Here's what's tricky about explaining humans in scientific terms. When you consider yourself, your mental state, it's a series of wildly shifting points along a huge number of spectra. How you're feeling at the moment exists anywhere along degrees of attractiveness, contentedness, creativity, arousal, relaxation, anger, a sense of romance – even states we think of as purely physical such as hungry or tired have uniquely emotional elements.
The shifts along spectra in those waking states fill your waking hours. From the inside, they define you – you live inside them and will never escape them, and that's the constraining envelope we think of when we describe ourselves with the attribution 'I'. Everything else going on – from breathing to muscle contraction, dreams, fatigue after exercising – we attribute with the word 'my'. They're things that belong to us and we control, regulate and live with, but they're not 'I'.
The interesting thing is all that stuff going on in our bodies but outside 'I' is our only insight into that constant inner state. We can measure the extent to which heart rate speeds up, the adrenal glands start to overproduce, the bowel decouples any nervous sensation that it needs emptying and our pupils dilate, and that can tell a scientist when we're in fight or flight mode. We can measure heart rate, nasal dilation and blood flow to the genitals to signify sexual arousal, but any measurement we can take of anything in the realm of 'my' is crude and doesn't tell anything like the whole story.
Why is that 'I' so locked off? How hungry, horny, relaxed, frightened or creative we feel– all those points on spectra that define us are very ill-defined scientifically. The only evidence we have that they exist at all is because we all live in them.
At least, I know I do – because I can never experience the same sense of immersion in what you're feeling, I can only assume you have it too because your actions in the social and physical environment are the same as mine, but for all I know I might be the only living thing on Earth, the rest of you cleverly-programmed robots that don't experience the sensation of an 'I' any more than the toaster in my kitchen does.
Empirically there's no such thing as sexual arousal, there's just increased heart rate, increased blood flow, pupil dilation and all the other physical hallmarks of it. Evolution tells us they must combine to form some function to the organism, but that doesn't explain the feeling going on in the 'I'.
It seems all the machinations in the realm of 'my' give rise to that locked-off experiential narrative, inform on it, serve and comprise it, but everything in that inside realm is impossible for science to measure. It's built on far too many varying factors from far too many independent (and interdependent) physical, psychological and physiological systems that our measuring equipment of today can ever hope to keep track of.
Will that always be the case?
