Printed book: The Incredible Likeliness of Being

Introduction Who or what are you fundamentally? The answer to this question is highly dependent on who you ask. When people talk about their concept of the ‘self’ they may use different kinds of attributes to describe it. In the often used phrase ‘we are our brains’ one is referring to a physical object. Because the brain of every person is unique it refers to a personal attribute as well. Talking about the brain as an attribute to describe one’s concept of self is straightforward, but using one’s ‘sense of self’ or the ‘first-person character of one’s experience’ is already more challenging. Analyzing and communicating about one’s concept of self can lead to misunderstanding when one doesn’t understand the attributes one is using. In this article I will present a framework to categorize the richness of attributes that are used to describe the ‘self’. The framework consists of just four kinds of attributes and just four types of self-concept. I claim that all four types are equally real and valid; they are different perspectives of looking at the self. In addition, this framework provides an important tool to study the concept of self, better communicate about it and foster mutual understanding. 4 kinds of attributes to describe the self The four kinds of attributes in the framework to describe the self are: personal, universal, objective and subjective. Personal Personal attributes refer to anything that can be used to describe a unique person. For example: one's body, one’s brain(structure), one’s DNA, one’s eye color and even one’s possessions. But it could also be one’s sense of self, one’s sense of agency, one’s likes and dislikes, the experience of one’s memories, one’s consciousness and one’s personal soul. Universal There are very few of the universal attributes and they are used less often to describe the self. Universal attributes refer to aspects of the self that are the same across all the universe. For example one could identify with the fundamental particles that one consists of or one’s intimate link to all other life and the universe that makes one part of a bigger whole. It could also be one’s first-person character of experience, which is that there is all experience had by every conscious being. In other descriptions of this, one identifies with a universal being or awareness. Objective Objective attributes refer to things that are measurable and observable, independent of personal perspective. This could be for example, one's body, one’s brain(structure), one’s DNA, one’s eye color and even one’s possessions. But it could also be the fundamental particles that one consists of or one’s intimate link to all other life and the universe that makes one part of a bigger whole. Subjective Subjective attributes refer to things in the realm of experience from within. For example one could describe seeing the color blue as light with a specific frequency entering the eye, hitting the retina and exciting the nervous system. This is an objective description of seeing blue. The subjective part is left out in this description because it is undescribable. It can only be experienced from within. Examples of subjective attributes are one’s likes and dislikes, the experience of one’s memories, one’s consciousness and one’s personal soul. But it could also be one’s first-person character of experience, which is that there is all experience had by every conscious being. In other descriptions of this, one identifies with a universal being or awareness. Personal versus universal and objective versus subjective In the framework I am describing every attribute belongs to two kinds. For example, in the phrase “I am my brain”, the brain is referring to a physical attribute, but also a personal one. Note that attributes can never be both personal and universal, neither can they be objective and subjective at the same time. To use the example of the brain again: a brain belongs to a person and can therefore not be a universal attribute. In the same way a brain can only be described objectively because it is a physical object and therefore it cannot be a subjective attribute at the same time. To sum it up: it is personal versus universal and objective versus subjective. 4 types of self-concept Combining the kinds of attributes that are ‘allowed’ pair-up leaves us with 4 (2x2) types of self-concepts: the personal-objective self, the personal-subjective self, the universal-objective self and the universal-subjective self. I will further elaborate on the four different types of self-concept and look at their explanatory power and their limitations. Additionally, I link each type of self-concept to various philosophical and scientific accounts of the self.  Personal-objective self The personal-objective attributes of the self are the physical characteristics of a person, its environment and life history. Those attributes can all be studied objectively. In a self-concept that is described by this kind of attribute, we are unique human beings with, amongst others, a unique DNA-code, a unique brain, unique memories stored in the brain and unique behavior. Basically everything that is objectively measurable and concerns you as a biological organism in its environment. The existence of this personal-objective self is dependent on very specific conditions that have to be met in order for that self to exist. For example: if your parents never met or if just another sperm cell fertilized the egg cell, the person that you consider to be you wouldn't exist. Instead, a potential brother or sister would exist, perhaps reading this. The existence of this self through time is dependent on the continued existence of this person's body and/or memories. However, the physical body is always changing. For example, memories are lost, aging processes change your body and changes in your behavior. The question that arises is: are you then the same self as when you were a child? Almost every physical and behavioral aspect of you changed. How do you then relate to your child-self? A self-concept solely described by personal-objective attributes fails to address the question why you are the person that you are instead of someone else. What objective-personal attributes of a person make the experiences it has, your experience? And since the objective, physical attributes of a person change over time, how does the experience of that person continue to be your experience? In a purely physical account of the self we can't find an identity carrier that makes the experience a person has your experience instead of someone else's? We need to look at different categories of attributes, different perspectives of the self, to look for answers. When we say we exist, what we care about the most is our subjective experience, also referred to as our conscious awareness. Like Thomas Nagel puts it in his famous article: 'what is it like to be a bat?' consciousness refers to the notion that there is something it is like to be you (5). The problem is that a pure physicalist account of the universe fails to explain the existence of consciousness. This is what philosopher David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness (6). Personal-subjective self Children naturally develop a sense of being a self, separated from others. This includes a sense of being embodied, a sense of agency, awareness of memories related to life history and thoughts related to a self-image. Personal-subjective attributes include all subjective experiences that together make up the content of the ‘what-it-is-like-ness’ of being a person. Logically, all subjective experiences associated with brain activity of one person have certain boundaries. One such pocket of experience includes within it all the content that is necessary for the creation of the personal-subjective self. Because a brain is a network of nerve cells that is cut off from other brains, there is a natural boundary to the content that is within one moment of experience. This makes biological sense because a person or an organism is the scale at which natural selection operates. The boundary of a moment of experience makes it feel like you are a separated self, cut off from others. It seems like your experience is yours and not someone else’s. But why then do you experience the thoughts and feelings (awareness) of the person from which point you view your are reading this, as opposed to someone else’s point of view? Why is the experience that you are having immediate (first-person-style) and centered around the person you feel you are and not centered around another person? Thought experiments in which brains are connected, brain hemispheres are disconnected and/or reconnected with hemispheres of other persons challenge our idea about boundaries of experience. One experience could include content from more than one person if their brains are connected in the right way. Experiential content could then be integrated across more than one individual person. Even then the same question remains: ‘what makes an experience, my experience as opposed to someone else’s? The personal aspect of a subjective experience is no more than a construct of experiential content. The immediacy of the experience is what makes it yours. Here the word ‘yours’ doesn't necessarily point to something personal but rather is a universal entity. A problem with a self-concept that consists mainly of personal-subjective attributes is that there can be a mismatch between what we feel like we are and what we fundamentally are. A strong sense of self that is tied to the biological organism you find yourself to be may result in behavior that is primarily concerned with the wellbeing of that organism. Universal-objective self Universal-objective attributes describing our self-concept position the self being as intimately connected and indistinguishable from the universe as a whole. We are made of stardust. A central idea here is the absence of boundaries between parts of the universe; everything is somehow connected. The most fundamental parts of the universe don't have an identity, they are universal. For example, every electron in the universe is the same. Therefore, we could swap the electrons in our body with someone else's and still remain the same person. Describing the self in terms of these attributes can feel alienating and comforting at the same time. When we die the particles that were inside our body persist and are going to be part of other lifeforms in the future. Like with the personal-objective attributes, universal-objective attributes have a hard time accounting for the subjective experience that always accompanies the self. Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is somehow present in some form associated with the fundamental elements in the universe. The difficulty with this view is that the unitary character of experience is hard to explain in this way. This is referred to as the 'combination problem' of consciousness (7, Chalmers). Universal-subjective self The universal aspect of your subjective experience is its immediacy (2). This is the quality of subjective experience that makes it 'live' like the experience of reading this sentence is for you. This first-person point of view is very dear to you. You care about experiences that are yours in a special way, different from the experiences that aren't yours. The idea here is that every experience has the same immediacy. This is what makes it universal. I bet you can't imagine an experience without it being 'live' like the experience of you reading this sentence. The immediacy of experience is something different than the content of experience. Regardless of whether the content of your experience includes the sensations of eating an apple or having a painful headache, both are experienced 'here' and 'now' for you in the same way. This begs the question: what makes an experience yours instead of someone else's. Is there something about you that makes the experiences that you are having yours instead of somebody else's? Such a thing would be called an identity carrier. Could it be your DNA, something particular about your brain or the contents of your thoughts? Whatever you choose as a possible identity carrier, it can't explain what makes the experiences you are having yours. If there is indeed no identity carrier, this opens up the possibility that every conscious experience, had by every conscious being whenever in all time, is yours because of its universal immediacy. This would imply there is only one universal awareness. This view is described by Arnold Zuboff as universalism (2), later also by Daniel Kolak as open individualism and as awareness monism by Mineta Oliver (4). This idea is very old. In the nondual vision of Vedanta, the self is the boundless and unchangeable awareness, called Brahman. This view that we are one consciousness is in agreement with analytic idealism, where awareness is placed in the center as fundamental reality. In this view the hard problem of consciousness dissolves because an explanation for a physical reality producing a mental world is not necessary. Now the physical is an appearance in a fundamentally mental reality. What is hard to explain with universal-subjective attributes of the self is the common sense experience that there are separate centers of awareness. Every such center has a first person perspective associated with it. There are clear boundaries to what’s in a moment of experience and what’s not. This boundary dictated where a private first person perspective stops. A good theory of consciousness should take into account the boundary problem, which questions why individual experiences are cut off from all other experiences. Psychiatrist Yulia Perch describes that in analytic idealism, personal conscious experience is a segment of a universal mind, separated from it by dissociative processes (8). Dissociation is not only an aspect in neurological conditions like dissociative identity disorder, but a widespread phenomenon in non-linear dynamic systems (NLD’s) and can occur at different hierarchical levels. For example the brain is an NLD, which implies it is composed of many subsystems that operate more or less independently. The subsystems can be regarded as alters and can be subtle or nearly completely dissociated. The former is the case in the different roles a person has in life (like being a parent or an employee), the latter is the case in personal identity disorder, where ‘alters’ sometimes don't know of each other's existence. In the same token, the sense of being a separate self is dependent on the degree of dissociation of the personal mind from the universal mind. Philosopher Andres Gomez Emilsson describes the dissociation of personal conscious awareness from universal awareness mathematically in terms of topological segmentation of the electromagnetic field. To explain this he makes an analogy between the process of dissociation and twisting a balloon so that a pinch point is created separating one segment of the balloon from the rest (9). Here, the complete balloon represents the electromagnetic field or universal awareness and the segment that is ‘dissociated’ represents an alter or a first person perspective. The pinch-point limits the information that can be transmitted from one segment to the other. Within segments, where the field of consciousness is undisturbed, elaborate computation can be performed. Note that because of its property of being continuous, the field inside the pocket accounts for the combination problem. Furthermore Emilsson suggests that evolution figured out that a segmented field of consciousness is beneficial for efficient computation. Using the framework to analyze a self-concept: an example Misunderstanding can arise when attributes of different kinds are used to describe one's concept of self without making this explicit. This may lead to an incoherent self-concept in which different types are mixed up. My suggestion is that my framework for describing the self can be used as a tool for analyzing one’s self concept by looking at the different kinds of attributes being used. I will illustrate this with a quote by anatomist Alice Roberts from her book 'The incredible unlikeliness of being' (3) " There's so much unlikeliness in you being here, right now, reading this. There's the unlikeliness of your parents meeting each other. There would have been so many points when their lives could have turned out differently, when each of them could have met someone else. Once they had hooked up, there's the unlikeliness of that ONE egg meeting that ONE sperm which made you ." As far as I can judge, this way of reasoning about the necessary conditions required for your existence can point at two different types of self-concept. Let's take a look at the different kinds of attributes that were used first. One of the attributes, the body that was conceived by two specific gametes, is of the personal and objective kind. It thus refers to a personal-objective type of self-concept. The second attribute to describe the self (one that isn't obvious at all) is referred to as the you in " you being here, right now, reading this". I suppose what is meant here (perhaps unintentionally) is that the experience of "being here, right now, reading this" points at the immediacy (first-person-style) by which this experience is being had by you (2). In this sense ' you' is the subject of the experience. This is a subjective attribute of the self. In case you are an awareness monist you identify as a universal subject of experience and in case you are an awareness pluralist you may think that the subjective character of your experience is personal in style or at least one of many (4). If my interpretation is correct it means Alice Roberts points at two types of self-concept: personal-objective and (depending on her metaphysical idea about the subject(s) of experience) personal-subjective or universal-subjective. These different types may lead to different conclusions about for example the likeliness of one’s existence. The unlikeliness of the conditions that led to the coming into existence of the physical body (personal-objective) may not apply to the subjective-universal attribute used to describe the self as in the immediacy of experience. The latter would be the subject of experience in the case there exists only one universal subject of experience. Even though my interpretation of Alice's quote is speculative, I hope that I have convinced you that if attributes being used to describe the self are of different kinds, this can be confusing and lead to misunderstanding on a fundamental level. Conclusion Being aware of all the possible concepts of the self, their explanatory power and their limitations can help us understand the self more deeply. All four self-concepts described by my framework shed light on different aspects of the self and together they complement one another. Only focussing on one kind of attribute to describe the self leaves us with an incomplete account of the self. I propose that the framework I presented to describe one’s concept of self can be used as a tool to study and analyze one’s concept of self in a systematic way. Using it could promote mutual understanding and it can give more clarity about aspects where self-concepts of different persons disagree. Moreover, the framework can help find and resolve incoherent reasoning about one’s concept of self. This may happen when one is combining attributes of different kinds in one concept of self. This may lead to conclusions about the self or the necessary conditions for one’s existence that don’t make logical sense. As we could see, there is no single type of self-concept that can fully capture the concept of self in its broadest sense. Each type has its distinctive explanatory power and its limitations. In general, the personal attributes of the self are necessary to describe our intuitive sense of self as being separated from others and how this appears in the physical world in terms of neurological processes. The universal attributes help us consider the universal nature of the self and our connectedness to other persons. In this sense we are everyone. Bibliography : Davey, Christopher G. and Harrison, Ben J. "The brain's center of gravity: how the default mode network helps us to understand the self" World Psychiatry . 2018 Okt 17 (3): 278-279 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127769/ Zuboff, Arnold "One Self: The Logic of Experience" An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy Vol. 33, No. 1, March 1990 Zuboff, Arnold “Finding Myself - Beyond the false boundaries of personal identity” 2024 (book in preparation) Roberts, Alice " The incredible unlikeliness of being: evolution and the making of us" Heron Books 2015, p. 4 Jurásková (Oliver), Mineta "Awareness Monism" , Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy and History of Philosophy, 2021 https://edralis.wordpress.com/2021/06/18/awareness-monism-1-9/comment-page-1/#comments Nagel, Thomas “What is it like to be a bat?” The philosophical review Vol. 83 No. 4, 1974 Chalmers, David “Facing up to the hard problem of consciousness” Journal of consciousness studies 2 (3): 200-19 , 1995 Chalmers, David J “Combination problem for panpsychism” Chapter 7 from Panpsychism: contemporary perspectives p. 179-214, 2016 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199359943.003.0008 Perch, Yulia "Dissociation and complexity: A psychiatrist's perspective" Essentia Foundation, 2021. https://www.essentiafoundation.org/dissociation-and-complexity-a-psychiatrists-perspective/reading/ Gómez-Emilsson, Andres Gomez and Percy, Chris (2023) “Don’t forget the boundary problem! How EM field topology can address the overlooked cousin to the binding problem for consciousness” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 17:1233119.doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2023.1233119

Part 1 of 'The Incredible Likeliness of Being'