The question “who am I?” sounds so enormously self-centered that it’s easy to dismiss it as one of those philosophical inquires that’s either so obtuse as to be meaningless or so egotistical as to be dangerous. Ethics, on the other hand, is very popular – so popular that most people don’t think you need philosophy to do it. You just need to be good, and getting good doesn’t take too long. You were probably good to start with, so all you have to do is forgive yourself for the few mistakes you have made (after all, everybody makes those) and you’re set to go. Then you can make up whatever you like and still give the impression you care about other people. It’s still entirely self-centered but it’s harder to see that that’s what’s going on. Answering the question “who am I?” isn’t very popular at all. It sounds just too self-centered right out of the gate. That’s too bad, because it’s no good deciding how you should treat other people if you don’t know some very basic things about yourself. Are you even capable of treating other people well? Why would you want to? If you do, what makes you think you can keep it up? Can you even trust your own understanding of these things? Anyone who hears someone tell them, “I did what I thought was right,” is almost always on the bad end of someone who didn’t think these things through very well. They are simply trying to cover up for a mistake, and the mistake they are covering up for isn’t an ethical mistake. It was a mistake having to do with their own understanding of who they are. And they probably have it wrong.
So let’s start from the very beginning. When we talk about ourselves, we can group our understandings into a two basic categories. One set consists of statements like, “I used to be 2 years old but my body changed and now I am 25 and different in many ways.” and “I remember going fishing with my father once. I may forget that but I will probably remember other things I have done with my father.” These kinds of propositions are pretty hard to argue with and, even though they may take some explaining, we still get the sense that they can be explained. The sciences have taken a pretty good run at explaining these sorts of things. Bodies change due to cell regeneration or deterioration. Memories fade because neural networks don’t function properly, It’s true they raise all kinds of philosophical questions too, but you can avoid the philosophy if you have a solid faith in science.
But there is another way of looking at ourselves that’s a bit harder to deal with. “When I die, my body is left behind and my real self lives on in heaven or hell depending on how I have lived my life.” You may not agree with this sort of thinking, but you also get the sense that people can say them without being entirely crazy. For example, if someone said, “I am a bowl of Cheerios,” you would not think of them the same way as you would of someone who said, “I was created by God to participate in His plans for humanity here on earth.” And it may not be because you think one is right and the other wrong. You just know that there are legitimate ways of answering the question “who am I?” even if you disagree. And they don’t include declaring yourself to be a breakfast cereal.
If you want to jettison all this because it sounds too religious for you, and it’s beneath you to take religion seriously, then let’s make it even simpler. “I am a good person,” and “I have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are very similar statements. Science can’t even take a shot at these, but you still get the feeling they are making claims on who you are and it’s important to decide whether or not they are true.
That’s because how you answer the question “who am I?” decides a lot about what you might be responsible for, how other people might make decisions about such thing as whether or not you can be trusted or how reliable you might be when it comes to doing the right thing. Doing ethics isn’t much help if the guy doing them thinks he is a good person and can do no wrong. The cart ends up coming before the horse in a very big way.
Substance Dualism
One of the most common ways of answering the question “who am I?” was put on the table by Rene Descartes. He argued that we are made up of two very simple, very divisible, very identifiable parts – the body and the mind. For our purposes, you can put “spirit” or “soul” in place of mind. Some philosophers and theologian will scoff, but let’s not make it too complicated. This theory – substance dualism – argues that these are distinct entities that don’t talk much to each other. When someone at a funeral says, “this is just the shell. The real person isn’t there anymore.” they are talking like a substance dualist. The thing called the “self” is gone and, even though the part that most of us would recognize as the real person is still very much there, the actual “real” person has left it behind and is presumably no worse off for the separation. Terms like “soul mate” need substance dualism to mean anything. So do common expressions like “He (or she) is beautiful on the inside.” They both imply that something substantial different from the body can account for that person’s real “self.”
Descartes arrived at this idea by asking himself, “what can I not possible be without and still say I existed?” He decided he could doubt most anything including the existence of his own body. Why? Because he relies entirely on his senses to discern his body, and his eyes have deceived him before. So what’s left? Well, he said, if I doubt everything, the only thing I can’t doubt is that I’m doubting. So the only thing I can’t deny the existence of is my mind. I can’t doubt my own mind because I need my mind to doubt it.
Aristotle’s approach was different, but he still came out in the same place – substance dualism. He said that the soul is a “simple” thing. It can’t be divided, and it can’t change. Clearly, the body changes and can easily be divided, even destroyed. But the soul can’t be destroyed and so it must be substantially different from the body. Then he reasoned out that, if the soul never changes, it must have pre-existed in a special place long before you were born. For a lot of people, that put him in the “I’m a bowl of Cheerios,” category, so it’s best that we don’t go there.
The problem here is that you can’t have much respect for people if their body is nothing more than a constantly changing, corrupted vessel that has no real value. So substance dualism seems to leave a lot of practical problems unresolved even if it works well at funerals.
Property Dualism
Property dualism tries to solve this by recognizing that it’s hard for us to imagine that there is no real connection between our minds and our bodies. They seem to work so well together that there must be some way in which they are talking to each other. And to simply dismiss the body as not mattering very much just seems wrong given that we spend an enormous amount of time paying attention to it. Still, they do seem like very distinct entities. I can think just as clearly even if I lose a limb.
Another matter that property dualists seem to have taken note of: most of our reactions to physical stimulus are remarkably similar. When I poke you with a sharp stick, your reaction is awfully close to the reaction I get from everybody else when I poke them with sharp sticks.
But not completely the same. The thing that I can’t be sure of is exactly what you are feeling when I poke you with a sharp stick. And even if I can make the connection between sharp stick poking and pain, I have no idea if the pain you feel is anything like the pain I feel. Remember those pain charts on doctors’ walls with the round face that starts with a smile and ends with tears? What does that mean, anyway? There must be a connection between the pain and the poking but how do I know it’s not different for each person?
The property dualist says that there may not be a real distinction between the body and the mind but they certainly behave differently. They have different properties even if they are substantially the same. So they divide things up into, not objects, but properties. When I am talking about the body, I talk about size and color, for example. When I talk about the mind, I talk about kindness and cleverness. I can still address you like your mind and body are one in the same, but I talk about the properties unique to mind-things and body-things like they are different, which they are.
Why does this matter? Because it makes it possible to deal with you as a whole human being rather than as a divided creature. The problem, though, is that it still doesn’t give me any insight into whether or not the mind-things look the same to you as they do to me. I can say you are kind, but I still don’t know what that means to you.
Reductionism
Reductionists, like Thomas Hobbs, believe something of the opposite of Descartes. It’s true that we ought to reduce ourselves to the most basic level in order to answer the question, “what is the very least I could have and still be me?” But instead of arriving at the mind, he arrives at the body. It’s the only thing our senses are capable of grasping. True, our senses can deceive us, but they don’t deceive us all the time and, of all the things we see, feel, smell, taste and hear, we see, feel, smell, taste and hear our bodies the most. So doubting its existence just seems silly. Our mind, on the other hand, seems pretty nebulous and anything like a soul seems ridiculous to Thomas Hobbs. So if we have to doubt something, we should doubt the invisible and undefinable mind. To him there is no reason to believe such a thing exists. But science has proven that synapses firing and hormones pumping can explain just about any human behavior that you can think of. All it takes is someone to ask a question like, “why do people fall in love?” and a dozen scientists will show up with brain scans and endorphin numbers to explain it all without once mentioning the metaphorical heart or the moving of the spirit.
The problem with reductionism is exactly that, though. If you can explain that everything that makes us human are these physical things, then we start looking suspiciously like chickens who also have firing synapses and pumping hormones. Are humans not special in any way? Are we nothing more than highly evolved animals. Lot’s of people say this, but, before you agree, remember that you may have to put aside things like human rights and respect for the dignity and life of others. Or you will have to apply the same rights to the chicken you had for dinner as you do to people, in which case you shouldn’t have had chicken for dinner.
The modern solution to this is not very satisfying but it’s very popular. Materialism is the scientific version of Reductionism. It says, yes, there is a mental state that we have to explain in addition to simply physical reactions. When you poke someone with a sharp stick, he or she not only react by pulling away from the stick, but that person feels pain and he or she gets upset. What are these two things (pain and anguish)? They have no physical existence? The Materialist says they are nothing more than a mental state defined by the physical events. The mental state isn’t something different. It’s just the expression of the relationship between physical components like sharp sticks and soft flesh. But even if this is a good model under which to practice things like medicine and kick boxing, it doesn’t explain mental states that have no physical components and it doesn’t explain why we react differently to events that do have a physical component. For example, I might hear a piece of music that I think is lovely and you think is terrible. There is no physical stimulus but we end up with two very different mental states. True, you can say that I am getting more endorphins than you, but why? Even when there is a physical component, materialism doesn’t explain why people react differently to the same component. One person’s pain makes him run away and another’s makes him punch someone in the nose. Why?
So it seems that any kind of clear separation between the mind and the body doesn’t give us enough to go on when it comes to explaining who I am, how and why I react to certain stimuli in certain ways, how I can predict how you will react, and how we both can expect the other to behave in order to end up with the best outcome. So several more complicated theories have been put on the table.
Logical Behaviorism is a theory that tries to explain what happens when two people are poked with sharp sticks and seem to behave differently. It also tries to help me interpret these things so I can respond to people as though they were real people, that is, with compassion, even if I don’t think they have something like a soul. And thinking people have a soul doesn’t seem to be enough to stop people from hurting each other anyway. So we have to find something else to solve this problem.
Logical Behaviorists believe that, when I poke you with a sharp stick, and you react with anger, tears or wincing, you are responding in such a way as to advertise a disposition that others who have been poked with sharp sticks can instantly recognize. What matters is not the actual feeling as much as the behavior. You can never know what another is feeling when the sharp stick is introduced, and you certainly can’t know why this matters so much, but you can try to understand others by looking at their behavior and making a connection between their behavior, your behavior and what they must be thinking.
This seems to do it, doesn’t it? The self is the thing that reacts to outside stimulus, results in close, common, but not identical reactions. These reactions help us better understand what people are experiencing and, hopefully, help us to be more thoughtful and compassionate. Except….
how close does the behavior have to be, and does it work with less obvious mental states like joy or love or just with obvious ones like the outcome of being poked with a sharp stick? Even more problematic, what if I keep deeply personal feelings to myself? According to behaviorists, these feelings would not exist if I didn’t act on them.
There are other theories that try to explain who I am. They try to account for things like memory, for example – how they seem to change, disappear, or get replaced but can still belong to the same person. But they all fall short in addressing the big problem of the self. Since I so obviously change in body, mind, memory, intentions, reactions and just about everything that I might normally use to explain who I am, how can I actually claim to be the same person from one year to the next? And it does no good to say that my soul doesn’t change because exactly what is the soul? Do you really want to go back to Aristotle who says that, if it never changes, it must have always existed?
There is one philosophy that says that we’ve had it wrong all along. They say, we started with no “self” at all, and a good hard look at the world will convince us that there’s no use getting a soul from God because he probably doesn’t exist and, even if he does, you can’t trust a guy that makes such a mess of the world to make anything good out of you. It’s called existentialism.