Chapter 7: Egos, bundles, and multiple selves

• "Questions about the nature of consciousness are intimately  bound up with those about the nature of self because it seems as though there must be someone having the experience, that there cannot be experiences without an experiencer." (SB: 94)
  
• Descartes' second meditation
• So, after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, ‘I am, I exist’, is necessarily true whenever uttered by me or conceived by my mind.
• Thinking? At last I have found it – thought. This alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist - that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that, were I to completely cease thinking, I should completely cease to exist. At present I am not admitting anything except what is necessarily true. I am, then, in the strict sense, only a thing that thinks. That is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason - words whose meaning I have failed to apprehend before now. But for all that I am a thing which is real and which truly exists. But what kind of a thing? As I have just said: a thinking thing.
• I know that I am, and seek to know what I am – this ‘I’ that I know exists.
• But what am I, then? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.
• Who dat?  "I"
• Locke: "something, I know not what"
  
• Hume: the no-self view ... "bundle theory"
• Kant's transcendental ego: a formal (nonempirical) condition of thought that the "I' must accompany every perception.
• Intentional mental state: I think that snow is white.
• to think: a relation between
  
• a subject = "I"
• a propositional content thought =  snow is white
• Sensations: I feel the coldness of the snow.
  
• to feel: a relation between
• a subject = "I"
• a quale = the cold-feeling
  
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• A thought comes when "it" will and not when "I" will. Thus it is a falsification of the evidence to say that the subject "I" conditions the predicate "think."
  
• It is thought, to be sure, but that this "it" should be that old famous "I" is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion. Above all it is not an "immediate certainty." ... Our conclusion is here formulated out of our grammatical custom: "Thinking is an activity; every activity presumes something which is active, hence ...."
  
• Lichtenberg: "it's thinking" a la "it's raining"
• a mere grammatical requirement
• no proof of an thinking self
• Plato
• immortality argument
• to perish is to decompose
• only composites can decompose
• the soul is unitary (noncomposite)
• the soul cannot perish
• the chariot analysis: the soul has three parts
• a controlling part: the mind or reason (the driver)
  
• a tractable pride/honor loving part (the lead horse)
• a stubborn pleasure-seeking part (the big dumb horse)
• Three topics of philosophical speculation
• the nature of self (what persons are)
• personal identity (what makes someone the same individual thru time)
• moral responsibility
• Ego vs. bundle theories (Derek Parfit (1987))
  
• Ego: "there really is some kind of continuous self that is the subject of my experiences, that makes decisions, and so on." (95)
• Religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism
• Philosophers: Descartes, Locke, Kant & many others (the majority view)
  
• Bundle: "there is no underlying continuous and unitary self." (95)
• Religion: Buddhism
• Philosophers: Hume, Nietzsche, Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein, Kripke(?), Parfit, Dennett {a stellar minority}
• Hume v. Reid
• David Hume: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.  I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.  (Hume 1739, Treatise I, VI, iv)
  
• Thomas Reid: I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling: I am something which thinks and acts and feels. (1785)

Multiple Personality

• Ur case: Ansel Bourne (an itinerant preacher)
• withdrew $551 in Providence
• set up shop in Norriston PA. under the name A.J. Brown
  
• woke up in a terrible fright at the sound of an explosion recollecting his former self & wondering what he was doing in this strange bed
• Wm. James & Richard Hodgsten investigated using hypnosis:
• under hypnosis "Mr. Brown reappeared and was able to describe his travels" (p 98)
• Hogsdon concluded "Mr. Bourne's skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves" (James, 1989, i: 392)
  
• "Perhaps the most obvious thing to note [about such cases] is the connection between memory and selfhood." (SB: 98)
• Other famous clinical and literary cases
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson
• 1931 film version: Jekyll/Hyde portrayed by Frederick March (without makeup!)
  
• Christine Beauchamp & Sally & others (Prince 1906)
  
• Prince considered Sally "a dissociated group of conscious states"
• Prince declared he had successfully restored "the real, original or normal self, the self that that born and which she was intended by nature ot be." (Prince 1906: 1)
• The Three Faces of Eve
• Eve White
• Eve Black
• Jane
• Sybil: "a woman possessed by sixteen different personalities" (Schrieber, 1973).
• Skepticism: some view Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociate Identity Disorder (DID) with skepticism akin to that due reports of alien abductions, "recovered memories" of mass satanic ritual child abuse, etc.
• case of hystoria: stories invented or "implanted" by therapy itself
• iatrogenic in origin (i.e.) caused by the treatment or the therapist
• But what of Ansel Bourne?
• Two takes on MPD
• Ego theoretic: "The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting." (James 1890, i:401)
  
• Alternate: Jane being unaware of Eve White & vice versa
• Coexisting: Eve Black being aware of Eve White's experiences (but not vice versa)
• Bundle (e.g., the "discursive psychology" of Harré & Gillet 1994)
• "the mind of any human being is constituted by the discourses they are involved in"
• H & G contrast "the old idea of the self as something inside a person and the new idea of the self as a continuous production" (H&G: 110)
• E. White is "I" in one narrative
• E. Black is "I" in another narrative
• Jane is "I" in another narrative
• "There are not three little egos inside Miss Beauchamp, each speaking up through her mouth.  The speaking parts are all there is to it.  They are the phenomenon, and these speaking parts are the selves." (H&G:110)
• Advantages & Disadvantages (SB)
• advantage: "not having to rely on mysterious entities called selves"
• disadvantage: "risk of failing completely to say anything about consciousness"

Split Brains, Split Consciousness?

• The brain
  
• two hemispheres
  
• left ("analytic"): specializing in language and sensing/controlling the right side of the body
• right ("intuitive"): sensing/controlling the left side of the body
• unifying corpus collosum (a big cable of nerves)
• Experimental data: subjects with severed corpus collosi (Sperry 1968)
  
• "When a dollar sign was flashed to the left and a question mark to the right, the patient drew the dollar sign, but when asked what he had drawn he replied "a question mark."
• "Each hemisphere could remember what it had been shown, but these memories were inaccessible to the other.  So the left hand could retrieve the same object an hour later, but the person (i.e., speaking left hemisphere) would still deny having any knowledge of it." (104)
• Sperry's conclusions
• "Each hemisphere seemed to have its own separate and private sensations"
• "the minor hemisphere constitutes a second conscious entity that is characteristically human and runs along in parallel with the more dominant stream of consciousness in the major hemisphere" (1968: 723)
• Gazzaniga (1992)
• experiment
• left-brain shown a chicken claw: says points to chicken pic
  
• right-brain shown a snowy scene: points to snow-shovel pic
• confabulation
• asked why the shovel, the the subject (with his left-brain) replied "you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed"
• the patients never said things like "Because I have a split brain and you showed another picture to the other half."
• "This kind of confabulation was common, especially in experiments with emotions.  If an emotionally disturbing scene was shown to the right hemisphere, then the whole body reacted appropriately with, for example, blushing, anxiety, and signs of fear.  When asked why, the uninformed left hemisphere always made up some plausible excuse." (104)
• Conclusion: "only the left-hemisphere interpreter uses language, organizes beliefs, [and] ascribes actions and intentions to people", hence it alone enjoys "high-level consciousness"
• What of the "nondominant" mute hemisphere?: Sperry's (1968: 731) posed alternatives
  
• alternate/coextisting self: having "a true stream of conscious awareness"
  
• zombie "automaton carried along in a reflex or trance-like state" (106)
• LH's discovery: "I'm not so sinister as I look in the mirror!"
  
• MacKay's "supervisory level" hypothesis (1987)
• experimental finding: the left & right hemispheres can play 20 questions
• conclusion
• "executive level" [typical of the right-brain] can (unconsciously) control goal-directed activities and evaluate them in terms of current criteria and priorities" (106)
  
• "supervisory level": only this level "can determine and update those priorities. We are conscious only of those features of our world that engage this self-supervisory system." (107)
• Shared ego theoretic assumptions
  
•  that selves are countable things
• that there must be either one or two of them inhabiting the split-brain body
• Parfit's bundle-theoretic alternative:
• since "there is no such thing as a single self who experiences the stream" (SB: 108)
  
• "the number of persons involved is none" (Parfit, 1987:20)