The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity

Abstract

What is a self? I will try to answer this question by developing an analogy with something much simpler, something which is nowhere near as puzzling as a self, but has some properties in common with selves. What I have in mind is the center of gravity of an object. This is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like , a theorist's fiction. It is not one of the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics.

Full text

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Self and Consciousness:
Multiple Perspectives
1992
Edited
by
FRANK
S.
KESSEL
University
of
Houston
PAMELA M.
COLE
National Institutes
of
Health
and
DALE L. JOHNSON
University
of
Houston
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
Hillsdale, New Jersey Hove and London
6
The
Self
as
a Center 'of
Narrative Gravity
Daniel
C.
Dennett
Tufts
University
My
appointed task
is
to tie the pieces
of
this Symposium together! I will
try to do this
by
doing what only a philosopher would dare do: Tell
you
what a self
is.
I
will
do this
by
developing an analogy with something
much simpler. Before you can run, you must walk, so I want to remind
you
of
a different sort
of
object, which
is
nowhere near as puzzling as a
self, but has some properties
in
common with selves.
Centers
of
Gravity
What I have in mind
is
the center
of
gravity
of
an object This
is
a
well-behaved concept
in
Newtonian
physics.
But a center
of
gravity
is
not
an
atom
or
a subatomic particle
or
any other physical item
in
the
world.
It
has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties
at
all, except for spatio-temporal location.
It
is
a fine example
of
what
Hans Reichenbach would call an
abstractum.
It
is
a purely abstract
object
It
is,
if you like, a theorist's fiction.
It
is
not one
of
the real
things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it
is
a fiction that
has a nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within
physics.
Let me remind you how robust and familiar the idea
of
a center
of
gravity
is.
In front
of
me
there
is
a lectern, and it has a center
of
gravity.
If
I start tipping
it,
you can all tell more
or
less accurately whether it
is
going to start to
faU
over or whether
it
would
faU
back in place
if
I let
go
of
it
We are quite good
at
making predictions involving centers of
gravity and devising explanations about when and
why
things fall over.
1.
This edited version of
my
summary remarks
at
the Houston Symposium draws fairly
heavily, and without specific citation, from several papers
of
mine, in which the topics
discussed here are developed
in
more detail; these papers
are
listed
In
the references. A
version of this chapter, under the title
"Why
Everyone
I,
a Novelist,· appeared in The
TImes
literary
Supplement,
Sepl
16-22, 1988.
T1.S
has given permission (or publication
here.
103

104
DENNETT
Here on the lectern
is
a pitcher
of
water. It, too, has a center
of
gravity.
If
I start
to
push it over the edge
of
the lectern,
we
know that at some
point it
will
fall.
It
will
fall
when the center
of
gravity
is
no longer
directly over any point
of
the supported base. Notice that that statement
is
itself virtually tautological. The
key
terms
in
it are all interdefmable.
And yet, it can also figure
in
explanations that appear
to
be causal
explanations
of
some
sort
We ask,
"Why
doesn't that lamp tip over?"
We
reply, "Because
its
center
of
gravity
is
so
low."
Is
this a causal
explanation?
It
can compete with explanations that are clearly causal,
such
as:
"Because it's nailed to the table," and "Because it's supported
by
wires."
We can manipulate centers
of
gravity. For instance, I change the
center
of
gravity
of
this water pitcher easily,
by
pouring some water into
the
glass.
So,
although a center
of
gravity
is
a purely abstract object, it
has a spatio-temporal career, which I can affect
by
my
actions.
It
has a
history, but
its
history can include some rather strange episodes.
Although it moves around
in
space and time,
its
motion can be
discontinous. For instance, if I were to take a piece
of
bubble
gum
and
suddenly stick it on the pitcher's handle, that would shift the pitcher's
center
of
gravity from point A to point
B.
But the center
of
gravity
would not have to move through all
of
the intervening positions. As an
abstractum, it
is
not bound
by
all the constraints
of
physical travel.
Consider the center
of
gravity
of
a slightly more complicated object
Suppose
we
wanted to keep track
of
the career
of
the center
of
gravity
of
some complex machine with lots
of
turning gears and camshafts and
reciprocating rods--the engine
of
a steam-powered unicycle, perhaps.
And suppose our theory
of
the machine's operation permitted
us
to plot
the complicated trajectory
of
the center
of
gravity very precisely. And
suppose--most improbably--that
we
discovered that
in
this particular
machine the trajectory of the center
of
gravity
was
precisely the same as
the trajectory
of
a particular iron atom
in
the crankshaft. Even if this
were discovered,
we
would be wrong even to entertain the hypothesis
that the machine's center of gravity
was
(identical with) that iron atom.
That would be a category mistake. A center
of
gravity
is
just an
abstractum.
It
is
just a fictional Object But when I say it
is
a fictional
object, I do not mean
to
disparage
it;
it
is
a wonderful fictional object,
and it has a perfectly legitimate place within serious, sober, echt physical
science.
. J
THE
SELF
AND
NARRATIVE
GRAVITY
105
A self
is
an abstract object, a theorist's fiction. The theory
is
· not
particle
physics
but what
we
might call a a branch
of
people-physics; it
is
more soberly known as phenomenology
or
hermeneutics,
or
soul-science
(Geisleswissenschafl). The physicist does an interpretation, if you like, of
the lectern and
its
behavior, and comes up with the theoretical
abstraction
of
a center
of
gravity,
which
is
then very useful in
characterizing the behavior
of
the lectern in the future, under a wide
variety
of
conditions. The hermeneuticist,
or
phenomenologist-or
anthropologist-sees some rather more complicated things moving about
in the world-human beings and animals-and
is
faced with a similar
problem
of
interpretation.
It
turns out to be theoretically perspicuous to
organize the interpretation around a central abstraction: Each person has
a
self
(in addition to a center
of
gravity).z
In fact
we
have to posit selves
for ourselves as
well.
The theoretical problem
of
self-interpretation
is
at
least as difficult and important as the problem
of
other-interpretation.
Facts about Fictions
Now
how does a self differ from a center
of
gravity?
It
is
a much
more complicated concept I will try to elucidate it via an analogy with
another sort
of
fictional object: Fictional characters in literature. Pick up
Moby
Dick
and open it up to page one.
It
says,
"Call
me
Ishmael. W Call
whom Ishmael? Call Melville Ishmael?
No.
Call Ishmael Ishmael.
Melville has created a fictional character named Ishmael As you read
the book you learn all about Ishmael, about
his
life, about
his
beliefs
and desires,
his
attitudes. You learn a lot more about Ishmael than
Melville ever explicitly tells you. Some
of
it you can read in
by
implication. Some
of
it
you
can read in
by
extrapolation. But beyond
the limits
of
such extrapolation fictional worlds are simply indeterminate.
Thus, consider the
following
question, borrowed from David Lewis'
(1978) paper, "Truth and Fiction." Did Sherlock Holmes have three
nostrils? The answer,
of
course,
is
"No",
but not because Conan Doyle
ever
says
that he doesn't,
or
that he has
two,
but because
we
are entitled
to make that extrapolation;
in
the absence
of
evidence to the contrary,
Sherlock Holmes' nose can be supposed to be normal Another
question: Did Sherlock Holmes have a mole on
his
left shoulder blade?
The answer to this question
is
neither
yes
nor no. Nothing about the
2 Karl Popper (1957) makes a similar claim about other social-scientific constructs:
"
...
social entities such as institutions and associations are abstract models constructed to
interpret certain selected abstract between individuals." (p.140).

.
106
DENNETT
text
or
about the principles
of
extrapolation from the text permit an
answer to that question.
It
is
simply not answerable.
Why?
Because
Sherlock Holmes
is
a merely fictional character, created
by
or
constituted
out
of
text and the culture in
which
that text resides.
This indeterminacy
is
a fundamental property
of
fictional objects
which strongly distinguishes them from another sort
of
object scientists
talk about: Theoretical entities,
or
what Reichenbach calls illata--inferred
entities, such as atoms, molecules and neutrinos. A logician might say
that the "principle
of
bivalence" does not hold for fictional objects. That
is
to
say,
with regard to any actual man,
living
or
dead, the question
of
whether
or
not he has
or
had a mole on
his
left shoulder blade has an
answer,
yes
or
no. Did Aristotle have such a mole? There
is
a fact
of
the matter even
if
we
can never discover
it
But with regard to a
fictional character, that question
may
have no answer at all. There
may
be no fact
of
the matter one
way
or
the other.
We
can imagine someone, a benighted literary critic, perhaps, who
docs not understand that fiction
is
fiction. This critic has a strange
theory about
how
fiction works. He thinks that something literally
magical happens when a novelist writes a novel. When a novelist sets
down words on paper,
this
critic
says
(one often hears claims like this,
but not meant to be taken completely literally), the novelist actually
creates a world. A litmus test for this bizarre
view
is
bivalence: When
our imagined critic speaks
of
a fictional world he means a strange sort
of
real world, a world
in
which the principle
of
bivalence holds. Such a
critic might seriously wonder whether Dr. Watson
was
really Prof.
Moriarty's second cousin,
or
whether the conductor
of
the train that took
Holmes and Watson to A1dershot
was
also the conductor
of
the train
that brought them back to London. That sort
of
question cannot
properly arise
if
you
understand fiction correctly,
of
course. Whereas
analogous questions about historical personages have to have
yes
or
no
answers, even
if
we
may
never be able to dredge them up.
Centers
of
gravity, as fictional objects, exhibit the same feature.
They have only the properties with which they have been endowed
by
the theory that constitutes them.
If
you scratch your head and
say,
"I
wonder
if
maybe centers
of
gravity are really neutrinos," you have
misunderstood the theoretical status
of
a center
of
gravity.
THE
SELF
AND
NARRATIVE
GRAVIlY
107
Now,
how
can I make the claim that a self-your own real self, for
instance--is rather like a fictional character? Aren't all fictional selves
dependent for their very creation on the existence
of
real selves?
It
may
seem so, but I will argue that this
is
an illusion. Let
us
go back to
Ishmael. Ishmael
is
a fictional character, although
we
can certainly learn
all about
him.
One might
fmd
him in many regards more · real than
many
of
one's friends. But, one thinks, Ishmael
was
created by Melville,
and Melville
is
a real character-was a real character-a real self. Doesn't
this show that it takes a real self to create a fictional selfl I think not,
but
if
I am to convince you, I must push you through an exercise
of
the
imagination.
First of all, I want to imagine something some
of
you
may
think
incredible: A novel-writing machine.
We
can suppose it
is
a product
of
artificial intelligence research, a computer that has been designed
or
programmed to write novels. But it has not been desinged to write any
particular
noveL
You can suppose
(if
it helps) that it has been given a
great stock
of
whatever information it might need, and some partially
random and hence unpredictable
ways
of
starting the
seed
of
a story
going, and building upon
it
Now
the designers are sitting back,
wondering what kind of novel it
is
going to write. They tum the thing
on after a while the high speed printer begins to
go
clickety-clack, and
out comes the first sentence. "Call me Gilbert," it
says.
What
follows
is
the apparent autobiography
of
this fictional Gilbert
Now
Gilbert
is
a
fictional, created self but its creator
is
no self. Of course there were
human designers who designed the machine, but they did not design
Gilbert Gilbert
is
a product
of
a process in which there are no selves
at
all. That
is,
I am stipulating that this
is
not a conscious machine, not a
"thinker".
It
is
a dumb machine, but it does have the power to write a
passable novel.
(If
you
think this strictly impossible I can only challenge
you to show
why
you think this must be so, and invite you to read on;
in
the end you
may
not have an interest in defending such a precarious
impossibility claim.)
So
we
are to imagine that a passable story
is
emitted from the
machine. Notice that
we
can perform the same sort
of
literary exegesis
with regard to
this
novel as
we
can with any other. In fact
if
you were to
pick up a novel at random out
of
a hbrary, you could not tell with
certainty that it
was
not written
by
something like this machine. (And
if
you are a
New
Critic you should not care.) You have a text and you can
interpret it, and so you can learn the story, the life and adventures
of

108
DENNETT
Gilbert. Your expectations and predictions, as you read, and your
interpretive reconstruction
of
what you have already read, will congeal
around the central node of the fictional character, Gilbert.
Now
I want to twiddle the knobs on this thought experiment. So far
we
have imagined the novel, The Life and Times
of
Gilbert. clanking out
of a computer that
is
just a box, sitting in the comer
of
some lab. But I
now want to change the story a little and suppose that the computer has
arms and legs,
or
better: Wheels. (I don't want to make it too
anthropomorphic!) It has a television eye, and it moves around in the
world. It also begins its tale with "Call me Gilbert," and tells a novel.
But now
we
notice that if
we
do the trick that the
New
Critics say you
should never do, and look outside the text,
we
discover that there
is
a
truth-preserving interpretation
of
that text
in
the real world. The
adventures
of
Gilbert, the fictional character, now bear a striking and
presumably noncoincidental relationship to the adventures
of
this robot
rolling around
in
the world.
If
you hit the robot with a baseball bat, very
shortly thereafter the story of Gilbert includes being hit
by
a baseball bat
by
somebody who looks like
you.
Every now and then the robot gets
locked
in
the closet and then
says
"Help
me."
Help whom? Well, help
Gilbert, presumably. But who
is
Gilbert? Is Gilbert the robot,
or
merely
the fictional self created
by
the robot?
If
we
go
and help the robot out
of
the closet, it sends
us
a note: "Thank you. Love, GilberL"
At this point
we
will be unable to ignore the fact that the fictional
career
of
the fictional Gilbert bears an interesting resemblance to the
"career"
of
this mere robot moving through the world. We can still
maintain that the robot's brain, the robot's computer, really knows
nothing about the world; it
is
not a self. It's just a
c1anky
computer. It
doesn't know what it's doing. It doesn't even know that it's creating this
fictional character. (The same
is
just as true
of
your brain; it doesn't
know what it's doing either.) Nevertheless, the patterns
in
the behavior
that
is
being controlled
by
the computer are interpretable,
by
us,
as
accreting biography--telling the story (to use Keen's metaphor)--the
narrative
of
a self. But
we
are not the only interpreter.;. The robot
novelist
is
also,
of
course, an interpreter: A self-interpreter, providing its
own
account
of
its
activities
in
the world.
I propose that
we
take this analogy seriously; if
we
do, some
perplexities
we
have discussed here
at
the Symposium take on a rather
different
IighL
Neisser talks
of
several different selves: The ecological
THE
SELF
AND
NARRA11VE
GRAVITY
109
self, the extended self, the evaluating self. Is be multiplying entities
beyond necessity? "Where are these selves?" be asks rhetorically.
It
is
a
category mistake to start looking around for them in the brain. Unlike
centers
of
gravity, whose sole property
is
their spatio-temporal position,
selves have a spatio-temporal position that
is
only grossly defined.
Roughly speaking, one self
is
here
at
the lectern and another one
is
there in front
of
me, and another
on
its right, and so forth.
Or
we
might
use a rather antique tum
of
phrase and talk about how many souls are
on the left side
of
the room and how many
on
the right. ("All twenty
souls in the starboard lifeboat were saved, but those that remained on
deck perished.") Brain research-such as that
of
Gazzaniga-may permit
us
to make some more fine-grained localizations,
but
the capacity to
achieve some fine-grained localization does not
give
one grounds for
supposing that the process
of
localization can continue indefinitely and
that the day will
fmally
come when
we
can
say,
"That cell there, right in
the middle
of
the hippocampus (or whatever)-that's the self."
-There
is
a big difference,
of
course, between fictional characters
aDd
our selves. One I would stress
is
that a fictional character
is
usually
encountered as a
fait
accompli After the novel has been written and
published you read
it.
At that point it
is
too late for the novelist to
render determinate anything indeterminate that strikes your curiosity.
Dostoevsky
is
dead; you cannot ask him what else Raskolnikov thought
while he sat
in
the police station. But novels do not have to
be
that
way.
John Updike has written three novels about Rabbit Angstrom: Rabbit
Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit is Rich. Suppose that those
of
us
who
particularly liked the first novel were to get together and compose a list
of
questions for Updike-things
we
wished Updike had talked about
in
that first novel, when Rabbit was a young former basketball star. We
could send our questions to Updike and ask him to consider writing
another novel in the series, only this time not continuing the
chronological sequence. Like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet,
the Rabbit series could include another novel about Rabbit's early
days
when he was a young basketball player, and this novel could answer our
questions.
Notice what
we
would not be doing
in
such a case. We would nol
be saying to Updike, "Tell
us
the answers that you already know,
the
answers that are already
fIXed
to those questions. Come on, let
us
knOVl
all about those secrets you've been keeping from
us."
Nor would
we
be
asking Updike to do research, as
we
might ask the author
of
a multi·
•

110
DENNETT
volume biography
of
a real person. We would be asking him to write a
new novel, to invent some more novel for us, on demand. And if he
acceded, he would enlarge and make more determinate the character
of
Rabbit Angstrom in the process
of
writing the new novel. In this
way
matters which are indeterminate
at
one time can become determinate
later
by
a creative step.
I propose that this imagined exercise with Updike, getting him to
write more novels on demand and answer our questions,
is
actually a
familiar exercise.
That
is
the
way
we
treat each other; that
is
the
way
we
are. We cannot undo those parts
of
our
pasts that are determinate,
but
our
selves are constantly being made more determinate as
we
go along
in response to the
way
the world impinges on
us.
Of
course it
is
also
possible (and this
is
perhaps Keen's point) for a person to engage in
auto-hermeneutics, interpretation
of
one's self, and in particular to go
back and think about one's past, and one's memories, and to rethink
them and rewrite them. This process does change the "fictional"
character, the character that you are, in much the
way
that Rabbit
Angstrom, after Updike writes the second novel about him as a young
man, comes to be a rather different fictional character, determinate in
ways
he was never determinate before. This would be
an
utterly
mysterious and magical prospect (and hence something no one should
take seriously)
if
the
self
were anything
but
an
abstractum.
I want to bring this
out
by
extracting
one
more feature from the
Updike experiment Updike might take up
our
request
but
then he
might prove to be forgetful. After all, it has been many years since he
wrote Rabbit Run.
He
might have Rabbit being in
two
places
at
one
time, for instance.
If
we
wanted to settle what the true story was,
we
would be falling into error; there
is
no true story. In each circumstance
there would simply be a failure
of
coherence
of
all the data that
we
had
about
Rabbit
And because Rabbit
is
a fictional character,
we
would not
smite
our
foreheads
in
wonder and declare, "Oh
my
goodness. There's a
rift
in
the universe, we've found a contradiction in nature." Nothing
is
easier than contradiction when you are dealing with fiction; a fictional
character can have contradictory properties because it
is
just a fictional
character. We
fmd
such contradictions intolerable, however, when
we
are trying to interpret something
or
someone, even a fictional character,
so
we
typically bifurcate the character to resolve the conflict
THE
SElF
AND
NARRAllVE GRAVIlY
111
Something like this seems to happen to real people
on
' rare
occasions. Consider the putatively true case histories recorded in The
Three Faces
Of
Eve (Thigpen & Cleckley, 1957) and Sybil (Schreiber,
1973). Eve's three faces were the faces
of
three distinct personalities, it
seems, and the woman portrayed in Sybil had many different selves,
or
so it seems. How can we make sense
of
this?
Here
is
one
way, a
solemn,
skepti~l
way
favored by the psychotherapists with whom I have
talked about the case: When Sybil went in to see
her
therapist for the
frrst time, she was not several different peOple rolled into
one
body.
Sybil was a novel-writing machine that fell in with a very ingenious
questioner, a very eager reader. And together they collaborated to write
many, many chapters
of
a new novel. And,
of
course, since Sybil was a
sort
of
living novel, she went out and engaged in the world with these
new selves, more
or
less created on demand, under the eager suggestion
of
a therapist
E Pluribus
Unum
(Usually)
Sybil
is
only a strikingly pathological case
of
something quite normal,
a behavior pattern
we
can
fmd
in ourselves. We are all,
at
times,
confabulators.
Why,
though, do we behave this way? Why
are
we
all
such inveterate and inventive autObiographical novelists? Maturana says
"Everything said
is
said by a speaker to another speaker that may
be
himself." But
why
should one talk to oneself? Why
is
that not
an
utterly
idle activity, as systematically futile as trying to pick oneself up by one's
own bootstraps? A central clue comes from the sort
of
phenomena
uncovered by Gazzaniga
~
research.
According to Gazzaniga's view, the mind
is
not
beautifully unified,
but rather a problematically yoked-together bundle
of
partly autonomous
systems. All parts
of
the mind are not equally accessible to each other
at
all times. These modules
or
systems sometimes have internal
communication problems which they solve by various ingenious and
devious routes.
If
this
is
true (and I think it is), it may provide us with
an
answer to a most puzzling question about conscious
thought
What
good is
it'!
Such a question begs for
an
evolutionary answer,
but
it
will
have to be speculative,
of
course.
(It
is
not critical to
my
speculative
answer, for the moment, where genetic evolution and transmission break
off and cultural evolution and transmission take over.)

112
DENNETT
In the beginning--according to Julian Jaynes (1976), whose account I
am adapting-were speakers, our ancestors,
who
were not really
conscious. They spoke, but they just sort-of blurted things out, more
or
less
the
way
bees do bee dances, or the
way
computers talk to each
other. That
is
not conscious communication, surely. When these
ancestors had problems, sometimes they would
"ask"
for help (more
or
less like Gilbert saying "Help
me,"
when he
was
locked
in
the closet),
and sometimes there would be somebody around to hear them. So they
got into the habit
of
asking for assistance and, particularly, asking
questions. Whenever they could not figure out
how
to solve some
problem they would ask a question, addressed to no one in particular,
and sometimes whoever
was
standing around could answer them. And
they also came to be designed to be provoked on many such occasions
into answering questions like that--to the best of their ability--when
asked:'
Then one day,
in
this account, one
of
our ancestors asked a question
in
what
was
apparently an inappropriate circumstance: There
was
nobody
around
to
be the audience. Strangely enough, he heard
his
own
question, and this stimulated
him,
cooperatively, to think
of
an answer,
and sure enough the answer came to
him.
He had established, without
realizing what he had done, a communication link between
two
parts
of
his
brain, between which there
was,
for some deep biological reason, an
accessibility problem. One component
of
the mind had confronted a
problem that another component could solve; if only the problem could
be posed for the latter component Thanks to
his
habit
of
asking
questions, our ancestor stumbled upon a route
via
the ears. What a
discovery!
Sometimes talking and listening to yourself can have
wonderful effects, not otherwise obtainable.
All
that
is
needed to make
sense of
this
idea
is
the hypothesis that the modules
of
the mind have
different capacities and
ways
of
doing things, and are not perfectly
interaccessible. Under such circumstances it could be true that the
way
to get yourself to figure out a problem
is
to tickle your ear with it, to get
that part
of
your brain
which
is
best stimulated
by
hearing a question to
work on the problem. Then sometimes
you
will
fmd
yourself with the
answer
you
seek on the tip
of
your tongue.
3.
The
theoretical problems surrounding the evolution
of
communication
are
not trivial,
but also not insoluble.
One
cannot lIsssume that a cooperative spirit
of
mutual aid would
have survival value,
or
would be a stable system i( it
emerged
See Dawkins (1982, pp.
55((,).
THE
SELF
AND
NARRATIVE
GRAVITY
113
This would be enough to establish the . evolutionary endorsement-
which might well be only culturally transmitted-of the behavior
of
talking
to yourself. But as many writers have observed, conscious thinking
seems--much
of
it--to be a variety
of
particularly efficient and private
talking to oneself. The evolutionary transition to thought
is
then easy to
conjure up. All
we
have to suppose
is
that the route, the circuit that
at
first went
via
mouth and ear, got shorter. People "realized" that the
actual vocalization and audition
was
a rather inefficient part
of
the loop.
Besides, if there were other people around
who
might overhear it, you
might
give
away
more information than you wanted. So what developed
was
a habit
of
subvocalization, and this
in
tum could
be
streamlined into
conscious, verbal thought
Gilbert
Ryle
asks,
in
his
posthumous book On Thinking (1979),
"What
is
Le
Penseur doing?" For behaviorists like Ryle
t.Im
is
a real
problem. One bit
of
chin-on-flSt-with-knotted-brow looks pretty much
like another bit, and yet some
of
it seems to arrive at good answers and
some
of
it does
not
What can be going on here? Ironically, Ryle, the
arch-behaviorist, came up with some very
sly
suggestions about what
might be going on. Conscious thought,
Ryle
claimed, should be
understood on the model
of
self-teaChing,
or
perhaps better, self-
schooling
or
training.
Ryle
had little to say about
how
this self-schooling
might actually work, but
we
can get some initial understanding
of
it
on
the suppositition that
we
are not the captains
of
our ships; there
is
no
conscious self that
is
unproblematically in command
of
the mind's
resources. Rather,
we
are somewhat disunified. Our component
modules have to act in opportunistic but amazingly resourceful
ways
to
produce a modicum
of
behavioral unity, which
is
then enhanced
by
an
illusion
of
greater
unity.
What Gazzaniga's research reveals, sometimes in
vivid
detail, is
how
this must
go
on. Consider some
of
this evidence for the extraordinary
resourcefulness exhibited
by
(something in) the right hemisphere when it
is
faced with a communication problem. In one group
of
experiments,
split-brain subjects must reach into a closed bag with the left hand to
feel an object,
which
they are then to identify. The right hemisphere
gets the information from the left hand, but the left, language-controlling,
hemisphere must make the identification public. . Ordinary tactile
sensations are represented contralaterally-the signals
go
to the opposite
hemisphere. Pain, however,
is
also represented ipsilaterally, that
is,
pain
stimuli
go
to both hemispheres. Suppose the object in the bag
is
a
•

114 DENNETT
pencil.
The
right hemisphere will often hit upon a very clever tactic:
Hold the pencil in your left hand so
its
point
is
pressed hard into your
palm; this creates pain, and lets the left hemisphere know there
is
something sharp
in
the bag which
is
enough
of
a hint so that it can begin
guessing; the right hemisphere
will
signal "getting warmer" and "got
it"
by
smiling
or
other controllable signs, and in a very short time "the
subject"--the apparently unified "sole inhabitant"
of
the body-will
be
able
to announce the correct answer.
Now either split-brain subjects have developed this extraordinarily
devious talent as a reaction to the operation that landed them with such
a radical accessibility problem,
or
the operation reveals--but does not
create--a virtuoso talent to
be
found also in normal people. Surely,
Gazzaniga claims, the latter hypothesis
is
the most likely
one
to
investigate.
That
is, it does seem that we are virtuoso novelists, who
fmd
ourselves engaged in all sorts
of
behavior, more
or
less unified,
but
sometimes disunified, and we always put the best "faces"
on
it we can.
We try to· make all
of
our material cohere into a single good story. And
that story
is
our
autobiography.
The
chief fictional character
at
the center
of
that autobiography
is
one's
seU.
And if you still want to know what the self really is, you
are
making a category mistake. After all, when a human being's behavioral
control system becomes seriously impaired, it can turn
out
that the best
hermeneutical story we can tell about the individual says that there
is
more than
one
character "inhabiting" that body. This
is
quite possible
on
the view
of
the self that I have
been
presenting; it does not require any
fancy metaphysical miracles.
One
can discover multiple selves in a
person just as unproblematically as
one
could
fmd
Early Young Rabbit
and Late Young Rabbit in the imagined Updike novels: All that has to
be
the case
is
that the story will not cohere around
one
self,
one
imaginary point,
but
coheres (coheres much better, in any case) around
two
different imaginary points. We sometimes encounter psychological
disorders,
or
surgically created disunities, where the only way to interpret
or
make sense
of
them
is
to posit,
in
effect, two centers
of
gravity, two
selves.
Note, fmally, that one
is
not creating
or
discovering a little bit
of
ghost-stuff in doing this. One
is
simply creating another abstraction.
It
is
an
abstraction you use as part
of
a theoretical apparatus to
understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behavior
of
some very
THE
SElF
AND NARRAllVE
GRAVITY
115
complicated things.
The
fact that these abstract selves seem so robust
and real
is
not surprising. They are much more complicated theoretical
entities than a center
of
gravity. And remember that even a center
of
gravity has a fairly robust presence, once we start playing around with
it
But no
one
has ever seen
or
ever will see a center
of
gravity. As David
Hume noted, no
one
has ever seen a self, either:
For
my
part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myseu,
I always stumble
on
some particular perception
or
other,
of
heat
or
cold, light
or
shade, love
or
hatred, pain
or
pleasure. I never
catch myself
at
any time without a perception, and never observe
anything
but
the perception. .
..
If
anyone, upon serious and
unprejudiced reflection, thinks
he
has a different notion
of
himseU, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I
can allow him
is,
that he may
be
in the right as well as I, and
that we
are
essentially different in this particular.
He
may,
perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which
he
calls himself, though I
am
certain there
is
no such principle in
me. (Treatise on Human Nature, I, IV, sec. 6). .
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