Human Individuality
The question for this series is what does it mean to be an individual in contemporary US society. The first posts lay some groundwork for this question. In this post, I give a tentative answer to part of the question: what do we mean by individuality.
I began to address this question in the conclusion to the series on Michael Tomasello’s book The Evolution of Agency, The idea is that all human characteristics, including consciousness, reasoning capacity, and emotions, evolved over millions of years. The main point of that post was to deal with the difference between free will and agency.
This is Tomasello’s description of agency:
…[W]e may say that agentive beings are distinguished from non-agentive beings … by a special type of behavioral organization. That behavioral organization is feedback control organization in which the individual directs its behavior toward goals — many or most of which are biologically evolved — controlling or even self-regulating the process through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring. Species biology is supplemented by individual psychology.
I suggest that we find individuality in the way each of us selects goals, directs our behavior toward those goals, and the way each of us controls and self-regulates ourselves through informed decision-making and self-monitoring.
It may seem that I am just pushing back the problem to another level: what are the goals and how do we form them, what are the control and self-regulating functions, what are informed decision-making and self-monitoring and how do they work. I don’t think so. I think we can’t handle the broad question of individuality, but we can find approximate descriptions for Tomasello’s operations. And, I think the part about setting goals and the part about informed decision-making carry us most of the way to individuality.
What Peirce Got Wrong
I like the ideas of C.S. Peirce, including this 1877 article. He tells us two things that are often true.
1. Thinking is hard and we don’t like to do it. We only do it when faced with doubt, and even then only when other techniques of dealing with doubt fail.
2. When doubt reaches the point that we can’t ignore it, we look for some other opinion. Not necessarily a true opinion, but just something that causes the doubt to subside.
I suspect that this is true of a lot of people (like MAGAts and me when someone attacks my heroes). But I think a lot of us enjoy thinking, talking about stuff, learning new stuff, meeting people not like us, traveling, and we happily do it all through our lives. I think it starts with curiosity, that force that drives children to ask questions about everything. For such people, truth matters.
Probably most of us are a combination of these two poles depending on the subject, but once you start with curiosity, it tends to undercut other certainties we hold, which in the long run might mean a bias towards true answers. I might even come to question my heroes.
A Metaphor
My brother Michael did a number of single cell studies as part of his research into the transmission of pain signals to the brain. He said a neuron fires when the number of charged ions in the cell hits the magic number. When that happens, the cell fires, sending a signal down the axon to the next neuron. The first cell then returns to its resting state, ready for the next burst of charged ions. See also this.
I think one way we set goals for our actions is sort of like that. We get a stimulus outside what we anticipate, and we shrug it off, If that keeps happening, we hit a magic number and we decide to look more closely. Nothing changes until the magic level is reached. We just coast along.
Here’s an example. You go for a hike in a national forest. You’re looking around, but mostly at the ground to avoid tripping. You notice a bush with berries. Fine. Later you see a similar bush with more berries. And again. Then again, and this time you look closely. What are they? Are they edible? Am I hungry? A whole series of questions suddenly arises based on that stimulus.
Here’s another example, this time fairly close to my recollection of my own experience. I was raised Catholic, and starting in third grade, attended Catholic schools. I read a bunch of books about the lives of the Saints, including one I found recently: Ten Saints For Boys. I knew the stories, read about relics, read kid versions of the Bible stories and the Gospels, and it all seemed fine.
By high school, some of the stories started to feel a touch unreal. They didn’t correspond with the things in my life, and the histories didn’t sound like anything I knew about. One in particular was the doctrine of the Assumption of the Body Of The Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. That was very difficult to believe, but I tried.
Then I found out that the doctrine of papal infallibility was not established until 1870, suspiciously close to the loss of the Papal States in connection with the reunification of Italy that same year. That was a tipping point. Over the next few years I modified my understanding of Catholic teachings using a much broader range of sources, many if not most of which weren’t Catholic at all.
Now that’s a simplified version of what happened. I was doing a lot of related reading in those days, including existentialisn, math and physics, even Zen Buddhism, including Eugen Herrigel’s Zen In The Art Of Archery which I recommend very highly; and mysticism, including Thomas Merton’s Mystics And Zen Masters. I’m sure all that worked together to lead me to examine my thinking.
Selection Of Influences
We don’t get to choose our initial influences, parents, their friends and family, the people we live next to, teachers in K-12, the people and leaders of our Churches. Those choices are made for us. Today many of us don’t select much of what we read on social media because algorithms do the picking. We are at the mercy of the Billionaire Media, and Google or some other profit-driven search engine, which generally sucks. (Side note: Musk attacks Wikipedia; one of the few useful sources of vetted information, donate if you can. I use it a lot so I donate regularly.)
But we can select what we read if we try. We can look for those who can teach us things we care about. How we pick what to read and who we can trust to teach us, and how we understand what we read and are taught, these are crucial factors in our individuality.
Summary
I think individuality is found in our control of our goal-setting and self-monitoring. I think we learn from other people, and that selection of those other people is crucial to our individuality. I think some things are better than others. Those choices are driven by curiosity. It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure to read and understand other people’s thinking. The world and the people in it are endlessly interesting.
Ed, I always get tremendous value from your work. This post had me–like most readers, I assume–thinking back on my own evolution as an “I” or the subject, not the object, of my development. Our parents gave my sisters and me a wealth of stimuli in the form of art, books, and music, but mainly in the form of endless talk.
I wish kids growing up now enjoyed the freedom we did to walk by ourselves to the public library and master its systems in the process of ferreting out information on our latest obsessions (mine included Harpo Marx, Peter Lorre, astronomy, and weird murders). But the rising powers in this country want to close those library doors, in some cases to unaccompanied children (which, let’s face it, is most kids most of the time); and in other cases by dictating which books can be offered where and to whom.
The process of individuation you describe threatens a theocratic political project. Look at your own history! We need to fight to keep those library doors open so we can indeed continue to “select what we read.” As always, thank you.
Life-changing childhood curiosity, empowered by my parents’ education:
Putting a drop of stagnant water on a slide and looking at it through my father’s microscope. Aiming an old Navy spyglass at Jupiter, Saturn, and the Andromeda galaxy. Reading astronomy books and Scientific American. Building a crystal radio. Listening to my father’s shortwave. Browsing a bookstore at a bus stop on my route to piano lessons.
And in college, coming across Galbraith’s The New Industrial State in the campus bookstore, which had nothing to do with any of my courses.
IMHO an education should enable kids to be curious about things that will empower them for life. Probably much harder now that teachers have to compete with a Niagara Falls of online clickbait bullshit.
A thought provoking piece.
I’ve been stuck (and have been for a long time) on the notion of free will. I say this because the assumption that we do indeed have it is baked into the post. The more I’ve looked and listened to experts (neurologists, behaviorists, physicists etc.) the more convinced I am that we haven’t really got any. I’m guessing our individuality is up to us but only to a point; and that point only exists within the boundaries of who we already are which is driven by factors entirely out of our control. This is not an argument; but a point of frustration with the subject.
It’s like having the agency to determine how tall you are. You can crouch down and be less tall, but not become any shorter than your (NOT designed by you) body will permit; and you can stand on a chair or even atop a building and you are still not in fact any taller at all, you’ve merely gone and chosen a higher vantage point.
We are inherently stuck in a circular response to stimuli mode, and our available responses have been dictated to us ahead of time by circumstance beyond our control.
Sometimes that’s fun. Sometimes not fun. But is it really agency?
When is the inevitable collapse of the wave function a free choice we get to make?
If you’d been on a hike and had been raised to revere berries as being God’s special and holy fruit your only choices available might have been to take the time to pray to them or to hurry on and make camp before it gets dark. Eating them may not have existed as a possibility at all.
And, everything I’ve just written might as well be bullshit, because no matter what we know we’re still stuck in that circular reactive state.
Your penultimate word holds the escape — rëactive …
Please read the conclusion to my series on Tomasello’s book; click on the word conclusion above. I think you will see that “free will”, at least in the traditional sense, is not baked into my post.
I note that if you are right, I could never have produced this post.
This.
Thanks for this Ed. Very deep.
Like the immune system, the nervous system is a complex system of checks&balances. Thresholds are triggered when ions pass through transmembrane receptors and signals are transduced via cascading enzymatic reactions to affect cellular behavior.
If an inhibitory signal (e.g. PD-1/PD-L1 suppressor pathway, postsynaptic neuron, etc) cancels out the stimulus, the message gets deleted.
Individuality and agency seem similarly composed via the checks&balances of our lives on a socio-philosophical-macro-scale. If curiosity is the stimulus, the time needed to act once threshold is reached requires freedom, bandwidth, compiler quietness, “thought”.
To be curious is a luxury not afforded by folks struggling to feed themselves, their families, their people or their passions. Thus, ‘free’ time is inhibitory to agency. To wit, how can an individual weigh pros&cons, consider options and then take initiative if they are too busy, distracted, preoccupied, prejudiced or…fooled?
So far I’ve focused on good scenarios for growing up. But as you note, there are implications for those not so lucky. Maybe there’s even some insight into improving our politics.
“…improving our politics”…
Kinda oxymoronic.
Certainly optimistic.
Usually, by the time I think through the posts on this wonderful website, and have worked out my thoughts to a point where they show some clarity, everyone else has moved on. But I think I might have some timely thoughts this time around. I was raised by two parents who were raised catholic. My father, for all intent and purpose was atheist and my mother was agnostic. For some god awful (pun intended) reason they decided to raise their three children in the catholic church despite their distain for the institution. I am the youngest of the three. My oldest brother (10 years older than me) went through catholic schools all the way through high school. My next brother is 2 ½ years older than me. He went to catholic school through second grade- when he kicked a nun and ran home after she threatened to lock him in the coat room (for some stupid infraction). My parents sent me to public school (Chicago) from the beginning. I was spared a lot, but they still insisted on raising me a catholic. I was told after I made my confirmation it was my choice. Same with my slightly older brother. The eldest, as far as I can tell, was never given that option. Confirmation was my last day in church. I am not sure if my slightly older brother went any further after his confirmation. I had several discussions with my dad about this stupid idea of raising us in a religion that he did not believe in, and his response was that it was always left to us to choose our path as we got older. My problem was that it gets harder if you are already indoctrinated to choose a path. My eldest brother is my proof. So, my husband and I decided on no religion- let our kids pick what, if any, religion they want.
Stay tuned. The jury is still out on that one but so far, they seem as balanced as can be expected in this fucked up world we live in.
Per above “I think individuality is found in our control of our goal-setting and self-monitoring. I think we learn from other people, and that selection of those other people is crucial to our individuality.” What does that mean if people are biologically unable, for various reasons, to control goal setting and self-monitoring? Does that mean they aren’t or can’t be “individuals” or develop “individuality”? Or is a person’s DNA that person’s individuality?