The Epistemic Revolution

The key to William Shakespeare's genius, at the turn of the seventeenth century and the dawning of the scientific revolution, was in exploring the drama of characters lacking self‐understanding, being unaware of their own motives, just as he explored the hidden processes of interiority in his soliloquies (Greenblatt ). Hamlet's “divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will” (Hamlet 5.2.11–12), is no less modern than Norman Mailer's: “Consciousness, that blunt tool, only bucks in the general direction of truth; instinct plucks the feather.” No doubt but that one of Sigmund Freud's contributions to our own most recent century was to foment an epistemological crisis in his demonstration that Cartesian introspection is neither privileged nor incorrigible (Flanagan ). We really do not and perhaps cannot know ourselves from the inside. If our ego defenses form the boundaries of who we are, and they are in fact just a catalogue of self‐deceptive tactics for hiding, shaping, or disowning our experience, then the very formation of the ego is based on a complex set of distortions of the truth. Randolph Nesse (Nesse and Lloyd ; Nesse ) has argued that such defenses are adaptive tactics that are part of our evolved psychological mechanisms. If our conscious self‐representations are constructed from these, then our conscious account of our own experience is not likely to be the best guide to who we are, and a hermeneutic of suspicion must be applied to our self‐understanding.

The Empirical Failure of Introspection

A lengthy research tradition in psychology began with Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson's () review entitled “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” They review dozens of studies on cognitive dissonance, attribution, the inability to report the weighting of factors in complex judgment, classic work on the absence of awareness of stimuli demonstrably affecting problem solving, and the reporting of demonstrably ineffective stimulus factors. They conclude that we may have no direct access to higher order mental processes of evaluation, judgment, problem solving, or the initiation of behavior. Most of what is present to consciousness are the results of such processes. Asked about how we perceive or remember, we are clearly stumped, though we have all sorts of beliefs about why we behave and why we like or dislike particular objects or persons. For example, after participating in experiments in which factors of which they were unconscious demonstrably affect their behavior, subjects deny any such influence. They would respond that such factors might have affected someone else, but not them. Such factors included simultaneous associations (subjects for whom “ocean” and “moon” were paired were more likely to report “Tide” as the name of a detergent), right‐left position effects (the rightmost object in a random ordering of consumer products is chosen by about a 4:1 ratio), and anchoring effects (where the use of a “randomly chosen subject” strongly influences the evaluation of average behavior). Subjects denied influences in each case. Nisbett and Wilson suggest that while people do sometimes tell more than they can know, subjects have no “privileged access,” as reports of subjects match those of naïve observers. The source of the reports appears to be the presence of plausible a priori causal theories. This may involve following cultural rules, folk psychologic implications, theories of empirical covariation, and connotative relations. These judgments are not always wrong, but they do not come from or provide introspective access. We also may have knowledge of autobiographical facts superior to an observer, sometimes be aware of intermediate products, have knowledge of prior idiosyncrasies, or have knowledge of attentions and intentions. These do not entail introspective access to mental processes. “It is frightening to believe that one has no more certain knowledge of the workings of one's own mind than would an outsider with intimate knowledge of one's history and of the stimuli present at the time the cognitive processes occurred” (Nisbett and Wilson ).

What then becomes of the “introspection” that seems to be valued so much by many religious traditions? Perhaps we need to drop the Cartesian model that introspection is what gets you to the hidden, private self. I think the question of how we construct and internalize a narrative for ourselves is far more interesting. To paraphrase Wittgenstein's famous line about Christianity, if religion is about anything, it is about changing your life, which is what a new story might do. We are all constructing little scenarios in our heads all the time, and managing the impressions others have of us so a certain view “comes off.” Except that, as several generations of social psychology have pointed out, we selectively listen to the feedback, listening to what we want to hear and discounting what we do not, so, in some sense, our “acts,” put on to fool others, have as their primary purpose fooling ourselves (Greenwald ). The rub, of course, is that fooling yourself means you cannot find out what your true self is. If the true self is just the body and its history, then what the stories we tell ourselves often do is to take us away from, apart from, or in opposition to our bodies, so maybe the “true self” is not this inner, secret sanctum, but just the biography of a body. Hoc est meus corpus. Perhaps what connects the different selves from differently situated narratives is just the shared body. It is our friends and loved ones from whom we get the most useful checking, which we may learn to interiorize. Perhaps that is a model of how our stories become more coherent over time, for example, from members of a church community asking questions about a story brought from a professional network, or vice versa. I think there is always an “other” in these course corrections. Then there are all sorts of ways our stories can become less coherent as well, by splintering off different part of our lives, different contexts, and different social groups. Even going back to when Homo sapiens lost its hair, became naked, we have learned to form self‐boundaries by hiding things, from our bodies to our simulations, our play. We can then check ourselves against imagined counterfactuals before acting on them. We get good at hiding things. This is where the self comes from. How do you know the words for your own emotions? You learned as a child, when they were obvious from your face, and only later learned to inhibit your facial expression, to act differently, to hide them, put on your poker face, wear your make‐up, put on your armor.

The Adaptive Unconscious

Twenty‐five years after Nisbett and Wilson's seminal work, Timothy Wilson's () Strangers to Ourselves cites a plethora of evidence from social psychology of many of the limitations and outright errors to which introspection is prone. Nevertheless this same research tradition has provided evidence for pervasive and often quite sophisticated mental processes with which we evaluate our situations, set goals, and initiate action, while we are consciously entertaining something else entirely. We can focus our attention on one conversation and block out our surroundings, while still monitoring those surroundings in case anything important happens, which will then come to our attention. We learn some things with little conscious effort, including our native language or how to get around a house in the dark. It is also such adaptive unconscious processes that determine very rapid emotional responses, which may initiate bodily responses or actions prior to any awareness, or give us the intuitions we dismiss that happened to be right all along. Indeed, Wilson cites research evidence that too much introspection can cause confusion or even produce errors in judgment. In one of his studies, couples involved in relationships were asked to either think about their relationships for half an hour or think about something else, and it was the latter group that more accurately predicted the future of their relationships (Wilson and Kraft ). It appears that for learning about what you feel or what you are like, it makes sense to pay attention to your actual behavior and other people's reactions to it. Change may come only from how a new self‐narrative may mold your adaptive unconscious if you act in ways consistent with it. You become brave by pretending that you are. There is a role of self‐deception in bringing about this kind of self‐fulfilling prophecy. We become brave not just by pretending we are, but also by believing it ourselves. This is one of the kinds of prospective, of prolepsis, of “story grasping” of a different future. I think we rarely do this alone.

Our Full Actual Selves

There is plenty of evidence about the emergence, or embedding, of our beliefs, our will, or our actions in our subconscious minds, or in our neuropsychology, and its developmental shaping across the course of our lives. The point is not only the obvious one that decisions are sometimes made too quickly to be the result of our ponderous and slow conscious thought, but that even the ones that seem to be may still be embedded within subconscious processes, which play a contributing if not determinative role. As long as we are willing to surrender any insistence that our agency always be a punctate, moment‐by‐moment, conscious controller, we allow some role for the subconscious and preconscious processes in which it needs be embedded. This position also would provide a remarkably rich vein of exploration for an ethical view in which consciousness is not the sole carrier of responsibility, in which our “full actual selves,” to use Owen Flanagan's () apt phrase, includes much more than that of which we are currently aware, or even of what we can become aware. Indeed, this view is happily consistent with an ethic in which the development of virtuous habits, and their socialization in our peers and dependents, also becomes an important ethical consideration, particularly given the vast array of human action, which must become nigh automatic in the functional hierarchy of complex human actions. It therefore becomes all that much more important to address the role of bodily experience in conscious feeling states and embodiment in decision making (Damasio ).

Embodied Cognition

There is a fast‐growing literature in “embodied cognition,” the study of how cognitive processes are aided by actual bodily activities, or their simulation, reviewed extensively for Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science (Teske ). Since Warren Brown (, this issue) gives more attention to this variety of “knowing”; we need not recount it here, short of noting that much of the thinking we do is actually done as much with our bodies, and the nervous systems coextensive with them, than with what is located solely inside our skulls. Our bodies are controlled by our brains, and there is plenty of thought that may reuse the same circuits in accomplishing cognitive tasks. Such tasks are not learned by disembodied minds, but are housed in and dependent on bodies, both for learning and maintaining knowledge, whether implicit or explicit. Sian Bielock, a psychologist with doctorates in both psychology and kinesiology, has written a very accessible introduction to this research entitled How the Body Knows Its Mind (). She addresses the role of gesture in memory retrieval, posture in attitude and alertness, and suggests that brains do not distinguish between body and mind. Our bodies may actually “hack” our minds, our movements affecting our thoughts, decisions, and preferences. We use our bodies as learning tools, and in general the body and our immediate environments shape our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Pacing can improve creativity, walking in nature can improve concentration skills, Botox can reduce depression, and physically fit children do better in school.

Extended Cognition

There is yet another area of research in “extended cognition,” data showing that the extension of the cognitive systems does not even stop at body boundaries (also cf. Teske ). Andy Clark's Natural‐Born Cyborgs () describes human beings as human‐technology symbionts, and suggests that we have been that way since the invention of words. What distinguishes our long developmental dependency and our neuroplasticity is that we are able “to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constraints, props and aides” (Clark , 5). Pens, paper, wristwatches, notebooks, calculators, cell phones, and Internet access are just the most recent layers of our extended cognitive systems, and include wide temporal and spatial extension. “Offloading” cognitive functions to calculators, written text, and clocks alters our brains over the course of our lives, and has a long history. Why limit the understanding of mind and person to our boundaries of skin, as “our sense of self, place, and potential are all malleable constructs ready to expand, change, or contract at surprisingly short notice” (Clark , 33)? Anyone who has ever awakened wondering about the ownership of a benumbed hand, or felt personally violated by incursions on one's property, understands this implicitly. The neural events, conscious and unconscious, that occur inside our skin are also embedded within a social and technological matrix that plays no less a role in knowing ourselves.

Narrative, Meaning, and the Narrative Self

Much of self‐understanding is in the realm of symbolic language, as we humans can build a conceptual world of symbols. This influences not only our current experience, but enables us to represent things to ourselves and others that are not immediately present to our senses. Jerome Bruner (; ) makes an important distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of understanding. The paradigmatic mode involves synchronic understanding via logical proof, empirical observations, and causal explanation, putatively more characteristic of science, and only learned late in the course of human development. The narrative mode, historically more ancient, and developmentally earlier, involves diachronic understanding via storied accounts of “the vicissitudes of human intentions,” organized in time. In narrative, explanations are not causal but are done in terms of believable stories about actors—human and otherwise—striving to do things over time, which is more characteristic of novelist or poets. According to Alicia Juarrero (), without narrative, personality traits and human actions are incomprehensible. Therefore, it is necessary to explain them using a hermeneutic, narrative model, as in the case of other interpretive understandings. Causality does not exhaust meaning. A narrative account is not an alternative or opposed to physicality or design but an additional requirement for comprehensibility; it is what we mean by “meaning.”

As Erik Erikson () indicated, becoming an adult involves a reconstruction of the past in a way that leads to the present. Although this does not falsify the past, it must use fictional and imaginative power to “make sense” of the facts as we remember them. “Narrative makes sense of a brain's own behavior, and may underlie the sense of a unitary self” (Roser and Gazzaniga ). To the extent that external, objective events do not occur in storied form, narratives are, from a paradigmatic point of view, always selections, fabrications, constructions and to that extent are always fictional. They can also be told in multiple ways, and by different people. We learn how to tell our stories by first being told stories about ourselves by others, which may form the core of a personal narrative. Stories may include actual events, of course, or fail to do so, and there is a facticity that constrains truth‐telling in stories. Donald Spence () distinguished between narrative truth and historical truth, where narrative truth is not the truth of logic, science, and empirical demonstration, but more like verisimilitude. Narrative truth is not about providing external descriptions of the world to be judged by their veridicality. Robert Coles, in his work on the moral imagination (), highlights the integrative functions of stories in healing what is sick or broken, bringing together what is shattered, helping us cope with stress, and propelling movement toward fulfillment and maturity.

Brain Fiction

There is a problem, of course, in distinguishing between the narrative latitude that produces greater verisimilitude and the violation of what historians, and, by extension, those trying to hold to the historical truth, call “facticity.” There are a number of neurological deficits that result in confabulation, wherein a patient may invent answers to questions, or accounts of events, fully believing themselves to be telling the truth, like a stroke victim detailing his attendance at a recent conference when he has not left the hospital. William Hirstein, a student of V. S. Ramachandran, argues that such cases are important to understanding the structure of the normal human mind (). Rather than admitting ignorance, even normal people can make up an answer to a question or an account of events that is not true, and express it with conviction. In a detailed study of a variety of such cases, Hirstein argues that there is a separation, even on the level of brain function, between the capacity to creatively invent a plausible‐sounding story, and a normal checking process that allows us to recognize the story as fantasy.

In split‐brain cases where the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres has been severed, the language‐dominant left hemisphere “interpreter” will confabulate an explanation of behavior produced by information delivered to the right hemisphere (Gazzaniga ; ). But information may not be freely shared between hemispheres even in normal subjects, the language‐dominant hemisphere inhibiting right‐hemisphere word recognition (a half‐second flash of “tar . get” results in a subject being aware only of the left‐hemisphere “get”; Gazzaniga ). As we have seen in our discussion of Nisbett and Wilson's () research in introspective failure, normal people regularly confabulate accounts of mental processes of which they are unaware. A confabulation is primarily understandable as an ill‐grounded epistemic claim that the confabulator does not know is ill‐grounded, and we all have the capacity to vary the strength of our epistemic criteria, say between talking with friends and testifying in a courtroom.

There is a question of whether there is any final “fact checking” that makes some memories more reliable than others. Every time a memory is brought back to consciousness it gets reconsolidated in the context of recall. Our memories are always and repeatedly reformed in time, so always run the risk of being increasingly altered. I think the case in point here is the research on so‐called “flashbulb memories” (Brown and Kulik ) of where we were and what we were doing during major public events, for example, the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. It turns out that we get all sorts of things wrong in these memories (Talarico and Rubin ; Krackow, Lynn, and Payne ), even getting the emotional experience wrong 58% of the time a year later. The more often we recall and retell an experience, the less accurate it may be, so perhaps “flashbulb” memories are more confident only because of how often they have been retold, like the “fishing stories” that get better every time they are retold, and we all have our repertoire of favorite stories. On some level we know we were making them better stories each time we tell them. So memory is all about reconstruction. It is not a record. So in what sense is it “the facts” plus subsequent modifications? It is not, which is why eyewitness testimony, which was once the gold standard in court, is so troublesome. It works this way because it is adaptive, information you learned after the original event gets incorporated into your story of an event. Yes, even when we read, we read for the gist, we are not recorders. But do we retain a core of the “things that transpired” and reconstruct the rest? Or is there a darker possibility that even the “things that transpired” can get altered? James Marcia's research () on Erik Erikson's “identity crisis” identifies four different identity statuses based on the dimensions of crisis and commitment in college student's stories. But is that what happened or is it about how we tell the story? What makes something a “story” is that there is some kind of conflict followed by some resolution or denouement after climactic tension. Ben Slugosky and Gerald Ginsburg () interviewed subjects a decade later and found them saying things like “What crisis? This is the kind of person I am, and I was always headed this way.” Their current “story” is that there was no crisis. Ask students to read from a journal or from emails of a few years back about something that seemed like a major crisis at the time, and they will usually respond with something like “oh my God, I thought that was a crisis? It is nothing compared to what I am going through now.” What is even the “gist” of an event might look different in retrospect. Our current story is always a rewriting of our past, just as each generation rewrites its history. So I think even what seem to be our most reliable memories may be more unmoored than we think. Bodily connections might provide better moorings in our memories of our past, as Odysseus is identified by his bodily scars. Or by what other people remember that can be verified by physical facts. Others might thus be involved in the “checking” of even our autobiographical memories.

Self‐Deception

Externalism and Relationality

A number of authors refer to the long history of contributions of the Abrahamic religious traditions, Christianity in particular, to a belief in individuality as separate from others, interior, and bodily restricted (Taylor ; Cary ; Grenz ). Nevertheless, there are alternative strands in these traditions, consistent with an intersubjectively externalist view. These include Karl Barth's conception of the imago dei as existing not in individuals nor in the capacity for relationship, but in relationship itself. Indeed, as Stanley Grenz () has argued, the ascendancy of relational ontologies has been widespread across a variety of theologies since the early twentieth century, and he suggests that it is in our relationships with others, including the bodily and the sexual, extending into our communities, to which our self‐understanding might better be bound. Such views are coherent with externalism in the cognitive sciences (Clark and Chalmers ; McCulloch ; Rowlands ; Wilson ; Noe ), the view that “the mind ain't in the head,” but that heads and bodies are proper parts of minds. Mental phenomena are hybrids of physical events in the head and events in the world to which they are often coupled, not least of which are events both within and between other people and ourselves.

Adult Attachment

Our earliest models of self and other come from the bond of love between caregiver and infant that provides support, protection, and a secure base for exploration, the dynamics of which also play out in adulthood (Bowlby ; Mikulincer and Shaver ). What we do in situations of danger, upset, and in relationship formation and dissolution tend to reflect secure, anxious/ambivalent, or avoidant attachments, developed initially in infancy, but extended in the ways in which adults engage each other in romantic love (Hazan and Shaver ). Adult attachment is less about overt proximity seeking, and more about our working models of significant others (Mikulincer and Shaver ). Under threat, our models of attachment are automatically activated to provide the comfort and security made possible by proximity, or by our representation of close others, and memories of helpful comfort in the past. Secure styles are associated with greater relationship interdependence, commitment, trust, and satisfaction. Anxious styles often produce more distress and ambivalence under difficulty. Avoidant styles result in the least amount of helping and support for partners, and report lower levels of intimacy and enjoyment in daily interaction. Securely attached people are far more active and effective in providing secure comfort, encouragement, and support to others. Our adult attachments may tell us as much about how we see ourselves as how we represent others. This is an implicit knowledge of self and other. Those with secure attachments identify with their attachment objects, and internalize the comforting and soothing qualities of the other. This enables the securely attached to be a secure base and safe haven for others.

Intimacy and the Boundaries of Self

Our culture commodifies everything, abstracting things from their context. Steven Winter () points out that we all too often treat the self in the same bounded and commodified way. Winter focuses particular attention on the development of sexual autonomy. Sexual autonomy is not about individual privacy. Winter finds this somewhat surreal: “after all, when one is alone, one does not need a condom” (238). If sexual autonomy is a fundamental aspect of human flourishing, it is because, as Plato points out in the Symposium, eros is a sexual desire that attaches to a person. It is something that enables us to treat another being as the person they are, sex being an agency by which we respond to each other through our bodies, even at our most carnal, interested in a relationship between persons.

Indeed, in the earliest stages of adulthood, sexuality is the domain in which we learn to be responsive and responsible to the other. The successful negotiation of sexuality and, ultimately, intimacy requires one to develop skills and values such as empathy, negotiation, compromise, cooperation, recognition of and respect for the other. (Winter , 242)

Intimate relationships are one of the primary ways that we seek recognition and establish identity, hence the havoc wreaked upon our sense of ourselves by the pathologies of intimacy, in narcissism, manipulation, and exploitation, or why childhood sexual abuse can destroy the very capacity for agency. An important part of what we expect from intimacy is someone who “sees me as I really am,” and one of the advantages it gives us is the comfort and confidence to be just that, our bodily selves.

Projection and Reciprocation

Our relationships are our redemption. We act on each other's behalf, and show kindness in our bodily presence, with a touch, a kiss of peace, in holding and being held, in assurances of love, in the return of hope, in laughter and in tears. The depth psychologist Robert Johnson (, ) asserts that “Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy” (1983, xi). He suggests that “falling in love” is the most powerful projection one makes, a projection of our own most noble and valuable aspects onto another human being, and they unto us. The problem is that even if there is divinity in each of us, the projections are not true, and this experience is different from the quieter and more humanly proportioned experience of loving. The intensity of the projection also obliterates the humanity of the beloved, and that while we have loosed the most sublime feeling of which we are capable, we “set ourselves up for the greatest suffering we will ever know” (1991, 66). Researchers in psychology regularly distinguish between the “passionate love” of early relationship formation, including frequent thoughts of the other, as well as idealization of the other's positive qualities and less awareness of their flaws, and the “companionate love” more frequent in longer term commitments, with an emphasis on mutual care, which is related to higher satisfaction in life (Hatfield and Rapson ; Diamond ; Kim and Hatfield ).

What may be most important, in both helping us transcend ourselves, and becoming what our narrative selves would have us pretend, as well as to come to understand ourselves better and more honestly, are our intimate relationships with others, including the enemies that often know us so well. It is in these relationships within which we may be pressed to acknowledge our self‐deceptions, by the knowing of others not sharing the same motivations to sustain them, or, by those who do, holding us to the commitments made in the name of those deceptions, and making them real by enacting them. It is in such knowing relationships, where such services are often performed reciprocally, whether for our benefit or theirs, are motivated to press us, gently and lovingly, or dangerously and confrontationally, to become our own better angels, to be more than we were before. It is in these relationships that we both come to know ourselves better, in the “checking” functions of others that we may come to interiorize, and by coming to expect more from ourselves, to do better than we have ever done before.

Communities and Ethics

The presence of others is essential, perhaps even definitive of our humanity. Feral, isolated, or severely abused children may never really have the others against whom they can build a sense of who they are, to whom they can be attached, and who reflect back to them. They have no way to construct a richer narrative with purchase on coherence, consistency, or reliability. The construction of a stable narrative incorporates and internalizes, is a product of many others. You can be isolated, living on a desert island, but you still have the accumulation of all the parents, peers, teachers, the people from whom you internalize all of what you consider to be the equipment of yourself. But it is living bodily together with a community that builds a story, and a view of the world, into a person's life. It is not just a collection of dyads, but a whole group of people so that the corrections can get corrected, the checks rechecked. Obviously this is a process that can be used in both good and poor ways, as a group can press a story that is pathological, destructive, or violent. The kind of commitment strategies, facilitated by early attachment, that make long‐term relationships and marriages possible, also involve commitments to communities, involving some of the same “leaps of faith” or “leaps into pretense” that can have a prolepsis upon a future. One's marital vows are said not just to each other, but in front of a witnessing community, who will see them vouchsafed. I can pretend to be a particular kind of person, and the result will be that if I do this long enough, get treated this way long enough, that is becomes who I am, and I am no longer fooling myself, and find a particular story important or even central to my work and life. Therapeutic relationships may even encourage such commitments as formative routes to healing.

There are kinds of judgmental communities in which it becomes difficult to grow and develop. We all want communities that are accepting, in which we are appreciated, in which we feel respect and love. But we also need to be held accountable, where respected peers can still hold up a mirror for you to see both your vices and your virtues, not in judgment, but in a way in which you can decide if this is the kind of person you want to be, if maybe you can do better than this. Part of the hermeneutic of suspicion is “don't be so sure about yourself”; even in spite of the advantages of confidence and the epistemic of accomplishment, there is always this piece that has to say “watch it there,” watch it in other people, but especially in yourself. The other half is the science half. Science is really good at a certain kind of checking: What do you have for data? What is the evidence you have for this? What is the empirical work to support this? But where is the moral checking? Sadly and unfortunately, while lots of scientists are wonderfully moral people, such checking is not so much part of science, suggesting that, while science is necessary, it does not provide a complete world view, as it has little basis on which to decide not how something should be done, but whether.

What is the role that religion, or religiousness, play in the development of self? Part of it may be in not taking a Cartesian view of a self or soul as inside, private, and hidden, or religion as about oneself, but as about an “us,” a chosen people, a community of believers, a society of friends. If we think of ourselves as bodies that act in the world, as part of a church, a synagogue, a mosque, then religion is about a community, expressed outside of me, in the world, and it is not about me. Is not this the ethic of most religions? I do not think it is so much about the salvation of my individual soul. How selfish and egocentric. Maybe it is about giving it away? Perhaps the “more perfect body” of an afterlife is not about the you that you think about yourself as being now, but about this broader model; is not religio about “tying things together”? Is not redemption about healing one's alienation from a community?