Containing Multitudes?

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, writes about the self in the November issue of The Atlantic. In "First Person Plural," Professor Bloom explains that the brain is made up of large parts that are made up of smaller parts, which in turn are made up of even smaller parts, and so on. Neuroscientists think that the interesting functions of the brain, such as intelligence, are created by the interaction of the parts, not the parts themselves.

Some scholars argue, says Bloom, that even though the myriad "smart" functions of the brain are generated by many neural subsystems, there must be "a part that constitutes a person, a self, the chief executive of all the subsystems." Scientists have found no such part, but we want to believe it's there. Bloom continues,

More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will. Perhaps the very notion there are such things as selves -- individuals who persist over time -- needs to be rejected as well.

Bloom tries to find a middle way between big self and no self. Brains do give rise to selves that last over time, he says. However, we have more than one self per brain.

The idea is that instead, within each brain, different selves are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control -- bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against once another.

To cap this off, Bloom throws in the famous line from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" -- "I am large, I contain multitudes."

The article continues at some length, with Bloom discussing his ideas about multiple selves. He also says that a sense of a continuing self is a biological necessity. The brain "must be sensitive to maintaining the needs of the continuing body," he writes. If one believed that the person who will wake up in your bed tomorrow morning is an entirely different person, why would you care what happens to him?

It's always fascinating -- and frustrating -- whenever a Western academic or scholar stumbles toward anatman. Buddhism teaches that the sense of a continuing, permanent self is a by-product of the skandhas.

Professor Bloom isn't all the way there, but his idea of selves "continually popping in and out of existence" is a step in the direction of what the Buddha taught -- “Oh, Bhikshu, every moment you are born, decay, and die.” He meant that, every moment, the illusion of "me" created by the skandhas renews itself. "Me" is a series of thought-moments. Each thought-moment conditions the next thought-moment.

But it's frustrating when people like Professor Bloom -- well-educated and intelligent, obviously -- clearly have no idea there's a teaching of self / no-self that nicely fits neuroscience and answers questions about the sense of continuity. Professor Bloom mentions Plato. Why not Nagarjuna? Why is Eastern philosophy still so exotic and mysterious to Western academics?