A Nobel Prize Winners Unsettling Theory About The Self

TITLE: A Nobel Prize Winner’s Unsettling Theory About the Self CHANNEL: Hana Clio DATE: 2026-05-01 ---TRANSCRIPT--- So, a lot of thinking we do is for survival, even if you are not in a life and death situation. One part of us is the person experiencing existence, the one living experience, you know, reacting, feeling, and surviving. The other part is the person inside of us observing the experience, the observer. And the observer is here to make sense of things, right? Looking for order and pattern. Once something is understood, the observer can use that to, you know, anticipate future events. So, the experience has a better chance of navigating what comes next. But there is this internal chaos of the process of thinking and decision-making, right? What kind of knowledge the observer builds, how it frames and interprets what the experience brings, that depends entirely on the observer’s perception. And we do often need a lot of, you know, building blocks to understand something deeply. For example, you compare things to understand the differences, like reference points. In my last video, I talked about a scenario of cognitive dystopia, right? I described this kind of internal horror, where you can’t expand your perception. It’s constrained, you know, the observer has no building blocks and reference points to draw differences. And therefore, they can’t diagnose what’s wrong with their current reality. And they don’t have enough mental tools to understand things in depths, despite being in a state of, you know, emotional turmoil. So, in this case, even if you are able to observe what is happening, the observer is there, right? But you still lack of the cognitive tools to gain meaningful insight. So, think about how a child functions, right? A child can experience and observe reality, but often lacks the language to conceptualize it. They can feel the weight of a negative situation, but that doesn’t mean they can diagnose or dissect the circumstances to gain a deeper insight. So, I think they they can to a degree, but a lot of those insights come later when they grow older, where the experience has allowed the, you know, the observer to gather way more information. But as I grow older, right? I realized that being locked in a constrained limited perception isn’t necessarily a situation unique to childhood, right? Much of the way we exist in our adult world still involves, you know, experiencing the same turmoil. So, there is something very interesting to me that I spend a lot of time thinking about. It’s this essay written by writer J.M. Coetzee. It was actually the speech he gave when he received the Nobel Prize in 2003. So, some brief background on the writer, right? Coetzee is a South African-Australian uh novelist known for being very precise and kind of detached in his writing, right? He explores this tension between a person’s internal world and the external reality that, you know, tries to consume it in a way. So, he’s interesting in these almost, you know, cold mechanics of how we survive our own isolation. And sometimes, when I look back on my own life, I prefer to examine everything in a distant, detached way. I often go through the process of reflection in an almost, you know, clinical manner, right? Of course, this is just a small part of it, but that process used to cause me a certain degree of mental discomfort, and I was using writing to handle it. You know, I I used to stay up, um, you know, so many nights just frantically writing about things. So, in a way, I feel writers write to cope with suffering, but part of it is also a way to enforce this distance between the self and the experience. So, when you write something down, you’re essentially, for example, turning an experience into a report, kind of, right? For yourself, you know, something discrete. You know, you’ve you you’ve created a new channel or a new way to experience things. You might be suffering, but you’re also observing the mechanics of your own suffering. So, writing changes how you perceive a memory, for example, you know, in the process, you move beyond being the experience and the observer, you become the narrator as well, you know, you get to witness your own survival from the outside, in a way. So, it’s such a private and intimate process, you know, I feel nothing is quite like it. So, through the process of writing, right? You you’re not just this character being acted upon by an environment, right? You have constructed a world in it, and it’s up to you how you conceptualize that world through, you know, language and imagination. Well, as limited as it may be, but you get to observe the way you observe reality. So, in a way, it’s also an experience of, you know, true autonomy, you know? And that’s what many intelligent mind craves in reality is this autonomy. So, there is a intellectual satisfaction that comes with it, right? Even if you are not a writer, it’s still something worth trying for your own experience. So, personally, I find the pleasure of writing itself just as intriguing as the depths it brings. So, with some writers, you can actually sense this experience of pleasure, you know, just from reading their works. So, speaking of pleasure, I feel that pleasure in life is always a subject that’s been kind of overlooked, right? It’s sometimes just because the outside world is full of cruelty and chaos, some of us kind of refuse to let pleasure carry any, you know, uh real weight of deep meaning. And I I I don’t necessarily agree with that, and that’s not my outlook on life. You know, there is a suffering in thinking, and there’s also pleasure, right? Does curiosity bear no pleasure in itself? Of course, it does, right? And if I choose to assign my entire life’s meaning to that, right? Who is to say that I cannot? So, uh back to the writer Coetzee’s speech, right? His speech titled He and His Man. It’s already a strange title, right? It was an unusual speech to give, to be honest. Instead of giving a standard lecture or history of him as a writer, he told a fictional story about a traveler and his secretary. So, the story is about a guy named Robinson Crusoe, right? Who was shipwrecked on a deserted island. Now, Robinson Crusoe is old, and he’s done with adventure. He doesn’t travel anymore. He lives alone in Bristol, and he barely leaves his room, right?

[snorts] But he gets these letters, you know, someone is out in the world traveling around England and sending him back detailed reports of what they’re seeing. So, Crusoe calls this someone his man, hence the title He and His Man. So, these reports Crusoe receives are detailed accounts of ordinary and horrifying things happening out there, right? Things such as traps laid out in the countryside that were designed to trap ducks and kill them, you know, or floods or plague in London, you know, uh description of execution machines, death and bodies, and all violence and dread. So, I I was quite taken back by the language, you know, Coetzee used to describe these events, you know, the intricacy of it. So, who is sending these very detailed reports to Robinson Crusoe, right? The man, you know, just sits there in his room and read these. Who is this traveling reporter? Turns out, it’s a man called Daniel Defoe. But the problem is Daniel Defoe is actually the real writer who invented the character Crusoe in his 1719 novel in the first place. So, what Coetzee has done here is taken Defoe’s own character and put Defoe himself, the writer of the story, inside it, but with the power flipped. So, now the character Crusoe is the one sitting and thinking, and his own creator is out in the world sending him reports. So, Crusoe is receiving the world through the man who invented him. So, [snorts] you have this strange loop, right? Defoe invented Crusoe, but Crusoe is now sitting in a room trying to make sense of Defoe’s world. Neither of them quite understands the other. So, there is this duality between Robinson Crusoe, him, he, and Daniel Defoe, the man, right? This exploration of experience and representation. So, it’s kind of a study of, you know, the alienation in the act of observation itself, right? This strange relationship between a life lived and the life recorded. So, here recorded, you know, it’s through words and reports and all that. So, what is this so-called representation problem, right? Defoe constructs Crusoe, brings him alive, and then gives him language, shape, meaning, feelings, but we can say doing all of this, right? He kind of also limits him as well. So, it’s a it’s an exploration of the duality we were just talking about, you know, the the part of you just lives life, and then the part just sits back and observes. You know, just like I mentioned before how the observer inside you constructs, you know, the information from your experience is dependent on the observer’s perception, right? Not only that, you know, the minute the observer tries to pull them into words, the limitation will come with it naturally. So, is this act of naming and framing the experience also an act of reduction in some ways, right? Maybe something always gets lost in the translation from experience to, you know, conceptualized narrative. So, when we name and frame things in our mind, right? Isn’t already an act of distortion? Right, because language and structure, description, all of things largely constrained by our limited perception, right? Are we just inevitably misrepresenting things? You know, because language maybe cannot really reproduce what the experience lived. So, when you describe an experience, right? Turns into a translation of that experience. And along the process, you know, maybe something always gets lost or distorted. You know, we’re always naming things the wrong names in a way. And there’s this word called catachresis, which means the use of a word in a context that differs significantly from its proper application, after creating a strained, forced, or paradoxical figure of speech. Originating from the Greek for misuse. It can be a deliberate rhetorical device to forge new meanings or unintentional in linguistic error. So, in this story, right? The Crusoe-Defoe relationship is a very strange one. You know, they they are the same person who cannot really properly reach each other. You know, there’s always this gap. But at the same time, it also explores this, you know, delicate relationship between a writer and his characters, right? Think about this whole experience-er and observer thing, right? The experience-er gets this experience from the outside world. And the observer has to deal with whatever it’s given, right? The observer didn’t choose the experience. The observer can’t ignore it either, right? So, the So, the observer just has to follow where the experience leads. Now, circle back to what I was talking about, right? That version of cognitive dystopia in my last video, right? I I said I had these dreams where reference points, all of that don’t exist, right? There are no tools. So, I was kind of like describe it if I have to put it into familiar context for other people. It’s more like somebody was born into the 1984 world, you know, without knowing any possible alternate places and will never get to know that. The person’s mind can never conceptualize anything else beyond this immediate environment. But here, even with great perception, even with all the reference points you can get, right? The observer’s output is just an approximation, it seems. So, not because the observer is bad at this whole thing, but because it’s the nature of our existence, right? That’s just how we experience things. So, even a functioning observer cannot fully capture what the experience lived. So, when we are living, right? While the observer inside us is trying to turn any lived experience into a narrative, yet can never fully capture the experience itself. You know, does that imply human consciousness is always in some kind of divided state? You know, to elaborate on this, right? For example, the report that Crusoe receives, one of them was about this duck decoy. It’s this complex system of pipes and nets used to lure ducks into a trap to kill them. So, the traveling reporter, which is the writer himself, right? Wrote this whole thing in very intricate details. You know, extremely clinical details to the point that it has this some kind of seduction, as if, you know, through these extremely detailed description and organizations, we finally we finally can get an accurate understanding and grasp about the system of duck decoy. Right? I I was feeling such a dread, you know, reading that part. Basically, the ducks don’t understand they’re being lured into the traps for death. Right? The ducks believe they’re in a natural pond, but they’re actually inside a machine designed for their capture. So, the duck decoy, you know, kind of represents the nature of organized reality, right? We feel as long as we can, you know, describe it, record it, you know, with words as much detail as possible, accurate details, right? We have some control over our reality, you know, as if the more detail, you know, more description, more recording we have about a system, right? The more we feel we understand it. Yet that understanding does nothing to save the ducks in the end. So, So, these details, these descriptions, you know, they give us this illusion of control or profundity, while the cruelty of the outside world, you know, remains unchanged. So, it poses these questions, right? Is our consciousness in this perpetual divided state? You know, is our profundity or human depths just some kind of byproduct of this distance we have internally? Um but I want to circle back to something I talked about in my last video, you know, the imagination problem. Because with everything I just described, all these limitations, the observer’s that distorts, you know, the experience cannot be fully named, I still think there’s a way to perhaps get to the next stage of your thinking, right? To expand your perception. Even though the next stage could still be part of the illusion or distortion. But there is this shared reality, right? But there’s also a world of an individual. And in my last video, I never specify what imagine what imagination is, right? I just kept mentioning this vague term and internal world. The reason I have such a hard time, you know, defining it is because I don’t want to turn into some kind of intellectual exercise. And I think the moment I try to frame it and name it, it limits itself, just like what I just talked about, you know, before. It becomes a restrained concept, which in itself probably lacks of imagination, right? That’s the trap. So, just like Coetzee explored the gap between these two characters doesn’t really get resolved in the end. So, sometimes when you ask certain artists, you know, like how to be creative, a lot of time they genuinely can’t explain it because words limited, right? But this just an example, it doesn’t have to be about art, right? Different [snorts] people have different things. But this whole imagination thing is also not just some type of daydreaming or coping mechanism. The coping is just the, you know, consequence of being in a relationship with your own experience. That’s not the point of it, not all of it. I think you just have to explore and discover what that is for yourself. I think that’s the whole point of it. I mean, in a way, right? You’re sitting here listening to all this stuff is an attempt to provoke some of that imagination, if possible.