[This is the fourth post in the series Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong. The series explores how our understanding of selfhood affects our sense of individuality, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics.]

Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9 percent

Of everything you think,

And of everything you do,

Is for yourself —

And there isn’t one.

— Wei Wu Wei

The Superself: Genome, Menome, and Wenome

The ‘illusion of individuality’ operates at two levels: First, the universal level of the ego, the constructed “I” which is a developmental imperative in the early years, yet the object of unlearning in later years in many traditions (particularly Buddhist); and the other, socio-economic, level of western individualism. Most of us, most of the time, cannot comprehend the implications of communal culture to human wellbeing.

– David Adair

To recap, the genome is the blueprint for our physical body. The menome is the connectome of the nervous system. By analogy, the wenome is the connectome of everything else, most importantly the cultural web of personal and social relationships in which we’re immersed and entangled. The wenome comprises the rules, customs, rituals, manners, images, tunes, songs, languages, laws, constitutions, and institutions that define the culture by which our genome and menome are conditioned.

In this view, our selves are far more extensive than we’ve been led to believe. They extend beyond our own bodies to include what we think of as other selves and the world. We live in the minds of others, and they in ours.

The situation is analogous to memory. We think of our memories as located in our heads and bodies but when you drive to town, it’s the road that holds the memory of the route, reminding you at every turn how to proceed.

So, too, is selfhood dispersed. It resides not only in the genome and the menome, but in the wenome. Much of the information we require in order to function is stored outside our bodies and brains—in other brains, books, maps, machines, objects, databases, the Internet, and the cloud. We’re dependent on these inputs to muster enough excitation to reach the threshold of emission of specific behaviors. Our genome and menome can not form in the absence of other genomes and menomes. The self does not stand alone, but rather is widely dispersed, encompassing, most immediately, our social milieu, and ultimately the entire cosmos.

As the illusory nature of autonomous selfhood becomes evident, and the full extent of the interdependence of selves becomes undeniable, our sense of selfhood will shift outward, from the limited identifications of the past to an amalgamation of these traditional facets of selfhood—the superself.

Recognition and Malrecognition

As mentioned, an inability to recruit recognition from others cripples an identity. That’s why solitary confinement is torture. Recognition is to the formation of identity as nutrition is to the building of the body. Put the other way round, malrecognition, like malnutrition, is injurious, and can be fatal. Think of the juvenile murderer sentenced to a life in prison, or orphans whose development is stunted by lack of an adult model. On the plus side, there are the benefits to children who grow up in the company of curious, creative adults.

In acknowledgement of the analogy between programming a computer and raising a child, both processes are described as culminating in a launch. In the world of computers, “failure to launch” belies the existence of a bug in the software that crashes the computer. In raising children, failure to launch reveals that an embryonic identity has not found a niche in which it can garner enough recognition to develop. As nutritional deficiencies limit physical development, recognition deficiencies cripple identity formation. We became aware of the terrible costs of malnutrition in the twentieth century. The twenty-first will witness an analogous awakening to the crippling effects of malrecognition.

To address the epidemic of malrecognition that now afflicts humankind, it helps to shift our vantage point from within to without, from subjective to objective, from introspection to inspection. If we interpret the menome as software that is continually being modified, then we can debug, patch, and rewrite it until the “program” no longer crashes the “computer.”

If this seems reductive and mechanistic, recall that before we understood the heart was a pump made of muscle, it was regarded as the seat of the soul. It’s hard to imagine surgery to the soul, but the muscle that pumps our blood is now routinely repaired. In that spirit, the mind can be viewed as a kind of computer (albeit one we are just now beginning to understand).

We balked at the seeming loss of the exceptional status implicit in Darwin’s theory of evolution, but eventually made peace with the incontrovertible fact of our simian ancestry. We shall follow the same arc as we come to see our selves as holders of an historic role in the lineage of ever-smarter machines, to wit the role of building machines that are smarter than we ourselves! This could be the final step in achieving a humility consonant with our actual place in the cosmos. There’s no better preparation for facing such an apparent comedown as to revisit a question posed by Mark Twain—What Is Man?—and we’ll do that in the next and penultimate post in this series.

Robert W. Fuller is an author and independent scholar from Berkeley, CA. His most recent book is The Rowan Tree: A Novel.