Сергей Гладков – The Human Being as a Multilevel System (страница 6)

On the contrary, there is a great deal.

But among this multiplicity, no separate object is found that we could point to and name: here he is, the inner observer, the hidden center, the unchanging owner of experience.

Here it is important not to draw the conclusion too quickly.

One must not say: if the observer is not found as an object, then experience has no subjectivity. That would be a mistake. Experience is indeed given from within. There is experiencing, there is perspective, there is a difference between what happens with me and what I observe from outside in another person. But the question is not whether there is subjectivity. The question is whether explaining subjectivity requires us to introduce a separate inner observer.

For now, the experiment shows only one thing:

what we call the observer is not found as an independent thing inside experience.

We find thoughts, emotions, sensations, attention, memory, and the feeling of presence.

But we do not find a separate center standing behind them as a hidden manager.

This experiment can be repeated in different states.

In the morning, when a person has not fully woken up, the "I" may be blurred. Thoughts appear slowly, the body is heavy, yesterday's concerns do not return at once. But after a few minutes, name, tasks, anxieties, plans, and familiar roles gather the person again into a recognizable form. It seems that the center has woken up. But perhaps it was not the center that woke up; perhaps the coherence of processes was restored.

In a moment of strong anxiety, everything is the opposite: the center seems to narrow. A person may say, "I have completely turned into anxiety." Attention is captured, the body is tense, the future is drawn as dangerous, memory throws up similar cases. Where is the calm observer here? Sometimes it appears later, when the anxiety has been named and placed into a story: "I had an anxiety attack." But at the moment of capture, a separate observer is almost not found.

In a state of flow, the center may almost disappear. A person plays, writes, drives along a familiar road, works with his hands, listens to music, talks with someone close, and suddenly notices that he was not separately watching himself. The action was happening, attention was gathered, mistakes were corrected, reactions appeared in time, but the inner commentator was silent. If the center is a necessary manager, such states are hard to explain. If the center is an effect of a certain organization of experience, it becomes clearer: sometimes experience is stable without an explicit feeling of an observing "I."

These cases do not prove finally that there is no center. But they show that the feeling of a center changes. It can strengthen, weaken, narrow, disappear from explicit attention, and return. And what changes together with the organization of experience is hard to treat as the unchanging source of that organization.

The Center as an Effect of Assembly

Here a natural resistance appears:

"But I feel the observer."

This objection cannot be dismissed. It is too strong. Many people really do experience something inside that resembles a point of presence: as if there is someone who looks at thoughts, who is silent behind words, who remains when emotions change. If we say to a person, "this is not there," he will rightly feel that his experience is being devalued.

So it is more exact to say it differently.

The feeling of the observer exists.

But the question is what it is.

It may be not a separate entity, but an effect of the assembly of experience.

When many processes are coordinated with enough stability, a feeling of center appears. Memory connects what is happening with the past. Language gathers experience into the form "I". Attention holds a certain area of experience. The body gives a stable perspective. The social environment addresses the person as one and the same individual. Biography connects episodes into a story. All this together can create the experience of an inner center.

In this case, the center is not the cause of coherence, but its result.

Not the source from which all processes spread out.

But the form in which coordinated processes become experienced.

This is like a stable pattern. If we look at a whirlpool, we can say that it has a center. But this center is not a small object inside the water that makes it rotate. It arises from the movement itself. If the movement changes, the center changes. If the movement falls apart, the center disappears. The center is real as a form of organization, but not as a separate thing.

Or we can recall a city square. It seems to be the center of a city. People arrange meetings there, streets converge toward it, maps mark it, transport routes take it into account. But the square is not a secret manager of the city. It is a center because many paths, habits, routes, stories, and decisions are organized around it. Here the center exists as an effect of relations.

The inner center may be similar to this.

It is felt because experience really gathers.

But from the fact that the assembly has the form of a center, it does not follow that inside there is a separate center-entity.

This shift is very important. It allows us to preserve the phenomenon without adding an extra entity. We do not deny that a person experiences himself from within. We do not deny that there is a feeling of presence. We do not deny that experience often gathers around "I". But we carefully change the status of this "I": perhaps it is not the source of the assembly, but its effect.

This is not the final answer.

It is a hypothesis that needs testing.

Here one more example may help.

A musical work has a theme. The listener recognizes it, returns to it, waits for its development. But the theme does not lie inside the music as a separate object. It exists in the relations of sounds, repetitions, pauses, expectations, and the listener's memory. If one note is removed, the theme may remain. If the rhythm is changed, it may become different. If the connections are destroyed, the theme disappears. It is real, but real as organization, not as a hidden thing.

The feeling of a center may be arranged in a similar way. It arises not from one element, but from the coherence of many elements. This is why it is hard to find as an object. We are looking for a thing, but what stands before us is a way of organization.

The Observer Paradox

The observer paradox appears at the moment when we try to make the observer an object.

If the observer is the one who sees thoughts, then how can we see the observer himself?

If we see him, he already becomes what is observed.

And the one who observes him seems to step back again.

One can continue endlessly: the observer of the observer, the observer of the observer of the observer, one more level, one more step back. Intuitively it seems that somewhere there must be a final point, a final "I" that is no longer observed, but only observes. But precisely here a risk appears: we introduce a hidden entity only because it is difficult for us to tolerate the incompleteness of the description.

One can take another path.

Not to search for the final observer.

But to ask what processes create the difference between what is noticed and the noticing itself.

When a person says "I noticed a thought," perhaps this does not mean that a separate observer looked at a separate thought. Perhaps it means that a new organization appeared inside experience: the thought stopped being a complete capture and became content that can be held, named, connected with other states, evaluated, released, or continued.

In other words, observation may be not the action of a hidden observer, but a change of relation inside experience.

The thought was a flow.

Then it became an object of attention.

The emotion was a state in which the person was located.

Then it became a state that he could name.

The reaction was automatic.

Then it became noticed.

In each case, distance appears. But distance does not necessarily require a separate entity that stands outside experience. It may arise as a reconfiguration of experience itself.

This is especially visible in simple situations.

A person is angry and fully captured by anger. At that moment he does not say to himself, "there is anger in me." He speaks sharply, acts from the state, sees the situation through it. But after a minute, an hour, or a day, he may say, "I was angry." Anger has become content of memory and language. It has stopped being the whole field of experience. Distance has appeared.

But where, in this distance, is a separate observer?

We can describe it differently: the organization of experience has changed. The possibility appeared to connect the reaction with a story, name it, compare it, evaluate it, include it in the image of oneself or, on the contrary, see its mismatch with that image.

Observation does not disappear here.

But it no longer requires a hidden observer.

Three Objections

At this point several objections appear, and each must be held without hurry.

The first objection sounds like this: