In Companion for the Modern Thinker, Amsterdam: De Balie (in press)

ONE-SELF: A MEDITATION ON THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Nicholas Humphrey

Department of Psychology 
New School for Social Research
65 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10003

I am looking at my baby son, thrashing around in his crib, two arms flailing, hands grasping randomly, legs kicking the air, head and eyes turning this way and that, a smile followed by a grimace crossing his face. . . I’m wondering: what is it like to be him? What is he feeling now? What kind of experience is he having of himself? Then a strong image comes to me. I am standing now, not at the rail of a crib, but in a concert hall at the rail of the gallery, watching as the orchestra assembles. The players are arriving, one by one — string-players, percussion, woodwind, taking their separate places on the stage. They are paying little if any attention to each other. Each adjusts his chair, smooths his clothes, arranges the score on the rack in front of him. One by one they start to tune their instruments. The cellist draws his bow darkly across the strings, cocks his head as if savoring the resonance, then makes a slight twist on the screw. The harpist leans into the body of her harp, runs her fingers trippingly along a scale, relaxes and looks satisfied. The oboist pipes a few liquid notes, stops, fiddles with the reed and tries again. The tympanist beats a brief rally on his drum. Each is, for the moment, entirely in his own world, playing only to and for himself, oblivious to anything but his own action and his own sound. The noise from the stage is a medley of single notes and snatches of melody, out of time, out of harmony. . . You might never guess that in so short a while all these independent voices will be working in concert under one conductor to create a single symphony. Now, back in the nursery, I seem to be seeing another kind of orchestra assembling. It is as if, with this baby too, all the separate agencies of which he is composed still have to settle into place and do their tuning up: nerves need tightening and balancing, sense organs calibrating, pipes clearing, airways opening, a whole range of tricks and minor routines have still to be practiced and made right. The sub-systems that will one day be a system have as yet hardly begun to acknowledge one another, let alone to work together for one common purpose. And as for the conductor who one day will be leading all these parts in concert into life’s Magnificat, this conductor is still nowhere to be seen. So, to repeat my question: what kind of experience is this baby having of himself? And then, as I ask it, I realize I do not like the answer that suggests itself. If there really is no conductor inside him yet, perhaps there is in fact no self yet, and if no self perhaps there is no experience either, nothing at all. . . If I close my eyes and try to think like a hard-headed philosophical sceptic, I can — just about — persuade myself it could be so. I must agree that, in theory anyway, there could be no kind of consciousness within this little body, no inner life, nobody at home to have an inner life. But then, as I open my eyes and look at him again, any such scepticism melts. Look. . . Someone in there is surely looking back at me, someone is smiling, someone seems to know my face, someone is reaching out his tiny hand. . . Philosophers think one way, but fathers think another. I can hardly doubt there are sensations being registered inside this boy, willed actions initiated, memories retrieved. However disorganized his life may be, he’s surely not totally unconscious. Yet I realize I can’t leave it there. The problem is that if there are these experiences occurring in the baby boy, they presumably have to belong to an experiencer. Every experience has to have a corresponding subject whose experience it is. The point was well made by the philosopher Gottlob Frege, a hundred years ago: it would be absurd, he wrote, to suppose "that a pain, a mood, a wish should rove about the world without a bearer, independently. An experience is impossible without an experient. The inner world presupposes the person whose inner world it is." But, if that’s the case, I wonder what to make of it. For it seems to imply that all those "someones" that I recognize inside this boy — the someone who is looking, the someone who is acting, the someone who is remembering, and so on — must all be genuine subjects of experience. Subjects, note: plural. If indeed he does not yet possess a single Self — that Self with a capital S which will later mold the whole system into one — then perhaps he must in fact possess a set of relatively independent sub-selves: each of which must be counted a separate center of subjectivity, a separate experiencer. Not yet being one person, perhaps he is in fact many. But, isn’t this idea bizarre? A lot of independent experiencers? Or — to be clear about what this has to mean — a lot of independent consciousness-es? And all within one body? I confess I find it hard to see how it would work. I try to imagine what it would be like for me to be fractionated in this way. And I simply cannot make sense of the idea. Now, I do agree that I myself have many kinds of "lesser self" inside me: I can, if I try, distinguish a part of me that is seeing, a part that’s smelling, a part raising my arm, a part recalling what day it is, etcetera. These are certainly different types of mental activity, involving different categories of subjective experience, and I’m sure they can properly be said to involve different dimensions of my self. I can even agree that these parts of me are a relatively loose confederation, that do not all have to be present at one time. Parts of my mind can and do sometimes wander, get lost, and return. When I’ve come round from a deep sleep, for example, I think it’s even true that I’ve found myself having to gather myself together — which is to say my selves together — piecemeal. Marcel Proust, in A la recherche du temps perdu provides a nice description of just this peculiar experience: "when I used to wake up in the middle of the night," he writes, "not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness . . . but then . . . out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, of shirts with turned-down collars, [I] would gradually piece together the original components of my ego." So, it’s true, if I think about this further, that the idea of someone’s consciousness being dispersed in different places isn’t completely unfamiliar to me. And yet, let me be clear that this kind of example will hardly do to help me understand the baby. For what distinguishes my case and the baby’s is precisely that these "parts of me" that separate and recombine do not, while separate, exist as distinct and self-sufficient subjects of experience. When I come together on waking, it’s surely not a matter of my bringing together various sub-selves that are already separately conscious. Rather these sub-selves only come back into existence as and when, as it were, I plug them back into the main me. So now, as I stand at the crib watching this baby boy, trying to find the right way in, I realize I’m up against an imaginative barrier. I won’t say that, merely because I can’t imagine it, it could make no sense at all to suppose that the baby has got all these separate conscious selves within him. But I will say I don’t know what to say next. And yet I spy a ray of light. Maybe there is, after all, the germ of some real insight here. Maybe the reason why I can’t imagine the baby’s case is tied into that very phrase: "I can’t imagine it.." For what seems to be happening is that, as soon as I try to imagine the baby as split up into several different selves, I make him back into one again by virtue of imagining it: I imagine each set of experiences as my experiences — but, just to the extent that they are all mine, they are no longer separate! But doesn’t this throw direct light on what may be the essential difference between my case and the baby’s? For doesn’t it suggest that it’s all a matter of how a person’s experiences are owned — who they belong to? With me it seems quite clear that every experience that any of my sub-selves has is mine. And, to paraphrase Frege: in my case it would certainly make no sense to suppose that a pain, a mood, a wish should rove about my inner world without the bearer in every case being I! But maybe with the baby every experience that any of his sub-selves has is not yet his. And maybe in his case it does make perfect sense to suppose that a pain, a mood, a wish should rove about inside his inner world without the bearer in every case being he. How so? What kind of concept of "belonging" can this be, such that I can seriously suggest that, while my experiences belong to me, the baby’s do not belong to him? I find that I know the answer intuitively, and still I need to work it through. Let me return to the image of the orchestra. In their case, I certainly want to say: the players who arrive on stage as isolated individuals come to belong to a single orchestra. As an example of "belonging", this seems as clear as any. But if so, if there is indeed something that binds the players to belong together, what kind of something is it? The obvious answer is the one I’ve hinted at already: there’s a conductor. After each player settles in and has his period of free-play, a dominant authority mounts the stage — lifts his baton and proceeds to take overall control. But, now, in this new context, I realize this image of the conductor as "chief self" is not the one I need, nor indeed was it a good or helpful image to begin with. Ask any orchestral player, and he’ll tell you: although it may perhaps look to an outsider as if the conductor is totally in charge, in fact he often has a quite minor — even a purely decorative — role. Sure, he can provide a common reference point to assist the players with the timing and punctuation of their playing. And he can certainly influence the overall style and interpretation of a work. But that is not what gets the players to belong together. What truly binds them into one organic unit and creates the flow between them is something much deeper and more magical: namely, the very act of making music — the fact that they are involved together in creating a single work of art. But, now, this suggests a criterion for "belonging" that should be applicable much more widely: namely, that in general parts come to belong to a whole just in so far as they are participants in a common project? Try the definition where you like: What makes the parts of an oak tree belong together? the branches, roots, leaves, acorns . . ? That they share a common interest in the tree’s survival. What makes the parts of a complex machine like an airplane belong to the airplane? the wings, the jet engines, the radar. . ? That they participate in the common enterprise of flying. Then, here’s the question: What makes the parts of a person belong together — if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common project of creating that person’s life. This, then, is the definition I was looking for. And, as I try it, I see clearly how it works in my own case. I may indeed be made up of many separate sub-selves, but these selves have come to belong together as the one I that I am just because they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: namely the enterprise of steering me — body and soul — through the physical and social world. Within this larger enterprise each of my selves may indeed be doing its own thing: providing me on one side with sensory information, on another with intelligence, on another with past knowledge, goals, judgements, initiatives, and so on. But the point — the wonderful point — is that each self’s own thing shares a final common path with all the other selves’ own things. And it’s for just this reason that these selves are all of them mine, and for this reason that their experiences are all of them my experiences. In short, my selves have become co-conscious through co-laboration. But the baby? Look at him again. There he is thrashing about. The difference between him and me is precisely that he has as yet no common project to unite the selves within him. Look at him. See how he has hardly started to do anything for himself as a whole: how he is still completely helpless, needy, dependent — reliant on the projects of other people for his survival. For sure, his selves are beginning to get into shape and function on their own. But they do not yet share a final common path. And it’s for that reason that his selves are not yet all of them his, and for that reason that their experiences are not yet his experiences. His selves are not co-conscious yet because there is as yet no co-laboration. Even as I watch, however, I can see things changing. I realize the baby boy is beginning to come together. Already there are hints of small colaborative projects getting under way: his eyes and his hands working together, his face and his voice, his mouth and his tummy. As time goes by, some of these mini-projects will succeed, others will be abandoned. But inexorably over days and weeks and months he will become one coordinated centrally conscious human being. And, as I anticipate this happening, I begin to understand how in fact he may be going to achieve this miracle of unification. It won’t be, as I might have thought at the beginning, through the power of a supervisory self who emerges from nowhere and takes control, but rather through the power inherent in all his sub-selves for, literally, their own self-organization. Then, stand with me again at the rail of the orchestra, watching those instrumental players tuning up. The conductor hasn’t come yet, and maybe he isn’t ever going to come. But, actually, it hardly matters: for the truth is it is of the nature of these players to play. See, one or two of them are already beginning to strike up, to experiment with half-formed melodies, to hear how they sound for themselves, and — interestingly — to find and recreate their sound in the group sound that is beginning to arise around them. See how several little alliances are forming, the strings are coming into register, the same’s happening with the oboes and the clarinets . . . See, now, how they are joining together across different sections . . . how larger structures are emerging. . . But, perhaps I can offer a better picture still. Imagine that, up at the back of the stage, above the orchestra, there is a lone dancer. He is the image of Nijinsky. His movements are being shaped by the sounds of the instruments, his body absorbing and translating everything he hears. Now, to begin with, his dance seems graceless and chaotic. His body cannot make one dance of thirty different tunes. Yet, something’s changing. See how each of the instrumental players is watching the dancer, looking to find how, within the chaos of those body movements, the dancer is dancing to his tune. And each player, it seems, now wants the dancer to be his, to have the dancer give form to his sound. But see, how in order to achieve this, each player is having to take account of all the other influences to which the dancer is responding: how each is having to accomodate to, fall in with, join in harmony with the whole group. See, then, how, at last, this group of players is becoming one orchestra reflected in the one body of the dancer — and how the music they are making and the dance that he is dancing have indeed become a single work of art. And my boy, Samuel? His body has already begun to dance to the sounds of his own selves. Soon enough, as these selves come together in creating him, he too will become a single self-made human being.