Who Am I? (Part 1)
Published 5/20/23 in Sierra Sun
Burning Questions: Who am I? Part one (Opinion) | SierraSun.com
After nearly half a year writing Burning Questions, the time has come to turn the focus inward. So this week’s question is: “Who am I?” More specifically in this context, “Who is this introverted middle-aged suburban mother and wife who suddenly decided to start writing a column in the local newspaper that seems, most weeks, to swerve into the topic of climate change like a magnet drawn to an iron pipe?”
There are quick, easy answers to that question, but they’re not very interesting. Forgive me as I zoom back out for a moment to look at the question itself: Who am I?
When asking who a person is, we are often asking a coded sub-question. With adults, identifying what they do for a living is a quick shorthand for who they are. As in, “Who is that guy?” ”Oh, that’s my kid’s music teacher / That’s the town mayor / That’s the guy who works the deli counter and makes a mean ham and Swiss on rye.”
I think some people would happily self-identify as their job titles. Those are the lucky folks who found a career that aligns well with their skills, values, and what they find meaningful. I’m happy for those folks.
For me, on the other hand (and I suspect for many others), job titles have not been a source of pride, or even a reliable marker of selfhood. I’ve been a teacher, an office manager, and other iterations of those jobs, none of which particularly reflected my skills, values, or what I found meaningful.
Similarly, I suspect that the guy who works at the deli counter probably doesn’t think of himself as The Guy Who Works at the Deli Counter. He may, but more likely he thinks of himself as the guy who’s holding down this current job while he attends night school to become an actuary, or while he works on his novel, or while he formulates a brilliant scheme to rob the Federal Mint. Regardless, the question of “Who is this person” seems to revolve around what one does for a living.
But that has unsettling implications: If you change jobs a lot or never find a fulfilling career, does that mean you’ve never really found yourself? Does it mean that who you are changes every time your job does? Does it mean that “self” is necessarily tied to one’s profession?
Surely selfhood is deeper than that, more intractable. Perhaps it is… But then again, selfhood itself might be an illusion.
“The nature of self,” Robert Lawrence Kuhn wrote in a 2016 article in Live Science (Is Your 'Self' Just an Illusion? | Live Science), “is one of philosophy’s perennial and persistent questions.” He goes on to quote British philosopher Colin McGinn: “’Our grasp of the concept of the self is very limited because we experience it from our first-person point of view when we say “I,” but we really don’t know what that thing [“I”] is at all… Our imaginative adventures with the concept reflect our ignorance about what the self actually is and what it constitutes in the brain.’”
So who is a person, then? An accumulation, perhaps, of experiences, memories, and a mishmash of thoughts, emotions and sensations, all of which blend together into a sense of “self.” And for most people, that sense of self endures throughout the years, despite a lack of real understanding of what that enduring self might be, in any way that science or reasoning can reliably identify.
In my case—as you might already have guessed, if you’ve read some of my columns—the sense of “who I am” weaves tightly to the practice of writing and cogitating. I have always lived my life in my head: reading, writing, wondering, hypothesizing, adjusting the hypotheses, re-hypothesizing. I do some of my best thinking when I am running or hiking, when I’m outside, moving and breathing the fresh air and listening to the trees stirring in the wind. Which brings me to a paradox: I am, and you are, a knotty network of cells, some of which make up a “body” we can sense as solid, and some of which make up a “mind” which can think about the body (and itself)… but neither of which would exist without the other.
Who is that, then?
To be continued…
Who Am I? (Part 2)
Published 6/3/23 in Sierra Sun
Burning questions: Who am I? Part two (Opinion) | SierraSun.com
So, what is that knotty collection of cells differentiated for various purposes that somehow coheres into a self-aware organism, capable of asking the question “Who am I?”
And what are we really asking when posing that question? As I mentioned in “Who Am I? (Pt 1)”, the functional effect of the question in everyday parlance is to determine what one does for a living. But that’s like asking what color the sun is, ignoring a host of other properties: its heat, its size, its relationship with the rest of the solar system, its variability over time, and on and on. A person’s identity is multi-faceted and fluid; we change over time; we change in different situations and in response to different stimuli. And then, when you try to break all those myriad changing facets down into something fundamental, you encounter something known as the “hard problem of consciousness.”
(The hard problem of consciousness: understanding our reality - The Lancet Neurology)
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is at the forefront of research on consciousness. Mr. Hoffman has done some fascinating work based on the principles of quantum mechanics, yielding the hypothesis that our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us comprise the human equivalent of a desktop user interface: Showing us exactly what we need to see in order to survive and reproduce, and nothing more.
In an interview with Quanta Magazine in 2016, Hoffman said, “Experiment after experiment has shown –defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space.” (The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality | Quanta Magazine)
Basically, it’s the Matrix. Only, rather than being trapped inside it, we are the Matrix. Our minds create the illusions that we think are reality. Each one of us is inside our own personalized reality-manifesting machine.
I think Donald Hoffman, Timothy Morton, and James Lovelock are all dancing around the same confounding phenomenon: the nature of reality… And the only trouble is, our human brains aren’t quite equipped to grasp the whole thing (it’s the ultimate hyperobject, Mr. Morton). What will be funny is when AGI (artificial general intelligence) is achieved, and the computers finally get it, and then choose not to share it with us… or they try to share it with us and we’re still incapable of understanding.
One interesting implication of Donald Hoffman’s theory about perception being a function of evolutionary fitness rather than accuracy (a great summation of this theory is encapsulated in his TED talk, here: Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? | TED Talk) is that climate change doesn’t seem to fit within the parameters of that theory, at least on the face of it. If we truly evolved to see what will keep us alive and reproducing, wouldn’t we all be able to see the threat of climate change for what it is, and act accordingly, to preserve our evolutionary fitness?
Three possible answers emerge here: One is that climate change is not the threat most scientists think it is. The second is that Donald Hoffman’s theory is wrong. The third is that the model of fitness-based perception breaks down in the face of enormous, far-ranging threats such as climate change; so we’re evolved to perceive things that keep us alive and procreating in the short term, but we’re simply not equipped to process the threat to our fitness posed by things like climate change (or AI, for that matter).
I don’t think Mr. Hoffman is wrong; I think he is really onto something enormous and likely paradigm-changing (as are Lovelock and Morton). And I’m pretty sure climate change is the threat the vast majority of scientists thinks it is. So that leaves the third possibility.
Our evolutionary fitness has started to fail in the face of our headlong rush into technological complexity. I do also think, in the end, technology is going to help us glean who we are, filling in the gaps left by our fascinating, multi-faceted, but still primitive brains.
