The Boundaries of Self
Last fall, after an unhealthy bout of doctor self-denial, I had surgery to remove a small tumor that had grown on my hard palate. Some wayward salivary glands apparently felt deglutition was far too easy for me and partook in the gradual obstruction of my oropharynx. The growth was benign, but it was the first time since being a physician that I traipsed the divide and became a patient myself. Before I learned that it wouldn’t end my life, my mind scribbled doomsday scenarios about what the tumor could do to me. It’s natural, I would remind myself, for patients to construct narratives of the worst possible outcome, but looking back now, what was most striking about my reaction was how I so readily othered the tumor. I behaved like it was an unwelcome invader of my physiology, a derivation from what I considered my homeostatic norm. It was not a part of me and I wanted it out.
But how could it not be me? The thing had arisen from my own cells. Yet it challenged my sense of normality, how I perceived myself as a healthy whole, which in turn led me to think about the nature of self and how the human mind creates artificial boundaries between me and everything else in the universe. The problem of othering a tumor that was clearly a part of me originates as a conceptual problem, namely, the fallacy of self.
In a modern world obsessed with possession, property, selfhood, and identity, it’s odd that we find difficulty localizing the nidus of self. Consider your own body, an organism teeming with bacteria which tutor our immune system, inhibit invasion by nefarious microorganisms, and regulate our weight. We are discovering new links between gut microbiota and a whole host of human diseases. Yet do we ever think of the bacteria as “us,” despite the fact that their activities are instrumental in making us who we are? It really is a metaphysical question. In reality, what I consider “me” is not a unified whole made of merely human DNA but a holobiont, an ecological unit composed of a variety of organisms that interact in myriad ways to construct the experience I identify as “mine.”
Of course, thinkers throughout the ages, theists among them, made us consider the philosophical and metaphysical dimensions of the self. To understand (and even harder, to actualize) the very difficult Buddhist concept of not-self, one must first accept that change, or impermanence, is at the heart of all experience. Conceptualizing the self requires us to create an identity, an essence, out of something that cannot be pinned down due to its endless manifestations. To call something self requires you to put a metaphysical boundary over it, but the impermanent nature of self, of experience, of consciousness, defies any such attempt.
In our very material world, the question might be answered by pinpointing the locale of conscious experience, the factory for identity. But when we look, its location eludes us. Where does the self reside in the brain? There is no anatomical center of conscious experience. We tend to think that there is some epicenter where the CEO of the brain, a great decider bundle of neurons regulates our thoughts and feelings. But no such place has been found. In fact, the conceptualization of self seems more like a psychological operation that conveniences the human organism to survive in competitive, resource scarce environments where natural selection bids that mind to propagate the self in order to fulfill life’s ultimate enterprise, reproduction. “I am this” is a psychological byproduct of evolution.
If we cannot easily mark the borders of self, if we cannot locate its anatomical address, and if we cannot ascribe the self with the usual characteristics of identity (essence and permanence, to some degree), then it becomes increasingly difficult to ascribe too much significance to our thoughts and feelings. We have a tendency to convince ourselves that the meaning we ascribe to our conscious experiences are valid phenomena, but if the nature of self is so nebulous to begin with, how much import does “my” reality even have? This is not to deny the existence of the self, of my lived experience, but understanding the shaky ground upon which we construct identity may help us be a little less involved in my worries, my fears, my pain, my regrets, and a little more vested in the lives of other selves.