Macroevolution of Self in 'Severance'
Assessing the Philosophy of TV's Best Current Show
The story begins as any other, with two squirrels. Near the Grand Canyon in what is now the state of Arizona in the arid southwest of what is (for now) the United States, there live two species of squirrel.
On the southside of the Canyon is the Albert’s squirrel, gray in color with a pale belly. On the northside is the Kaibab squirrel, a subspecies of the Albert’s, brown in color with a black belly. These separate species emerged around ten-thousand years ago due to a change in climate that caused their major food source, the ponderosa pine, to stop growing at lower elevations in the canyon, creating a divide between two groups. This led to divergence in the species until, over time, they’d fully severed, evolving from one species into two.
…or into one species and a subspecies, depending on who you ask. But taxonomy aside, point is, a single entity became two because of a severance.
We’re now in the middle of the second season of Severance on Apple TV Plus. (And no this won’t spoil anything as long as you get the show’s premise. If you don’t, here’s your off ramp.) The first season was wonderful for its sense of mystery. Along with the characters, viewers unraveled what-the-fuck-is-happening in a gorgeously measured rhythm punctuated by maddeningly sharp cliffhangers that ascended to the break-your-TV-with-your-remote dizzying altitude of final moment of the final episode.
But now. The second season. Fuck. The second season hits hard at the ontological heart of the premise, which is simply and in a compact query: What is Self?
The question was approached and batted at cautiously like a ninth birthday party piñata in season one, with one character suggesting that the firing (i.e. expulsion) of another character from the Severed Floor was akin to death.
Like the severed squirrel species who have no evolutionary memories of their pasts, the severed human adults in the series awake in a conference room having had their Episodic Memories wiped. (“Suppressed” is a better term, but it doesn’t properly convey the dramatic nature of the circumstance.) And only their Episodic Memories; all other forms of memory (Semantic, Working, Sensory, Emotional Procedural, etc.) are intact. Meaning: they remember facts like the capital of Georgia and how to tie a shoelace, but not autobiographical information like their names or who they had a crush on in third grade.
Question 1 when an innie awakes on the conference table: Who are you? (Episodic memory)
Question 2: In which U.S. state or territory were you born? (Episodic)
Question 3: Please name any U.S. state or territory. (Semantic)
Question 4: What is Mr. Eagan’s favorite breakfast? (Episodic)
Question 5: What is or was the color of your mother’s eyes? (Episodic)
With a blank page as an autobiography, a Self is left no choice; a new story must be written.
With a severed squirrel population, a new species was written. Then the ponderosa pines grew again at low elevations, and the two species of squirrels were free to intermix but were no longer capable of doing so. This is speciation.
Now, think of that 8,000 BCE group of Albert’s squirrels at the southern rim of the canyon in what would become Arizona in what (at least for now) is the United States as a single body. Then ask: How long before the divided squirrel populations from that single body were no longer able to interbreed as a species? i.e. How long until a second Self formed within that body?
The answer is (scientifically speaking) a shitton of time.
With selfiation (the severance of Episodic Memories, the creation of a new autobiography and new self) the process is much faster. But how fast? Is the process immediate? As soon as a single new autobiographic memory is formed, does a new, independent, sovereign Self emerge?
The answer Severance seems to give is yes; a severed mind immediately forms a new Self. And it doesn’t stop there. A newly formed Self will continue to evolve, just like the goddam squirrels.
In the pilot episode of Severance, innie Helly R asks, “Am I livestock? Like, did you grow me as food and that’s why I have no memories?”
Jump to last week’s episode, in which Helly R, speaking of her outtie, has evolved to proclaim, “She had no right to steal my identity!”
Okay. But now here’s the cool part.
There are two major theories of Self: the ego theory and the bundle theory.
The ego theory of self asserts a center within each of us, a soul, an “I” (or whatever) that perceives the world, that is the constant thread across our lives. The bundle theory, first proposed by David Hume, argues that we are each a collection and reconciliation of our innumerable perceptions.
(Worth noting perhaps, Endless Sunshine on the Spotless Mind espouses the ego theory, an immutable “I” that maintains no matter how many memories are wiped, which is why Kate and Jim are incapable of being apart.)
Severance believes the bundle theory, which was also rather brilliantly defended in a undergrad neuroscience thesis at the University of Skövde as the more valid of the two theories, and which makes it possible for an outtie to steal the identity of an innie while being the same body, the same person.
But then it gets even cooler when we ask what all of this means for us. What does the possibility of divergence of Self and creation of a new Self based on the severance of Episodic memories mean for those of us who are not severed (i.e. all of us)?
It means we are entangled with Episodic memories that impact the formation of that Self. It means our macroevolution is creating a new Self in each moment we experience.
If this is frightening, it shouldn’t be. It should feel pretty fucking liberating, because we are able to recognize that we, each of us, our Selves right now, are not who we were. We are neither our pasts nor our experiences nor our emotions. These things merely flowed through us and around us. Our Selves are not these things. Our Selves are how we reconcile these things. Therefore, we each have the ability to create a new Self without forgetting.
More importantly, we have the chance to acknowledge this in our friends and loved ones. To forgive them for who they were while cherishing that past Self. And we can create a new Self with a partner’s new Self. We can find each other again.
Coda: All this is ignoring the gaping plot hole (or entire point of the show; one or the other) that the logic of why Mark Scout gets severed makes no sense. Purportedly, he’s in pain for the loss of his wife, so goes to work on the Severed Floor to be able to escape her memory for a third of his day. In other words, to not always feel that pain of missing her. However, the moment Mark Scout goes down in the elevator, time stops for him (and starts for Mark S.) Which means the moment after he enters the elevator on ground level, he exits the elevator on ground level, because, to him, going down is all lost time. It doesn’t exist. Mark Scout can’t remember the eight hours between 9am and 5pm. His reality only exists between 5pm and 9am. Meaning it’s always between 5pm and 9am for Mark Scout. Which means he still always misses his wife. It’s just that his “always” has collapsed. But it’s still always no matter how much time it takes.