Decisions, Perceptions, Sensations

Who are you, really? I mean really, deep down?

When Scottish philosopher David Hume introspected in search of a self, he reported that all he found was a “bundle of perceptions.” He seemed to be disappointed, but I believe he was on to something; he was just looking in the wrong direction. Of course you are not going to be able to perceive the self, no matter how you try. The perceiver does not perceive itself, yet it can infer itself by acknowledging that it is none of these perceptions, and yet does perceive.

Should Descartes have said, “I perceive therefore I am”?

You are sitting in your car in a parking lot. A driver attempts to pull into the space next to you, but his car hits your car.

“Hey!” you yell to your friend next to you. “That guy ran right into me!”

But he didn’t. His car hit your car, but he did not hit you.

A kindergartner spills paint on your shoe. “Careful!” you warn. “You’re getting paint on me!”

But she is not—not on you anyway.

Are our possessions part of us? What does it mean to own something? My pencil is a pencil that is associated with me, to the extent that everyone involved agrees that I get to decide what happens to that pencil.

In the case of my body, I don’t need consensus. Just the facts about how persons and bodies work with each other make body ownership pretty clear. When a person is not the one to control her body, either a crime or a peculiar illness has occurred.

Let’s change point of view. If this is my body, then what am I? I am not the body. I am somehow in the body, carried by the body, running the body. Sensory messages come to me from my eyes, my ears, my skin—I am not my sense organs. I can feel hot or cold, happy or sad, comfortable or in pain, but I am not those sensations; I feel them. I am the one who perceives.

Here’s something spooky. If you do something, i.e. if your body performs some particular movement, can we say that you are not only the perceiver, you are also the agent? It certainly feels that way, but consider this experiment. People were wired up for brain activity and told to make a very sudden, spontaneous decision to push a button, with no premeditation. They thought they did, but the brain scan said otherwise. Their brains had made the decision for them well before they acted, well before they thought they were making their decision.

I used to be very good at slapping flies (still am, I guess). I would hover my hand over a fly and move as close as I could until she stopped washing her hands. Then I would enter a meditative state, relax my mind and arm, and try to send the fly the telepathic message that everything was just fine--when SLAP down would come my hand before she knew what hit her.

What a disappointment to learn that during that last second when I imagined I was meditating and not planning a slap, my brain was firing away in preparation!

Decision-making is a brain sensation. The awake part of us is riding around in a body that sensations tell us is our own, feeling pain, seeing blue, and getting the sense (believing) that we are making decisions and performing actions.

I am going to try to remember that about myself as often as I can all day today.

Or perhaps I should say: I observe the brain sensation that I have the intention of observing the mind remembering itself all day today.