Over the past year I've made a number of cryptic posts regarding consciousness, language, and the slippery notion of "self," "identity," or "self-concept," particularly in the era of digital and social media. I am still toying with the idea, but here are some of its pieces which may hopefully lead to fruitful discussion, copied and somewhat cleaned up from loose drafts written over IRC:
Point 1. Our entire experience and world of accessible thought is circumscribed by language. This is similar to Wittgenstein's notion of "language games," in which we use words as tools to conceptualize and model the structure of the world. However, crucially, it is impossible to escape from this linguistic framing; there does not exist any point outside of language from which it becomes possible to "objectively" assess or analyze language from a detached point-of-view. Our world is in fact circumscribed by the expressivity of our language (with allusions to strong Sapir-Whorf here).
Point 2. Our consciousness is lexical, linguistic, metaphorical, and narrative in structure This is an idea from Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind," where he discusses linguistic metaphor, of how we use concrete concepts, ideas, and words, things we already know, to analogize, or make helpful comparisons to, what is unknown. He brings up the example of the word "to be," and the concept of existence, which is so philosophically abstract and removed from any concrete experience of hunting for game through the savannas or foraging for wild berries, that we simply didn't have a word for "existence," or "being" until Sanskrit speakers came up with the metaphor of "bhu," which literally means "to grow," but in fact serves as the etymological root for the english word, "to be." Hence we have analogized from the familiar concept, and the word we have attached to it, "grow," to the unknown, the metaphysical, and the abstract notion of "being."
Do you "see" what I'm saying? Of the way we can leverage language used to describe one sensory faculty, vision, to make statements of others - sound and thought? How the web of loose associations and connotations carried by the sense of the word "see" can extend outwards and be applied to speech and thought, shading in the word "saying" with its depth of nuance? Of how we proceed from the "knowledge primitive," the immediately apprehensible concept of "sight," to build mental machinery and cognitive tools that allow us to talk about the invisible world of ideas? Of how we can apply our knowledge in one domain to build analogical bridges to, and footholds in, others? So it is, too, with the self - when exploring the territory of the self, we can only use our existing language and vocabulary, rooted in the physical world of the five senses, to build maps that hope to capture the immaterial nature of the psychological world of "self."
Jaynes hypothesizes that essentially all language and thought operates on this metaphorical basis, including consciousness itself, and our own internal concepts and notions of self. Jaynes believes that a fundamental characteristic of human conscious experience is the creation of a "metaphorical self," a model of who we are, which he calls "the analog 'I'." We draw on our existing spatiotemporal experiences in the physical world to construct a spatiotemporal metaphor in our internal psychological world, a "simulation" of ourselves. We picture ourselves in our heads, going about our day wondering about how action A may lead to consequence X, and instead action B may lead to consequence Y... That little mini-me we simulate in our head? That is the "analog I," the metaphor we have of ourselves; and in addition to being spatiotemporal, of physical bodies moving around in a 3D space and through time, it is also narrative in that our metaphor of self is fundamentally driven by a story we tell about who we are, that links together events in time into a coherent thread of why we are the way that we are right now.
Point 3. The media we inscribe our language upon, both constrains and influences what kind of language we can use to express ourselves. This is weakly inspired by Marshall McLuhan, "the medium is the message," and how the structure of the medium actually imparts information of a fundamentally different quality from messages expressed through other media. Here's the most salient example in modern day social media: Twitter. Until a few years ago, the medium of Twitter literally and technically forbade you from being able to write Tweets over 280 characters; it is literally putting a hard cap on the maximum complexity and information content of your speech. Hence the emergence of "hot takes," soundbytes, and other 15-second quips that are devoid of any actual rich philosophical insight and other garbage short-form "junk food" content.
So too with our selves - where previously we had to be content with cave drawings, statues, paintings, that loosely gestured at a human being, and invited us to consider what the actual person the medium depicts was really like, now we have 4K, HD, 24/7 real-time streaming of everyone's lives in minute detail. Now we have photoshop, and airbrushing, and filters, and /r/instagramreality. Instead of the literary, artistic, oil on canvas language of the self, of ink and scrolls and paper, we now have a photorealistic, even hyperrealistic, more-real-than-reality language of the self that no longer invites speculation, that no longer invites discourse and discussion to learn more about the man behind the photo. In some ways all of that beating around the bush is obsolete - we know exactly who you are, pixel by pixel, right here - and so there is little left of pondering what the content of the man's soul is.
In fact, the man's soul has already died; there is no room for it in modern discourse, for science has assured us of its nonexistence. The pixels themselves are sufficient - a Johnny Silverhand facsimilie of a human being, necromantically reanimated into the pixels you see on your screen. The self, the "soul," is obsolete. We can capture your "psychological engram," in the lingo of Cyberpunk 2077, and implant it into another mechanically augmented body, preserving your entire being even across the horizons of death. We can make the cyborg, the pixels, the videos, move, talk, and walk exactly as you do; the self from which the "engram" is taken is no longer needed, and can be put through the incinerator, because Johnny Silverhand is sitting right there, playing guitar from his newly occupied cyborg body, the exact same way he used to until he was shot in the chest in the year 2023.
Our stories, our narratives of ourselves, the languages we use to describe ourselves, have all attained such a high level of definition, that there is nothing left to the imagination, nothing left for the viewers and audience to fill in. As McLuhan calls it, the Internet is a "hot" medium, contrasted with "cool" media that sketch in as few points as possible and leave the rest up to the audience to interpolate between. It's the mystery, the lack of definition, the feeling that there is more information behind the pixels, that sustains belief in some kind of immaterial "psyche" or "soul" behind the sense data assembled into the selfie, the self-portrait. There is no longer any mystery; ourselves have become coextensive with their digital representation. What is on the screen is in the man, and everything that is in the man is on the screen.
Point 4. The confusion of symbols of things, with the things in themselves I will defer to Alan Watts here who summed up the idea so eloquently (emphasis mine):
For on the one hand, there is the real world, and on the other, a whole system of symbols about that world, which we have in our minds. These are very, very useful symbols. All civilization depends on them. But like all good things, they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves, with ourselves.
The point about confusing "images of ourselves" with our (real) selves is most salient here. With our ability to depict reality to the finest grain of resolution, it becomes much easier to mistake the image for the thing itself. Our hyperrealistic language and depictions of ourselves have rendered the inner world obsolete, because we no longer have the mystery of incomplete information to gesture at, to suggest the existence of an ineffable, inscrutable, immaterial "soul" or essence of self. We've looked very hard at all the pixels. all we can see are pixels, no "souls" here. The pixels are the man, and the man is the set of pixels. As McLuhan once said, live on television, "we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you're on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you don't have a physical body. You're just an image, on the air."
Taken further: by presenting the correct sequence of symbols to human beings, you can confuse other people into mistaking those symbols for reality, and thus in some way, "create reality itself." Consider the following thought experiment: a man born deaf, mute, incapable of communicating to others, but who still has internal thoughts, dreams, hopes, et cetera. For all we know there may be a very rich storehouse of ideas and stories that are only accessible to the mind of the deaf-mute, but since he is unable to communicate any of those ideas, through language (let's leave body language aside for now), he is unable to realize any of those ideas, create shared intersubjective experiences; unable to bring any of those private and internal thoughts to the world of the living; unable to externalize those purely internal experiences, to make his inner subjective experience, at least now an intersubjective experience, if not an objective one. Instead, others may create their own realities, their own models, ideas of what is going on in the deaf-mute's head, and if the deaf-mute were to spend his whole life like that, it's really only those models, those projections, those guesses of what is going on in the deaf-mute's head that are "real." After all, he can't speak, talk, tell us what he's thinking, so all we have to go on are our uneducated guesstimations.
Suppose now after some period of time, years, decades, the deaf-mute is spontaneously able to speak, write, communicate as fluently as any other fully grown adult human. Now he starts literally speaking his mind, taking what was once purely ideal, mental, internal, subjective, and lending at least some degree of objectivity, reality to it, by, at the very least, physically vibrating the air in order to produce sound, which is an objectively verifiable and quantifiable phenomenon. Not only is he now physically influencing the world through causality, he is also influencing the minds of his caretakers and friends by overturning their self-deceptions and illusions regarding what the deaf-mute is thinking, how his mind works. It's only by breaking silence, by literally speaking his mind that he is able to change the perceptions and the minds of those around him, who now may suddenly start treating him differently, with a little more respect, since it turns out he wasn't just a brainless invalid but may actually have half a thought lingering in his head.
Simply through the application of language and speech he has almost literally rewritten reality. You could say, "you are what you speak forth;" and for the deaf-mute, who could not speak forth anything at all, his self, others' concepts of his self, were empty, mere speculation, empty shadows and guesses at a human being. In fact, his persona is almost entirely socially determined and mediated - the only "self" that exists in the mind of his social circle, is the poor approximation that the deaf-mute's friends had to construct in his silence. It was only his act of using language, speaking his mind out into the world, that actually solidified his subjective experience of self into an intersubjective shared reality.
In fact, extending the thought experiment further, what if the deaf-mute decided to lie about the contents of his own mind, and speak forth completely different ideas and thoughts from those he harbors internally in the privacy of his mind? Would his friends and acquaintances know any better? or would they take his word at face-value, and now accept this linguistic fabrication of who the deaf-mute is as the deaf-mute's ACTUAL person, his ACTUAL character?
What exactly is the difference? does it matter whether or not his speech has any actual direct correlation or resemblance to his internal thought process? After all, one can say all sorts of things about themselves; in the immortal words of Razzlekhan,
I'm many things. A rapper. An economist. A journalist. A writer. A CEO. And a dirty, dirty, dirty dirty hoe.
This doesn't mean she actually is a rapper (in fact, this video would suggest the complete opposite). But does anyone deny the socially constructed, intersubjective "reality" of the media persona that is Razzlekhan? After all, someone logged in under such an alias posted moving pixels depicting a human being doing and saying these things in the physical world. I will probably never get to meet the actual "person" behind that alias, that persona - the only thing I will ever know of Razzlekhan is the narrative that was sold to me in my suspension of disbelief in the reality of digital media.
Do you see what I'm talking about?
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Notes -
I do. I worry that that's the biggest problem in the world today, because the soul does exist. Or we are more than our image, whichever way you want to look at it. I want to talk more about it, but I don't know how. Especially when I see people buying into media narratives, which seem to be the foundation for reality for almost everyone in my life no matter what I say to them. So many people seem to think the the world works the way the movies they watched in their formative years told them it works and no amount of loudly screaming that Hollywood isn't reality has any effect, the instant the subject changes they immediately return to basing their reality on art.
It was a mistake to wipe your history though, appropriate or not.
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I feel an overwhelming sense of "so what" upon reading this.
It has an intense feeling of navel gazing. And while I am not wholly opposed to navel gazing, I'm usually only interested in reading it when the navel gazer has proven very interesting in other subject areas. I go to check your profile and see if you were someone I read much in the past, and lo and behold your entire history is deleted. You are actively and intentionally a nobody in reputational terms on this website.
Why? The only post left remaining is one about leaving reddit and making it more of an echo chamber.
"Private mode enabled."
Maybe this is am intentional attempt at irony in the context of the post.
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