Autonomy and control over one's social self-consciousness, Professor Lucy O'Brien

On 7th October at 6pm, Chair of The Royal Institute of Philosophy and Richard Wollheim Professor of Philosophy at UCL, Lucy O'Brien, gave an exclusive online talk to members, on "Autonomy and control over one's social self-consciousness."

The abstract for Professor O'Brien's talk is as follows:

Other people can make us feel self-conscious, embarrassed, ashamed, and proud. In this talk I want to consider a subject’s relation to her own affective social self-consciousness. Two areas I will consider are (i) a subject’s practical management of their social self-consciousness, and (i) a subject’s appraisals of their own social self-consciousness. I will suggest that the latter concern can be thought of in the context of a general problem of deference. I suggest that our self-appraisals should be understood as allowing for a kind of necessary opacity. In so far as our self-conscious lives are rationally permeated with the appraisals of others, we risk standing in an uncomprehending, but committed, sense of ourselves and our value.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:03

Just to introduce myself, I'm Lucy O'Brien and I'm chair of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and we decided that it would be good to have these events so that members of the Royal Institute could kind of do some philosophy together. Um I mean, I'm in I'm in fact going to give you a little talk, but I'm going to do it in two parts, and I'm hoping that you will uh have questions. Um or or if you've got like adjacent stuff you'd like to talk about, I'm very happy to, you know, if it reminds you of something that you've been puzzling over, then I'm I'm very happy to to hear it. Um there's two ways to do the questions and Julia who's who's my what are you my my manager, my tech support. Um Julia, so if so if if people want to ask questions the rules of thumb and how they lead to bias, so they're not using so using. Someone's got their volume on, I think. Has someone is that oh yeah, it's gone now. Um so you can raise a question by raising a hand in Zoom or by just raising a hand and waving. Um, or if you'd rather put a question in the chat, you can put a question in the chat and then Julia will will uh as it were ask it for you if that's if that's how you'd rather do it. Okay, but I'm going to I'm gonna get going. Before I put up my slides and disappear to a little a little mini me in the corner, um, let me just tell you what I'm working on. So what I'm giving you here is stuff that I'm currently working on. It's a sort of it sort of comes out of a very, very rough final draft of a book I'm writing. And its topic, or in a way, its question, is what sorts of control we have over what I call our social self-consciousness. We're socially self-conscious beings, we feel embarrassed, self-conscious, shame, pride in relation to each other. Other people make us feel these things, right? It's being among others that we come to feel these things, and in a way, my question is: how does a reflective being managing her own life, what sorts of control does she have over her social self-consciousness, and what sorts of control doesn't she have over her social self-consciousness? So let me let me start. I've got some slides. So autonomy and control over one's social self-consciousness. So, first of all, self-consciousness. So, one of the things that I think is important, and sometimes if you read any philosophy, the question will be like, what is self-consciousness? And one of the sort of first things I think we need to do is correct the idea that self-consciousness comes in one type. I think there are a variety of different forms of self-consciousness. And we can divide those forms up in different ways. Kind of tendentiously, and there's lots of problems about drawing the distinction in this way, but I'm going to go ahead anyway. We can think about forms of self-consciousness falling into two broad kinds: self-consciousness from the inside, and self-consciousness from the outside. So self-consciousness from the inside is the is is the thing that in when you've read Descartes, or you've read or thought about how you know your own beliefs and actions, how are we conscious of ourselves in our introspective lives? That's that's what I'm thinking of as self-consciousness from the inside. That that's one of my topics, but it's not my topic today. I'm thinking I want to think about a certain kind of self-consciousness from the outside. So we're conscious not just of our own minds and things, but we're also conscious of ourselves as one being among other objects and persons in the world. Um, and again, within self-consciousness from the outside, I think you can distinguish between what we can call objectual self-consciousness. So, one of the things that I'm conscious of is being an object in space. I'm extremely clumsy. I'm often conscious of being an object in space because I bump into things, I come across things, and and you know, there I am, one object alongside others in a shared spatial world. But I can also perceive my body in space. I can see myself walking, look down at my legs, see myself walking along. And I come to I can come to appreciate that just as all you are material objects in space, human beings that I bump into, so so am I. Again, that's not going to be my um question. My question is about another kind of self-consciousness from the outside that I'll call interpersonal social self-consciousness. I can be conscious of myself as one or among other subjects, not just one among other objects. I should say that if people have sort of questions as I'm going along, they should, you know, they're they're should be free to ask them or pop them in the chat or raise your hand. Okay, so now I want to I want you to imagine something to try and get a fix on the kind of phenomena I'm thinking about when I talk about self-consciousness, social self-consciousness. So feeling self-conscious before another. Suppose you're sitting on a tube train reading your book, and suppose you notice that someone's staring at you with a quizzical expression on their face. You might think, oh, they're probably not looking at me, they're probably looking at the poster behind me, and you you know, you check, you follow their gaze, but no, they're definitely just staring at you. So you then try to look back at them, you try to maybe catch their eye, and they swerve a little only to come back to looking at you when your eyes go back down to your book. Now, many of us in a situation like this will come to feel self-conscious, you'll come to feel looked at. Um now that's a sort of very pure instance of what I call social self-consciousness. In particular, I call that ordinary self-consciousness. I call it ordinary self-consciousness because when somebody says, I feel I felt self-conscious, they mean something like that. So when you felt self-conscious in the tube, that for me is ordinary self-consciousness. Now, I hope it's just a familiar kind of phenomena to you. I have a view about what's going on. So for me, for a subject to be ordinarily self-conscious is it is for her to be effectively at as in that is emotionally aware of herself as up for an evaluation by another according to their evaluative standards or schemas. But that that detail we could argue about exactly how to clarify it. I hope the phenomena you think, I know that phenomena. Now I think ordinary self-consciousness, that capacity we have to be effectively responsive to other people's attention to us, evaluative attention to us, also can explain our capacity for feeling shame, feeling pride, feeling embarrassment, and a number of other um, and probably a number of other forms of self-consciousness that I actually don't think we have names for. Feeling slightly awkward that you don't know what to say, or and more than that, I think this capacity, this capacity we have to absorb other people's evaluative attention is a really vital, central human capacity. We organize human life utilizing this kind of capacity. Both we use it, we are sensitive of other people utilizing this capacity, and also we can use it to control other people by making people feel ashamed or proud or so on. So I think part of the economy of a human social life depends upon, if you like, these emotional hydraulics, these this capacity to be able to absorb other people's evaluations. A consequence, though, is that it means that our self-conscious lives can be at the behest or whim of others. Um but we think of ourselves, and particularly when we do philosophical reflection, we think of ourselves as autonomous individual thinkers, autonomous animals. But now we've got also an autonomous individual, independent thinker whose experience of herself, and it's a form of evaluative experience of herself. When we feel ashamed, that's an appraising emotion, when we feel pride, it's an appraising emotion. But now it looks as though those things are also can be up to others. So whether it's the kind of social self-consciousness that I've talked about, or things like love and grief, as human beings we experience ourselves in these two ways as independent, autonomous, like standing alone, determining our lives in accordance with our own sense of what's reasonable, what's rational, what has value, what norms we have. But we also experience ourselves as inseparable from and in some way conjoined with others. You know, when people lose somebody and experiencing grief, they say things like, um, part of me feels like it's gone. Um any account, I think, of human self-consciousness that doesn't allow for this kind of internal complex duality actually just fails to capture human self-consciousness. There's another kind of clarification I want to make to uh our self-conscious thinking about our self-conscious lives. Again, when philosophers think about the question, what's self-consciousness? Very often they just think with Descartes, they think about introspection and how we know our own thoughts. But the other thing they do is they ask the question, what are our capacities like? Right? What is it, what is it to have a capacity to be self-conscious? But I think thinking about forms of social self-consciousness really bring to the fore the fact that it's not just that we have, we all have, or most of us have, maybe there's a question we can ask about everyone, has it, has a capacity to be socially self-conscious, but it's variously realized. Different people have different stimuli, different people have it to a greater and lesser mistake. So I think it's a mistake when we're thinking about social self-consciousness to think only about how we should understand the capacity, we should also think about how we understand its occurrence. To be and to feel socially self-consciousness, something that you can be and feel in real time, right? In a day, our capacities for social self-consciousness can be uninterrupted, but the occasioning of it depends on stimuli that can come and go. And it's also worth noting that some individuals, and the social psychologists, unlike the philosophers of mind, have been all over this for a long time. Some individual individuals are just more prone to forms of feelings of self-consciousness than others. So social psychology operates and has you know sophisticated um mechanisms for uh testing for a distinction between individuals that they call high self-conscious individuals and those that are low self-conscious individuals. So that that interacts with our some people will feel differently when someone stares at them on the tube than others. And interestingly, I also think it's clear that some groups are more likely to be faced with self-consciousness inducing stimuli than other groups. If in some way you look atypical, let's say you had a kind of unusual facial structure, then you're more likely to be looked at more often. And so you're more likely to be so persons, so persons who belong in that group are going to be more likely to be um presented with self-consciousness-inducing stimuli. Okay, so that's my phenomena. I want to point out that it is something that can come and go, it's something that responds to stimuli, and that different people will, as it were, be faced with different problems, depending perhaps on individuals, aspects of them, or perhaps about what group they belong to. But anybody who suffers, suffers, enjoys anyone who is able to be socially self-conscious, in nice ways, you know, that feeling of sort of social self-satisfaction or comfort, or the feeling of pride, or in sort of difficult ways, like embarrassment and shame, all of us who can live who live socially self-conscious lives are being reflective subjects who plan our lives, we're able to think about and do manage our own social self-consciousness. And there's two areas I want to sort of split up in thinking about this question of managing our own conscious lives, in particular managing our own self-conscious lives, and that's to um think about a subject's what we can call practical management of their social self-consciousness, and distinguish that from what I'll call a subject's normative management of their social self-consciousness, that is their appraisals of their social self-conscious lives. So if I feel ashamed and I don't like it, I might think, what's to be done? And then another thing I could think is, should I be feeling shame? Is this the right thing to be doing? And that's the difference between the two. Now, in asking the question, and it's a danger, it's dangerous using the word management in in a way, um, I really want us to try and approach the question, the difficulty. And I don't have our I don't have an answer to this difficulty, but the the thing that it's very easy to fall into is what I think of as a supervisory way of thinking, right? We need to keep in mind that we don't manage ourselves as we might manage another person or perhaps a pet, right? I might I might manage my dog's life in certain ways, um, but but I don't take that relation. I am the human animal that I manage. There's not the ordinary distance we have when we're thinking about managing another creature and managing our own. Okay, so now practical self-management. Setting aside social self-consciousness for a moment, I just want to like remind ourselves that we are creatures that manage our consciousness. Right, we make all sorts of plans that are dependent upon how it is for us to live. I mean, just think about managing our wakefulness and our sleep. We set alarms, we put ourselves to bed, we put ourselves in a condition so that we can lose consciousness by going to sleep, or we put ourselves in a position that we can regain a certain kind of consciousness by setting an alarm in the morning. We do things like we stop our ears when there are loud noises. If anyone has been on the northern line recently, you will see between Euston and Tufnell Park there is this appalling noise. The tube makes, and you see everybody just putting their hands to their ears. We cover our eyes when we don't want to see something, we keep our hands from the fire, and we wrap ourselves in blankets when we're cold. We seek out pleasurable stimuli and we avoid painful uh stimuli or useful or not useful stimuli. So we manage our conscious lives. There's no um and and one might say the forms of self-consciousness is actually uh integral to it, sort of what what it's practical or sensible to do in the face of it. You know, if the fire hurts your hands, then keep your hand from the fire. But all of us face this lifelong practical task of managing our forms of consciousness. But we're also creatures that manage our social self-consciousness, and that's the sort of focus I'm gonna think about here. So I think there are four ways we manage our social self-consciousness. We we alter our overall consciousness, or we alter or change our relation to the relevant stimuli, or we alter our own behavior and presentation of ourselves, or most difficultly, we alter our dispositions to act and to feel. So, what do I mean by altering our consciousness? Well, this is this is my you know, we get drunk and go to sleep option. So, one way that we avoid painful forms of social self-consciousness is we intoxicate ourselves or we knock ourselves out. So there's a very well-established theory of addiction, for example, Hull's theory of addiction, which has got this fascinating work on the extent to which painful forms of self-consciousness are you know are more prevalent among particularly addicts to people who are addicted to alcohol, and then work on the effect of alcohol in um regulating what he calls self-indicating thoughts. So this you know, this is some of this is borne out in in the uh psychological literature, but it's familiar to us all that we ameliorate forms of social self-consciousness by by having disinhibiting intoxicants or by changing our um states of consciousness, or or as I say, going to sleep. I can't take it anymore, I'm going to bed. That's a form of managing your self-consciousness by managing your overall consciousness. We also use methods of distraction, engagement, and absorption. Okay, but we also, and perhaps more commonly, we alter our relation to stimuli. We manage our self-conscious lives not directly by altering our states of consciousness, but by managing our interactions with the stimuli. Um, so we avoid, for example, falling under the attention of others. We reduce interaction, we stay home, we stay out of sight. I mean, the the picture of the person who has shame who hides herself away, that's a very familiar sort of trope. But that's what people feeling a lot of shame do hide themselves away. We select the others that we are going to interact with, and we select for likely evaluations. We also might avoid, I mean, there are all sorts of stimuli that aren't other people, so mirrors, cameras. A lot of us will experience like feeling self-conscious before a mirror, or feeling self-conscious before a camera or recorder, or indeed a zoom camera. Um and one of the things we do is manage our relation to those sorts of stimuli. Okay, so these those all seem uh pretty familiar. But I think the other thing we also know we do, and and in some ways this is what this is what the function of these forms of self-consciousness are for, is that we alter our behaviors and our presentations of ourselves. Now, there are severe limits to the extent that we're able to control our relations to uh stimuli for social self-consciousness, because there are severe limits to the extent we're able to control our interaction with other people. We can't all be hermits, even if we wanted to. Um, or if if we're if the stimuli for social self-consciousness is just a inner is is is for you often pleasurable. We also can't always be with other people. But the central means of managing one's interaction with others is to manage oneself, right? We manage our social self-consciousness by acting well and presenting well as determined by the norms operative in the social world we operate in. So consider things like we whisper in the library, right? We change the pitch of our voice because the norms in the library are don't make loud noises. So we we we uh determine our behaviors so that they fall in those norms. We wear clothes to work. You know, I'd much rather wear my pajamas to work, but I won't wear my pajamas to work because it's not it's not the norm to wear my pajamas to work. We plan our actions and try and control our impulses to avoid behaving in ways that are socially prohibited, and as I said, arguably that's what these forms of social self-consciousness are sort of for. They're for um the encouragement of those of us to fall in with the social norms that operate around us. Uh let me just say a little bit about uh more using uh the work of um Goffman, the sociologist Goffman, Irving Goffman. Um, he has this lovely uh concept or sort of paper called face work. When we are on among others, we do face work. Um when we enter into a space of social encounters, each of us offers a presentation of ourselves and a pattern of behavior, knowing what we are and what we're doing, and knowing that what we are and what we're doing will make an impression on the other participants. We claim what Goffman calls face. The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. The line here, which a person takes intentionally or not intentionally, like you know, deliberately or not, is a pattern of acts by which he expresses his view of the situation, and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself. And how it goes when we um take a line in a social situation depends, is going to make a difference to how we respond. Social situations, according to Goffman, evoke emotional responses that depends on the subject's relation to the extent that they've managed to preserve faith. So here's a quote A person tends to experience an emotional response to the Hang on a minute. Emotional response to the face which a contact with others allow him. He cathetes his face, his feelings become attached to it. If the encounter sustains an image of him that he has long taken for granted, he probably will have few feelings about the matter. If events establish a face for him that's better than he might have expected, he's likely to feel good. I would say he's likely to feel a bit proud or socially comfortable. If his ordinary expectations are not fulfilled, one expects he will feel bad or feel hurt. I would say he'll feel embarrassed or perhaps a bit ashamed. In general, a person's attachment to a particular face, coupled with the ease with which disconfirming information can be conveyed by himself and others, provides one reason why he finds that participant in any contact with others is a commitment. Okay, so we we take a face, we take control of ourselves, our behaviors, and our presentations. But of course, we all know there are severe limits to the extent that we can, as it were, we can adopt the ideal face in any social situation. Just think about, you know, think about trivial things about appearance. We have limited control over our physical appearance, our hate, our height, or our weight, or our skin colour, or the timbre of their voice, our, you know, my voice is going today, and I really wish it wasn't. Our limb length and the form of our face, etc. And we all operate with time and money budgets for our clothing. And often we're ignorant in or not schooled in the norms that are operating in a social situation. And even if we're really good at maintaining a form of face that always, as it were, goes well for us, that can still also be highly costly. Because one of the things we really value as human beings is like spontaneous, instinctive, habitual, disinhibited interactions uh with others. So maintaining face can be a costly business, even if you're successful. Okay, so that's one, that's the third category of ways in which we might adapt ourselves. Here's the fourth: altering our dispositions to act and feel. I mean, this is the idea that in effect you could uh change your character, change your way of being in the world in order to avoid shamefulness and difficulties, or in order to uh uh inculcate feelings of pride and social confidence. So if we if we can't change our response to the stimuli, and we can't change our own uh behaviors, we can and it's in a c in a un in a non-costly way, we can perhaps work on our dispositions to act and present so that we're better evaluated, so that we spontaneously and uninhibitably without all that costly hard work respond uh in a way that's meets the norms of our social worlds. So that's one way we can develop our dispositions. The other way is we can develop them so we don't care as much, so we can change our dispositions to respond emotionally to others. To some extent, the first sort of cultivation of dispositions is not something the subject needs to worry about. I mean, one of the things that ease of evolution has given us, as I said, to some extent, these social emotions are for training us in the business of conformity to the social norms. If it's really, really embarrassing if you wear your pajamas to work, then you won't do it again because it wasn't nice and we're designed to do things not do again things that are painful and to seek out things that are pleasurable. But but we can try to direct and deliberately adopt or drop dispositions to act and feel, but we all know that's difficult. Rehabituating ourselves is difficult, you know. Anyone who's given up smoking will know rehabituating yourself is difficult. Um, anyone who tries not to interrupt people, I always interrupt people when they're speaking, and I really try not to, and I'm really bad at learning not to. Um, I'm deliberately trying to adopt a new form of disposition, but it's you know it's hard. And actually, very often with these retraining our dispositions, it's something you can't do on your own. It's something you need other people, you need in your social world to help you with. If you're trying to give up smoking, you need your friend to say, okay, let's make sure we sit inside at the pub. Or if you if you're trying to learn not to interrupt, you need your close friend to say you're interrupting and help you out and could correct you and get you back on. So very often, and we know this from teaching and training, training people in dispositions is something that very often doesn't happen on one's own. Okay, so that is um that's the practical management of a social self-consciousness. And I'm going to just now stop sharing for a bit and ask if people had any thoughts on that or any questions about that or any examples that they thought were relevant to that.

SPEAKER_05 38:50

Um, can I make a comment, please?

SPEAKER_03 39:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 39:02

It's um Doug Kingsley in Chompsford.

SPEAKER_03 39:06

Hi Doug.

SPEAKER_05 39:08

Hello. Uh I go to a large, well, in fact, it's a private school on Wednesdays for lunch. And what it is, I obviously I meet a number of the students there that if I say GCSE students mainly. And obviously I talk to them a fair bit, but some of them, if I say talented, they might mention they play the piano, they might sing, play the guitar, so forth. I said, Well, there's always 10 minutes, if you like, at the end of the lunch. I said, Why not mention singing or playing the guitar? So obviously their thoughts, oh no, no, I I couldn't do that. I think no, the reason you're saying that is because you're concerned that your fellow students at the end of it might say, We thought you were better than that, or you know, um, that wasn't very good. But I say to them that if you go through that initial, shall we say, embarrassment next time round, you'll be stronger for it. I said, because if you don't stand there the first time and add to that, you will never ever find out the worth of yourself. I said, that is part of the problem. I said, you know, I'm from age now. You know, if I say it doesn't, I don't care what people think, but that's by the way thing. But going to a teenage world, yes, they are very conscious of it. I said, but you really have to push yourself to do it, and you will grow from it, and that's what I say to them.

SPEAKER_02 40:43

So that's really interesting. So that would be, I think, what you're I mean, so that's a classic case of how sometimes you need someone else to help you train your dispositions.

SPEAKER_05 40:56

So you're I must admit I do push them, yeah, anyways.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

Yes. And you're saying, so there's two things that are con sort of interesting about that. So you're not saying to them, don't feel embarrassed, you're saying you will feel embarrassed, go for it because you'll feel something else, or you'll get some other advantage out of it. Yes, you'll grow stronger. You'll grow stronger, but but also you'll like realize that you can do it, you'll get some kind of pleasure of achievement having done that, and those two things operating can can, as it were, help them overcome the disposition to be embarrassed, and that would be that seems to me a classic case of training somebody to alter their dispositions by setting things up so that they have the right kinds of feed feedback from it. Of course, it may be that they continue, you know, performers always say that um that you don't become completely sanguine. Some kind of anxiety performance will will often continue, but but you can you can you can nevertheless manage it.

SPEAKER_05 42:19

I see you've got some hands up. I was gonna mention something else, but perhaps I let your other people.

SPEAKER_02 42:24

Shall we come, we'll come back to you.

SPEAKER_05 42:26

Yes, that's that's fine. I'll I'm I'm for the moment. I'll put you on the list and then come back.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

Um Julia um well, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

That was really um interesting and it was very carefully considered. Um, I enjoyed listening to that the way you've laid out all the sort of aspects of your your subject. Um I I was wondering if you have or were thinking of uh considering um what I prefer to call neurodiversity um in relation to this. Um and I I asked the question because of this this idea of self-consciousness. Um, I couldn't I couldn't even respond to somebody saying hello to me when I was younger. I would go bright red and uh be uh and that lasted into my early 30s. Um and I've only recently come to understand that I I am, you know, well, I want to say autistic, but because I think these things are so overlapping and that I I don't um see necessarily there are strict sort of boundaries around these these these kind of diversities, but um it it seems well it seems on it seems very relevant to what you were saying.

SPEAKER_02 43:53

Um I'm so glad you asked that. I'm so glad you asked that. So so if you my little Slide on philosophy of mind just talks about capacities and doesn't talk about the ways in which they're variably so all the neurodiversity um uh work has tended to be like what can't people with autism say do? And I think that's not the question. The question might be maybe maybe people with autism do something more than other people, maybe they do it more often, maybe they do two things at once, or um, so I I'm really glad you uh you asked that that question because it's that's that's in the back of my mind. In the we need to think about the way these things are variously um now. It's interesting that when people ask try and try and uh ask the question, how does neurodiversity interact with these forms of social self-consciousness? They the sort of traditional literature on this was well, very often people on the autistic spectrum aren't good at reading other people's minds, so they're not likely to be socially self-conscious, which of course is completely contrary to your suggestion that as a child you could barely cope with the stimuli of another person. Um, and of course, that then gives you two competing explanations. Maybe the other person is you're too responsive to the other person rather than not responsive, and then you have a strategy of of hiding or removing yourself from the overwhelming stimuli in order to manage it. So I really I'm I really I haven't thought in, I mean I've thought a bit, but I haven't written enough on how these um part one of the things I want to do is find out the relation between the categorization of high self-conscious, low self-conscious that the social psychologists use and have their established surveys for and how that is interacts with other forms of neural classification of uh behavior. But thank you, thank you, Julia. Um the other Julia, is there a question from the chat?

SPEAKER_00 46:48

Yes, thank you so much. It says, Hi Lucy, are you suggesting that our sense of self and our values only really make sense against the backdrop of others' perspectives? That there isn't really a self without the contrasting other.

SPEAKER_02 47:04

Um so I'm not saying anything as quite as strong as that. I'm saying that our actual sense of selves as humans lived among others, um we will be unintelligible to us in reflection unless we understand ourselves as in some way, like the our sense of ourselves is due to the other. So there are vet there are certain quite strong philosophical theses that say, you know, I wouldn't be a self were it not for others, and I'm not sure I hold that. I think I could be a self, I could be a practical, introspecting self, uh, were it not for others. But I think the kind of self that we actually are as human beings, with the effective capacities we have to be sensitive to others' attentive evaluations, mean that actually my relation to myself has to is or is constituted by others' reactions to me. Does is does that help? Um, I can't I can't because the person's on in a text, I'll I'll leave it there and you can put another comment in. Um uh okay, next question, Graham. Um thanks for that.

SPEAKER_04 48:41

So um and also I wanted to thank first Julia, if I might call it that. I mean, so the neurodiversity point is a really good one, and and I'm definitely relevant to some of the things that that I'm thinking about of kind of strategies for responding to pathologies of self-consciousness, as it were. So you you notice that you keep doing this thing in this situation. Um, you know, Dorothy Emmett has a nice example. You know, with deadly accuracy that when person A hears someone make a comment, you know, person B make a comment, they will tell a certain joke or something. You sort of have these dispositions, and you mentioned, look, we can do things like setting alarm clocks and so on to kind of just change our behavior, and then we can change our dispositions. And it struck me that we can kind of do weird complex combinations of those where we try to change which of our dispositions manifest and like put cues in a situation and and scaffold the situation to present those cues so that hopefully we change our dispositions a bit, but we just trigger certain other dispositions to come in first or something.

SPEAKER_02 49:58

So can you give an example? Sorry, that's probably I would I'm gonna touch two again.

SPEAKER_04 50:04

Um, yeah, um so if you tend to get you know very aware that you're on the spot, someone's just asked you to clarify something, and you just need to sort of think an example. Um if you can train yourself to have a particular thought to reframe it, you think, look, actually, um, you know, this person is trying to help me, and I should I should treat them as a friend who is helping me rather than someone who is there judging me. If I practice reframing it as a different situation, a situation in which my friend is helping me clarify my thought, then I'm going to respond in a different way, the dispositions of you know, not worrying about how I sound. This person wants to help me, and I just I just need to say the thing on my mind and not manage them as a separate variable. Because I've had that kind of ah, this is this is this type of situation. Can I start treating it like that, rather than this is a situation in which I need to show the world that I'm a competent functioning human being? Well, look, if the person's trying to help me, it's okay to reveal that I'm not because they're going to make me better.

SPEAKER_02 51:28

Like, I don't know if that's a good example, but we'll we'll see where that's a that's a great example, and and uh I haven't I so the the next kind of thing I wanted to talk about was self-appraisal rather than self-management. So, how we should think about ourselves when we respond in an embarrassed or or shame-filled way to some kind of stimulus. So, one of the things I want to say is like understanding the nature of these social emotions, like having a philosophical understanding of these social emotions, enables you to think of yourself, well, it's completely rational that I should feel like this because after all, they sneered when I said that. So I'm just responding as I'm rationally built to respond, right? That is my appraisal of myself because I've internalized that. However, I'm also I'm also a reflective creature thinking about whether I would have sneered, right? So that's a different, slightly different way, but it's still this idea that somehow I can take a both a reflective uh both a theoretical and an effective relationship to my own effective life, right? And that that sort of thought, thinking about thinking about the fact that somehow we're co-constituting how I feel about myself, I think that is helpful in these difficult and as it were, it might be easier to change those dispositions than it is to change just the dispositions to that's the moral of the story. So actually, I think changing our fundamental, and I also think sort of training ourselves either to perform appropriately or trying to retrain our dispositions. I mean, to clarify, I'm very, very keen on people giving up smoking. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, you know, there are dangerous dispositions we have that hurt us. But a lot of this kind of um, you know, how to retrain yourself, how to make friends and influence people, I think it's toxic because it doesn't count the costs of exactly how hard it is to do that. I think rather we need a much a more kind of, if if you like, if we can use the e-word, an existential understanding of our situation in relation to each other, and that and that will make it actually a uh it will it will downgrade those, you know, look better, be better, change strategies which are all very hard, very costly, and and even success comes with costs, and think about um sort of strategies that enable you to remain uh more spontaneous or or uh disinhibited.

unknown 54:52

Thanks.

SPEAKER_04 54:53

I see you've got another question in the chat, so I'll I'll be quiet, but thanks for that.

SPEAKER_02 54:57

So chat question.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

Yes, thank you. Um it says similar question to Phil. If being conscious of self changes and develops with society and its norms and behaviors, then what does autonomy of the self entail? Is self-knowledge limited to social consciousness?

SPEAKER_02 55:17

Well, so what what autonomy? Oh, it's a question to Phil though, not to me. So Phil. Um is Phil up for answering it? I'll answer it. Phil, type in there if you're up for answering Faisal's question. Um I think the key question there is um oh, it's how far uh uh the key question there is the what does autonomy of self entail? Right, that's the key question. And I think this comes to a a real dispute in philosophy. So the the reason I think a social emotion like shame, for example, is that there's there's a there's an example I've got sort of later on, and we can decide between us whether we've had enough, or I'll talk a bit more about this. But there's an example of I've got later on, which is you know, my mum thinks I've done something really well, and I feel kind of proud. I know it's no achievement at all, right? I know that it's sort of and I feel rather embarrassed that I should feel proud of doing this thing, but really is no achievement at all. But nevertheless, my mum thinks I did well, and I feel a sort of glow of pride over it. So there's a case where my self-apraisal, my effective self-appraisal in my pride is not determined by my own judgments or my own reasons or my own norms of what I had reason to be proud of. It's in some way I've deferred, it's an effective deferral. I've deferred to my mother's sense of of uh whether or not this is prideworthy, not my own sense. So you might think that that's to lack autonomy. And an autonomous um an autonomous creature would in some way excise these appraisals that don't line up with her own evaluations, or we'll think of them just as intentions, and in a way, what I want to say is that we should think about this kind of ambivalence as we should we shouldn't think that there's an ideal of autonomy we've fallen short of because we're creatures whose self-apraisals defer to others' appraisals of us. So me acting, and this goes back to the supervisory, try and avoid the supervisory picture. I am a creature who has, as Sartre would put it, I have, I am partly being for the other. I I I appraise the world as my mother does in certain ways, and that includes myself. Um, so what do we think of autonomy? Well, maybe there's a definition of autonomy where I failed then in my ambivalence, in that ambivalent state of mind. I failed to be autonomous. Um but maybe there's an maybe we need a new slightly enlarged sense of autonomy, meaning you know, exercise your own rational capacities, including the ones to defer to others, without brainwashing or domination or whatever from others. So we need a kind of lighter notion of autonomy. Um Fraser. Hi, I can't hear you.

SPEAKER_06 59:44

There we go.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

Brilliant.

SPEAKER_06 59:46

Uh it's been a very interesting discussion. Um what is the effect of social media on uh this whole area of social self-consciousness? We we clearly see a lot of extreme responses from people, and I would imagine social media has changed people's perception of uh others. Um how have how have you judged the impact of social media on this whole area?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:22

I think that's such an interesting question. I mean, both social media but also um sort of phones, the extent the extent to which, I mean, go right back to technology, you know, Zig and Zog or whatever are cave person ancestors, lived in a world where they operated only with other intimates because they didn't travel as far. I mean, presumably they would have marauding cave dwellers from a nearby district occasionally. If they saw themselves, it would only be in a reflected water or something. Um so they the forms of self- of presentation to themselves that they had, and you know, presumably we evolved our capacities for human self-consciousness in that sort of environment. And we've and just just think about mirrors. I mean, I you know, my mom gave me a wonderful mirror, a 19th-century mirror. You can hardly see yourself in it, it's lovely, it's perfect, you know, it's dappled and grey, and and now we live in a world where every building has ginormous mirrors everywhere. We live in massive glasses, you know, where we're constantly seeing ourselves reflected back back. And that's before you get to phones, Zoom calls. I mean, just this experience. We're all talking to each other, looking at ourselves. I mean, that's just extraordinarily weird. Um, I mean, sometimes I remember to take off the hide self view, but then it does feel like I'm somehow missing from the party. But so I think it's a really interesting question, and I think um so here's one aspect of the question. So I've just had a uh a research student write a thesis on this, which is which is a question of it goes back to Graham's question of control. Social media can make the forms of sort of self-management that I listed, particularly the third one that you can present well, they make that seem attainable. So, you know, as long as you uh filter your photos, you filter your chat in the right way, you can you can completely sort of curate, or at least there's the sense that you can curate the uptake, the presentation of yourself that the other gets. And since in human life you can't actually, you know, when you go to the shop, you can't do that. When you go to sit in your seminar room with your teachers, you can't do that. When you go to work and have to work with your colleagues, you can't do that. This dislocation between the sort of fantasy of control you get on an online life and the reality of us having to feel uncomfortably. I mean, it goes back to Douglas's thing, right? The child needs to feel the embarrassment and anxiety of performing in order to understand how to operate in the world. And social media, I think, gives you the fantasy, or at least gives you this this domain where it looks like you can control your self-presentation. And I think that's very, very in the end, very damaging.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:27

Um as you can see, I'm more self-conscious about my environment uh than I am about myself with my blurred screen.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:43

Well, it's interesting. So there's there's also privacy, right? I didn't say anything about privacy. There are there are um I also can I say I moved, I had a big map, rolled up map here, and I moved it before the talk because I thought this is gonna be like distracting. So so um uh this is this is what this affords us. Um okay. Um I think that's all the questions. I think I think the I mean I could say a little bit more about the appraisal, but it is ten past seven. So um perhaps perhaps I'll just say there's just one thing that I think is interesting. Sorry, I do think the rest is interesting. There's one thing that might be particularly interesting. Um, or at least, you know, what I think we like a puzzle. I think we like a puzzle, and I think there's a there's a puzzle. I think there's a general puzzle in philosophy about rational deference. Right. So um you know you you'll ask me a c a question perhaps about you know whether philosophers are concerned with this or that. And and I tell you and you believe me. Right. That's what we do. We have this practices of telling each other things and we come to believe things on the basis of other people telling us. Now what's interesting about that those sorts of practices is that you it's not like you do the all the rational work for yourself. You don't go and do a full kind of investigation of the person who told you this thing and find out exactly how they reliable they are about this thing. We rather have developed a practice where you can defer to other people even though you don't know their reasons or evidence for believing the thing that they tell you. And I think there's a there's a similar um rational capacity for deference when it comes to our emotional lives. I think we I think what we do in feeling pride and shame or awkwardness or whatever is that we that we defer to others effectively but again it's very mysterious. So here's my um slide where I try and set out the mysteriousness of it. Okay so this is the puzzle of deferential shame but as I say I think there's a completely general puzzle about rational deference anyway. So shameful self-consciousness if I feel shame it's rational only if it's intelligible to me in relation to my own reasons, evaluations and norms. So generally we think for something to be rationally intelligible is for me to be able to supply the reasons and cite the evaluative grounds and norms that that undergird the judgment but in fact in feeling shameful self-consciousness a subject effectively defers to the rational attitudes of the other as other in relation to their reasons evaluations and norms so if somebody you know shames me I may not know why they're shaming me. I may not know the grounds for their judgment but I might nevertheless come to feel ashamed. The attitudes of the other as other in relation to their reasons evaluations and norms may not be intelligible to me at all or I might be completely ignorant of them. A deferential feeling of shame therefore may not be intelligible to the subject who has the attitude in relation to their own reasons, evaluations and norms. So feeling deferral shameful self-consciousness can't be rational so that seems like a nice puzzle. Now I think shameful self-consciousness is rational I think it's the human being working as the human being ought even when she doesn't know the grounds on which she's been made to feel ashamed because someone else has shamed her. So I've got to somehow get around this argument. And I think there's two ways to do it one is just to deny one or come up with a different kind of reading of one and the other is to deny that three leads to four and say well there's some other reasons you have that make it rational. So it's not the reasons that underlie the evaluation it's some other reason perhaps the reason that uh well there's a number of of reasons and we could um talk about them.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:42

So I just thought I'd put that puzzle in your um in your heads and I think it's you know I think that is the difficulty uh and it it goes back to um it goes back to the autonomy Faisus question um how do we make sense of ourselves how do we make sense of ourselves when we are aware that we are appraising ourselves as it were in the name of another okay any more questions any questions about that or shall we all go and Lucy it's Doug Kingsley can I comment on that of course please um his his pure experience my own experience if you like when I was a teenager um going back many years now of course um no but I was very self-aware that I use the expression skin problems you know going back many years no creams nothing so one suffered in a sense and obviously I became very embarrassed by that situation and your comment about hiding away not going out etc yes I can fully understand that but the way I gradually overcome that was I thought to myself yes people are looking at the outside I mean I was almost felt embarrassed in myself as a person but the way I overcome that I thought to myself well the world is seeing you yes facially the external you but what you need to do is show the world what you are as it were internally in the sense of what you enjoy perhaps what you like to read you know basically never mind the outside that will gradually heal but bring the inside out to the world if you like so and you'll find and I found that you know I could I mean I like reading many things obviously philosophy history etc and I thought yeah you you need only mention that to someone then you may well find they pick up on it and they're not interested in what you look like they're more interested in what you feel think about that very subject so I had to put a power within myself to bring me out and I knew eventually my skin would heal so rather than thinking oh god I I mustn't talk to anyone do anything no bring yourself out and battle the world in that way and bit by bit like my earlier comment the more you do that the more you I would grow and gradually my skin would heal and I would be someone again but I can very much sympathize with what you were saying about the self-consciousness of a person in themselves.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:54

Yeah I had the say I had the same appalling self-consciousness as a teenager but so this can I ask a question about bringing yourself out there's sort of two ways of thinking of your comment one is as a kind of meditation on yourself you'll read you'll think you'll start to think hang on a minute I've got really cool interests I love my Tolstoy I love my philosophy like and start to find as it were for oneself sources of of um confidence or self-worth or whatever and then another way of reading and you use this phrase bring yourself out which is such an interesting phrase the other way is like you make yourself manifest in a multiple different ways so in some way you give the world more you don't give them less right rather than hiding away you don't just present yourself and I think this is something that that that is really really common I think it's really common for example if you're in in philosophy when I was a young graduate student I was always the only woman in the room nearly always the only woman in the room and it just meant you got a kind of attention to your appearance that you didn't you wouldn't get otherwise and you you face a choice between keeping quiet and keeping out of the way or giving or giving your audience like more to think about by telling them what you think about things or asking a question or so which way are you thinking of it Doug? Are you thinking of it as like drawing on your own evaluative resources or in some way presenting more of yourself to the world so that there's as it were more appearance there's more there's more there's more that they can think about and evaluate than just what you look like I think to be fair I could mention you know whoever I may meet obviously I did meet people and I might say then I'm interested in let's say philosophy for a moment and they might say are you really and also they might pick up on that because it was almost though they were too embarrassed to mention say to me that they're interested in it.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:33

You know so all of a sudden you found this link that you could actually go into and talk and gradually the interest developed but it's purely making that breakthrough initially to say I'm interested in X and it's surprising then what people then actually pick up on it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:50

So eventually they're not interested what I look like they're more interested I tell you what let's have a good chat about this what I look like they're more interested in the inner me and what I'm thinking and then I gain of course from their experience as well so it's like it's almost like drops of water gradually clinging to each other and bit by bit you build that up so so I'm gonna take that as an answer saying do the second thing give more and you give more of yourself give things that secure other forms of connection non-creative forms of connection like common interest or joint attention to some further thing and I think that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right and really the you know sort of what you one's fellow intimates or the people that you know one of the things I said is you you can find new people making social connections very often philosophers have not got a good done a very good job of like making sense of what connect you know what it is to feel connected to someone socially um but but one thought would be certain forms of social connection mean that these forms of evaluative self-consciousness like fall away as irrelevant or at least are diminished in their um uh effect so is there another question from the chat Julia yes I'll read it it says if humans risk alienation by over relying on others' appraisals do AI systems trained on human feedback risk a parallel optimizing for approval rather than truth and how should we design feedback so deference doesn't become value capture um so interesting so so one thing you know Shannon Valor will say um that AI systems you know don't feel they don't have effective systems so the particular kind of feeling we have of train or embarrassment that's not something that anyway any current AI system does they may say that they you know the sentences might come out of the machine saying oh I feel really awkward about this but they simply don't have the the affect response possible they don't have the physiology that makes emotional life possible for them so so assuming you agree with me on that um then the question becomes um uh if AI systems are trained on human uh feedback are they going to as it were uh imitate uh human uh tendencies to optimize approval rather than truth I'm not sure humans do actually um optimize approval rather than truth we I didn't argue from that maybe Goffman would think that doing facework requires that but I think we'd have to look sort of more more deeply at that link but let's say humans do optimize for approval rather than the truth then ai systems will unless we train them on other data because they're imitative systems they're systems that take human patterns and and um generalize from them so uh so how do we divine I'm not a I I'm not an expert on how to um how to produce training materials for large language models but um but presumably you know you you could find texts whereby you know perhaps you need to train them on philosophers who talk about truth despite the fact that it causes us um it fails to optimize uh our approval it's it's an interesting question Graham thanks so I'm I'm puzzled by your puzzles you'll be pleased to hear um so so deferring to our appraisal I interrupted you say can I clarify are you are you puzzled that I think it's a puzzle no no no I'm puzzled by the puzzle that it's puzzled good okay yeah no I'm I'm I'm I'm in the throes of right so one of the most difficult emotional experiences that I have and I have it far more often than I would like is the feelings that I'm encountering people who I really care about the judgment of like these are not people that go well I didn't care what you think anyway talking like family members you're not gonna get rid of you know aunts uncles cousins you go and see them at Christmas and you know you start assessing your life like oh so have you got a partner now I'm single you know what's your job doing oh it's less exciting than the one that I used to have like these kind of things and you think I'm actually I like myself confident that I being a good virtue you know like I when I self-reflect on my life choices I have very few regrets but when faced with someone whose expectations of a good life just differ from mine who I am committed to caring like it's the differences of value so it's not even that hey I'm not quite sure what their reasons are yet I find myself deferring to them.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:07

I think that their reasons might be bad reasons yet still I differ. And I find it crushing to have to disappoint them for something that I not you know I don't feel is a failure. But I I care about their values because they're their values. So yeah so I I'm in the grip of that I don't have anything useful to contribute on it other than repeating it back to you.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:47

That's just what you know that's ha what I think of as non-identifying shame and it's very it's something you know it happens that that's a very nice sort of example of it but if you just think about think about people who've decided not to have children and are like constantly made to feel the shame somehow that they didn't or couldn't or whatever. Think about people who leave religious communities and you know they leave consciously reflectively autonomously and they consider themselves you know secular and having but they can still feel terribly ashamed about whatever. I didn't leave a religious community but if I if I had well I joined another religious community anyway but but um uh you know you could still feel ashamed for being things that the or doing things or just not having the belief anymore because your family or your social world does and I just think it's that I think that's the that's the human condition. And I mean perhaps thinking about the two two things one of the things I wanted to say is that it's very important that we have this capacity because this is how we learn you know we learn as children we know our parents kind of don't like what we're doing because we feel their displeasure um we haven't got a clue what's wrong with putting your spaghetti in your water glass what's wrong with that right um so that's you know one of the ways we train our people in order to coordinate with each other is by this this hydraulics this emotional hydraulics um so you know maybe a comfort to you um but but in a way that's what I'm that that and I haven't got very far what I'm trying to work on is how to think about that kind of ambivalence um how to think about the ambivalence as uh uh i i in a way that makes it philosophically less puzzling but hopefully the thought is there's a certain form of philosophical reflection that will also make it um in some way effectively more manageable um but i'm glad you're puzzled and and I look forward to the consolation that you'll at some point bring to me probably my best bet in the meantime is what did I say you know drink and drugs option buy you a beer sounds good um it's half past so we probably probably really should um thank you for amazing amazing questions um and thanks for for coming along and I'll see you at another such thing