In the Milinda Pañha, a Buddhist text written in Pali in the first century of our era, Nāgasena replies to the questions of King Milinda, denying his existence as an entity:106
King Milinda says to the sage Nāgasena: What is your name, Master? The teacher replies: I am called Nāgasena, o great king; Nāgasena is nothing but a name, a designation, an expression, a simple word: there is no person here.
The king is astonished by such an extreme-sounding assertion:
If no person exists, who is it then who has clothing and sustenance? Who lives according to the virtues? Who kills, who steals, who has pleasures, who lies? If there is no longer an actor, neither is there good or evil any longer.
And he argues that the subject must be an autonomous being that is not reducible to its component parts:
Is it the hairs that are Nāgasena, Master? Is it the nails or the teeth or the flesh or the bones? Is it the name? Is it the sensations, the perceptions, the consciousness? Is it none of these things?
The sage replies that “Nāgasena” is effectively none of these things, and the king seems to have won the discussion: if Nāgasena is none of these, then he must be something else—and this something else will be the person Nāgasena who therefore exists.
But the sage turns his own argument against him, asking what a chariot consists of:
Are the wheels the chariot? Is the axle? Is the chassis the chariot? Is the chariot the sum of its parts?
The king replies cautiously that certainly “chariot” refers only to the relationship among the ensemble of wheels, axle, and chassis, to their working together and in relation to us—and that there does not exist an entity “chariot” beyond these relations and events. Nāgasena triumphs: in the same way as “chariot,” the name “Nāgasena” designates nothing more than a collection of relations and events.
We are processes, events, composite and limited in space and time. But if we are not an individual entity, what is it that founds our identity and its unity? What makes it so—that I am Carlo—and that my hair and my nails and my feet are considered part of me, as well as my anger and my dreams, and that I consider myself to be the same Carlo as yesterday, the same as tomorrow; the one who thinks, suffers, and perceives?
There are different ingredients that combine to produce our identity. Three of these are important for the argument of this book:
1.
The first is that every one of us identifies with a point of view in the world. The world is reflected in each one of us through a rich spectrum of correlations essential for our survival.107 Each of us is a complex process that reflects the world and elaborates the information we receive in a way that is strictly integrated.108
2.
The second ingredient on which our identity is based is the same as for the chariot. In the process of reflecting the world, we organize it into entities: we conceive of the world by grouping and segmenting it as best we can in a continuous process that is more or less uniform and stable, the better to interact with it. We group together into a single entity the rocks that we call Mont Blanc, and we think of it as a unified thing. We draw lines over the world, dividing it into sections; we establish boundaries, we approximate the world by breaking it down into pieces. It is the structure of our nervous system that works in this way. It receives sensory stimuli, elaborates information continuously, generating behavior. It does so through networks of neurons, which form flexible dynamic systems that continuously modify themselves, seeking to predict109—as far as possible—the flow of information intake. In order to do this, the networks of neurons evolve by associating more or less stable fixed points of their dynamic with recurring patterns that they find in the incoming information, or—indirectly—in the procedures of elaboration themselves. This is what seems to emerge from the very lively current research on the brain.110 If this is so, then “things,” like “concepts,” are fixed points in the neuronal dynamic, induced by recurring structures of the sensorial input and of the successive elaborations. They mirror a combination of aspects of the world that depends on recurrent structures of the world and on their relevance in their interactions with us. This is what a chariot consists of. Hume would have been pleased to know about these developments in our understanding of the brain.
In particular, we group into a unified image the collection of processes that constitutes those living organisms that are other human beings, because our life is social and we therefore interact a great deal with them. They are knots of cause and effect that are deeply relevant for us. We have shaped an idea of a “human being” by interacting with others like ourselves.
I believe that our notion of self stems from this, not from introspection. When we think of ourselves as persons, I believe we are applying to ourselves the mental circuits that we have developed to engage with our companions.
The first image that I have of myself as a child is the child that my mother sees. We are for ourselves in large measure what we see and have seen of ourselves reflected back to us by our friends, our loves, and our enemies.
I have never been convinced by the idea, attributed to Descartes, that the primary aspect of our experience is awareness of thinking, and therefore of existing. (Even the attribution of the idea to Descartes seems wrong to me: Cogito ergo sum is not the first step in the Cartesian reconstruction, it is the second. The first is Dubito ergo cogito. The starting point of the reconstruction is not a hypothetical a priori that is immediate to the experience of existing as a subject. It’s a rationalistic a posteriori reflection on the first stage of the process in which Descartes had articulated a state of doubt: logic dictates that if someone doubts something, they must have thought about it. And that if they can think, then they must exist. It is substantially a consideration made in the third person, not in the first, however private the process. The starting point for Descartes is the methodical doubt experienced by a refined intellectual, not the basic experience of a subject.)
The experience of thinking of oneself as a subject is not a primary experience: it is a complex cultural deduction, made on the basis of many other thoughts. My primary experience—if we grant that this means anything—is to see the world around me, not myself. I believe that we each have a concept of “my self” only because at a certain point we learn to project onto ourselves the idea of being human as an additional feature that evolution has led us to develop during the course of millennia in order to engage with other members of our group: we are the reflection of the idea of ourselves that we receive back from our kind.
3.
But there is a third ingredient in the foundation of our identity, and it is probably the essential one—it is the reason this delicate discussion is taking place in a book about time: memory. We are not a collection of independent processes in successive moments. Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past—the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.