Diderot vindicated

Illustration of a Sephonophore from plate 37 of "Kunstformen der Natur" (1904) by that other Spinozist, Ernst Haeckel (1837-1919)

In d’Alembert’s Dream, the eponymous mathematician-dreamer expounds on the paradoxes of corporeity and identity in his sleep, much to the distress of his companion Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse. The lady takes for ravings his claim that the individual is best described as a hive of bees. Diderot’s dialogical character Dr. Bordeau explains the claim with another similie, describing each organ as an individuated animal working in concert with all the rest.

This analogy finds no more perfect aptness than in the siphonophore, a alien variety of jellyfish. They live in colonies, with hundreds of separate, distinct, and semi-autonomous units growing out of a single fertilized embryo. Casey Dunn explains in this Vimeo (watch first!) and in this blog:

A bird, a rose bush, and a fly are all individuals as functional entities, according to their ancestry, and as units of selection. This makes it easy to get lulled into thinking of individuality as a monolithic property.A siphonophore colony is a functional individual. But a siphonophore colony is made up of many parts that are each equivalent to free living organisms such as sea anemones and “true” jellyfish. So by the evolutionary descent definition it is a collection of individuals. The colony as a whole is acted upon by natural selection, making it an individual in the sense of the process of evolution. But it is entirely unclear whether natural selection can act on the parts within the colony, as it does on our own cells when we get cancer, since we don’t know about the heritability between the parts of the colony.

Siphonophores, by forcing us to disentangle what we mean when we call something an individual, help us understand the evolutionary origins of individuality. These different aspects of individuality don’t necessarily evolve at the same time, and one or more of them can even be lost. Organisms like siphonophores provide glimpses of these different combinations of individuality.

Forster on personality

Dora Carrington's portrait of Edward Morgan Forster, ca. 1924-5

Good description, bad prescription:  

[P]sychology has split and shattered the idea of a “Person,” and has shown there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we cannot. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not interchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of living, one has to assume that personality is solid and the “self” is an entity, and ignore all contrary evidence. -E.M. Forster, “What I believe,” 1938  

It confuses and frustrates me when people suggest acquiring knowledge of things which have always been true about the human condtion somehow poses a threat to the possibility of accepting that condition–for example, when Einstein said we should treat human beings “as if” they possessed free will, even though he had just said he could not imagine what a will uncompelled by internal necessity could possibly look like. Recognizing humanity as a natural thing bound by mechanistic laws, Einstein recognized individuals as the causes of the effects of their actions, and wished to arrange society so as to provide incentives for good behavior and punishments for bad ones. Which is to say, he wished for people to be more-or-less treated as they always had been. Despite our intuition’s insistance otherwise, responsibility can be thought of as an individual being the necessary cause of the effects of their actions; and belief or disbelief in determinism or indeterminacy has no effect on our valuation of incentives or fear of punishments. 

Perhaps this frustration arises from my gnosticism. I use the term not in reference to the early immaterialist Christian sects, but in the broadest possible sense of the word. I am a gnostic insofar as I believe truth is liberating, is soteriological. 

So I accuse Forster, otherwise an exemplary liberal, as a destroyer of human liberty in urging the ignorance of a difficult truth. He is does so because he is mistaken as to the utility of his untruth. Human relations do not depend on belief in an atomic “self.” They are probably, in fact, harmed by it. All bad psychology, all corruptions in our theory of mind force us to hold intercourse with ghosts of fancy. 

All personalities we interact with are fictions–but some more fanciful than others. We surmise other minds only by analogy and inference, which is to say invention. This is necessarily true of our own minds as well. Too much information passes before consciousness for all of it to be remembered or even processed correctly the first time. This is true even of entirely subjective knowledge, pleasures, pains, emotional reactions, daydreams, unspoken comments, flutterings of the esprit d’escalier, etc. So we know ourselves by means of a working fictional account of ourselves, an overly simplified embodiment of general trends of our behaviors real and imagined, or at least real but so heavily redacted in remembering they cannot be called true.   

This fiction is not our ideal self. We admit ourselves faults, though not all of them. The importance of some may be exaggerated, other perhaps more important ones downplayed. As La Rochefoucauld said, 

Often we admit a vice to conceal a greater one. 

Forster speaks of those occasions in which “that something incalculable” bubble up, which is to say, the spontaneous fluxes of our personality, as if they are rare occasions that only might disturb our “normal balance.” If by “our normal balance,” he means a pattern of behavior aligning with our conception of ourselves, this is broken all the time.  But a battery of cognitive biases prevent us from recognizing change within ourselves, or makes us forget its appearance, or rationalize it away as a fluke. I am more than what I am. My form is capable of a wider array of passions and behaviors than I can ever be allowed to recognize by myself. And yet. Another person, one who has been around me long enough to notice the inconsistancies in my character can alert me to my betrayals of my best selves. They could, if they cared for me. 

 friendships are those which do not indulge either friend, but one in which the joys of exertion are shared, where friends work together to refine themselves to achieve the highest possible potential. This can only be done if both participants are brutally honest with each other, if they highlight the other’s self-deceptions and hypocrisies. Which is to say, only if both recognize the other’s personality, which they themselves love so much, is as a phantom.

The fracturing of personality is not the end of friendship; rather, it means when we befriend an individual, we gain more friends than we can count.

Hume, Douglas Adams, and “the self”

Julian Sanchez puzzles over the resilience of ego-theory:

[W]hy does the idea seem so (ahem) self-evidently true to so many people? I think this is one of many cases where it’s hard to disentangle our raw intuitions about the internal reality we directly apprehend from the mental habits overlaid by language.  Not any quirks of English, of course, but rather the perfectly natural way we talk about a world where strange split-brain disorders are extraordinarily rare, and Star Trek teleporters nowhere to be found.   There is every practical reason to speak of “the person” as a unique and perduring entity who remains the same over the course of a life, just as there is every reason to individuate objects instead of talking about clusters of molecules or parts. We also, quite naturally, have a hardwired concern with the survival of our brains and bodies—having evolved under circumstances where that was, after all, the only way genes were going to get to the next generation.  So it makes sense that we’d end up treating the verbal convention as though it represented a deeper fact of the first importance. In every context we actually deal with, to be told it is an “open question” or a matter of “grammar” whether or not we will survive a particular experience just sounds absurd—like someone trying to pull a fast one—because, of course, it isn’t like that in real world situations: The survival of brain, body, and all the mental traits we’re centrally concerned with go together. Even when it comes to external objects, when we think it’s important whether “the same thing” continues to exist, we have a sense of how weird it is to encounter a different set of conventions, though usually we ultimately recognize that it is a matter of convention.

The case against character

Gustavo Dore's portrait of Immanuel Kant composing his "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," as Johann Gottlieb Fitche looks on.

I’ve mentioned several times in this space that I believe there is no substance to “the self.” I can think of no better analogy to it than a fictional character, the protagonist of a narrative the brain tells itself to winnow the data it is inundated with into something manageable. This winnowing necessarily omits some vital information, even about the mind’s own function. It overplays some trends and downplays others, usually to make itself look better than it is. (Once the individual believes the lie of excellence it has made, it can more readily convince others, too, of its excellence.) Contrawise, a depressive might downplay accomplishments and virtues as a means of rationalizing the low moods they feel, which may have begun prior to the recognition of any of any malady, shortcoming, or crisis. I proffer these examples to illustrate the statement: We are capable of a broader range of good and bad behavior than we believe ourselves capable of at any given moment. The Socratic imperative “Know thyself!” is impossible. At least, it is impossible to have a complete account of oneself; self-deception comes to easily. Even if we do come across every relevant true statement about our character over our lifespan, we won’t believe all of them at one time. If we are to be realistic, “Seek thyself tirelessly! But do not trust [s]he tells you!” is our command. Or, even more aptly, “Know thyselves!”

I find more support in the recent work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. According to Jeremy Waldron, writing in The New York Times Review of Books, Appiah is working to defeat the Quixotic campaign of Kant to understand ethics without reference to psychology:

Virtue theorists believe that the disposition to act and react courageously or honestly is deeply entrenched in a person’s character. As Appiah describes their position, a virtue is supposed to be something that “goes all the way down,” enmeshing itself with other aspects of character, equally admirable, and affecting what a person wants out of life, her conception of happiness, and her view of other people.

Are there such virtues? Well, the psychologists that Appiah has read report that character traits do not exhibit the “cross-situational stability” that virtue presupposes. He cites a study of ten thousand American schoolchildren in the 1920s, which showed that they were willing to lie and cheat in school and at play in ways that did not correlate with any measurable personality traits. It is not that the children cheated whenever they could get away with it; they cheated sometimes and in some settings (when they could get away with it) and not other times or in other settings (when they could get away with it). “The child who wouldn’t break the rules at home, even when it seemed nobody was looking, was no less likely [than other children] to cheat on an exam at school.” There was none of the consistent and comprehensive honesty, “all the way down,” that virtue ethics seems to presuppose.

This seems to be true for other virtues too: helpfulness or charity, for example. With respect to them, studies cited by Appiah show that people act in ways that seem vulnerable to odd and unseemly differences in circumstance. If you accidentally drop your papers outside a phone booth, the best predictor of whether people will help you pick them up is whether they have just discovered a dime in the phone’s coin-return slot: six out of seven of the dime-finders will help as opposed to one in twenty-five of everyone else. If you need change for a dollar, stand outside a bakery: the warm smell of fresh-baked bread makes a huge difference to the kindness of strangers. The beneficiaries will probably say of anyone who came to their assistance, “What a helpful person,” little suspecting that tomorrow when the bakery is shut down and there is nary a dime in the phone booth, the selfsame person will be as mean-spirited as everyone else.

Hume was wrong

From the Treatise, I.VI :

[W]e may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; said these ideas in their turn produce other impressions. One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expelled in its turn. In this respect, I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts.

Wrong, but close. The brain works like the electoral college.

What Lincoln and I have in common

(On the occassion of  The Word Warrior’s 999th post, Bento engages in the production of a self-indulgent mega-post of prodigeous word-count and no relevency to current events. Do not feel the need to humor him. In fact, he would probably be better of if you didn’t encourage him.)

Should the flashbulb used to produce this photograph been given the power of thought, it should surely assert that it flashed of its own free will, independent of the depression of the camera's button or ignition of the magnesium powder.

Two Fridays ago, I arrived back in Milwaukee. As my parents turned bickeringly into the 16^th street parking complex, I noticed a car with Illinois plates. Superimposed over the ghostly blue portrait of Lincoln was this vanity phrase:

FRWLL

Presumably, “free will.” Plastered were it was, across the face of our 16^th president, it was an ironic, eerily apt insult to the memory and person of the man. For all his adult life, Abraham Lincoln was a strict determinist and denier of the will’s freedom.  

Update: “The Bucket Rider” is not actually my favorite short story

Actually, my real favorite short story is Everything and Nothing, by Jorge Louis Borges. (Go on, read it; the thing’s less than a page.) The other serious contenders, off the top of my head:

Deutsches Requiem, Tholn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and Borges and I, also by Borges, the latter of which continues the exploration of “the self” as a narrative illusion also undertaken in Everything and Nothing and his essay “The Nothingness of Personality”.

Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, possibly the most thorough fictional interrogation of the possibility of morality since Hamlet (and before Crime and Punishment)

Gimpel the Fool, Isaac Bashevis Singer

Long walk to Forever, Kurt Vonnegut

 The Bureau d’Echange de Maux, The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth, Edward Plunkett the 18th Lord Dunsany, and by the same, Ardor Canis, which I have only ever seen a moulding copy of The Man who Ate the Phoenix stumbled upon by accident in Raynor. The anthology now out of print, and even Amazon cannot find.

The Shadow over Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft

 Feeders and Eaters, by Neil Gaiman

The Red Queen’s Race, The Final Question, Isaac Asimov

Thank you for entertaining my vanity.

Any reading suggestions for the spare time I don’t have?