Сергей Гладков – The Human Being as a Multilevel System (страница 3)

The First Mismatches

The first mismatch appears between intention and action.

A person decides not to check his phone before sleep, but reaches for it again. He decides not to enter an argument, but is already answering. He decides to begin important work in the morning, but by evening discovers that he has done everything except that work. In each separate case, an explanation can be found: habit, tiredness, anxiety, weak discipline. But if we look more carefully, something becomes visible: intention is not an absolute center of control.

It can be strong and still lose.

The second mismatch appears between knowledge and reaction.

A person knows that no one meant to offend him, but he feels offended. He knows that the danger is small, but he is anxious. He knows that an old fear no longer fits the situation, but the body reacts as if it still does. He can explain everything to himself correctly and still experience it differently. This means that knowledge does not always rebuild experience at once. Inside a human being there are levels that change at different speeds.

The third mismatch appears between values and actions.

A person considers himself honest, but in a concrete situation avoids the truth. He considers himself attentive, but does not hear someone close. He considers himself free, but again does what is expected of him. After this he may feel guilt, shame, or irritation with himself. But the very fact of this experience shows that inside there is no simple line from belief to action.

The fourth mismatch appears in time.

What seemed important yesterday may become indifferent today. What seemed impossible in youth may later become ordinary. A person may look at an old photograph and recognize himself, while also thinking: "How could I live like that? How could I think like that? How was that even me?" He is not completely foreign to himself, but he is not completely the same either.

The fifth mismatch appears in relationships.

With one person we become softer, with another harder. In one environment we speak with confidence, in another we lose our voice. At home a person may be one way, at work another, with parents a third, and alone a fourth. Usually we do not take this as proof of a multiple personality. But it shows that the coherence of a human being depends not only on an inner center. It is supported by situations, roles, expectations, the memory of relationships, and the reactions of other people.

The sixth mismatch appears between the image of oneself and the view of others.

A person may be sure that he is calm, while those close to him have long known that on certain topics he instantly becomes sharp. He may consider himself independent, while from the outside it is visible how strongly his decisions depend on approval. He may say, "I am not offended," but his silence, tone, gestures, and delays in answering tell another story. Other people sometimes notice in us what we ourselves do not include in our picture.

This is unpleasant. It feels as if we are being deprived of the right to inner truth. But the point is not that another person always knows us better. The point is that self-access is not absolute. A person is given to himself from the inside, but not completely. Others see external repetitions that he may not notice, because each time he experiences the situation as new.

The seventh mismatch appears between decision and time.

At the moment of decision, a person may be sincere. He really wants to begin again, stop repeating the old, leave a destructive connection, write a book, change profession, learn to speak more honestly. But after a week, a month, or a year, it turns out that the decision has not become a stable form of life. It was real, but it could not stabilize. This means that the sincerity of a decision is not yet the same as a reconfiguration of the whole system of experience.

These examples do not prove that there is no center.

They do something smaller, but more important at the beginning: they show that the usual confidence in a center is not enough.

If there is one controlling source inside, why is it so often not the only participant in what happens? Why can a person argue with himself? Why can an action begin before a decision becomes clear? Why can a reaction contradict knowledge? Why can a past self seem both mine and foreign? Why do different situations call out different versions of a person?

One can answer: because the human being is complex.

That is true, but too general.

To say "the human being is complex" is to admit the problem, but not yet to explain it. Complexity must be described in such a way that it is not reduced back to one small controlling center that, for some reason, keeps failing to cope.

This is where a more delicate task appears.

Not to destroy the idea of the human being.

But to check which elements of this idea are truly necessary.

Here a second objection appears:

"But are all these mismatches not explained by ordinary psychology? Why make a philosophical question out of them?"

This objection is fair insofar as it protects us from premature metaphysics. Indeed, much can be described psychologically: habits, defensive reactions, traumas, impulses, social roles, cognitive distortions. This book does not cancel such explanations and does not try to replace them with one large formula.

But the philosophical question appears in another place. A psychological description often says which processes take part in behavior. Here we are also interested in why we keep imagining the human being as if all these processes should come together in one inner center. Why, with such clear multiplicity of levels, are we still so sure of simple unity? Why does it seem to us that behind all changes there must stand one unchanging owner?

This is what makes the question philosophical.

Not that a person sometimes makes mistakes.

But that the familiar model of the human being itself may be too simple for the experience it tries to explain.

Doubt

Doubt about the familiar picture does not arise where a person simply makes a mistake.

Mistakes can be explained by lack of information, chance, or external pressure. Something else is much more important: a person sometimes discovers that he is not fully transparent to himself.

He may not understand why exactly that word hurt him.

Not understand why he avoids a conversation.

Not understand why he repeats the same scenario.

Not understand why he cannot do what he considers necessary.

Not understand why in a certain situation he seems to become younger, weaker, sharper, or more helpless.

In such moments, a person does not simply meet an external difficulty. He meets the fact that his own experience is organized less simply than it seems.

One can imagine a human being as a room with a manager standing in the center. He sees all the screens, receives all the signals, makes decisions, and gives commands. This metaphor is familiar, even if we rarely formulate it openly. But real experiences are often less like a control room and more like many processes trying to coordinate with one another.

Some processes hold past experience.

Others react to threat.

Others support the image of oneself.

Others orient themselves toward the expectations of other people.

Others pull toward the habitual way of acting.

Others try to build a new line of behavior.

In a calm situation, all this may look unified. But in tension, coherence becomes visible precisely because it begins to break.

Inner conflict is one of the simplest entrances into this problem.

"I want to leave, and I am afraid to leave."

"I want change, and I want to keep the old."

"I want to tell the truth, and I am afraid to destroy the relationship."

"I want to be free, and I want to be approved."

"I want to begin again, and I hold on to the old version of myself."

If the human being were a simple center of decisions, such conflicts would be a strange error. But they do not look like an error. They are too regular, too recognizably human. They show that different lines of stabilization can act inside experience at the same time.

One line holds safety.

Another holds meaning.

A third holds belonging.

A fourth holds the image of the future.

A fifth holds the link with the past.

And when these lines diverge, a person experiences himself not as a clear center, but as a tension between possible ways of being himself.

Here another objection appears:

"But the conflict still happens to me. So there is an I who experiences all this."