The Short Version

I was somewhat surprised when I woke up one morning in 1973 and found that I was thirty years old. It had never occurred to me that I would reach that age. I had never wondered where I might be, or who I might be, but there I was, and if I had lived that long, it seemed possible that I might someday be 40, or even 50!

Not anticipating it, I had made no preparations for being 30, but I realized that if things kept on as they had and I lived to be 40, perhaps it would be wise to make some plans.

The reason I’m thinking of that long-ago day now is that I’ve read a couple of things lately that put planning for the future in a different perspective. Paul Bloom wrote a very interesting article in the November 2008 Atlantic Magazine called, “First Person Plural,” about the concept of having multiple selves. I’ve written and talked about this idea previously, often using Marvin Minsky’s term, “sub-personalities,” but perhaps multiple selves is better: “sub-personalities” suggests that there might be some main personality that somehow dominates or is superior to its subordinates—someone in charge—and I think there may be no such entity.

I could write a very long piece on all the points Bloom makes—the article is well worth reading—but for now, this quote is what brought on thoughts of my 30th birthday:

Although it might be hard to think about the person who will occupy your body tomorrow morning as someone other than you, it is not hard at all to think that way about the person who will occupy your body 20 years from now. This may be one reason why many young people are indifferent about saving for retirement; they feel as if they would be giving up their money to an elderly stranger.

The young people he’s referring to sound like me with my prior-30 attitude.

Bloom doesn’t mention him at all, but I’ve been re-reading Minsky’s Society of Mind, and interestingly, he brought up a very similar idea 25 years ago:

Consider how you are generous to future self at present self’s expense. Today, you put some money in the bank in order that sometime later you can take it out. Whenever did that future self do anything so good for you?”(p. 54)

As Bloom points out, we feel more akin to the self of yesterday and tomorrow than we do to that self in the distant past or future. Perhaps it is because the consequences of our actions are more obvious in the short term: yesterday’s overeating is today’s extra pound, and tomorrow’s paycheck may depend on our going to work today.

For people who believe in free will, who they were in the distant past may not seem particularly consequential. They feel they have the power to alter their course at any time no matter what has happened to them earlier. We determinists may feel more tightly bound to what has come before, more interested in understanding the connections between what we were and what we have become. Careful consideration of the consequences of past actions leads to their exerting a greater influence on present decisions than if they were less thoroughly examined, and we become more attuned to the possible ramifications of the present for the future.

Regardless of the importance we assign to the past, the recall of memories has an interesting effect: When I remember things that I did and how they felt, I am recreating the experience of a former self in the context of the present. Past experience becomes present experience, and despite any differences in how it felt to prior selves, it is updated in recollection to the point of view of the self now in charge, so that it feels very much as if it happened to the current “me.”

(A note to those young people Bloom refers to: If you are fortunate enough to become that “elderly stranger,” it will feel very much as if it is you, and it will feel as if you are experiencing the consequences of your current self’s behavior.)

Memory provides the base from which we imagine the future, and the greater our education and experience, the broader foundation we have for imagining what may lie ahead. Some of us have to repeat the same mistakes several times before realizing that the results are always the same, and sometimes it takes years to learn the lesson. Younger people haven’t had that opportunity.

Actions do have consequences, and despite the differences between my current selves and those that came before, they made me who I am, and I am grateful to those that made it easier for me. I’m enjoying the fruits of their labors, and with that in mind, I’m doing my best to take care of the brain and body that future selves will inherit. If all goes well, they’ll have as much fun as I’m having now.

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Imagine that you were projected 200 years into the past, and found yourself with no cell phone, no car, no TV, no internet, no latte; in a totally alien culture. Or keeping things contemporary, imagine you were in some remote village on an upper tributary of the Amazon, or in the interior of Africa or Tajikistan. If you were an urban dweller, any of these places might seem incredibly barren and threatening. At the same time, a native of any of these outback regions might find New York City equally barren and threatening.

As time goes on, human culture will likely become much more homogeneous, but the current diversity offers a valuable lesson in how we come to be defined by the culture in which we grow up. It also shows the inventiveness of human beings in their efforts to make sense of the world and to make themselves comfortable in it.

Growing up in any culture, we learn how parent relates to child, spouse relates to spouse, and friend to friend. We learn how good and bad people behave, and how they’re rewarded or punished; which occupations are most desirable; which possessions most valuable. We are given, more or less explicitly, the information we need to function as a participant in that culture.

In larger societies, the possible relationships, values, and opportunities get much more complex and difficult to negotiate. In some ways the comfort level of citizens may be lower, the level of anxiety higher. There are subcultures with their own sets of rules within the larger culture, and people who wander into  subcultures outside their own may feel as alien as if they were in Kyzyl.

Despite these differences in culture, physics and chemistry are identical all over the planet: water flows downhill everywhere, and DNA spirals universally. Laughter, anger, fear, etc., are the same for all human beings, regardless of what provokes any of these emotions.

Consider what it might be like to step outside the limits of what you have been taught that you are, to see yourself as a generic human being, undefined by any specific culture. You could be comfortable anywhere, viewing the local rules and roles as arbitrary but being able to take them into account enough to function: a cultural chameleon, a universal human being. You would know just how much conformity each system required, how much deviance would be tolerated.

It seems there are two necessary ingredients in achieving this universality: You need the kind of broad perspective on culture that I’ve been trying to present, and you need to be totally comfortable with your basic humanness. It takes redefining your self as greater than the limited version you acquired from parents, friends, teachers, media, etc. You need to regard everything you have been taught as provisional; as only one of the many threads of social evolution, with no more claim to absolute truth than any other.

Perhaps the most difficult part of this redefinition is in learning to see human relationships in universal rather than personal terms. If you do something nice for someone and they smile in appreciation, can you enjoy that human emotion even though the other person has no idea who you are? Can you empathize with the love of a parent for their child, loving that child as if it were yours without any hope of reciprocity or recognition? When you see two lovers lost in each other’s gaze, can you feel that love as if it were directed at you, or do you devalue your empathized emotion because it isn’t personal?

All the pleasures and joys of being human exist as particular brain-states, and we can partake of them regardless of whether the culturally defined stimuli for them are present. We can see ourselves as citizens of the world; or the universe, for that matter. Beam me up to Pandora, Scotty.

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