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?