Is the Self an Illusion?

Josh Landy
Is there such a thing as a self—something that makes you who you are?

John Perry
Or is the self just a convenient fiction?

Josh Landy
If we all stopped believing in selves, would the world be a better place?

John Perry
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions, everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I think I’m Josh Landy.

John Perry
And I think I’m John Perry. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW in San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative, and where John taught philosophy for 44 years.

John Perry
Today we’re asking: is the self an illusion?

Josh Landy
An illusion, John? if it were an illusion, who exactly would be deluded?

John Perry
Your brain! There’s no self in your brain. Look as hard as you want—ya ain’t gonna find yourself in there. All you’ll find is a series of perceptions, memories, and, in some people’s case, half-baked ideas—not meaning you, Josh, of course.

Josh Landy
Speak for yourself, John! And I guess you’re speaking for a lot of philosophers to.

John Perry
Whom do you have in mind?

Josh Landy
Yeah, Hume I have in mind.

John Perry
Hume is whom you have in mind (my favorite joke). Well, I take that as a great compliment. I don’t agree with everything Hume said. But he had a lot of insights into the human mind. And you know, he wasn’t alone. Some of the great Buddhist thinkers agreed that the self is an illusion. And I think for similar reasons.

Josh Landy
Oh, you mean the whole chariot thing?

John Perry
Oh, yeah. One One Buddhist teacher (name escapes me) said that the self is like a chariot: all you have is stuff like wheels, axles and reins—just parts. Nothing above and beyond that. No essence. Nothing immortal. Same with your mind. There’s only advertising jingles, dashed hopes, football results, the sound of the phone ringing because some Democrat wants money. No magic extra thing called a self.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s great for chariots, John. But you know, chariots don’t have memories of their childhood.

John Perry
So what? I’m 77, I don’t either—I barely remember last week, or what I ate for lunch, or we haven’t had lunch; anyway… Maybe I was a chariot last week.

Josh Landy
I doubt that, John. I think we actually do a decent job of accessing our childhood memories for the most part, and we have special access to them. I mean, other people can find stuff out about my childhood, but they can’t remember it the way I can. And that’s because I’m the same person. There’s something that’s persisted throughout all these years. And that’s me: myself.

John Perry
Well, as another great Buddhist teacher said, memory shmemory. Half of it is made up. Every time you remember something you rewrite the past. Good luck getting a self out of that, Josh.

Josh Landy
Well, okay, John. But consistency also works in the other direction. I mean, it’s not just I can remember how it was in the past, I can also predict, at least to some extent, how I’m going to be in the future. I can also predict how you’re going to be. I mean, I am 99.9% confident that any moment now you’re about to crack some off-color joke, hopefully not on the air.

John Perry
Ha!, Just wait and see what my illusory self decides to do.

Josh Landy
Oh, I don’t have to wait, John—I’m certain of it. And that’s because we do a pretty decent job of predicting what our friends are going to do. And that in turn is because they have personalities. There’s something in them, John, that’s relatively stable that that makes them do a lot of the things they do. Why not call that a self?

John Perry
Well, okay, but for the sake of argument… I can predict the sun’s gonna rise tomorrow. That doesn’t make the sun a self.

Josh Landy
Sure. Okay, but just the sun worry about who to be with or what to do with its life? Human beings, you know, we’re constantly making all these big decisions about our futures, and the way we make them often enough, is by figuring out who we are. I mean, take me. Do you really think I should ditch my teaching job and sign up for the Ice Capades?

John Perry
Give it a whirl—you might be good at it.

Josh Landy
I really don’t think it’d be too much of a hit on the ice.

John Perry
Oh, I think before too long you would make a big hit on the ice.

Josh Landy
Fair enough. That’s just evidence from my point. You clearly know me, John, and I know me. And that’s why I can plan, I can make realistic decisions about my future, at least from time to time.

John Perry
Well, it’s good to pretend to have a self. It’s useful to think of my future self as the same person as me. It’s even useful maybe to think of that there’s some kind of essence that carries through all these stages of the thing we call me. But really, at bottom, isn’t it just a convenient fiction?

Josh Landy
See, I knew you were gonna say something like that. You’re so predictable, John and that’s what I love about your wonderful self.

John Perry
It’s clear I have more work to do to persuade you of the truth (or to persuade some stage of you or part of you). And to help thatm we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shereen Adel, to find out whether it’s better to hang on to the self, or let it go. She fileth this report.

Shereen Adel
It’s funny going to talk to someone you’ve never met about the illusion of self, because as a radio reporter, the first thing we always ask is for people to introduce themselves. How would you describe yourself?

David Michelson
Well, on the surface, I might say, my name is David Michelson, and I’ve been a consultant for over 30 years. I’m a dad, this probably my most important job and love of my life. And yet, obviously, that question is a much deeper question as well.

Shereen Adel
And that’s the question that got David started on this journey. He says, At first, he was curious from a psychological perspective, what makes you you, but then he began reading about Buddhism and practicing meditation. He even went to India to study with spiritual teachers. And six months in…

David Michelson
In a nutshell, on February 7 1997, I went to sleep, and woke up on February 8, and literally, my consciousness was different. It was wild.

Shereen Adel
It was 3:30 in the morning, and he went outside and walked around, looking at the trees and the view below.

David Michelson
It felt like I was actually in a movie set. It was like, at one level, it was real and one level, it actually experienced it as an illusion.

Shereen Adel
He says it’s hard to find the words to describe it. But when he was back in the States, he found a teacher who could articulate what happened.

Adyashanti
Up until you see beyond it, everything is dominated by oneself. I want to be enlightened, I want to have some spiritual revelation… Which is really no different than I want an ice cream cone, I want to be loved, I like or I don’t like.

Shereen Adel
Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher and founder of open gates Sangha in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied Zen Buddhism, but he doesn’t teach any particular tradition.

Adyashanti
The fiction of self always keeps itself in the center of one’s consciousness. And spiritual awakening is seeing through the fiction of that, that there isn’t actually a self in the center of one’s consciousness.

Shereen Adel
As in, if you like vanilla, and I like chocolate, where does that feeling come from? That’s not what makes you you. It’s just a reaction to a set of experiences. But I told David, honestly, it’s a lot to wrap my head around. Why is it important to see the self as a fiction? Is it a complete abandonment of identity? I think that can be harder for some people than others.

Chika Okoye
I am deeply embedded within my identity as a black woman, child of immigrants, and I’m not. There isn’t for me in this moment, and a strong movement toward letting those sort of markers of identity go.

Shereen Adel
Chika Okoye is a practicing Buddhist who works at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Oakland. She thinks it’s a wise teaching, but she’s still in the process of questioning the idea of self or no self.

Chika Okoye
Yeah, some of the thinking I’ve been engaged with is to think about identity as both something that gives us power, and something that may lead us into traps.

Shereen Adel
She says that for many disadvantaged groups, their identity can be a source of strength.

Chika Okoye
I’ve been to people of color meditation retreats, and those have been really deeply powerful and transformative experiences.

Shereen Adel
And while allying with people who’ve had experiences like hers can be empowering.

Chika Okoye
Our end goal isn’t just to feel safe and comfortable with our folks. In our lived reality, we are dealing with various types of harms that come to us as a result of these selves. And we have to heal it and transform it. And perhaps through that healing and transformation, we can get to the place where we can see through what about it is false.

Shereen Adel
At the end of the day for Chica, what’s important is to recognize that these realities are not personal.

Chika Okoye
Some painful thing may happen. And our tendency is to say, you know, my pain, my sadness, my anxiety. But there’s another way to look at these things that’s something more like anxiety is arising in this mind or in this body.

Shereen Adel
Chica and David both said it’s not about believing one thing. Their spiritual learnings are guided by their own direct experiences. For Philosophy Talk. I’m Shereen Adel.

John Perry
Thanks, Shereen, for that fascinating report. I’m John Perry. With me is my Stanford colleague Josh Landy (a brilliant assemblage of parts you are Josh), and today we’re asking is the self and illusion.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Alison Gopnik, who’s professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, and author of “How David Hume Helped Me Solve My Midlife Crisis,” which is a fantastic article in The Atlantic. Alison, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Alison Gopnik
Glad to be here, always.

John Perry
So, Alison, David Hume helped you solve your midlife crisis. Tell us how that happened?

Alison Gopnik
Well, when I turned 50, as, as happens with many people, exactly what happened was that the sense of self that you rely on for long stretches of time without paying much attention to it kind of fell apart. So I got divorced. So I wasn’t a wife anymore. My children who had been a big part of my identity, the last my youngest child went off to college. I couldn’t work partly because I was stressed and anxious about all of these things. So my identity as a philosopher and a psychologist, so sort of fell apart. And in the course of that experience, I think an experience that lots of people have, at one point or another. The way that I dealt with that was by reading and thinking in particular started out by looking at Buddhism and trying Buddhist meditation, my doctor’s sort of suggested that that would be, it was a choice between sort of Prozac or yoga or reading about Buddhism, and I hated Prozac, and I couldn’t do yoga. So I decided reading about Buddhism was probably the best choice. And then when I started reading about Buddhism, I realize this reminds me of something. And the thing that it reminded me, of course, was, was David Hume. So I went back and read a bunch of David Hume as well, and was really struck by the similarities and the wisdom that both the Buddhist tradition and David Hume had to impart for this special case about trying to figure out who it was that you are.

Josh Landy
So David Hume, and various strands of the Buddhist tradition are, are taking aim at the whole notion of selfhood. But are they really saying the same thing exactly?

Alison Gopnik
Well, of course, it’s complicated, because the Buddhist tradition is a very long, complicated tradition with lots of different strands and different arguments. But the way that I really helped to solve my midlife crisis was by going out and doing a bunch of historical research the way an academic would, would deal with anxiety and depression. And the interesting thing that came out of that research was, as a matter of fact, at the time that Hume was writing his great book, The treatise, he was in a place in France, le flash, where there were among the very few people who actually knew something about the Buddhist tradition, particularly the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. And there’s a long, complicated, romantic, wonderful story about that, but, but what it comes down to is, especially if you look at someone like sankalpa, who was the famous Tibetan, Buddhist, the ideas that Tsongkhapa and a nega Cena, who made the chariot analogy talked about were sort of strikingly similar to the things that Hume talked about.

Josh Landy
In the sense of a reduction to parts, right? We’re only these sort of personality parts, we’re, you know, self parts, but we’re not a self as a whole.

Alison Gopnik
And Hume has this beautiful passage, famous, beautiful passage in the treatise where he says, You know, I look inside of my head, and I see thoughts and memories and beliefs and perceptions, but I never see this thing that’s supposed to be in there. That’s the self. And that’s very much like the magazine point about going to see the Emperor and the Emperor says, What do you mean, you’re, you’re not you That’s ridiculous. And, and he says, Well, how did you get here? And the Emperor says, The king says, Well, I came in a chariot, and he says, well, but what is that chariot? That’s the same way that I’m, that’s the same way that I’m the self.

Josh Landy
But you know Ricœur’s, Paul Ricœur’s answer to Hume’s claim whenever I go and look at myself I never see a self, I only see some perception or other. And Ricœur says, what do you mean, “I”? Especially combined with words “always” and “never”? Like, if you really weren’t the same thing from moment to moment, how on earth xould you add up all those different times that you went and looked at yourself into a general thought about what the self is? How could you do that?

Alison Gopnik
Well, it’s interesting that some copy in particular, the Buddhist scholar, much like, like Hume makes a distinction. And there’s debates about this in the Buddhist tradition, but Tsongkhapa his view is, well, of course, you think that you have a self and it’s even important that you think that you have a self and in some sense, it’s real, that you think that you have a self. It’s just that that isn’t tracking some metaphysical reality out there in the world. And, and if you recognize that it’s, in a sense, it’s a real illusion. It’s a real fiction, but it’s still an illusion in fiction.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re asking whether the self might be an illusion with Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley.

John Perry
Do you think the self is an illusion? Or is there a part of you that remains the same throughout your life and makes you who you are? What can we learn about the self from psychologists?

Josh Landy
Selves, souls, and psychology—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Lady Gaga
Mitaken for love, it’s wasn’t love, it was the perfect illusion.

John Perry
So Lady Gaga tells us that love can be a perfect illusion. Could the same be true of the self? I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk the program that questions, everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and we’re asking whether the self is an illusion. Our guest is Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley, author of “The Philosophical Baby.”

John Perry
Alison, when you say that the self is an illusion, what exactly do you mean? I mean, we have this pronoun “self”—I say Alison speaks for “herself.” Is some kind of illusory, immaterial soul involved in a remark like that, or some personality that has an essence that abides over time?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think, again, we think that we have a personality that has an essence that abides over time. But one of the things that’s come out of psychology, this is part of how I got involved in this in the first place, is that a lot of those intuitions that we have turned out to be wrong or incoherent. So for instance, if you think about the fact that we all think that we have an autobiographical memory, we think, Well, I have a self because I look, I remember everything that happened to me and it continuous line. Turns out that that’s not true that actually what we’re doing a lot of the time is reconstructing our memories. And that when we were kids, when we were three or four years old, and I talked about this in the philosophical baby, we didn’t even really have this idea of an episodic memory at all, we didn’t have the idea that there are some special things that we know that are ours are the result of our experiences and say, what our mom tells us is something that isn’t part of that experience. And in the same way, the idea that Josh was talking about about the idea of having a personality, one of the things that comes out of psychology is that we don’t really have clearly consistent personalities, our personalities change all the time. And what we do has a lot more to do with the situations we find ourselves in, then this mythology we have that we have a long lasting single personal trait.

John Perry
But is this mythology, really part of our ordinary conception of a person or of a self? Or isn’t just something that a lot of people believe for, you know, religious, you know, religion tells us we got an immortal soul, but isn’t really part of our ordinary conception of a person or itself?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think that’s an interesting question, how much is it that in our everyday life, are we really caught up in ourselves? Or is it just in special circumstances that we invoke the self, like when we’re trying to make a long term plan? So that’s a context in which it makes a lot of sense to say, Well, what will you know, my 401k, my 401k, not your 401k John look like. But a lot of times in our everyday life, it’s not so obvious that we actually make a strong line between ourselves and other people.

John Perry
Now, think the Dalai Lama, he’s a Tibetan Buddhist, very proud of it says it’s a very naturalistic religion. And yet He also seems to believe in reincarnation, he believes that he’s the 14th Dalai Lama, but he’s also identical, or the same person, as the 13th Dalai Lama. Is this inconsistent? Or is there’s some subtlety there that I’m not catching?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think, as I said, before, you know, Buddhism, we, in the West, we haven’t talked about Buddhism, as if it’s just, you know, a single thing, but it’s a really complicated tradition. And it has a lot of religious elements, a lot of things that are believed as part of a religion, just like any other religion. And then there’s this philosophical piece that kind of gets pulled apart from the religious piece. And it’s interesting that if you look at these Tibetan figures from the 17th, and 18th century, they were really philosophers, they function like philosophers, rather than functioning as sages or, or, or religious figures. And, and that’s, I think, where you see the most clear arguments about the self.

John Perry
But when it comes to negotiating royalties on their books…

Josh Landy
Yeah, there was a lot of hypocrisy, but I mean, my favorite aspect of this hypocrisy is that is David Hume himself, right? He mounts this famous argument against the notion of selfhood. But what is he then turn around to do writes an autobiography called my own life, right, in which he attributes stable personality traits himself, he talks about his mild disposition to for humor, moderation in all passions, he wants to be upended as a preface to his collected works. So I mean, does anyone actually believe this? Hume says he believes it and then turns around and writes an autobiography.

John Perry
Well, that’s that’s not quite fair. Because Hume says, You go up in your study and you’re a philosopher, and you write down what you think you have justified belief in, but on lunchtime comes, you can’t keep that up. You might jump out the window. Thinking you have as much real evidence that works is going down the stairs don’t do that, you know? So I think he could legitimately say, look, yeah, what? What I’m just getting my royalties or riding my bike or if we I’m not just sticking to the stuff that I think is justified in my philosophical moment.

Alison Gopnik
Well, that’s sort of true. But on the other hand, it’s interesting that you himself had what you could think of as an early life crisis. He was he was in his 20s. And he was thinking these kinds of skeptical thoughts. And he, I mean, really did go through a psychological crisis, there’s a letter that he wrote to a doctor asking for advice, everything was falling apart, he couldn’t make sense out of everything, he felt as if there was nothing, nothing that he could do the doctors instead of, instead of prescribing Prozac and yoga, they prescribe port and horseback riding. But the point is that when you read the book, when you read the treatise, he actually worked that midlife crisis, let early love crisis into the lungs. So he says, God, I’m falling apart, I’m terrified, how can I function without the sense of self and, and a sense of the real world? And then he says, Well, wait a minute, everything’s exactly the same. And this is one of the points that the Buddhists make to0: what have you lost as a result—

Josh Landy
Okay, but I’m worried about us having it both ways here, right, because on the one hand, we say we don’t lose anything, don’t worry, there are no practical consequences, you might worry that it would cause you to fall apart and, and become like a patient with anterograde amnesia or something like that, where your life is really falling apart, you have no sense of who you are. But don’t worry, it’s just theoretical. But on the other hand, we want to say, you know, become a Buddhist, because these ideas are really powerful, and they will help you become calm and connected with the universe and things like that. So surely, we have to pick aside it doesn’t have practical effects or not.

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think that’s one of the interesting differences. Although there’s some debate about this among Hume scholars between Hume and the, and the Buddhist tradition. So the Buddhist tradition thinks you’re not gonna lose anything, not only you’re not gonna lose anything, you might really gain things you might function better in the world, if you understand that the self is an illusion.

John Perry
Just note, though, that there is I mean, there’s a little inconsistency in Humes position that makes you think what he’s denying is, is really some Cartesian view of the self, because he says the self is just a bundle, but leave out the just, that’s the theory, the self is a bundle. And there’s a big difference between my bundle and your bundle. And he relies on it all the time when his theory of induction. The experiences that cohere and lead to his notion of causation are all experiences in a single bundle. Right? I mean, just because I open just because I dropped, let go of this doesn’t mean people all over the world have the impression of it falling, it just means that well anyway, so.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk—you or a bundle of you are listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re talking to Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley about the illusion of self. And we’ve got a caller on line. it’s Ed from San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Ed, what’s your comment or question?

Ed
Hi. Yeah, so I’d like to ask Alison about what’s called an Ipseity Fisturbance. And so the basic layers of the self that have to be present for us even to get to the point where we can say that the self doesn’t exist. And even how the in Buddhism it’s a non affirming negative in Tsongkhapa. Logic where there isn’t a no self, we don’t say that no self exists, we have a self. And then we realize that it’s quite porous, really. We don’t impose no self. That’s my question.

Alison Gopnik
Yeah. I mean, that’s, again, you can see the complexities of trying to articulate exactly what is it that you mean, when you say that there’s no self. And so kappa goes into at some length about the difference between saying, as it were, there’s a no self that’s there, versus saying, it’s not true that there’s a self that’s continuing, and it’s not true in particular kinds of ways. And it’s, it’s quite a tricky question about what does it mean to have an illusion of the self that’s, that’s vivid, and that’s functional in various kinds of ways. Even if you don’t metaphysically think that there’s, there’s really a self there.

John Perry
So Alison, there’s a tradition in psychology. Of course, everything I say is about the history of psychology, because I, so I just want to remember, but that says, kind of describes what I would call a self concept but uses the word self worth, which is those things that you believe about yourself, that you really can’t quite imagine being different. So it’s part of some people’s self that they’re of a certain gender, others it’s not it’s part of some people’s self that they’re an American. Others it’s not that as they can easily imagine themselves not being an American or not being a woman or not being a man. And when when you said your midlife crisis, it sounded like That was what was involved. You’re thinking of yourself as a wife, and an active mother. And all of a sudden, it was, but you couldn’t think of yourself that way. And you’re still a mother, but they’re going off. So shouldn’t somebody whose feelings be more accurate this is, our concept of the self isn’t accurate, as opposed to the self is just an illusion.

Alison Gopnik
Just an illusion. So I think there’s two pieces to that. One of them is that we do have self concepts that are more malleable than we think. If any of you’ve seen the Seven Up series, which I think has the most recent, the most recent version is coming. This is something where they tracked a bunch of children from the time they were seven up until now, I think they’re 64. And the remarkable thing about that series is you see some continuities, but then people’s lives and who they are change in all sorts of unpredictable ways, what counts what seems like it’s central, doesn’t become central. So another part of my midlife crisis was that I haven’t been I thought, essentially heterosexual for my entire life, fell in love with a woman. And that was an example of something that felt as if it was a really deep, important part of part of the self that turned out not to be and I think one of the things that’s happening nowadays is people are questioning whether gender which seems like an absolutely essential part of of people selves is really that kind of immutable part. So I think there’s one question about what are the things that actually hold us together? And then there’s this other kind of more philosophical question about for an individual person is thinking of yourself as this in this, this individual self that’s continuous over time? What are the benefits and costs of that.

John Perry
So you might say to the self isn’t AN illusion, it’s a series of illusions. Yeah, you’re, you’re raised, you know, to believe in an immortal soul at least if you’re raised in a Christian household. And then you have doubts about that, particularly begin to go to into philosophy or psychology, then your thought, well, there is this self concept, though. And then you kind of say, well, you know, that’s, that’s really not essential, doesn’t always obtain and matter of fact, are usually, I mean—that’s not really a question.

Josh Landy
All these things make sense to me. And of course, we do change and sometimes change radically. But there is still a question, first of all, of whether that change should be thought of in the way you said, John, you know, is that is, is the difference that I just didn’t understand what I actually am, I always was something I was just an epistemological problem. I just got it wrong, as opposed to there never was anything there in the first place. And then there’s a question for me, at least, if Why is it so hard? Right? If the self really were just an illusion? Why couldn’t we just say, it’s an illusion? And then it’s gone? It seems to be a pretty stubborn one. And I wonder if it isn’t, because, in fact, there are at least some elements of who we individually are, for example, our capacities, like I’m never going to transform myself into a great musician. Right? That’s just a limitation. Right. And other people are great musicians. So clearly, you know, there’s a difference between me and I don’t know, Lady Gaga, I’m not going to be as great a singer as whatever I do. And it will be a mistake to think about myself, either I am a great singer, or there is no fact of the matter as to how good a singer I am. So aren’t there the constraint is not just situation. I mean, people say it’s all about situation, if you find $10 in your pocket, you’re going to be a good person that day. But I don’t think Martin Luther King found $10 in his pocket every day, he was just a good person. So aren’t there these stubborn constraints? You know, there? Aren’t there some facts about who we are that just resist this kind of, you know, de-selfing?

Alison Gopnik
Well, if you get back to John’s point about your brain, right, I mean, there is a continuous story about those cells that are in your brain and those neurons that are firing, and you could point to them in a particular location and over time. But of course, on the other hand, those cells are all being replaced on a steady basis. And the the thing that comes out is really different from the brain that I had 10 years ago, or the brain that I’ll have 10 years from now. So the question is, in some ways you can track here’s a continuous story about this brain. But in another sense, the idea that there’s some essence that’s staying the same through that continuous transformation is a really different idea.

Josh Landy
And I totally get that. I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying the replacement of cells isn’t really I don’t think it’s a very strong argument, because after all, our vision cells get replaced, but we still see, it’s it’s not just about the components about the organization. I think that’s what’s wrong with the chariot analogy. A chariot isn’t just seats and rains and what have you and horses. It’s an organization of those things. And the organization creates an additional thing. If you just had a bunch of seats and horses, you couldn’t, they could couldn’t get anywhere with them. But the organization makes it a new thing. And that’s what gets replaced as the cells suggest a new cell.

John Perry
So before we end this part, I suppose I would Talking about philosophy and talking about psychology. How about literature? How about your man Pruett? How does? What insights does your many times reading his laborious 16 Volume work, or whatever it is, give you about this?

Josh Landy
Well, a couple of things. One, you know, he has a view that Allison does not hold. And I think she has some very good arguments against it, which is that we have special access to our own memories and that special access, it’s John Locke’s view, that special access to my past where I feel it from the inside things past that, that shows me that I am the same person, I am a single thing. But but he also had this idea of, so that’s, you know, thinking about ourselves, as it were outside of time. But there’s also the issue of the totality of our life experiences. And their his thought is, think of it as a story. Think of the totality of your life experiences together as one story. And we might add, that allows you to plan for the future, right? It also allows you to assess whether you think your life was overall a good thing. But we’re coming up to break I don’t want to keep I could be here all day talking about the wonderful person. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking with UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik about whether the self is an illusion.

John Perry
If you started thinking that you weren’t really yourself, would you become more calm, kind and compassionate? Or would you just give up and sit on the sofa all day?

Josh Landy
A world without selves—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Joe Walsh
I just can’t help but feeling I’m living a life of illusion.

John Perry
What’s so bad about a life of illusion anyway? I mean, my life has been pretty good; if it’s an illusion, well, you know, good for it. I’m John Perry. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your necessary illusions. I’m Josh Landy. And our guest is Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley. We’re thinking about the self as an illusion.

John Perry
So, Alison, would would the world be a better place? If we all stopped believing in illusory selves?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think that’s a really interesting question, the Buddhist tradition, certainly suggest that. And there’s other pieces of data that suggest that so there’s some beautiful work that my colleague, Dr. Keltner, has done about the way that being in awe of something literally shrinks your sense of self. So you’ve asked people to draw a circle about how big they are compared to compared to the other people around them. And they get to have an experience of all looking up at a beautiful mountain or a redwood tree, they actually shrink their circle, especially with regard to other people. So they are less likely to think that they’re somehow the center of the universe compared to other people. And that’s probably a good thing. It makes them behave better. It makes them treat other people better. And that’s one of the big points of the Buddhist tradition as well. On the other hand, if you wanted to know, from an evolutionary perspective, why do we have this sense of self? Why do we have the sense that we’re continuous, if we’re thinking about things like acting effectively, or doing long term planning or being willing to defer gratification, you know, I’m willing to save up for my old age, and I’m not really willing to save up for the old age have another, you know, female academic in her in her 60s, there’s something about as being my old age that leads me to save, and you could argue that that’s actually a good thing. Even even our egos I’ve argued about this sometimes with, with some of my Buddhist friends. You know, the intolerable egos that we know among those around us. Maybe that intolerably ego is what you need to make a great scientific discovery, for example, that ends up doing something that makes cure lies better, like curing cancer makes lives better for everybody around you, or to create a great new technology.

John Perry
I’m intrigued by the suggestion that you get Donald Trump to stay out on the golf course all night long. And stare up at the stars. outside help.

Josh Landy
Yeah, nice, nice idea. It’s really it’s really vexing, isn’t it? Because you’ve got on either side, it seems like there are there are benefits both for ourselves and for other people. Right? On the on the Buddhist side of the ledger, you’ve got, you know, becoming calmer, more flexibility about our possible possible lives that we could lead a compassion. And that’s yeah, so so there’s a good good results for me, but also good results for the community. And similarly on the side of on the side of the belief itself. Well, what do we have? Yeah, I mean, planning for the future, fulfillment and a vocation How can I choose a vocation that’s going to satisfy me unless I know what the mean is, it’s going to be satisfied and you know, authentic action and, and falling in love. I mean, you know, surely I should probably know something about the temperament of the person I’m choosing to be with and my own temperament and how they’re things put together. And as you say, maybe cures for cancer come out of it. But maybe there’s also a certain selfishness. So how on earth do we resolve all this once we pick?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think it’s kind of interesting that the Buddhist tradition, especially in its original in its original form, but to some extent in in the West, as well has been that, as always, with these trade offs between understanding things and making decisions, switching back and forth from one mode to another seems to be a really useful thing to do. So say having a retreat for a period of time in which you can not be caught up in that immediate desire to do the things that you need to do to be able to accomplish your goals or, or having a meditation practice where for 20 minutes a day or an hour a day, you can release yourself, you can get out of that mode of having a self and trying to accomplish goals. I think there’s an argument that then when you go back into the world of engaged action and decision making, you can do it in a better way, a less anxious way more effective and more compassionate way than you would if you didn’t have those experiences.

John Perry
Let me ask about guilt, and responsibility. I mean, those really seem connected to the idea of a continuing self and also perhaps to the idea of First Person memory. Suppose we’ve got somebody who’s in in court for a serious crime, and they bring in a Buddhist lawyer that says to the jury, no, don’t base your decision on this illusion of the self, the one you see before you is just a completely different thing than the one who committed the crime. So wouldn’t that be a little bit dicey?

Alison Gopnik
You know, it’s interesting. This actually tunes into a whole bunch of other work that we’ve been doing in my lab recently looking at where our idea about freewill, which is something that’s very closely connected to our idea of the self comes in. And what we found was, if you look at kids in, you know, kind of typical Western culture, there’s a big connection between freewill and their ability to regulate their own behavior to do things like defer gratification, or, or take responsibility for their actions. But if you look at kids coming, growing up and other cultures, you don’t see that connection. So it seems as if the kids in the other cultures, so the kids in our culture have this sort of picture of consciences, you’re, you know, this little person and your little free whales sitting on your shoulder and telling you what to do. In other cultures, it’s more like, well, there’s just the right thing to do. And the right thing to do is out there in the world, it’s in the social world, and you internalize this is what the right thing to do is without necessarily having to think I am telling myself that this is the right thing to do.

Josh Landy
Is there no concept of promising for example? Right? Do you make a commitment and your future self is now bound by that commitment?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think the idea of the thought is that it’s more like the whole society is bound by commitments, or you’re bound by commitments to your entire group to the other people around you. Rather than that it’s your individual will and decision, that’s the thing that’s responsible.

Josh Landy
But surely there’s still crime in those societies, right?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I mean, interesting phenomenon, for example, is in some societies. In fact, arguably, in in earlier societies, if someone commits a crime, the group that they’re part of can actually do something to to compensate for that crime and is sort of responsible for compensating for that crime. It isn’t just the individual person. So one of the ideas is that if you got rid of the sense of self, you would extend yourself to the other people around you in a way that would make you like, make make you a more effective social agent. And, and I think we underestimated how much we do that in our everyday life. Anyway, it’s not obvious that most of what I do is just the result of the causal properties inside of me, a lot of it depends on the context. I’m in the other people that are around me.

John Perry
So we have an email. Carl Young—but it’s Y O U N G, not J U N G—sent this email: I wonder if there’s any connections between Humes use on the self and his views on causation, eg maybe the self is an illusory cause, tying together a series of correlations that we take to be the self?

Alison Gopnik
Well, I think cume in general is a kind of anti foundationalist. So Hume thinks in general, that we have this illusion, not just the illusion of the self, but a lot of other illusions that are illusions that there’s some, you know, fundamental, foundational metaphysical reality beyond our experiences. And causality is a good example of that. But, but in general, you know, the idea that there’s a universe that’s out there that’s real and is separate from and responsible for our experiences. He was always very skeptical about that. And it’s, if you think about the philosophical tradition, I mean, Descartes, of course is skeptical about that, too, but then Descartes solves that by saying, but the one thing that you can’t doubt is the fact that you’re the one who’s doing this Thinking and then he says, Oh, really you can’t doubt that just come and come and try, right? Watch me. And that is another respect in which Hume is very similar to the Buddhist tradition. So the Buddhist tradition is also saying there isn’t this kind of foundational thing outside of us this reality, that’s other than just our experiences. And again, what both human and Buddhist traditions say, and why would you want that?

Josh Landy
But in each case, there’s an interesting paradox, right? Because in Humes case, he’s proving the self doesn’t exist by a causal argument, right? He’s explaining how it got to be that we have this illusion, and that’s a causal argument, which he’s not supposed to believe. And in the Buddhist case, they’re saying, Look, nothing is real. It’s just in our minds. But those minds are the things that there aren’t supposed to be either. So there’s interesting problems here. And it sometimes seems to me as though just saying the self is an illusion, isn’t gonna cut it. In other words, either we have to say everything is illusion, or we can’t single out selves.

Alison Gopnik
Yeah, I think the the Buddhist tradition and Hume, it’s interesting, because actually, the sequences that both of them start out being skeptical about the idea that there’s a world out there, that’s really separate from our experiences of the world. And then they start applying that idea to the self as well. So then you end up with a bunch of experiences. But again, the point that Hume has this beautiful passage where he says, Then I go and play dominoes and backgammon and backgammon, I play it exactly the same way I did, when I wasn’t, didn’t, didn’t think that I had a self and I pick up a glass of wine, and I drink it. And that’s just the same as before.

John Perry
And there’s also a wonderful passage, in, in his dialogues on natural religion, where he essentially anticipates Darwin, with with a theory of evolution, you know, you got all this stuff just falling through the void, and it starts bumping into each other and given an infinitude of time, eventually, these kind of things that survive, so forth and so on. And then he just says in the dialogue, I mean, his character says, But of course, there’s never been enough time for that crazy idea. So that’s a very naturalistic human with, with selves, and the sorts of things that could have illusions coming along really late in this story. And so—

Josh Landy
But that assume that everything else is real, right. Everything else was real, in the way that Darwin, yeah, it’s just that this notion of self isn’t real. But once you start pushing on the ontion of self—

John Perry
Well, just stick with evolution, you can have a pretty diminished sense of reality, for most of the things we believe, right are just constructs that help them things that are themselves constructs survive, or something like that. But anyway…

Alison Gopnik
There’s a little bit of interesting neuroscience about this, too. So one of the things that we know is that there’s a particular brain network, the default mode network gets called. And it seems to be very much involved in our ordinary sense of ourselves. It’s something that develops relatively late, it seems to be connected with some of these feelings we have about ourselves. And there are circumstances in which that default mode network has or actually gets deactivated. And people report that they don’t feel the same sense of self, something we’ve talked about on this program before. If you look at people who have mystical experiences, or have psychedelic experiences, one of the things that’s kind of interestingly characteristic of those is people saying, No, it’s not just that I sort of theoretically now know that I don’t have self I just really didn’t feel it, I really felt continuous with, with the natural world around me or the other people around me. And again, for what it’s worth, people often report that they behave better as they behave better as a result of that, that, that. And Hume has this beautiful idea about morality as a matter of sentiment that’s very different from the way that most philosophers think about morality, but again, very similar to the Buddhist tradition, that it’s your feelings of compassion. It’s that sense of really extending yourself to another person. That’s the thing that’s the basis for morality.

Josh Landy
Well, Alison, you have convinced me that the self may well be an illusion, but this conversation has definitely been real. I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Alison Gopnik
Oh, it’s great to be on Philosophy Talk.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Alison Gopnik, who’s professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “The Philosophical Baby” and “How David Hume Helped Me Solve My Midlife Crisis.” So John, what’s your thinking now?

John Perry
Well, I am not willing, in spite of what I said in the introduction, to say that the self is an illusion. I’m willing to say that many of the things we believe and in particular many of the things we’re taught about persons and what it is to have a self are quite wrong. So I’m feeling like in be in some ways, right sympathetic way of thinking about it. Well, I’m just the right way of thinking about it. Maybe pretty much the way gopnik and Buddha and Hume think about it, but I just kind of wouldn’t quite say it adds up to cells be an illusion because that’s as a philosopher of language. I think that little particle self that we use in himself and herself is really the basis of the whole concept.

Josh Landy
I don’t know what that means, but the conversation continues it philosophers corner and our online community of thinkers were a monster with apologies to Descartes is Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog and you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk dot O R G.

John Perry
So you’re apologizing to Descartes but not to Hume—you’re putting Descartes before da Hume. If you have a question that wasn’t addressed (or mangled) in today’s show, or if you’re bedeviled by a conundrum in your own life and could use some philosophical insight, we’d like to hear from you. Email us at conundrums at Philosophy Talk dot O R G.

Josh Landy
Now a man who never strays from his speedy selfhood—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. In the public domain, the general consensus seems to be, for those who hold consensuses about such things in perhaps stoned conversations, the soul is a nugget, with no properties we can describe other than essence. And the self is layered on top of that, like a mutating oyster around a pearl. The self is your DNA, environment, race, allergies, left handedness, weird personal habits, phobias, drive, gumption, bliss, taste in movies, personal regrets, all that stuff, which we also don’t really know what it is, other than it exists. Or does it? The self is relatively new. Kings didn’t have selves. They were bad kings or good, but they didn’t take personality quizzes in women’s magazines to see what type of king they were. Ditto with serfs and peasants. Their self was their station. Sure, sometimes a pauper might become a king, but that depended on fate, destiny, fortune, being switched at birth, killing an ogre, solving three riddles in a wood, that type of thing. We have lost destiny. Instead, today, we have life goals. Ted talks. Successories. Motivational speakers. Even Trump rallies. They all seem to be eggs in the same basket we used to call yearning. Now it’s just another flow chart. The self itself seems always contingent. We’re self conscious, self aware, we have self expression. Unlike say, legs, or puppies, the self only exists when we put a word next to it. The self is always being measured on its way to completion. But it never ends, is never fulfilled. It’s like doing laps. You’re not racing anybody, you’re just doing it until you reach a number. What is measured? We do not know. The self is destroyed by observation, like subatomic particles, or a second marriage. So if there is a self, it may just be a social construct, or a pretty bubble created by soap and blowing, or what remains of the soul after public education gets through with it. We do not know what the self is, but we are always unhappy with it. It’s a fuzzy thing, kind of like the shadow of things in Plato’s cave, only even dimmer. ”What the hell is that thing?” Well, it’s what we could be. If we were self improved. It’s the selves we see on a movie screen. “I could be that guy, if I had super powers and a gun.” Not that we admire movie stars, necessarily but we can identify with this truncated flashy version of life, over in two hours, lessons learned, happiness achieved, or death achieved, depending. And now we don’t even need to leave the house to get that. Movies right there on the couch. With the unexamined self to join you as you gawk at the all too examined selves on the screen. There is a self at which we never arrive. Kind of like the signs telling us how many miles we have left to go before we hit Disneyland. Then we finally get to Disneyland, and it’s still not Disneyland, just pieces of it, this ride or that. We don’t have the time or the money to see it all. The totality of Disneyland will ever elude us. If the world, like the self, would just land on our head, or, conversely, leave us completely alone, we would know. We would come into ourselves at last, and know. Or at least have a pretty good idea for a movie, if we can just get somebody to help us write it. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

John Perry
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

John Perry
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o r g, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m John Perry.

Josh Landy
and I’m Josh Landy.

John Perry
Thank you for listening. And thank you for thinking.