At the Bafta film awards last Sunday, a man in the audience shouted the N-word while two Black actors were on stage. The BBC broadcast it. The fallout was considerable.
The man was John Davidson, a Tourette syndrome activist whose life story had inspired one of the nominated films. He has Tourette’s. He didn’t choose to shout it. He was, by his own account, distraught. His statement afterwards was careful and precise: “My tics have absolutely nothing to do with what I think, feel or believe. It’s an involuntary neurological misfire. My tics are not an intention, not a choice and not a reflection of my values.”
Most people accepted this. But it raises a question that is harder than it looks. The word came from his brain, through his vocal tract, in his voice. It was linguistically formed—not a grunt or a spasm but a semantically loaded utterance. Something in him produced it. If it wasn’t him, who was it? And if it wasn’t him, where exactly does he end?
The standard move here is to invoke volition. We hold people responsible for their words because we assume intent. Remove intent, and the moral framework dissolves. Davidson didn’t mean it; therefore, it wasn’t really his; therefore, he bears no responsibility. Case closed. But this doesn’t actually answer the philosophical question. It just sidesteps it. Because here is the thing about Davidson’s tics that deserves closer attention. They are not random. They are contextually coherent. Unpleasant, shocking, certainly disruptive, but coherent. At the ceremony, host Alan Cumming made a joke involving Paddington Bear and his own sexuality. Davidson’s tics responded with homophobic slurs and the word “paedophile”—triggered, he explained later, because Paddington is a children’s character. Something in his system was tracking the semantic content of what was being said. It identified what was transgressive in context. It reached for the worst available word. Then it fired. That is not noise. That is a process with its own logic, running in parallel with Davidson’s conscious attention, with access to his semantic knowledge, and occasionally—when the usual controls fail—with access to his voice.
There is a useful way to think about this borrowed from how AI large language models work. A language model operates in high-dimensional continuous space. Vast amounts of computation happen there—pattern recognition, semantic association, something that functions like reasoning. None of it is directly visible. What we see is the output: a sequence of tokens, one after another, a flat stream of words.
The projection from that internal computation to the token stream is lossy. Much of what happens in the model never surfaces as language. The token stream is not the computation. It is a particular kind of readout of the computation, filtered and serialised into the only form we can directly receive. Now consider what controls what gets into that stream. There is, in effect, a gate. Not everything the model computes becomes output. The gate is part of what shapes the model’s behaviour, its apparent character, what it will and won’t say. It is what makes people like one model and hate another.
This is roughly what neuroscience suggests about the human case, though it arrived at the conclusion from a different direction. The self is the author and publisher. The self is not the computation, but the editing function. What goes out, not what gets thought.
Michael Gazzaniga‘s split-brain research in the 1960s showed that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter”—it observes behaviour generated by other systems and constructs a retrospective narrative of unified authorship. We don’t experience ourselves as unified because we are. We experience it because one subsystem is very good at telling that story after the fact. The verbal self—the “I” that speaks, explains, claims authorship—may be less the source of thought than its narrator. It sees the outputs of processes it didn’t run and reports them as its own decisions. On this view, what we call the “I” is substantially the gate—the function that governs what reaches speech from “computation”, what gets claimed, what gets published as the self’s output. Normally the gate and the computation are so tightly coupled that we can’t distinguish them. Tourette’s decouples them. The gate fails for certain kinds of output, and we see that the substrate was not unified to begin with.
Davidson’s distress is entirely coherent under this account. He is not distressed because he acted against his values. He is distressed because something that looked like him did. Something with access to his voice, his semantic knowledge, his body, but not under the control of the function he identifies as himself.
This reframes the question slightly. We tend to ask: what caused the tic? And the answer—some misfiring in the basal ganglia, a failure of inhibitory control—while true is also incomplete. The more interesting question is: what normally prevents the tic? What is the gate, and what runs it?
In ordinary cognition there may be a great deal happening in the substrate that never gets tokenised into speech—not because it isn’t there, but because something governs what reaches the output. Much of the brain’s activity is never published. Although the phrase, “he has no filter between his brain and his mouth”, which my wife often says of me, suggests that control is imperfect. The verbal self is the name we give to whatever makes that editorial decision and claims authorship.
When the gate fails, we don’t see randomness. We see coherent sub-processes that were running all along, now briefly with access to the channel they’re normally denied. The tic is not an intrusion from outside. It is an internal process that has temporarily escaped editorial control.
Now consider what certain comedians do for a living.
Dave Chappelle, early Richard Pryor, in a different moral register Bernard Manning—the act is partly constructed around the comedian having deliberate access to the gate in a way the audience doesn’t. They say the thing the audience is computing but suppressing. The laugh is partly recognition, partly relief, partly the vicarious experience of the gate being lifted by someone else’s hand. The comedian is an authorised, licensed publisher of material the rest of us keep in the substrate. The skill—and it is a genuine skill—is knowing exactly how far to go, when to pull back, and how to ensure the frame holds. Controlled gate failure, performed for an audience that has consented to the performance.
Chappelle’s career is substantially about making this mechanism visible. His famous walkaway from a $50 million deal was articulated partly in these terms—he became uncertain whether the audience was laughing with the subversion or simply enjoying having the gate lifted on material they wanted to consume without guilt. Whether he was controlling the frame or the frame was controlling him. Whether his speech was authorised-as-subversion or merely authorised-as-release.
That is the knife edge. A Tourette’s tic and a Chappelle bit can produce the same word in the same room, but the intentional structure is entirely different. One is gate failure. The other is gate performance. Except Chappelle’s anxiety—the anxiety that ended his show—was that the performance might be providing cover for something closer to the former. That the laughter was coming from a place the comedy wasn’t actually reaching.
Manning is the case where the performance defence eventually collapsed. The gate, it turned out, was the man.
Dementia approaches from the opposite direction, and in some ways is the starkest case of all. In Tourette’s the gate fails selectively and intermittently. In dementia it degrades systematically as the substrate that runs it is physically destroyed. You can watch the editorial function diminish over months and years. What typically goes first is not memory in the crude sense but the social and executive apparatus—the machinery that governs what gets said, to whom, in what context. The person starts saying things they would previously have filtered: sexual remarks, racial language from fifty years ago, brutal assessments of people in the room. Families often find this the most distressing feature of the disease, more than the memory loss itself. The person seems to have become someone else—crueller, coarser, unrecognisable.
But the logic developed here suggests the opposite reading. They have not become someone else. The editor has gone, and what remains is substrate that was always there, now publishing without authorisation. The language from half a century ago was always in the network. The judgements about the people in the room may reflect something that was always computed but never passed the gate.
This is uncomfortable. It implies that a significant portion of what we think of as a person’s character—kindness, decency, tact, a person’s goodness in daily life—may be substantially gate rather than ground. Who we are is not what we compute but what we suppress. The consoling counter is that the gate is real. The suppression is itself a genuine expression of values, not mere performance. Davidson’s distress is evidence of that. The narrator who identifies with the gate is genuinely not the process that produced the tic. A publisher who refuses to print something ugly is making a real choice, even if the ugly thing exists somewhere in the system. But dementia strips that away and leaves the question uncomfortably open. How much of the person we loved was the computation, and how much was the editing?
Speech is authorised in two senses. It is permitted—cleared for publication by whatever runs the gate. And it is authored—it carries the signature of a self, it is owned, it counts as an expression of who we are. Normally these travel together so seamlessly that we treat them as one thing. Davidson’s tic, Chappelle’s comedy, and a person with late-stage dementia saying something unforgivable to their daughter—each in a different way pulls them apart.
The “I” is not the thinker. It is the publisher, the tokeniser of thought to speech. And the question of who we really are may depend, more than we would like, on what we choose not to print.