Being
a selfless human being is not a moral goal toward which Daniel Dennett thinks
any of us should strive. This is not due
to a belief that selflessness is immoral or impossible, but rather because to
his belief that all of us are already selfless, as in being literally without
selves. He thus disagrees both with
those who, like Richard Swinburne, believe the self is some concrete but
immaterial thing and those who, like David Velleman, believe it is some property
or part of the brain. Over both these
accounts, Dennett favors one in which the self is a mere fictional abstractum, posited by our selfless
brains in order to more efficiently interact with and predict the actions of
other human beings. He believes the
self, as an abstractum, plays a role
in the study of human beings’ behavior similar to that played by the center of
gravity in the study of physical entities’ behavior.
Centers
of gravity depend for their spatiotemporal locations on the spatiotemporal
distribution of actual bits of matter, yet they are themselves not material
things. Rather, we talk in terms of
centers of gravity because it is typically a more efficient way to study the
motions of more or less self-contained material bodies. A literal description of why a book being
slowly pushed off the edge of a chair falls at a particular time requires an
exceedingly complex explanation, which must include both the gravitational
force pulling each of the book’s atoms downward and
the electromagnetic forces holding the atoms of the book together. The tipping point is reached when the total
gravitational force pulling down on all the atoms not over the seat of the
chair is stronger than the force pulling down on the atoms that are over the
chair. At this point, the total downward
force on the unsupported part of the book is greater than the upward force on
that part of the book exerted by the electromagnetic bonds unsupported atoms
have to support ones and the upward force exerted by atoms in the chair on
supported atoms in the book. The reason
the entire book falls off the chair when the tipping point is reached and
passed is that the forces holding the book together cause
the part of the book over the chair to be pulled down along with the part of
the book that is unsupported.
Or,
we could simply treat the book as if it were a single rigid body and say it
falls when its center of gravity is no longer directly over any part of the
seat of the chair.
Dennett
sees an analogous situation in the case of brains and human behavior. In order to literally describe what goes on
when someone locked in a closet calls for help, we would need to explain all
the ways in which different parts of the brain communicate with each
other. Specifically, we’d need to be
able to explain all the complex neural connections that lead from the
perception of being locked in (this perception itself being a complicated mix
of sense data and reasoning about its significance) to the linguistic module(s)
of the brain putting together a certain utterance (which, in the past, has
successfully resulted in assistance from someone else). Then we would need to explain how the brain
translated this mental utterance into motions of the vocal apparatus and on
into a collection of sound waves. In the
listener, an equally complex process takes the aural input to a linguistic
module which then communicates certain information to other parts of the brain,
parts which in turn communicate with each other both consciously and unconsciously.
Eventually, some extremely complicated
“conversation” between parts of the brain results in information being sent to
the body’s motor apparatus, to either move the body toward the closet to free
its captive or to ignore him and go have a cup of coffee in order to get the
caffeine the brain had been craving before hearing a cry for help.
Or
we could simply say that the single unified agent comprising the self of the
person locked in the closet notices his situation and calls for help, and that
the agent that is the self of the potential rescuer hears this call,
understands its meaning, and either goes to unlock the closet door or decides
she doesn’t care for the guy and goes instead to the break room for a cup of
coffee.
Just as describing more or less connected clumps of matter in terms
of centers of gravity gets around much of the complexity of a literal
explanation of their motion, describing persons in terms of unified agents
(selves) gets around much of the complexity of literal explanations of people’s
behavior. Furthermore, until the
last century or two, science was incapable of providing us with even the most
rudimentary neurological explanation of what really goes on in the brains of
people locked in closets. Without some
advanced understanding of neuropsychology, the only coherent way people can
talk about human behavior is by positing the existence of a unified agent in
control of each human body. Dennett
merely argues that, though positing such unified, agentive selves is convenient
in conversation, science has showed us that this is not the way to try to
understand what is really going on
inside our brains.
It’s
all well and good to describe selves as being like centers of gravity in their
explanative usefulness, but up to this point our account of selves lacks
something that is essential to discussions of centers of gravity. Even when the exact calculations are
difficult to the point of impossibility, we know that the center of gravity of
an object can be found by taking a weighted average of the positions of each
individual particle making up the object (with the individual weights being,
well, the weights of each particle). For
the analogy between selves and centers of gravity to be productive, we require
a way to determine some specific characteristics of the posited self. Here Dennett resorts to the phenomenon of
fictional characters, arguing that the self is such an entity. When reading an autobiographical narrative,
we rarely have any trouble inferring all sorts of the main character’s traits
that are not mentioned outright, and we also have no problem with the fact that
some traits we expect real characters to have are not possessed by these
fictional characters. For instance, we
can legitimately guess that Moby Dick’s
Ishmael has exactly two nostrils, even though this may never be stated
explicitly; and we are not bothered by there seeming to be no fact of the
matter of whether Ishmael has a strange looking mole on his right shoulder
blade, even though any real person either does or does not have such a
mole. Dennett claims that the same two
things are true of selves.
Based on everything you’ve ever said, it
is fairly easy for others to infer certain things about you that you haven’t
said explicitly, but is anything about your self as indeterminate as whether
Ishmael has a higher than average risk of skin cancer? Dennett clearly thinks so: “We cannot undo
those parts of our pasts that are determinate, but our selves are constantly
being made more determinate as we go along in response to the way the world
impinges on us.”[1] And indeed, once we realize that not only
physical characteristics can be indeterminate, a wealth of examples comes
up. For instance, there is no fact about
whether I (or Ishmael, for that matter) enjoy Lithuanian romantic
comedies. Sure, there might be some fact
of the matter as to whether I would
enjoy them, were I to watch several, but this seems to be a fact pertaining to
my brain rather than my self. My brain
may be structured in such a way that some exceptionally clever neuroscientist
could look inside and determine, with complete accuracy, whether my watching
Lithuanian romantic comedies would result in feelings of pleasure or of
boredom. My self at this moment, on the
other hand, neither likes nor dislikes watching such movies, because my
feelings toward the Lithuanian film industry have never been rendered
determinate.
In
terms of the selves-as-fictional-characters metaphor, the autobiographies are
the complete narratives we tell (silently to ourselves and vocally to others)
about our lives, the authors are our brains, and the central fictional
characters in these stories, the “centers of narrative gravity”, are our
selves. “In Dennett’s metaphor, the self
is the non-existent author of a merely fictional autobiography composed by the
human organism, which neither is nor embodies a real self.”[2] Figuring out precise characteristics of these
selves may be even more complicated than finding the precise centers of gravity
of particularly complex bodies. Yet it
seems straightforward that autobiographical narratives have central characters,
even if these characters are not precisely defined in every detail.
According to Dennett, our brains,
essentially made up of several interconnected and unconscious modules, tell the
stories of our lives automatically. We
talk (to ourselves and others) as though a single, real agent figures in each
story, simply because doing so cuts down drastically on the amount and
complexity of the information that would otherwise have to be shared between
brain modules and between people for any cooperative work to get done. The self is nothing more than a posited
fictional entity that makes certain things easier to talk about. “If you…want to know what the self really is, you’re making a category
mistake,” just as you would be making a category mistake if you wanted to know
which physical particle was really
the center of gravity of an object.
David
Velleman has a problem not with Dennett’s assertion that the self is “the
fictive protagonist of a person’s autobiography,” but with his conclusion that
the autobiography is “consequently false in characterizing its protagonist,”
(Velleman). Instead, he argues that the
autobiography is true in spite of being fictive, and that “we really are the
characters whom we invent.” The problem
Velleman sees with Dennett’s account is that Dennett proposes that the
narrative both reflects the person’s life and influences the person’s actions,
and then goes on to deny agentive characteristics to the part of the brain
composing the narrative. Velleman claims
that in his description of how our brains compose autobiographies, Dennett
implicitly gives enough agency to the brain’s
language-producing systems for these systems to be attributed selfhood. (What he actually says is that Dennett equips
them with enough selfhood to be considered agents, but what he goes on to
discuss directly is agency, from which selfhood can ostensibly be
inferred).
Velleman’s objection is made more
explicit with regard to Sybil, a sufferer of multiple personality disorder:
Sybil’s
behavior always manifested the personality whose story she was telling at the
moment. Her life shaped her story, and
her story shaped her life, all because she was designed to maintain correspondence
between the two….
Yet
if a self-narrator works in both directions, then the self he invents is not
just an idle fiction, a useful abstraction for interpreting his behavior. It – or, more precisely, his representation
of it – is a determinant of the very behavior that it’s useful for
interpreting. Indeed, the reason why the
narrator’s representation of a centrally controlling self is so useful for
interpreting his behavior is that it, the
representation, really does control his behavior to some extent. (Velleman,
emphasis added)
Because the module narrating the story
can affect the actions of the person whose story it is, this module is in
agentive control of the person and can thus legitimately be considered that
person’s self.
What
this objection misses is the complexity possible on Dennett’s account. In particular, it seems to miss the full
significance of Dennett’s statement, “conscious thinking seems – much of it –
to be a variety of particularly efficient and private talking to oneself,”
(Dennett). Velleman appears to interpret
this fact as meaning the brain’s narrative module directly talks to other parts
of the brain and thus has some agentive control over what those other parts do
because their actions are based on what they are told by the narrative
module. Instead, I believe this fact
should be interpreted as meaning some arbitrary brain system nonverbally sends
information to the narrative module, which then verbalizes that information and
sends it to parts of the brain not as closely connected to the original system,
and these parts then react to the information.
In other words, while Velleman takes the effect narration (internal or
external) has on the rest of the organism as evidence for the agency of the
narrator, I take it merely as evidence for the wonderful effectiveness of
verbalization by an agentless narrative module in integrating many diverse,
equally agentless brain systems.
Velleman argues that anyone able to
“maintain correspondence in one direction, by saying that he’s locked in the
closet when he is, should be able to maintain correspondence [in] the other
direction, by going into the closet when he has said that he will.” While this may be true, it does not mean that
the module responsible for narrating a plan to eventually enter the closet is
responsible, as an agent, for initially making that plan. Rather, I believe it means only that some
nonverbal interaction between other modules led, unconsciously and nonverbally,
to an unstated decision to enter the closet, and that this decision was then
translated into a vocalization by the narrative module. The nonverbal interaction may have been
between the part of the brain storing memories of a broom being in the closet,
the parts that for whatever reason concluded that a broom was needed, and the part knowing no one else was likely to go to
the closet and get it. (Perhaps the
person in question is a janitor who is paid, among other things, to be the one
who gets brooms.) The utterance by the
narrative module, which need not have been audibly vocalized, was more likely
an automatic reaction (to the information that part of the brain decided a trip
to the closet was necessary) than the result of this module’s executive
decision, as the brain’s central agent, to make such a trip. That this utterance precedes an actual trip
to the closet simply means other parts of the brain reacted favorably to news
of the decision, perhaps because the trip fit well with the information those
parts already had.
In
fact, it seems that any time the narrative module produces an utterance that
does not correspond to a decision previously reached by other parts of the
brain, the utterance has no effect. If
the narrative module was really an agent, there should be more consistent
examples of a person saying something out of the blue and then following
through with it. But however often I
utter the words, “I should go for a run,” I won’t even be leaving this chair
unless several other brain modules agree with the meaning of the
utterance. There are times, of course,
when making just this utterance precedes a person’s actually putting on shoes
and ruining his or her knees for an hour or so.
It may appear at first glance that these situations are cases of the narrative
module intentionally causing the person to go for a run, or at the very least
intentionally hardening the person’s resolve to do so. But the fact that my uttering the same words
doesn’t result in my going for a run seems to hurt the argument for the
narrative module’s direct control over a person’s actions. If there is no direct control, but there is
“resolve” present to be hardened, it’s just as plausible to claim that whatever
agentless brain system created that resolve in the first place also sent a
command for the linguistic module to make an utterance that would harden it, as
it is to claim the linguistic module made the utterance on its own in order to
harden the person’s resolve. In light of
the explanation given above for the utterance that precedes entering a broom
closet, this alternative claim actually seems more plausible than one
attributing agency to the linguistic module, because it is consistent with the
idea that agentless modules of our brains can make fairly complex decisions
before there is any conscious verbalization of those decisions.
That
Dennett’s theory resists objections Velleman brings up doesn’t make it a good
theory. It should also be able to deal
with some of the problems that arise in other theories of self and personal
identity. One problem brought up
frequently by other philosophers is that of counting persons. If selves are centers of narrative gravity,
then there should be as many selves as there are distinct narratives. When deciding whether two narrative passages
(which could each be book-length) form parts of the same story, we generally
resort to looking at the consistency of the characters therein. If descriptions of the main characters are
too different in one passage than in the other, we are inclined to say we have
two distinct stories. How much inconsistency
is too much remains an open question, both for brain-narratives and for works
of literary fiction, but some ambiguity in this regard may not be all that bad
for our theory. The fact that it is
difficult to give a specific number to the personalities in one brain, on Dennett’s
or any other account of multiple personality disorder, could simply mean that
there is not a specific number in the first place. As we have already seen, some traits of
selves are indeterminate, so why not distinctness and number as well? The persistent difficulty we seem to have
counting the number of selves in normal brains, bisected brains, and brains
with multiple personalities fits much better with an account like Dennett’s
than with any account requiring selves to obey the laws that constrain other
concrete things. So perhaps the
inability of the “centers of narrative gravity” theory to count persons any
more satisfactorily than other theories we’ve looked at should not weigh
against it. Rather, it may be that the
inability of other theories to count persons satisfactorily should weigh in
favor of a theory (such as this one) that actually explains why selves should
be so hard to count accurately.