10 - The Highest Peak

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

― Socrates

It is a hall of mirrors. Few designed to assist clear sight. Some concave, come convex. Some cracked, throwing further confusion into the visual mix. Some missing. Some outright shattered. You have to navigate the broken glass and the distorted reflections with no map and dim lighting. Good luck with that, my friends. To all of you, good luck.

- Arnold Furbrish

I am designed, both culturally and biologically, to inherently create a difference between things. And in this difference I make them desirable or undesirable or worthy of indifference or what have you. But in the engagement with and investment in this activity, I indulge a division that separates the experiencer from the experience. A useful separation in that it enables me to function socially with maximal efficiency, but its usefulness does not correspond with its apparent ubiquity. Its habitual usage has grown with, and is therefore has become intertwined with, my sense of identity. I am therefore often unaware that there are other ways of experiencing reality, other routes to discrimination. And the default setting I use to engage with interior objects can be augmented with or possibly even be superseded by, a more considered and consciously chosen mechanism, one that fundamentally includes awareness of its own nature, and one that therefore is much more likely to permit and encourage alternative modes of seeing. The key is to align the objects of consciousness and the agent of consciousness with each other so that their interaction arouses little or no internal friction. The success of this depends entirely on what I choose to align with and the method and means I choose to perform this alignment.

I come to understand what is expected of me, what is desirable for me to be, and to emulate, according to the norms of aspirations and expectations shared by other, relatable, members of my culture. The influences that ultimately determine what I consider valuable are often deeply buried and difficult to change. It is therefore important that I understand what my own natural inclinations are and the likely boundaries of my potential. In this way I can place myself in an appropriate and useful context so that I don't remain persistently and inextricably bound to them.

If asked, most people would claim that they know themselves quite well, without necessarily having made any special or particular effort to do so, or even to understand why the proposition might be problematic. “I am myself, therefore how could I not know myself?” The assumption being that the self is a physical, tangible phenomenon. The body is that, certainly. I know myself as well as I know my own body. The self is curiously and closely associated with the body. The “Mind” on the other hand is thought of as a thing different from self – The Cartesian mind/body split still retains a popular weight, even if consciously it might be acknowledged to be anomalous. It makes experiential sense to us to consider the two phenomena as apart. The “Self” as an idea is one that included both mind and body.

The self that assumes it sees itself clearly and the self it is witnessing being the same phenomena viewed from a different vantage point, are social constructions and are therefore dependant on social conditioning for form and meaning. What self am I observing? What self is doing the observing? There is no clear act of seeing since the self is itself when it is observing itself. It is not outside of itself. For an observation to take place then there must be an observer and an observed. A subject and an object. A line of division that separates the observer from the observed. It is itself engaged in the act of observation and simultaneously it is also the observed party in the same action. If it is observing, then it is the observer not the observed. If it desists from observing, then it is not the observed either. It can imagine that it observes its own actions but that is nothing more than an act of creativity.

The imagination as a phenomena is, in and of itself, pretty impressive. We take it for granted, because most of us are to some degree or other, adept at using it. But the mechanics of having one are astounding. This becomes most clear when we attempt to engineer one for ourselves. We encounter considerable obstacles in the manufacture of an artificial intelligence. In fact when we think of AI we don’t even consider artificial imagination, we seek to recreate intelligence, an artificial reasoning machine that is adaptable to the changing landscape of the information it encounters. Creating a machine with the ability to invent subjective experience is something difficult to imagine without first mastering artificial intelligence. But the fact that having an imagination is objectively impressive does not make its products any more accurate or dependable.

It’s like the eye observing itself in the mirror. It says “look, I can see myself”. But in this case, what it is seeing is a historic interpretation of light patterns the brain has interpreted. It has not witnessed itself. And cannot ever actually perform that feat since it is merely the organ of observation, it lacks anything resembling cognitive or interpretive facility. It participates in the act but can in no way separate itself from that action.

We expend a phenomenal amount of processing power to effectively persist in the world, navigating social, personal and physical space, withouteven thinking about it. The reflective self that is aware and thinking of itself, is not really that large a slice of the overall perceptual pie. And it all existsin that moment of experience. The minute we attempt to alter our actions we are altering what is already past. The self is persistently in the process ofmaking itself. But, I might plausibly claim, I am the same self from moment to moment. I have been this self all my life. And this might seem true to me. But it’s more that the products of the activity of self making, seems to me to be predictable enough, in that I become accustomed to my own particular pattern of behaviour and response. My habitual patterns determine the apparent consistence of my experience of self but they are the resultof my moment to moment engagement with the changing exterior landscape and my attempt to manage my own experience of that.

I am always working historically with my self. That the history is relatively immediate does not alter the fact that it is of necessity in the past. Add to this the fact that at any given point in time I might find myself overwhelmed by the complexity of the information I am attempting to parse, organise, utilise and inter-relate. This vast deluge of information often results in the divergent impulses of the typically conflicted individual that might be struggling with multiple and often diametrically opposing prerogatives, sometimes making it difficult to control and manage my own impulses or behaviours, even when those behaviours might be destructive or unhelpful to me.

The self-idea is inherently prone to its own kind of fabrication - for the purposes of social advantage and appearance and a bunch of other less inspiring imperatives. It's a common and often necessary function of human social interaction to make minor adjustments to how I am perceived in agiven moment to achieve some particular advantage. Often when people are asked to self-assess their abilities, they tend to err on the side of over-estimation. Furthermore, I am rarely the villain of my own tale and so whatever actions I take, I am fairly certain to have some manner of logical construction to prop myself up while I do whatever I so please. I am culturally predisposed to massaging the truth in order to yield the best (or worst) condition that permits me to do more or less, what I please. So I attempt to present the best image to the world - how I want to be perceived or how I think I should be perceived or some variation on that theme.

Whatever my experience of self is, and however that experience may vary from its style of presentation - to other people I am what I seem.That is often the only evidence others have to go on. And what I seem to them depends on the flexibility, range and power of my presentation skills. I may adjust my self presentation or the presentation of my motives to make myself seem better than I actually am, but this doesn’t serve to change what I am. It can be extremely easy to seem to be something, to be seduced by something that seems to embody a particular set of desirable properties, or to attempt to display another set of desirable properties in order to seduce another for some purpose or other. It’s of little use to seem to be wise, kind, experienced, to have perspective, judgement and all the other attributes that contribute to a satisfying experience of being in the world, if that is all I am doing - Seeming to be, displaying characteristics without concentrating on the fundamental generator of those characteristics.

This refers to the interior landscape of my own experience. Though this can be separated from behaviour, behaviour does have a significant impact upon it. I am what I do. But what I do might change what others think I am. Being the thing-itself in my bones requires a long term view and a lot of work on myself, as I gradually move towards becoming a person who naturally demonstrates these features without apparent effort or intention. It requires me to be able to incrementally and by degrees evolve towards some satisfying version of myself.

It's very easy for me as a human being to buy my own snake oil, (buying it myself first might well be the optimal means of effectively selling it to others). The more I participate wholeheartedly in my fiction, the more conviction I have in it. Of course, it’s impossible to actually lie to myself, though I've made many a fair attempt at it. Like the observer/observed dilemma, there really is no escape from this truth. What I can manage, is to pretend that I have escaped or to distract myself from my failure to escape by other means. And if I am wholehearted in my commitment, then I avoid weakening my own position with self doubt. This self projection can be even more powerful, since it occurs in tandem with the self projections of others. We are all so busily engaged in this myth-making, that it becomes easy to mistake the form of presentation for the actual substance of it.

Alternatively, What I actually project may well be counterproductive to my goals. I might work to make myself seem worse than I am to myself and others, depending on how conflicted my personality might be. It is a peculiar impulse in humanity that makes some of us yield to expectations andothers tilt against them. It can be very difficult for human beings to utterly divorce themselves from their own self presentation, certainly not over aprolonged period. We can manage to persist in this state and survive or even flourish, but we are likely to remain alienated from anything resembling clarity of perspective.

Most of the obstacles to accurate self-perception exist in the friction space of social relationship. The self and its perceptions find context and meaning in relationship to others. How I am like them? How I am unlike them? How inferior or superior do I feel to them? What are the qualities andmeasures the prevailing culture tends to use to apportion value to humans and their skills and possessions? Where do I sit in relation to those measures? Do I approve of them or not? Do I take them on to ease my passage through the world? Do I do so for fear of the consequence of failing to do so? How much of what confers power in my culture do I possess or feel I lack? What are the particular circumstances of my life in my social milieu?All these things conspire to influence my self-perception, my self-presentation and any clarity of vision I might experience in the process. Or indeed, any lack thereof. Taking all this into account, it starts to become clear quite how tricky a proposition this, “know thyself” actually is.