Сергей Гладков – The Human Being as a Multilevel System (страница 2)

1. Doubt About the Familiar Picture of the Human Being

Introduction

He was going to answer calmly.

He had almost decided it in advance. Even before the conversation, he had gone over it several times in his mind: how everything should go, without harshness, without accusations, without the old habit of defending himself before anyone had really attacked him. He even felt a quiet satisfaction with this inner preparation. This time he would be different. This time he would not lose control. This time he would not let the conversation go where it had gone so many times before.

But the conversation began, and a few minutes later he heard his own voice.

Not the voice he had meant to use.

The voice was harder, faster, drier. The words came out almost on their own. He already understood that he was saying something different from what he had wanted to say, but he could not stop. Some part of him seemed to be standing nearby, looking at what was happening in confusion: why am I doing this? I did not want this. I had decided otherwise.

Later, when the conversation was over and the tension had passed, one strange sentence remained:

"I do not understand why I did that."

This sentence seems simple. We say it after arguments, after harsh actions, after strange decisions, after words we had not meant to say. Sometimes it sounds almost ordinary: I did not sleep enough, I was tired, I was emotional. Sometimes it feels heavier: as if, for a few minutes, a person had not quite been himself. Not in a mystical sense, not in the sense that consciousness disappeared, but in a very recognizable human sense: the intention was one thing, and the action became another.

And it is precisely here that the first doubt appears.

Not a catastrophe. Not proof that the familiar picture of the human being is completely false. Not a reason to declare at once that personality is an illusion. For now, only doubt: a small mismatch between how a person usually imagines himself and how he sometimes finds himself in action.

Usually we think of ourselves as if there were some coherent point inside. Someone who knows what he wants. Someone who makes decisions. Someone who observes thoughts, controls reactions, chooses words, and keeps the direction of life. We may call this "I", character, will, personality, or an inner center. The names differ, but the intuition is often the same: somewhere inside there is the one who is me.

But everyday experience constantly brings situations in which this picture begins to tremble.

A person wants one thing and does another.

He decides to change, but returns to the old.

He knows that something is harmful to him, but chooses it again.

He loves a person and hurts that person at the same time.

He says, "I understand everything," and a week later repeats the old mistake.

He looks at his own action and does not recognize himself in it.

Such moments are rarely seen as philosophical. They are too personal, too awkward, too ordinary. But that is exactly why they matter. A philosophy of the human being does not begin only in abstract questions about consciousness, freedom, or personality. Sometimes it begins in a kitchen after a failed conversation, in the silence after a flash of irritation, in a message that should not have been sent, in a decision that was made as if faster than the person had time to ask himself.

There are quieter cases too, cases that do not look dramatic. A person buys something he does not need, although in the morning he promised himself to be more careful with money. He opens an app for a minute and discovers that forty minutes have passed. He agrees to a request although he wanted to refuse. He stays silent where he meant to say something important. He smiles when he is angry. He puts off a call that another person is waiting for, and he himself cannot explain why this call has become so difficult.

All this can be explained by weakness, habit, tiredness, or social pressure. Sometimes that is exactly what should be done. But when such situations repeat, they begin to speak not only about a particular weakness. They show that a person does not always coincide with the image of himself that appears in calm reflection.

Doubt does not begin when a person makes a mistake. One can make mistakes even in the simplest model. Doubt begins when a mistake reveals an inner mismatch: I thought I knew myself, but in action something appeared that I had not taken into account.

The first question of this book is born from here:

is the human being really arranged as he seems to himself?

The Most Familiar Picture

The most familiar picture of the human being almost needs no proof. From the inside, it seems obvious.

I wake up in the morning and feel that it is I who woke up.

I remember yesterday and consider it mine.

I make a decision, and it seems to be my decision.

I say "I think", "I want", "I remember", "I chose", and language easily gathers all of this around one center. In ordinary life it could hardly be otherwise. If before every simple action we had to clarify exactly which process is now taking part in experience, speech would become impossible. We say "I" not because each time we build a theory of the subject, but because this is how the practical coherence of experience works.

And there is strength in this coherence.

A human being really does experience himself not as a set of scattered flashes, but as someone who continues. He can remember his childhood, recognize himself in a photograph, feel shame for an old action, pride in something done many years ago, and anxiety about tomorrow. His life is not given to him as a pile of separate frames. It gathers into a story.

This is why the objection appears almost at once:

"But I feel that I am myself."

And this objection cannot simply be thrown away. It would be a crude mistake to say: if a person sometimes contradicts himself, then the feeling of wholeness is worth nothing. It is worth a great deal. Without it, it would be hard to act, answer for one's actions, build relationships, keep promises, learn from the past, and plan the future. The feeling of being oneself is not a random illusion that can be removed with one sentence.

But the question is not whether this feeling exists.

The question is different: what exactly does it describe?

When a person says, "I feel like myself," he may mean the stability of a name, a body, memory, habits, a way of speaking, or connections with other people. He may mean a recognizable inner style: this is how I usually react, this is how I fear, this is how I rejoice, this is how I defend myself. He may mean a feeling of continuity: yesterday it was me, today it is me, tomorrow it will probably be me too.

But it does not follow from this that there is a separate unchanging center inside that controls everything else.

Here it is important not to hurry.

The familiar picture is built like this: there is an inner self, and it is the source of coherence. It sees, decides, chooses, directs. Thoughts may change, moods may change, the body may age, circumstances may break, but somewhere deeper than all this there seems to remain the one who passes through the changes.

This picture is convenient. It makes the person understandable to himself. It is supported by language, culture, morality, law, and biography. We ask, "Why did you do that?" and expect one responsible answer. We say, "Get hold of yourself." As if there is someone who must take hold, and someone who must be taken hold of. We say, "I am fighting with myself." As if inside one human being there are already at least two sides, while we still assume that somewhere there is a main owner of this struggle.

Everyday speech is full of such hidden images.

A person "controls himself."

A person "lost himself."

A person "found himself."

A person "betrayed himself."

A person "was not himself."

These expressions are not accidental. They show that our usual model of the human being assumes unity and constantly meets its disturbance at the same time. We speak about ourselves as one, but describe our life as a field of inner mismatches.

And as long as everything goes calmly enough, the contradiction is not visible.

But once a strong conflict appears, the familiar picture begins to fail.

At this point it is important to notice: the familiar picture is not stupid. It has not remained in place for so long by accident. A human being needs to feel that he is the one who can answer for words and actions. Without this, the fabric of everyday life itself would fall apart. It is impossible to begin every morning with the question of who exactly woke up today and to what extent he is connected with yesterday. Ordinary life requires a reduction of complexity.

But reducing complexity is not always the same as explaining. Sometimes it only makes life possible.

When a person says "I", he uses the shortest way to gather many processes into one practical point. This is convenient, necessary, and often quite enough. But the book begins where this is no longer enough. It begins where the practical word "I" starts to present itself as a final description of the inner structure of the human being.