Written Spring 2018

Identity and the Empty Interval: The Predicament of Selfhood in the Present

From Saint Augustine’s Confessions: “One hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments…If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided up into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we should call ‘the present.’ And this time flies so quickly from the future into the past that it is an interval with no duration.”1 The present, considered in this way, is a seemingly empty interval. Everything in the future passes through it to become part of the past, but the present itself has no character—that is, aside from the function of making the future into the past. If we accept Augustine’s position on the present moment (and I will briefly detail why we should), how can we reckon for identity? If we only exist in an interval that is devoid of content but nonetheless houses us and our experiences,2 how can we exercise self-definition in such a vacuum? Does the past dictate who we are, or the future? Quite possibly—and I below make the case for this—the character of the present is such that we must reject in some way the existence of identity as it stands. These questions are thematic roads-less-travelled in philosophically-leaning fiction of the past 100-odd years, but are routes that, when explored, can provide us with important lessons about identity in the present moment. The works of fiction that I’ll detail—Daniel C. Dennett’s Where Am I? and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams—both investigate some workable options of responding to Augustine’s predicament of the present as it bears on identity. It is my aim to bring us out of this predicament with either our identities intact or with a permissible rejection of identity across time (read: across present moments).

Before we launch into a critique of self-definition relative to the present, it might be necessary to convince you firstly of Augustine’s position. After all, we surely feel as if the present extends across a wide(ish) margin of time. We speak of people not yet arrived as coming “presently;” we can clearly conceive of and hold onto impressions we find contiguous across a cohesive set of instants that we together label “present moment.” Were the present so fleeting as to be empty, would these definitions hold? Augustine advances that memory—typically considered an aspect of the past—and imagination—one of the future—are both, in fact, mental experiences taking place in the present. He writes regarding future and past events, “I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if there also they are future, they will not yet be here. If there also they are the past, they are no longer there. Therefore, wherever they are, whatever they are, they do not exist except in the present.”3, 4 Though Augustine considers the present fleeting, it is not imperceptibly so, because it is that present during and through which we invoke past-facing memory and future-facing imagination.

The present is then not, in fact, empty in the strict way that we first imagined—but it is indeed empty in another. Consider the following: Everything that may be considered a present experience of the extant world is actually, already, part of the past. Imagine you are sitting in a café. The man next to you drops his teacup and it shatters on contact with the floor. By the time you register that the teacup has shattered, the event has already happened; the future of that teacup5 has already passed through the present. It is already only the memory of a teacup shattering upon which you reflect, and it is this memory that constitutes a so-called “present” experience. In this way, the present holds our reflections on the micro-moments that have already passed through it. There is nothing that we experience in the present aside from the past and the future, because by the time we can step back and mark a once-future moment as “present,” it is already in the past. In this way, the present is empty, but in a very, very special way. The teacup has already stopped shattering, but our minds in the ‘empty’ interval hold onto this experience of shattering and render it as presently happening.

The future functions in the same way: our imaginations dream up possible futures or circumstances that must, and can only, occupy space within the present moment. The world of the future is a mental reflection of possible events, just as ‘unreal’ as memories. Imagine a thousand teacups, thrown from a high-up window, shattering on the street outside. This image is a function of the present, where we have dreamed it. That does not make it real. One past teacup is unreal for having already passed us by and for no longer existing within the present; a thousand future teacups are equally unreal for never having done so. The present, oddly empty as it may be, must exist for things future to become things past; for us to both remember and to imagine.

Now, what can we do with this notion? May we hold onto our identity in such a present? There is a central disconnect between possible responses at this point. Here are two distinct classical possibilities, to which the literature detailed more or less responds.

First: Adherents to Heraclitus’ natural philosophy and/or the physics of Tao and Zen—which together posit that we can never step into the same river twice because the world is in a state of constant flux—might imagine that the makeup of the present is such that there is indeed a progression of states (namely from the future into the past through it) and that we are therefore never the same ourselves. Just as the water of Heraclitus’ river wraps around and passes by one standing in it (meaning, poetically, that we might actually never step into the same river once),6 the future wraps around us in the present and becomes instantly the past. There is nothing in the stream of time to hold onto that would account for a stable, consistent identity. In another (more Taoist) way, we might even consider ourselves the river7—it is we who bend around the present, and our constant bending, contorting, and flowing together make up a fluid, dynamic identity that cannot be held onto in any one instance of our empty present, because by the time it is grasped, it is changed.

Second: This picture imagines that, instead of it being the case that we never stay the same, we actually never change. This is a simple account to understand, because it springs purely from the makeup of the present—not the future and/or the unreal past, as in the river example. Such a notion states that there is only one version of us, and that is the ‘us’ that occupies the micro-moment of the present. We can never change, because there is no progression into or out of the present. The infinitesimal present is a locked box, and every micro-second of our existence is a new8 box into which we, the living, are locked. As the past and future are unreal, so are all the other possible boxes into which we might be crammed. Indeed, the only us is the us in the box of the current (and only) present—which is the only place that we could possibly be. Personal change, and a cohesive identity as constituted by such change across time, is therefore impossible.

The above accounts are a lot to make sense of, and both tend toward discrediting identity in the first place, so let’s turn to an author who might provide us with workable way to cash out these conceptions. Daniel C. Dennett’s 1978 short story Where Am I? details the philosopher’s bizarre (and, we can probably conclude, fictional) experiences during the Cold War. Synopsizing, these include being drafted by the United States government to disarm a nuclear weapon stuck under Tulsa, Oklahoma. Due to the danger of the mission, the government converts Dennett’s body into a remotely-controllable husk while his brain, the controller, is extracted and moved into a secluded vat. This situation provides a springboard for Dennett’s rumination on the makeup personal identity when brain is disconnected from body, but I believe the notion Dennett develops for use in this spatial predicament is more broadly applicable. In fact, it might explain why we can still hold onto a temporal identity even when we live in an empty present. Dennett writes, “At any given time, a person has a point of view, and the location of the point of view (which is determined internally by the content of point of view) is also the location of the person.”9 So, when Dennett’s remote-control body (which can be said to house Dennett’s POV because it is from the RC body that the POV’s content is determined) is in Tulsa, Dennett is therefore in Tulsa. When his body dies and Dennett’s POV zaps back to the vat, then Dennett is in the vat.

Now, what this says about identity in the present is thus: Identity derives from POV, which is in turn determined by the content of the POV (aka, what makes us think we are where we are). More importantly, we must imagine that identity-via-POV is also constituted by how that POV got to be in a certain place. It is not enough to say that Dennett is just in Tulsa or in the vat; identity intuitively incorporates a Why? into one’s being somewhere; one’s holding a certain POV. In another way: Who you are is a function of How you are—how your POV got to be where it is, as well as where it is in any case. Dennett is in the vat, but he is ‘Dennett-in-the-vat’ because that instant of his being in the vat is the present-moment climax of a historical story reaching back all the way to his birth (and [arguably] even before).

What this POV-Historical identity do for us? It gives us good reason for recalling and using the past, even in its Augustinian unreality, as a tool of self-definition. This, you can imagine, is an extremely intuitive notion. Even if the present is an interval with no duration, we have established that it is only through the present that we might experience and recall the past. So, in this way, and as Augustine wrote, the past is always present when recalled. If we recall how our POV got to be where it is ‘now’ (and we do), then we have a strong account for identity. Seemingly miraculously, we can define ourselves in both space and time (whoo!) by our points of view.

However, this account isn’t all roses. It doesn’t give us sufficient grounds for understanding whether we undergo constant change or no change. And, thinking about it, there is a particularly dangerous (albeit proprietary) sort of phenomena that, given we take this account to be true, would be permissible as identity-constitutive: implanted memories. In sci-fi, we sometimes encounter a person, a clone, a robot, or some other creature that has had memories falsely generated or implanted in its brain. These past moments never actually happened, but the creature’s POV and that POV’s history (which I have argued might constitute identity) is such that the creature now has a POV-Historical identity based upon a falsified past. It is unsettling that we, or really anyone, might have an identity predicated on false POV memories. If memories can be effectively falsified, they would constitute a past (for the one reflecting on it in the present) just as lucid as one that might really have been experienced. In this case, the false past is just as real to the cognizer as one that might really have happened in the world. Taken further, we, within our own POVs and POV-Histories cannot necessarily state that our memories, our pasts, experienced in the empty present, have their own reality. Like I wrote above, a thousand imaginary teacups are just as unreal in the present as one teacup shattered in the past. How can we distinguish a real-past shattered teacup from a false-past shattered teacup? I don’t know that we can. Both are just as unreal, and so, in our reflective present, just as real.

Well, hell. It seems like identity is actually a lot more precarious than we imagine. The future can’t be said to actually exist, the past can’t either, and the present is a very special kind of empty. We might launch into nihilism at this point, but I think that Alan Lightman, author of the 1992 novella Einstein’s Dreams, gives us good reason to fundamentally reject egoism and adherence to a precarious identity, which in turn gives us the ultimate escape from our present predicament—and solves the riddle of whether we are never the same or never changing.

Einstein’s Dreams presents us with a number of episodic vignettes, each one a different dream experienced by Albert Einstein in the months leading to the publishing of his Special Theory of Relativity. The dreams all play with time and its progression10 in various inventive ways, but the central lesson from Einstein’s Dreams, taking after its main character’s real-life Theory of Relativity, is that time lacks a consistent flow or character. When taken further, we can conclude that this central inconsistency of time, this relativity, is an experiential phenomenon in the world. That is (as I have argued elsewhere11 during the course for which I write this paper), in a very real way, time is relative not only in the grand, Einsteinian sense, but also in an individual sense. Individuals each have their own personal time, and this personal time, after the Augustine, is constituted entirely by a personal present. With this the case, there is room for us to both never change and to never stay the same—it is entirely up to us how deeply we want to hold on to the unreal past or the unreal future; up to us whether we permit our POV-History to constitute what we are in any present moment.

To motivate this account, take, for instance, the Dreams’ world of “11 June 1905.” In this universe, which reflects certain conceptions of personal time in our own, time terminates at the instant of the present moment. To those living in the world of “11 June,” no future ever comes,12 so one has the freedom to either live in instantaneous re-creation of their identity, or they may hold onto their pasts as consolation for lack of a future. Lightman writes, “In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final… Some are thus paralyzed into inaction. They lie in their beds through the day, wide awake but afraid to put on their clothes…Others leap out of bed in the morning, unconcerned that each action leads into nothingness, unconcerned that they cannot plan out their lives. They live moment to moment, and each moment is full.”13 It is thus up to an individual to, in the midst of this grand time, to dictate the bounds and character of their personal presents. They have the choice of holding onto the past or living in the present, because the future never comes—not entirely unlike our real world.

Contrast this with the world of “20 May 1905,” in which there is no memory, so no mechanism by which to bring the past into the present. “The past exists only in books, in documents. In order to know himself, each person carries his own Book of Life, which is filled with the history of his life….With time, each person’s Book of Life thickens until it cannot be read in its entirety. Then comes a choice…Some have stopped reading altogether. They have abandoned the past. They have decided that it matters not if yesterday they were rich or poor, educated or ignorant, proud or humble, in love or empty-hearted—no more than it matters how a soft wind gets into their hair. ”14 Again, aspects of our extant world (as identified by Augustine) are clearly identifiable in “20 May”: The past is fleshed out in historical documents, because we cannot convey it otherwise. Memories decompose over time; it is up to us to hold onto them. In this way, the past is just a story we tell ourselves.15 As in “11 June 1905,” it is up to us whether to let the past (as we’ve committed it to paper) dictate who we are in the present, because otherwise, there is no memory of the past that we can recall for such dictation.

The world of “20 May 1905” clearly forms the inverse of “11 June 1905.” When the lessons of both are taken together (and we can do this when we take that both worlds are just shades of experience in our real world—those in our present world can conceivably live in such circumstance), we have a strong case for abandoning our wrongheaded adherence to an identity that is based either on looking into the past or into the future. We must, the lessons of the above works understood, let unreal history die, just as we must let the unreal future pass as it comes—que sera, sera. All we have is an empty present, and a choice about whether to accept its vacuousness.

Is identity constantly changing or staying the same in the present? As it turns out, it depends on how much faith you put in the reality of the past and the future. For someone like Dennett, it is your point of view and how that point of view got to be where it is presently that dictates identity. You are who you are based on the summation of your POV’s past. To abstract Dennett’s view, we swim upriver from past to present, our past (which we might wrongheadedly cling to) weighing on our backs. For someone like Lightman (who more clearly lies within the Augustinian tradition of rejecting the reality of past and future outside their experience in the present moment), there is no change to speak of, because change implies the reality of the future and the past. It is the freedom of Augustine’s empty interval that allows us to declare the past and the future unreal and express all that we are in the present moment. The past and the future are therefore both simply stories, which we are more than free to reject.

Published 2018