Where Are You?

By Mihir Mathur

Your search for yourself might be more difficult than you thought

We have all come across the enlightened pontifications about "finding oneself", the endless sermonizing of the utmost gravity of "discovering your center", and the inalienable import of "uncovering your inner self", usually adorned by kittens and flowers on Instagram posts by vacuous people and on daily morning vexatious Whatsapp posts.

So, how do you find yourself? Where do you start? What can you confidently say is, actually, "you"?

Let's start at the opening of the maze that is the human mind, with this:

Boo

That is an image designed specifically to elicit a fear response. It is something that intrinsically provokes a flight-or-fight response in you. It releases adrenaline into the bloodstream to prepare you for your response, tenses your muscles, raises your heart rate and breathing and sharpens your senses. And you control none of these things. Your body does this automatically, outside of your control. You also don't control what scares you. This applies to everything that can put you in such a state.

Your fears, therefore, aren't "you".

What about things that you like? Your favorite music, your hobbies, and so on. When your favorite song comes on, your brain releases endorphins - the pleasure hormones. While you can choose what you listen to or what you do, you can't choose what to like. If you could, you can just choose to like everything for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit. But, you can't.

Your tastes and preferences, therefore, aren't "you".

Let's move onto other things. What about higher-level things? Playing instruments, driving and other higher functions that we can do? Those are under are control, right?

Well, no.

These things require your conscious control, but with enough practice, they become automatic. People driving to and from home will remember their route without thinking about it. With enough practice, your fingers will remember where to go on the pegboard, or which keys to hit on the piano.

Your higher motor functions, therefore, aren't "you".

What about simpler stuff? Moving your hand or your leg, or whatever? That is certainly something that you control, right?

Well, no.

Libet* conducted a study where he asked a group of people to press a button whenever they felt like. He found that their brain activity spiked well before they pressed the button. This suggests that your subconscious mind - which you don't control - made the decision well before your conscious mind did.

Your small decisions, therefore, aren't "you".

What about more basic stuff? What about thinking? That is certainly "you", right? You can certainly always choose that.

Not always, no.

If you are good enough at a language, then you are not consciously attempting to understand them. The words go in, are decrypted, and the meaning is presented to your consciousness, whatever that may be. You don't, consciously, control any step of this process. The same applies for every sensation that reaches your brain - of heat, light, pressure and pain.

Your thinking, therefore, isn't "you".

So what else isn't "you"?

Well, things like:

Balancing when you run or walk, your sleeping patterns, recalling memories, compiling the information that comes through your dozen or so senses into coherent picture for you to understand, processing language, text and speech, perceiving color or patterns, and much, much more, isn't "you".

What is "you", then, you may ask?

Take a moment to find a quiet place in your house, and close your eyes. Ignore all thoughts - your pending chores, your anxieties and fears - and all sensations.

You'll find that beneath all those things that you are now ignoring, that there is something there. Not a center, nothing that can be sensed, not a monkey pushing levers and buttons. But there is an awareness - something that is aware that there all these things surrounding itself - your fears, your thoughts, your likes and dislikes, your sensations.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is "you".

And let me tell how absolutely amazing a thing that something that is "you" is. There are very few creatures that are blessed with this self-awareness - elephants, dolphins, some great apes - and us humans. Most animals don't even recognize their reflections.

If there is life out there in the universe, then the question arises if they are self-aware. They might be intelligent, but would they be conscious, like us? It is possible that the gift of self-awareness is exceedingly rare, that it is a evolutionary fluke because nature decided that it might be helpful to survive. And we have won that one-in-a-billion genetic lottery.

By Mihir Mathur