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A New Approach to the What am I Question
By: Mitchell

This essay will attempt to approach the question of What Am I in an holistic way, hoping to reconcile strict materialism and strict dualism by readdressing the problem of mind-body and of the self. It will look at each of the major difficulties faced by an theory of the self and mind-body and attempt to over come them through a synthesis of dualism-materialism as well alternative approaches to the question itself.

Whenever we consider the self and mind-body we almost always do so from introspection. To understand oneself, we suppose, we must look inside and examine what we find however, this is not a fruitful line of enquiry. As Hume points out,
“It is remarkable concerning the operations of the mind, that, though most intimately present to us, yet, whenever they become the object of reflection, they seem involved in obscurity, nor can the eye readily find those lines and boundaries, which discriminate and distinguish them.”[1]

For Hume, when we look into ourselves, we find nothing but thoughts, feelings, emotions. There is no ‘self’ to be discovered, no thing that is ‘us’ separate from all else. As such, he suggests, any attempt to pin down what the mind may be, is going to be impossible to do entirely from introspection. Here is where I first would like to differ from strict materialism and dualism, my approach to defining ‘I’ will be one which is no taken from pure introspection but one which takes in to account any instance during which I seem to encounter the ‘I’.

I do not, however, want to reject totally the use of introspection in understanding oneself. It does play a huge role in understanding what mind may be and as such I would here like to establish what we may know through introspection. Of course, we know we exist through Descartes maxim cogito ergo sum, but we can also know much more than this. Whilst Hume said we cannot find a self when we look within he did concede we could find some things. We cannot help but encounter feelings, beliefs, desires, emotions and all such things. In Buddhist terms, we find the five skandhas, body, feeling, perception, volitions and consciousness. The body is all that we can feel physically, the feelings are our emotions, sentiments and so forth, our perceptions are all that we gain from other stimuli, our volitions are the things driving us in certain directions, and consciousness is Descartes cogito, our own existence as a thinker.

These are the five roots that we find when we delve within ourselves, we cannot help but encounter them and we cannot help but to affirm their existence, even in attempting to deny them we only help to establish them further. In Buddhism, however, this does not mean that there is a self, as we may be inclined to believe. The self is but an illusion. The self is merely the umbrella under which the five skandhas are to be found. If we remove the thought then there is no thinker left behind. What we conventionally call our self is nothing but the sum of these processes. For Buddhism, what you are is what you feel, think and see. There is no epistemologically existent and separate you, merely the you that emerges from your experience of life.

This is very much similar to the thinking of Kant for whom the mind was the thing that unified perception. We are bombarded with a wealth of sensory data coming through our five senses and these must be formed in to a world. We know the must, because that is how we experience the world, as such the mind takes them and reasons with them, analyses them and puts them together in the form of the world we experience. This is the unity of apperception. Namely that the mind constructs the world in the form of the world we experience out of the raw data coming to us via our senses. Here again there is no self, no mind, no independent thing, it is merely the process of turning data in to world. The Buddhist (Pali) term for this is Santanna. Once we recognise the mind as nothing but a label to cover a process then we can dissolve the problem of mind/body interaction. There is no mind to interact with, it is merely the name given to the brain’s construction routine. We are also able to dissolve the concept of self and to return to a state of anatman or ‘no self’. This is the concept that the self is not something separate and all of it’s own, but rather something which is merely an element of one single thing. we can already understand the idea that the self is not permanent, if I am to consider myself today I know that I have changed since yesterday, this is the concept of panta re as posited by Heraclitus, essentially stating that all is change. By embracing the concept of an impermanent self, a self which is merely some local traits or a larger system, then we can dissolve the problem of self and mind and singular identity. It no longer makes sense to ask what is the mind, as the mind is but a process, it is not a thing. It no longer makes sense to ask what I am, as I am nothing but an element of a larger whole. The ‘me’ that I am seeking to describe is an illusion, it is the unifying of sense data and the construction of a being here and now that is forever in change and merely a bubble on the surface of existence, part of it, formed from it, yet different and ever changing. All that I can say I am at any time, is what I am at that time, a collection of unified perceptions, a wealth of memory, experience, volition and perception that is in flux.

Aside from introspection, we must also consider aspects of our self that only become evident through interaction with others. These are capacities or elements of being ‘I’ that cannot be known by solitude and here, again, I differ from the doctrines of dualism and materialism. I feel there are aspects of self that can only be found in contact with others. The prime example is language. I am a thinking being who thinks in language, I know this from introspection, but language can only arise in community as Wittgenstein showed with his language game argument.

Equally capacities such as shame can only be known through contact with others. The existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre put forward the concept of intersubjectivity, namely the way we feel in relation to others. It is, for example, impossible to feel shame if one has never been around others as Shame is a social construct, we all have the capacity for shame but it can only be known when we are caught by someone else doing something we shouldn’t.

So what, ultimately, am I? My personal inclination is that we are emergent phenomena in terms of a self or mind. We cannot deny the physical if we are approaching mind in any modern way shape or form, and this is a relatively simple thing which operates by observable physical laws, but what of the rest of being? This, I feel, is emergent from the physical. The brain, as we know, is immensely complex and we do not have even a fair understanding of it, as such many seeming ‘mental’ items may, in time, be reasoned away by science, but there still remains the fact that I feel like there is a ‘me’ something totally separate from the world, from others, from my brain, and this, I suspect, is emergent.

As a tornado is not an existing thing beyond being a large mass of rotating particles, and a traffic jam is nothing more than stationary vehicles, the mind, at the base level, is no more than neurones, synapses and chemicals. Yet from this emerges what we term the self.

I follow Kant in so far as I feel the mind is nothing more than the processes which unify our perception, and I follow Buddhism in that I feel the self is an impermanent thing which is formed from the five skandhas. These together, along with the physicality of being able to do what I chose, and feel, give rise to the notion of a self, or an ‘I’ which, as Nagel would put it, “It is like to be.”[2]

To be emergent does not retreat in to dualism, I am not suggesting that from the brain springs forth something else which is the self, or the mind, just as a group of cars stopping in the road due to bottlenecking does not lead to some enormous being which is a traffic jam or swirling water and dust cause the creation of a hurricane. They are in fact entirely made up of what constitutes their foundation or, as M Bedau puts it,
“Emergent phenomena are somehow constituted by and generated from underlying process....Emergent phenomena are somehow autonomous from underlying processes.”[3]

Following this through to apply to the idea of self, the self is something which comes from the processes of the brain, the process of unifying perception that the mind does, the five skandhas within our self and all the external stimuli that effect us. Yet, although generated from these things, it is not totally causally linked but has a form of autonomy. In the mind this comes down to the feeling of ‘thinking’ of ‘choosing’ of ‘being’ of ‘separation’. It does not, however, mean these things are separate entities, but things that are given rise to by the brain and it’s function. In this way, there can be something it is like to be me, that thing is impermanent, of one substance, ever changing and entirely emergent from the brain.

By following such a theory I feel have over come the problem of mind/body interaction by showing that the mind may be thought of as merely the unity of apperception. I have shown how, despite introspection’s limits, there is a lot to be gained from it, namely knowledge of the five skandhas. I have shown how impermanence and the embracing of anatman can lead to a different understanding of the self - namely one in flux, one which is not a permanent, ontologically separate object, but one which is an illusion created by the local feelings we experience. I feel I have also shown how the self may be thought of as emergent from the physical, removing the need for dual substance theory whilst over coming the problem of the mental realm seeming to be so different from the physical. I have also explored how we must approach the self from outside, namely through language, intersubjectivity and communal experience, in order to understand ourselves fully.

By looking at ourselves from many different angles and on many different levels I hope I have formed a new and radically different conception of the self. One which avoids the problems of strict dualism/materialism and one which seems both logical, natural and workable.

Footnotes

1. Hume, David - Enquiry Concerning Human Nature 1.13
2. Nagel, Thomas - What is it like to be a Bat? [The Philosophical review Pg 436]
3. Bedau, Mark - Weak Emergence [Philosophical Perspectives Pg 375]

Bibliography

Bedau, Mark A. - Weak Emergence (Philosophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation and World 1997)

Hume, David – An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford University Press 1999)

Nagel, Thomas - What is it like to be a bat? (The Philosophical review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), 435-450)

Sartre, Jean-Paul - Being and Nothingness (Routledge 2002)

Thompson, Mel - Eastern Philosophy (Hodder Headline Ltd 1999)

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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