TB: Losing Ourselves (Garfield)
Core Thesis
We exist not as selves but as persons. There is no self — no unitary, persistent, causally efficacious subject standing behind and possessing body and mind — but this does not mean we don't exist (that would be madness). Persons are socially embedded, causally and cognitively open, conventional continua of psychophysical processes. The illusion that we are selves is not just philosophically mistaken; it is ethically damaging — it distorts moral perception, inflates the ego, and undermines moral cultivation. Free will, the natural companion of the self, is likewise an illusion of the first-person perspective. Though the bulk of the book investigates the self illusion, in the end it is really a book about ethics: coming to understand ourselves as persons enables a more mature, salutary moral engagement with the world.
Key Takeaways
What the self is supposed to be
- Atman (Vedic/Upanishadic): unitary, always the subject never the object, the witness of all perception, the agent of action and enjoyer of aesthetic experience, persisting through changes of body and mind and even beyond death. The relation of self to embodied person is like you to your wardrobe — you "put on" a new mind and body each life but are never identical to any.
- Christian soul (Augustine): distinct from and possessor of mind and body; subject of knowledge, agent of action, locus of moral responsibility; immediately available to introspection; and crucially exempt from causation — free — a property Augustine deemed necessary for moral responsibility.
- What both share: the self has existence prior to and independent of body and mind; it is the stable foundation beneath the flux of experience. That this idea recurs across diverse traditions is not evidence it is correct — it is evidence of an innate tendency to a cognitive illusion.
The Buddhist/Humean refutation
- Hume: "I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception." Honest introspection finds sensations, perceptions, affect, cognitive states — an ever-changing collection — but no ghostly owner behind the curtain.
- The chariot analogy (Candrakirti): a complete inventory of the world's basic constituents — even hair, fingers, desires, experiences — contains no person as a singular entity. The person is neither identical to nor distinct from these parts.
- "The idea that we have or are selves is not even false, it is just gibberish."
- The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" was anticipated by the Indian philosopher Uddyotakara, and rests on a false premise: that only substances can act or have properties. Corporations, committees, colleges and nations have properties and perform actions; so can composite, non-substantial persons.
What we are instead — persons
- A person is a socially embedded human being with no self — a complex, constructed, socially embedded psychophysical complex.
- We are causally and cognitively open continua of psychophysical processes. No one process captures who we are; none persist unchanged; none are independent. Together they constitute a robust conventional identity.
- Just as dollars exist on a different plane from dimes, persons exist on a different plane from minds and bodies. And just as a dollar's not being a piece of paper doesn't mean dollars don't exist, our not being selves doesn't mean we don't exist.
- Personal identity over time is explained by causal and psychological continuity — pattern and memory — not by a persisting subject. We are more like hives than bees.
Actor vs. role — the Hamlet analogy
- We are neither identical to nor different from the facts that ground us. Hamlet is not identical to Shakespeare's words, the performances, or the critical literature — no text can fall in love with Ophelia — yet apart from all these there is no Hamlet.
- The self is taken to be preexisting, primordial, unitary, transcendent, independent of body, mind, and social context. The person is constructed, dependent, complex, embodied and embedded. That is the difference between the actor and the role: we are roles, not actors.
- But the difference from Hamlet matters too: Shakespeare's fiction is local, optional, and need not be instantiated; the fiction in which we play our parts is global, mandatory, and necessarily instantiated by biologically real creatures. We are real persons, not imaginary ones.
The looping construction of persons — biology ↔ psychology ↔ social
- Persons are poised between the biological, the psychological, and the social, living on the cusp of fact and fiction. You can't use physics to understand a chess game or how money works; all these levels of description are needed to understand who we are.
- Our goals, behavior, and what gives us pleasure and pain are largely set by social context, so psychology can't be understood apart from the social. Even our biology is shaped by social and psychological selection pressures.
- We are biologically determined to create social structures that shape our psychology, which elaborates those structures, which reshape our psychology and even our biological heritage and its expression. Persons emerge from this looping, spiraling interaction — none of its levels can be ignored.
- This construction proceeds through both intentional and tacit participation in social structures; it requires constant open causal interaction with the physical and social environment. That flexibility and embeddedness is the mark of persons, not the isolation and constancy of selves. There is no place for the self in this story.
Language and the word "I"
- We are biologically wired for language, selected for it in the human social niche, and disposed to recognize and be governed by systems of conventional norms. Words are meaningful only because rules govern their use.
- When we ascribe mental states to others we interpret, using the meaningfulness of language as a model. We do the same to ourselves — describing our own beliefs and intentions without observing inner sentences. Self-understanding is a constant act of auto-interpretation.
- "The word I is first and foremost a linguistic term." Once the whole interpretive system is created, particular statements about us can be true or false relative to it — that is how it is with us considered as persons, not as hominids.
Knowing minds through co-participation
- "Are you a zombie?" You couldn't tell — a zombie would believe it has an inner life just as you do. We know we are minds not through introspection but through participation; we know others are minds not through inference or clairvoyance but through co-participation.
Non-dual experience and the subject-object illusion
- Our nervous systems construct experience from causal interaction with the environment; the world we experience is not transported into our skulls but constructed in ongoing engagement. The world we experience is not independent of us.
- The dichotomy of subject ("I") and object (everything else) is itself a constructed illusion, not a feature of experience. Awareness is better understood as a constant modulation and attunement of the open interaction between organism and environment — a mode of embedding in the world — rather than a relation between an interior subject and exterior object. The polarity of subject and object is tantamount to the reification of a self.
- An alternative is a non-dual model: experience without an experiencer standing apart from it. To the extent our experience is non-dual, we experience ourselves without positing a self. We do not succumb to the self illusion at every waking moment.
Expert performance, flow, and self-consciousness
- Immersed phenomenology (flow) is indicative of expertise and facilitates fluid, successful performance; when truly immersed, one's own subjectivity is the furthest thing from mind.
- Novices who attend to their own performance do better than distracted ones; experts asked to attend to their own performance do worse than those given a distractor. We are at our best when the self illusion is out of the picture — further evidence of its illusory status. Self-conscious attention is useful for learning and teaching, but obstructs expert spontaneity.
Meditation
- Tsongkhapa: only long-term meditative exercise can rid us of the innate sense of self; it is too deeply wired to be removed by philosophy alone. Meditation is the vehicle through which philosophy becomes transformative — it lets the philosophy seep deeply enough into consciousness to reshape experience.
Free will as illusion — and Augustine's invention of it
- Among the illusions we are wired for is that our decisions to act are uncaused — "agent causation," a spontaneous act of will unconstrained by deterministic causes, enshrined in our cognitive habits and in law.
- Augustine introduced the distinction between free acts and caused acts to absolve God of responsibility for the Fall — inventing two ideas at once: a will, and its exemption from causation. Out of a theological problem a moral, legal and metaphysical ideology was born, now so ingrained that we accept it unquestioningly and forget its religious roots.
- Free will and the self are both illusions of the first-person perspective. Once we recognize we are part of the causal order, wishing our behavior to be uncaused is bizarre: the uncaused would be random, and randomness is not freedom but a curse. (Nobody thinks "now let me be angry" — people just get angry.) Recognizing that an unreasonable action "has been brought about by conditions" lets us remain content.
Why it matters ethically — Kant, Rawls, and the near enemies
- Kant: if morality merely tracks my desires and preferences, it is no morality at all. Rawls: morality demands common assent.
- To see everything through the subject-object lens is to cast oneself as the sole subject and agent and everyone else as moral objects and patients — to remove oneself from membership in the world. That egocentric stance is the moral side of the self illusion.
- Its consequence is, at best, the "near enemies" of the virtues: states like partial affection (being a good friend only to those one likes, or for one's own pleasure) that feel like virtue but re-inscribe egocentrism — irrational and destructive attitudes made worse by masquerading as virtue.
- Seeing ourselves as persons in an interdependent matrix gives deeper insight into our own and others' agency, and yields healthier responses: to resolve rather than recriminate, ameliorate rather than punish, cultivate attitudes that make everyone more effective and happy. "Who we think we are determines in part who we eventually become." It is both rational (it fits our best understanding of the world) and morally important (the self illusion is not harmless) to shed the self illusion.
Mental Models
- The Map is Not the Territory — the self is a map of experience that we mistake for the territory; careful investigation reveals no territory that corresponds to it
- Complex Systems: Features from Path, Not Design — personal identity emerges from the looping causal continuity of biological, psychological, and social processes; there is no designer-self managing the system