We started with the notion of identity and how what appears to be most intimate is our self. It is difficult to evade or shake off this sense of being an isolated individual, subject of experience. However extroverted or gregarious, however wide our circle of family and friends may be, we have the sense not only of being subjects or agents directed at the world but also of being selves that are fundamentally separated from it.
However much we may want others to be content and fulfilled, we inevitably want those things for ourselves too. And of course, this is how it should be. Morally, we should want what is good for others as much as we want it for ourselves. But our self-directed bias makes this, for most of us at least, difficult to achieve. And because it is, or appears to be, difficult our societies are fractured into billions of competing selves, each with its own agenda, each with an agenda of self and self-interest.
Yet at the same time we’ve seen how the notion of a self somehow divorced from the world and from our fellow human beings is difficult to grasp. In essence, the self is no more than a collection of brain processes which guide our behaviour. Moreover, we saw in the last blog how our sense of being selves comes and goes. When we attend fully to a task or objective our sense of selfhood disappears, at least for as long as that attention is maintained. If somewhere there was an individual who in the waking state was able to maintain attention at all times she or he might never have the sense of being a self at all. What then might a community of such individuals achieve? What solutions might it find for our global problems and what limits might be placed on its reach?
Unfortunately, our evolutionary inheritance has selected us for an alternative path, one in which mind-wander is a recurring feature of our daily existence, one in which we cannot in practice attend for very long without the mind losing focus and coming back to the ‘me’. What’s in it for me? What do I get out of it? Why do I feel fearful or unfulfilled? We circle around, and in and out, of self-regarding thoughts, but we gain little in doing so. Of course, our ancestors did gain something- the more they thought about and acted in the interests of those apparent selves their chances of survival were enhanced, even if their exposure to mental and psychological suffering was increased. Perhaps then the survival and replication of these acquired characteristics is the best that we can hope for?
Except, given our current global problems such survival is becoming more and more doubtful. Unless as a species we attend closely and collectively to those problems, and do so urgently, homo sapiens may not survive the century. Yet, the remarkable fact about solving the problem of selfhood is that if achieved it would not only make each individual human being more fulfilled and content, it would also help to solve those pressing, inter-generational issues which are today causing us so much grief. In the best of all possible worlds we would survive, be happier, and (though perhaps in smaller numbers) continue to reproduce; our genes would live on, except that one feature of their legacy, namely the self, would be modified by mutual agreement.