Do you know what you are?
You are what you is
You is what you am
A cow don't make ham
from You Are What You Is, Frank Zappa
"Who am I?" Three words that haunt us from birth to death. An infant senses a tiny arm waving in front of her face and realizes for the first time "that's me". Stomach growls. That's me. The popular kids pick me to be on their dodgeball team. Wow, is that me? The doctor says I have prostate cancer. That is me also.
This essay explores five shards of self. 'Shards' refers to interdependent pieces of a broken whole…the whole self. I use the word "I" to represent both singular and plural forms of the noun (like "you" or "sheep"). Since there are multiple forms of self, it is grammatically and semantically correct to ask "Who Are I?".
The importance of understanding who I are is so that, when I hurt, I can treat all of me. That means each part of who I am. I hesitate to use the word "holistic" because it is clichéd and rarely defined. But that is exactly what I intend to do in the article: to define what comprises our selves so that we can get comprehensive treatment of what we or our loved ones need. No single healthcare professional is qualified to treat the whole you.
Rene Descartes resurfaced an idea in Meditations (1641) that the self comprises two parts: a physical part and a spiritual part. Part of my faith is the belief in a world of immutable and discoverable physical laws. If something can be observed and measured, it is physical and is a suitable subject for scientific inquiry. If it cannot be measured or if it appears to violate physical laws, then it is theology. In this essay, I focus on those things that can be observed, measured, and appear to be consistent with physical laws. I do not address theological, philosophical, and psychological definitions of the self in this essay.
Here is my summary list of the five shards of self:
My nervous system (neuro-self)
My body (body-self)
My stored experiences and knowledge (mental-self)
My feelings: “I am angry” (affective-self)
My cultural endowments: "I am a software developer" (endowed-self)
I will define each shard, give several examples, describe associated diseases, and point out how each differs from the other senses of self.
Neuro-Self
The neuro-self is my nervous system. It is the self that thinks "I see a blue sky".
It is the only self that is not self-aware: nerves can transmit data of a sensed blue sky but nerves do not sense themselves. The neuro-self can sense the world around me and make me aware of my other shards of self. There are over 600 neurological diseases treated by neurologists. A few of these include headache, stroke, Alzheimer's disease (AD), Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and epilepsy. The neuro-self does not fully develop in humans until roughly 25 years.
Body-Self
Imagine your body as a thing separate from the nerves that innervate it--that is the body-self. It is the self that tells you it feels hungry or cold.
The body-self can feel cold, sore, tired, hungry, off-balance, dizzy, blind, bloated, nauseous, or thirsty. When different parts of the body become diseased, they are treated by physicians that specialize in those body parts.
Cognition is a process in which the brain (neuro-self) acts within a sensed environment (umwelt) and changes in that environment are sensed and fed back to the brain. This cyclic process is called the Perception-Action Cycle. In humans, our visual system is updated about 30 times each second. I bring this up because the body-self is part of that sensed environment. From the perspective of the neuro-self, our bodies are part of the sensed environment as much as rocks, trees, and birds.
Mental-Self
The mental-self is the sum of all memories originating from direct experience, social learning, and personal innovation. It is the self that knows “Iron skillets can get hot enough to burn me” or "I remember Paris in the springtime".
The relationship between the neuro-self and the mental-self is the same as between a container and the contents it contains. The neuro-self is a means of retaining memories, not the memories themselves.
Unlike the neuro-self, the mental-self is introspective…a faculty called metacognition. "I cannot jump over a chain-link fence" and "I can win this race" each express beliefs about one's personal limitations and achievable objectives. Even honey bees have been shown to be capable of metacognition.
This may come as a surprise: the neuro-self senses and acts in the present only. We neither sense nor act in the past or the future. The future and past reside only in the mental-self and is constructed from metaphors experienced in the present. In Western culture, time is travel and the future is forward ("I look forward to seeing you"). In a few other cultures, time is described differently.
The medical community acknowledges the difference between the physical (body-self & neuro-self) and psychological pathologies (mental-self), but struggles to integrate them. According to 1994 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) [1]:
“The term mental disorder unfortunately implies a distinction between ‘mental’ disorders and ‘physical’ disorders that is a reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism. A compelling literature documents that there is much ‘physical’ in ‘mental’ disorders and much ‘mental’ in ‘physical’ disorders. The problem raised by the term ‘mental disorders’ has been much clearer than its solution, and, unfortunately, the term persists in the title of DSM-IV because we have not found an appropriate substitute”.
I am shocked that the medical community only makes a distinction between physical and 'mental' disorders.
Affective-Self
The affective-self describes an emotional state. It is the least understood of all selves. Emotion is speaking when it says, "I am sad", "I am angry", or "I am happy".
Feeling a caress from another person is a sensation of the body-self. However, our affective-selves responds very differently to an identical sensation depending on whether the caresser is a loved one or a creepy sexual predator. Emotions have valance: a spectrum that ranges from good to bad. Emotions also have a level of intensity or arousal. Experiences with high arousal levels are more likely to be retained as memories. Emotions determine which perceptions become meaningful memories.
Psychiatrists and psychologists help patients with affective or mood disorders. Some of these include [2]:
Unipolar Depression and its variants including:
Postpartum Depression
Atypical Depression
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
Bipolar Disorder
Dysthmia and Cyclothymia
Generalised Anxiety Disorder
Panic Disorder
Phobias including Agoraphobia
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Affective disorders are often treated with mood-changing drugs. Similar but unregulated mood-changing drugs are used recreationally…often with devastating long term effects. Drug addiction removes what little freewill we have because it directly affects our desires and desire drives our behavior.
Endowed-Self
The endowed-self is the sum of all innovations and social affiliations acquired through culture and social learning. Like trust fund babies, we inherit a wealth of cognitive affordances and tools at birth: language, books, cell phones, spell checkers, social norms, schools, laws, highways, and so on. We, individually, did not earn or originate these things even though they make us smarter, stronger, and healthier. These endowments are invented by the smartest among our species but nearly every member of our species benefits from these inventions.
We are also social and we self-identify by our family relations and our memberships in religious, political, sports, cultural, social, and professional organizations.
If you took away language, fire, electricity, cooking, social norms, laws, hospitals, schools, factories, farms, computers, social memberships…if you took away our endowments, we would not be that different from chimpanzees. But our chances of survival would be much less than chimpanzees.
You could argue that the endowed-self should be a part of the mental-self. Both are fundamentally just memories. I draw a distinction between the two because the endowed-self is both culturally transmitted and persistent. The mental-self is individual and ceases to exist when the individual expires. Social learning and cultural transmission are what makes the endowed-self spread, perpetuate, and ratchet up in endowment. And it originates entirely outside of each individual.
The diseases of the endowed-self, studied by sociologists and political scientists, are also persistent and socially-transmitted. The endowed-self makes us a social animal. Failure to fix endowed-self disorders endangers us all. Endowed-self disorders include prejudice and social inequality, economic exploitation, media bias, conspiracy theories, prostitution, pornography, enslavement, gang-related violence, drug trafficking, corruption, extremism, terrorism and war.
#
When your chiropractor or therapist tells you that he or she is going to provide you with a holistic treatment plan, you are now better able to tell the difference between a marketing pitch and complete solution. Each self is a collection of shards. No shard is independent. Any treatment that ignores the other shards is not treating the whole you. I hope you now recognize that nobody is trained to treat all shards of self. That responsibility rests with you.
[1] American Psychiatric Association (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edition) (DSM–IV). Washington, DC: APA.
[2] The International Society for Affective Disorders, downloaded 10/20/2023, https://www.isad.org.uk/aboutus/affective-disorders.asp