capable of running is fundamentally selfless. In the grand interplay of all things, it becomes clearest of all that our experience is a tool. Likewise, it also becomes apparent that ‘being selfish’ is just a flawed interpretation of what we are. If our environment is a fundamental part of us, every behavior of ours is bound to be a collective action rather than an individualistic one. Even the simple act of taking care of ourselves means taking care of the whole, simply because we are the whole.
Why the self?
When we contemplate the current scientific understanding of what we are, particularly the fact that we are merely the result of our neural activity (which also includes our environment) and we compare it with the current state of modern society, wherein the conception of the self runs deep within our neurochemical pathways, a natural question comes to mind. If this intuitive sense of the self is far from accurately representing what we are, why, then, did we develop it in the first place?
The answer to this question has already been, in truth, touched upon on our last topic. We are social animals. As psychologist Bruce Hood explains, it is not a coincidence that humans spend proportionally the greatest amount of their lifetime in childhood compared to any other animal. Evolution has pre-programmed us to spend most of our juvenile years interpreting and understanding the world around us so that we can learn from others and quickly become like others.
Add that to the fact that we are born into a world where we are continuously subjected to subtle and less subtle indicators that help create and further cement the belief that we are an individual with its own rights, dreams, and freedoms, and the conclusion becomes obvious. The construct of the self is a socially-learned phenomenon. We learn to generate an individualistic intellectual idea of who we are by interacting and reacting to other people.
This is, in psychology, often referred to as the looking-glass self, the idea that our self-image is shaped in the reflection that the world holds up to us. If we compare, for example, how we behave at home or at school, with our parents or with our friends, we will notice that, even if in very subtle ways, we are always a different person. This is not a decision that we consciously make but it is rather a natural consequence of how we change our behavior to fit other people’s reflected opinions and perceptions.
Of course, depending on the peculiarities of human interaction we are subjected to during the course of our lives, our mirrored self might turn out surprisingly different. Anthropologists have long mentioned the marked differences between Westerners and Easterners but perhaps more intriguing are the cases of people who grow up to believe they are a cat trapped inside a human body or a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Ironically, we might find these particular narratives bizarre or even psychotic but the one we are so used to - that we are an individual residing inside a body - while accepted and reinforced by society, is as elusive as any other story we could potentially come up with.
Ultimately, our ability to mirror and mimic people around us is one of the most powerful skills we are born with. It provides the means via which we gradually become able to see ourselves through the eyes of others, learning who we are and how we fit into the world around us. And since, due to a lack of understanding, the conception of a self has become omnipresent in our society, with sufficient and repeated human interaction, that’s what we have come to embrace.
Even though scientists readily agree that the self is merely an intellectual construct that we’ve created through interaction with other people, many still strangely claim that having a self-image is an inevitable outcome of our experience. That while the self cannot be physically found inside our brain and does not represent the ever-changing nature of what we are, the brain will still manage to generate a self-conception given adequate interaction with others. This is perhaps one of the most significant and limiting misconceptions of science at the time of this writing. Despite clear empirical evidence that the mental construct of the self is not in line with what we are, scientists keep perpetuating the delusion. Upon inspection, the reason seems clear. Scientists too have come to adopt their own self-narrative and are nowadays deeply attached to it. And since negating the self would mean, from their perspective, to fundamentally question their long-held idea of who they are, they never dare to contemplate the possibility that their self-conception could be different. That if they had, for example, been taught about their true nature from an early age, they could have perfectly developed a ‘self’ in line with the scientific understanding of what they are. Under these circumstances, where, on one end, science makes it clear that the self does not exist and, on the other end, scholars still helplessly identify with it, the scientific consensus eventually found intellectual solace on the sketchy notion that the self is an illusion - it’s not that it doesn’t exist, it just isn’t what we think it is.
A common argument to legitimize why we need an experience of the self is the idea that we need some sort of reference point to make sense of the multitude of events that bombard our senses throughout our lifetime. This notion is, however, totally unfounded. We can perfectly summarize and organize all external input without equating ourselves with the idea of an individualistic self.
Self on autopilot
In our last topic, in answer to the question why we have developed a sense of individuality, we’ve concluded that the self is a socially-learned phenomenon (meaning it is learned in interaction with other people). However, this observation only tells us half of the story. It explains why and how the self has emerged and what shaped it, but it doesn’t elucidate why our experience of the self is today so compelling. If there is, as we’ve thoroughly explored at the beginning of this chapter, no internal individual residing inside our body, why then does it feel so strongly that it does?
This is not an easy question to tackle but if we build on the understanding that we are merely the result of our particular brain configuration and the neural activity that it produces, we can assume that the answer will be found in the specialized mechanical patterns by which the idea of the self has been written into the microscopic hardware of our brain.
One particular aspect that seems to provide an important initial peek into the specifics of this process is the way the brain wires itself. While, not so long ago, scientists believed that the brain’s structure did not change after childhood becoming hardwired as we aged, modern research has veritably demonstrated that our brain is always reorganizing itself by forming new neural connections and altering existing ones, even at later stages of our life.
This reorganization process is called neuroplasticity and the way it works is quite simple. Depending on what we are doing at each point in time, our brain will physically modify itself in accordance. Neural pathways that are frequently used will develop stronger connections and those that are rarely (or never) used eventually die. This is the physical basis of why ruminating over a thought or repeating the same actions (like washing our teeth) increases their power. Over time and with constant neurological stimulation, these activities end up becoming automatic, sinking below the level of conscious control.
With this information in hand, we can already better understand why our self-narrative became so compelling over time. The experience of the self is merely the end result of physical changes in our brain. During all these years of channeling our emotions through the concept of the self, we’ve stimulated the same neural connections over and over again and created bundles of instinctive and individualistic thoughts and beliefs that have been carved into the structure of our neurons to the point it all became second-nature.
Our mind is essentially being run by a self on autopilot. Yet, this doesn’t mean that we have been irreversibly subdued by it. By combining the right mindset with the right information, we can still behave in a way that is completely in line with our true nature.
How to align with what we are
Having now reached a point in our examination where it has become clear what our true nature and purpose is and also the reason why we have come to perceive ourselves wrongly, the next most obvious step becomes understanding how can we detach from this idea of an individualistic entity or self at the center of our existence and instead embrace the true all-encompassing nature of what we are.
We’ve seen in our previous topic that our mind is being run by a self in autopilot and, because of this, sometimes people assume that detaching from the self must require some sort of inner transformation wherein every single one of our self-centered thoughts has been eradicated from our mind. However, it has nothing to do with that. Detaching from the self is not about annihilating or minimizing thoughts. In fact, it’s not about thoughts at all. Detaching from the self is simply about acknowledging the truth of what we are and accept that life is not about ourselves but about doing what needs to be done for the progress of our species. That's all it is. It’s about reflecting on these insights, take full ownership of them and translate them into action.
Of course, one could still argue that self-centered thoughts might potentially get in our way and that the ideal situation would be to attain an awareness where we would no longer be identifying with them but the problem with this approach is that first, it is completely unrealistic and second, even if such state of awareness exists, reaching it would only make sense insofar as it would lead us to taking action - or more specifically to a change in mindset where we would no longer be focusing on ourselves but on the betterment of the world - and there are actually quite a few examples of people (among them monks and self-professed ‘enlightened’ beings) that, while proclaiming to have achieved this higher state of awareness, still spend the majority of their time focusing on… well, themselves.
So we really shouldn’t be worrying about what kind of thoughts we have or obsessing about ‘dissociating’ from them. To detach from the self, reality is much simpler than that. As we have said before, all we have to do is acknowledge that the self does not represent what we are, accept that we are a tool made for progress and then start taking action on that understanding. By doing so, not only would we be automatically and naturally getting into a more selfless state (where thoughts are no longer an issue), we would also be already actively working towards making a positive difference in the world which is what someone ‘detached’ from their sense of self would be (or should be) doing anyway.
Once we manage to reach an awareness where our self-image is in line with our true self, we become, in a sense, one with the biological machine that we are. A state of clarity with little conflict that can be best described as a choiceless awareness arises and what matters at that point is merely doing what makes sense to move life forward.