“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.”

— Alfred Tennyson in Oenone (1829)

Here I sit. It is 6:22 am on Wednesday, October 27th, 2021. My family is asleep. The house is quiet but for the clicking of my fingertips at the keyboard and the whirring of the external disk drive. There is a taste of instant coffee and sleep in my mouth. My shoulders sag. My legs are uncertain of their proper positions under the desk. I shift uncomfortably in the hard-backed chair. It has been a long and restive night, troubled by strange dreams. I look through the screen at my reflection, which I know rests upon its surface, but which appears to sit behind it. I wonder: who is that semi-transparent, disembodied man whose every action appears to mimic my own? Can I know him by thinking and typing, or is he permanently walled-off from me? Inaccessible and inscrutable, impenetrable and unknowable? (Even is I strive to describe everything EXACTLY AS IT IS, I suspect that I begin to elaborate, to explain, to justify.) The ostensible object of my attention is the SELF. As honestly as I try to examine the diaphanous shadow reflected before me, he shifts and deflects; he is not solid; he cannot be grasped. It is impossible to apprehend him clearly and at once. Certain knowledge of him cannot be had, no matter how much thought is applied. I cannot trust the conclusions I come to about myself. They are mere fictions, no matter how well attended by feelings of knowing and certainty. They are post hoc rationalizations of the thinking mind about whatever emotions, thoughts, and actions the subconscious pushes to the surface. Some of these rationalizations are comforting; some of them are destabilizing. It matters not: none is reliable. And what of the rationalizations themselves? Aren't these also the products of genetics and conditioning? Why does my conscious mind interpret my internal state this way rather than that? And why does one of these interpretations seem more believable and true than another? Is there a way to put these hypotheses about myself to the test?

The question, "What for?" can never be answered in an ultimate sense. By this, I mean that we can never know the purpose, or telos, of the Universe. The best that we humans can do is attempt to answer the question, "How come?" And even here we face monumental difficulties. If we allow ourselves the miracle of the "Big Bang," then we are off to the races, but we must come to peace with accepting that the question of why there is something rather than nothing can never be answered definitively. The best we can do is to look to religion. Setting aside the question of why the Universe exists, and therefore the question of why we humans exist, we are still faced with insurmountable metaphysical and epistemological questions about our own, subjective natures. When it comes to asking "Why?" of our personal thoughts, emotions, preferences, actions, etc., both questions of causation ("How come?" and "What for?") cannot be determined, even in principle, no matter how "insightful" may be our powers of introspection because the unconscious mind is forever inscrutable to us. Even if we were to develop a sound biological model of how thinking, emotions, and memory arise from the activity of neurons (and we are a very, very long way off from arriving at such a theory), we would still be left with the problem that, as a matter of subjective experience, we as individuals cannot inspect the working of our own subconscious minds. The machinery is forever veiled from us. We are no closer to experiencing directly how sight and hearing work than we are to sensing in real time how the subcionscious functions and how it pushes its "ideas" into the conscious realm of thoughts and emotions. The best that we can hope for are rationalizations after the fact, and we have no way of knowing whether these rationalizations are true explanations of the workings of the subconscious mind. Even setting aside the thorny question of what constitutes "explanation," we also have no idea of why some rationalizations seem to be truer explanations than others. The "sense of knowing," or "sense of correctness," is itself subject to the impenetrable fancies of the subconscious. Therefore, we simply have no way of knowing who we are at bottom. We are, and forever will be, strangers to ourselves.

One does not have to be a long-practising meditator to experience directly and for oneself that there is no thinker of thoughts: thoughts think themselves. They cannot be anticipated; their contents are not known in advance. They arrive unannounced from the depths, like bubbles popping at random on the surface of a dark ocean, or like heavy raindrops splashing into puddles without a discernible pattern or rhythm. Consciousness is simultaneously the context in which thoughts arise and the witness of them. Outside of consciousness, there are no thoughts (or emotions, or sensations.) Descartes was wrong to conclude that thinking proved the existence of the self. Unlike many Buddhists and secular meditators, I am not yet convinced that there is no self, but I am confident that thinking is not evidence of it. Instead of saying, "I think therefore I am," Descartes would have been more accurate to report, very simply and without drawing conclusions, "There is thinking." English is very familiar with active verbs that have no subject. For example, we do not assume a rainer of rain when we look outside and see water falling from the sky. We declare, straightforwardly and honestly, "It is raining" without attempting to define what "it" is.

I am convinced that this is an accurate, if inadequate, description of what is happening in the mind when thoughts and emotions arise: they are like drops of rain from the sky. Presumably, they have causes, but we can never be sure what those causes are. Am I feeling anxious because I drank too much coffee today, or is it because the scent of fresh laundry reminds me of the time my mother scolded me for using too much soap in the washing machine when I was eight years old? Is it because I am due to make an important presentation to my CEO next week and Steve in accounting hasn't yet emailed me the updated sales figures? Am I suddenly worried that the growing bald patch at the top of my head will render me unattractive to the new secretary? Is it a combination of all of these things, or none of them? Are these possible "reasons" mere fictions that my conscious mind has invented to explain the feeling of anxiety that has welled up within me? And even if one of these "reasons" were, in fact, the true cause–the memory of my mother scolding me, say–I would still have no way of knowing why this memory yielded the feeling of anxiety rather than some other feeling. Is there a psychological law, a rhythm and pattern of the human mind, that makes it inevitable that past traumas remembered in the present cause anxiety? Reflexively, it seems reasonable, even obvious, that such a relationship should exist, but why? And how general is this law? Why does it apply to me, specifically? Why should it be that memories of my childhood make me anxious at all, even if my childhood were hideously traumatic. If I were a different person, memory of the same event may have made me vengeful, instead; or perhaps I may not have formed any memory at all of that event. Why does my particular brain remember this event as it does and make this particular association, rather than remember something else instead and make another association, or no association at all? The proximate cause of my anxiety may therefore not be an adequate explanation of it (and probably isn't.)

I can know myself in the sense that I have an expectation of how I would think, feel, and act in a given situation based upon how I have thought, felt, and acted in similar, prior situations. This is to say, I have an approximate idea of my personality, which is a stable collection of characteristic traits and dispositions that accurately predicts my behaviour. This is not the kind of self-knowledge that I am talking about when I say that I am forever a stranger to myself. My personality is to my behaviour as Newton's Laws of Motion are to the behaviour of moving objects, which is to say, my personality describes how I am likely to act in a given situation; it does not explain why I am likely to act in that fashion. A physical law is exactly the same. For example, the First Law allows me to predict that a ball at rest in a wagon will roll backwards when my son begins to pull the wagon from a stationary position. It is insufficient as an explanation to say that the motion of the ball is caused by "inertia" because this is simply the name we give to the observation that the ball rolls backwards. "Inertia" is an explanation only insofar as the behaviour of the ball in the wagon is consistent with the fact that objects at rest stay at rest and those in motion stay in motion with constant velocity in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force. Because the concept of inertia aligns so closely with our everyday experience of the world, we take it as an explanation when in fact it is merely a description of a brute fact about the Universe, that is, a description of a behaviour whose cause, if there is one, we do not understand. To attempt an explanation of the ball's motion by reference to inertia would be to put the cart before the horse (the wagon before the boy, I mean): as paradoxical as it sounds, the First Law is the result of the ball rolling to the back of the wagon; the ball rolling to the back of the wagon is not the result of the First Law. In the same way, I may say that that I find it easy to talk to strangers because I am extroverted. But this, again, would be to make the error of reversing cause and effect. The truth is that I am extroverted because I find it easy to talk to strangers. How can this be? The way in which I discover my personality is to observe my behaviour in a variety of situations (or have someone else observe me) and then score myself (or have someone else score me) on standardized scales of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Which is to say that my discovered personality is nothing more than a rationalization after the fact, much like one of the so-called "explanations" for the anxiety that welled up in me today. It was caffeine! It was my mother! It was my secretary! It was Steve in accounting!

This view of personality may be a little too unkind to psychologists, who have laboured in good faith over many decades to determine valid and reliable traits that accurately capture the stable characteristics of a person's mind that cause him to act as he does. If I were a dyed-in-the-wool realist in personality psychology, my position would be that extroversion, for example, is not merely a word used to describe the ease with which I talk to strangers, but is instead the true underlying cause of that ease, that is, there is something within the fabric of reality, possibly within the neurobiology of my brain, that is called extroversion which makes it easy for me to talk to strangers, and so I do. Though I take a realist (as opposed to instrumentalist) position in other areas of science, I am not persuaded by this view in psychology because I do not believe that psychology is close enough to the "bottom" to provide fundamental explanations of human behaviour. Perhaps this view arises from my strong materialist bias (and from ignorance): I may have a more favourable view of psychology if there were an established grounding of it in neurobiology. It appears to me to be an emergent phenomenon whose general features cannot be explained by reference to the behaviour of lower-level components–and I tend to resist explanations that rely upon "strong" emergence of this kind because they appeal to magic.

Even if I were to adopt a realist stance with respect to personality psychology, I would still be left with the question of why I have the personality I do, rather than some other personality. The psychologist may deflect this concern with a general reference to genetics and upbringing. I find this explanation unsatisfying because I cannot, as a matter of subjective experience, sense these reasons through inspection: my genes and how they interact with my environment are beyond my ability to see, and reflection upon my upbringing leaves me once again at an epistemological impasse. I can remember neither my infancy nor my early childhood, both of which are crucial periods for the development of my personality. As for the memories of my later childhood, here I have to trust both the the fidelity of my recollection of the period (shaky, at best) and also my felt perception of which of several possible explanations correctly accounts for the relationship betweeen what happened to me and who I am. In the latter context, I may be influenced by how familiar I am with psychological reasoning (how widely I have read in the field, whether or not I have been subjected to psychoanalysis, etc.), and a host of other contingent factors. I am no better off correctly explaning why my personality is the way it is than I am deciding why I am feeling anxious today. The possibilities are rationalizations thrown up by the conscious mind; they are stories I tell myself about who I am. (A further complication here is that the explanations I can conceive of are very likely to be flattering to me; I may be completely incapable of conceiving, let alone believing, possibly correct explanations that would put me in a negative light, so strong is the desire to maintain a positive self-image and avoid cognitive dissonance.) There is no way to decide between two possible explanations that both accord with the remembered facts; the feeling of certainty, as I have already discussed, is no guide: it itself has no epistemological grounding, arising as it does from the inscrutable unconscious.

Perhaps I am too attached to the idea that I should be able to explain who I am, why I have the personality I do, why these thoughts arise rather than those, and why I feel the way I do from one moment to the next. This is the scientist in me: the man who is driven by the need to discover theories. Perhaps I should forgo this grandiose plan and come to peace with the possibility that a sound, explanatory framework of self-knowledge is impossible and that the best I can hope for is a descriptive self-knowledge. I cannot ever know why I am the way I am. I must console myself with knowing simply how I am. But even in this more limited project of self-knowledge, I face tremendous difficulties. For how am I to know that X is the case and not-X is not the case? What is it that gives me the assurance that I am honest, rather than dishonest, for example? I could rely on Aristotle's teaching that "we are what we repeatedly do." I could examine my behaviour over the course of a long period of time and adjudicate whether I lie more frequently than I tell the truth, or assess whether the people in my life consider me to be trustworthy. But here I am severely handicapped by confirmation bias. I believe that I am honest and trustworthy and therefore I selectively forget the occasions when I lied, or minimize the lies I told, or excuse them in some self-satisfying way. If one of my friends, or family members, catches me in a lie, I explain it away as a misunderstanding, or a mistake, preferably because of some reason outside of myself. In this way, I preserve my positive self-image. And if ever I am confronted with incontrovertible evidence of my mendacity that cannot be explained away, I will comfort myself by saying that, deep down, I am "really" an honest person, that the lie I told doesn't truly reflect who I am at heart, that I would prefer not to have lied, and that it should not be counted against me. In short, I drink the Kool Aid.

There may be no self. An explanatory theory of the self is impossible. A description of the self is very difficult, if not impossible. There is no scientific understanding of consciousness, though consciousness is all that we have and all that we can be certain of. There is no knowing why, either how come, or what for. And yet, here we are. This is what we have to deal with.

(All photographs in this post were taken on the West Coast Trail, the “hike of a lifetime.” The title of this post is taken from the Satires of Juvenal. The saying was written up in the Temple of Delphi.)

Nathan Jones

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