Our Opaque Self

Do I know myself?

Our Opaque Self

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. Paul the Apostle, Romans 7:15

“We are unknown to ourselves, the knowers”. Friedrich Nietzsche (from the preface of On the Genealogy of Morality)

A child’s question

In the first blog I wrote about the need to see clearly. Now I begin with my then eight-year-old daughter asking me a question: “Dad, does a cat know that it is a cat?” I tried hard to answer in a way that an eight-year-old could understand, only to realise that my struggle to answer was not because I did not have the vocabulary for an eight-year-old, but because I did not know the answer. I did not even understand the question. Was the cat aware of its ‘cat-ness’? Was the cat aware of its selfhood? Was the cat aware of its uniqueness? I can turn the question around. How aware am I? I am aware that I am a human being, part of a species; belonging to a nation, a tribe, a clan; a holder of multiple roles as a healer, a father, a son, a husband, a provider; and a unique combination of atoms and molecules that has never existed before and will eventually perish. But can I truly say that I understand the selfhood of being me? Who am I that is pondering these thoughts? I am not my body, I am not my roles, I am not my chemical composition, and I am not the thinker. Thinking happens, but where? Who remains? My is-ness seems simultaneously self-evident and yet beyond description.

As far as we can tell, no other creature studies itself as obsessively as we humans do. A hungry animal seeking food must sense hunger as its own. However, this is not the kind of self that we talk about when we talk about ourselves. Who resides in the recesses of our innermost being?

Self as illusion

The famous inscription “Know thyself” at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi was made central by Socrates in his statement: “the unexamined life is not worth living”. The original Greek maxim is commonly understood as a warning for mortals to know their limits and avoid thinking that they could be Gods. Socrates considered self-knowledge as a prerequisite for a virtuous life that requires wisdom from rational examination of one’s thoughts, beliefs, and actions. In the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud popularised the concept of the unconscious, a part of the psyche that operates outside awareness. Like an iceberg, conscious awareness, or the ego, is a small, visible tip that hides a vast, inaccessible unconscious, within which primitive drives (the id, including sexual and aggressive drives) rage in conflict with the superego, a rigid moral compass imposed by parents and societal norms. The unconscious is hidden from awareness by repression and defence mechanisms, and its secrets can only be revealed through psychoanalysis.

Critics have argued that psychoanalytic concepts are so broad that they cannot be disproven. The analyst suggests that the patient is unconsciously sexually attracted to his mother. Denial of this assertion is considered suppression or a defence mechanism. The patient’s disagreement with the analyst is further proof of reaction formation or projection. Psychoanalysis has an armour so complete that criticism or doubt cannot pierce it. Others argued against the possibility that an outsider could discern what was hidden and invisible inside another person. Psychoanalysis might be ‘insightful’, but it fails empirical falsification because it cannot be externally verified. It interprets from inside. Yet Freudian theories, for all their limitations, have profoundly impacted most aspects of contemporary society from psychology and psychiatry to art, literature, and everyday language.

Many influential neuroscientists consider the idea of a unified self to be an illusion. There is no single entity that can be called a self. Instead, we all have a dynamic, fluid, emergent narrative woven together in networks from internal and external brain signals into a mental entity we call the self. The self is not a mental substance or psychic structure but often framed as an information processing device.

Complexity beyond comprehension

In this blog, I argue that the problem of understanding the mind is two-fold. The first is the technological problem of studying the subjective as an object. The second is the personal difficulty of searching within oneself without understanding the nature of the inside. The first is a structural difficulty (technological inquiry), and the second is a spiritual one (internal inquiry).

Science strives for objectivity by eliminating emotions, bias, and subjective interpretations. Randomised controlled trials are designed so that in all stages, from framing a hypothesis, selecting a sample, collecting data, analysing it, and drawing conclusions, subjectivity is eliminated or at least minimised. However, the mind cannot treat itself objectively: the observer and the observed are the same. We cannot step outside of consciousness or hold our minds at arm’s length. The mind observing itself is like trying to lift the chair you are sitting on - impossible without external support. We have no external vantage point; we are always sitting on the chair. We must be outside the chair, using external and separate mechanisms to lift it.

Another way to think about it is to look at a photograph of the Milky Way. In reality, no one has ever photographed the Milky Way from outside it. All images show partial internal perspectives. To truly photograph the Milky Way, we would need to leave it. A foetus filming the womb might believe that it can see its mother, but it can only see parts of the mother that are accessible to its insider view. Likewise, we cannot see the whole of consciousness from within consciousness.

The second problem in understanding the mind is the distinction between complicated and complex entities. Complicated systems, such as jet engines, can have millions of parts, but each is governed by deterministic Newtonian predictability; understanding the parts explains the whole. Complex systems have feedback loops, nonlinear interactions, and emergent and changing behaviours. There is no static starting point or outcome that does not influence the starting conditions. Everything is in a constant flux. We know all the laws that determine the weather in precise detail, yet we cannot predict the weather precisely. Weather systems are complex rather than complicated, as are the human body, living beings, and societies. The mind is not only complex; it is internally entangled. Thought, emotion, sensation, memory, imagination, and narrative cannot be cleanly separated.

The necessity of illusion

The mind is complex, self-referential, and therefore opaque. We are instruments trying to measure ourselves with no fixed calibration, no external standard, and no way to step outside the apparatus itself. Even with a technical blueprint, complexity and subjectivity prevent full understanding.

Although we cannot know ourselves objectively, we need to believe in a sense of a unified self. This is not a shortcoming but rather a survival mechanism. Without such a belief in continuity, agency, identity, and coherence, the mind would collapse under uncertainty. Our tragedy is mistaking these illusions for the truth, and our necessity is needing them. Across cultures and in different time spans, mystics, meditators, and contemplatives have taught us about loosening identification with the narrative and witness the mind without merging with it. They have experienced a self beyond the mind. They do not entirely escape the Milky Way but rather glimpse its shape. They do not lift the chair but stop believing that it is their only support.

Conclusion

We are opaque to ourselves because we are inside the system we attempt to observe. The mind is complex, self-referential, and lacks an external vantage point. Illusions of self-knowledge make life more bearable. Partial clarity arises not from escaping consciousness but from gently witnessing it from within. Therein lies the truth, freedom, and contentment.