The Self

One of the most certain truths in the world is Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". Descartes was so certain of the existence of some kind of essential self that others have coined the term "Cartesian theater" to describe the sense that we all have of being the audience enjoying the rich play of our experiences. We tend to believe in an enduring self, independent of our individual percepts. Sometimes this virtual "self" in our mind, sitting in the audience of the Cartesian theater who watches our thoughts is referred to as a homunculus. This is not necessarily to imply that most of us believe that the self or homunculus is an identifiable region of the brain like the pineal gland, just that at some level of organization, we assume that there is a self that is separate from the stuff that self experiences, remembers, thinks about, etc.

The Cartesian theater metaphor suggests that some process dresses up reality in qualitative costumes (or creates reality completely) and presents it to consciousness, or the self, and that the self just sits back in the audience and watches. Accepting such metaphors unquestioningly (which is to say, by speaking in terms of them with no explicit argument for their truth), invites some unwarranted assumptions.

In the real physical world, a child learns from a very young age that everything within my skin is "me", and everything outside of it is "not me". There is a subject/object distinction. There is me, and there is the tree. When I want to move my arm, it moves, but when, by similar force of will, I want the tree to move, it stays put. When I smack myself in the arm it hurts, but when I smack the tree, it does not (or at least it does not hurt at the place on the tree where I struck it).

It feels natural to carry this distinction over into the world of our own minds. When we speak of our percepts and thoughts, we still cast the situation these terms: "I" perceive the "tree", even when the tree is one that is created entirely in the mind. I question the appropriateness of the subject/object distinction in this case, however. In some sense, it is the very percept of the tree that is the "me", or rather it is the process of creation of that percept. To separate the self from the percept is to invite infinite regress.

For there to be a Cartesian theater with a homunculus in the audience, sense data must come in from our sense organs, thoughts must be generated and presented in some fashion to the homunculus, who then experiences them. The homunculus, then, has the same Hard Problem relative to this presentation that we do relative to our sense organs. Any distinction we can draw between the homunculus and the percepts, any line between some receptors (functionally construed) on the homunculus and those aspects of the percepts that these receptors are sensitive to, serves to push the whole problem down one more level, but doesn't solve it. We still have a problem of how the stimuli impinging on the homunculus come together in its "mind" to form the rich qualitative field of consciousness that it has. Perhaps it has a homunculus in its mind too, watching its Cartesian theater, and so on ad infinitem. Under pain of infinite regress, then, there can be no homunculus in the audience of the Cartesian theater separate from whatever is going on onstage. The self is just another part of our world-model, a hypothesized construct.

As William James said, the thoughts are the thinkers. The memories are the rememberers, the experiences are the experiencers. I am the scene on the stage of the Cartesian theater. James also suggested that instead of saying, "I am thinking" it might be more appropriate to say, "it is thinking", using "it" in the same sense that we use it when we say "it is raining."

To replace the Cartesian theater metaphor, perhaps we should think of our mind as like a pseudopod that shapes itself into whatever is being thought about or perceived.