The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity

61. THE TELECLONE FALL FROM MARS TO EARTH

You see the moon rise in the east. You see the moon rise in the west. You watch two moons moving toward each other across the cold black sky, one soon to pass behind the other as they continue on their way. You are on Mars, millions of miles from home, protected from the killing, frostless cold of the red Martian desert by fragile membranes of terrestrial technology—protected but stranded, for your spaceship has broken down beyond repair. You will never ever return to Earth, to the friends and family and places you left behind.

But perhaps there is hope. In the communication compartment of the disabled craft, you find a Teleclone Mark IV teleporter and instructions for its use. If you turn the teleporter on, tune its beam to the Teleclone receiver on Earth, and then step into the sending chamber, the teleporter will swiftly and painlessly dismantle your body, producing a molecule-by-molecule blueprint to be beamed to Earth, where the receiver, its reservoirs well stocked with the requisite atoms, will almost instantaneously produce—from the beamed instructions—you! Whisked back to Earth at the speed of light, into the arms of your loved ones, who will soon be listening with rapt attention to your tales of adventures on Mars.

One last survey of the damaged spaceship convinces you that the Teleclone is your only hope. With nothing to lose, you set the transmitter up, flip the right switches, and step into the chamber. Five, four, three, two, one, FLASH! You open the door in front of you and step out of the Teleclone receiver chamber into the sunny, familiar atmosphere of Earth. You’ve come home, none the worse for wear after your long-distance Teleclone fall from Mars. Your narrow escape from a terrible fate on the red planet calls for a celebration, and as your family and friends gather around, you notice how everyone has changed since last you saw them. It has been almost three years, after all, and you’ve all grown older. Look at Sarah, your daughter, who must now be eight and a half. You find yourself thinking, “Can this be the little girl who used to sit on my lap?” Of course it is, you reflect, even though you must admit that you do not so much recognize her as extrapolate from memory and deduce her identity. She is so much taller, looks so much older, and knows so much more. In fact, most of the cells now in her body were not there when last you cast eyes on her. But in spite of growth and change, in spite of replacement of cells, she’s the same little person you kissed good-bye three years ago.

Then it hits you: “Am I, really, the same person who kissed this little girl good-bye three years ago? Am I this eight-year-old child’s mother or am I actually a brand new human being, only several hours old, in spite of my memories—or apparent memories—of days and years before that?” Did this child’s mother recently die on Mars, dismantled and destroyed in the chamber of a Teleclone Mark IV?

Did I die on Mars? No, certainly I did not die on Mars, since I am alive on Earth. Perhaps, though, someone died on Mars—Sarah’s mother. Then I am not Sarah’s mother. But I must be! The whole point of getting into the Teleclone was to return home to my family. But I keep forgetting; maybe I never got into that Teleclone on Mars. Maybe that was someone else—if it ever happened at all.

Is that infernal machine a teleporter—a mode of transportation—or, as the brand name suggests, a sort of murdering twinmaker? Did Sarah’s mother survive the experience with the Teleclone or not? She thought she was going to. She entered the chamber with hope and anticipation, not suicidal resignation. Her act was altruistic, to be sure—she was taking steps to provide Sarah with a loved one to protect her—but also selfish—she was getting herself out of a jam and into something pleasant. Or so it seemed. “How do I know that’s how it seemed? Because I was there; I was Sarah’s mother thinking those thoughts. I am Sarah’s mother. Or so it seems.”

A song or a poem or a movie can undoubtedly be teleported. Is a self the sort of thing—a thing “made of information”—that can be teleported without loss? Is our reluctance to admit the teleportation of people a bit like the anachronistic resistance, recently overcome in most quarters, to electronically scanned legal signatures on documents? (I learned in 2011 that Harvard University’s Society of Fellows would not accept a scanned signature on my letter of recommendation; they required some dry ink that had actually been laid down by the motion of my actual hand, and it took me half a day of riding around in taxis in Beirut to get, sign, and express-mail back the relevant form—on cream-colored bond paper. It is my understanding that the Society has now changed its policy, but I hope Harvard still insists on putting wax seals on their diplomas. There is a place for tradition, in all its glorious gratuitousness.)

62. THE SELF AS THE CENTER OF NARRATIVE GRAVITY

What is a self? Philosophers have been grappling with this question for centuries. The Christian concept of an immortal soul, immaterial and inexplicable, captivated thinkers and deflected serious investigation for centuries, but it is losing adherents daily. The idea of a mind-thingy that goes to Heaven when somebody dies grows more incoherent every day. The wishful thinking that prevents us from just discarding it, along with the goblins and witches, is only too apparent. So those of us who are materialists, confident that the mind is the brain (properly understood), have to confront the question of why it seems that each of us has some such mind-thingy, or better: that each of us is some such mind-thingy inhabiting a body, and more particularly a brain. Do we simply find our selves when we look inside?

David Hume famously disparaged this idea in 1739:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception. . . . If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. [1964, I, iv, sect. 6]

Hume’s tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that others may be different echoes to this day among those who muse about whether I, for instance, am a zombie (a zimbo, of course) innocently extrapolating from my own impoverished experience to how it is with others. An amusing conjecture, but I don’t think anybody takes it seriously.

It is clear what a self isn’t. It isn’t a part of the brain, like the amygdala or hippocampus. The frontal lobes play a crucial role in evaluating situations, intentions, perceptions, and the like, but I don’t think anybody has made the mistake of locating the self in the frontal lobes. (A prefrontal lobotomy is a dire surgery, leaving behind someone who really is “a shadow of his former self,” but it isn’t a self-ectomy. As the old joke has it, I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy, but in either case I’d be there to experience it.) Then what might the self be? I propose that it is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity, an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world. You, like every other material object, have a center of gravity (or more properly a center of mass, but we’ll ignore that nicety here). If you are top-heavy, your center of gravity is higher than average for people of your height, you have to work harder to stay upright, and so forth. There are many ways of locating your center of gravity, which, depending on such factors as the shoes you have on and when you last ate a meal, moves around in a smallish area in the middle of your body. It is a mathematical point, not an atom or molecule. The center of gravity of a length of steel pipe is not made of steel and indeed is not made of anything. It is a point in space, the point on the midline running through the center of the pipe that is equidistant from the ends (roughly, depending on imperfections, etc.).

The concept of a center of gravity is a very useful thinking tool in its own right. In effect it averages over all the gravitational attractions between every particle of matter in a thing and every particle of matter on the planet, and tells us that we can boil all that down to two points—the center of the earth (its center of gravity) and the center of gravity of the thing—and calculate the behavior of the thing under varying conditions. For instance, a stationary object becomes unstable when the vertical projection of its center of gravity falls outside its supporting base, unless something else holds it in place. Of course, we had an intuitive understanding of centers of gravity long before Newton figured out gravity. (“Sit down! You’re rocking the boat.”) Now we can explain how and why the concept works in detail, and if we’re designing vehicles or floor lamps, for example, the goal of lowering a center of gravity, or moving it to a more effective location, shows the near indispensability of the concept in many of our activities. It may be a “theorist’s fiction,” but it is a very valuable fiction from which a lot of true predictions can be generated. Can such an abstract entity, having no material existence, actually cause anything? Not directly, but explanations that cite a center of gravity compete with explanations that are clearly causal. Why didn’t that coffee mug tip over when the sailboat heeled so drastically? “Because it has an unusually low center of gravity” competes with “Because it is glued to the deck.”

We may call a center of gravity a theorist’s fiction because it shares with fictional characters the curious property of indeterminacy of properties. Sherlock Holmes, as described by Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes mystery stories, has many properties, but where Conan Doyle was silent, there is no fact of the matter. We can extrapolate a bit: The author never mentions Sherlock having a third nostril, so we are entitled to assume that he didn’t (Lewis, 1978). We can also agree that he was not a bigamist with one wife in Paris and another in New York. But for many such questions there is no answer: Did he have a mole on his left shoulder blade? Was he a first cousin of Oscar Wilde? Did he own a cottage in Scotland? These questions and kazillions more about any real human being must have true answers, even if we can never discover them. Not so for Sherlock; being fictional he has only properties his author says or implies that he has. A naïve reader who thinks the Sherlock Holmes stories are true might wonder whether the conductor on the train to Aldershot was taller or shorter than Holmes, but if you understand what fiction is, you know better than to ask. The same is true of centers of gravity. If you wondered whether they might eventually “turn out to be neutrinos,” you would be missing the point of them as theorist’s fictions.

What then is a center of narrative gravity? It is also a theorist’s fiction, posited in order to unify and make sense of an otherwise bafflingly complex collection of actions, utterances, fidgets, complaints, promises, and so forth, that make up a person. It is the organizer of the personal level of explanation. Your hand didn’t sign the contract; you did. Your mouth didn’t tell the lie; you did. Your brain doesn’t remember Paris; you do. You are the “owner of record” of the living body we recognize as you. (As we say, it’s your body to do with what you like.) In the same way that we can simplify all the gravitational attractions between all the parts of the world and an obelisk standing on the ground by boiling it down to two points, the center of the earth and the center of gravity of the obelisk, we can simplify all the interactions—the handshakes, the spoken words, the ink scrawls, and much more—between two selves, the seller and the buyer, who have just completed a transaction. Each self is a person, with a biography, a “backstory,” and many ongoing projects. Unlike centers of gravity, selves don’t just have trajectories through space and time; they gather as they go, accumulating memories and devising plans and expectations.

There are parts of the backstory that each person would probably wish to disavow, but what’s done is done; that part of the narrative cannot be revised. It can be reinterpreted, however, in the light of later biographical elements. “I wasn’t myself when I did that,” is a familiar refrain, and our tolerance for this apparently self-contradictory claim is often wise. What the person means is that he was in an extreme “out of character” state when he did that, and he is imploring us not to judge him in the present or extrapolate from that behavior into the future. Sometimes this is very plausible, sometimes not. Another familiar move: “Well, if you didn’t do that, who did?” “The devil made me do it.” Again, we often accept this claim, not on its face value, but as a sincere disavowal of the character and motivations that guided the action. This raises issues about responsibility and free will that we will tackle in the next chapter; just note, for now, how we need the concept of the self to draw a line (however arbitrary it may often turn out to be) between what you do and what happens to you.

Every physical object has a center of gravity and every living human body has a self, or rather, every living human body is owned by a self, a sort of live-in manager. Only one owner? Could a body be shared by two or more selves? The condition known as dissociative identity disorder (it used to be called multiple personality disorder) is apparently an example of many selves sharing a single body, with a dominant self (the “host”) and a group of “alters.” I say “apparently” because controversy rages about the diagnosis, running from outright fraud through folie à deux (in which a naïve psychiatrist unintentionally encourages a troubled patient to develop the symptoms) to acceptance of a few rare and genuine cases surrounded by various flavors of wannabes. After studying the phenomenon (and the people studying and treating the phenomenon) for several years, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and I (1989) decided that everyone is right! There are frauds, exaggerations, gullible therapists with eager patients, and yes, a few cases in which the condition seems to have existed in at least rudimentary form prior to any elaboration at the hands of a fascinated interlocutor. This is not surprising, when we recognize that it is an intensification of something quite normal that we all experience to various degrees. Most of us lead several fairly distinct lives, at work, at home, at play, and acquire habits and memories in each context that turn out not to travel well to other contexts.

As sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) recounted in his classic book on the subject, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we all engage in presenting ourselves as characters in real-life dramas (Professor Dennett, Dan from up the road, Dad, Grandpa, etc.), and we effortlessly enlist the help of the supporting cast, who are similarly presenting themselves. We feed each other lines we can handle readily, becoming complicit in each other’s campaign of self-presentation, or we can disrupt these smoothly running scenarios by playing out of character, with results that are awkward, comic, or worse. It takes nerves of steel to do this. Can you imagine asking a person newly introduced to you at a party to show you some identification, a driver’s license, perhaps, or a passport—or, heading in the other direction, attempting to give her a passionate embrace? When people are put in extremely difficult positions, they sometimes adopt extreme measures, and what starts out as feigning in desperation becomes almost second nature. When the going gets tough, you simply depart, leaving behind a different center of narrative gravity, a different character, better equipped to deal with the problem at hand.

Humphrey and I learned that when you interview a putative sufferer of dissociative identity disorder, expect to find a naïve virtuoso in the art of deflecting obtrusive inquiry. To raise the questions that cry out for answers 1 or—better—to set little traps to see whether one alter really doesn’t have any memories of what the other alter was doing and saying, you will have to be downright rude, and risk giving serious offense, so in all likelihood you will find yourself politely going along with the gag, an accomplice enlisted without so much as a wink. Con artists do this deliberately, with great skill, but so do innocent victims of this personality disorder, without any recognition of what they are doing. So do we all, to one degree or another. But their alters are just fictional characters, right? The real person is the host, right? Well, it isn’t quite that straightforward.

That thing that is you, the person you play, whether you play multiple roles or really just one monolithic role, is your center of narrative gravity. It is how your friends recognize you (“You’re not yourself today!”), and how you see yourself for the most part, but it is also somewhat idealized (“Oh my God! Did I do that? I would never do that!”). Professional novelists, like con artists, create narratives with cunning and deliberate attention to the details. The rest of us are talented amateurs, spinning our tales cleverly but (in the main) unwittingly, rather the way a spider spins a web. It is nature, not art. It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us. There is a core of undeniable true biography, to be sure, but over the years large parts of it become as good as gone, inert and of no relevance to who you are now. Some of it you may actively disavow, jettison, “forget,” in the process of self-maintenance and self-improvement.2

Consider how easily you can answer some questions about your past. Have you ever danced with a movie star? Have you ever been to Paris? Have you ever ridden a camel? Have you ever strangled somebody to death with your bare hands? These are easy for almost all of us, whether the answer is yes or no. (Imagine someone who was asked the last question and who paused, thoughtfully, scratching his chin, before answering. Give him a wide berth!) We know the answers to these questions because we know enough about ourselves—our selves—to know that had we ever danced with a movie star, been to Paris, ridden a camel, or strangled someone, we’d now be recollecting it. When “nothing comes to mind,” we interpret this absence as a negative. (How else could we be so sure? Do you keep a list of all the things you’ve never done? All the places you’ve never been?) Contrast those questions with these superficially similar questions: Have you ever danced with a person named Smith? Have you ever been to a drug store that sold floor polish? Have you ever ridden in a blue Chevrolet? Have you ever broken a white coffee mug? Some may be easy to answer, and others may lead you to say you have no idea, and some may inspire you to give false answers without realizing it, just because they are so unimportant. Why would you remember it if you had done any of these things? A lot that has happened to us is just not memorable; a lot of things that we have done, good and bad, have been shed by our centers of narrative gravity; and a lot that never happened has been added, innocently enough, because for one reason or another it just fits us to a t. What you are is that rolling sum of experience and talent, solemn intention and daydreaming fantasy, bound together in one brain and body and called by a given name. The idea that there is, in addition, a special indissoluble nugget of you, or ego, or spirit, or soul, is an attractive fantasy, but nothing that we need in order to make sense of people, their dreams and hopes, their heroism and their sins.

This center of narrative gravity may not be a mysterious nugget of mind stuff, but if it is just an abstraction, can it be studied scientifically? Yes, it can.

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1 Such as: How do you folks decide who is host and who are alters? How have you explained to yourself that your memory of recent experiences consists of brief episodes of being there surrounded by hours or days of oblivion? Doesn’t that strike you as alarming?

2 In T. S. Eliot’s verse play, Murder in the Cathedral, Becket is asked about an event in his past and he replies:

You talk of seasons that are past. I remember Not worth forgetting.

63. HETEROPHENOMENOLOGY

Heterophenomenology is not an intuition pump, but another example of staging that is well worth putting in place before we tackle some difficult questions. The study of human consciousness involves phenomena that at first glance seem to occur in something rather like another dimension: the private, subjective, “first-person” dimension that each of us occupies with regard to our own consciousness, and to which nobody else can gain direct access. What, then, is the relation between the standard “third-person” objective methodologies for studying meteors or magnets (or human metabolism or bone density), and the methodologies for studying human consciousness? Do we have to create some radical or revolutionary alternative science, or can the standard methods be extended in such a way as to do justice to the phenomena of human consciousness? I defend the claim that there is a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that handsomely covers all the ground of human consciousness, doing justice to all the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the experimental methods that have worked so well in the rest of science. This third-person methodology, heterophenomenology (phenomenology of an other not oneself), is the sound way to take the first-person point of view as seriously as it can legitimately be taken.

Why the multisyllabic name? “Phenomenology” originally meant a catalogue of phenomena, of one sort or another, before there is a good theory of them. In the sixteenth century, William Gilbert compiled a good phenomenology of magnetism, but it was centuries before all the magnetic phenomena he carefully described could be explained. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl, and a group of psychologists and philosophers influenced by him, adopted the term, “Phenomenology” (with a capital “P”), for a presumably scientific study of the phenomena of subjective experience, to be observed using a “first-person” introspective method that attempted to be theory-neutral and without presuppositions. The school of thought continues to this day, embattled or ignored for the most part, for reasons good and bad. In spite of some very tantalizing results, well worth further exploration, as a first-person approach it has been shunned by objective, empirical science, which insists on data that can be accessible to all investigators. But we can study consciousness objectively, and the method is really just a simple twist on Phenomenology, so I call it heterophenomenology, to contrast it with Husserlian autophenomenology. Heterophenomenology is the study of first-person phenomena from the third-person point of view of objective science.

Obviously the key difference between experiments with rocks, roses, and rats on the one hand, and experiments with awake, cooperative human subjects on the other, is that the latter can communicate in language and hence can collaborate with experimenters, by making suggestions, interacting verbally, and telling them what it is like under various controlled conditions. That is the core of heterophenomenology: it exploits our capacity to perform and interpret speech acts, yielding a catalogue of what the subject believes to be true about his or her conscious experience. This catalogue of beliefs fleshes out the subject’s heterophenomenological world, the world according to S, the subjective world of one subject. The total set of details of heterophenomenology, plus all the data we can gather about concurrent events in the brains of subjects and in the surrounding environment, comprise the total data set a theory of human consciousness must explain. It leaves out no objective phenomena and no subjective phenomena of consciousness.

The interpretation required to turn raw data about speech sounds and button pressings into reports and expressions of beliefs involves adopting the intentional stance: it requires the working hypothesis that the subject is an agent whose actions are rationally guided by beliefs and desires that are themselves rational, given the subject’s perceptual history and needs. For instance, the constraints of the intentional stance can be clearly discerned in the standard precautions taken in such experiments to prevent subjects from having experiences that might give them either beliefs or desires that would tend to bias their responses in ways that would distort our interpretation of their actions: we keep them in the dark about what we hope they will say, for instance, while at the same time taking steps to assure ourselves that they understand the tasks we set them. This adoption of the intentional stance is not an irreparably subjective and relativistic affair. Rules of interpretation can be articulated; standards of intersubjective agreement on interpretation can be set and met; deviations can be identified; the unavoidable assumption of rationality can be cautiously couched and treated as an adjustable, defensible, and evolutionarily explicable assumption. (The details of these processes are articulated in Dennett, 1991a.)

This is not a proposal for a new methodology for studying consciousness. I am just being self-conscious about the standard methods already adopted by researchers in cognitive psychology, psychophysics (which studies the relationships between physical stimuli and subjective reactions), and neuroscience, and explaining and defending them. These methods, correctly understood and followed, obviate the need for any radical or revolutionary “first-person” science of consciousness, and leave no residual phenomena of consciousness inaccessible to controlled scientific study.

What kinds of things does this methodology commit us to? Beyond the unproblematic things all of science is committed to (neurons and electrons, clocks and microscopes), it commits us just to beliefs—the beliefs expressed by subjects and deemed constitutive of their subjectivity—and to desires— the desires to cooperate with the experimenters, and to tell them the truth as candidly as possible. (An important part of the method involves controlling these beliefs and desires, and any experimental result that shows evidence of failure to do this must be discarded.) What kind of things are beliefs and desires? We may stay maximally noncommittal about this—pending the confirmation of theory—by treating beliefs and their contents or objects as theorists’ fictions or abstractions similar to centers of mass, the equator, and parallelograms of forces.

Mermaid-sightings are real events, however misdescribed, whereas mermaids don’t exist. Similarly, a catalogue of beliefs about experience is not the same as a catalogue of experiences themselves. Philosopher Joseph Levine (1994, p. 117) has objected that “conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer.” This can’t be right. How, in advance of theory, could we catalogue the experiences themselves? Consider the evidence we get from putting subjects into experimental situations and querying them (and asking them to perform whatever other actions we want them to perform). These sources are naturally nested by the cascade of interpretations we have to perform, ranked here from least raw to most raw:

(a) “conscious experiences themselves”

(b) beliefs about these conscious experiences

(c) the “verbal judgments” Levine mentions

(d) the utterances of one sort or another that (can be interpreted to) express those verbal judgments

In one sense of “primary,” the utterances are primary data—recorded sounds and motions. Electroencephalographic (EEG) readings and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) readings and the like can be added to the primary data, as circumstances permit. Reliable methods of interpretation can take us to (c) and (b), so we have a catalogue of subjects’ beliefs about what it is like to be them under these conditions. But should we push on to (a) in advance of theory? This is not a good idea, for two reasons.

First, if (a) outruns (b)—if you have conscious experiences you don’t believe you have, then those extra conscious experiences are just as inaccessible to you as to the external observers.

So Levine’s proposed alternative garners no more usable data than heterophenomenology does.

Second, if (b) outruns (a)—if you believe you have conscious experiences that you don’t in fact have, then it is your beliefs that we need to explain, not the nonexistent experiences.

Sticking to the heterophenomenological standard, then, and treating (b) as the maximal set of primary data, is the way to avoid any commitment to spurious data, while ensuring that all phenomena accessible to anybody get included.

What if some beliefs are inexpressible in verbal judgments? There is nothing to prevent heterophenomenologists and subjects from collaborating on devising analogue or other nonlinguistic modes of belief expression. For instance,

Draw a vertical line across the line segment indicating how intense [in one dimension or another] the experience is:

Barely noticeable Overpowering

Or subjects can press a button with variable pressure to indicate severity of pain (or anxiety or boredom or even distrust in the experiment). Then there are a host of physiological dependent variables to measure, from galvanic skin response and heart rate to changes in facial expression and posture. And if you, the subject, believe that there are still ineffable residues unconveyed after exhausting such methods, you can tell this to the heterophenomenologists, who can add that belief to the list of beliefs in your primary data:

S claims that he has ineffable beliefs about X.

If this belief is true, then science has the obligation to explain what such beliefs are and why they are ineffable. If this belief is false, science still has to explain why S believes (falsely) that there are these particular ineffable beliefs.1

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1 The defense of heterophenomenology as the methodology of choice for the scientific study of consciousness has occasioned substantial controversy. Some researchers regard it as a game-changing clarification of the conditions under which science can study consciousness, some regard it as just rehearsing the obvious, and still others continue to object. See Sources for references to some of the best work on this that has appeared to date.