The SELF

Exploration of the embedded and embodied Self

Man is maybe half soul and half matter, like the polyp is half plant and half animal. At the border are often the strangest creatures. Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher

Take a deep breath. Focus. Who is reading these words? Is it yourself? Your Self? What is the Self? This question has puzzled thinkers for millennia. What can you state at this moment with certainty after introspection? You see words on the page. You can read them, and if you are adhering to the grammatical rules of the language, meaning emerges. Where? Somewhere in your brain. You can likewise see, sense, smell your surroundings. While concentrating on reading this paragraph, you will have ignored environmental clues. Did you notice? We establish an attention baseline. Below the threshold, our conscious mind is inactive. Only once a sound, stir, or smell rises above the threshold, a conscious cascade kicks in that assesses the specific difference to the baseline. Monitoring is unconscious.

Why is the subjective experience so difficult to conceptualize? Look down at the device you are using to read the text. One or two hands are holding it. They appear to come out of nowhere. They are attached to a body. Does the body have a skull? You cannot see it. I am communicating with a virtual avatar that is driving and manipulating a variety of dexterous equipment. Who are you, my friend? There is matter and material, perception, and emotion, but your Self seems to hide away. A psychological entity pretending to be undivided. An optical illusion, a hallucination, a magic trick.

Daniel C. Dennett identifies this mirage as coming from a single source. A unified agent that “posits a center of narrative gravity.”¹ The unification of disparate inputs into one entity is crucial. Where is the location of this midpoint? There isn’t one. Various brain regions create the illusion of a unified Self.

Is this unity created unconsciously? While we appear to have a zombie within, conscious actions are present. You would agree that we are too pretty to be zombies? There are several characteristics of our Self’s interaction with mind and matter, conscious and unconscious. We recreate our three-dimensional physical environment within our minds. It is not a complete replica, but sufficient to navigate through the world. The physical matter is converted into a virtual space, like a game designer building levels. And not just buildings, but roads, tables, and even people. Emotions such as fear, ecstasy, and boredom are as crucial as sounds, smells, and sights. They are all consolidated into a model of the world. Our Self interacts with this model virtually. An avatar exploring the world.

This world is a continuous place. Things happen in sequence and are connected. You read the first word, then the sentence, there is meaning. You lift the reading device. It comes towards you in a continuous manner. Jump scares in horror movies are based on discontinuity. They disorientate the mind. One aspect of the Self is continuity of experience, actions, perceptions, thinking. John Locke proposed the continuity of consciousness through memory as the Self,² but we must reject this notion. We understand the concept of continuity, but memory and consciousness are too ill-defined and broad to help at this stage in our understanding of the Self. Continuity within the mind is modeled on the real world. It is not a neurobiological program. In an alien world where items appear out of nowhere when you press a button, or where music from childhood is played in dissonance without melodies, and language is disjointed instead of logical, the mind would not experience its environment as continuous. In our current environment, the brain is trained in a continuous manner. Discontinuity is disconcerting. Death, accidents, sudden movement or sounds, spiders, jump scares, magical tricks, all take their dramatic effect from the interruption of an expectation of a continuous sequence of events.

This virtual, continuous, unified Self resides within a body. We will use the term embodied Self, adapting a concept expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “Existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body.”³ Should we not use the ‘embrained Self’? The perception of the world is not just achieved via the brain. Other senses are relevant and connected. The microbiome is a part of your Self, as are erogenous zones all over your body. The embodied Self interacts with the outer world and creates an inner idea palace. From a psychological and biological perspective, it captures our being in the world.

However, our embodied Self does not exist in isolation. It is part of a culture, groups of people, a historical period. Martin Heidegger uses Geworfenheit, thrownness, to describe this state.⁴ We don’t choose when and where we are born. We cannot select the culture we will grow up in. We are thrown into the world and must make the best of it. Via social interaction, the Self is always embedded in a cultural and social context. We will refer to this reality as the embedded Self.

The Self is placed in a spatio-temporal reality. It emerges during a specific cultural period and is shaped by it either in assent or opposition. The culture in which the Self is embedded is both a place of freedom and bondage. It provides a selection of limited plots. An individual is constrained by the teaching, imitation games, and social learning of his given period.

How do the embedded and embodied Self engage in storytelling? There is a continuation of events, often causal, that create a continuous narrative, a telos. The embedded Self adds context. It experiences the story from the beginning to the open-end via characters. There are specific forms of storytelling that we will discuss. All happen within the framework of this model.

Your embedded Self is thrown into the world. You grow up in a cultural context. While you are nested in your environment, you are expressing your individuality. Your passions, emotions, and ideas are personal. They are expressed via the Self. They are buffered and shaped by your surroundings.

Few things can show how ingrained your Self is in the social circumstances as living in another country with an unfamiliar language. I have made this move four times in my life. Each time is an exhilarating and frightening experience. In the first few months, you feel like a toddler relearning your steps. Your knowledge of the language and culture is growing exponentially. It is humbling to converse in a foreign language, as the beginnings of achieving oral fluency are difficult. You must talk to people. A lot. It is incredibly frustrating as words are at the tip of your tongue, but they will not come out. Fluency takes time. And it requires immersion. I immersed myself in different cultures: US, UK, France, and China. It is taxing for your embedded Self. Extract your Self from its familiar surroundings and start afresh. I have seen many people that keep to their old ways. But that would not work for us. We are philosophers. We jump at the opportunity to transcend our embedded Self and experiment. The massive emigration movements out of Europe starting in the 16th century need to be placed in this context. A large-scale displacement of embedded Selves, and the creation of novel entities.

You learn how much language encapsulates meaning. It is fine to grasp this theoretically, but experiencing it on a personal level creates new insights. The humor and teasing in British English. Hierarchy hides away within layers of language but ever-present. The openness to new social contacts in US English. Growing up in Germany, I sometimes struggled to meet new people. But not in the US and not speaking US English. I became another person. More open. The people in the pool in Las Vegas, fellow students, the crowd in the beer garden, tourists, or neighbors. Chatting people up is easier. The openness of the US society is under appreciated. On the local level, it is a different country from the one portrayed in the media. China is similar. The people are welcoming and interested. As you are foreign, there is a novelty factor. The ingrained hierarchies, long cultural history, close family ties, extensive social contacts, the gua(2)n xi network 关系, only become apparent after appreciating the subtler influences of language. The melodic French makes you forget the exclusivity of French culture at many levels. However, caring, consideration and closeness await when obtaining fluency.

You appreciate your old nested Self. You cannot go back to it. Like Caesar, you burned your intellectual bridges. There is now only a way forward towards the unknown. Nietzsche expresses this thought in the following way: “Friends as ghosts. - When we change significantly, our friends, that remained the same, are like ghosts of our past; their voice echoes shadowy-shocking - as if we heard ourselves, but younger, harder, less mature.”⁵

If there is a philosophical imperative to become self-aware, how do we get closer to understanding our embedded Self? It is difficult. If you are writing in your language, in your country of origin, the investigation will always be tainted like a crime scene contaminated by the local police. Often you will not be aware of how entrenched you are in your language and cultural system.

Even from the outside looking in, there are plenty of issues. You attempted to displace your Self, so what are you observing? How can you confidently write about it? As social science is at least partially subjective, an exact diagnosis becomes impossible. However, we could argue that this is fine. Do you need to know your true Self? Why? Would it not be sufficient to understand its limitations and take those into account when making decisions?

Reflections about our embedded Self allows us to understand the underlying narratives within our social environment. We are embedded in a collective culture. What stories create the glue that keeps society together? Think about your own culture. Listen to politicians, journalists, or opinionated friends. Once you take a step back, it is relatively easy to identify the narrative. Displacing your Self into another culture and language can sharpen your senses for narrative structures. Studying past societies and ideas serves the same purpose. It makes it easier to understand the confirmation bias that people display. While these tools can assist us in detecting narratives, I am doubtful they can discover our true Self. I have to disagree with Rousseau on its existence. You are embedded in a culture. You can become a narrative island like Nietzsche, but it gets lonely. If you dislike your own culture, either change your Self, society, or emigrate. Those are your options, choose wisely.

The analysis of how we interact with the world is fraught with difficulty. The road to self-awareness is paved with grammatical constructs. Be wary to talk about subject-object dichotomy, the mind-body problem, conscious-unconscious state from the outset, as this terminology forces us down a specific road. It provides the illusion of a clear distinction that gives us intellectual certainty. It ignores the subtle differences.

Let us try to build the embodied Self from first principles. You have a Self. You feel there is a frontier between you and the outer world. A barrier. It interfaces with the air surrounding you. On a windy day, you feel the air pushing against your body. If you go for a swim, it is the water that keeps you afloat. The fluid encloses your body when you dive. That boundary is real. It is a physical entity surrounded by flesh.

From within this fenced off space, you create a representation of your Self. A three-dimensional reproduction of your body. The body image is created in the brain, yet perceptions from all senses, tactile, audio, and visual are routed via the body. As you orient your bodily Self within physical objects, it makes sense for the image to be created by your eyes. We are visual entities. If you are an animal that does not rely as heavily on visual stimuli to create a body image, say a bat, octopus, or spider, it stands to reason that their body images would be different.

It is fascinating to think about how a spider creates an embodied Self. It should have a center of gravity, as we discussed above. Adrian Tchaikovsky in his brilliant book Children of Time tells of hyper-intelligent spiders colonizing a planet. It is anthropomorphic in overstating the visual sense. That does not distract from the brilliant setting, spiders thinking in the third person: “Somewhere in her little knot of neurons a three-dimensional map has been built up from her meticulous scrutiny, and she has plotted a painstaking course to where she may come at the Scytodes from above, like a minute assassin.”⁶ It is likely that the map would be an overlay of a few visual stimuli and a myriad of tactile ones, creating a virtual interpretation of her world.

The same is true for a bat. It uses echolocation to create a representation of its spatial environment. However, its embodied Self will create a similar model to the human visual space. The physical matter is the same. Just aspects of it will differ, highlighting corners, obstacles, and prey. All those environmental signals will have to be rapidly assembled within its nervous system to create a Self that can navigate and hunt.

Research into animal sentience is ongoing.⁷ Consciousness is only the tip of the mental iceberg. It is not required to create a body image or orientation in space. Investigating a non-sentient species to identify their perception of Self is technically challenging. Their inability to converse with the human observer creates challenges. In humans, language is an imperfect but useful utensil to probe self-perception. Jonathan Birch is probing deeper to understand and dissect animal sentience. In his recent paper, he proposes key metrics to measure and explain sentience in animals. He suggests six dimensions for measuring sentience in animals. It is interesting to note that dimensions relate directly to the embodied Self such as unity, temporality, and selfhood.⁸ P-richness is the ability to perceive your environment. E-richness helps to evaluate input and output signals such as pain, fear, pleasure, or comfort.

Spiders are likely to score well on p-richness via sensing light and vibrations. In addition, unity and temporality would score high, hence creating an embodied Self for our hairy friends. While Birch explores a way to understand animal sentience, we can happily adapt his concept for our purposes of explaining the embodied Self like Sir Francis Drake hijacking the Spanish Armada in the name of Queen Elizabeth. It serves our purpose.

There are further dimensions that should be added to the graph to explain how animals, such as humans and dogs, create the embodied Self. We are missing p-richness for smell (dogs, mosquitos), sound (bats, elephant, moths), magnetic (pigeons, turtles) and electric fields (sharks, eels), temperature (snakes), UV light (reindeer), and multiple wavelengths (birds). It is obvious from this list that embodied Selves have found ways within earth’s ecology of inhabiting myriads of niches. Humans are one of those species.

The embodied Self of humans is created by p-richness, e-richness, unity, selfhood, and temporality. It rests within the center of gravity across the nervous system. Is there storytelling involved in shaping it? At a first glance, we might argue that this is not the case. These are bodily perceptions and feelings. Where should storytelling come in? However, on closer examination, we would have to admit that we appear to create stories around specific areas of bodily experience. Take sugar, for example. Carbohydrate provides the body with energy. A small sugar high if you overdo it. There is no story here, it is just the intake of sugar and its physiological effects. Consider though the question of why we have sweet shops? Myriads of sweets laid out, different shapes, colors, brands. We could argue that stepping into a sweet shop engages the bodily response of expecting sugar. Why then are all these sweets presented in so many ways? The embodied Self creates stories around a simple chemical based on memories and bodily experiences.

I can see that you are not convinced. Sweet shops are for kids. Ok, here we go. What about sex? A simple physiological exercise or an elaborate game? If the requirement is a simple in-and-out, why on earth all the different clothes, play acting, power displays, positions, subtle plots in pornography, and stories? I disagree with Freud’s complete focus on sex, but it is undeniable that sexuality plays a major role for both the embedded and the embodied Self. For the embedded Self, there are rules to follow in your cultural context. But the embodied Self is turned on by muscles, high heels, and the whispering of words. Stories are used to shape bodily responses in a certain way.

Sweets and sex are obvious examples. What about drugs, food culture, inspiration by sporting figures, hiking, relaxing in a garden with beautiful flowers, or a family hug? While these have specific bodily responses, they are driven by stories. These stories shape and transform the embodied Self.

Merleau-Ponty carefully develops a theory of the embodied Self. While he mentions the inter-linkage with culture, it is not stated strongly enough. The embedded is distinct from the embodied Self because it highlights the importance of the cultural context. As we have seen, if I remove my Self from this context, it takes time to recalibrate. We can hence piggyback onto Merleau-Ponty but extend the reach of his system. Summarized, we can state: The embedded and embodied Self interact psychophysically within the environment. They both lean into the external world within a spatio-temporal dimension. They undergo constant change and establish a new form of the embedded and embodied Self. At a certain time, they cease to exist, death is the endpoint that results in nothingness.

The embedded Self is not just a psychological entity. It interacts with physical cultural artifacts. Look around your room. Do you see a smartphone, a TV, a cup to drink coffee, a plastic bottle of water, and cables for electricity? While we might not notice, these are all artifacts of our cultural environment. They distinguish our time from others. The embedded Self of a woman in the Lower Middle Ages would have none of those items in her household. Instead, she sees an open fire, clay cups, one room with furniture for living and sleeping. A hunter-gatherer would encounter different items. The culture, customs, and lifestyle all impact the perception of Self, often in unconscious ways.

The embodied Self is not just a physical entity. It receives perceptions and sensations but also shapes the virtual representation of your world. Various body parts are involved in creating that image. The development of your sexuality is a case in point and shows the importance of time. Babies and toddlers interact differently with others compared to hormonal teenagers or adults. Sexuality is a distinct example of the expression of the embodied and embedded Self. It happens in a cultural framework that is interlaced with your body. Different locations at various time intervals will express your sexuality in different ways. Your Self is undergoing constant change.

This change is like an osmotic gradient in constant flow. Process philosophy argues that we hence cannot isolate the parts and have to acknowledge its fluid nature. While this is an accurate description, there are two reasons we can reject the process hypothesis. First, we will have to stop the flow at specific intervals to investigate. This could be a minute or a nanosecond, but without halting time for an experiment or an observation, investigation becomes meaningless. If we were to stop observations at each nanosecond and plot a graph, even within a flow, we would get individual stages that can be submitted to analysis. The time we choose the experiment hence becomes a necessary condition of our inquiry. But it does not invalidate the experiment. Many biological reactions happen in the nanosecond space. They can still be understood like a radical reaction or radioactive radiation. The presence of fluidity does not prevent the scientific process of induction.

Second, we know there is a Self. We can argue it changes continuously, but that runs counter to our personal experience. Your Self is reading these lines. Count three seconds. Is it still your Self reading? It has changed somewhat; you breathed in fresh oxygen molecules, you metabolism has churned, thoughts have altered, but it is still your Self. We could argue that your Self now is 99.99% identical to your Self three seconds ago. Should we focus on the 0.01% that has changed or the 99.99% that has remained the same? We should be aware of changes, but the focus on flow should be discouraged as it does not support a logical analysis. Heraclitus statement that we cannot step into the same river twice, needs to be rejected as foundation for scientific analysis. It is an interesting metaphysical statement on the change of being, but we can step into a river that is almost the same, and we can understand the constituents of that river and our Self. Stating the contrary viewpoint becomes a self-defeating argument.

Our body is changing every minute in its material composition, and yet the embodied Self remains stable. Process philosophy overstates its case when it tries to apply its findings in the hard sciences like psychology, biology, or neuroscience.

Merleau-Ponty expresses perspective changing between bodily entities as “glisse spontanément dans celle d’autrui”,⁹ a spontaneous sliding or gliding from one to the other. That gliding momentum is an apt description for the two parts of the Self. Like green and blue water, they mix in an irreversible process. The endpoint of that proces is death.

Footnotes & Bibliography

1. Dennett, D.C., (1993). Consciousness Explained, p. 418. Penguin, London.

2. Locke, J. (1847/2004) An essay concerning human understanding. 2nd edn. Gutenberg.

3. Merleau-Ponty, M., (1982). Phenomenology of perception, p. 475. Routledge, London.

4. Heidegger, M., Friedrich-Wilhelm, (2001). Sein und Zeit, 18th ed. Max Niemeyer, Tübingen.

5. Nietzsche, F., (2013). Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, loc. 13187. Kindle.

6. Adrian Tchaikovsky, (2015). Children of Time, p. 21. Tor. London.

7. Birch, J., (2020). ‘The Search for Invertebrate Consciousness’, p. 791. Noûs.

8. See Figure 1; Birch et al., 2020

9. Merleau-Ponty, M., (2010). Oeuvres, p. 1053. Gallimard, Paris.