Why does a "You" exist?
- Ethan Smith
- Aug 31
- 11 min read
Updated: Sep 11
We appear to experience life through the point of view of a discretely singular, egocentric entity, distinct from everything else. Pride means celebrating oneself; jealousy means one being envious of another. I look out and see that the hands before me are distinctly mine, and those beyond me are unnegotiably yours. I just said "I,” and better yet, all of language has been crafted to cater to this first-personhood experience, built on the view that experience requires an experiencer.
I think this is something we take for granted. It’s easy to assume that the mind must occur this way because, simply, it’s all we know, mistaking the familiar for the fundamental. Though, I really think this is yet another "Absurd that it is at all," representing an arbitrary exception by chance, not necessarily the rule. There is nothing written into the universe that mandates that the human experience ought to take on any kind of specific form in absolution. Our assumptions about "normal" experience stem entirely from what we observe in ourselves and others around us. The capacity to feel pain, joy, hunger, jealousy, anger, excitement, pleasure, to see, to want, and more are all common but not guaranteed facets of life we should expect with certainty.
The brain's extraordinary plasticity hints at the broader landscape of possibilities. This truth became viscerally clear during my work as a mental health technician in a hospital's medical-surgery unit. There, I witnessed the extremes of the space of possible human experiences, ranging from dementia to schizophrenia and many more. One moment a person recognizes their spouse of fifty years; the next, they're terrified by the stranger sitting beside their bed. It all shattered my worldview that experience ought to follow any particular blueprint. These forms of experience are deviant with respect to what we know as "normal,” but when we step back from our framework of conventionality, we can recognize them simply as different. In this way, seeing the edges of human experiences, to me, suggested that there lies much more beyond when we consider the kinds of experiences that can manifest outside of the common human architecture, an incredibly humbling thought to know how much could exist outside of our awareness. The range of human experiences is massively multimodal with many clusters of normalcy but perhaps represents only a small slice of the ways it can manifest, sometimes in unconventional manners.
This draws into question as well how our experience has changed over time, both in the big picture of evolution and development in a lifetime. Perhaps we weren't always singular, egocentric entities, but many, a continuum, or something else entirely, particularly when we first come out of the womb. The sense of being a separate individual may be something we gradually construct rather than something we're born with. Which raises the question: if selfhood is learned, what other forms might consciousness take if set along a different path or configuration? Observations around multiple personality disorder push this even further, suggesting that a single brain can house a community of distinct identities, each with their own memories, preferences, and ways of being in the world. If You can fragment this completely while still maintaining some form of coherent function, one has to wonder if the singular self is just one of many special cases of experience, perhaps as an adaptive illusion we have created for ourselves for convenience.
Nonetheless, a singular agentic You appears to be how we'd describe ourselves and one another. So why might this be the case?
The answer, I believe, lies in adaptations for survival. The brain, the widely accepted pilot seat of your experience and the playwright of your show, is attached to this body of yours. This body needs to be fulfilled for its survival as well as the progression of progeny; in turn, it provides the oxygen, nutrients, and blood to keep the lights on upstairs. It has given you a set of sensory inputs to perceive the environment in which the body exists and advise its actions. The body's survival, by proxy, also means the survival of the brain and thus you. There is a strong evolutionary incentive to craft You in such a manner that it feels ownership over the body in order to protect it. A fruitful way to ensure cooperation in the social contract is to fully identify with all the constituents, all the components of the body that, in a parallel universe, could be seen as separate entities. If you hurt your hand, you feel the pain. It's less so thought of as "The hand's problems are also my problems" and more so as "My hand is part of me, or is me, so it is my problem.”
Outside of mental design, features of our corporeal design lend themselves to a singular entity delineated from the environment. The body is a single connected mass insulated by layers of dead cells (the skin) that is distinctly separated from its surroundings. Additionally, we have senses that orbit around this mass that route towards the brain, allowing for understanding the point where this mass exists spatially in relation to the world. We ultimately need to ensure the health of the entirety of this mass—a mass composed of an absurd number of moving parts that would benefit from the ability to synchronize and act as one as opposed to tripping over each other like a poorly choreographed dance. In an environment filtering for fitness where every second of reaction time matters, one could imagine how a multiple-You's system could introduce more latency if there's a bureaucracy involved just for making your legs move.
Perhaps, then, the "single-You" cognition falls out as a natural choice of adaptation. By our radial senses, distinct singular physical form, and rewards and penalties of pleasure and pain, a singular self arises as the most rational explanation of everything felt and observed. It is the Occam’s Razor, or simplest explanation, for the stimuli we receive via the senses. However, as with all perception rendered by the brain, it may just be an illusion we buy into. I would argue the physical form biases us towards this explanation of self, but it need not manifest this way. We are built upon a number of symbioses; we should not take for granted that somehow this orchestra is able to give rise to something that appears like a single entity.
It may seem odd that I talk about the body and brain as two separate things bound by the social contract of mutual survival. Though, in a way, this is kind of how it's always been. The extent to which millions of cells synchronize and differentiate through local, myopic interactions to create complexity at scales orders of magnitude larger than themselves is truly a miracle. Sectors ranging from blood cells to the symbiotic relationship of gut microbiome to brain cells. Not to mention as well, the mitochondria, an integral part of many cells, was not an independent development but instead an accidental joining of forces after a digestion went wrong. Despite the close relationship between the cell and its mitochondria, the mitochondria actually maintains its own DNA and reproduction processes. At every order of complexity are born even higher orders of complexity. The amino acids form the organelles, the organelles form the cells, the cells form the organs, and the organs form all of you.
Does it stop there?
Our so-called singular form exists as a hierarchy of living components. Normally we view the human at the head of this hierarchy, but who’s to say there aren’t levels beyond ourselves? Some might argue that corporations, cities, and countries reflect superorganisms with whole humans as components and buildings and roads as their internal structures. It’s not too dissimilar from how living cells form the components of organs and construct their own protein structures. At a glance, this analogy may seem pointless beyond an entertaining perspective. A valid counterargument is that within a life form, all components share the same DNA, making for a convenient place for delineation.
Though I would argue that it should not be dismissed too readily. It is far easier to see downward from a bird's-eye view that which constitutes us than it is upward towards the things we constitute, and there are forms of life, near the edges of conventionality, that suggest it deserves more nuance. Thomas Hobbes wrote about The Leviathan, pictured above, where the masses of people became part of an organization much larger than themselves. Even now, the boundaries of self remain far more porous than we imagine. Your thoughts arise from conversations with friends, books you've read, and cultures you've absorbed. The emotions you feel are contagious, shifting the moods of everyone around you. Your decisions emerge from networks of influence that extend far beyond the self. I think we are witnessing an extremely early phase of an assembly into an organism larger than ourselves, sacrificing autonomy for synchronization and collaboration. It’s presently subtle, revealing itself in places like armies, governments, companies, fraternities, and online communities, places where we often see a diffusion of responsibility and identity. As individuals, we may attribute human characteristics to these organizations, treating them as if they were their own singular entity, revealed in statements like “The government is spying on us.” With increased communication bandwidth between people at a level that connects both physically and mentally, body and mind, I foresee this doubling down. The thought of humans forming a superorganism may absolutely be feasible.
Why should experience gather itself into a neat singular package? The universe doesn't seem particularly concerned with maintaining these divisions. Atoms of the body replace themselves routinely and flow freely between bodies through what we consume and give back to the earth. Yet somehow, the persistent hallucination of singular experience emerges. There are lifeforms that possess strange designs, which make me question at whether there are any strict rules as to how experience should manifest.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of an extensive, underground network of a single living fungus, with some growing up to over a thousand acres. Up on the surface, we only observe scattered mushrooms, but the veins below are all interconnected pathways for nutrient extraction and sharing of resources. Additionally, two fungi with differing genes can fuse together via anastomosis, making it a strange decentralized organism that could be composed of what were initially several separate organisms and blurring the lines between the levels of hierarchy.
Ant colonies and beehives operate as something of a single unit guided by a queen, each driven by myopic incentives and relatively simple behaviors, but their collective efforts give rise to a complex network. Individuals in these populations take on different roles around reproduction, scouting, and defense, sometimes bred from birth for these purposes, not so different from how the cells that constitute an individual will differentiate their roles and perform work within their scope to contribute to the survival of the whole, even laying down their lives at times. It’s not too dissimilar from how individual brain cells consult with their immediate neighbors but give rise to beings much greater than themselves, admittedly with the added nuance, but not necessarily an invalidator, that ants themselves have their own brains as well.
Octopuses have a central brain but also have one in each tentacle, totaling 9 brains. About two-thirds of their total neurons exist in the brains that reside in the tentacles. Each arm has a significant degree of autonomy and can perform complex movements even when disconnected from the central brain. This distributed intelligence allows the arms to solve problems and react to the environment independently. They can solve complex puzzles, use tools, recognize individual humans, and even learn through observation. Of course, the central brain has special access to senses like vision, which the other brains receive as a secondary source. However, this one is an interesting case to assess in how we consider multiplicity of the self.
Dolphins and sparrows exhibit an interesting behavior where half the brain sleeps at a time, alternating to make sure the full brain achieves rest at some point. While half the brain sleeps, though, they can still remain alert. Notably, these two creatures both exist in a biome that requires them to be consistently on the move: the water and the air. This perhaps explains why it may have evolved, but it is also wildly fascinating to imagine what experience may be like as they switch between which hemisphere gets to be awake, especially as dolphins are regarded as quite intelligent creatures. We could perhaps extrapolate what we know of human studies on brain hemispheres and a severed corpus callosum to hypothesize what that may be like. It reminds me a bit of Severance, though I imagine memories may be shared between the two hemispheres.
Siamese twins are another interesting edge case, where there are a number of subtypes describing where the twins are connected, which singular organs are shared, and which organs are present in both individuals, which, interestingly, also influence the brain’s function. The stories around organ transplants resulting in personality, identity, and personality changes baffle me. Not to mention, these cases are observed in transplanting organs not typically thought of as associated with these cognitive functions, like the heart. Admittedly, it’s beyond my pay grade, but I know it’s not unthinkable given how the brain does not exist in isolation. We know, for example, via the gut-brain hypothesis, that activity in the digestive system can affect the brain. At a trivial level, we can imagine that the gut feeds the brain and supplies the amino acids that convert into the brain’s neurotransmitters. Though the relation is even more complex with all kinds of bidirectional communication. Perhaps then, when considering where You are, we need to consider much more than just the brain itself. This also makes the story of Siamese twins who share organs even more complex to think about.
Each case introduces new questions as to how we think about the quantization of a singular self. Additionally, if we subscribe to some networks of life resulting in a more complex single agent, such as the cells in the brain, we should question what the distinguishing factors are that would make other networks not qualify for the same, whether that be size, rate of communication, types of communication, etc. In other words, if neurons are capable of giving rise to a singular-seeming being, but ant colonies do not, despite the similar transmission of information between nodes, why might this be the case?
I often wonder if an alien life were to encounter us, might it be possible that they recognize our entire earth as one living, experiencing organism or something similar? We often imagine aliens as humanoid or animalistic, but who is to say what form that intelligence may take on? Through the communication of individual brain cells arises an integrated single (?) conscious experience of the senses and thought. It's pretty out there, but not entirely absurd to imagine the activities of humans at large generating an experience, one that is imperceptible to us.
We might benefit from assessing why our perspective of a singular self would arise, borrowing from developmental and evolutionary theories. Between nature and nurture: Nature suggests there could be structural adaptations, design choices that came about over long periods of evolution, biasing the mind towards creating a singular self. Nurture suggests having developed a body that must be flexibly maneuvered in sync and associates chosen actions with corresponding felt sensations on the periphery, which could also provide the foundation for a single self to arise, though it might also suggest a development exempt of these features, or one that has veered off the conventional course, may not manifest this kind of experience. Is this how it has to be?
If a brain was raised in a vat since birth without any attachments to the typical senses or a meat suit to run around in, would a distinct and single sense of self still arise? With nothing to compute over and no stimuli to adapt to, I'm uncertain what may happen at all.
Though there are now a number of companies exploring creating computers made of biological neurons grown in a lab. Through the proper stimulations and the property that neurons are always adapting their tendencies to fire with respect to incoming stimulations, they can be made to perform computations and learn functions. This, of course, raises ethical concerns, both for what this means presently when we have the living cells we recognize as our kin being put to work, but also for how we may think of such things in the future when synthetic biological neural networks become more complex.
My personal view of the status quo is that it is simply a change of substrate for computation, but they learn to perform the same computations compared to their silicon counterparts. After all, neurons are typically also used in very raw forms rather than seeing the kinds of local structures that arise in full brains. As described in this post, I don't believe entities are determined by the substrate but rather the program they ultimately perform. Predefined structures like the hippocampus, among others, may provide inductive biases for the exact programs that are learned, like how You arises as an adaptation to the structures that provide visual signals, hunger signals, auditory signals, memory, and beyond. Accusations of "torture" feel odd when there aren't even dedicated receptors for pain, but I could imagine how this could get strange in the future.
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