The Boundaries of Self-Knowledge

Without presuming to know the consciousness of another human, it occurs to me that a lot of people must engage in regular self-examination. I have no way of knowing, of course, whether all humans think about their own lives. There may be people to whom introspection is alien or irrelevant. Perhaps many people think of looking at your own life as narcissism or self-absorption, and in some cases they might be right. I don’t see it in such well-defined terms. I don’t normally plan to sit down and think about the road from earliest childhood to where I am now. It doesn’t happen in such a neat, easily summed up chronologically ordered manner. Often times I am engaged in a task that, without my realizing it at first, has summoned into my conscious attention some image, some feeling, some moment, some episode from my personal past. The power of mental association is so great that I have been reminded on more occasions than I could possibly count of events or impressions from my own life triggered by some seemingly unrelated event or impression in the present moment. I suspect that this sensation is as close to universal as any human mental event can be. It is these random associations that quite often get me thinking about the story of my life itself. Where do these sketchy images come from? How can it be that intense emotional feeling can be set off by brief pieces of music, fleeting glimpses of objects, familiar but long forgotten smells, or even a situation that reminds one of another, analogous situation from decades before? 

The tangle of events, reactions to events, motivation, action, feeling, thought, belief, impression, interpretation of the world, and self-evaluation that I have experienced is so thick and overgrown that I can do no better than guess about its impact on the self I possess at the present moment. As I have said before, I am not entirely sure if the term self has any real validity as a descriptor. It’s not exactly as if I can’t tell you about my own life (although I rather doubt you’d be interested in my biography). It’s just that a huge mass of details about it are either lost in the recesses of what some might call the unconscious, or lost to my brain forever. Even allowing that many of these details are too minor to have had an effect on me, I have to think it probable that at least some of these lost details have had an impact. Therefore, I have to say that I don’t fully understand how I have come to be the individual I am in the present moment. The definition seems to depend on information that I just don’t have any more. It also seems to me that the self (if it exists) is so fluid, so constantly evolving, that attempting to grasp it or define it seems like an exercise in futility. I understand myself in part. I don’t think I will ever understand myself in whole. Such an understanding may be impossible.

Because of these ideas, I concluded a long time ago that I was an exceedingly complicated person. What is, in a way I can’t quite express, disquieting to me is the hypothesis I have formed about humans in general: that everyone is as complicated, in varying ways, of course, as I am. It may strike you as arrogant or presumptuous on my part, but I further suspect that no one really, fully, completely, comprehensively understands themself, and as I said in the prologue to this work, it does not matter if they think they do. The human world, in short, appears to be populated by people who find their own nature to be elusive and ultimately mysterious. It is this hypothesis that has given rise to all of my subsequent thought on the nature of human history.

To expand on what I said above, I have a sensation that seems to strike in the quiet, unremarkable moments of my life, insinuating itself into my thinking when I least expect it. It is, for a lack of a better expression, a sense of the strangeness of human existence, the feeling of being mystified by the very nature of experience itself. It is an elusive sensation, one for which I can’t quite find the words. But a deep truth seems to be apparent in those moments: I don’t really understand what’s going on, I don’t understand reality itself. I suspect that many, if not most, of my fellow humans have had or will have such moments, perhaps repeatedly. It is this feeling that I believe to be at the heart of our dilemma as both individuals and as a species, and I believe it is at the core of our incredibly convoluted history. I have come to a conclusion that many would find disquieting: the human race does not know where it’s going because it doesn’t understand where it is. The human situation is too complex for humans to understand it. Moreover, it always has been, and probably always will be. That means that all of our attempts to explain the nature of human existence will fall short. It means that, ultimately, all of our philosophy and all of our science will prove insufficient to the task of explaining the world.

 “You don’t know what it’s like” is an extremely deep insight, even though the phrase is commonplace. None of us knows what the internal experience of another human is like. We can only infer that experience on the basis of our own. But in another sense, we don’t even know what our own experience “is like”, at least not completely. We very often react to events in thoroughly unexpected ways. Do we even know ourselves?

A Massive Tangle of Reactions and Motives

In relation to our brief look at the boundaries of self-knowledge, a major part of the difficulty we have in understanding our ever-changing selves is that our actions often spring from motives that are hard to comprehend, as we have seen from our examination of the unconscious. Granted, there are motives which are plainly linked to basic physical needs such as the satisfaction of hunger and thirst, or the cessation or avoidance of physical suffering. But our behavior is often the result of chains of reaction which stem back to a time prior to our conscious memories. There may be emotional memories, not visual or auditory ones, that even stretch back to early infancy, although the evidence for this is not definitive. Once we were born into the world, events occurred to us that caused involuntary reactions. These reactions in turn affected the way we would react to other, similar (but never identical) subsequent events. We in turn acted, and elicited reactions in others that taught us (or so we supposed) what actions could or could not be taken safely or which actions were effective. I call these reactions to reactions to reactions.

In my view, understanding the concept of reactions to reactions is crucial to our understanding of human behavior itself. Human thought tends to be tangential. The chains of association tangential human thought make cause reactions to cascade forward in unexpected directions. Most importantly, it would appear that this tangential line of thinking (or reacting) is mostly hidden from us, acting at the unconscious level. This is what creates the sense of mystery in it.

My hypothesis (and it is no more than that) is that the way in which we react to an intense experience, or else an experience which has been repeated enough times, forms particular kinds of neural configurations and firing patterns. These configurations and patterns are brought into play when an experience of a similar nature is perceived. The interconnected neural networks affect these perceptions, and in turn are affected by them in a reciprocal manner. When something happens to us, or if we perceive something, it elicits in us an emotional response, whether we are consciously aware of it, or not. That response helps form the basis of our response the next time we perceive or experience an event. In short, every reaction to a circumstance we have experienced establishes the base or foundation for the next time we react to a similar circumstance. A pattern is established. A behavioral precedent has been set.

In my view there are conditioned response-like reactions; “predictable” reactions; unexpected reactions perhaps caused by altered chemical states, unusual neurotransmitter patterns, or the coming together of various other reactions to create a synthesis of reactions. Complex interactions with other people can complicate the issue, including our sense of how others are reacting to us.

Reactions are imbued with layers of often fluid emotion. Reactions themselves are like emotional canvases that change color in unexpected ways as the days pass, and as we look back on them with our very limited and imperfect judgment.

Our reactions, while real, may be inappropriate. We may, emotionally, be “fighting the last war”. Sometimes people overreact or react in ways that deeply offend others. These mistaken or exaggerated reactions have been at the root of many human conflicts, both interpersonal and international.

We are the sum of all the reactions we have ever had. Some we are conscious of, many we are not. Most we have forgotten. But they form the emotional basis of our response to the world.

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Bearing in mind the significance of our personal chains of reaction, what else can we say about human motivation here?

Whenever we acted in life, sometimes we simply acted out of pure impulsiveness or basic physical needs, but what was occurring was the build-up of neurons in the brain associated with action and the perception of its effects and consequences. As children, we often ran into situations in which our desires were in conflict, or in which we lacked the background necessary for understanding. We were often baffled or confused by the world around us, and sometimes we literally did not know how to be—how to feel, how to react, what to do, what to say, what move to make next. Our emotions often were troubling to us, and since problems of being and feeling cut so deeply, our natural tendency was to try to ameliorate them by trying to figure out what the rules of life itself were. Many of our motives in later life, it seems to me, are the ghosts of childhood attempts to comprehend the world. It should be added that preferences established in childhood are often surprisingly persistent, and our motives may be influenced by them to a degree we do not suspect.

Further, motives are affected by anatomical and physiological changes, our immersion in a culture that we more and more see as ours, the longer we live in it, and the host of learned behaviors and attitudes bequeathed by that culture. Motives are affected by the internalization [internalization: the establishment of neural pathways specific to learning] of roles and the sense of one’s self in relation to other selves that tends to become more complex as we grow older. Motives may involve the desire to ingratiate ourselves with others in order to secure advantage or comfort, or the desire to help someone with whom we identify and with whom we have become emotionally involved. Motives may also be tied to the resolution of personal issues that cause us internal suffering or other intense sensations—the desire to avenge an old wrong, the determination to accomplish an elusive goal, the need to simply be heard and understood, the need to be accepted, and many others, all in unique combinations that are dependent on a host of physical states of being a human may be going through at any given moment.

For example, it may be said that a man’s sexual motives are straightforward—the pleasure and physical release of sexual contact. But as we have already seen, there is so much more to it than that. Males may be motivated by a combination of factors—raw desire, the need for personal validation, social expectations, status within an in-group, a sense of “conquest” or domination, the need for emotional bonding and the expression of deep affection, or, darkly, the desire to inflict humiliation and suffering. Combinations of these motives may be in play when a man is seeking a sexual partner.

There are also emotions and reactions which are both contradictory and consciously felt at the same time. The common phrase “mixed emotions” is an attempt to describe this. We may simultaneously celebrate a military victory and mourn the deaths that brought it about. We may, at the same time, exult in a new opportunity and be frightened at the daunting challenges that come with that opportunity. We might feel great affection for someone while harboring uneasiness about some of their behavior. And the list goes on. There is surprisingly little unambiguous feeling in us.

Further, there are times when we are required to weigh complex evidence, conflicting research results, conflicting opinions, abstruse findings. Many times in human life we face not just contradictory emotions but intellectual conflicts in which we are required to consider multiple possibilities at the same time, many in direct opposition to each other and yet all of them plausible. Those entrusted with making critical decisions understand this all too well. Sometimes the fiercest arguments we have are within our own brains.