Oxford: being oneself over time

Now I’m in Oxford, England. Discussing the weather makes me self-conscious, but failing to do so might leave you with entirely the wrong picture. The skies are mostly perfectly blue, apparently starting at some point in the middle of the night. If I wake up at 6:45am, I can go outside and wander empty streets of old British buildings, under a hot, empty sky.

Also, this is what actually happens, because — perhaps relatedly — here I wake up at like 6:45am, and then become tired and fall asleep at like midnight. This is not a usual experience for me, including the part where one gets tired and falls asleep at some point roughly a day’s length after waking, without substantial prompting and melatonin-consumption.

I am liking this better, for now. In part because I also feel like being virtuous in the morning here. The office is hard to get into until 9am, so I have been variously going for walks, meditating, running, doing exposure therapy, practicing speaking, and thinking about how to prioritize my work activities. Whereas in my usual lifestyle, if I wake up in the morning, I am likely to groggily reflect on how uncomfortable it is to be a human while half-heartedly hanging out near my work for the first ten hours or so, and don’t expect to really get into a rhythm until the evening.

Which brings us to personal identity: in the past, if my behavior changed noticeably, or if what it felt like to be me changed noticeably — or if I thought these might have changed, and that I just couldn’t tell because I have a terrible memory for ‘what it feels like to be me’, given the difficulty of recording it in words — then I would be very worried. When I came to Oxford in 2013, I was trying to learn to speak better, with a speaking teacher, but I eventually gave up because speaking differently made me feel like a different person. Which was horrifying.

I think part of what was horrifying was that with such a poor understanding of the space of what it is like to be a person, I couldn’t really tell how much I was moving in it, and without markers to see where I had moved, how could I ever return? Especially if it was a big and multidimensional space. It felt like being in a tiny boat in a vast sea, without an anchor or landmarks on the horizon. In the tossing waves and giant currents, I could never know where I had drifted.

Why did it matter where my boat drifted? Well, the exact location of my boat was what made me ‘me’. And plausibly that was the most important thing. To drift too far might be basically death. Or at least the loss of something hugely valuable to me. Or, to the extent that I seemed to have anything important going for me, that might help me save the world, I might lose it and regress to the mean, which didn’t seem too promising.

(I feel something like this about a lot of things, and uniformly other people disagree with me. For instance, pain and flavors. If I am in pain, I am sometimes worried that I don’t know how much pain it is. It is kind of like a level on an unmarked scale. It seems like I can’t compare it easily to other pain I have had, because I don’t remember the feeling of that — just that it was also some amount bad: another unmarked point. It’s hard to get a measurement scale off the ground if you can’t compare the points. You can measure by behavioral clues, like ‘is the pain making it hard to carry out a conversation? Hard to play computer games? Hard to avoid throwing up or passing out?’ But my sense is that these don’t very directly track either the intensity of the pain, or the suffering entailed by it. This all describes in an extreme way a thing that only bothers me somewhat, some of the time — I do usually have some intuitive sense of how much pain a thing is, and am at least not worried about it — but sometimes I’m pretty confused, and the underlying issue seems to be something like this.)

The other thing that was horrifying about feeling like a different person, is that contrary to my reasoning about such matters, I felt like I had a soul, or that there was a ‘further fact’ about my personal identity. That it was conceivable that I would stop experiencing anything in five minutes, and that my body would continue to function with a different self at the helm, or on the observation deck, or whatever. My body’s behavior would be exactly the same, but I wouldn’t be experience being it any more — someone else would, much like with all of the other people in tho world who aren’t me. I would experience nothing. My guess is that this is in line with the common naive view of how selves work, but more strangely, I felt like this self-death might actually happen, if I diverged from myself in concrete ways. Like, if I spoke differently and walked differently and adopted new modes of thought, I might just stop experiencing anything. I would have claimed that this view didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was very hard to shake enough to not worry. Which I think seems reasonable actually — who wants to bet their life on their impressions of the gist of the nascent field of personal identity matching the correct answer?

Anyway, I used to be so worried about somehow losing myself that my boyfriend at the time would respond to my worrying by pointing out that he could tell I was still myself by my distinctive concern about whether I was still myself. And he had only known me for a small fraction of the time that this had been a problem.

One thing I was worried about on these grounds was taking SSRIs. They weren’t supposed to have too many terrible side effects, but random people on the internet seemed to think that their personalities had been irreversibly altered by them sometimes. And could an intervention really destroy one’s all-encompassing anxiety, leaving one the same person? What would that even mean?

Anyway, I took the SSRIs. And I stopped worrying about whether I was the same person. I’m not sure if they were actually related. But maybe my worst fears came true: I destroyed that most central part of myself that is cripplingly concern about losing oneself. It seems fine now, but that’s what you would expect after such a catastrophe.

A different way to explain what happened was that I never knew what exactly was important about myself, so drifting at all in mental-space felt dangerous. Then at some point I decided that what was important was goodness. And my commitment to goodness, and my pragmatic ability to pursue it, are both relatively empirically measurable matters. I can have a sense of where I am on those oceans. And at last I felt that, even if I were to lose myself and what it ineffably takes to be me — and even if I were to lose some kind of metaphysical connection to an anticipatable future, and so to have no more experiences, and to be ‘killed’ and replaced by a similar person, if the rules of personal identity turned out that way — then if it was in the pursuit of a better future for humanity, it would be a sacrifice I’d take willingly.

But I think I sort of decided all of this in the background, in moments of distraction from reading restaurant menus, and lapses of focus in conversation and such. So I don’t really know if it counts as a decision so much as a change in perspective. And I don’t know if I endorse it.

(On the other hand, I recently went to a small social event where people got to trying to name different parts of themselves, and each other. For instance, ‘martyr’ or ‘maximizer’ or ‘eight year old’. I was the worst at this, but my friend suggested one of my key parts was ‘uncertainty sailor’, a sub-agent who can’t figure out whether to eat a sandwich by smelling it, because they can’t know what sandwiches usually smell like, or how much this smell of sandwich differs from the usual one, or whether this thing they are experiencing is a ‘smell’… so maybe I haven’t fundamentally changed that much.)

This weekend I got to thinking about such things more, because I went to a conference celebrating Derek Parfit, the father of not worrying too much about personal identity. (Or perhaps the father of spending all of your time worrying about how much to not worry about personal identity.) I got into a discussion at dinner afterwards with a friend who said that he did at least strongly feel that he had something like a soul that persisted during his life, and that could in principle be in a different body. I hadn’t heard anyone reasonable saying anything like that in a while, and it reminded me that in spite of my social inclination to laugh at the view and distance myself from it, it was probably pretty much what I felt was true. Or at least had done pretty recently. Which was at least a large part of his point.

His other point was that genuinely changing your mind on this question would have major consequences. And I suppose that is probably true even for myself, having patched my need to act on such worries. I might think that I’d be willing to sacrifice my ‘self’ substantially for the good of the world, but if the real state of affairs is that such things don’t exist, that is probably a better basis for a lack of concern (if only because it is more likely to be true that I’m willing to sacrifice a thing that doesn’t exist, than one that does and matters a lot to me).

With all of this spare time in the mornings, I got to experimenting. I have been doing my own version of ‘exposure therapy’. Which consists of walking around looking for things that will trigger OCD compulsions or other nearby fear, and then doing them, to some non-awful degree. Usually I would find a butcher and stare at the meat and chicken feet without twitching my eyes or face, and walk past poles and buildings without moving my line of sight around them according to particular patterns, and look people in the eyes and then not look at their eyes twice more, and maybe find a cemetery to look at. The last couple of days I have been doing personal identity related exposure therapy for a bit each morning. I pretend to be someone else — I wander around the streets talking on my phone to nobody, and I speak differently, and walk differently, and say different things. Sometimes I act like Barack Obama, or Petra from Jane the Virgin, or a slouching teenager, or a Southern lady with confident views. Pretending something for a bit has never been that alarming for some reason, but ceasing to officially end the make-believe has been. So I have been not ending it. I just play and then get distracted at some point and maybe gradually go back to my normal way of acting. Or not. Maybe I’ll talk slightly differently forever. This has been not very scary. I think occasionally part of me still thinks about whether I’ll just disappear, but it is not very much of me. Which is not to say that I don’t still believe in a soul, but perhaps now I at least believe in the stability of whatever I have.

So, in some ways I am fairly different from the me of 2013, but I think better equipped to seek the good, so whatever. I hope that one day I actually understand all this well enough to actually believe in the right answer. I also hope that I get to be all of the people in the universe in the same metaphysical sense that I get to be my future self.