Сергей Гладков – The Human Being as a Multilevel System (страница 10)

Sometimes a decision is conflicted. A person chooses, but part of him continues to resist. This does not mean that the decision is unreal. It means that coherence is incomplete. One line of experience has become strong enough for action, but other lines have not disappeared.

In this way we can preserve the reality of choice without introducing a hidden manager.

The decision remains human.

But it is understood not as the command of an essence, but as an event of coordination.

Here one more objection appears:

"But if a decision is an event of coordination, does freedom disappear?"

This objection is understandable. If choice stops being an order from an inner center, it seems to become the mechanical result of processes. But this is too poor an understanding of process. Not every process is mechanical. Conversation is a process, but it can be free. Understanding is a process, but it can open new possibilities. Learning is a process, but through it a person changes what once seemed inevitable.

Freedom does not disappear in such a model. It changes place.

It is located not in a hidden point that is miraculously independent of everything, but in the system's ability to reconfigure its ways of coordination. A person becomes freer not when he separates himself from memory, body, language, and relationships, but when he can work with them differently: notice old reactions, name them, create new supports, change the environment, ask for support, hold another meaning, endure a pause.

Freedom turns out to be not the opposite of the system, but the possibility of its reconfiguration.

A Limitation of the Concept

Now we need to stop and acknowledge a risk.

The word "stabilization" may become too broad.

If we call everything that somehow holds experience stabilization, the term will lose precision. It will begin to explain too much, and therefore will stop explaining anything specific. Any habit, any feeling, any thought, any object, any conversation will become stabilization. This will make the model convenient, but weak.

So boundaries are needed from the start.

In this book, stabilization means not every repetition and not every stability.

Stabilization is maintaining the coherence of experience between changing elements.

If a person simply repeats an action automatically, this is not necessarily stabilization in the strong sense. We need to ask: what does this repetition hold? Does it reduce anxiety? Support an image of oneself? Preserve a connection? Close a question? Prevent the collapse of meaning? If it holds no coherence, it is better not to use the word "stabilization."

If a person keeps a habit, this also is not always stabilization. A habit may be the remainder of an old structure that no longer helps, but only reproduces itself. It may once have stabilized experience, but later become a source of fragmentation.

If a person feels calm, this is not always a sign of good stabilization. Sometimes calm arises from avoidance. Experience seems coherent only because an important part has been excluded from attention.

So stabilization cannot be evaluated only by the feeling of comfort.

It must be considered by its function: does it hold the coherence of experience, and at what cost?

This limitation protects the model from blurring.

There is one more limitation.

Not every stabilization is desirable.

A person can stabilize experience through avoidance. Not think about what matters, not open a letter, not tell the truth, not meet the person who reminds him of pain. In the short term, this really does hold coherence: anxiety decreases, the day continues, the familiar form of self is preserved. But later such stabilization may narrow life and deepen the inner split.

A person can stabilize experience through the role of the suffering one. As long as he remains in this role, the world is understandable: I am the one who was unlucky, who was not understood, who was hurt. Such a story can hold coherence, but at the same time close the possibility of a new action.

A person can stabilize himself through control. Everything must be predictable, people must behave as expected, plans must not change. This gives a feeling of safety, but makes the system fragile: any deviation is perceived as a threat.

So the question is not only whether experience is stabilized.

The question is at what cost it is stabilized.

The model must not turn stabilization into a good. Stabilization is a function. It can support life, and it can hold a person in a form that has already become too narrow.

The First Central Formula

Now the central formula can be spoken not as a slogan, but as the result of reasoning:

the human being is

not a fixed essence,

but a multilevel system for stabilizing experience.

Every word matters in this formula.

"Not a fixed essence" means: we do not begin with the assumption of an inner unchanging center.

"Multilevel" means: experience is held not by one mechanism, but by the interaction of body, memory, attention, language, meaning, habits, relationships, and external structures.

"System" means: we are speaking about relations between processes, not about a set of separate parts.

"Stabilization" means: the human being maintains the coherence of changes, not immobility.

"Experience" means: we are speaking about how experiencing becomes coherent, continuing, and able to be recognized as "mine."

This formula does not cancel personality, responsibility, freedom, or inner life. It only suggests that we should not look for them in a hidden essence. It suggests looking at the processes through which they become possible.

But as soon as this formula appears, a new question arises.

If the human being is not given as a ready-made essence, but is assembled through processes of stabilization, then what is personality?

How does the feeling of constancy arise?

Why can a person say: this is my story?

How do memory, language, and other people take part in the assembly of the one we call ourselves?

This question opens the next chapter.

How Does Personality Arise?

4. How Personality Arises

If Personality Is Not Given

An old friend looks at him a little longer than usual.

They have not seen each other in many years. At first the conversation is easy: news, work, families, cities, random memories, names of people who once seemed central and now require an effort of memory. Then a pause appears. The friend smiles, but in this smile there is not only the joy of meeting. There is surprise.

"You have become different," he says.

The phrase is simple. It can be said almost in passing. But it touches deeper than expected.

Different compared with whom?

With the person he was in his friend's memory? With the person he remembered himself as? With the image preserved in old photographs? With the voice that once spoke more confidently, more sharply, more naively, more lightly? If he has become different, does that mean the former one has disappeared? Or does the former one still participate somewhere in the present one, but no longer govern him?

After such meetings, a person sometimes returns home and takes out old photographs.

Here is a face that is definitely his. Here is the body, the posture, the clothes, the look. Here is the room where he lived. Here are the people he was close to. Here is an event that then seemed enormous, and now has almost no weight. He looks and recognizes himself. But the recognition is strange. This is me, and not quite me.

On the one hand, there is continuity. He can tell what happened before and after the photograph. He can remember the smell of the room, the voice of the person nearby, the anxiety of that year, the hope that later did not come true. On the other hand, the person in the photograph thought differently, feared different things, wanted different things, did not know what is known now.

Sometimes a photograph returns not an event, but a whole way of being. A person sees how he stood beside someone, how he held his shoulders, how he smiled, how he tried to look confident, or, on the contrary, how he hid behind someone else's presence. Memory brings up not only "what happened," but also who he then was for himself: what he was ashamed of, what he was proud of, whose recognition he was waiting for, before whom he wanted to prove his worth.

In this case, the photograph does not simply show the past. It reveals the distance between versions of personality. And this distance does not destroy continuity. It makes it complex. A person understands: to say "that was me," one does not need to coincide with the past completely, but one must be able to connect it with the present.

If personality were a fixed essence, such moments would be hard to explain. Why does an essence change? Why can a person be himself and at the same time not coincide with his former self? Why does an old friend recognize and not recognize him at the same time?

After the third chapter, we are no longer looking for a hidden center as the source of coherence. We are considering the human being as a multilevel system for stabilizing experience. Now the question becomes new: