Becoming Self-Conscious

At the beginning of my book Mind-Body Problems, I describe one of my earliest childhood memories. I was walking through weeds on the bank of a river with two friends when suddenly I thought, and then said aloud, “I’m me.” My friends ignored me and kept walking, so I did too. But inside I was thinking, “I’m me, I’m me.” I felt lonely, scared, exhilarated, bewildered.

That moment was when I first became self-conscious, aware of myself as something weird, distinct from the rest of the world, demanding explanation. Or so I came to believe when I recalled the incident in subsequent decades. I never really talked about it, because it was hard to describe. It meant a lot to me, but I doubted it would mean much to anyone else. Then I learned that others have had similar experiences.

One is Rebecca Goldstein, the philosopher and novelist, whom I profiled in Mind-Body Problems. Before interviewing Goldstein, I read her novel 36 Arguments Against the Existence of God, and I came upon a passage in which the hero, Cass, a psychologist, recalls a recurrent “metaphysical seizure” or “vertigo” that struck him in childhood. Lying in bed, he was overcome by the improbability that he was just himself and no one else.

“The more he tried to get a fix on the fact of being Cass here,” Goldstein writes, “the more the whole idea of it just got away from him.” Even as an adult, Cass kept asking himself, “How can it be that, of all things, one is this thing, so that one can say, astonishingly, ‘Here I am’”?

This passage popped off the page at me. Cass was expressing how I felt as a boy muttering, I’m me. When I asked Goldstein if Cass’s experience was inspired by her own, she confirmed that it was. Lying in bed as a girl she would wonder, “What is it about me that makes me me… What makes me this and not that?” Goldstein suspected that people who are “truly bothered by philosophical problems” are more likely to have experienced this feeling.

After I published Mind-Body Problems, David Berman, a philosopher, told me about other mind-body thinkers who had experiences like mine. One was psychiatrist/guru Carl Jung. In a 1959 BBC show, the interviewer asks Jung (just over three minutes into the interview): “Can I take you back to your own childhood? Do you remember the occasion when you first felt consciousness of your individual self?” Jung replies:

That was in my eleventh year. On my way to school, I stepped out of a mist. It was just as if I had been in a mist, walking in a mist, and then I stepped out of it and then I knew, I am. I am what I am. And then I thought, But what have I been before? And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things. I was just one thing among many things.

Berman has found hints of similar experiences in the writings of Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) and modern philosophers, including Saul Kripke. In his 2006 paper “The First Person,” Kripke discusses “the perplexities some philosophers have felt concerning the simple first person pronoun ‘I’.” Kripke does not describe a personal episode of self-awareness, but he certainly seems obsessed with the strangeness of the self, his and others. An alternative title for Kripke’s talk could be, “When I Say ‘I’, What Do I Mean?”

Berman calls Jung’s experience of self-consciousness, and mine, “dualistic,” because we felt a sharp division between ourselves and the rest of the world. Other mind-body thinkers, Berman says, seem to have had “monistic” experiences, in which divisions dissolve and you feel a profound sense of oneness. They include Spinoza, Hume and William James.

Monistic experiences get most of the attention, because they are usually accompanied by bliss and spiritual exaltation rather than anxiety and alienation. Enlightenment, the goal of Buddhists and other spiritual seekers, is supposedly monistic. But I prefer my humble dualistic experience. It has left me with an abiding sense that the world is utterly weird, and the weirdest thing of all is that I’m here feeling the weirdness. It’s an unsettling feeling, but I cherish it.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”