Narrative selves
From MindHacks — Philosophy Now has an article on how the self might be based on our ability to create narratives. The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre […]
From MindHacks — Philosophy Now has an article on how the self might be based on our ability to create narratives. The article looks at how the self has been related to our ability to make narratives out of the disconnected events in our lives, and particularly focuses on the theories of philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur.
From the article:
Don Quixote and The Narrative Self
Stefán Snaevarr asks, are our identities created by narratives?
Once upon a time a philosopher wrote an article called ‘Don Quixote and The Narrative Self’. He commenced by saying: In this essay, I will discuss the question of whether our selves are constituted by narratives, ie stories. Are we like Don Quixote, whose self was created by his reading of medieval romances: are we Homo quixotienses, the narrative self? Or are we rather like the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Antonin Roquentin, whose life did not form any narrative unity? Are we in other words rather Homo roquentinenses?
The idea that our life is a story is by no means new. Thus the great bard Shakespeare said that life “…is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth) However, it took philosophers some time to discover the philosophical import of this view of life. It was actually a German chap called William Schapp who first gave this age-old idea a philosophical twist. He maintained that we live our lives in a host of stories, which have connection with the stories of other people in various ways; so actually, our selves are nothing but cross-sections of stories. Our identities are created by a vast web of stories, as is our relationship with reality. We understand and identify things by placing them in the stories we tell about them: just like selves, things do not really exist outside of stories. We are caught in this narrative web because we cannot exist outside of it. There is a world-wide web of stories: the world is that web.
(…) Full story at Philosophy Now
I would say that William Schapp is spot-on. Our somewhat vague conscious selves are clearly a mental construct taking the form of a verbal narrative, subject to exageration, delusion, deception… and pathological fragmentation, as well as dissolution (e.g. Alzheimer’s).
As prescient as Shakespeare’s sarcastic insight, it is a bit too dramtaic and negative. It seems that the human capacity for language and meta-cognition which emerged from our neural network, and gave rise to the narrative self. However, Shakespeare was right in the sense that at revealing moments, we feel or glimpse ourselves as though caught in a play… those interconnected “stories”… and indeed, we are.
That “glimpse” is consciousness coming to grips with the deterministic and inexorable “unfolding” of spacetime, eh?
This view also tells us something about QM “collapse”. When does collapse occur? When one of the alternatives is incorporated into a narrative. Consider Schrödinger’s Cat: when someone opens the box, they incorporate either “cat alive” or “cat dead” into their narrative. But what about me? I haven’t seen the cat, so its two states are still superimposed in my narrative of physics. If the person who opened the box tells me the cat is dead and I believe him, the states “collapse” upon my incorporation of that report into my narrative. Write it in a scientific journal and states collapse for those who read and accept the report. And on and on. The immense philosophical and conceptual confusion around quantum collapse come from the misconception of a single shared reality that we all have immediate access to. But whatever reality is, we don’t share it in that immediate way — we are all late comers, to varying degrees, to reality, and we all have narratives that lag behind and are incomplete and in many ways just plain wrong. Einstein made a breakthrough in his treatment of simultaneity, but the full scope of the importance of point of reference in our understanding of the physical world has not been appreciated. It’s not just that we stand in different places, but that we have different brains each of which contains a somewhat different narrative.