my mind on books

“Consciousness is the appearance of a world.”

That is the first line of the new book The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger (Basic Books, 2009).

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We’re used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain—an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is “a virtual self in a virtual reality.”
But if the self is not “real,” why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.

Our relation to our past is no more passive than is our relation to what we presently visually perceive; we are not the containers of memory-images that a true narrative would accurately describe. Rather, we are in a continual process of reconsideration, … of reflective restructuring, and of repositioning the actions, events, occurrences, interactions, efforts, aspirations, achievements, intentions — in short, our words, deeds, and everything in between that, taken together, form the teleological trajectories, the narrative threads, of our selves. … Memories, understood in this way, are not inert visual images filed into storage by time and date. They are remembered experiences of all composite kinds, and, like works of art and like human selves, they take on and cast off relational properties, networks of interconnections to other experiences both similar and different. (Hagberg,Describing Ourselves, p. 236)

Garry L. Hagberg, in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2008), explores Wittgenstein’s views on the self in relation to autobiographical writing.

The ‘Cartesian’ view of introspection as an internal act of inspecting determinate mental “objects” exerts a pervasive influence on concepts of the mind and self. According to Hagberg, Wittgenstein opposed this view without falling into the contrasting behaviorist camp that shares the presuppositions of the Cartesian, dualistic account. “Wittgenstein’s position … cuts beneath the metaphysical presuppositions of both of these polarized, antithetical theories of the self.” (p. 185) However, Wittgenstein’s own position resists any simple capsule formulation. As Hagberg states (p. 240), “the very phrase ‘Wittgenstein’s method’ can easily prove… misleading” but he points to a convergence between therapeutic philosophy and autobiography:

To see autobiography as philosophy is to see it as an ineliminable source of language-games of narrative self-description, and to see philosophy as autobiography is to see it, in turn, as the distinctive kind of self-analysis — the intricate, layered disentangling of the mind’s grammatically fueled impulses to misspeak, to mischaracterize itself — that Wittgenstein’s remarks on therapeutic philosophy articulate. (p. 256)

Self, Logic, and Figurative Thinking by Harwood Fisher (Columbia University Press, 2008).

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Harwood Fisher argues against neuroscientific and cognitive scientific explanations of mental states, for they fail to account for the gaps between actions in the brain, cognitive operations, linguistic mapping, and an individual’s account of experience. Fisher probes a rich array of thought from the primitive and the dream to the artistic figure of speech, and extending to the scientific metaphor. He draws on first-person methodologies to restore the conscious self to a primary function in the generation of figurative thinking.

How does the individual originate and organize terms and ideas? How can we differentiate between different types of thought and account for their origins? Fisher depicts the self as mediator between trope and logical form. Conversely, he explicates the creation and articulation of the self through interplay between logic and icon. Fisher explains how the “I” can step out of scripted roles. The self is neither a discursive agent of postmodern linguistics nor a socially determined entity. Rather, it is a historically situated, dynamically constituted place at the crossroads of conscious agency and unconscious actions and evolving contextual logics and figures.

Fisher is a professor emeritus of City College of New York; an earlier book of his is The Subjective Self: A Portrait inside Logical Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) (reviewed at Metapsychology)

“Self awareness and Obama,” a recent blog post at The Frontal Cortex, mentions the notion of “self-overhearing” (aka metacognition), citing Philip Tetlock of UC Berkeley. I looked for more information about self-overhearing, which comes from Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
Paul Monk in “Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Algorithms” discusses Tetlock’s book and traces “self-overhearing” back to Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Monk provides this quote from Tetlock as a further guide to what he means by ‘self-overhearing’ (which may not be the same idea as Bloom intended):

“Good judgment, then, is a precarious balancing act…Executing this balancing act requires cognitive skills of a high order: the capacity to monitor our own thought processes and to strike a reflective equilibrium faithful to our conceptions of the norms of intellectual fair play. We need to cultivate the art of self-overhearing, to learn how to eavesdrop on the mental conversations we have with ourselves as we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking core assumptions. This is no easy art to master. If we listen carefully to ourselves, we will often not like what we hear. And we will often be tempted to laugh off the exercise as introspective navel-gazing, as an infinite regress of homunculi spying on each other…all the way down.”

I recently read Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History by Ross Hamilton (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which surprisingly turned out to have a lot to do with changing concepts of the self in Western culture, from Aristotle to postmodernism. I had some difficulty following the argument in this densely woven academic text, so it was something of a relief to find my response echoed by Terry Eagleton’s review:

“But there are times when the subject threatens to disappear under this imposing weight of learning, only to re-emerge just when one thought it had sunk without trace. Hamilton does not keep a sharp enough eye on the storyline. There is a grand narrative struggling to get out of this study, which is the mysterious tale of the disappearing substance.”

Here is a quote from Hamilton’s conclusion that sort of sums up and perhaps gives a flavor of the book:

“we can point to shifts in the value assigned to aspects of accident that demarcate a series of important attitudinal domains: The reign of substance as the enduring quality with respect to accident lasted into the eighteenth century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a shift occurred from seeking qualitative resemblances to the exploration of differences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a second shift replaced the retrospective sense of self with anticipatory self-structuring and gave primacy to inwardly determined self-definition. A third shift, one that began in the twentieth century and is accelerating rapidly, sacrificed the claim of a substantive self. According to critics like Foucault or Virilio, this movement threatens to extinguish the self completely.” (p. 301)

After the jump there are some notes from my reading… (more…)