The Shifting Sands of Self: Narrative, Qualia, and African Oral Traditions — Epoche C1
The argument to be tested Qualia — the supposed intrinsic felt qualities of experience, the redness of red or the bitterness of quinine considered in themselves rather than as responses to anything — are the pivot of a familiar argument about the self, and the argument is this essay's subject. It runs: a stable self requires that these felt qualities recur unchanged, since my being the same person tomorrow consists in the constancy of what things are like for me; narrative and social context continually reconfigure what things are like for me; therefore there is no stable self, only an ongoing story. The conclusion is defensible and the route to it is not. Two faults have to be dealt with before the interesting position can be reached, and stating them is not a retreat from the thesis but the condition of its being worth holding. The first is that the premise attributes to the philosophical tradition a view almost nobody has held. The second is that the argument is internally inconsistent: if qualia are intrinsic in the sense the definition requires, narrative cannot touch them, and if narrative can touch them, they were not intrinsic. What follows disposes of both, and then rebuilds the case on grounds that do support it — Dennett's account of the self, the experimental record on how remembering works, and the treatment of personhood in African communitarian philosophy, of which the oral traditions are one expression. Why the qualia-constancy premise cannot bear the weight Take the attribution first. The standard criteria of personal identity over time have never been phenomenal. Locke proposed continuity of memory: I am the person who did what I can remember doing. Later writers substituted overlapping chains of psychological connection, or bodily and biological continuity. None of these requires that the felt quality of my experiences stay fixed, and for a good reason: nothing follows about who I am from how vivid or dull my colour experience is today. The point can be sharpened by a thought experiment that belongs to the same tradition. Suppose the colours of the spectrum were systematically inverted in one person relative to another — where you see red, she sees what you would call green — while every discrimination, every judgement and every use of colour words remained identical. If such an inversion is even coherent, then phenomenal character can vary while everything that identifies and individuates a person stays put. Whatever the correct verdict on the coherence question, it makes clear that the constancy of qualia was never the working criterion of identity. The essay's opening target is a construction. The second fault is more damaging and more interesting. Daniel Dennett (1988) set out the four properties a quale is supposed to have: it is ineffable, so that it cannot be fully conveyed in words; intrinsic, so that it does not consist in relations to anything else; private, so that comparison between people is impossible; and directly apprehensible in consciousness. Now consider what narrative could do to such a thing. Narrative works on describable, relational content — it places an experience among other events, assigns it a significance, connects it to what came before. If the felt quality is intrinsic and non-relational, then by definition none of this reaches it. To claim that story-telling reconfigures qualia is therefore not to refute the traditional conception; it is to have abandoned it while continuing to use its vocabulary. Dennett's own conclusion is the consistent one: the properties as defined are not instantiated by anything, and what we actually have are reactive dispositions — states that are describable, comparable and shaped by context, which we mistake for ineffable inner glows. Once that substitution is made, the essay's claim becomes coherent and even plausible. Narrative does not alter an intrinsic property; it alters the relational, dispositional states that were being misdescribed as intrinsic. The argument survives, but only by giving up the premise it started from. The centre of narrative gravity, explained The positive account the essay invokes is Dennett's (1992) proposal that the self is a centre of narrative gravity, and the analogy repays being taken literally rather than as a metaphor about fluidity. The centre of gravity of a physical body is defined by an equation. For a body composed of masses $m_i$ at positions $\mathbf{r}_i$, with total mass $M=\sum_i m_i$, it is the point $$\mathbf{R} = \frac{1}{M}\sum_i m_i \mathbf{r}_i .$$ Three features of this point matter for the analogy. It has no properties of its own: no mass, no colour, no material composition. It need not lie inside the body at all — the centre of gravity of a ring lies in the hole. And no amount of dissection will find it, because it is not among the parts. Yet it is not a fiction in the dismissive sense. Whether a wardrobe topples is settled by whether the vertical line through its centre of gravity falls outside its base of support, and this prediction works. Dennett takes the distinction from Reichenbach: an illatum is a posited unobserved entity, like an atom, which one hopes eventually to detect; an abstractum is a calculation-bound entity, like the equator or a centre of gravity, which does indispensable predictive work without being a further object in the world. The self, on Dennett's account, is an abstractum of the second kind. A human body's brain produces a continual stream of talk and behaviour, and interpreting that stream requires positing a single subject to whom it all belongs — an author of the words, an owner of the deeds. That posited point is the self. What this replaces is the picture Dennett calls the Cartesian Theatre: the assumption that somewhere in the brain there is a place where everything comes together for the benefit of an inner observer, at which point it becomes conscious. There is no such place, because there is no anatomical or functional f