you

On the ride into work today I was thinking about some of the Great Mysteries^TM. Things like, "Why does anything exist?" or "What the hell is up with quantum mechanics?"

I've always been partial to the mysteries surrounding consciousness and personal identity. Yes, things like quantum entanglement are weird and interesting, but for me they don't pack the same punch I feel when I think about how there could be something like consciousness. All the mysteries about the physical universe seem to concern the same basic sort of "stuff". But the idea that there should be a non-extended, subjective, first-person-only viewpoint on things is really strange.

Even stranger than that—at least in my opinion—is that there should be something like personal identity. I say "like" because we're not even sure what we're dealing with here. The paradoxes of subjectivity creep me out a lot more than the paradoxes of quantum mechanics.

For instance, each of us has the immediate impression of being a continuous person through time, each at the center of their own experience. I not only have memories of being a 6 year old. I also have the intuition that the self who perceived, thought, and lived as a 6 year old is the same person who perceives, thinks, and lives now. It's not as though my "soul" "died" at some point along the way and was replaced by a new one. It's still "me". Part of what it means to be conscious or to be a consciousness is that a whole set of things are mine and are always only mine—in principle.

And yet what is this "me"? Whatever goes on in the mind—be it perception, consciousness, the sense of self, etc.—is at least caused by (if not identical with) what happens in the brain. And yet the contents of those neurons are being turned over all the time, and the cells themselves are also replaced over the course of months or years. None of the atoms composing me as a child are in my body now. If there's nothing permanent in me that is physical, then how could there be anything permanent in me that is subjective, either?

Sartre argued for the same outcome, though he did so from a phenomenological rather than a physical perspective. In his essay "The Transcendence of the Ego" he argues that intentionality is the sole structure of consciousness. It's the "aboutness" of consciousness that makes it what it is, not that it belongs to an ego. There could be an ego in consciousness, like when I reflect on the fact that I'm typing a blog entry. But there's no way to objectify the ego of that second-order consciousness without invoking a third-order consciousness. In other words, consciousness is a purely internal, subjective phenomenon, and as soon as you turn it into something objective—like when you locate the ego in consciousness—you have turned it into the object of a new consciousness, or a new intentionality. The idea that there is a transcendental ego that subsists outside of each conscious state and acts as the "hub" of the multitude of states is an illusion. Each consciousness is its own "thing", absolutely free from other consciousnesses, even within the same "person".

The early Buddhist position is similar to Sartre's. This is a useful book on the subject. Buddha disagreed with the idea that consciousness is pure intentionality, but he arrived at a similar conclusion with regard to the impermanence and illusory nature of self.

Perhaps we can salvage the idea of a self if we assume it is a form or pattern of matter rather than the matter itself. If my sense of self persists despite the constant turnover of matter in my brain, then perhaps it is the arrangement or form of that matter that makes up who I am rather than the stuff itself. But there are problems with this solution, too.

Imagine we have the ability to destructively scan your brain at a resolution good enough that we can recreate its exact patterns (arrangement of matter) in a new brain. Presumably something like this happens in Star Trek. Your old body is wiped out, and a new one replaces it. According to a patternist view of self, you should experience no break in continuity between your old self and new self. It's the same pattern, after all.

But is this true? How do we know the new you is really you? It will act exactly like you. It might even really be conscious. But from the interior, subjective perspective of the old you, maybe you went to sleep and never woke up, and this new person came into existence, having all your memories, thinking it's really you (but it's not). It would be like a replicant from Blade Runner, thinking it had a past when it really didn't.

But, you might say, don't we turn over our matter all the time? Each person goes to sleep every night and wakes up the next morning. Maybe the person who goes to sleep is not the same person who wakes up. But we have good (internal) evidence that this is not the case. Therefore, there's nothing to be concerned about in this scenario. It's nothing that doesn't happen all the time. It just happens all at once rather than taking days, weeks, months, or years.

Even if this is true, we can upset this self-assurance further by adding a detail to the thought experiment. Assume the scan is non-destructive, so that the original you is preserved when the new you is created. Imagine this happens when you are asleep, so you don't even know it's happened. You wake up and find you standing over you! The new you says, "I have excellent news. The consciousness transfer worked. I'm over here now. We won't be needing you anymore!" (I suppose all this depends on your personality. Some people might be more excited to have an army of clones of themselves.)

In that case we have two identical patterns (at least at the point of creation—they'll diverge after that) but also two identical consciousnesses. Clearly you (your consciousness) aren't in two places at once. There's only one "you", laying helplessly in bed as the new you decides the "transfer" was successful. There must be something more to personal identity than a mere pattern.

This goes back to the ontological gap between objective and subjective things. Subjective experiences are essentially internal and personal. They belong to a person, but a person is something that endures over time, throughout change. This concept doesn't show up anywhere in a purely physical understanding of the world. Of course there are scientific ways to study people. My body is also an object of scientific (and generally empirical) inquiry. But the personhood of my person is not. Insofar as patterns are empirical things, they're not capable of capturing personhood.

So this doesn't leave us with a whole lot to work with. In that regard it's not much different from other puzzles, like those mentioned above. But the fact that this puzzle reaches down to who we are on the deepest, most essential level is what's most disturbing.

Why are you you? That's strange.

Hegel's philosophy of history

While I was on the bike at the gym today, I read the chapter on Hegel's philosophy of history in Herbert Marcuse's book Reason and Revolution. This is probably the most derided and dismissed part of Hegel's philosophy, maybe even more so than his philosophy of nature, owing to what some take to be its political and moral implications. As Marcuse himself puts it:

Hegel's picture of the Reformation is fully as erronenous as his description of the subsequent social development, confusing the ideas by which modern society glorified its rise fo the reality of this society. He was thus led to a harmonistic interpretation of history, according to which the crossing to a new historical form is at the same time a progress to a higher historical form—a preposterous interpretation, because all the victims of oppression and injustice are witness against it, as are all the vain sufferings and sacrifices of history. The interpretation is the more preposterous because it denies the critical implications of the dialectic and establishes a harmony between the progress of thought and the process of reality.

I'm not really in a position to refute Marcuse on this point, not being familiar enough with the text he's interpreting. What he's saying sounds true. From the perspective of the current order (whatever it may be), there is going to be strong pressure, just by virtue of being embedded in the culture, to view everything that has come before as not only leading up to the current state of affairs but also justifying it and making it appear rational. It's one thing to say that the basic categories by means of which we understand history—justice, freedom, and emancipation—could not have come about but through the experience of humans of their opposites (injustice, slavery, and oppression). It's quite another thing to say this makes history rational and thereby justified. This is the move that Marcuse calls a "harmonistic interpretation of history". The philosopher's job is not to justify or rationalize what has come before and what exists now. It's the opposite. It's to engage in the act of immanent critique, by means of which the highest categories of civilization are turned against civilization itself. It's only by means of the most ruthless self-criticism that we arrive at the self-consciousness which Hegel sees as constituting the ultimate law of history.

And that law of history is, I believe, more or less correct. It's the idea that universality means something, i.e., is a real historical force, when individuals self-consciously understand themselves as acting in accordance with it. The whole point and purpose of history is so that individuals understand themselves as acting in accordance with notions of freedom, justice, equality, and the like. Hegel's understanding of history is in an important respect a Kantian one, in that there are always two, not one, preconditions of rational action: I must act in accordance with the notion, but I must always also take myself to be acting in accordance with the notion. Anything else is mere mechanism. This is why, according to Hegel, history is the story of man's emancipation from and domination over nature. Again, it's a basic Kantian move. The given (be it nature, the thing in itself, or the local Catholic bishop) has no intrinsic authority for freedom. Whatever authority it gets it gets by means of the free act of reason.

In my opinion the major metaphysical (as opposed to moral or political) weakness in Hegel's philosophy of history (at least as explained by Marcuse) is in Hegel's understanding of the relationship between historical change and natural change. As Marcuse puts it:

Since Aristotle, historical change has been contrasted with changes in nature. Hegel held to the same distinction. He says historical change is 'an advance to something better, more perfect,' whereas mutation in nature 'exhibits only a perpetually self-repeating cycle.' It is only in historical change that something new arises. Historical change is therefore development. (emphasis mine)

As Aristotle puts it in Physics B1, "[W]hen we speak of nature as being a generation, this is a process toward nature [as a form]." From the time of Aristotle but until roughly the time of Hegel, the process of nature was understood as roughly cyclical in kind. It was an imperfect replica of the perfect cyclical generation of the heavens. While species occasionally passed into and out of existence (the Greeks knew of fossils), the overall tendency was for nature to "keep with itself". So humans give birth to more humans, deer give birth to more deer, acorns eventually become acorn-bearing oaks, the Nile flooded according to schedule, etc. This idea was under attack in Hegel's day, but it wasn't really until the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species that people began to realize the extent to which the opposite position was true. Even Darwin wasn't aware of the extent to which nature generated novelty. He thought the entire process leading up to humans might have transpired over the course of a few million years. We know now the process was several orders of magnitude greater. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

The implications of this for the philosophy of history are staggering. Hegel thought going back to the beginning meant going back to the Greeks or to "oriental" society. We know now that Hegel's history covers approximately 1% of the actual history of mankind. But apart from the mere quantitative adjustment, there is a qualitative one, too. Evolution makes it impossible to regard human history as constituting a realm entirely separate from that of natural history. On the one hand, we now know that nature generates radically new forms. Evolution is the original avant garde modernist. On the other hand, it no longer makes sense to think of the human act of creation (be it artistic or technological or otherwise cultural) in abstraction from the tendency of nature to increase in complexity and in order. The transition from genetics to memetics in human beings does not designate a radical break with nature but rather a smooth continuation of this increase in complexity and order toward an as-yet unrealized terminus.

Historical change and natural change appear to be two species of the same genus, and so neither reduces to the other. The genus appears to be change itself, or time, which is not an empty form as Kant thought, but which has a rational structure. As Marcuse explains:

The work of thought was destroyed by thought. Thought is thus drawn into the process of time, and the force that compelled knowledge in the Logic to negate every particular content is disclosed, in the Philosophy of History, as the negativity of time itself. Hegel says: 'Time is the negative element in the sensuous world. Thought is the same negativity, but it is the deepest, the infinite form of it...'

As Hegel argues repeatedly, negation is not mere destruction but rather determinate negation. It is an annihilation which remembers and builds upon what it annihilates. A community or way of life does not merely come into existence. It kills the parent-society that gave birth to it, and it understands itself and justifies its way of doing things in contrast to the previous way of doing things. Modern society is a rational society that takes itself to be rational for rational reasons! (Enter Nietzsche and Adorno here...) Whether or not you buy into all these trappings about rationality, though, this much is true: people in a society have a shared memory or history which constitutes who they are. Furthermore, it constitutes how they reflect upon that identity—which especially in the United States has huge implications for the critique of racial, gender, and sexual identity.

What I'm suggesting is that there is an analog for this in nature. All life based on DNA "records" everything that has happened to it so far in the evolutionary process. Every species in existence today is a descendant of one, common, universal ancestor, the basic chemical traits of which we still all possess. That genetic information gets expressed in an organism which gets acted upon by an environment, which in turn causes the organism's genetic information to change over the long-run. Those organisms in turn impact and change the environment in drastic ways (the oxygenation crisis, the snowball earths, etc.), resulting in a dynamic feedback loop. This is precisely why the evolution of life has been accelerating. It's a result of (a) the ability of nature to store and destroy information and (b) the dynamic feedback loop between nature and itself as it acts on this information (blindly carrying out those instructions). Eventually large brains allow for greater memory and self-conscious, rapid information storage and retrieval. The invention of culture causes an increase in the order and complexity of information in the universe, but it does more than that. For once, the instructions don't have to be carried out or destroyed blindly. The information can be used and changed consciously, in accordance with other experiences. Language allows people to share these experiences and information with one another in one life time. The arrangement of the information is more ordered and complex now than previously, but a qualitative change is also taking place with the introduction of consciousness. Information has now become knowledge. Knowledge allows me to act upon my own experience, rather than waiting for nature to do it over the course of many generations. I direct myself by means of knowledge only if there is a self to mediate the relationship. Thus, individual subjectivity. Yet only agriculture allows societies to grow much larger than they could before. This in turns sets the stage for the complex social relations that give rise to what Hegel calls Geist: the relationship in and through which individual subjectivities are validated as subjectivities, but which is constituted by those very same subjectivities. And that's where Hegel's story takes off.

The fact that Hegel is blithe about history being a "slaughter bench" and that there are people who are "outside of history" is distracting, to say the least. But I think a proper understanding of the world requires something like Hegel's account. The main problem with it—once you get past the 19th century German-isms in it—really isn't in the account of history so much as it's in the account of nature behind it. The quote about time being the negative element in the natural world comes very close to the truth. The problem is with seeing nature as a less perfect form of thinking. That's a remnant of the old Aristotlean idea that the earth is a less perfect image of the stars, and the stars are an image of pure thought, so therefore life is an imperfect image of pure thought. That's where you get a lot of weird teleology and retroactive justification. I think the correct view is that, as Aristotle said, nature is form [morphe and therefore eidos or "idea"]. But once the last universal ancestor came into existence (and perhaps before), nature developed the ability to act destructive upon itself. It could "negate" itself. (And by the way, this is why Wolfram's cellular automata can't really explain why we have thought and culture and jazz and whiskey. It's because there's no dynamism in cellular automata. You need to introduce evolutionary algoritms. These cause the laws (the "forms") by means of which the automata act to themselves change. This is precisely the destructive, reflexive ability nature already has after the LUA.) And that's the key right there. That's why you can get from cyanobacteria to Mahler. That's why you can eventually get from the blind destruction and creation of information in "brute" nature to the self-conscious construction and use of knowledge in a human being. It's because nature isn't just "form" or "in-form-ation". It's because—for whatever reason—nature is already reflexive.