- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
One problem, claims Dennett, is our tendency to think about selves as all or
none, existent or non-existent. But just as we can be comfortable with fuzzy
boundaries between species (cabbages and Brussels sprouts?), or between liv-
ing and non-living (viruses?), so we should be with selves. They are biological
products like spider’s webs or bowerbird’s bowers. They appeared gradually
during evolution, and they are built gradually in each of our lives. Every indi-
vidual Homo sapiens makes its own self, spinning a web out of words and deeds
to build a protective string of narrative. Like spiders and bowerbirds, it doesn’t
have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. The result is a web of discourses,
without which an individual human being is as incomplete as a bird without
feathers or a turtle without its shell.
But perhaps it is wrong to say that ‘we’ build the narrative. We humans are
embedded in a world of words, a world of memes that are apt to take over,
creating us as they go (Chapter 11). As Dennett puts it, ‘Our tales are spun, but
for the most part we don’t spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness,
and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source’ (1991, p. 418). This
echoes the causal reversal we have seen proposed in several other theories –
and this is where the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ comes in. When we speak, we
speak as if the words come from a single source. They may be spoken by a single
mouth, or written by a single hand, but there is no single centre in the brain
(or mind, or anywhere else) from which they come. Yet we end up speaking as
though there is. Who owns your car? You do. Who owns your clothes? You do.
Who owns your body? You do. When we say ‘This is my body’, we do not mean
the same as ‘This body owns itself ’. Thus, our language leads us into speaking
and thinking as if there is someone inside: the audience in the Cartesian theatre,
the ‘central meaner’, or the inner agent. This self may be an abstraction, but,
like the physicists’ centre of gravity, it is a wonderfully simplifying and useful
abstraction. This is why we have it.
For Dennett, multiple personality seems strange only because we falsely think
that selves are all-or-none and must exist one to a body. Abandoning this idea
allows us to accept fragmentary selves, partial narratives, and multiple selves that
are just as real as the more common one-to-a-body type (Humphrey and Den-
nett, 1989). There might even be fewer than one self to a body, as in the case of
the twins Greta and Freda Chaplin, who seemed to act as one, and speak together
or in alternation.
Like Parfit, Dennett rejects the idea that in split-brain cases there must be some
countable number of selves, but he goes further. ‘So what is it like to be the right
hemisphere self in a split brain patient?’, or as Koch (2004) asked, ‘How does it feel
to be the mute hemisphere?’ This, he says, is a most natural question, conjuring
up a terrifying image of a self desperate to get out, but unable to speak. But this is
a fantasy. The operation doesn’t leave an organisation robust enough to support
a separate centre of narrative gravity. The most it leaves is the capacity, under
special laboratory conditions, to give split responses to particular predicaments,
temporarily creating a second centre of narrative gravity. That this self could have
gaps should come as no surprise. As Dennett has it, both self and consciousness
may appear to be continuous but are in fact thoroughly gappy. They can lapse
‘into nothingness as easily as a candle flame is snuffed, only to be rekindled at
some later time’ (1991, p. 423).
‘Our tales are spun, but
for the most part we
don’t spin them; they
spin us.’
(Dennett, 1991, p. 418)