When I commenced drafting the text that ended up as a four part post ( see  Laughing with Dr. D  –  The Shock of Unknowing –  Dendritic Forest –  Clouseau and the Maggots ), I experienced a shift in mood. The act of writing generated a sense of calm. I also felt motivated. I wanted to investigate my behaviour, examine it thoroughly, understand it completely. The intensity of my response, and the degree to which I worked to spotlight the issues, struck me as borderline symptomatic of OCD, or some other form of quiet mania. What follows is the result of my investigation.

Sense of self is intimately connected to an awareness of one’s personal ability to influence the surrounding environment. If it is possible for the individual to manifest a change in the external environment then there must exist an actor capable of initiating the observed change.

Conventional wisdom has it that René Descartes asserted “I think therefore I am.” I am not a big fan of Descartes and have not read deeply in his works. My memory of my studies suggests Descartes actually asserted “I doubt therefore I am.”

We are connected to the physical world through various sense mechanisms. We know from experience that these mechanisms are fallible, that it is possible for us to confuse a coil of rope with the form of a snake, and envisage a threat were none exists. We fool ourselves all the time. It may be argued that mutual self deception is required for relationships to work, for organizations to function, for civilizational processes to proceed. It is not difficult to go on the web and find people casting doubt on everything from the work of Darwin, the scientific study of climate change, free trade, contemporary monetary policy, or the facts surrounding the events of 9/11. It is possible to cast doubt on every aspect of our experience. We have institutionalized this skepticism in the form of science.

The one aspect of life that we cannot doubt is the existence of doubt itself. For doubt to be present there must exist some capacity to experience the world in different ways, to envisage an alternate construction of the facts. If this alternate facticity exists, it must reside in some entity, it must spring from somewhere. Descartes proposed that thought processes were contained within something we call “mind,” an entity responsible for the generation of meta-data concerning sensory epiphenomena. Something flashes by us in a blur of colour and sound, our senses perceive it, our mind processes the sense data, catalogues it, and labels it, and we become conscious of having just seen a bird.

Of course, it may not have been a bird. It may have been a kite falling from the sky. That same kite which now lays at our feet in a tangle of wreck.

If our mental processes were fully congruent with the facts of our environment then there would be no room for doubt, no opportunity to second guess. We should never mistake a coil of rope for a snake. Or a falling kite for a bird. We would be at one with our world, in perfect union with our surroundings. From the perspective of Descartes, our world, every aspect of it, was the creation of a munificent God, a transcendent being who not only created all that stands before us, he also endowed us with the sensory capacity to perceive his prefect creation in order that we might give thanks for his generosity.

The fact of our ability to doubt, to question our own sense perceptions, to generate alternate conceptions of reality (God is truly a She) serves to support the assertion that there exists an “I,” an autonomous individual capable of performing the required thought operations. However this same capacity for reason compels us to the possibility that our entire deductive chain is in error and we have mistakenly given credence to entities which do not in fact exist. There may be no “mind,” and there may be no “I.” Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, affords the best means to unpack the first assertion. Any valid Buddhist text will quickly unpack the second.

A closer approximation of what occurs in the creation of the self is likely to be found in the assertion “I initiate change therefore there must exist an actor to be recognized as me.” I cannot remember my studies of Piaget and infant psychology but I believe that an infant will, at an early age, come to recognize his / her agency and this constitutes a seminal event in provoking the self awareness which is later identified as the self.

In the case of my injury, the most debilitating effects are due to the impaired exercise of agency which results in a deprecated sense of the self.

This thesis serves to explain why my acknowledgement of my deficits was found to be so crippling. I was no longer as capable as I once was. I was forced to acknowledge this impairment. As the deficits made themselves manifest they served to undermine the sense of self which had been established over the prior 60 odd years.

I continued to rely on sensory evidence exactly as I had learned to do from infancy. But, subsequent to the accident, this sensory evidence was frequently wrong, or incorrect, or failed in some way to remain congruent with physical reality. I have absolute certainty I parked my car at this exact location. But, when I return to the same precise spot, I find the car has vanished. This disappearance posed a philosophical problem that I was then forced to solve. It was extremely disquieting to learn that my innate life-long capacity to process sensory evidence was no longer to be trusted. That I was no longer to be trusted.