Greg – thank you so much for your thoughtful and insightful note. I love this topic of self-consciousness, and you did a wonderfully clear job laying out the issues.
While it’s unlikely I can take on any new experimental program in this area at the moment, I’m certainly going to keep my eyes out on insights here, especially given your revealing descriptions and enthusiasm for the subject. I’ll keep you posted as anything strikes me or as new data cross my radar.
Also, I’m preparing on episode on the self for a couple of months from now. I’ve already written most of it and it doesn’t touch on self-consciousness at the moment…. but it strikes me as a possibility that I’ll add something to the episode on this. If I do I’ll mention you by name as having given me inspiration to add this. In case I go that route, can you just clarify the pronunciation of your name (is de vlee-shower a good guess?)
Thanks and let’s keep the ball rolling on ideas here.
D
Dear David,
I have long admired and followed your work with great interest, from your sparkling book ‘Sum’ to your fine and highly illuminating books on the brain. Recently, your Inner Cosmos-podcast has brought me tremendous insights and enjoyment, for which I am sincerely grateful.
My fascination with the philosophical problem of self-consciousness dates back over twenty years, resulting in my doctoral dissertation in philosophy (2011). Although I have no background in neuroscience, as a layperson I eagerly follow developments surrounding self-consciousness in this field. I am heartened by the growing interest in this subject. Yet I notice that the approach of many neuroscientists is still rather one-sided or reductionist. Your different way of talking about this topic I find very refreshing. For instance, your metaphor about a radio set, discovered by an isolated tribe, I found particularly apt: of course the electronic circuit in the radio is necessary to get voices from the radio speakers, but those with no notion or eye for things like radio waves and transmission masts will never gain a real understanding of what that ‘magical box’ (the found radio) actually is or does. In that same episode you left some opening for possible future discoveries around the potential quantum workings of neurons. I wholeheartedly agree that one should never rule out any hypothesis beforehand. But if I understand you correctly, it is not from that line of research that you expect much promise. I follow you completely there as well.
Intriguing about the radio metaphor is also that it has a social dimension: the transmission masts are built and the radio waves transmitted by people. This mirrors our profound social nature. The recent growth of social neuroscience is encouraging, but it seems this new attention has not yet fully penetrated the research into self-consciousness.
I like to share my thoughts with you, as I believe that for a complex subject like self-consciousness, there can never be enough different perspectives. I would very much like to find a bridge from my background to neuroscience. Possibly you see merit in my line of thinking, and ideally it could inspire you to new experimental research.
In my view, a clear and qualitative distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness is essential. By ‘consciousness’ I mean, as you also indicate in one of your Inner Cosmos-episodes, the pure experience, such as the experience of the color red or the sensation of pain. The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ refers to the origin of this ‘qualia’ of our experience. Interestingly, I think this problem is not as ‘hard’ as is often claimed. It only seems hard because it is often confused with the problem of self-consciousness. You refer, among others, to the ‘global workspace theory’ and the ‘integrated information theory’. These approaches remind me strongly of the inspiring work of Canadian cognitive psychologist Merlin Donald. He describes ‘consciousness’ as the result of the fusion of diverse sensory inputs into a single perception or experience.
This differs from self-consciousness, which not only encompasses these interwoven sensations, but also enriches them with a sense of ‘selfhood’. In addition to the perception (consciousness) of a tree, I also ‘experience’ that it is I who sees the tree. However, this ‘self’ is not so much an additional perception, but rather a formal, structuring framework (the philosopher Immanuel Kant refers in this context to an ‘ap-perception’). Instead of a substantive element, the ‘self’ is a structuring principle, comparable to a riverbed that determines the course of the water. As an invisible framework it subjectifies our experience (first-person perspective). This ‘mineness’ makes me experience myself as a single subject, with one past, living in the present, directed at one future — which does not imply I need to concretely imagine that past or future. When I wake up in the morning, there is no doubt about who I am: I automatically slide back into the life that is uniquely mine. In the river metaphor, this ‘mineness’ corresponds to the riverbed: it has no tangible content, yet shapes and directs my experiences.
What seems crucial to me is that this first-person perspective (‘mineness’) never stands alone, but always goes together with an awareness of third-person perspective. Experiencing the world from a subjective standpoint is inextricably linked to the awareness that one can also be followed by others. Newborn babies do not yet possess self-consciousness. Through social interaction they develop this during the first years of life, a process thoroughly researched in the field of developmental psychology. A crucial aspect in this process is that the baby gradually becomes familiar with the idea of being recognizable and followable by others – that is, by individuals who experience the world from a different perspective than the baby itself. This increasing familiarity with the concept of ‘perspectivity’ and one’s own ‘followability’ or ‘outside-ness’ leads to a growing awareness in the baby that it too is an individual with a unique perspective on the world.
In this sense, self-consciousness can be seen as a social function: through social mediation (third-person perspective), we now also ‘appear’ to ‘ourselves’ (first-person perspective). We become the ‘bearing’ sub-ject of our life (subject literally means “bearer” in Latin). We no longer merely coincide with our experiencing (consciousness) of our life, but now also appear to ourselves as ‘this being currently undergoing this experience’ (self-consciousness).
This socially mediated distance towards ourselves is an aspect of ourselves we do not like to acknowledge. It has something shameful about it, as if a virtual community is constantly hovering with us, following us in everything we do. It concerns the hidden dimension the diary writer struggles with, who wants to write solely for himself, but constantly loses himself in the reading gaze of an elusive Other. It concerns the solitary boy playing football in the garden who at the same time takes on the role of commentator in his game. It concerns the character Mr. Duffy from the short story ‘A Painful Case’ (from James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’), who during his daily solitary park strolls experiences himself from a third-person perspective, and who with every step almost literally hears an observing instantiation say: ‘Mr. Duffy walks with slow and deliberate step through the park…’
Now I try to build a bridge to neuroscience (sorry it took a while) by looking at the Default Mode Network (DMN). Interestingly, the DMN, which plays a central role in our social context, is involved in self-reflection, daydreaming, memories and imagining future scenarios. These processes are strongly anchored in our own position within a social context, where questions like ‘How do others see me?’ and ‘How do I experience others?’ are crucial.
Remarkable is how psychological studies make a distinction between ‘field memories’ and ‘observer memories’. ‘Field memories’ are memories where we relive an event from a first-person perspective, while ‘observer memories’ are memories where we see ourselves from a third-person perspective in that situation. This distinction between being an active participant and seeing oneself as an observer also occurs in our dreams. The fascinating thing is that these two types of memories often intermingle, possibly illustrating how the first- and third-person perspectives cannot be seen separately.
From this angle, it seems the DMN could form a neurological basis for the coupling between the first- and third-person perspectives, and thus our self-consciousness. The DMN develops in the first years of life of newborns. This developmental process raises the question of how a child becomes familiar with the concept of perspectivity.
Possibly a connection can exist with the couplings between our motor and our sensory brain centers — I must think here of ‘mirror neurons’, although it is a bit difficult for me to assess to what extent the contestation of this discovery is justified or not. When for instance we see someone laugh, this perception is mirrored in our own motor reactions, such as a tendency to smile back. This interaction is not passive; our perception of others is active and responsive. Think of the example of a baby smiling back at a smiling person. Initially this smile is just an automatic reflex, without any understanding of the social context. However, this interaction possibly forms a link in the brain between perceiving and performing the smile. As the baby grows older and starts smiling more consciously, this action can invoke the perception of earlier interactions, adding a third-person perspective to the experience. In this way our socially situated gestures may activate an outside perspective, possibly laying an early basis for the kind of self-consciousness I described and linked to the DMN.
With every shared gesture we make, or with every intentional action we perform, we summon the own spectator position from the past. The body serves in this way as a bridge between the socially meaningful world, in which we know ourselves to be followable and identifiable, and our ‘inner world’, which we could previously only experience as ‘conscious’ beings, but now also as ‘selfconscious’ beings. Meaning does not reside in the brain, but hovers somewhere between our brain and the world, which we share with our fellow human beings. The intertwining of the first- and third-person perspectives is possibly the gateway that gives us access to a sphere of shared meanings.
Given all this, it could be interesting to set up experimental research around the question of whether correlations exist between on the one hand the coupling of our motor and sensory centers and on the other hand certain parts of the DMN. This is of course just a vague suggestion. Possibly you see things not only much more concretely, but also more clearly.
Thank you for following my train of thought,
Kind regards,
Greg
Greg Houwer 