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We might say that any concept of the self-conscious self is itself socially determined because it emerges from our most religious or philosophical, hence our social and cultural beliefs. In calling attention to memory for the purpose of demonstrating the immortality of the soul, Plato was calling for a kind of self-reflection, which we can call an introspective, critical self-consciousness. Plato did not invent self-conscious introspection; nor was he the first to have introspective moments. But Plato did instigate a particular style of introspection and imbued it with transcendental significance by valorizing introspection as part of the immortal aspect of human existence. Essentially he theorized the self as a transcendent being. Plato proposed a proof based on an aspect of experience-memory-that was significant enough to present introspection not just as a leisure activity but as a value beyond the individual and a comfort in the face of mortality.

Cultural Software

IT BEHOOVES us to try to understand why religious symbols are such poignant and important signifiers for us and speculate on how they can be compared adequately. An important perception comes from J. M. Balkin.13 He compares the ideological content of culture to computer software. At first this may seem to compare the human brain with a computer and hence to replicate the mistakes of Cartesian dualism. But this is not so. Balkin suggests that ideology, even culture itself, is a kind of software or programming, not that the human mind is a computer. Individual minds are only secondarily involved since culture is not produced by individual minds at all; it is an intersubjective phenomenon. Furthermore, the term “cultural software” is not meant to suggest that ideology programs us to perform as machines, without having to make decisions. It merely suggests to us the terms by which we make our decisions, and those terms very often predispose our decisions. The terms suggest the dramas in which we play out our lives.

Religion is, in some sense, like the program “Windows,” or any other graphically-based operating system. The program utilizes a simple metaphor: A personal computer can be managed like a desktop. Because of that visualization, any computer user can then perform important procedures-move, copy, store files, executing various useful operations. But a computer is in no literal sense a desktop. There is no literal analogy between the two. Religion is, likewise, a creative visualization that allows us to live our lives within a culture and society. Religion claims to point to transcendent values that go beyond the experience of any individual person believing in it. Some parts of the system may be confirmable and some are probably not, especially from within the system. So it is best to think of the terms that religion gives us as conventions, not truths.

Although we may have conventions and traditions for dealing with the world, in any given culture we have a group of different and sometimes contradictory ones and we differ in social class, in political and economic groupings, as well as in our personal abilities to adjudicate between them. Our culture does not force us to make decisions but predisposes us to see decisions in certain culturally approved terms. Furthermore, each of the “units” of this software, units Richard Dockins called memes-suggesting both the English “memory” (like the Greek mimesis, imitation) and the French même (“same”)-changes over time, sometimes due to an individual talent but never only because of one person.14 Balkin describes these units of cultural meaning as something:

that exists in each individual;

that shapes and enables individual understanding and cultural know-how;

that guarantees similarity of cultural understanding and know-how while permitting some variation, disagreement, and mistake among individuals within the same culture;

that changes and develops over time; and

that constitutes