The self is a verbWhy you remake yourself every morning — and why the mirrors stop

In the first three parts of this series one motion has appeared three times. Settle, turn, spread as the basic law. The same motion on the level of order gives life. The same motion on the level of belief gives mind. Now comes the third and final lift — and the structure that emerges has an unusual economy: one equation, applied three times, each time to the result of the previous stage.

A belief about beliefs

A conscious system holds a picture of its state and keeps that picture moving. A self-conscious system does one thing more: it takes its own belief state as an object. Where the second layer says I am in state X, the third says: I believe that I believe I am in X.

What is stabilised in the process is a notion of oneself that persists across time and disturbance. What matters is how Schmieke describes this reference: it is not innate and not fixed. In a living system it is shaped by development, memory, learning and social life. The formalism asks only two things of it: that it change more slowly than moment-to-moment belief, and that it exert a stabilising pull.

Identity is thereby, in his phrase, not a fixed content but a set-point a system works to return to.

„I don't know who I am any more“

Exactly that last clause — until it falters — is why I consider this chapter practical and not merely elegant.

After a separation, after losing work, after the last child moves out, after the death of someone you had oriented yourself by, many people say the same thing: I don't know who I am any more. We normally hear that as the loss of an object — as though someone had mislaid something they previously owned.

On Schmieke's model it is something else, and it explains the experience better. If the self is a performance, then the performance depends on a stage: on the roles, the responses, the repetitions against which it tests itself daily. Clear the stage away and it is not the self that has vanished. It is the daily work by which it confirmed itself that has suddenly run into empty air.

That is the more uncomfortable reading at first: there is no fixed I that could simply be found again. And it is the more consoling in the end: what has been lost is not a substance but a practice — and a practice can be taken up again, on a different stage. Anyone who has experienced the sense of being themselves return slowly over months has experienced exactly this: not the recovery of an object, but the restarting of a motion.

Four classes, and the boundaries between them are sharp

Out of the three layers falls a classification that needs no vague talk of complexity. You ask only: on which layers is a sustained motion running?

• Non-living — none. A crystal, a galaxy: ordered and at rest.
• Living, not conscious — motion on the level of order. It maintains itself through cycles and models nothing. The bacterium, the tree.
• Conscious — plus motion on the level of belief. It lives and infers, continuously updating a picture of its state. The animal that perceives and acts on what it perceives.
• Self-conscious — plus motion on the level of the self-model. It lives, infers and holds a model of its own inferring as an identity. The creature that not only knows but knows that it knows — and works to remain the same knower across time.

Each stage strictly contains the previous one; each adds exactly one motion; and the boundaries are sharp conditions on a measurable quantity rather than impressions of complexity. Schmieke tags the classification itself as derived. That the top two classes really are consciousness and selfhood and not merely their outward sign he tags as posited — and he does so at every single place.

Why the mirrors stop

Now comes one of the finest arguments in the book, and it answers a question that inevitably arises while reading: if the self is a model of its modelling — why does that ever stop? Why not a model of the model of the model, endlessly?

And here it shows again why I value this book. One half of the argument — that every further iteration already lands inside the second order — is proved and tagged derived. The other half — that categorially, too, no fourth level can exist — Schmieke marks expressly as a conjecture, that is, as open.

He could easily have kept quiet about it. „There are exactly three“ reads better than „there are exactly three, with half the proof still outstanding“. He writes the second version.

The same three stages, found from two directions

It is remarkable that exactly these three stages had been found once before — from the other side. The logician Gotthard Günther spent decades working out a hierarchy of reflexion and gave it names:

• Being — without any self-reference. The objective order that belongs to no one.
• Experiencing — the lived self-relation of a process present to itself.
• Self-consciousness — the I that takes its own reflecting as an object.

They coincide one for one with Schmieke's three orders. Günther arrived by philosophical analysis of the logical place a subject can occupy; Schmieke arrives from the structure of the distinction operation. The names arrive as consequences, not as premises — and that is the kind of agreement that means something.

This article reports ideas from a work of physics and philosophy and is intended as everyday orientation. All ideas and images are Marcus Schmieke's; the applications to everyday life are my own transfers and not claims of the book. The impulses described support general wellbeing and holistic balance. They are not a medical diagnosis, promise no cure and replace no medical or therapeutic treatment.