While I agree that there is disjuncture between neuroscience and philosophical/psychological  approaches to questions of self, I did see some connection with Damasio’s autobiographical self – “the systematized memories of situations in which core consciousness was involved in the knowing of the most invariant characteristics of one’s life.”  Could not this autobiographical self be termed an Imago (imagoes give voice to traits and recurrent behaviors – McAdams 129)   In addition I see a connection between Laszlo’s core self, “which includes a sense of agency, coherence, continuity and affectivity” and Damasio’s core consciousness, that which “provides the organism with a sense of self about one moment (now) and one place (here) and does not illuminate the future…” (The Feeling of What Happens 16) It seems that a creative thinker could connect and perhaps “crossbreed” (Gaipa) these theories. Of course there would be some inconsistencies, but it seems that there is some crossover. The brain may indeed be where the processes that enable consciousness coalesce, and that brain as part of body interacting with the environment gives rise to an apprehension of experience (Noe), that gives rise to the narrative self.  Not as much a conscious construction, as an organic process of the organism  – “human experience is storied because of the way most of us comprehend such human actions as being organized in time.” (McAdams 30)

One passage in Laszlo, from Barclay and Smith (1992) I found particulary interesting: “Infants learn about their own subjectivity in relation to their caretaker. This is where infants experience their relation to their mother, their physical and emotional dependence on her. The self is created through detachment from the mother. (122) The notion that the self is a consequence of separation is fascinating and relates to Noe’s brain, body, environment argument.  As a father of a four year old I have observed first hand how aspects of my son’s personality have slowly emerged, both as he has separated from his mother and engaged with the environment. Interesting too in Laszlo, is the  subjective sense of self that emerges with language and concept formation. When my son was one he stubbed his toe, his subjective experience was only pain, which resulted in a screech and tears, both of which faded with the pain. Later when he learned to speak he began to articulate such experiences and in doing so, began to consolidate his memories. “Do you remember when I stubbed my toe? I cried, I was a baby then,”  He differentiates himself now from the baby he was then and thus perpetuates a developing sense of self enabled and facilitated by language.

Before I lay out in earnest my own story dealing with McAdams, I’ll just comment that László provided a nice survey of this new landscape—but really I’m not that concerned with things like verifiability and prediction in narrative models for personhood/consciousness. If there is “narrative truth in life,” I’d use McAdams’ words to say that the really interesting part is “quite removed from logic, science, and empirical demonstration” (McAdams 1993a The Meaning of Stories).

When I began reading McAdams I found myself refreshed. Not only did the load of this week’s assignments seem manageable within normal time constraints, but the content of that first chapter kind of cleansed my palette in this transition into a different mode of inquiry. “I can dig this,” I thought to myself,  reading about myth and its place as part of our social and personal psychologies. Our myths are constructed as a kind of personal history—a re-creation of the past in the present moment—to deal with circumstance and identity. It makes sense that a myth is more like chronicling a personal history, “judged to be true or false not solely with respect to its adherence to empirical fact,” but rather “with respect to such narrative criteria as believability and coherence” (28:1993a). By the conclusion of the chapter, I was on board with the approach—that we should explore how, thru our personal myths, we “help create the world we live in, at the same time that it is creating us” (37:1993a). That right there is a crux for me; I am all about explicating the subject-object relationship.

Then… in the next chapter we deal with Character and Imago (McAdams 1993b)… Yes, there is something to these concepts—there is something to be revealed, or appreciated, or at least discussed in the thought that our dealings with our own identity involve developing certain patterns of thought and behavior that are in fact based on an idealized personification we create as part of some personal myth (124:1993b). Sure, okay… It’s… It’s just… There is something I find intolerable about the way this is discussed here. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but I found myself literally mumbling obscenities aloud in parts, fuming to myself over McAdams’ presentation. And it was something quite different from the obscenities I mumbled reading Noë. Where Noë makes me roll my eyes all over, McAdams makes me fume about… what?

It’s like I am pissed about how irresponsibly he is deploying language for his argument. Not that it’s imprecise per se, but I feel like his structure leads to intolerable conclusions. An example is in this passage (127:1993b):

Imagoes may personify aspects of who you believe you are now, who you were, who you might be in the future, who you wish you were, or who you fear you might become. Any or all of these aspects of the self—the perceived self, the past self, the future self, the desired self, the undesired self—can be incorporated into the main characters of personal myths. [emphasis mine]

Gods, with this line of thought it’s no wonder McAdams talks about needing a unifying frame for a fragmented identity! How many selves are we supposed to account for? These are assumed in the argument, but this is the fucking part we need clarity on!! We don’t need an explanation about the self that further invokes this self, that self, red self, blue self!!!

::breathe::

Okay I guess what’s at issue for me is this assumption of a multiplicitive self that needs unification thru narrative devices like imago. This “underlying self” is implied by the structure of McAdams’ argument, and I find it a harmful assumption—not just harmful to the strength of his argument, but harmful in a real way to people carrying out his line of thinking.

While imago contains useful content as a concept, I think it needs a much subtler deployment for any positive use.

Finally we are presented with a theory of self and identity that I can get behind. While this weeks articles don’t deal exactly with the same question as before, the theory of self as story holds a lot more credibility to me then self as brain chemistry. Granted, the neuroscientists and other authors we’ve previously read were all trying to answer WHERE is self and HOW is it created (in the brain, the whole body, the environment) this weeks reading looked more at the question WHAT is self. To me, this is the far more interesting and important question. I’m sure the other authors consider their work to answer ‘what’ as well as ‘where’ and ‘how’ but they all fall short. Brain chemistry can’t explain the phenomenon of self-hood and identity and everything that entails. Not even Noe’s poorly developed theory of body, brain, environment really encompasses all the intricacies of the self.

This description of self as a narrative on the other hand does the best job yet of explaining what self and identity are, why its such an important part of humanity and explaining how experiences translate into this identity. We are the stories we tell in a sense. We are our autobiographies, even in the parts where we omit, or embellish, or forget. We are the sum of our experiences, not as they occurred but rather, as we experienced them. No definition I’ve heard comes closer to fully describing that sense one gets when they ponder who they are. We are, as McAdams describes on page 28, a Narrating Mind, we are telling our own story as we live it. Our thoughts are constant, the mind always working, narrating daily life.

This idea doesn’t tell us where the self is stored or how it comes to be. The answer to this still might be in the brain, or something like the idea of a soul. How is it that human beings have this narrating mind that other animals seem to lack? What makes us into storytellers rather then mere experiencers? What is it that gives us this faculty to tell our own story, to describe ourselves and our lives, to narrate our experiences and even to ask these questions? All these questions remain after this weeks reading and I am inclined to agree with philosophers like Hume and Plato in asserting that such answers are simply beyond the realm of human comprehension. Trying to explain how the self comes to be is a lot like explaining what makes the sky blue to someone who is blind. You can get all the science exactly right but it won’t make them see blue. Well, you can describe the sense of self, you can describe what happens in the brain and the body but you won’t ever SEE the self. You’ll never be able to reach out and touch it, to pin point it and say “There it is!!!” Self is not a corporeal thing and as such can’t be ‘found’ in that way. I suppose that makes it more of a metaphysical thing, and the metaphysical is something, I believe, can only be speculated about but never truly understood by a human being.

The lack of an attempt to explain self in those kind of terms is actually part of what I most enjoyed about this reading. No pretentious sermonizing by people claiming to have the answer to an unanswerable question. Just a perfect analogy to describe a thing we can’t define with science.

Consciousness, self, identity are all things that are a bit difficult to define and describe in any meaningful way. This idea of that description being a story works so well I’m not sure a better analogy could be made. The self is strongly associated with the mind, the mind is a constant stream of thoughts (also known as a stream of consciousness) and those thoughts come together to describe our lives moment to moment. If we are more then simply bodies then we are our thoughts and what are our thoughts if not the constant narration of our experience?

This week’s readings enter into an entirely different examination on the possibilities for understanding the self from a psychological, sociological and philosophical perspective inclusive of the concepts of identity and emotion. This way of understanding self is a slightly more familiar lens through which I may have had more exposure on this topic and I am struck by the stark contrast between this week’s conversation and the previous neuroscience and philosophy accounts. As we have discussed in class, it seems incredible that these fields do not analyze this topic from a multidisciplinary approach. After reading on concepts of personal narrative, autobiography and identity in the formation of the self, it appears some or all of these notions were ostensibly absent from Damasio and Noe’s discourse; almost as if two entirely different subject matters have been distinguished which I supposed may be the point. It would be interesting to know how concepts of self linked with identity and notions of self tied to consciousness intersect within these two paradigms. How are the two reliably demarcated?

Laszlo articulates this differentiation when introducing the emergence of psychological postmodern-  narrative therapies which focus on a collection of factors emanating from an individual’s account of experience rather than forming determinations based in biologically instinctual responses. In this field, the study of autobiographical narratives of life stories serves as the foundation for studying the formation and health of the self. His chapter neatly summarizes several constructs of inquiry in the field of identity and narrative.

Attaining an empirically based account of something as abstract or variable as personal narrative is addressed within several of the theories presented by Laszlo.  In order to create a structure within which to collect data and form conclusions, some generalizations are made in terms of categories of personality, identity, storyline or narrative. Such as McAdams delineation of four main identity components involved in ascertaining “crucial motives of power and intimacy.” (118). A well integrated index of personal experience indicates a well developed “meaningful” self identity. Laszlo notes McAdams’ categories may be excessively abstract and I also believe they may be subjective or ethnocentrically biased.

Barclay’s method of evaluation of “the subjective experience of the narrator concerning the emotional value of the narrated event along a positive-negative continuum” (120) seems to offer a slightly more (objective) specific range of categories which can be measured qualitatively. This method, Laszlo points out, is supported by the availability of advanced information technology which makes content analysis in this qualitative research format more reliable (though not necessarily more accurate?).

In McAdams’ own chapters he outlines a category chart for character types or “imagoes” which seem to be based in value systems to which I personally do not relate and which would not fit a host of personal scenarios of individuals living in non-western societies. McAdams asserts that what he listed is a merely a “guide” and that much variation exists. I appreciate the construction of McAdams’ theory on personal myth creation and our understanding of self and his discussion of their being dual or disparate selves which conjoin into the characters of personal myths, appearing in varying degrees or intensity at various points in one’s life. This seems to accurately depict human development on a continuum throughout the life-span. I thought it was somewhat humorous that the two examples (or more?), McAdams used for a dual or “juggling” of self identity involved some variation of a “woman in her twenties or thirties” dealing with the identity of career and family – this seemed rather limited. I understand his theory needs to culminate around a central construct, but much of the underlying components which build his theory seem based partially in a narrow social, class or gendered valued standpoint. Perhaps I am overanalyzing through personal interest, but some of the concepts of character creation, personal myth and identity formation would seem not to apply to persons of an entirely other situational standpoint.

Another question concerning the correlation between language and the cultivation of self seems apparent here. If narrative theory requires the evaluation of an individual’s re-telling of their life-stories, as a foundational component in appraising how coherent, well-integrated or well-developed their self-identity is, how can this be done if an individual’s language (reading/writing) skills are limited? “…subjective perspective, meaning based on experience and the ability to reflect on it consciously are expressed by specific linguistic patterns in stories about the self” (123 Laszlo). If the individual was not formally educated in language to reveal such detailed articulations whether verbally or in writing, does this preclude the possibility that a well-formed self-identity is present? Or perhaps the analyst would need to be trained in colloquial or other literacy formats?

The concept of narrative self not “belonging” to the individual self, but rather arising through socially constructed means, through interaction with others and the external environment was rather interesting. Laszlo points out that this theory of understanding self and identity through social representation could make a valuable contribution sociologically, in understanding an individual and relation with groups of individuals.

Overall Laszlo presents the goal of narrative psychology materializing into a “real” science which can be applied to better understand the formation of self and identity. To me, these methodologies appear as viable and perhaps even more elucidating, in a different plane of information, than the neuroscience and quasi neuroscience/philosophical viewpoints of Damasio, Noe, Blackmore, Bolte-Taylor. I suppose it depends upon the goal of the inquiry, but I cannot help but think of Damasio’s claim that better understanding where the self is located within the biological organism would ultimately lead to an improved sociocultural homeostasis or advancement of humanity as a whole; how could this be accomplished without including some analysis of identity formation within an understanding of the self?  Exposure to this information construct makes visible the missing parts of the previous analyses we have examined thus far.

Perhaps an entirely different topic but one question also would be how diseased brains, ie; schizophrenic (or other severe mentally ill) minds create autobiographical narrative? Are the schizophrenic voices differentiated from the core self voices in writing the personal myth of identity? The preponderance of untreated schizophrenics who make up an estimated half of all untreated mental illness in the U.S. is of particular interest given the correlation with the perpetrators of many of the recent mass shootings- the last one being at the military compound in D.C. area.

My blurb on this book if I were a super cheesy book reviewer: Out of Our Heads is a breath of fresh air among the neuroscience literature we’ve explored so far. Noë’s facility with simple yet highly effective analogies and expert storytelling that distills what is generally presented tediously and dry into a page-turner for this genre.

OK, so that aside, I was definitely captured by this book and became clearly convinced by his hypothesis: That consciousness cannot simply “live in our brains, or in our bodies, but is the ongoing experience of relating to and being changed by our environments and other organisms.” He’s so convincing regarding what it’s not, that it was fascinating (and even entertaining) enough to learn about what consciousness is not through several different philosophical and biological lenses.

One large theoretical question I have about Noë’s argument is about it’s implications for our agency. Since humans cannot control much of our environments (including other humans), does his viewing of consciousness as always partially determined by our environment mean that we do not “drive” the “story in our minds”? He writes that consciousness is “…not something the brain achieves on its own. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain , body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context” (Noë 10). While Noë’s ideas may open up much greater possibilities for understandings of our selves in relation to a dynamic world and he may see that as liberating us from neural determinism where you = your brain, it’s also a little scary too.  In true analogical style, He writes that “the brain is no more in charge of what you do that a surfer is in charge of the wave he’s riding” (Noë 95).

Yet just because the brain is not the only apparatus at work – doesn’t mean that Noë agrees with Blackmore’s claim that consciousness or the self are illusory, and makes a clear return to realism from science’s post-modern focus on deconstructing the awareness of individual senses in the brain (like vision) as mere illusions. In relation to Damasio, I wonder if Noë would agree that thought without language is possible, when he writes that “A language user is, to the extent that she is expert, the participant in a specific social practice; crucially she is the participant in a social practice of which language forms only an aspect.” This remains unclear to me, but I’d be curious to know what others think he would argue.

Just as I now use a language that was in place before my body/consciousness arrived, the idea that other people have produced the knowledge that I now think of as “mine,” or what I know – was beautifully explained in this book. The interconnectedness of humankind through knowledge, language, and “commitment to the consciousness of others”  (Noë 33) had really beautiful implications for humanity: Essentially he shows the extent to which the consicouness of ourselves is predicated on the viability of consciousness of others (and vice versa), showing that we are so interconnected that our default view of others’ existence is that of ourselves. Perhaps the implication is that with this more accurate understanding of consciousness as highly related to our outside world, we’ll take better care of it, and of each other.

Noe asks “are you your brain?” If we are not our brain, then our consciousness should live on once our brain dies. In the video Alva Noe stated that the “brain is a part of a dynamic network, brain, body, environment, that allows us to achieve consciousness.” Although I agree with Noe’s theory that that our body and environment help form who we are, I do not agree that consciousness is not located in the brain. I believe that his argument is flawed because he gives no real scientific evidence that supports his theory. To me, his argument is a lot like believing in GOD, you have to have blind faith.

Where Damasio’s argument that consciousness is in our brain left me intrigued and wanting to look more into his research of how different regions of the brain controlled different parts of us, Noe’s argument left me with questions that his argument could not answer. Why are psychiatric drugs able to alter or moods and personalities? Why are some people not always able to control our moods and behaviors? Why can a “normal” functioning adult begin functioning at the level of a child after a brain injury?

However, I believe that Noe has a valid point when he says that in order to make headway in research on what consciousness is scientist need to expand beyond the brain.  Expanding the research may give more insight into the mystery that is our consciousness.

I want to start by saying that several times while reading this book, I threw my hands up in disgust with the arguments.  Then, occasionally, I found what I was disgusted by redacted in a way to a broader argument I could subscribe to.  It seems to me that Noe’s thesis is mainly that our conscious experience is not simply in the brain, but it a product of an embodied existence. I agree.  However, he seems to think this is dramatically different than other posited theories.  His arguments are often invalid (conclusion does not necessarily follow from premises) and he constantly uses skepticism to discount scientific evidence, but then uses similarly constructed evidence to prove his hypothesis.  Also, Noe’s argument constantly commits the straw man fallacy, building up arguments attributed to scientists that are under-representations or utter misrepresentations.  I’d like to think that no scientist actually thinks that the brain is independent (or even the nervous system) in conscious experience.

He uses the metaphor that science sees consciousness as a “phenomenon of the brain, the way digestion is a phenomenon of the stomach.”  First of all, digestion is a product of the stomach, but it is not exclusive to the stomach.  It, too, is an embodied process full of biological intricacies.  In the same way, consciousness is a product of the brain (he avows this occasionally) but it is not exclusive to the brain or independent of other processes.

I don’t know, in the video, he seemed much clearer as he really only posited his thesis that consciousness is much more complicated that strictly neural activity.  I completely agree with that, but in the book, he tries to propose reasons to discount the work or analysis of the work of neuroscience that is completely unfounded and badly argued.  I was content with the thesis, just not at all what developed from it.

In my opinion, I agree that consciousness is more than neural activity.  However, I believe it is because the concept of consciousness is linguistically vague and developed before the science trying to describe it.  Therefore, science is trying, in vain, to pinpoint something that doesn’t necessarily have a neurological basis.  I believe that science can discover qualities of the brain and the importance of its processes and even describe what happens when we are conscious of particular moments, however, that will never be enough to completely be sufficient for “consciousness” as we know it phenomenologically.  Because what we feel and understand as being conscious comes from that phenomenological aspect, and the word consciousness was constructed to encompass that feeling, science will have a hard time satisfying that definition biologically.

I liked the format of this week’s video lecture, as it wasn’t a lecture at all, but a kind of interview-conversation-debate between Noë and the neurophysiologist, and it lead right into Out of Our Heads, with Noë even utilizing the same metaphors and examples. Since last class, I’ve been thinking about this video lecture project in relation to a ph.d. course I’m taking at the GC: Adaptations, taught by Prof. Greetham. It’s basically a survey of the different ways in which novels are transformed into films, comic books, music-pieces, and more, but its relevance to this class, in my mind, is in the relationship between the video-lectures we watch and the books we later read. At a foundational level, Noë and Damasio’s talks are really performances of their books; adaptations for a wider audience. But even the most accessible of these video talks, so far, is greatly amplified by the inevitably larger space for expounding evidence the book contains, to the point that I believe many of the videos are unnecessary. The questions generated by gaps or ideas left unexplained make a more in-depth reading crucial, so these lectures, in a way, behave more like commercials than anything else. We discussed in class briefly the social currency being plundered from these digestible videos, but really, I feel like, outside of radical unsubstantiated suggestions or personal inferences, these videos are neutered of anything truly enlightening. I don’t think we can get the full picture from these videos alone (there’s a seeing pun in there, somewhere.).

Anyway, returning to Noë, this video was helpful in that it can encapsulate his “astonishing” hypothesis exceedingly well (skip to the 10-min. mark, for what I would argue is his main argument, diluted and devoid of backing up ((which he will do, or attempt, in the book)).). It seems like he is picking up where we left off with Damasio – the core self changes and is changed by the objects it perceives, and the autobiographical self creates patterns or narratives around these relational occurrences. What Noë is arguing, I’d hazard, is that these objects, separate from the body/brain, are central in the process of consciousness. For Damasio, consciousness is impossible without the brain, and Noë agrees, but without a greater environment – complete with other organisms and objects and thought structures – the brain is not enough to generate consciousness all on its own. I thought Alva’s (tired of finding the umlaut e symbol) analysis of the relationship between infants and mothers and kin-systems in monkeys was especially helpful in making this not-so-astonishing hypothesis stick; no man is an island, the growth and development of most any organism takes place within a community of similar organisms and definitely within a physical setting or environment, and that these extra-bodily relations could account for the inability of science to fully explain self-ness through physiological means.

I couldn’t help think about possibilities for human growth, or development, or existence outside of normal social bounds (orphans and the homeless, Sam Rockwell’s character from Moon, test-tube babies), or about how it seems that so-far the disabled or stigmatized viewpoint has only appeared in the forms of medical curio-examples used to reinforce some theory to explain normative human experience, but I feel like I’ve been beating that drum in all of my blog posts and I don’t wanna become one-note. I like Noë’s Blade Runner shout-out, as both a fan and someone interested in studying posthumanism, and how unnatural (read artificial) methods of creating and propagating life call our “normal” or “biological” lives into sharp question, and potentially rendering this self-searching useless. Nothin’ worse than havin’ an itch you can never scratch.

Hi everybody. As you post reading responses to Alva Noë’s Out of Our Heads, you might consider doing one of the following:

1. Writing a fictional–but plausible–dialogue between Noë and Damasio, on a topic you’re pretty sure would elicit strong opinions from both.

2. Testing Noë’s ideas against Damasio’s (or vice versa).

3. Responding directly to Noë, as you’ve done with previous writers.