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Mapping the Self: Discovering the Hidden Structure of Who You Are

Were we to be taken apart surgically, there isn’t a doctor in the world who would be able to locate this thing we call “I.”

We can’t capture it under a microscope or prod it during surgery.

The “I” of us, the “self” of me, isn’t concrete or tangible, and yet we are all, to varying degrees of consciousness, trying to grow, tame, avoid, hurt, help, and even nurture it.

But what and who are we caring for?

Who is this “I” we always speak of?

Where does the “I” of me actually live?

When we refer to ourselves, we use the names our parents chose for us, names that represent this supposed “I,” but our bodies are not who we are.

They are mere physical vehicles that allow us to contain and transport our organs from one place to another without spillage.

We constantly mistake the bodies of us for the “I” of us. This is what we humans are known for—misapprehending as real all that is phantom.

Take God for instance.

Or, a better, less polarizing example, my favorite topic: Emotion.

When we are anxious, we mistake the sensations of dread and fear inside our bodies to mean that something is dangerous.

We confuse our somatic waves of worry that someone hates us, or that we’re getting fired, or any number of things, for fact.

But feelings are not facts, no matter how real the feeling.

Many people find themselves trapped in silent competitions against their peers using arbitrary measures, plotting their achievements and failures onto an invisible chart that they believe is who they are.

But we are not our measurements, and if we are not our test results, or the measure of our outsize emotions; if we are not our bodies or even our brains, what, then, are we? And where are we?

Some people—take me, for instance—spend decades tracing the roots of their present-day behavior back to specific origin points, precise moments that might help them finally understand why they are the way they are; and people like me do this so that we can break the cycle and reclaim the original self we feel we were meant to become, an original self that existed before the world had its way with us.

So much work is devoted to untangling the Gordian knot of self with nary a thought given to the actual self. What is a "self," and how exactly did our capacity for awareness arise from matter seemingly incapable of awareness?

In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Douglas R. Hofstadter explores this very question.

How do meaningless things become meaningful? We are made up of molecules, carbon atoms, and proteins, and yet none of these things have an “I.”

How is it possible to get an “I” out of something that has no “I”?

It’s not therapists who have solved how to derive meaning from meaninglessness, but—Hofstadter believes—mathematicians.

When a mathematician assigns arbitrary symbols to an equation in order to answer a question, they are linking the arbitrary symbols to the question itself.

If X=table then X and table are the same.

We’ve gone from a meaningless symbol to something that refers back to itself, and it’s that self-referential nature that gives a thing its meaning.

The meaningless symbol and the self-reference that arises from that meaningless symbol is—mathematicians claim—equivalent.

This self-reference in equations is a recursive loop. It’s a self looking back on itself, and in so doing, it becomes self-aware; this is how an established system acquires a self.

That loop is a pattern, and it’s this very pattern that is the signature mark of having a self. In Hofstadter’s view, the “I” arises through the brain’s mirroring pattern. Patterns in the brain mirror the brain’s mirroring of the world, which then mirrors itself, creating a causal form that becomes the “I.”

Douglas Hofstadter posits that we are, each of us, all just strange loops. What we see and our interpretation of what we see is no more—and no less—than our own projection onto external material. In order to understand these projections, we ascribe them meaning and then register that meaning as our own perception.

The “I” inside of us manifests itself as the “I” we project and perceive in the world, and our experience is the experience of ourselves, tossed out and absorbed back, like looking in a mirror. Our sense of the world is a mere projection of our self onto signs and symbols, which acquire meaning that we provide.

If this is the case, then the “I” of ourselves, and how we interpret what we see, is never actually outside of ourselves. When we are speaking to a friend, we are really speaking to ourselves inside the body of another.

And if we are mere projections of the person viewing us, then aren’t we all just replicas of the people who raised us, and they of the people who raised them? We look outside to understand who we are, but if what we are looking at is only ourselves projected outside, then who, or what, is the “I” inside?

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