Self as narrative construct

[telophase]

What caused me to mention our conversation of a few weeks ago to rachelmanija that resulted in her question and my question was coming across the radio show Radio Lab on the way down to Houston. I managed to catch about 3/4 of the show Who Am I?, all about the perception of the self.

The neurologist Paul Broks was featured and his book of essays Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology mentioned. I ordered it from Amazon before I thought to check the library, woe!, but am currently reading the library's copy. I like this bit, where he talks about how the self is a story, how we are narrative constructs. The context is after he's just discussed a young woman whose brain's left half was anesthetized to evaluate the function of her right brain, and how her behavior and speech was different when her damaged right brain was dominant than when her healthy left brain was.

One might think that the self is divided in such circumstances, but this would be to swallow the illusion of unity; to imagine in the first place that there is some 'whole thing' to be fractionated. There isn't. From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self -- feelings, thoughts, memories -- are scattered throughout different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.

This is not to say that our lives are fictions. Unlike Robinson Crusoe or Emma Bovary we are embedded in a universe with physical and moral dimensions where every thought and action splinters into a million consequences. Readers of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will vary in their reactions to its heroine as she makes her way through the novel, but her life and thoughts are fixed. She will always marry Charles, fall prey to the abominable Rodolphe, and die her horrible death. It's different for us meat puppets. We don't know where our lives are going. What the fuck am I doing here? I often wonder. [a question the young woman above asked when her right brain was dominant]

Who tells the story of the self? That's like asking who thunders the thunder or rains the rain. It is not so much a question of us telling the story as the story telling us.

and now who's going to make me a nifty icon with "It is not so much a question of us telling the story as the story telling us." on it?

Comments

[paper-legends.livejournal.com]

That is an amazing concept that really plumbs the depths of self in terms of philosophy as well as science, and it gave me tingles. I think one of the reasons the escape of fiction is so addictive is that the readers know that, however surprising the plot may be, it is fixed. The characters have merely to react, and the readers can remain safe in the knowledge that there's usually a symmetry and purpose behind the journey. In life, there is no guaranteed narrative, purpose, or closure. Not everyone grows up, finds love, and dies old. It's a completely unique experience for each individual.And while that uniqueness is beautiful, it also leaves a fierce hunger to be reconnected to the collective, to be witnessed, to be defined by others. No two stories are ever exactly the same, and what are they worth if not shared? And so here we all are, trying to carve out a sense of self based on every moment we process this lack of narrative. What more is the concept of self than the collection of experiences and memories? Take away the senses and the past, and we suddenly have nothing to fall back on. Where is the soul? Where is our uniqueness? What do we contribute to the whole? Fascinating stuff.

I want that icon too!!!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Your mention of sharing stories reminded me in an orthogonal way of his next essay, where he talks about something else but the sense of self-as-narrative is still there. He talks about a 50-year-old woman who had a brain anuerysm and had major changes in brain functioning as a result. When he interacted with her in the examination, the slightest prompt from him could send her off into verbosity, speaking whatever crossed her mind or sparked off other thoughts without pause, acting disordered and agitated, but how, when her husband was present, she calmed down:

Cities don't float in a vacuum, and neither do brains.

What became clear was that the brain could not be fully understood if you treated it as an isolated object. I had underestimated how tightly the brain's functions are bound to the rest of the body and, at the same time, how deeply they are embedded in the wider physical and social landscape. No brain is an island.

When Mary's husband came to visit he had a calming effect. They seemed to function as a unit. Mary's behavior meshed into the networks of partnership and so became more coherent and consistent. In any relationship each person is partly defined in terms of the other. So, for Mary, her husband's presence was a guide to self-definition. He provided a template. He drew from her a behavioral repertoire and a mental structure to complement his own, and the centre of gravity lay between them. There was stability, a kind of equilibrium. This effect was not of his deliberate doing. That's just the way it happens.

It seems that if we define the self as a narrative, then they each end up a collaborative story.

Anyway, it's a great book and the radio show I heard it from is great, also. You can stream that episode from the site I linked to above or download it from iTunes. The last segment of the show really hit me - the biology Robert Sapolsky talked about his experience when his father died and the boundaries between his own self and his father's self became blurred for a while - he took to wearing his father's clothes and had to always have a bottle of hid dad's nitroglycerine tablets with him, even though he had no heart problems. It culminated when he found himself (he was 30 at the time) giving a lecture to a hall full of undergraduates as if he were 80 years old, with lots of "You'll understand when you get older" and "Call your mother!" stuff. He said he realized afterward that it was as if his father had said goodbye in his own way, and after that he didn't need to carry the tablets or any of his father's traits any longer.

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

In any relationship each person is partly defined in terms of the other.

This could not be any truer. :D

I've been married almost twenty years, and I was with the guy for five years before that (since the age of nineteen) and I become more conscious with every passing year of how much each of us is a product of that relationship, and how different each of use might be if we had not met or had ended up with other people. Talking about two people becoming one flesh is almost inadequate. *cue gooey romantic music*

This goes for bad relationships as well as good ones, of course. Unfortunately. Unless you have extraordinarily strong boundaries and are able to close yourself off from human influence, which is pretty darn rare and not entirely desirable...

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I once got in an argument with someone, saying that you don't fundamentally change while in a relationship, and he disagreed. But I realized later, that's not at all what I was trying to say - the context was a mutual friend of ours who had a serious crush on a girl, and who was also convinced that if she'd only date him, he'd change for the better. It squicked me that the entire reason he wanted to date her seemed to be to make himself a better person, with no thought of what *he* could bring into the relationship for *her* - it seemed selfish. However, he eventually did start dating her, and he spent some time growing up, and they recently married. :) She probably *did* help him mellow out a bit, but I think that he had to start that particular process himself before he could bring things into the relationship.

And on a funnier note, your comment also reminded me of a line a former roommate of mine once said, when talking about her CRAZYINSANE music teacher and his wife: "It's a good thing they married each other and didn't fuck up two more families."

[telophase.livejournal.com]

(chomiji came through below. :D)

Self and narrative

[amberley.livejournal.com]

The nature of "I" is also the topic of I Am a Strange Loop (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465030785/) by Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote the terrific Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/).

Also of interest might be Charles Tilly's Why? (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Charles-Tilly/dp/069112521X/) on the four kinds of explanations and their effect on social relations. (Convention, Narratives, Technical cause-effect accounts, Codes or workplace jargon). Mismatches between preferred modes of explanation lead to much angst and drama.

Re: Self and narrative

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks! Will look them up. :D

[chomiji]

Errrhhhm, like this, maybe?

(Requests for changes entertained cheerfully, if not promptly ... )

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ooh, nice. :D

(I think "the story telling us" might read better if it were moved to the right a skosh - right now, I think the "as" is missed.)

[chomiji]

Hmm, you were right, I think ... hit "refresh" ...

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Weee, thanks! :D

[chomiji]

You are most welcome!!

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

Iiiiinteresting. I will have to find this book for myself.

The whole thing does remind me of my Unsellable Story To Which I Am Unreasonably Attached* - the conceit of the setting was that all living things reincarnated (as literally anything from bacteria on up - no discernable pattern) and retained full memory of previous incarnations (although intelligence/sentience level changed as appropriate for the reincarnations). My fictional people had no real concept of species, instead dividing up the world into "natures"; the form of the body/mind dictates the nature, so you might say that a falcon had the "sky-nature", or that a howler monkey had the "singing-nature". To these people, there'd be a much greater difference between, say, a falcon and a chicken than between a falcon and a fox.

Anyway, my fictional people distinguished human beings as having the "story-nature". *grin*

(* it's the Unsellable Story because you try making sense of a historical tale about a quasi-religious figure being told by an immortal endless reincarnating being with no concept of death, with no "outsider" viewpoint to use to explain the worldbuilding. *sigh*)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Anyway, my fictional people distinguished human beings as having the "story-nature". *grin*

:D And in a lot of anthropological/biological thinking, they say that *that* may be the actual difference between the human animal and the non-human animal: that humans have the power of story, of being able to construct their lives and realities as a narrative.

NOt that I can *remember* where I read or heard that, which means it's going to drive me crazy for a while...

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Have you read the Eleanor Arnason story whose name I've forgotten that's available online somewhere, which has no outsider viewpoint and is about a race of beings who have an absolutely different concept of self, as they think of each set of siblings as having a shared consciousness and, in fact, a single being?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has a race of creatures that combine in groups of 3 or more to form a single being.

[chomiji]

Yup, the "Tines." They were dog-like critters and the components of a single "being" were in constant communication with each other via high-pitched sounds. A really neat idea, IMO.

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

See also Theodore Sturgeon's "More Than Human" for the same idea applied to human evolution (though I think he slightly copped out by only portraying the POV of the "head" of the gestalt entity, who had the worldview closest to our own).