Сергей Гладков – The Human Being as a Multilevel System (страница 8)

If there is no center as a separate entity,

what holds coherence?

3. The Human Being as a System for Stabilizing Experience

After the Center Disappears

Sometimes a person does not change at once, but after an event that for a long time does not look final.

At first, everything still continues out of inertia. He walks the same streets, answers messages, buys the usual food, says the usual phrases. The outer form of life may remain almost the same. But inside, something has already shifted. Work that once seemed part of the future becomes a temporary structure. Relationships in which a person recognized himself no longer give the same reflection. Old goals sound foreign. The words with which he explained his life to himself stop working.

And one day a phrase appears:

"I no longer understand who I am."

It may appear after divorce, moving, losing a job, illness, major success, a child growing up, the death of someone close, or a long inner crisis. Sometimes it comes not after a catastrophe, but after reaching a goal. A person has arrived where he had been going for many years, and suddenly discovers that the goal no longer holds his story. Everything was built around it, and now it is complete, and with its completion an emptiness appears.

This state is frightening precisely because what disappears is not one answer, but the way of connecting answers.

The person still remembers his name. He knows the facts of his biography. He recognizes the face in the mirror. But the connection between past, present, and future becomes weaker. What used to gather life into a recognizable form no longer holds it with the same force.

After the first two chapters, we come to this place with a question that has already changed.

In the first chapter, doubt appeared about the familiar picture of the human being. In the second chapter, we tried to find the inner center and did not find it as a separate entity. We found thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, attention, memory, a feeling of presence, but we did not find a hidden observer standing behind them as an independent manager.

Now a new question appears:

if there is no center as a separate entity,

what holds coherence?

This question cannot be bypassed. If we simply remove the center and offer nothing in its place, the human being turns into a scattering of processes. Thoughts separately, body separately, memory separately, language separately, relationships separately. Such a picture may seem radical, but it explains the main thing badly: why does experience still not fall apart every second?

A person wakes up in the morning and in most cases does not assemble himself from zero. He recognizes the room. Remembers what happened yesterday. Continues unfinished tasks. Understands whom he needs to answer. Keeps anxieties, hopes, habits, intonations, routes, ways of defending himself, and ways of loving. Even if the inner center has not been found, some coherence is clearly there.

So the question must be put differently.

Not: who governs the human being from within?

But: how does experience hold coherence?

This shift seems small, but it changes the whole direction of thought.

As long as we ask "who governs?", we already assume the form of the answer. We look for a face, a center, an inner owner, a hidden point of decision. But if this center is not found, the question begins to move in a circle: who decided, if not the center? who noticed, if not the observer? who held it together, if not the manager?

The question "how is coherence held?" is built differently. It does not require us to introduce an owner in advance. It allows us to look at memory, attention, language, the body, habits, relationships, external supports, and meaning as processes that may take part in coordinating experience. It does not impoverish the human being, but opens more levels than the model of the inner center.

Systems Do Not Always Have a Center

To move further, it is useful to look at systems that are stable without a single governing center.

A city does not have one inner "I."

It may have an administration, a map, a center, a history, borders, transport hubs. But the city is not governed from one hidden point that decides every second where people will go, where a cafe will open, how a district will change, why one street will become busy and another quiet. A city exists as a multitude of coordinated and uncoordinated processes: roads, residents' habits, economic ties, the memory of places, rules, accidents, routes, conversations, fears, expectations, seasonal changes.

And still the city is not chaos.

It can be recognizable. It has a style, a rhythm, districts, repeated paths. A person who returns after a long absence may say: the city has changed, but it is still the same city. Or the opposite: formally it is the same city, but something in it has lost its former coherence.

The stability of the city does not require a hidden city observer.

It arises from the organization of many processes.

An ecosystem also does not have a single center.

In a forest there is no main tree that governs the forest as a whole. There is soil, moisture, light, fungi, roots, insects, animals, seeds, decay, competition, symbiosis, fires, recovery, seasonal cycles. A forest can be stable, but this stability is not like immobility. It changes constantly. Old trees fall, young ones grow, some species retreat, others become stronger. The stability of a forest is not the preservation of every detail, but the preservation of the coherence of changes.

If we look for a center of control in the forest, we will not find it.

But if we conclude from this that there is no forest as a system, that would be strange.

Language is perhaps even closer to the human being.

No one person governs language alone. Language has no hidden observer who decides which words will survive, which meanings will change, which expressions will become familiar. But language is stable. It allows people to understand one another, pass on memory, argue, promise, tell stories, build laws, write books. At the same time, language changes. Words lose old shades, receive new ones, move from one environment to another, disappear, return, become living or dead.

Language preserves continuity through change.

And this continuity does not require a single center.

These examples do not automatically prove that the human being is arranged in the same way. A city is not a person. A forest is not consciousness. Language is not personality. But they help remove one intuitive obstacle: stability does not always require a central manager.

A system can be stable not because there is a chief owner inside it, but because many processes are sufficiently coordinated with one another.

Now we can carefully return to the human being.

There is one more example: an orchestra.

An orchestra may have a conductor, but the music is not located only in the conductor. It arises from the score, the musicians' hearing, the habit of playing together, the memory of rehearsals, the quality of instruments, the acoustics of the hall, the common rhythm, mutual attention. If the conductor disappears in the middle of a simple, well-learned passage, the music will not necessarily fall apart at once. But if coordination between the groups breaks down, even the conductor's presence will not immediately save the sound.

This example matters not because the human being is literally like an orchestra. It shows something else: even where there is a visible center of coordination, stability is often distributed more widely than it seems. This is even more important for the human being, in whom the inner conductor is not found as a separate entity.

A New Hypothesis

If the inner center is not found as a separate entity, but coherence of experience still exists, we can formulate a new hypothesis.

The human being is

not a fixed essence,

but a multilevel system for stabilizing experience.

This formula should not appear as a dogma. It is an answer to the path that has already been taken.

First there was the familiar intuition: inside there is a single center.

Then doubt appeared: a person argues with himself, acts automatically, does not understand his own reactions, changes.

Then there was an attempt to find the observer: there are thoughts, emotions, sensations, attention, a feeling of presence, but the observer is not found as a separate object.

Then a possibility appeared: the center may be an effect of assembly, not a cause.

Now the next step appears: if the center is not the source, coherence may be held by a system of processes.

The word "system" should not sound mechanical here. This is not about the human being as a machine with parts. The machine metaphor is too crude. A person is not simply a set of functions that can be replaced and reassembled without remainder. His experience is living, historical, bodily, linguistic, social, and meaningful. So here system means not a mechanism, but an organization of interconnected processes.

The word "stabilization" also requires care.

It does not mean stopping.