Go Back to Page 1 of "The Self"
Perhaps the most important realization about our experience of consciousness in recent decades is that the overwhelming majority of what we do is compelled without any conscious participation at all. David Eagleman explains, “most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you—the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning—is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. …Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The ‘I’ simply has no right of entry. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.” He continues, “Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn’t matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it’s not. Whether we’re talking about dilated eyes, jealousy, attraction, the love of fatty foods, or the great idea you had last week, consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.” That may be true in a far more literal way than generally imagined. John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute has worked on many studies suggesting that even ‘free will’ is an illusion of sorts [44], which has long been the contention of classical physics and deterministic realists like Albert Einstein. Haynes reports that not only can a ‘free’ decision be indicated up to ten seconds before it enters a subject’s awareness, but researchers can tell how a subject will choose based on fMRI patterns [12]. He writes, “we demonstrated using fMRI that the outcome of free decisions can be decoded from brain activity several seconds before reaching conscious awareness.” Where does this leave the question of Self? Thomas Metzinger asserts, “Strictly speaking, there is no essence within us that stays the same across time, nothing that could not in principle be divided into parts, no substantial self that could exist independently of the body. A ‘self’ in any stronger or metaphysically interesting sense of the word just does not seem to exist. We must face this fact: We are self-less Ego Machines.”
The Narrative Self
Is the existence of an experiencing Self a necessary component of consciousness? Is self-aware consciousness driving our actions when playing sports or absorbed in thought while driving? “I don’t think it is,” writes Thomas Metzinger, “for one thing, because there seem to be ‘self-less’ forms of conscious experience. In certain severe psychiatric disorders, such as Cotard’s syndrome, patients sometimes stop using the first-person pronoun and, moreover, claim that they do not really exist. …Mystics of all cultures and all times have reported deep spiritual experiences in which no ‘self’ was present, and some of them, too, stopped using the pronoun ‘I.’ Indeed, many of the simple organisms on this planet may have a consciousness tunnel with nobody living in it. Perhaps some of them have only a consciousness ‘bubble’ instead of a tunnel, because, together with the self, awareness of past or future disappears as well.” Of course, in humans the sense of ongoing continuity is foundational. But is it the same ‘me’ from moment to moment? “Memory and prospection (future-vision) are the crucial mental capacities enabling you to think of yourself as an ‘I’ who endures through time as a thinker of thoughts and a doer of deeds,” writes Evan Thompson, “they enable you to think of yourself as having a unique storyline through time.” Philosopher Daniel Dennett contends [13] that “The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you’re making a category mistake. After all, when a human being’s behavioral control system becomes seriously impaired (e.g. schizophrenia, etc.), it can turn out that the best hermeneutical story we can tell about that individual says that there is more than one character ‘inhabiting’ that body.” It is possible that our self-awareness and self-narrative are downstream consequences of our ability to use language. Jill Bolte Taylor attributes this story-telling trait to the left hemisphere, which is widely considered the language center of the brain. She writes, “One of the jobs of our left hemisphere language centers is to define our self by saying ‘I am.’ Through the use of brain chatter, your brain repeats over and over again the details of your life so you can remember them. It is the home of your ego center, which provides you with an internal awareness of what your name is, what your credentials are, and where you live. Without these cells performing their job, you would forget who you are and lose track of your life and your identity.” Evan Thompson agrees, “(The mind) habitually projects this ‘I’ feeling onto the store consciousness, which it mistakenly takes to be a separate and independent self. In reality, however, the store consciousness isn’t a separate and independent ego that’s present in each experience and that functions as the owner of experience. Although it exists at every moment, it’s constantly changing, like a flowing river, so nothing in it is wholly present from one moment to the next, and hence nothing in it could function as the owner of awareness. Thus the feeling that consciousness at its deepest level is somehow ‘I’ or ‘mine’ is based on a profound illusion.” In Incognito, David Eagleman explains the famous separated brain hemisphere research mentioned earlier, performed by Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux, which illustrates the separate forms of consciousness experienced by the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and he discusses the essential role of our left hemisphere in creating a descriptive narrative using language and logic [45]. “Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an ‘interpreter,’ watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. The left hemisphere works this way even in normally functioning brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.” As Gazzaniga puts it, “These findings all suggest that the interpretive mechanism of the left hemisphere is always hard at work, seeking the meaning of events. It is constantly looking for order and reason, even when there is none—which leads it continually to make mistakes.”[51] The stroke experienced by Jill Taylor-Bolte exemplifies how losing the left hemisphere’s logical and linguistic constraints can profoundly alter experience. This notion of retrospective storytelling also relates to the previously noted research of John-Dylan Haynes as well, which suggests that our sense of free will may simply be a narrative of emotional ownership associated with the the observation of our own behavior.
Simply put, our internal narrative storyteller, once thought to be a model of rational insight, turns out to be a fairly unreliable story-teller. In recent decades, a long list of commonly used cognitive shortcuts have been documented, with names like ‘confirmation bias,’ “anchoring effect,” “halo effect,’ and so on. Even for skeptics who may point to insufficient replication of these studies, the literature points clearly undermines the traditional view of human rationality. “Confirmation bias” is the profound tendency to notice information that agrees with our current beliefs and overlook information that does not. “Anchoring” is the tendency to adjust our views relative to where they started, i.e. are anchored. The “halo effect” helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations, like, good people do only good things and bad people are all bad. Each of these suggest a more general tendency to simplify narratives to conform to whatever paradigm we currently believe. Douglas Hofstadter explains, “Mature human brains are constantly trying to reduce the complexity of what they perceive, and this means that they are constantly trying to get unfamiliar, complex patterns …to trigger just one familiar pre-existing symbol (or a very small set of them). In fact, that’s the main business of human brains — to take a complex situation and to put one’s finger on what matters in it, to distill from an initial welter of sensations and ideas what a situation really is all about.” In Dan Ariely’s aptly-named book, Predictably Irrational [14], he writes, “we are all far less rational in our decision making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.” He continues, “We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires—with how we want to view ourselves—than with reality. Each of these forces (emotions, relativity, social norms, etc.) influences our behavior… not because we lack knowledge, lack practice, or are weak-minded. On the contrary, they repeatedly affect experts as well as novices in systematic and predictable ways.” Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman was one of the first modern researchers of subconscious biases, and his book Thinking, Fast and Slow [15], describes cognition in two parts: an intuitive subconscious level (he labels ‘System 1’) and a semantic and analytical level (he labels ‘System 2’). Kahneman explains, “System 1 (~intuitive) provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions. It offers a tacit interpretation of what happens to you and around you, linking the present with the recent past and with expectations about the near future. It contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising. It is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without your conscious awareness of its activities. System 1 is also the origin of many of the systematic errors in your intuitions… Your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 (~analytical) tells itself about what is going on… The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.” Kahneman concludes “Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.”
The narrative and the narrator are, of course, one and the same, and the enduring sense of Self is a product of this mutual co-creation. Evan Thompson writes, “what we find is a collection of interrelated processes, some bodily or physical, some mental or psychological. These processes are all ‘dependently co-arisen,’ that is, each one comes to be and ceases to be according to a multitude of interdependent causes and conditions.” He continues, “The self is a process, not a thing or an entity… It is an experiential process that is subject to constant change. We enact a self in the process of awareness, and this self comes and goes depending on how we are aware.” This process of perpetually identifying and owning experience gives rise to the Self, which becomes an object within the very same process of identifying and owning experience. It is a self-referential loop. Douglas Hofstadter writes, “Through many types of abstraction and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and through many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities, we build up an intricate, interlocked set of beliefs as to what exists ‘out there’ — and then, once again, that set of beliefs folds back, inevitably and seamlessly, to apply to our own selves.” He concludes, “The higher level takes perceptual precedence over the lower level, and in the process becomes the ‘more real’ of the two. The lower level gets forgotten, lost in the shuffle… The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what ‘I’-ness is all about.”
Recursive Loops
Douglas Hofstadter writes, “the current ‘I’ — the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions — by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified ‘I’; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, day after day, year after year. In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving us as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind. Indeed, as the years pass, the ‘I’ converges and stabilizes itself just as inevitably as the screech of an audio feedback loop inevitably zeroes in and stabilizes itself at the system’s natural resonance frequency. “
Mental symbols are closely associated with language. As such, language is crucial to our narrative construction of Self and the world. It is the descriptive paradigm used to define and explain Self and experience. One of my favorite philosophers on this subject is Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [22], he writes, “The general form of propositions is: ‘This is how things are.’ That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, (but) one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” This is the same observation made by Schrodinger, Planck and Heidegger on page 4, and harkens back to David Eagleman’s observation about the limitations of human perception and conceptualization referenced on page 5. Wittgenstein is pointing out that the way we describe nature is a product of our perceptual and descriptive paradigm, not necessarily a product of nature (i.e. reality) itself. Thomas Kuhn later labeled this construct as a “scientific paradigm.” In the words of Kuhn: “Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature.” As Max Planck famously observed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” It seems that we must always have a story – a myth – by which we explain nature to ourselves. We explain nature by analogy, not direct perception or understanding. Humberto Maturana writes, “it is not possible to step outside of the domain of discourse through discourse. …the logic of the description is the logic of the describing system (and its cognitive domain). …From this it follows that reality as a universe of independent entities about which we can talk is, necessarily, a fiction of the purely descriptive domain.” In Philosophical Investigations [23], Wittgenstein explores the self-referential nature of language: “what we do in our language-game always rests on a tacit presupposition. Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive.” In other words, context determines the way we understand language. In different contexts, the same sequence of words may take on altogether different meanings. He writes, “Our knowledge forms an enormous system. And only within this system has a particular bit the value we give it.” Wittgenstein is pointing out that both the proposition itself and the context in which it is understood are products of a particular descriptive paradigm, and so there is a circularity of descriptive meaning being derived from descriptive context derived from descriptive meaning, ad nauseum. He is pointing to a circularity that underlies all human perception, belief and knowledge; it is the antithesis of the firm foundation that Descartes and many other philosophers have contended undergirds human knowledge and belief. Wittgenstein’s criticism can be a difficult point to grasp if never considered before, so I will attempt to better illuminate Wittgenstein’s logic for how we build up meaning through language, which is itself built on meaning through language in an unsupported net of codependent linguistic meaning, all of which is based on a foundation of paradigmatic supposition. Below are a selection of propositions from his essay, On Certainty [24] that I hope are insightful to how language and beliefs operate codependently.
“30. One does not infer how things are from one’s own certainty. Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.
(so) 146. …somewhere I must begin with an assumption or a decision…
(ultimately,) 166. The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.”
This loop exemplifies how language and meaning ground each other in each other, though neither is itself grounded in ‘certain’ knowledge. To those who would try to escape this ungroundedness through the logic of mathematics, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems [62] act as the foil. Godel showed that any non-trivial mathematical system can be mapped to propositional statements in language, and invariably either includes some untrue statements or excludes some true statements through paradoxes like the Liar’s Paradox in which truth at one level reveals a falsehood at another level, undermining logical bivalence. Douglas Hofstadter writes, “Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed. …that is how languages always progress. And that is also the way the human mind works — by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.” Linguist Alfred Korzybski famously said “the map is not the territory” in describing the inability of description to capture complete truth. Hofstadter writes, “Ultimately, the ‘I’ is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own. As Dan Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, an ‘I’ is a little like a bill of paper money — it feels as if it is worth a great deal, but ultimately, it is just a social convention, a kind of illusion that we all tacitly agree on without ever having been asked, and which, despite being illusory, supports our entire economy. And yet the bill is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic worth at all.” I think Dennett goes too far. He has taken the “illusion” of consciousness as presenting a meaningful enough window into reality that he can analyze it, then paradoxically discredited the window’s role in deriving meaning. He is successfully attacked the object of “self” as conceived in western philosophy, but not addressed or reached the depth of consciousness beyond the “self” explored by eastern philosophy.
Part Two: Form and Unity
The inner workings of a mind can be described as an ongoing self-referential process. So too can the environment in which we live. It is natural to look at my own physical organism and say, “my organism is contained within my skin. Inside my skin is ‘me,’ outside my skin is ‘the world.’” Case closed. Simple enough. Or is it? The human organism acts as an ecosystem for thousands of species and millions of alien organisms that are many orders of magnitude smaller than my composite human form [45]. There is actually more bacterial DNA than human DNA within my organism. In fact, it is estimated that 95% of the genes in a human body are non-human. I require a thriving symbiotic relationship with these alien microscopic organisms to survive in human form [46]. The bacterial ecosystem is crucial to food digestion, skin health and immunity, and is different within each human being. Bacteria also appears to affect the production of hormones that can dramatically alter brain chemistry, impacting moods, perceptions and behaviors. In a very literal sense, organisms with non-human DNA help create and determine my thoughts and feelings as a human being [47]. I am no less reliant upon contributions from outside my skin. Oxygen is literally the breath of life, and a fresh supply of oxygen can only be found outside of my organism. Each out-breath is a invitation to death, each in-breath is a rebirth. Heat. Food. Water. All of these ingredients necessary for survival come from outside of my organism. What I eat, drink and breath transforms into my cells, literally becoming ‘me.’ My material form is perpetually reconstructing itself at the cellular level using new molecules incorporated from outside my skin. Like the stability observed in the cognitive sense of Self, physical stability (homeostasis) also proves to be a perpetual process, not a static state of being. Both inside and out, at smaller scales and larger, my organism does not and cannot exist apart from its environmental context.
Physics
The interconnectedness between organism and environment is reflected at all scales, and as the understanding of the human organism has changed in the twentieth century, so too has the understanding of the physical environment. The twentieth century offered dramatic revisions to many long-standing human conceptions about reality and truth. No field provided more startling revelations than physics. The classical notions of Absolute time and space as imagined by Isaac Newton were uprooted. According to Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity [16], the way each observer experiences time is dependent upon spatial positioning and acceleration relative to other points in the universe. It is truly relative [48]. For instance, imagine three observers: Observer A near Earth, Observer B near Venus, and Observer C halfway between the two. If Venus and Earth exploded ‘simultaneously,’ would all observers experience the explosions as simultaneous? According to the Special Theory of Relativity, no. Observer C, positioned halfway between them, would see them as simultaneous. But for Observer A, near Earth, Earth would explode before Venus by roughly 3 minutes. Why? Because light and information have a speed limit (about 300,000 km/sec, i.e. the speed of light) and it takes light from Venus roughly 3 minutes to reach Earth. For Observer B near Venus, Venus would explode roughly 3 minutes before Earth. The ordering of events would be different for Observer A than Observer B. So my initial statement about both planets exploding ‘simultaneously’ is itself misleading, as such a statement presupposes a particular point of view in its assertion. Even for those who are well aware of Special Relativity, the implications are deeply counterintuitive to our experience of time. I think the philosophical implications for the nature of Truth are profound. Our human concept of truth is based upon consistent correlations to our experience in the world. But as a matter of physical fact, according to Special Relativity, no single temporally ordered account is universally ‘correct’. So what is true? Each of the three accounts is true to some observers and false to some observers. It is truly relative. But importantly, this lack of an “absolute” does not render truth arbitrary or meaningless; it just makes it relative. It depends entirely upon the perspective of the observer. Furthermore, Special Relativity implies that the ‘future’ has already ‘happened’ (thus Einstein’s concept of ‘Block Time’ [59]). From the perspective of Observer A near Earth, Venus has already exploded (in the future) before it is observed on Earth. The future has already ‘happened’ to some observers before it ‘happens’ for others. This idea, extended across the vast distances of space, starts to profoundly challenge our intuitive sense of time. In The Grand Design [17], Stephen Hawking writes, “Einstein’s work showed that, like the concept of rest, time cannot be absolute, as Newton thought. In other words, it is not possible to assign to every event a time with which every observer will agree. Instead, all observers have their own measures of time, and the times measured by two observers who are moving relative to each other will not agree. Einstein’s ideas go counter to our intuition because their implications aren’t noticeable at the speeds we normally encounter in everyday life. But they have been repeatedly confirmed by experiment.” The nature of time is perhaps even more baffling at the subatomic scale. The ‘arrow of time,’ i.e. the impression that time only ever moves towards the future, disappears altogether at the quantum scale. Subatomic interactions work equally well (mathematically) in either direction of time (actually, this ‘symmetry’ is almost always true at classical scales as well), and can even appear to reverse time. Quantum ‘entanglement’ is central to the mysteries of quantum. ‘Entanglement’ is the experimental fact that two subatomic ‘particles’ can be codependent in such a way that one ‘particle’ reflects the behavior of an entangled partner faster than the speed of light allows, even at great distances [49]. This looks like a profound contradiction to Special Relativity, which says time is relative to motion and locality. Entanglement suggests an underlying quantum connection that makes what is locally past or future, in fact, simultaneous at the quantum scale. Whereas Special Relativity says the ‘present’ on Earth is three minutes removed from the ‘present’ on Venus, Quantum Entanglement provides an instantaneous connection, linking ‘past,’ ‘present’ and ‘future’ instantaneously at the quantum scale. As noted by physicist John Stewart Bell, “any physical theory that incorporates local realism as favored by Einstein cannot reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanical theory.” There are certain quantum experiments that are particularly problematic to the paradigm of temporal ordering, and relatedly, cause and effect: ‘delayed choice,’ ‘quantum eraser’ and ‘delayed quantum eraser.’ Those experiments seem to imply the possibility that present observations can overwrite past observations, and perhaps future observations influence the present in what looks an awful lot like retrocausality. This is also the logical implication of quantum entanglement in a cosmos where time is constrained by Special Relativity. The experiments are difficult to describe and even more baffling in their conclusions, so I suggest reading the links if interested or curious [50]. The essential philosophical takeaway noted by physicist Anton Zeilinger, who has performed many of these experiments, is that “in a certain sense, quantum events are independent from space and time.” Stephen Hawking writes “Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history.” He continues, “The fact that the past takes no definite form means that observations you make on a system in the present affect its past.” Think of how this might apply to notions of judgement and personal responsibility, especially as applied in a religious context. How does this apply to the notion of personal salvation? The revelations of 20th century physics suggest that time is not a sequence of moments, but something much more mysterious [54]. Our intuitive sense of time is at best incomplete, and at worst, utterly mistaken.
Modern scientific models, with ideas like superposition (subatomic particles in more than one ‘place’ at once) and entanglement (instantaneous non-local connections between ‘entangled’ sub-atomic particles) provide powerful empirical evidence against the universal applicability of Aristotelian logic. From Descartes to Kant and throughout philosophical history, the faith in pure reason has relied upon empirical experience to back up logical axioms like a=a, a!=b, and so forth, trusting that truth could be determined by correlation to our experience of the world. But relativity and quantum physics profoundly challenges the correlative truth found in the heretofore unquestioned observational truths of logic [63]. All notions of intuitive truth, like ‘Occam’s Razor,’ are based on a fundamentally aesthetic bias towards what is ‘beautiful’ to the human mind, not necessarily what is ‘true.’ The human mind loves simplicity and orderliness and will go to great lengths to find it, as illustrated by various psychological biases discussed earlier in this essay. Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup observes, “the realist worldview has shaped the rules of our current logic. Much of what we intuitively think of as ‘self-evident logical truths’ is, to a surprising extent, determined implicitly by the assumption of realism; that is, by the assumption that the world ‘out there’ is strongly-objective and exists independently of our cognition.”
The General Theory of Relativity combines time and space into a single substratum “out there,” so it should come as no surprise to discover that in addition to uprooting beliefs about the nature of time, 20th century physics uprooted beliefs about the composition of space and matter as well. In Physics and Philosophy [18], one of godfathers of quantum physics, Werner von Heisenberg, writes, “The theory of relativity has… revealed entirely new features of space and time, of which nothing is seen in Kant’s a priori forms of pure intuition. The law of causality is no longer applied in quantum theory and the law of conservation of matter is no longer true for the elementary particles.” At the smallest known scales, ‘particles’ can transform without changing their place in the hierarchy of matter, and can even blink into and out of existence altogether. At root, there is no substantial material undergirding our experience of macroscopic ‘matter.’ Heisenberg writes, “all different elementary particles could be reduced to some universal substance which we may call energy or matter, but none of the different particles could be preferred to the others as being more fundamental.” Elsewhere, he writes, “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.” To consider subatomic information as discrete ‘particles’ is itself problematic. Another godfather of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, explains, “Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.” In The Tao of Physics [19], physicist Fritjof Capra writes, “Matter has appeared in these experiments as completely mutable. All particles can be transmuted into other particles; they can be created from energy and can vanish into energy. In this world, classical concepts like ‘elementary particle,’ ‘material substance,’ or ‘isolated object’ have lost their meaning; the whole universe appears as a dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns.” Physicist David Bohm concurs in The Implicate Order [25], writing, “In a more detailed description the atom is, in many ways, …dependent for its particular form on the whole environment, including the observing instrument. Thus, one can no longer maintain the division between the observer and observed. Rather, both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality, which is indivisible and unanalysable.” He continues, “relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context. This view implies that flow is, in some sense, prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow.”
Organic Life
This flow of interconnectivity that is observed in physics manifests itself in the forms of all systems at all scales. All material systems can be seen as recursive, self-referencing and self-reforming to some extent. For instance, the path of a river affects the erosion of its riverbed, which affects the path of the river, which affects erosion, ad nauseum. The molecular composition of the atmosphere inhibits the kinds of organisms that can flourish, and the kinds of organisms that flourish boomerangs to affect the composition of the atmosphere. So forth. Of course these self-referencing loops are interconnected in ways that can be extended to both smaller and larger scales and ultimately include, and in fact define, the entire universe. Thus, “the Butterfly Effect [64],” as Edward Lorenz called it. In The Systems View of Life [20], Fritjof Capra writes, “There is no ‘environment’ in some independent and abstract sense. Just as there is no organism without an environment, there is no environment without an organism. Organisms do not experience environments. They create them. They construct their own environments out of the bits and pieces of the physical and biological world, and they do so by their own activities.” He continues, “(Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock) were able to gradually identify a complex network of feedback loops which bring about the self-regulation of the planetary system. The outstanding feature of these feedback loops is that they link together living and nonliving systems. We can no longer think of rocks, animals, and plants as being separate. The theory shows that there is a tight interlocking between the planet’s living parts – plants, microorganisms, and animals – and its nonliving parts – rocks, oceans, and the atmosphere. The feedback cycles interlinking these living and nonliving systems regulate the Earth’s climate, the salinity of its oceans, and other important planetary conditions.” In the words of chemist and mathematician Alfred Lotka, “It is not so much the organism or species that evolves, but the entire system, species and environment. The two are inseparable.”
As humans, we are embedded in our environment, not as operators controlling it, but as cells within nature’s organism. Jill Bolte Taylor writes, “you and I are literally swimming in a turbulent sea of electromagnetic fields. We are part of it. We are enveloped within it, and through our sensory apparatus we experience what is.” Similar to how the sense of Self may emerge as a higher-order consequence of lower-order neural interactions, physical organisms can be seen as emergent higher-order products of the elements within their environment. In a 2005 essay in Nature, biologist Neil Theise explains that “we’ve thought of the cell as the basic building block of the body ever since the microscope revealed the cell membrane, but from another conceptual and observational perspective, the body is a fluid continuum: On one level, cells are indivisible things; on another they dissolve into a frenzied, self-organizing dance of smaller components. The substance of the body becomes self-organized fluid-borne molecules, which know nothing of such delineating concepts as ‘intracellular’ and ‘extracellular.’ … The cell as a definable unit exists only on a particular level of scale. Higher up, the cell has no observational validity. Lower down, the cell as an entity vanishes, having no independent existence. The cell as a thing depends on perspective and scale.” This is true of anything observable in space-time, including you and me: zoom in or zoom out far enough in spacetime and we become indistinguishable from our environmental surroundings [53] in space or time. Zoom in to the subatomic and l have no discernable boundaries, and time stops at light speed. Zoom out and I am indiscernible on that tiny dot called earth, and a thousand earth years is a cosmic blink. Douglas Hofstadter writes, “if you choose to focus on the particle level, then you cannot draw neat boundary lines separating an entity such as a cell or a hog from the rest of the world in which it resides. Notions like ‘cell’ or ‘hog’ aren’t relevant at that far lower level. The laws of particle physics don’t respect such notions as ‘hog’, ‘cell’, ‘gene’, or ‘genetic code’, or even the notion of ‘amino acid’. The laws of particle physics involve only particles, and larger macroscopic boundaries drawn for the convenience of thinking beings are no more relevant to them than voting precinct boundaries are to butterflies. Electrons, photons, neutrinos, and so forth zip across such artificial boundaries without the least compunction. If you go the particles route, then you are committed to doing so whole hog, which unfortunately means going way beyond the hog. It entails taking into account all the particles in all the members of the hog’s family, all the particles in the barn it lives in… in the whole of the earth, in the whole of the sun, in the cosmic background radiation pervading the entire universe and stretching back in time to the Big Bang, and on and on.” Philosopher and Biologist Humberto Maturana coined the term autopoietic to describe a system that defines itself out of and against its environmental background [52]. Evan Thompson writes, “The living cell, by virtue of being autopoietic, provides the minimal and fundamental case of a self-specifying system. A cell stands out of a molecular soup by specifying the boundary that sets it apart from what it is not. At the same time, this boundary specification happens through internal chemical transformations that the boundary itself makes possible. The boundary and the internal transformations specify each other, and in this way the cell emerges as a figure out of a chemical background.” The autopoietic self-defining of systems can be found across all scales. Humberto Maturana writes, “The correspondence that the observer sees between the conduct of the organism and the environmental conditions with which this conduct appears to cope, reveals the structural coupling of the organism (nervous system included) to its ambience (i.e. environment)… through phylogenetic and ontogenetic (i.e. evolutionary) selection.”
The paradigm of interdependence extends to the expression of genetic information. As our individual selfhood can be imagined extending in space to include smaller organisms and our surrounding environment, it can also be extended over time to include the information of our genetic code. Individual genetic code can be imagined as a thread in the fabric of carbon-based life, all of which is connected over time as part of an ever-evolving pattern of life expressed through genetic information. All carbon-based life shares certain DNA expressions. The DNA of humans is virtually identical across the species. Chimpanzees share about 98% of the human genome. A mouse shares about 92%. A fruit fly about 44%. Corn about 40%, yeast about 26%, and a weed about 18% [68]. The point is simply that we are genetic relatives of all carbon-based life forms, and quite possibly the entire universe (certainly the case if the Big Bang theory is accurate). In Chaos [21], James Gleick writes, “No one gene makes an organism. Insects and plants and animals are collectives, communal vehicles, cooperative assemblies of a multitude of genes, each playing its part in the organism’s development. It is a complex ensemble in which each gene interacts with thousands of others in a hierarchy of effects extending through both space and time. The body is a colony of genes. Of course, it acts and moves and procreates as a unit, and furthermore, in the case of at least one species, it feels itself, with impressive certainty, to be a unit.” He continues, “There is no gene for long legs; there is no gene for a leg at all. To build a leg requires many genes, each issuing instructions in the form of proteins, some making raw materials, some making timers and on-off switches. Some of these genes surely have the effect of making legs longer than they would otherwise be, and it is those genes that we may call, for short, genes for long legs—as long as we remember that long-leggedness is not directly represented or encoded directly in the gene.” Douglas Hofstadter writes, “A ‘gene’ is not a thing, rather it is an abstraction; it is the particular way information is encoded in the physical substratum of DNA. A tornado is not a thing, rather it is an abstraction that serves as an explanatory shortcut for the process of air currents and pressure combining into a self-referent whirlwind. Similarly, a ‘self’ is not a thing, but an abstraction that emerges within the self-referential brain.” “The essential properties of an organism or living system,” writes Fritjof Capra, “are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts.”
Continue to Page 3, Conclusion, of "The Self"