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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. I'd like to welcome you all to the LSE and to this event, Understanding the Self, which is part of the 6th LSE Literary Festival. My name is Danielle Sands and I'm fellow at the Forum for European Philosophy. And we're hosting this event today. I'd like to introduce you to this evening's speakers. So, Raymond Tallis, he's a writer, physician, he's a philosopher. He's published many books, the most recent of which is called Reflections of a Metaphysical Flanner. Mary Midgley, who I'm sure you all know, she's a world renowned royal philosopher and writer. She published many books and her most recent book is due for publication in April and it's called are you an illusion? And finally, last but not least, Jonathan Rae. He's a philosopher, he's a writer, he's a historian, he's also published lots of books and articles, including Concise History of Western Philosophy. Okay, so the format this evening is that each of the speakers is going to speak for about 10 minutes or so broadly about this question. What is the self and how can we understand the self? And hopefully this will open up into a discussion between them and then we'll take some questions from the audience. I think we're going to start with you, Raymond Tallis.
- [01:26]
B
Danielle, thank you very much indeed. And thank you very much indeed for turning out in such large numbers of selves for this illusory occasion. But thank you. Now, in my brief opening comments, I'm confined to five to 10 minutes and being an obedient boy, I'm probably going to speak about seven and a half minutes. I want to touch on three areas, what we mean by the self, whether it is possible for us without self contradiction to, to deny that we ourselves. And also then to examine the claim that science, more specifically neuroscience, has demonstrated that the self is an illusion. And more generally, I want to criticize the notion that neuroscience has anything at all to say on this matter. And I speak of someone, I speak to someone, all of whose research was in neuroscience. And I remember there was a dialogue once between Chekhov and Tolstoy, and Tolstoy was banging on about the peasants and how wonderful they were. And Chekhov said, for God's sake, I was brought up amongst peasants. I can tell you there are a heap of colonic material. And I feel the same in a sense, because I've been involved in neuroscience for 30 to 40 years. I hugely admire what it has to tell us about the world. But I can tell you I'm extremely aware of its enormous limitations, particularly its metaphysical limitations. If you go away tonight with the notion that neuroscience has nothing to tell us about metaphysical problems, I feel I will have done a good day's work. So, first of all, what do we mean by self? The self is an extraordinary, complex concept. It has many facets, and I guess we could spend the rest of the evening teasing them out. And one of these is the first person perspective on the world, the most literal manifestation of which is seeing the world from a particular point of view. I experience what's out there from over here, and you experience what's out there from over there. But the self is more than that, just as it is much more than a bare Kantian logical subject implicit in perception, more than a naked eye. That is the referent of the first person singular pronoun. It includes what I've called in my book on the first person being, plug alert, the existential intuition that I am this, that there is something, a conscious being that I am, and I consciously am that something. Now, more relevant today is the sense that this something is enduring. While of course the self is not a thing in the way that my body is a thing, it is nevertheless something of which it makes sense to say that it is the same over time as is manifested in all sorts of ways, stable or enduring. Personal characteristics and habits are the external surface of this stability. And what we may call continuity of office, such as my being the husband of my wife, are part of the social surface. But more importantly than that is the ownership we feel of our past life, the thread of memory that connects different parts of that life and the responsibility we take for them. And I still feel responsible now for. For the mistakes I made as a junior doctor 40 years ago. So that's a little bit about the self. Now, can we deny the reality of this continuing self? Now it seems to me that in order to deny the existence of the self in the ordinary sense, we have to be pretty well developed selves. We have to have a sense of what it is that we are denying. And we have to have the equipment to enable ourselves to make that denial and to make sense of it. In short, it takes a self to form the concept of what is being denied and to engage in the kinds of arguments that are mobilized by those who deny self. A mere succession of moments of experience would not be able to engage in the sort of arguments that we're going to be having tonight. More to the point, perhaps one would have to be an enduring self in order to entertain the illusion. If it were an illusion that one was an enduring self. And so the illusion could not possibly be an illusion. Now this might sound to some of you suspiciously like Descartes famous cogito argument. Descartes, as you all know, argued that we couldn't deny. I couldn't deny that I'm thinking because in order to do so I would have to be thinking. If furthermore, I cannot deny that I'm a thinker, then I cannot doubt my own existence because if I'm thinking, I must exist. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Well, there is a family resemblance between Descartes argument and what I've just said about the self. But this does not mean that I take on board the entire Cartesian world picture that I am a persisting eternal substance, a thinking substance. One can, as it were, be a la Descartes. I do not know. Thank you for that. The laughter was planted in advance. One cannot, as it were. I don't think the self is the transparent, totally unified Cartesian thinking substance associated with Descartes, but nor am I obliged to be so. In defending the reality of the self, there is a position that voids both the denial of the self as an enduring reality that's wrong. And the acceptance of the self as a pure eternal thinking substance that's wrong. So it brings me to my third point. Why are so many speakers, so many thinkers inclined to assert that the self is an illusion? Now there are various reasons for this. One that I've already touched on. The belief that if you don't take on board the full blown Cartesian self, then you have to reject the notion of an enduring self altogether. But more influential at present is the supposed evidence that comes from science, in particular neuroscience. Certain experiments seem to show that when we believe ourselves to be acting as self conscious agents, we are in fact under the influence of factors of which we are unaware. Increasingly, we are told there is evidence that the brain gets on with living our life and we are merely the seat of its happenings. So the self as the source of voluntary actions is, it is argued, a myth or an illusion. We can discuss these experiments, but none of them in fact supports the conclusion that we are not truly self conscious agents in everyday life. And I hope we discuss this further. But the more profound basis for the attack on the self comes from the belief that we are identical with activity in our brains. And if you look at the activity in our brains, you can't find anything corresponding to the self. But that argument is based on the false belief that we are identical with activity, the sort of stuff you can see in a brain scan. It relies on the assumption that if neuroscience, or more generally physical science can't see it, then it doesn't really exist. Unfortunately, this would oblige us to deny the existence of other things that neuroscience can't see, which undoubtedly do exist, namely the ordinary experience of qualities, the first person perspective, the unity of consciousness at any given time, a teaser that no neuroscience can deal with, and tensed time. Nor could neuroscience find anything corresponding to the illusion of the self, which seems, by the way, even more mysterious than the self. The self does not exist. So in summary for my opening one, the self is a very complex concept and we need to bear this in mind in our discussion. Secondly, denying the reality of the self is on most definitions of self, a self contradiction, pragmatic self refutation, and thirdly, natural sciences such as neuroscience have absolutely nothing to tell us about the reality or otherwise of a self. Thank you.
- [09:24]
C
Well, I have to say I find all that terribly convincing. I've been saying this sort of thing for a long time, so one certainly needs to think, why are people denying it? Why would anybody say that there is no such thing as a self? And quite a lot of people, especially across the Atlantic, have suggested that this is the Buddhist doctrine of no self. Well, it isn't. This I find fairly important. I mean, the Buddhists, who are rather given to paradoxical, strong statements like this, mean when they say there is no self, that there is not the permanent, immortal, absolutely solid, substantial self which many traditions have supposed that they were, including our own. But you see, the thing is, they don't leave it at that. They say you should have a different view of yourself. You should identify with something much larger. You are not something cut off from the rest of life and the rest of the world. The world is all continuous. And it's terribly important that we recognize our, our unity with other beings. And they obviously want to infer from that that we should love and consider others, that we should not live solely for our limited little selves. There's a whole positive way of life being linked to that. They deny themselves in order that they deny the limited eternal self in order to assert the unity of all life. And I now don't want to say more because I will be only making them look more crude. This is a completely different thing from the view put forward by Mr. DNA Crick and other scientists and some philosophers in recent times who only have the denial and don't say what's meant to be there Instead, now, I don't think you can ever say that something is an illusion unless you produce a convincing view about what's actually there. Instead you see if it's an optical illusion, you say what the actual state of affairs that you're failing to see, to say that the brain cells are that reality seems to me just so perverse that I cannot get my head round it. I've just been describ. Cutting in the car how people actually think this works. But I can see how I think. I can see how they got to think it works because there has been a lot of very successful and knowledgeable neuroscience done in recent years and people have found out much, much more about brain cells than they once knew. And what's more, they can show us pictures of them. It must be real, doesn't it? And people have the idea that if they're real, then the other thing can't be, that is the subjectivity, the feeling that we have, as if there was only one sort of real thing. Now this, I do think, is a very arbitrary and unnecessary complicated way of trying to think about things. I mean, I guess caught on already in the 17th century with Newton and all that physics, that physics became, as it were, the basic explanation of everything, the basic physical stuff was the stuff out of which everything else is made. They didn't notice for quite a long time what a bad effect this has come. They got a God as well, you see, and they got spirit as well. They'd got this dualist arrangement whereby all the interesting things were on the spirit side and they could afford to say physics is the only solid reality. But as they gradually got to think they'd better not have God and soul, they got left with only the physical matter. And I am so pleased to have somebody authoritative to say science isn't any. Doesn't say this and couldn't say it isn't. Taking this line. An awful lot of people today, whether they know any science or not, do have the idea that science, and particularly physics, is what tells the truth. Everything else is a bit loose, isn't it? It's sub provisional. It's really a metaphor, as Richard Dawkins always says, or something of that sort. I think the thing is that we have somehow to get round the thought that reality is terribly complex. It's a great big cake into which we cut from various angles. The angles are not continuous with each other. We see things and touch things, two quite different ways of gathering that there's something there. They don't have to be continuous and they aren't. A thing can be perceived and discovered in. In two quite separate ways. Think of lightning and thunder. You see, you hear something and you see something. Well, what you're hearing and seeing is the same thing, isn't it? But this is rather surprising. It's more complicated thing than one had supposed. And I think that to get it into one's head. I shall pause after. Stop after this. To get it into one's head that human being, beings are complex in the sort of way that requires that they be understood partially in a lot of different ways which don't contradict each other. I think that is the central enlightenment that I'd like us to have. Thank you.
- [15:43]
D
I'm afraid if you're after some huge disagreements, I'm not sure I can really supply them. But there is one thing I slightly.
- [15:49]
C
They didn't pick us out to disagree, did they?
- [15:52]
D
Well, perhaps not. Perhaps the audience will be disappointed about that. But there is one thing that's common to raise and Mary's presentations, which is that they talk a little more confidently than I think is right about whether the self exists or not. It does seem to me that we have a whole range of concepts, the self, the personality, the mind, consciousness, and that it might be worth reminding ourselves of how very different they are, rather than trying to wrap them all up under the heading of the self. I'm going to give you a little history lesson. I think that the argument that we're surveying this afternoon is usually framed by an old story, such a pervasive story that I think most of us are not really aware that we've taken it in since we were tiny children. It's a story about the rise of science and how the rise of science is correlated with the humiliation of human pride. It started, I think, with T.H. huxley and Ernst Heckel in the 1880s. And their claim was that the achievements of Darwin exactly rhymed with those of Copernicus. Copernicus had overthrown the geocentric idea of the universe, thus deposing humanity from its comfy throne at the center of the cosmos. And then Darwin had overthrown the anthropocentric idea that man's the center of life on Earth, thus removing us from our position at the summit of creation. So there is this sort of idea that the rise of science and the decline of human dignity is correlated with the decline of human dignity. And as you probably know, in his introductory lectures in 1915, Freud took the story a bit further by appointing himself as the successor to Konicus and Darwin, he has this wonderful phrase. Psychoanalysis had delivered a third blow to the just humanity's self love. A blow to. It had served notice on the ego.
- [18:02]
B
That's ish.
- [18:04]
D
There's a lot of translation problem there. It had served notice on the ego or the self that it is not even master in its own house. The wonderful resonant phrase that you would that the life of your soul has, Freud puts it, is going on. It's like, you know, your kids have had organized a party in your house and you just have absolutely no, no control over it.
- [18:30]
B
That's.
- [18:31]
D
That's Freud's idea of how he contributed the third blow to human self esteem. Now, the second point I want to make is that there's something funny about this story. In a way, it's supposed to describe the end of human self assurance, but it can also provide a sort of rallying cry for those, and I think the three panelists may fit this role, who want to fight back against what you might call the complacent imperiousness of science. In the field of politics, we're familiar with the idea that a resistance tends to coalesce around points that have actually been defined, defined by the oppressor. And it seems to me that we trying to kick back against overweening science are in danger of going along with an obliteration of distinctions which this story of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud tends to lead to. It seems to me that those of us who, like me, who are inclined to rally to the idea of humanism or the human or the human world, although I do have serious doubts about it, but it seems to me that people who do talk about the human may well be, as it were, copying something from the agenda of the enemy. That's to say, the idea that there is a unitary thing called the human, and that incursions by natural science into its domain deserve to be.
- [20:10]
C
Resisted.
- [20:13]
D
So to be more positive about it, I want to speak up for the miscellaneousness of various items that tend to get lumped together in the notion of the human. There's selfhood, which is the theme announced in our title for this evening. There's also the mind, personhood and personality. The soul, spirituality, inwardness, will, consciousness, I don't know. And it seems to me that they all have very different profiles whose distinctness we would do well to dwell on. If we're not careful, we'll think that these various notions are all more or less indirect ways of referring to the same object. And I think I've got a Quotation from Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy, where he's unbelievable, obtuse sometimes, this brilliant man, he wrote, when I am acquainted with my seeing the sun, it seems plain that I am acquainted with two different things in relation to each other. On the one hand the sense datum, and the other hand that which sees the sense datum. And then he goes into a little aria about how difficult it is to tell whether we are actually acquainted with our own self directly or whether we are only acquainted with it by description. But what seems to me really weird about it is the idea that the self is a sort of hypothetical object which we might or might not be able to find by surveying the contents of our consciousness. The question, I think this is astonishing. Isn't it clear that he was, to use Wittgenstein's expression, misconstruing the grammar of selfhood? Whatever else it may be, yourself is not an object which you may or may not be acquainted with. And to say that does not commit us to imagining that it's a spooky entity that we're not acquainted with any more than we have to imagine a spooky entity when we speak of the self. Stutterer in a car or a self service checkout in a shop, you don't say, well, where's the self? And it seems to me that there's a. That's why I say it's what grammar. What Wittgenstein would have thought of as a grammatical point. The self isn't that kind of thing. And indeed, it may be one of those things which Wittgenstein, in a Kierkegaardian mood, once suggested is intrinsically unanalysable. Anyone who tried to subject this sort of concept to correct logical analysis, he said, or to purge them of paradox would have failed to understand what they meant. That's in the lecture on Ethics in 1929. If you think that the concept. If you think you've managed to construe the concept of self so that it makes sense, and you can discover whether there's a thing corresponding to it or not, then you've clearly misunderstood the grammar of the concept. It's not that it's not something that it's not a concept that refers to entities.
- [23:09]
B
Thank you.
- [23:11]
D
In the gravitational fields, in fact.
- [23:13]
B
Thank you. Point of disagreement.
- [23:20]
D
What goes for selfhood doesn't necessarily apply to those other notions that I've touched on. Mind, soul, spirit, intellect. I don't know. Le moi das'.
- [23:27]
B
Ish.
- [23:28]
D
Maybe the will. And it would be an intriguing Project, if a rather frustrating one, to try to map them all and trace their changing meanings over time. I'm not going to try and do that now, but I will suggest that they stretch out between two poles. One pole, the negative pole, is the location of selfhood, that ultimately elusive center of gravity, of individual existence, the behind the scenes entity, the entities that are not an entity, the locus of experience that's not itself an object of experience, an inexpressible something far away from that. The other pole of psychological concepts are things that are far more public and accessible. The wholly expressible world of mind or thought or intellect, or the world comprising the meanings, the meanings that constantly circulate through society, embodies in language and books and mathematics and seminars and other practices. And my hypothesis is that we could plot the positions of various other phrases, soul, spirit, will, etc. At some intermediate latitude between pure selfhood pole and the pure thought pole, the inexpressible pole and the expressible pole. And if we did so, we could start to reclaim the variety of different themes that have been crammed together into the category of human as we try to defend it from the encroachments of natural science. I think that would take an awful lot of work. It sometimes seems to me that the whole terrain has now been laid waste by a terrible conceptual plague. And the name of that plague is identity. I haven't mentioned that word. I don't think any of us have really mentioned that word yet. It's a very tricky, tricky customer or personal identity. You probably know that it was launched by John Locke in a note added to the second edition of his essay in 1694. And it reminds us. The point of it is to remind us that. Well, the point I want you to notice is that person and personality are other items that need to be on our map, along with the self and the mind and all the others. For Locke, the idea of person was legalistic or forensic or moralistic. The point was, and Ray touched on this, to speak of a person is to speak of the entity that's responsible for certain actions and open to punishment or praise accordingly. And the difficulty arises when you start doubting the continuity between, between the person who performed a certain act in the past and the one who is at a later time being held accountable for it. Maybe I pinched loads of apples when I was a kid, but am I still responsible for it 50 years later? And I have no memory of it? And in a sense I'm not the same person at all. I'm not going to Go off pinching apples again, probably. And of course, as far as Locke was concerned, there's a special poignancy when our concern is with a life after death where perhaps, you know, I want to imagine myself conducting a post bodily existence. And his how can I be praised or damned for things I did 50 years ago that I don't even remember? And Locke's extraordinary suggestion is that actually you can't. If it's not on your conscience, then it's not one of your sins. You have become a different person. That's the way he finesses the idea of personal identity. And I think it's a richly interesting idea. It's one of the few real conceptual game changers in the history of philosophy. Or, well, I mean, it spreads out far beyond philosophy, this idea of personal identity. But I think it's done damage because it's created a kind of short circuit between what I've called the two poles, the negative pole of the inexpressible self and the positive pole of the expressible mind. Selfhood comes to be identified with self image or what I am conscious of being, thus somehow eliminating the possibility that myself might be something to which I have extremely limited access and awareness, which I have extremely limited understanding. The word identity then becomes. Well, I think it's a real car crash. The way it's used in contemporary discourse. Identity sometimes is sort of absolute identity, as attested by your passport, your DNA, your family background, or your utility bills. And then there's the subjective version where it means the causes that you consciously affiliate yourself to. You know, your identity as a Scot, as a woman, as a classical music buff, or as a fan of Woody Allen or something. So that it seems to me identity is playing these two. It's a sort of double agent in this conceptual field. And I think the domination of the idea of identity in the past 50 years has worn away a whole range of distinctions that we really need to retrieve and treat with respect, creating this curious amalgam of human in which all kinds of experience, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, honest or self deceiving, mind, soul, spirit and self, are all presented as much the same thing, as different ways of referring to the same thing, and as Russell would have put it, as an object of possible acquaintance. So to sum it up in a word, if we're really going to make a successful pushback, push back against scientific triumphalism, I think we should question the idea that there is a unitary thing called the human, which can be represented by the concept of the self, and recognize that it's composed of many threads that we would do well to try and tease apart.
- [29:30]
B
Thank you.
- [29:31]
A
I'd like to begin by asking a question actually. So Jonathan, you just touched upon the relationship between selfhood and self image. I wonder if the other speakers might want to say something about that. Whether we have kind of unmediated access to our own selves or whether our own selves are in some way always mediated to us through other people.
- [29:56]
C
Yes, I was terribly pleased to hear Jonathan attacking this frightful way in which Russell talks about knowledge by acquaintance and showing this thing as a, as a substance. The trouble is, Descartes started calling it a substance, didn't he? And every sort of attempt has been made since then to isolate something, whether it's quite the self or something else and give it. The point about a substance is it's independent of everything else, isn't it? It's meant to be existing in itself, for itself. There are no such things. The idea of a substance is obviously wrong. I think it's quite important, isn't it, that this word self wasn't used until fairly lately as the name of something. It's kind of particle which is used when any, any reflexive situation is being mentioned. You have self knowledge and self responsibility for yourself and so on, but you also shoot yourself or see yourself in the mirror. So it includes the body. It is the whole person. When this word self goes about on its own, it is used to fit whatever remark is being made at the time. If what you're talking about about is self knowledge or self perception or self consciousness or something of that sort, then it's something inner. We do however need language for the inner. And Johnson, quite right to point out all kinds of different concepts that we need for different purposes. And we should not treat these as competitions between quotes and the character and the personality and all these things. They are ways of looking at what is a continuous person. And I think you see dualism, the idea that this can all be split off from the body has cultivated this thought that there's got to be one thing which isn't the body somewhere inside us or not what yet. And it's dualism we need to get rid of.
- [32:04]
B
Of course, I mean, I would completely agree with what Jonathan said about the self. You're trying to bring together things that are quite disparate. And in fact, in my pitilessly detailed 350 page book on first person being, I actually start off by varying a quote from Kant. Kant said out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made, and it seems to be out of the crooked timber of human discourse, no straight thing was ever made. And if you look at some of the elements that Jonathan's referred to, like the person, the person has legalistic, religious, extraordinarily complicated histories. So each of these elements is very complicated indeed. So what we've got to tease out really is what's actually at stake. And for me, what's at stake are two things. One is the notion of sometime today, the gravitational field. Again, just talk amongst yourself. One is the idea that we are, at any given moment, coherent in a way that cannot be explained in material, in particular neuroscientific terms. For example, as I'm sitting here, I'm feeling the pressure of the seat on my bottom. I can see you all in front of me. I'm aware that I'm in London, I'm aware that I'm a particular gig. All those things that are brought together in a unified way which lies beyond the grasp of materialist science. So that's, as it were, the unity of the conscious field at any given moment. And the other is unity over time. Yes, there are things we forget. But of course, you remember Thomas Reid's response to John Locke. John Locke says, yes, I can't remember whether I stole the apples when I was a child, but let's break, as it were, my past up into pieces. When I was a young subaltern, I remember that I stole the apples. Now I'm an old general, I remember when I was a young subaltern. So there is, as it were, an overlapping series of threads. I'm almost as it were, tempted to quote Wittgenstein, except that when anybody quotes Wittgenstein, they think they've stumbled into truth. Which always worries me enormously. Just because Wittgenstein said it doesn't mean to say it's true. Anyway, perhaps that's another story.
- [34:18]
A
I'd also like to pick on something else that Jonathan said about.
- [34:21]
B
This is bullying now, isn't it? We're both, all three of us getting it.
- [34:25]
A
You mentioned this Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. Is these kind of three blows to the subject and to this kind of anthropocentric viewpoint made me think, is the self something that's unique to the human being? Can other animals have selves or is it just humans?
- [34:45]
C
Well, they keep telling us monkeys can see themselves in the mirror, don't they? Right, so it's not unique to beauty, is it?
- [34:56]
B
Right. When we come to monkeys, there's a very Famous experiment carried out in the late 1970s, when if you put a lipstick on a gorilla, it actually sees the lipstick in the mirror and then wipes it off its own body. And that indicates that it has a sense of self. Yes, and I'm sure higher primates have little arias of selfhood, but what's missing is the recitative, the continuous narrative, the internal narrative that adds up to our own sense of self, where we're always referring backwards and forwards. We always relate ourselves to other selves and feel positioned by other selves. And I don't think, and Mary and I might disagree about this. I don't think we have good evidence that chimpanzees, or indeed other higher primates have that sustained complex narrative in a pre linguistic as well as neat linguistic sense of self. But I guess Mary and I, elephants do. Well, elephants look at themselves in the mirror, but that's not the same as.
- [35:51]
D
As a wax.
- [35:52]
C
They remember people over very many years and you can't. I'm sorry, we should not have this row.
- [35:56]
B
Now, exactly what's happened? Have we done something rather disgusting? We stumbled into the empirical, which is rather degrading for philosophical argument, isn't it?
- [36:10]
C
Some empirical bits are irrelevant. You brought this up.
- [36:13]
B
I know I did. See, Mary and I agree on so many things. We're desperate to find something to bitterly disagree over.
- [36:21]
C
I think we should get the audience going. Yes. I love this kind of meeting, which is really a discussion among Everybody rather than 50 minutes of somebody. I think it's a totally good idea. Ms.
- [36:32]
A
Gentleman?
- [36:33]
C
Yes.
- [36:34]
D
Oh, thank you.
- [36:38]
C
This is perhaps for the last speaker, but I would appreciate any response. What relationship do you see, if you want to take it up between roles and self?
- [36:55]
D
Roles have a role playing role.
- [36:58]
C
Well, people have roles. Whether they're playing or not is another matter.
- [37:01]
D
No.
- [37:01]
B
Okay.
- [37:01]
D
No, I was just afraid you might be talking about John Rawls. Terrible tangent.
- [37:09]
C
No, you've understood me.
- [37:11]
D
I think that's a very illuminating way of describing some of the things that we mean when we talk about our selfhood or our identity over a time. I mean, so Ray talked about, you know, his role as a loving husband. And you can see how that is sort of part of that becomes part of you. But I think I also. I think Ray and Mary were perhaps keener on the idea. Keener than I am on the idea that whatever you do does, as it were, cling to your identity. And that you know, that because the little boy's stealing is remembered by the subaltern and the subaltern is remembered by the old general, therefore, the old general. It does seem to me that, I mean, maybe this is a more moral issue than an ontological one, that there are good reasons for saying, of giving a sort of statute of limitations about moral and indeed political responsibility. And I. I mean, I must. I find. I find maybe I shouldn't open this up. I find the pursuit of 100-year-old former concentration camp guards just, you know, who scarcely know what they're doing. Well, at least that's the story. Because, I mean, they. They might. There might be good reason to think it's the same individual. But honestly, you know, discovering someone in Brazil and Brie. Taking them back to Israel and charging them. I mean, there are lots of. I mean, there are obviously political issues and so on involved there. But from the point of view of identity, I think there is a sense in which, you know, the person who did that 65 years ago really can't be thought to be the same person.
- [39:00]
B
It's interesting with the body, there's an audit trail that's the same body over those whole periods of time. And that, in a sense, underpins, as it were, any kind of memory threat. And in fact, I mean, come back to roles. Roles is part of this sort of external carapace, the exoskeleton, that supports a sense of a continuing self. Within that exoskeleton, there is my memories of what I did, and both voluntary and involuntary memories. But then there are a series of roles. So I was a doctor for 40 years, and what people expected of me and what I expected of them actually sort of propped up my sense of continuing self. So I was responsible. What happened a fortnight ago, I was responsible. What happened three years ago, I was responsible. I still feel responsible what happened 40 years ago. And in a sense, I don't think I'll be less responsible because I forget it. Because as Nietzsche said, you know, I did this. Said my memory. I can't bear to think it says my pride. So in the end, my pride wins. And it seems to me that in many ways that if we relied on memory or amnesia to define the limits of the self, we potentially will be in quite a difficult moral quagmire. And I think Jonathan was implying that.
- [40:12]
C
It'S one of these narrowings of the concept which really don't help, because what it's all about is how we should treat others and ourselves and we did things long ago. It's not about redefining the kind of being that we are. I think.
- [40:29]
B
I think that quote From Marlowe. That was in another country. Besides, the wench is dead.
- [40:34]
C
Yes.
- [40:38]
B
The idea that just because it was a long time ago in a different place, that there's new, as it were, moral hook into your present is, I think, quite worrying. But I know that's not what you meant at all.
- [40:51]
D
But there are also cases about sleepwalking or being completely pissed out of your mind and not knowing what you're doing. And then it is. You can see how holding someone responsible for what they do in those cases may not be.
- [41:07]
B
But we have very complex and subtle law around those cases of diminished responsibility. If I actually go out and get blooded and then sock someone, there is actually a. As it were, I'm part of the whole process. I actually went for the 16th pint. So that's rather different from sleepwalking or automatisms in the context of some seizure or whatever. Yes. I'd like to ask about this question.
- [41:35]
D
Of subjectivity and the two perspectives that Mary Mitchell speak about.
- [41:44]
B
And even if we accept, as I would, that, you know, it doesn't make.
- [41:49]
D
Sense to think of a substance that is, we can equate subjectivity with. Would you say. Would you and Professor Tallis, would you.
- [42:01]
B
Agree with Jonathan Rae that there is.
- [42:03]
D
Nothing that we can say usefully about subjects?
- [42:10]
B
Is it one of these ineffable themes.
- [42:14]
D
Or is there anything useful that we can say? I mean, when you talk about the two different perspectives that produce the same. That come from the same entity of.
- [42:23]
B
Thunder and lightning, we can say things about both thunder and lightning.
- [42:29]
D
Is there anything similar that we can say usefully, do you think, about subjectivity?
- [42:35]
C
I think subjectivity is an abstract noun that we should not, on the whole be talking about, if you see what I mean. I mean, it's not that there isn't a place for this abstract noun, but not that somebody has a subjectivity if they have a foot in them. Yeah, sorry. But it's. We have to think in different cases, and we are very well used to thinking in different cases about how much a thing is somebody's fault as a whole and how much it sort of has happened to them.
- [43:06]
D
And I don't.
- [43:07]
C
I don't think there are many sort of good general rules about how to do that, but we are very well aware with the situation which subject word subjectivity refers to, which is what it's like for the person.
- [43:23]
B
We.
- [43:26]
C
I want to think about this point you're making about thunder and lightning. I think you see that it's. Suppose that we've got one of These cases where somebody may be a bit potty or they may not they've done something, we have to try to think whether it was in a sense they themselves that did it or they wasn't. Now, this is not going to be a yes or no matter. In some sense it was them and in some sense it wasn't. And the senses in which this are said so really do depend on all sorts of local and experiential data. I don't want to generalize about it, and I think you're rather wanting to concentrate on the philosophical max logical problem. What the status is of this word subjective. And I don't think that it's got any one status. I think, like a lot of words, and I think Jonathan's saying this, it's used in different ways in different situations, and we have to know how it's going to be used. There may well be, in this situation, no single obviously satisfactory answer to did he really do it himself or not? You know, because both things are partly true. And that's the sort of inconvenience that experience always faces us with.
- [44:58]
D
I think there is something more to be said about describing subjectivity. And there is. There's quite a lot of literary theory which I can't quite dredge up from the back of my. My mind about direct speech, indirect speech and free indirect speech in the novel. And the way that, you know, from Jane Austen to Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, people devise more subtle ways of explaining someone's view of the world from sort of inside. I wish I could think of a dignified example, but I was listening to the Secret Garden this morning and the servant girl presents the spoiled girl from India with a present. And she says so. She took hold of the rope with a handle at each end painted red and blue. She had never seen a skipping rope before. And that seems to. To me, that's an extremely clever way of letting you in a sense, into the subjectivity of this child. It's not saying she didn't know what it was, but it's just describing it with the words that were available to her until the person said, it's a skipping rope. This is what you do with it. And it seems to me that in a way, if there is ever going to be such a thing as the science of subjectivity, then we're going to look to novelists to provide it. And novelists inventing ever more interesting techniques of presenting subjectivity by using, by various kinds of irony where the words the author uses are the words that would have been selected by the character rather than the words imposed on them by the narrator. So it seems to me that if I was thinking of producing a theory of subjectivity, then I would start with a survey of the growth of the representation of subjectivity in the novel. So I think that makes some real progress.
- [47:03]
B
I mean, I would agree with that. I mean, one of the worries I have is that what is truly ourselves is that which is ineffable. Because that in many ways is an alibi for scoundrels. That inside me is something you cannot imagine. It's far better. I'm a bald, boring old fart and a mediocrity and all the other things which all of you can see. But inside here is something quite different you can't even get anywhere near to. And that's been criticized, of course, by many, many philosophers and novelists. So I'm a little bit worried about, as it were, the transcendence of the subjective out of the grasp of the social gaze. On the other hand, when we do try and express things, we try very hard to express subjectivity. I mean, John's example is brilliant. We are always left with the language of the collective because if I'm going to make sense to you in describing my subjectivity, I've got to go the extra mile and actually use the language that you would use to describe your subjectivity. And I really don't question quite know as if we meet in a point of compromise in our shared language. So that's not a very useful comment. It's more a state of my current confusion statement of my current confusion gentleman in the middle.
- [48:24]
D
Is it one of the most fundamental illusions in this whole debate, what I'm inclined to call the sort of the imperialistic map view of scientific knowledge, that somehow there's a sort of finite material and it has to be painted either red as science or blue as superstition. But it's perfectly obvious, at least to me, that knowledge has a sort of fractal geometry.
- [48:48]
C
The more you know, the more you don't know.
- [48:51]
D
And that doesn't mean the more you know that you don't know. That doesn't mean to say that advances in knowledge aren't real, they're real advances.
- [48:57]
C
But that they give an access to.
- [49:00]
D
As you were saying, this fascinating multi layered reality. And we just have to get away from the idea that science kind of.
- [49:07]
C
Knows most of what's important science, you know, I mean, if we say that.
- [49:13]
D
We know 2 or 3% of what's important in science, that would be closer.
- [49:17]
B
But that doesn't mean to say that.
- [49:18]
D
When we know twice as much, we'll know 4 or 6%. We just have to be humble about.
- [49:22]
B
What we know and realistic about how.
- [49:24]
C
Interesting the world is. Yes.
- [49:30]
B
But I think in many ways you were saying several things at the same time, all of which were interesting. One, I like the fractal metaphor very much indeed. That, as it were, the deeper you dig, the more complexity actually is preserved. But I also like your idea that there is, as it were, an area that science has conquered. And, for example, there's just a little bit left called, poor bloody sod, called consciousness. It's the last bit, the last bit of Here Be Dragons. And it does seem to me that that is a complete mistake, because science can cover a territory enormously, but within that territory it covers, there is an enormous amount that science doesn't even touch. And that includes basic things like secondary qualities, like what it's like to be and so on.
- [50:14]
C
It's just like this thing calling space the last frontier, isn't it?
- [50:18]
B
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
- [50:22]
A
Gentlemen on the front.
- [50:23]
D
Babe, I wanted to ask. I want to ask about the role of the imagination both in the creation of a sense of self and in the continuous experience of a sense of self, and perhaps also in the empathy with other people's sense of self. And I'm thinking perhaps of three different things here. One's the sort of self creative choice between alternative narratives, which seems to be as part of our continuous re. Imagining of our own lives. Another thing is a filling out of the narrative of ourself, which is a sort of building concept. And then I was thinking of Hazlitt's brilliant Principles of human action in 1805, in which he reduced even the notion of self interest to a completely imaginative enterprise. So you have an imagined interest in your imagined future, self's experience of the imagined future. So in other words, imagination is key, it seems to me, to the notion of self. And I wonder what you thought. Up to you.
- [51:22]
B
Well, I'm just saying. I mean, we're always narrating ourselves for a start. And the narrative will be more rich and encompassing the more imagination is deployed. And even when one's thinking about one's own future self, that deep sympathy that you need in order to think into somebody else's life is also required. I always think when you try to recover yourself and remember yourself, you have to be a really good novelist to remember what it was like to be Raymond Tallis 10 years ago. I mean, I think God I just don't have the imagination to remember him with different preoccupations, different circumstances, a different body a bit. And so imagination is extraordinarily important in order to both recover yourself and. What was the force of your question? I think to expand and enrich and deepen yourself. I turned the radio on the other.
- [52:23]
D
Day just in time to hear a comedian say, I've had the same room for 20 years.
- [52:27]
B
I've changed the head. Sorry, I turned the radio on the other day.
- [52:32]
D
Tyra.
- [52:32]
B
Comedians say, I've had the same broom for 20 years. I've only changed the head five times.
- [52:36]
D
And the handle seven times. So in the view of the panel.
- [52:41]
B
Would you say that that was the.
- [52:42]
D
Same broom or that he had a different broom?
- [52:46]
B
Brilliant. I have strong feelings about this, so I better hold back.
- [52:51]
C
Well, I mean, the word sermon is used in lots of ways. You've just got to make sure the people you're talking to understand it as you do. I think they don't seem problem here.
- [53:02]
B
You see, I believe that the concept of identity and the same as is really the primary location for that is in a human being. And that when you say something's the same broom or the same club, when all the rules have changed and the premises have changed and the members have changed, I think that's a parasitic sense of the same. So in many ways, yes, you can call it the same broom, but that's borrowing from the sense of being the same Raymond Tallis over a period of time, despite the fact that his body has been in every seven years it's changed all its atoms and he's replaced one. Lot of stupid ideas and a lot of stupid ideas, but in other words, identity. It seems to me it is something that has to be asserted, appropriated, owned by the thing that has that ID entity. In other words, it stands on itself and appropriates itself as itself.
- [53:58]
C
Yes. I mean, it has to be made clear every time if you come across somebody who has changed greatly, you might warn somebody else. He really isn't the same person who you knew. Now, so long as they know what you mean, this is all right. I don't believe that there is any one single sense, but the sense in which we are the same person through our lives is pretty important to us. Because it's not just a matter of being blamed, is it? It's a matter of owning your life, of being able to reckon it all as yours. And if you discover that you have done something which you didn't know you'd done, but which is actually of great interest, you've extended the. And some people are lacking in self knowledge. They don't notice what they're doing. So they do not have, as it were, so rich and full a life. I think this is quite important. And on the whole, our interest in trying to bring things in, if they might possibly be thought of us, is quite as strong as our interest in not being punished for things.
- [55:10]
D
I thought the discussion was very vast, Millennial, because it was totally disembodied, Almost totally. We have to, I would suggest, look at human beings as total brain body systems.
- [55:27]
B
And then arguably the self is the capacity of that total system, the whole.
- [55:34]
D
Body, to continually reconfigure itself. We're continually changing ourselves.
- [55:39]
B
Paradoxically, we're like actors. And you know, you can't have attitudes that are disembodied. You know, get a grip of yourself.
- [55:50]
D
You know, chose some backbone.
- [55:51]
C
Don't be so lily livered, nerve yourself.
- [55:53]
B
What else have I got here? You know, everything is constantly involved.
- [56:01]
D
And.
- [56:01]
B
When you look at it, and once.
- [56:03]
D
You start thinking about that, by the way, the prime art form is not.
- [56:06]
B
The novel, which again, very verbal last.
- [56:09]
D
Millennium, it's the movie.
- [56:11]
B
Because we respond to each other as.
- [56:14]
D
Whole bodies and we are aware, mirror neurons tell us that of how a person is conducting themselves, how they hold themselves, how they comport their whole body. The self is the whole body.
- [56:32]
B
I feel like. May I respond immediately to that? I don't think we have been disembodied. And if we have, it's a terrible omission. As far as I'm concerned, you cannot have a sense of self without at the very least the audit trail of the continuing human body that you've been from the moment, you know, you sprang into nappies to the moment when you were oxidized in the. The local authority crematorium. I mean, clearly there's that trajectory which is absolutely vital to any sense of identity, any sense of continuity, and also, most importantly, to check in the difference between pseudo memories and real memories. And we can perhaps talk about that. There is, in addition to that, if you like, within us there is also this psychological continuity, the sense of memories that are own, and so on and so forth. I hate to think that either of us would for a moment discount the body. I see ourselves as embodied subjects. Merleau Ponty is my particular hero and we are embodied subjects and we're inseparable from our bodies, but we're not identical with them. Even less are we identical with a particular giblet between our ears. Called the brain drives me to crack it. I make a button. Which part of you is not identical with your body? Are you talking about souls?
- [57:49]
D
What are you referring to? That is not embodied.
- [57:53]
B
Can you give me an example?
- [57:54]
D
That is limited.
- [57:55]
B
Can you give me an example? Well, for example, I am conscious and my consciousness has intentionality which reaches way beyond my body and basically unites with other people's intentionality that produces something called community of minds in which I participate as I'm participating now, I'm not a basically a hover full of meat as I'm sitting in front of you, or perhaps you think I am.
- [58:16]
C
The word body is a highly abstract word.
- [58:20]
D
And then you just said, no, I disagree.
- [58:23]
B
There's something else that isn't. It's not.
- [58:25]
D
You really do have.
- [58:28]
B
No, I didn't say we're disembodied. I said we are embodied subjects. Which is not to say we're disembodied subjects. I don't think I'm a ghost.
- [58:38]
D
Although.
- [58:38]
B
I'd be frightened of myself.
- [58:41]
C
The thoughts are not part of your body. The talk of body is to talk in abstraction of whatever part of you could be weighed, measured and put in a coffin. You think. Suppose we have Einstein. He's actually thinking the thoughts that he thinks would not be possible if you didn't have a body and a brain. But that's just like having legs to walk with. The thoughts themselves are not part of the body and you don't think they are. I know you're recognizing stabs of somebody who, as it were, goes like that and says, that's my body and that's all there is. Well, it isn't all there is. Your friends would not be at all satisfied if only that were brought in the coffin tomorrow. What they want when they expect to see you is to see you talking and behaving in a manner which shows your thoughts and your thoughts are not physical. The physical is an abstraction from this complicated person. I don't know how to get this point across, Ray.
- [59:53]
B
We'll have to hand over to John. It's a difficult job, this one.
- [59:56]
D
Well, I think we passed a bit quickly over raised suggestion that we are storytelling animals. Did you put it like that? We're narrating animals.
- [60:04]
B
Amongst other things.
- [60:05]
D
Amongst other things. And I think that maybe that's actually a more useful word than the word.
- [60:09]
C
Imagination.
- [60:12]
D
Narration or interpretation. The way that our body enters into our experience of the world is not causes in the body and effects in the world. I mean, the body is a locus of Meaning the surface of your body, which touch things and hold things, are engaged in an act of interpretation or perhaps an act of narration. And what a better way of thinking of our relations to our bodies is not to think that our bodies. That we are helpless puppets of our bodies, but that our life, to live a life, is to tell yourself stories about yourself. And that self is an embodied self. And it's one that, you know, feels bloody ill at the moment or something. But the fact that it feels ill is not. That's part of my story about why I'm losing the plant.
- [61:13]
B
The story is very important here because stories actually have temporal depth. There is no tense in the material world. If you were just a body, you would be tenseless, just like all the other rest of the material world, like a pebble. The fact that you are actually a tensed being who reaches forward into a future, root into a past. Not merely your own past and your own future. It's a shared past and a shared future.
- [61:39]
D
That is an acquired capacity at a certain point in life.
- [61:43]
B
Yep. Never mind. But we acquired.
- [61:45]
D
It's not fundamental. It's an acquired.
- [61:48]
B
I mean, we were organisms when we were in deutero. And we were organisms basically as we perish. But between this little arc in which we are embodied subjects, which is something a little bit different from an organism.
- [62:00]
A
Okay, I think there was a question.
- [62:01]
B
Which is not a criticism of your organism, by the way. It's a fine organism, I can see from this distance.
- [62:11]
D
I've got a quick question, but I just wanted to say first that I read a review of a book quite recently. It sounded a lot like the project you were talking about where someone studied the history of how novelist approached the subjective view, which I think was Frederic Jameson, his latest book. So I haven't read it, but it sounded a lot like what you were talking about. You're not audible. Am I not? It sounds very loud back here. Read Frederick Jameson's latest book. It sounds a lot like what you were interested in. My question is about the unconscious, which seems something I read recently was Daniel Dennett's review of Sam Harris latest book. And kind of got on the subject of free will and seems like a lot of the battleground there on that subject is very similar to where the debates occur on this one. When people criticize the concept of the self. On the scientific side, it's all about how we're unaware of things, therefore they're nothing to do with us, therefore they don't exist. On the other side of the unconscious, it seems that the only other concepts available are Freudian, Jungian ones. But there's a lot of sort of muddy waters there where one side says if it's unconscious, it's not you. The other side says, well, maybe we don't know. There's different ways of looking at it, but it's not often brought up to be what it is, I think, which is the main thing that's being argued about. So I don't know if you had anything to say about that.
- [63:38]
B
Is it worth a pick up? I mean, it's a very rich question you've asked, but pick up one strand the elephant dropping in the room, as it were, which is basically the notion one of the key things about being a self is that you're an agent. That in a sense, to some extent you're shelf shaping the narrative. You don't merely record the narrative of your life. You're not a spectator, you're not a merely sight of happenings. You are a shaper of your life to some extent you're a prisoner of your previous choices, but nonetheless you're a shaper of your life. And there has been claims that contemporary neuroscience shows that you don't really shape your life, that an awful lot of things happen in the brain long before you're aware of them, of your intentions. And I'd just like to take one example of that so we can just finally boot it into the stratosphere, which is Libert experiments. I mean, is everybody familiar with Libert experiments? Will they die of boredom if I just very briefly talk about them?
- [64:35]
D
Is that all right?
- [64:37]
B
Yes. The dying boredom? No, to yes. Should I say a little bit about them? Basically on these experiments has been described by various people as metaphysically of huge importance. What Libert did was he asked some subjects to essentially at their own time, bend their finger. What he noticed was that there was neural activity in the appropriate part of the brain at least a third of a second before people are aware of the intention to bend their finger. Shock, horror probe. But worse than that, John Dillon Hayes more recently did some studies in which people are asked to choose to either move their right hand or their left hand, right hand or left hand. And the neuroscientist, peering at the brain scans could see whether the person was going to move their right hand or the left hand by appropriate activity in the relevant hemisphere. So as if the brain knew at least seven seconds in advance of what you're going to do, what you're going to do. And I have to say, well, come on back, hold back A minute. Let's think about the person who got involved in the experiment. In order to get involved in the experiment, they actually had to come to the laboratory, they had to park the car, they had to negotiate a very irritating man with a peaked cap turn, they couldn't park the car, they had to make arrangements for their children to be looked after while they came to the experiment. They joined the experiment because they thought Dr. Libert or Dr. Dylan Hayes was a neuroscientist who's perhaps going to advance neuroscience and he might even help my child, who's got brain injuries, to get better. So you can see the whole frame of reference or framework of that little movement moving your arm up and down isn't the few seconds before it or after it. It's the whole person who's got engaged in this rather difficult experience experiment and who understands the experiment, knows that it's safe, is willing to obey Dr. Libet and so on. So these are the kinds of experiments that have led some people to think that neuroscience has demonstrated we don't have free will. Well, all I can say is it's clearly not the case. We don't have free will over little movements. When I walk into the pub, I freely walk into the publisher, but I'm not forming and unforming the cross bridges in my muscles as I go to the dog and duck.
- [67:03]
C
Yes, it's very important, isn't it, that these are not choices, so to speak. I mean, the whole point about free will is that serious choices are made by us actively. There is no serious choice involved in when you move your hand about. It's quite off. The whole subject matter of ordinary use of the word pre roll, which is about effort. Let's look at a different situation. Einstein has some calculations to make. Now suppose he'd been told your brain cells will do that. He could just go away and leave them to do it, rather than he goes through a lot of painful work and you see then a very interesting thing happens which I cannot get those engaged in this matter to attend to. If he does some different thinking and ends up with a different conclusion, it will be true, won't it, that his brain cells are in a different arrangement by the time he's finished. He has affected this physical phenomenon by thinking, which he need not have done. This is a quite contrary situation, you see, to the one which is always being assumed that the physical matter does it all first and everything else follows from that. And there have actually been a lot of experiments about things called biofeedback in which people by thinking alter their temperature or their blood pressure or what is these things. And I keep reading a new scientist about some machine or other which to help unfortunate people has a prosthetic machine has been arranged so that by thinking they can make it move. Now this is the order of events which is left out entirely by this kind of talk. And I wish to repeat that the concept of free will operates in that sort of area. That it has always been about making serious choices deliberately not about moving your finger or not.
- [69:19]
B
And in a way that relates to the fact that a free action is one that's part of a whole field of freedom. So my coming to this meeting tonight relates to an awful lot about me, you know, interested in philosophy, very flattered to be invited. All of those things which clearly couldn't be broken down into individual movements. People sometimes say, well you know Einstein, it was only when he was dozing off that he really understood. He Suddenly occurred to E mc2 when I doze off, nothing happens to me. And the reason why his unconscious is so fertile is because his conscience has been so busy for so many years. There's a famous story of Poincare he was trying to work out, I don't know, some non euclidean geometry and he got stuck. And it was only when he was getting onto a bus suddenly it occurred to him everybody says, you see, it's all about the unconscious. No it isn't. It's about a highly quality a consciousness that's a very high quality that's able to take advantage of unconscious moments. I'd like to come back to. I thank you for the idea of.
- [70:29]
D
The self and all its. And the family of related concepts, personality, unconsciousness and so on.
- [70:37]
B
And I'm thinking of Frederick Myers book.
- [70:39]
D
Human Personality and its Survival and its survival. He believed in the survival of something of us after death. Do you have a view based on your understanding of all these concepts of self consciousness and everything.
- [70:56]
B
Whether it is.
- [70:58]
D
Considered whatever you personally believe in as being likely.
- [71:05]
B
Is it if you were.
- [71:07]
D
To discover after you died that there was some part of you that had survived, what could that have been? Because you've emphasized that mind and body are all, we are embodied, etc etc the whole person. So is it conceivable in your view that any part of us might survive bodily death?
- [71:31]
C
I don't know. I don't know. But I do think one should recognize that the human race as a whole has been able to entertain this idea. Now it doesn't seem to me terribly likely that the human race is as a whole has entertained an idea which is really senseless, but I have no strong views. What I think we can't do is to use this in this life, so to speak. I mean, when we're talking about all these problems, we're talking about us as we are here and now, and the speculations about the future and genuine religious facts so are a bit extra to that.
- [72:16]
D
It seems to me that arguments against religion have got far too hung up on the question of the existence or non existence of God. It seems to me that what a lot of people take from religion is the comforting thought of survival, of bodily death. And I am pretty confident that it is, it is complete nonsense, that idea. I mean, you can envisage it. Swedenborg envisaged at these nice little cottages which he would go to at night in heaven and visit his mother. And you know, you just start thinking, well, I mean, for one thing there is the in principle argument. How would I know that this disembodied spirit is the same spirit that used to inhabit my mother's body? Which I think is, I think there, you know, the Lockean argument about personal identity becomes incredibly powerful. But there's also, just imagine it. I mean, you think, oh, it would be so nice to be with your loved ones. And then you think, but they're going to be with their loved ones too and there are going to be thousands of millions of them in this little.
- [73:22]
B
Sweet and bawdy village.
- [73:23]
D
And I think the more you actually try and imagine it, the less sensitive makes, I mean, I think the idea of non individual survival of death in the form of your thoughts. Continuing, I was reading a very moving book, Autobiography of Benedetta Croce, who says that the real who was an Italian philosopher and that as far as he was concerned, the unit of philosophical work that he was concerned with was the philosophical lifetime that he was going to spend all his life basically trying to figure out the things that struck him as paradoxical. And he knew he'd never solved them, but he hoped that somehow through his teaching, through his writing, through chatting to people on the street, he might make things a little bit clearer in future than they were in the past. And that seems to me to be a form of immortality that it's perfectly sensible to long for. But I really do find the idea of disembodied souls in another place utterly incredible.
- [74:36]
B
And I think it's partly because I have a sense of ourselves as embodied subjects. And if you disembodied me, what would I have to do? What job would there be for me? What location would I have? And given that space and time are inseparable, what location would I have in time? And supposing I was to meet my nearest and dearest, how old are they going to be? Because they want to meet their nearest and dearest. My mother might want to meet her grandmother. So we're all going to be a bit awkward when it comes to sort of who calls the shots on how old everybody's going to be. There is quite a serious problem of that. And I feel, on the other hand, the idea of an afterlife where you're remembered is a bit tricky as well. People say. Tallis. Was he a kidney specialist? No, no. Oh, he was the drunk we saw. No, no, he wasn't. No, he wasn't.
- [75:21]
C
Him. Talis.
- [75:22]
B
And when you think how we do remember people, you know, I think of RS Thomas recently, you know, the great poet. He's. He's unwittingly advertising crisps. I mean, can you imagine That's. Yeah, they're using him, using his scowl to show why people don't like Tyrrell's Crisps or don't like the alternative Tyrrell's Crisps. So, in a sense, the idea that you'll join the choir, mortal, you know, the choir of the water dead who live on by what they've done to make our lives better. I think one will end up as part of the long noise that gradually fades away in a period of time that's neither long nor short, because once you're dead, there's neither a long time nor a short time. You know, what's immortality for 9,000 years compared with 2,000 years? There's no difference. My 20 minutes, you know, will match up to Shakespeare's 90,000 years. So I actually find even this side of the grave, immortality a bit of a tricky one. And you can see I pondered it a lot.
- [76:22]
A
Thank you. I think we're both fortunate here because we've got. I'm just reading your bios on my phone. My got historian, philosopher and professor of geriatric medicine. So I'm sure you can all answer this from different perspectives.
- [76:39]
C
I'm wondering.
- [76:40]
A
I have to come clean, actually. I am a neuroscientist myself as well.
- [76:43]
B
Shh.
- [76:46]
A
And I work with people with dementia, so obviously losing their abilities. And you're talking about free will and the unconscious and the embodied self. And I'm wondering if this actually does apply to people like this, especially when you hear some relatives saying, that's not my mother. That's A completely different person. And I wondered if you could actually kind of maybe speak to the idea that maybe sometimes these people are just the meat, I'm afraid, because they can do all the kind of normal kind of function things, but they may not be able to relate to people.
- [77:25]
B
I didn't hear it, I think, essentially. And thank you for your nice comments about us. Essentially, the latest book deals with people who have dementia. And although we have very much talked about, as it were, the transcendence of the self over the body, there are certain situations where as the body deteriorates, you become, unfortunately you act out the deterioration of your body. I mean, I've thought a lot about the dementia and it seems to me that it illustrates that the brain, normal brain function, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of ordinary life. One of the most poignant and difficult aspects for me of dementia is when you can be described as having ceased to be a person. And one of the most harrowing aspects of dementia is the way people lose aspects of personhood in part and retain other aspects of personhood to the very, very end. And I feel that dementia is one of those most unredeemably terrible situations. And by the way, neuroscientists are fine. It's neuroscientists who want to be metaphysicians that I have problems with. On exactly that subject, whether neuroscience.
- [78:45]
C
On exactly that subject of whether neuroscience.
- [78:48]
B
Or neuroscientist can say anything about the metaphysical world. I'm thinking of One particular neuroscientist, Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor, who wrote a book about her experience of a severe left hemisphere stroke which essentially disembodied her completely. She lost all sense of her body, space, time, and entered what she thought of as nirvana that was quite obviously caused by neural changes.
- [79:27]
C
So does that not suggest, does her.
- [79:28]
B
Experience not suggest that there is something to neural activity? Is having something metaphysical or speaking to.
- [79:38]
C
Metaphysics and the idea of the soul.
- [79:42]
B
I mean, to me, sorry about fellow panelists, but it seems, it just underlines that the brain is necessary but not a sufficient condition of our consciousness. You chop my head off, my IQ falls quite precipitously. It doesn't mean to say my IQ is to be understood as some interferable phenomenon. If you bang me over the head, I lose consciousness in all of those things. I'm very aware of the vulnerability of our normal personhood to damage to our body, particularly to our brain. But it doesn't mean to say we are identical with brain activity. And what is the danger? Why is it such A dangerous idea. A, because it's boring. B, because it's wrong. Exactly.
- [80:24]
C
I don't think you're boring.
- [80:27]
B
But maybe.
- [80:27]
D
See, and I have had no experience of transplants with dementia, but you hear stories about how people seem to be hopelessly lost to the world, and then you take them out into the sunshine and they say, what a wonderful day. You hear stories about people who are severely suffering from severe dementia, but nevertheless are able to occasionally, as their friends would say, their old self would be back, their old smile, their old attitude to the garden or something. And so in that respect, I think just letting a discourse about the dysfunctional brain take over at a certain point in the progress after a dementia diagnosis must be mistaken. I mean, as I say, I have no experience with this, but I think someone sitting next to me does.
- [81:22]
A
Okay, I think we have time for one final question. Hi, thank you very much for speaking, but I wanted to know. You seem to. This is for Raymond Tallis. You seem to equate a sense of self with self awareness and being awake. But how do you speak for people who perhaps are not aware of a continuum in their life? Maybe they do not remember stealing apples. They are not aware enough to steal those apples to understand that they are the ones doing so. So how do you kind of account for having a self if you are not self aware?
- [82:18]
B
Shall I kick off? I think I've talked too much. One of my fellow panellists. This is a question of how the lady was saying that I seem to equate, as it were, selfhood with the continual self aware self. So how can one's notion of selfhood survive the fact that we are often as sleep and so on and so forth. That was the burden of your question.
- [82:41]
A
Not just asleep, but also different stages of consciousness.
- [82:47]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:48]
C
Well, I pointed out earlier that a person can shoot themselves. And when they do that, what they shoot is not their inner secret personality or they can look at themselves in the mirror. The self is. This is naturally a term used for the whole being, the whole person. And it's very important not to go splitting the person up as if they were made in the factory from a lot of different components. They're not. A person is basically a unity. The unity can be messed up. If the person becomes ill. Bits of them do nothing work any longer. But there is, it seems to be no problem in the ordinary way about saying that your body is an aspect of yourself.
- [83:41]
B
I mean, I think it's a very good question. It's one that preoccupied me enormously when I was a teenager. And actually, in a lot of Sartre's early novels, people are completely obsessed by the desire for continuity of consciousness. And there's a bit in, I think, the Reprieve, where Jack, whose name I've forgotten, sees somebody opposite him in a train, just like that. And this horrifies him, the idea we can be so passive, so empty of ourselves in normal daylight. And it is something that I think one can be seriously anxious about, that you have periods when you are. You vacate yourself. I mean, I'll do it every night. I mean, supposing I told you I had a disease that consisted of loss of self for eight hours a day, every day. You think, God, I hope it's not infectious. But in fact, of course, once more, it's full of hallucinations, you know, God, the poor bloody sod, you know, must find a cure for this. But of course, it's our natural condition and we do fluctuate. Paul. Valerie is various in that I don't know whether you're familiar with the great French thinker and poetry, but he has a marvelous essay called An Evening With Monsieur Teste. And Monsieur Test is determined to remain continuously conscious. And it ends up with Monsieur Test drifting off, trying to pay attention to the very process of falling asleep so he doesn't lose himself. And that kind of anguish is something I sort of deeply sympathise with, but it doesn't undermine the continuity itself. When I wake up the following morning having had a sleep, I don't think that's all my sins forgiven.
- [85:22]
A
Unfortunately, we have run out of time. I'd like to thank you all for coming. Speakers will be signing books in the foyer, so do come and join us. And there's also a drinks reception for you out there. I'd like you to join me in again thanking Jonathan Ray, Raymond Tallis and Mary Midgley.