Consciousness, Headlessness and humanity's case of mistaken identity

A Headless Scooby-Doo

Who am I? This is surely a, if not the, central question of everybody’s life. Without knowledge of who we are, how can we respond appropriately to life? What is life, if we don’t know who is living it?

I am going to argue that you, who you think you are, is a case of mistaken identity. And that this case of mistaken identity is responsible for much of the suffering in life.

It’s classic Scooby-Doo, and the villain is about to be unmasked. Who, or what, lies underneath?

The human case of mistaken identity is one of consciousness with its objects, it is the confusion between the one looking in the mirror with the one looking back, it is the confusion between the voice in your head and the one who listens.

This voice in our heads was the focus of a recent debate at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival this year in Hay entitled ‘The Real Me’. The debate brought together spiritual psychologist Steve Taylor, philosopher Jack Symes, philosopher Anneli Jefferson, and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis to debate whether the voice in our head is really who we are, or whether we have become mistakenly identified with this voice.

You are presumably using the voice in your head to read these very words. Hello inner voice. Yes, hello, I’m talking to you.

‘I’ am talking to ‘you’. These little innocuous terms: ‘I’, ‘you’… ‘we’ use them all the time. But who the hell are we actually talking about? And more importantly, who is doing the talking?

Most of us, I propose, are constantly mistaking ourselves for the voice in our heads. As we go about our day, we become ‘lost in thought’, we become entranced by the voice and its chattering, even to the point where we barely notice the reality around us or at least only perceive that reality through the lens of that voice’s story. And we instinctually think it is we who are talking – we even think the inner voice is ‘me’. We think ‘I need to do the dishes later’, ‘I wonder what I should have for dinner’… ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’…

What is this ‘I’? It’s a strange little word. One of a kind even. ‘I’. One letter long. So much of our lives contained within it. What does it refer to?

When I say I what am I referring to? I am referring to me. Who is this me? Well it is me, it is I myself.

We see immediately the circularity of this little ‘I’. It is the perfect example of a self-reference. The ‘I’ is a reference, and the thing being referred to is the ‘I’ itself. So, when I say I, I is referring to that same I which initially did the referring. A visual representation is below:

Fig 1.

The idea of self-reference is not limited to the ‘I’. Many will have heard of the famous liar’s paradox.

This sentence is false.

We can see that the sentence refers to itself – ‘this sentence’. But there is a second part here – ‘is false’. The paradox lies in the fact that if we think the sentence is true, then it must be true that is it false. However, if the sentence is false, then it must be false that it is false and so it must be true. And so on…

Notice the sense of dynamism here. The sentence almost moves around its truth values. ‘If the sentence is true, then it is false, if the sentence is false then it is true, but if it is true then it is false, but if it is false then it is true’ … there is movement. It is like a metronome swinging back and forth between truth and falsity. There is even almost a rhythm to it; ‘if it is true then it is false, but if it is false then it is true…’ Maybe it’s just me but I can almost hear the music. It is like a wave flowing endlessly between truth and falsity, as visualised below:

But, if we return to our innocuous little ‘I’, the ‘I’ that refers to itself, there is no movement. The ‘I’ refers to itself and then stops. Leaving us mute, silent, unquestioning. We do not ask whether ‘I’ is true or false, it just is. ‘I’. It is like a thud. I. I. I. There is no music here. No sense of dynamism. Even the image we illustrated this I’s self-reference with has much more solidity, it is enclosed, rock-like:

It is this solidity that makes the ‘I’ so innocuous in our lives, so fixed, and so often left unquestioned. Of course I am I, what more is there left to say? Much more interesting is to just continue on from the ‘I’ and think ‘I… need to do the dishes later’, ‘I… wonder what I should have for dinner’. Where the self-reference ‘this sentence is false’ opens a can of dancing worms (another view of our Fig 2), the self-reference ‘I’ encloses itself with itself, it begins where it ends all in one moment, in a thud. The truth value of the ‘I’ – whether the ‘I’ is something true (think ‘real’) or something false (think ‘illusory’) – doesn’t even arise as a question.

The ’I’ appears to provide its own evidence. “‘I’ do not need evidence that ‘I’ exist… I am the very one asking the question!”

But it is time to bring the ‘I’ into question.

Questioning this ‘I’ is the very thing we must do. If we do not, if we allow it to go unquestioned, to take over our whole identity, without a second thought, then we are servants to this ‘I’, to this voice in our heads, and it will, and often does, run amuck.

The Mistaken Duality of the Self

The connection between mysticism, spirituality and philosophy is much closer than many philosophers are willing to admit. ‘Serious’ philosophers tend to think that spirituality makes philosophy a discipline less worthy of pursuit. This is a mistake. So hear me out with this next reference. And don’t worry, I’ll reference Wittgenstein later (who himself was extremely mystical).

Eckhart Tolle, the popularised spiritual writer, claims his moment of spiritual enlightenment came when, at a point close to suicide, he thought, “I cannot live with myself any longer”. I am sure many of us have thought this thought or something similar in our lives. It’s likely not an uncommon thought. Likely though we did not become spiritually enlightened upon thinking it. However, Eckhart Tolle had an insight upon thinking this thought, one that led him to reconsider who he was.

“I cannot live with myself any longer”. “I cannot live with my-self any longer”. Tolle realised, who the hell is this ‘I’ who cannot live with its ‘self’ any longer? Surely the ‘I’ is the ‘self’, and so in what sense does the ‘I’ need to live with its ‘self’ at all, if the ‘I’ is the ‘self’, and the only one there?!

This shows the mistaken identity that so many of us live with. There is a mistaken, supposed, duality in all of us. ‘I can’t live with myself’, who is the I and who is the self?

There are not two Eckhart Tolle’s struggling to the point of suicide to live with each other. If we had walked in on Eckhart Tolle in his room at this moment, considering suicide, thinking ‘I cannot live with myself’, we would not have walked in and seen two Tolles; Tolle’s ‘I’ talking to Tolle’s ‘self’. We would have of course walked in and seen only one Eckhart Tolle sitting there.

The mistaken duality is between consciousness and the ‘I’. Even when we think ‘I must do the dishes’… who the hell are we talking to? Is there another ‘you’ inside of ‘you’ who needs ‘you’ to remind ‘yourself’ to do the dishes? After all ‘you’ are the one reminding ‘your’‘self’ to do them.

This labyrinth, this spiral of self-reference… we are so lost in it. As soon as the ‘I’ gets started, it is a jumping-off point for all kinds of wandering thoughts. ‘I wonder whether she likes me’, ‘I need to speak to my boss about that holiday’… almost every other thought begins with this little ‘I’. No wonder we’ve forgotten to question this little ‘I’, there is so much built on top of it, there is so much this little ‘I’ has to think about.

And this is the same mistaken identity that Douglas Hofstadter makes in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. The self-referencing, strange loop, which is the ‘I’ remains only a pattern within consciousness, it does not give rise to consciousness itself. To claim that, as Sir Roger Penrose states, would be to claim that long strings of numbers could become conscious. Even if that were true, due to the unobservable nature of consciousness, we would be unable to verify it. The connection between the self-refencing, strange loop, of the ‘I’ and consciousness is very interesting, and possibly gives rise to self-consciousness. But the equating of ‘I’ and consciousness is the mistake of concern here, and I think Hofstadter makes that same mistake.

This mistaken conflation between consciousness and the ‘I’ may come from Descartes, ‘I think therefore I am’. What Descartes should have said is ‘I’m conscious therefore I am’. What he really meant was that there can be no doubt that we are conscious. Even if we are being deceived by an evil demon, even if we are a brain in a vat, we can at least be certain we are conscious even if everything is illusory within consciousness. But Descartes’ readers have equated ‘thinking’ and ‘consciousness’, as so many continue to – especially when it comes to AI. And we all in practice mistake consciousness with thinking too; when we mistake who we really are – consciousness – with the thinking voice in our heads – ‘I’.

As Steve Taylor creatively rephrased Descartes during the HowTheLightGetsIn debate, ‘I think, therefore I am stupid’… stupid to mistake consciousness with the thinking voice in our heads.

Or as Lacan writes, “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”

Speaking of Lacan… another way of demonstrating this mistaken duality is through Lacan’s mirror stage. At some point in early development we all begin to identify our self with the image we see in the mirror. And after this point, most of us continue to think that we are the one we see in the mirror. Possibly many reading this still believe they are the one in the mirror. After all, when ‘I’ move the mirror me moves. But this again is mistaking consciousness with its objects.

Ask yourself: Are you the same on ‘this side’ of the mirror as you are from ‘inside’ the mirror? ‘Inside’ the mirror there is a version of you with a face and a head. ‘This side’ of the mirror, there is a body, seen from a different angle sure… but there is no face and no head. Not on ‘this side’ of the mirror. On ‘this side’ of the mirror, what is there in place of a head and a face? Look down at your shoulders and upper chest. Is there a head on those shoulders? – here, in your immediate visual field. Point back at where you imagine your own face to be… again, in your immediate visual field, what are you pointing at? A vast nothingness replaces your head and face on ‘this side’ of the mirror. A nothingness filled with everything, a world, a world with a mirror with a face looking out of it, but that face is not you. Douglas Harding’s book The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth and On Having No Head is all about this fact of experience.

You might think this ‘self’ vs ‘mirror self’ difference is trivial. This fact of my visual field not being able to see my own face and head is just due to my specific point in space and time. And it overly prioritises the visual field. I can still touch and feel my head!

Both of these points are of course true. And I do wonder if the mystery of consciousness could be completely solved with just another look into Einstein’s special relativity – as philosopher Riccardo Manzotti suggests it could be. ‘I am conscious in this point in space and time, and so I perceive from here and perceive objects over there. My consciousness is not an object for me, as I cannot see my own self, due to the relative position of my eyes and head in space-time to themselves. I am in a 0 point of relative space-time, hence my consciousness is not an object for me and hence the always now-ness of consciousness’– this really might be all there is to the mysterious immaterial nature of consciousness.

And yes, I grant you, you can touch your own head. The philosophy of headlessness does not fall or fail based on these objections. The philosophy of headlessness is simply a reclaiming of direct experience, a reclaiming of the self as a unity (not a duality), and the reclaiming of consciousness from its identification with its objects.

We have become so enthralled with our thinking ‘I’ and our concepts, that we do not see reality, rather we look past it. We are so used to identifying ourselves with the one we see in the mirror, with our name, ‘Ricky’, this person in the world, all wrapped up with an identity, that we forget the direct experience that we are not the one we see in the mirror, we are the headless one looking, the no-thingness, the subjectivity of consciousness, looking at the object in the mirror, but not being wholly identified with it.

Through this notion of headlessness we come out of the mistaken duality. Rather than a head, face and eyes looking at the world, rather there is just the world. When you look at the world, it is not as though, in the direct visual field, that there is a ‘you’ ‘here’ looking ‘out’ at a ‘world’ ‘there’. There is no boundary between the world and yourself. The world replaces where your head should be! Don’t take my word for it; this is the meaning behind Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (which could be known as World and No-headedness), Berkerley’s notion that there is no such thing as distance (no distance is seen between ‘you’ and the ‘world’, they are a unity), and Wittgenstein also noticed this in the Tractatus:

5.621 The world and life are one.

5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)

5.631 The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.

If I wrote a book “The world as I found it”, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.

5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye.
And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.

5.6331 For the field of sight has not a form like this:

See the similarity between our rock like ‘I’ image (Fig 1) and Wittgenstein’s image of the eye and field of sight – both enclosed, rock-like. Notice the lack of duality in Wittgenstein, there is no self, no subject of the world, there is only the world.

Some may argue against this by referencing Kant and notions of voluntary control of the body. Kant argued that in order to perceive or know a ‘world’ at all, we must first recognise a ‘self’ distinct from that world. If the world and self are one unified thing, then one would not be able to perceive the other at all, as to perceive is to perceive distinction.

Again we can give Kant and our imagined counter figure their due. To perceive is to perceive distinction. But this does not mean that the self and world are not a unity. It only shows that within the unity of the self and the world, there are distinctions, but the self-world itself remains a unity. Or we could reply that, okay the self and world are distinct, but we are still not left with a duality, because the self is no-thingness, nothingness, and there is no real duality between a world and nothing – because nothing isn’t there! Again, this is what Sartre meant with Being and Nothingness.

But our counter figure might argue, if the self and world are a unity, if the world is my self, then why can’t I control events in the world like I can control my body? Why can’t I control the stock market or the weather, like I can control my left hand and simply raise it by thinking?

In response here, we must question free will, and also question this suggestion that control over a thing means that that thing is my self. Control does not equate to identification. I can control (drive) a car, but the car isn’t a part of me. I can’t control my dreams, but my dreams arguably are a part of me – an argument the philosopher Daniel Kolak makes. Furthermore, as many will know, free will may be an illusion. The notion that I can lift my left arm simply as an act of my own free will has many problems with it. Isn’t there an infinite regress of causes – most of which are outside of my free will – that led me to the point of thinking to lift my left arm? And how am I reaching out of the present moment to act upon the present moment as if from outside of it – surely I am united with the present moment and cannot somehow separate myself from it in order to change the course of events from within that present? – an argument the philosopher Galen Strawson makes.

So, with our counters defeated or at least rethinking, we can assert the idea that the self and the world make up a unity – the self-world as I call it. We can assert that the direct experience of headlessness is a nice way to realise this unity of the self-world (there is no duality), as well as to recognise that we are not the object we see in the mirror or any object at all – Lacan’s mirror stage is a point where mistaken identity occurs.

We are consciousness. We are not the identity trapped in the mirror. We are not the voice in our heads – for that voice, that ‘I’, is an object in consciousness, we are aware of that voice using the no-thingness that consciousness, and we, really are.

And why should this realisation make life much better and do away with suffering?

Firstly, evidence shows, as Anneli Jefferson said as part of the HowTheLightGetsIn debate, “separating the inner voice from the self can be helpful therapeutically.” It can be therapeutic to know that the often cruel, annoying voice in your head isn’t who you really are. But the link with the cessation of suffering and coming out of our mistaken identity goes deeper than this…

It is linked to our notions of non-duality and of consciousness being mistaken with its objects. As Joscha Bach said to me, also at the recent HowTheLightGetsIn festival, following our interview: “Suffering is a mismatch between the self-model and the world-model.” Suffering is the misalignment between what the self wants, and how the world actually is compared to that. We immediately see the problem of duality here. If we recognise that the self and world are a unity, then this mismatch between self-model and world-model simply can’t exist – because the self is the world! So-long suffering.

Furthermore, suffering is an object within consciousness. Consciousness is aware of suffering. But if we no longer mistake consciousness (no-thingness) with its objects (things, including things like thoughts, feelings, pain), then we recognise that it is not the real me that suffers, rather it is that phenomenal ‘I’, it is the one in the mirror who suffers. Anxiety and pain are feelings within consciousness. The consciousness aware of the objects of anxiety and pain is not itself in anxiety and pain, if it no longer identifies with its objects. Of course, this may not be much use to many presently suffering… there is much meditation and self-enquiry to do before this mis-identification of consciousness with its objects, sustained and habitualised over the course of our entire lives, can be un-done. I know I for one am nowhere near this point of enlightenment yet. Though of course, in another way, we are all already enlightened, we are all already the self-world, we are all already the no-thingness of consciousness apart from its objects.

And so, the case of mistaken identity has been solved. The Scooby-Doo villain has been unmasked. And underneath the mask… empty space. No head. Nothing at all.

“What am I? That is the question. Let me try to answer it as honestly and simply as I can, forgetting the ready-made answers. Common sense tells me that I am a man very similar to other men (adding that I am five-feet-ten, fortyish, grey-headed, around eleven stone, and so on), and that I know just what it is like here and now to be me, writing on this sheet of paper.

So far, surely, nothing can have gone wrong. But has my common sense really described what it is like to be me? Others cannot help me here: only I am in a position to say what I am. At once I make a startling discovery: common sense could not be more wrong to suppose that I resemble other men. I have no head! Here are hands, arms, parts of my trunk and shoulders – and, mounted (so to say) on these shoulders, not a head, but these words and this paper and this desk, the wall of the room, the window, the grey sky beyond… My head has gone, and in its place is a world. And all my life long I had imagined myself to be built according to the ordinary human and animal plan!

Where other creatures carry small rounded body-terminals, fairly constant in shape and furnished with such things as eyes and hair and mouth, there is for me a boundless and infinitely varied universe. It looks as if I alone have a body which fades out so that almost the only hints which remain of it above my shoulders are two transparent shadows thrown across everything. (I may call them nose-shadows if I please, but they are not in the least like noses.)

And certainly I do not find myself living inside an eight-inch ball and peering out through its portholes. I am not shut up in the gloomy interior of any object, and least of all in a small tightly-packed sphere, somehow managing to live my life there in its interstices. I am at large in the world. I can discover no watcher here, and over there something watched, no peep-hole out into the world, no window-pane, no frontier. I do not detect a universe: it lies wide open to me. These ink-marks are now forming on this sheet of paper. They are present. At this moment there is nothing else but this blue and white pattern, and not even a screen here (where I imagined I had a head) upon which the pattern is projected. My head, eyes, brain – all the instruments that I thought were here at the centre – are a fiction. It is incredible that I every believed in them.” - Douglas Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Hell

“Indeed I have only to look to see that other men have bodies to die, and I have not. The syllogism All men are mortal; I am a man; therefore I am mortal is wrong as to fact in the minor premiss. I am a headless receptacle, not a man; or, if this headless receptacle is a man, then these creatures with heads are not men. In neither case does the conclusion hold that I am mortal. What I have in place of a head is mortal animals and mortal men, mortal stars and mortal galaxies, and the immortal Whole. When I say that all men are mortal (including him who bears my name), I am generalizing from sufficient particular instances; but when I say that I am mortal (I who am plainly as different from them as I could well be), I am talking wildly. What is nothing but vacancy for everything is at once too mean and too great to die—it could not be more permanently dead than it is in itself, or more permanently alive than it is in its objects.” – Douglas Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Hell

“By contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of inner truth, by art, we must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways—is nothing.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea