The imaginary I
Can phones and brains understand the ideas they convey?
The New Mindscape #5–3.
The “I” is a firm belief. We believe in the stability and permanence of our own self.
When I give a lecture, “I” talk to you. You see “David Palmer” talking to you. Both of these, to a great degree, are wrapped up in imaginations.
I imagine myself to be a certain kind of person, and you also imagine me to be a certain kind of person. I try to live up to that imagination of what I am, or what I should be. In the classroom, I have my imagination of how a professor should behave and appear. I don’t imagine myself lying down on the floor. No, I should be standing and talking to you. I should be speaking clearly to you. I should be teaching new things. I should dress properly. As I am talk, I am trying to conform to a certain imagination — my imagination of what a good professor should be. But when I’m at home with my daughters and wife, I may not be the same kind of person at all.
We are imagining ourselves all the time. You may imagine yourself in a projective way. You may have projective plans — planning, imagining how you are going to pass all the assessments, to get good grades, to get your degree. All those plans are made in a projective mode of imagining yourself as a successful student. But you may also think in a creative mode. You are exploring your life in university, as you have more freedom than before. You’re trying out many new things that you have never experienced before. You’re actually creating your life in a more imaginative way. So, you are using the creative imagination to make yourself into a certain kind of person. Along this way, you will encounter a lot of things beyond your expectation. Many thoughts, inspirations and unexpected happenings or coincidences will come to you. Receptive imaginations will come to you, and will operate in your life as well.
Who I am, then, is an imagination. It’s both what I imagine myself to be, and what you imagine me to be. What will there be if we take away these imaginations?
Many religions consider that the ego — the self — is an illusion that doesn’t even exist. The self is just the product of our imagination. At one level, then, “I” and “myself” don’t exist at all.
Yet at the same time, they are very real. We are truly experiencing our interactions here — “I” am experiencing “you” and “you” are experiencing “me”. What does this mean?
Just our brain cells?
Many people claim that actually, all these kinds of imagination are simply movements of our brain cells. They are the effect of the movement of neurons in our brains. Anything that comes into our mindscape is the result of electric currents between neurons in our brains. This is a materialist explanation: there is nothing in our mind other than our brain cells.
But I don’t think that explains anything. Let’s think about when I talk to you. Obviously, every word that I tell you doesn’t come from anywhere else than currents in my brain cells. These currents are transferred to activate my mouth and tongue, as well as my whole body, which project sound waves and visual signals to you. Next, your ears will pick up the sound waves, causing movement in your brain cells — so that, by talking to you, I cause movement in your brain cells. According to this theory, our communication comes from nowhere else than the movements in our brain cells.
But what made my brain cells move in that particular way, just a minute ago? What led them to utter these sounds but not others? I didn’t know five minutes ago what words I would tell you now. How is it that the currents in my brain cells started to flow in that particular way to produce those particular sounds at that particular moment, if they didn’t receive a signal from somewhere else?
Saying that ideas come from my brain cells is, at one level, a very true explanation for things; but at another level, it doesn’t explain anything at all.
Who is talking to you right now, then? Let’s assume it’s a bunch of brain cells sending currents around. None of those individual brain cells is conscious of being David Palmer or part of David Palmer. Is there even an “I”, David Palmer, talking to you?
What is it, then, that is talking to you?
Let’s say I receive a call on my mobile phone. The sounds come from the headset, from the movement of electric currents in the wiring of the phone, that cause soundwaves that are projected into my ears, which then cause the movement of electric currents in my brain cells.
The sounds definitely come from the phone. I answer the phone, and someone talks to me. Now, we don’t assume that the ideas originate from the phone. We assume that the ideas come from beyond the phone. They come from a conscious agent, a person making the call. The phone is merely part of a mechanism for transmitting those ideas by means of sounds, over a distance.
Our brain, like a phone, is also a mechanism of “wires” and currents.
Do our ideas come from our brain, just as they would come from a phone?
Or is the brain receiving ideas from somewhere else, and transmitting them? “I” understand my ideas. But does my brain understand them?
The real “I”.
Wait… just a few minutes ago, I made the point that the “I” is imaginary… but now, the “I” has come back!
But this is a different I. The first I is the ego, the social self, the “me” that emerges out of how we imagine each other in our interactions with each other. The second I is what many religions refer to as your spirit, or your pure consciousness. It’s not the same as your brain. Just like a phone, it uses the brain to transmit signals and messages. It receives messages through the brain, and it sends them through the brain. But it’s not the same thing as the brain.
Many religions consider that the first I, the “me,” is imaginary or an illusion, while the second I is the true I, the true self. From this perspective, spirituality consists in understanding the source of this true I, to strengthen this true I. And once we have reached this understanding, we become transformed, and our “me”, our social self, becomes transformed too.
See the next essay, on Materialist dualism: Things exist, and you have thoughts about them.
For more on spirituality as a process of self-transformation, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, see Why Western philosophy forgot Greek Spirituality.
See the previous essay, on Let go. You are nothing, and you are so much more.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
