philosophy understanding the self essay

Philosophical Perspective of Self Essay

Introduction, rene descartes, meditations on first philosophy, second meditation summary and analysis, analysis and definition of “i”, other definitions of self, works cited.

Throughout history, the philosophical perspective of “self” has received myriad descriptions and analyses from many philosophers, researchers, and even scholars. In gaining this understanding, these people are important in explaining how the knowledge of this concept affects the world and how people perceive themselves and their ultimate relationships with others.

An understanding of “self,” therefore, affirms a person’s identity in a social environment, allowing him/her to recognize others besides oneself (Sorabji 13). In other words, the way human beings socialize solely depends on how they perceive themselves and others through daily social interactions.

Innumerable philosophers, including Socrates and Aristotle, have immensely contributed towards gaining clarity in defining “I.” Yet, it is believed that some have been quite outstanding with regard to their input. In this category lies Rene Descartes, whose findings remain essential in defining the concept of “self” and how this definition affects people’s thinking and interactions.

This paper goes far ahead in synthesizing Descartes’ findings to achieve a concise definition of the word “I” that seems reasonable and critical from a philosophical perspective of the “self.” This essay further digs into several research findings unearthed by renowned scholars and experts who have devoted their time and resources to studying and exploring the definition and how it influences interpersonal relationships in one’s life.

By compiling ideas from an array of thinkers, this philosophy of “self” essay intends to explore the implications of defining “I” in a given manner and how such a stance would affect our self-reflection and perceptions of ourselves or how we treat ourselves. The survey also focuses on how these definitions would affect our knowledge of ourselves and the world outside our “selves.”

Born in 1596 in France, Rene Descartes was a great philosopher, thinker, writer, and mathematician who spent his adulthood in the Republic of Dutch. He has arguably been dubbed as the father of modern philosophy with special emphasis on the Western school of thought (Smith 1).

As a result, his pieces of writing remain key reference materials for scholars across the global plane. For example, meditations continue to serve as principal textbooks in most universities’ philosophy departments today. His contribution to mathematics set unbeaten records, with his efforts being widely applied in calculus and geometry. In the development of natural sciences, his input cannot go unnoticed.

He believed philosophy was a mega entity encompassing all aspects of knowledge expressed through it. Although most of the works and thoughts have been widely considered, there has been a strong emphasis on Meditations on First Philosophy. As mentioned before, this essay will emphasize the second meditation in defining the concept of “I,” also known as “self.”

These meditations are considered the origin of modern Western philosophy. In this coverage, Descartes criticizes most of Aristotle’s arguments and designs questions that have remained debatable in the world of philosophy today. He breaks from the norm created by Aristotle that knowledge is achieved through human senses and that mental statuses usually resemble what they are. As such, Descartes is able to develop brand new concepts about the mind, ideas, and matter (Frankfurt 185).

In this portion of his findings, Descartes explains the nature of the human mind and that it is better than the body. His research revolves around the search for certainty and ignores every idea that carries any slightest doubt. Throughout his memory, Descartes believes that whatever he happens to see is actually meaningless and may not ever exist in real life (Descartes 17).

As a result, we can view place and movement as mistaken notions in human life since lack of certainty is the only certain thing that exists in his life. This is essential in defining ourselves and our existence.

Is it possible for Descartes to believe that he does not have a body and senses, yet he exists? What about the nonexistence of the physical world, as proposed by the author? Ironically, he can only posses these doubts of nonexistence if he truly exists.

In other words, one can only be misled by the devil from within if he does exist. As such, “I” has to exist in order to doubt and be deceived by the evil one. Nevertheless, it can generally be viewed that “I” is a necessary and true preposition when suggested by somebody or conceived in one’s own mind (Descartes 72).

After conceiving the existence of “I,” the mediator does not stop at this particular point but aims at defining and explaining the meaning of the “I am.” This approach makes it possible to be certain that we possess a soul which augments our thinking, nourishment, movement, and sensibility. Furthermore, human beings have a body (Frankfurt 185).

Regardless of these initial doubts, many people sink into a ditch of doubts and hang on to the fact that one has the ability to think. In other words, our existence does not solely depend on the above-mentioned attributes of human beings, but we have no doubt about our breathing power.

This implies that thinking is essential for a person to exist regardless of whether he has other qualities like body and soul, among others. By the fact that thinking defines “self,” it is possible to relate it with human existence and consider it inseparable from being. From a general perspective, we can view one’s self as simply “thinking something.”

The definition of “I” is enshrined in Descartes’ cogito argument based on its formulation in Latin, “cogito ergo sum,” translated as “I think, therefore, I am.” This line is quite famous in the history of philosophy and is most probably regarded as the origin of Western philosophy and other schools of thought that developed after Descartes. In this line, the mediator gets in touch with a grip of certainty after his continuous disbelief is manifested in the First Mediation (Frankfurt 186).

In essence, the cogito exposes a different view of the world and states that the mind is the only thing in the world that can know itself. Notably, understanding our mind first before any other thing has remained rooted in Western philosophy, even though the main point of contention has been the connection between the mind and the real world. From this perspective, the mind is no longer an aid to understanding the world but an internally locked thing (Frankfurt 186).

In analyzing Descartes’ Second Meditation, it is of immense significance to note the existing differences between “I think, therefore I am” as described in the Discourse Method from the general formulation derived from meditations.

At this point of the synthesis, it is imperative to mention that the proposition “I am, I exist” holds only when it is put forward by a specific individual and conceived by the person’s mind. The mediation is further divided into an argument of three steps, which are: whatever thinks exists, I think therefore, and I exist (Frankfurt 188).

However, in understanding “self” through syllogistic reading and analysis, denied by Descartes in other pieces of writing is the fact that there is no reason why “whatever thinks exists” should not be doubtful as portrayed by the mediator. This reading approach further analyzes the cogito as a conclusion that has been reasoned out at a specific point in the doubtful mind of the mediator, even when inferences that have been well reasoned out are called to doubt (Frankfurt 189).

The question we need to ask ourselves in this definition of self is the path somebody takes to know the cogito when everything else is doubted. As a result, several proposals have been put forth as reading formats and methodologies aimed at simplifying this reading process and step (Frankfurt 202). It would be impossible for a person to say he/she exits or even thinks of existence without being in a real state.

Consequently, the truth is achieved by the utterance concerning the concept of existence. In this line of thought, it can be argued that the existence of a person can only be confirmed by oneself in the present tense, “I am.” It is also important to double emphasize the fact that cogito can only work when one is talking about thought. One cannot say: “I sleep, therefore I am,” since the act of sleeping can be doubted. In explaining this, one cannot doubt the act of thinking because doubt on its own is a form of thought.

Besides cogito , the mediator also affirms that he “thinks,” leading to an argument commonly referred to as sun res cogitans (Rorty 215). This comprises three controversial views regarding one being a “thinking thing.” In this approach, it is essential to comprehend the meaning of “thing” and “think” to establish their definitive relationship with “I am.”

There are two approaches to defining “self” at this point. This can be done both epistemologically and metaphysically. In other words, body and mind cannot be one since one has got either to know both of them or none of them. As a matter of fact, the existence of the body ceases since one is a “thinking thing with delinked body and mind. This gives way to the conclusion that one is a “thing that thinks.”

With preciseness, “I” can be defined as the “thing that thinks.” In addition, “I” possesses other attributes besides being able to think, understand, and be willing to do certain things. These qualities include but are not limited to imagination and the use of the senses. In the understanding of “I,” it is worth noting that senses and imagination cannot be trusted (Rorty 214). This is because imagination can trigger all forms of things that may not necessarily be real.

How can one identify wax? This is made possible through a sense of taste, color, smell, size, shape, and hardness, among others. When heated, the wax changes some properties but can be identified despite the deviation from the initial form. Due to the fact that wax can be identified even when its shape is infinitely changed, it suffices to mention that this cannot be possible via imagination but through the intellect alone and proper mental scrutiny.

Based on this argument, it can be concluded that the mind knows better than the body. In this approach, the human view is that one has to know the mind more than any other thing in his or her life as a way of understanding the self better (Rorty 214). There is no doubt in perceiving the identity of something, and these actions of thought clearly imply that the item exists in reality. Therefore, confirming one’s existence is the core of ascertaining the nature of the mind through the intellect alone.

As mentioned before, various authors have defined and described the concept of “self” throughout history. According to Sorabji, the idea of “self” is real in human history. He argues that the “self” comes to play when the owner of a body is intertwined with existing psychological states (Sorabji 13).

He further notes that in explaining the “self,” there is a stream of consciousness that lacks the owner. In his description of this analogy, Sorabji asserts that his definition of “self” fits other members like animals as embodied owners of the body. Based on this approach, Sorabji further double emphasizes the fact that there is a need to protect the human way of life and not only base it on its relationship with the “self” or the interaction between members of a given stream (Sorabji 13).

The broadness of “self” also encompasses the picture of human beings developing into male or female, baker or teacher, son or daughter, Indian or American, among other development attributes. Importantly, these cannot be visualized through the metaphysical conceptualization of the “self” because of its narrowness in determining the nature of the pictures to be adopted. Additionally, the pictures are not considered to be essential and are likely to be altered under extreme pressure (Sorabji 14).

However, visualized pictures are important in describing a complete image of selfhood, even though they can be philosophically studied differently. “I am” is also described by the use of unique features, which make human beings different from other creations (Sorabji 14). In essence, thoughts and actions people execute are usually a result of the self. It can be described as a substance that persists through time. This is to say that actions and thoughts experienced at different times of the day or in life may also concern the “self.”

In most cases, philosophical definitions of “self” are discussed based on the first-person attributes. This is because third-person definitions do not identify unique identification properties. Viewed from a different point, the “self” can be principally described through the discourse and conduct of a person.

As a result, intentions can only be deduced from something being observed through actions undertaken by an individual. Of great significance is the fact that the characteristics of a given “self” have the full potential of determining its real identity (Rorty 215).

Based on this analogy, it can be argued that “I” can be divided into various concepts as defined by specific qualities and attributes. For instance, the “self” can be viewed as an illusion (Sorabji 17). This is common in ancient spiritual traditions in which the human identity is conceived as a mere illusion for the existence of individual human beings. This identification further ensures that there is a boundary between humanity and other forms of creation, especially in terms of characteristics and abilities.

In general, individual existence is considered as the representation of a human being and advocates fighting for its rightful position in the world (Rorty 216). Moreover, “self” is linked with time and mind, which determine obsessive thinking based on the future than emphasizing the present. Most religions advocate for the dissolution of humans for human nature to prevail in the world. This is commonly known as nirvana, presence, or enlightenment.

Besides viewing the self as an illusion, other philosophers approach the concept by considering the “self” as an activity. Among these philosophers were Aristotle and Plato, who defined the human soul as the principal essence of humanity but posited against differences in existence.

Unlike Plato and other religious traditions who supported separate existence, Aristotle viewed the human “self” as an activity of the body which lacks the properties of becoming immortal (Sorabji 17). To be specific, the soul is viewed as the activity of any living body. In defining the soul, Aristotle divided his argument into four major parts, including the desiderative, calculative, rational, and scientific parts.

Another renowned philosopher and psychologist today who defines “self” is Dr. Phil. He believes that a person dwells on a state of fictional self or authentic self as created by the Supreme Being. According to Dr. Phil, most people define who they are by explaining what they are doing, where they are, or their role in society.

However, Dr. Phil argues that one’s authentic self encompasses the genuine existence of a person’s identity (McGraw 1). This is to say that an authentic self demonstrates core human qualities. Additionally, the self is made up of the part of an individual that is not defined by profession or a given role in society. It consists of an individual’s talents, skills, and wisdom.

The psychologist further argues that an authentic self revolves around a person’s uniqueness, including abilities, rather than what he/she is expected to do or become. This, therefore, implies that when an individual does not live to the standards of his authentic self, he adopts a fictional self that has emptiness and incompleteness (McGraw 1).

It is doubtless that the definition of “self” has a wide range of implications. For instance, this knowledge affects the way human beings view themselves differently from animals. It gives them an understanding of their uniqueness and potential in using their senses to recognize their surrounding and their imagination ability.

Additionally, the definition of self impacts how we interact with and perceive others. In other words, human beings are able to appreciate others regardless of their shortcomings and differences since each one of them possesses unique qualities and attributes.

Although numerous philosophers have devoted their lives to defining the “I am” concept, Rene Descartes is regarded as the father of Western philosophy and a great contributor to several schools of thought. In particular, Meditations on First Philosophy has widely been used as learning at teaching materials across the globe.

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy . Sioux Falls: NuVision Publications, LLC, 2007. Print.

Frankfurt, Harry. Descartes’ Discussion of His Existence in the Second Mediation. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2004. Print.

McGraw, Phillip. “Self Matters.” Dr. Phil , 2012. Web.

Rorty, Amélie. Essays on Descartes’ Meditations . California: University of California Press, 1986. Print.

Smith, Kurt, “Descartes’ Life and Works.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. Web. < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/descartes-works/ >.

Sorabji, Richard. Graeco-Roman Varieties of Self. New York, NY: Springer, 2008. Print.

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Thomas Aquinas – Toward a Deeper Sense of Self

Therese scarpelli cory.

“Who am I?” If Google’s autocomplete is any indication, it’s not one of the questions we commonly ask online (unlike other existential questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is a human?”). But philosophers have long held that “Who am I?” is in some way the central question of human life. “Know yourself” was the inscription that the ancient Greeks inscribed over the threshold to the Delphic temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom. In fact, self-knowledge is the gateway to wisdom, as Socrates quipped: “The wise person is the one who knows what he doesn’t know.”

Thomas Aquinas

The reality is, we all lack self-knowledge to some degree, and the pursuit of self-knowledge is a lifelong quest—often a painful one. For instance, a common phenomenon studied in psychology is the “ loss of a sense of self ” that occurs when a familiar way of thinking about oneself (for example, as “a healthy person,” “someone who earns a good wage,” “a parent”) is suddenly stripped away by a major life change or tragedy.  Forced to face oneself for the first time without these protective labels, one can feel as though the ground has been suddenly cut out from under one’s feet: Who am I, really?

But the reality of self-ignorance is something of a philosophical puzzle.  Why do we need to work at gaining knowledge about ourselves?  In other cases, ignorance results from a lack of experience.  No surprise that I confuse kangaroos with wallabies: I’ve never seen either in real life.  Of course I don’t know what number you’re thinking about: I can’t see inside your mind.  But what excuse do I have for being ignorant of anything having to do with myself?  I already am myself !  I, and I alone, can experience my own mind from the inside.  This insider knowledge makes me—as communications specialists are constantly reminding us—the unchallenged authority on “what I feel” or “what I think.”  So why is it a lifelong project for me to gain insight into my own thoughts, habits, impulses, reasons for acting, or the nature of the mind itself?

This is called the “problem of self-opacity,” and we’re not the only ones to puzzle over it: It was also of great interest to the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose theory of self-knowledge is documented in my new book Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge .  It’s a common scholarly myth that early modern philosophers (starting with Descartes) invented the idea of the human being as a “self” or “subject.”  My book tries to dispel that myth, showing that like philosophers and neuroscientists today, medieval thinkers were just as curious about why the mind is so intimately familiar, and yet so inaccessible, to itself.  (In fact, long before Freud, medieval Latin and Islamic thinkers were speculating about a subconscious, inaccessible realm in the mind.)  The more we study the medieval period, the clearer it becomes that inquiry into the self does not start with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”  Rather, Descartes was taking sides in a debate about self-knowledge that had already begun in the thirteenth century and earlier.

For Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting with our environment.

Aquinas begins his theory of self-knowledge from the claim that all our self-knowledge is dependent on our experience of the world around us.  He rejects a view that was popular at the time, i.e., that the mind is “always on,” never sleeping, subconsciously self-aware in the background.  Instead, Aquinas argues, our awareness of ourselves is triggered and shaped by our experiences of objects in our environment .   He pictures the mind as as a sort of undetermined mental “putty” that takes shape when it is activated in knowing something.  By itself, the mind is dark and formless; but in the moment of acting, it is “lit up” to itself from the inside and sees itself engaged in that act.  In other words, when I long for a cup of mid-afternoon coffee, I’m not just aware of the coffee, but of myself as the one wanting it .  So for Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting with our environment.  That’s why the labels we apply to ourselves—“a gardener,” “a patient person,” or “a coffee-lover”—are always taken from what we do or feel or think toward other things.

The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, © 2004 David Monniaux

But if we “see” ourselves from the inside at the moment of acting, what about the “problem of self-opacity” mentioned above?  Instead of lacking self-knowledge, shouldn’t we be able to “see” everything about ourselves clearly?  Aquinas’s answer is that just because we experience something doesn’t mean we instantly understand everything about it—or to use his terminology: experiencing that something exists doesn’t tell us what it is . (By comparison: If someday I encounter a wallaby, that won’t make me an expert about wallabies.)  Learning about a thing’s nature requires a long process of gathering evidence and drawing conclusions, and even then we may never fully understand it.  The same applies to the mind.  I am absolutely certain, with an insider’s perspective that no one else can have, of the reality of my experience of wanting another cup of coffee.  But the significance of those experiences—what they are, what they tell me about myself and the nature of the mind—requires further experience and reasoning.  Am I hooked on caffeine?  What is a “desire” and why do we have desires?  These questions can only be answered by reasoning about the evidence taken from many experiences.

Aquinas, then, would surely approve that we’re not drawn to search online for answers to the question, “Who am I?”  That question can only be answered “from the inside” by me , the one asking the question.  At the same time, answering this question isn’t a matter of withdrawing from the world and turning in on ourselves.  It’s a matter of becoming more aware of ourselves at the moment of engaging with reality, and drawing conclusions about what our activities towards other things “say” about us.  There’s Aquinas’s “prescription” for a deeper sense of self.

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About The Author

Therese Scarpelli Cory is the author of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. She is assistant professor of philosophy at Seattle University....

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You are a network

You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. an emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity.

by Kathleen Wallace   + BIO

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. ( Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

H ow do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying the kind of relation).

We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below, captures the clustering idea.

Figures 1 and 2 (both from my book , The Network Self ) are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

F igures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process .

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations, that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised. There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.

Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another. For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage. Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances? Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or .

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

T he network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view. The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history might be constituted in particular.

Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self -determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself. Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

To read more about the self, visit Psyche , a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

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August 7, 2018 | Kenneth Best - UConn Communications

Know Thyself: The Philosophy of Self-Knowledge

Dating back to an ancient Greek inscription, the injunction to 'know thyself' has encouraged people to engage in a search for self-understanding. Philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses its history and relevance to the present.

From Socrates to today's undergraduates, philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses the history and current relevance of the human quest for self-knowledge. (Getty Images)

UConn philosopher Mitchell S. Green leads a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) titled Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge  on the online learning platform Coursera. The course is based on his 2018 book (published by Routledge) of the same name. He recently spoke with Ken Best of UConn Today about the philosophy and understanding of self-knowledge. This is an edited transcript of their discussion.

Q. ‘Know Thyself’ was carved into stone at the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi in Greece, according to legend. Scholars, philosophers, and civilizations have debated this question for a long time. Why have we not been able to find the answer?

A. I’m not sure that every civilization or even most civilizations have taken the goal to achieve self-knowledge as being among the most important ones. It comes and goes. It did have cachet in the Greece of 300-400 BC. Whether it had similar cachet 200 years later or had something like cultural importance in the heyday of Roman civilization is another question. Of course some philosophers would have enjoined people to engage in a search for self-understanding; some not so much. Likewise, think about the Middle Ages. There’s a case in which we don’t get a whole lot of emphasis on knowing the self, instead the focus was on knowing God. It’s only when Descartes comes on the scene centuries later that we begin to get more of a focus on introspection and understanding ourselves by looking within. Also, the injunction to “know thyself” is not a question, and would have to be modified in some way to pose a question. However, suppose the question is, “Is it possible to know oneself, either in part or fully.” In that case, I’d suggest that we’ve made considerable progress in answering this question over the last two millennia, and in the Know Thyself book, and in the MOOC of the same name, I try to guide readers and students through some of what we have learned.

Q. You point out that the shift Descartes brought about is a turning point in Western philosophy.

A. Right. It’s for various reasons cultural, political, economic, and ideological that the norm of self-knowledge has come and gone with the tides through Western history. Even if we had been constantly enjoined to achieve self-knowledge for the 2,300 years since the time Socrates spoke, just as Sigmund Freud said about civilization – that civilization is constantly being created anew and everyone being born has to work their way up to being civilized being – so, too, the project of achieving self-knowledge is a project for every single new member of our species. No one can be given it at birth. It’s not an achievement you get for free like a high IQ or a prominent chin. Continuing to beat that drum, to remind people of the importance of that, is something we’ll always be doing. I’m doubtful we’ll ever reach a point we can all say: Yup, we’re good on that. We’ve got that covered, we’ve got self-knowledge down. That’s a challenge for each of us, every time somebody is born. I would also say, given the ambient, environmental factors as well as the predilections that we’re born with as part of our cognitive and genetic nature, there are probably pressures that push against self-knowledge as well. For instance, in the book I talk about the cognitive immune system that tends to make us spin information in our own favor. When something goes bad, there’s a certain part of us, hopefully within bounds, that tends to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. That’s probably a good way of getting yourself up off the floor after you’ve been knocked down.

Q. Retirement planners tell us you’re supposed to know yourself well enough to know what your needs are going to be – create art or music, or travel – when you have all of your time to use. At what point should that point of getting to know yourself better begin?

A. I wouldn’t encourage a 9-year-old to engage in a whole lot of self-scrutiny, but I would say even when you’re young some of those indirect, especially self-distancing, types of activities, can be of value. Imagine a 9-year-old gets in a fight on the playground and a teacher asks him: Given what you said to the other kid that provoked the fight, if he had said that to you, how would you feel? That might be intended to provoke an inkling of self-knowledge – if not in the form of introspection, in the form of developing empathetic skills, which I think is part of self-knowledge because it allows me to see myself through another’s eyes. Toward the other end of the lifespan, I’d also say in my experience lots of people who are in, or near, retirement have the idea they’re going to stop working and be really happy. But I find in some cases that this expectation is not realistic because so many people find so much fulfillment, and rightly so, in their work. I would urge people to think about what it is that gives them satisfaction? Granted we sometimes find ourselves spitting nails as we think about the challenges our jobs present to us. But in some ways that frequent grumbling, the kind of hair-pulling stress and so forth, these might be part of what makes life fulfilling. More importantly, long-term projects, whether as part of one’s career or post-career, tend I think to provide more intellectual and emotional sustenance than do the more ephemeral activities such as cruises, safaris, and the like.

Q. We’re on a college campus with undergraduates trying to learn more about themselves through what they’re studying. They’re making decisions on what they might want to do with the rest of their life, taking classes like philosophy that encourage them to think about this. Is this an optimal time for this to take place?

A. For many students it’s an optimal time. I consider one component of a liberal arts education to be that of cultivation of the self. Learning a lot of stuff is important, but in some ways that’s just filling, which might be inert unless we give it form, or structure. These things can be achieved through cultivation of the self, and if you want to do that you have to have some idea of how you want it to grow and develop, which requires some inkling of what kind of person you think you are and what you think you can be. Those are achievements that students can only attain by trying things and seeing what happens. I am not suggesting that a freshman should come to college and plan in some rigorous and lockstep way to learn about themselves, cultivate themselves, and bring themselves into fruition as some fully formed adult upon graduation. Rather, there is much more messiness; much more unpredictable try things, it doesn’t work, throw it aside, try something else. In spite of all that messiness and ambient chaos, I would also say in the midst of that there is potential for learning about yourself; taking note of what didn’t go well, what can I learn from that? Or that was really cool, I’d like to build on that experience and do more of it. Those are all good ways of both learning about yourself and constructing yourself. Those two things can go hand-in-hand. Self-knowledge, self-realization, and self-scrutiny can happen, albeit in an often messy and unpredictable way for undergraduates. It’s also illusory for us to think at age 22 we can put on our business clothes and go to work and stop with all that frivolous self-examination. I would urge that acquiring knowledge about yourself, understanding yourself is a lifelong task.

Q. There is the idea that you should learn something new every day. A lot of people who go through college come to understand this, while some think after graduation, I’m done with that. Early in the book, you talk about Socrates’ defense of himself when accused of corrupting students by teaching them in saying: I know what I don’t know, which is why I ask questions.

It seems to me the beginning of wisdom of any kind, including knowledge of ourselves, is acknowledgment of the infirmity of our beliefs and the paucity of our knowledge. — Mitchell S. Green

A. That’s very important insight on his part. That’s something I would be inclined to yell from the rooftops, in the sense that one big barrier to achieving anything in the direction of self-knowledge is hubris, thinking that we do know, often confusing our confidence in our opinions with thinking that confidence is an indication of my degree of correctness. We feel sure, and take that surety itself to be evidence of the truth of what we think. Socrates is right to say that’s a cognitive error, that’s fallacious reasoning. We should ask ourselves: Do I know what I take myself to know? It seems to me the beginning of wisdom of any kind, including knowledge of ourselves, is acknowledgment of the infirmity of our beliefs and the paucity of our knowledge; the fact that opinions we have might just be opinions. It’s always astonishing to me the disparity between the confidence with which people express their opinions, on one hand, and the negligible ability they have to back them up, especially those opinions that go beyond just whether they’re hungry or prefer chocolate over vanilla. Those are things over which you can probably have pretty confident opinions. But when it comes to politics or science, history or human psychology, it’s surprising to me just how gullible people are, not because they believe what other people say, so to speak, but rather they believe what they themselves say. They tend to just say: Here is what I think. It seems obvious to me and I’m not willing to even consider skeptical objections to my position.

Q. You also bring into the fold the theory of adaptive unconscious – that we observe and pick up information but we don’t realize it at the time. How much does that feed into people thinking that they know themselves better than they do and know more than they think they do?

A. It’s huge. There’s a chapter in the book on classical psychoanalysis and Freud. I argue that the Freudian legacy is a broken one, in the sense that while his work is incredibly interesting – he made a lot of provocative and ingenious claims interesting – surprisingly few of them have been borne out with empirical evidence. This is a less controversial view than it was in the past. Experimental psychologists in the 1970s and 80s began to ask how many of those Freudian claims about the unconscious can be established in a rigorous, experimental way? The theory of the adaptive unconscious is an attempt to do that; to find out how much of the unconscious mind that Freud posited is real, and what is it like. One of the main findings is that the unconscious mind is not quite as bound up, obsessed with, sexuality and violence as posited by Freud. It’s still a very powerful system, but not necessarily a thing to be kept at bay in the way psychoanalysis would have said. According to Freud, a great deal with the unconscious poses a constant threat to the well-functioning of civilized society, whereas for people like Tim Wilson, Tanya Chartrand, Daniel Gilbert, Joseph LeDoux, Paul Ekman, and many others, we’ve got a view that says that in many ways having an adaptive unconsciousness is a useful thing, an outsourcing of lots of cognition. It allows us to process information, interpret it, without having to consciously, painstakingly, and deliberately calculate things. It’s really good in many ways that we have adaptive unconscious. On the other hand, it tends to predispose us, for example, to things like prejudice. Today there is a discussion about so-called implicit bias, which has taught us that because we grew up watching Hollywood movies where protagonist heroes were white or male, or both; saw stereotypes in advertising that have been promulgated – that experience, even if I have never had a consciously bigoted, racist, or sexist thought in my life, can still cause me to make choices that are biased. That’s a part of the message on the theory of adaptive unconscious we would want to take very seriously and be worried about, because it can affect our choices in ways that we’re not aware of.

Q. With all of this we’ve discussed, what kind of person would know themselves well?

A. Knowing oneself well would, I suspect, be a multi-faceted affair, only one part of which would have to do with introspection as that notion is commonly understood. One of these facets involves acknowledging your limitations, “owning them” as my Department of Philosophy colleague Heather Battaly would put it. Those limitations can be cognitive – my lousy memory that distorts information, my tendency to sugarcoat any bad news I may happen to receive? Take the example of a professor reading student evaluations. It’s easy to forget the negative ones and remember the positive ones – a case of “confirmation bias,” as that term is used in psychology. Knowing that I tend to do that, if that’s what I tend to do, allows me to take a second look, as painful as it might be. Again, am I overly critical of others? Do I tend to look at the glass as overly half full or overly half empty? Those are all limitations of the emotional kind, or at least have an important affective dimension. I suspect a person who knows herself well knows how to spot the characteristic ways in which she “spins” or otherwise distorts positive or negative information, and can then step back from such reactions, rather than taking them as the last word.

I’d also go back to empathy, knowing how to see things from another person’s point of view. It is not guaranteed to, but is often apt to allow me to see myself more effectively, too. If I can to some extent put myself into your shoes, then I also have the chance to be able to see myself through your eyes and that might get me to realize things difficult to see from the first-person perspective. Empathizing with others who know me might, for instance, help to understand why they sometimes find me overbearing, cloying, or quick to judge.

Q. What would someone gain in self-knowledge by listening to someone appraising them and speaking to them about how well they knew them? How does that dynamic help?

A. It can help, but it also can be shocking. Experiments have suggested other people’s assessments of an individual can often be very out of line with that person’s self-assessment. It’s not clear those other person’s assessments are less accurate – in some cases they’re more accurate – as determined by relatively well-established objective psychological assessments. Third-person assessments can be both difficult to swallow – bitter medicine – and also extremely valuable. Because they’re difficult to swallow, I would suggest taking them in small doses. But they can help us to learn about ourselves such things as that we can be unaccountably solicitous, or petty, or prone to one-up others, or thick-skinned. I’ve sometimes found myself thinking while speaking to someone, “If you could hear yourself talking right now, you might come to realize …” Humblebragging is a case in point, in which someone is ostensibly complaining about a problem, but the subtext of what they’re saying might be self-promoting as well.

All this has implications for those of us who teach. At the end of the semester I encourage my graduate assistants to read course evaluations; not to read them all at once, but instead try to take one suggestion from those evaluations that they can work on going into the next semester. I try to do the same. I would not, however, expect there ever to be a point at which one could say, “Ah! Now I fully know myself.” Instead, this is more likely a process that we can pursue, and continue to benefit from, our entire lives.

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6.2 Self and Identity

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Apply the dilemma of persistence to self and identity.
• Outline Western and Eastern theological views of self.
• Describe secular views of the self.
• Describe the mind-body problem.

Today, some might think that atomism and Aristotle’s teleological view have evolved into a theory of cells that resolves the acorn-oak tree identity problem. The purpose, or ergon, of both the acorn and the oak tree are present in the zygote, the cell that forms when male and female sex cells combine. This zygote cell contains the genetic material, or the instructions, for how the organism will develop to carry out its intended purpose.

But not all identity problems are so easily solved today. What if the author of this chapter lived in a house as a child, and years later, after traveling in the highly glamorous life that comes with being a philosopher, returned to find the house had burned down and been rebuilt exactly as it had been. Is it the same home? The generic questions that center on how we should understand the tension between identity and persistence include:

• Can a thing change without losing its identity?
• If so, how much change can occur without a loss of identity for the thing itself?

This section begins to broach these questions of identity and self.

The Ship of Theseus

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a wooden ship owned by the hero Theseus. Within months of launching, the need to replace decking would be evident. The salt content of sea water is highly corrosive. Accidents can also happen. Within a common version of the thought experiment, the span of one thousand years is supposed. Throughout the span, it is supposed that the entire decking and wooden content of the ship will have been replaced. The name of the ship remains constant. But given the complete change of materials over the assumed time span, in what sense can we assert that the ship is the same ship? We are tempted to conceptualize identity in terms of persistence, but the Ship of Theseus challenges the commonly held intuition regarding how to make sense of identity.

Similarly, as our bodies develop from zygote to adult, cells die and are replaced using new building materials we obtain though food, water, and our environment. Given this, are we the same being as we were 10 or 20 years ago? How can we identify what defines ourselves? What is our essence? This section examines answers proposed by secular and religious systems of belief.

Write Like a Philosopher

Watch the video “ Metaphysics: Ship of Theseus ” in the series Wi-Phi Philosophy . You will find five possible solutions for making sense of the thought experiment. Pick one solution and explain why the chosen solution is the most salient. Can you explain how the strengths outweigh the stated objections—without ignoring the objections?

Judeo-Christian Views of Self

The common view concerning identity in Judeo-Christian as well as other spiritual traditions is that the self is a soul. In Western thought, the origin of this view can be traced to Plato and his theory of forms. This soul as the real self solves the ship of Theseus dilemma, as the soul continuously exists from zygote or infant and is not replaced by basic building materials. The soul provides permanence and even persists into the afterlife.

Much of the Christian perspective on soul and identity rested on Aristotle’s theory of being, as a result of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas . Aquinas, a medieval philosopher, followed the Aristotelian composite of form and matter but modified the concept to fit within a Christianized cosmology. Drawing upon portions of Aristotle’s works reintroduced to the West as a result of the Crusades, Aquinas offered an alternative philosophical model to the largely Platonic Christian view that was dominant in his day. From an intellectual historical perspective, the reintroduction of the Aristotelian perspective into Western thought owes much to the thought of Aquinas.

In Being and Essence , Aquinas noted that there was a type of existence that was necessary and uncaused and a type of being that was contingent and was therefore dependent upon the former to be brought into existence. While the concept of a first cause or unmoved mover was present within Aristotle’s works, Aquinas identified the Christian idea of God as the “unmoved mover.” God, as necessary being, was understood as the cause of contingent being. God, as the unmoved mover, as the essence from which other contingent beings derived existence, also determined the nature and purpose driving all contingent beings. In addition, God was conceived of as a being beyond change, as perfection realized. Using Aristotelian terms, we could say that God as Being lacked potentiality and was best thought of as that being that attained complete actuality or perfection—in other words, necessary being.

God, as the ultimate Good and Truth, will typically be understood as assigning purpose to the self. The cosmology involved is typically teleological—in other words, there is a design and order and ultimately an end to the story (the eschaton ). Members of this tradition will assert that the Divine is personal and caring and that God has entered the narrative of our history to realize God’s purpose through humanity. With some doctrinal exception, if the self lives the good life (a life according to God’s will), then the possibility of sharing eternity with the Divine is promised.

Think Like a Philosopher

Watch this discussion with Timothy Pawl on the question of eternal life, part of the PBS series Closer to the Truth , “ Imagining Eternal Life ”.

Is eternal life an appealing prospect? If change is not possible within heaven, then heaven (the final resting place for immortal souls) should be outside of time. What exactly would existence within an eternal now be like? In the video, Pawl claimed that time has to be present within eternity. He argued that there must be movement from potentiality to actuality. How can that happen in an eternity?

Hindu and Buddhist Views of Self

Within Hindu traditions, atman is the term associated with the self. The term, with its roots in ancient Sanskrit, is typically translated as the eternal self, spirit, essence, soul, and breath (Rudy, 2019). Western faith traditions speak of an individual soul and its movement toward the Divine. That is, a strong principle of individuation is applied to the soul. A soul is born, and from that time forward, the soul is eternal. Hinduism, on the other hand, frames atman as eternal; atman has always been. Although atman is eternal, atman is reincarnated. The spiritual goal is to “know atman” such that liberation from reincarnation ( moksha ) occurs.

Hindu traditions vary in the meaning of brahman . Some will speak of a force supporting all things, while other traditions might invoke specific deities as manifestations of brahman . Escaping the cycle of reincarnation requires the individual to realize that atman is brahman and to live well or in accordance with dharma , observing the code of conduct as prescribed by scripture, and karma , actions and deeds. Union of the atman with brahman can be reach though yoga, meditation, rituals, and other practices.

Buddha rejected the concept of brahman and proposed an alternate view of the world and the path to liberation. The next sections consider the interaction between the concepts of Atman (the self) and Brahman (reality).

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination

Buddhist philosophy rejects the concept of an eternal soul. The doctrine of dependent origination , a central tenet within Buddhism, is built on the claim that there is a causal link between events in the past, the present, and the future. What we did in the past is part of what happened previously and is part of what will be.

The doctrine of dependent origination (also known as interdependent arising) is the starting point for Buddhist cosmology. The doctrine here asserts that not only are all people joined, but all phenomena are joined with all other phenomena. All things are caused by all other things, and in turn, all things are dependent upon other things. Being is a nexus of interdependencies. There is no first cause or prime mover in this system. There is no self—at least in the Western sense of self—in this system (O’Brien 2019a).

The Buddhist Doctrine of No Self ( Anatman )

One of many distinct features of Buddhism is the notion of anatman as the denial of the self. What is being denied here is the sense of self expressed through metaphysical terms such as substance or universal being. Western traditions want to assert an autonomous being who is strongly individuated from other beings. Within Buddhism, the “me” is ephemeral.

Listen to the podcast “ Graham Priest on Buddhism and Philosophy ” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Suffering and Liberation

Within Buddhism, there are four noble truths that are used to guide the self toward liberation. An often-quoted sentiment from Buddhism is the first of the four noble truths . The first noble truth states that “life is suffering” ( dukkha ).

But there are different types of suffering that need to be addressed in order to understand more fully how suffering is being used here. The first meaning ( dukkha-dukkha ) is commensurate with the ordinary use of suffering as pain. This sort of suffering can be experienced physically and/or emotionally. A metaphysical sense of dukkha is viparinama-dukkha . Suffering in this sense relates to the impermanence of all objects. It is our tendency to impose permanence upon that which by nature is not, or our craving for ontological persistence, that best captures this sense of dukkha. Finally, there is samkhara-dukkha , or suffering brought about through the interdependency of all things.

Building on an understanding of “suffering” informed only by the first sense, some characterize Buddhism as “life is suffering; suffering is caused by greed; suffering ends when we stop being greedy; the way to do that is to follow something called the Eightfold Path” (O’Brien 2019b). A more accurate understanding of dukkha within this context must include all three senses of suffering.

The second of the noble truths is that the cause of suffering is our thirst or craving ( tanha ) for things that lack the ability to satisfy our craving. We attach our self to material things, concepts, ideas, and so on. This attachment, although born of a desire to fulfill our internal cravings, only heightens the craving. The problem is that attachment separates the self from the other. Through our attachments, we lose sight of the impermanence not only of the self but of all things.

The third noble truth teaches that the way to awakening ( nirvana ) is through a letting go of the cravings. Letting go of the cravings entails the cessation of suffering ( dukkha ).

The fourth truth is founded in the realization that living a good life requires doing, not just thinking. By living in accordance with the Eightfold Path, a person may live such that “every action of body, mind, and speech” are geared toward the promotion of dharma.

Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths

Part of the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Ideas , this clip is narrated by Steven Fry and scripted by Nigel Warburton.

The Five Aggregates

How might the self ( atman ) experience the world and follow a path toward liberation? Buddhist philosophy posits five aggregates ( skandhas ), which are the thoughtful and iterative processes, through which the self interacts with the world.

• Form ( rupa ): the aggregate of matter, or the body.
• Sensation ( vedana ): emotional and physical feelings.
• Perception ( samjna ): thinking, the processing of sense data; “knowledge that puts together.”
• Mental formation ( samskara ): how thoughts are processed into habits, predispositions, moods, volitions, biases, interests, etc. The fourth skandhas is related to karma, as much of our actions flow from these elements.
• Consciousness ( vijnana ): awareness and sensitivity concerning a thing that does not include conceptualization.

Although the self uses the aggregates, the self is not thought of as a static and enduring substance underlying the processes. These aggregates are collections that are very much subject to change in an interdependent world.

Secular Notions of Self

In theology, continuity of the self is achieved through the soul. Secular scholars reject this idea, defining self in different ways, some of which are explored in the next sections.

Bundle Theory

One of the first and most influential scholars in the Western tradition to propose a secular concept of self was Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Hume formed his thoughts in response to empiricist thinkers’ views on substance and knowledge. British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) offered a definition of substance in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Book XXIII, Locke described substance as “a something, I know not what.” He asserted that although we cannot know exactly what substance is, we can reason from experience that there must be a substance “standing under or upholding” the qualities that exist within a thing itself. The meaning of substance is taken from the Latin substantia , or “that which supports.”

If we return to the acorn and oak example, the reality of what it means to be an oak is rooted in the ultimate reality of what it means to be an oak tree. The ultimate reality, like the oak’s root system, stands beneath every particular instance of an oak tree. While not every tree is exactly the same, all oak trees do share a something, a shared whatness, that makes an oak an oak. Philosophers call this whatness that is shared among oaks a substance.

Arguments against a static and enduring substance ensued. David Hume’s answer to the related question of “What is the self?” illustrates how a singular thing may not require an equally singular substance. According to Hume, the self was not a Platonic form or an Aristotelian composite of matter and form. Hume articulated the self as a changing bundle of perceptions. In his Treatise of Human Nature (Book 1, Part IV), Hume described the self as “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Hume noted that what has been mistaken for a static and enduring self was nothing more than a constantly changing set of impressions that were tied together through their resemblance to one another, the order or predictable pattern (succession) of the impressions, and the appearance of causation lent through the resemblance and succession. The continuity we experience was not due to an enduring self but due to the mind’s ability to act as a sort of theater: “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume 1739, 252).

Which theories of self—and substance—should we accept? The Greek theories of substance and the theological theories of a soul offer advantages. Substance allows us to explain what we observe. For example, an apple, through its substance, allows us to make sense of the qualities of color, taste, the nearness of the object, etc. Without a substance, it could be objected that the qualities are merely unintelligible and unrelated qualities without a reference frame. But bundle theory allows us to make sense of a thing without presupposing a mythical form, or “something I know not what!” Yet, without the mythical form of a soul, how do we explain our own identities?

Anthropological Views

Anthropological views of the self question the cultural and social constructs upon which views of the self are erected. For example, within Western thought, it is supposed that the self is distinct from the “other.” In fact, throughout this section, we have assumed the need for a separate and distinct self and have used a principle of continuity based on the assumption that a self must persist over time. Yet, non-Western cultures blur or negate this distinction. The African notion of ubuntu , for example, posits a humanity that cannot be divided. The Nguni proverb that best describes this concept is “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” sometimes translated as “a person is a person through other persons” (Gade 2011). The word ubuntu is from the Zulu language, but cultures from southern Africa to Tanzania, Kenya, and Democratic Republic of the Congo all have words for this concept. Anthropological approaches attempt to make clear how the self and the culture share in making meaning.

The Mind as Self

Many philosophers, Western and non-Western, have equated the self to the mind. But what is the mind? A monist response is the mind is the brain. Yet, if the mind is the brain, a purely biological entity, then how do we explain consciousness? Moreover, if we take the position that the mind is immaterial but the body is material, we are left with the question of how two very different types of things can causally affect the other. The question of “How do the two nonidentical and dissimilar entities experience a causal relationship?” is known as the mind-body problem. This section explores some alternative philosophical responses to these questions.

Physicalism

Reducing the mind to the brain seems intuitive given advances in neuroscience and other related sciences that deepen our understanding of cognition. As a doctrine, physicalism is committed to the assumption that everything is physical. Exactly how to define the physical is a matter of contention. Driving this view is the assertion that nothing that is nonphysical has physical effects.

Listen to the podcast “ David Papineau on Physicalism ” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Focus on the thought experiment concerning what Mary knows. Here is a summary of the thought experiment:

Mary is a scientist and specializes in the neurophysiology of color. Strangely, her world has black, white, and shades of gray but lacks color (weird, but go with it!). Due to her expertise, she knows every physical fact concerning colors. What if Mary found herself in a room in which color as we experience it is present? Would she learn anything? A physicalist must respond “no”! Do you agree? How would you respond?

John Locke and Identity

In place of the biological, Locke defined identity as the continuity lent through what we refer to as consciousness. His approach is often referred to as the psychological continuity approach, as our memories and our ability to reflect upon our memories constitute identity for Locke. In his Essay on Human Understanding , Locke (as cited by Gordon-Roth 2019) observed, “We must consider what Person stands for . . . which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.” He offered a thought experiment to illustrate his point. Imagine a prince and cobbler whose memories (we might say consciousness) were swapped. The notion is far-fetched, but if this were to happen, we would assert that the prince was now the cobbler and the cobbler was now the prince. Therefore, what individuates us cannot be the body (or the biological).

John Locke on Personal Identity

Part of the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Ideas , this clip is narrated by Gillian Anderson and scripted by Nigel Warburton.

The Problem of Consciousness

Christof Koch (2018) has said that “consciousness is everything you experience.” Koch offered examples, such as “a tune stuck in your head,” the “throbbing pain from a toothache,” and “a parent’s love for a child” to illustrate the experience of consciousness. Our first-person experiences are what we think of intuitively when we try to describe what consciousness is. If we were to focus on the throbbing pain of a toothache as listed above, we can see that there is the experiencing of the toothache. Curiously, there is also the experiencing of the experiencing of the toothache. Introspection and theorizing built upon first-person inspections affords vivid and moving accounts of the things experienced, referred to as qualia .

An optimal accounting of consciousness, however, should not only explain what consciousness is but should also offer an explanation concerning how consciousness came to be and why consciousness is present. What difference or differences does consciousness introduce?

Listen to the podcast “ Ted Honderich on What It Is to Be Conscious ,” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Rene Descartes and Dualism

Dualism , as the name suggests, attempts to account for the mind through the introduction of two entities. The dualist split was addressed earlier in the discussion of substance. Plato argued for the reality of immaterial forms but admitted another type of thing—the material. Aristotle disagreed with his teacher Plato and insisted on the location of the immaterial within the material realm. How might the mind and consciousness be explained through dualism?

Mind Body Dualism

A substance dualist, in reference to the mind problem, asserts that there are two fundamental and irreducible realities that are needed to fully explain the self. The mind is nonidentical to the body, and the body is nonidentical to the mind. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) offered a very influential version of substance dualism in his 1641 work Meditations on First Philosophy. In that work, Descartes referred to the mind as a thinking thing ( res cogitans ) and the body as an extended nonthinking thing ( res extensa ). Descartes associated identity with the thinking thing. He introduced a model in which the self and the mind were eternal.

Behaviorism

There is a response that rejects the idea of an independent mind. Within this approach, what is important is not mental states or the existence of a mind as a sort of central processor, but activity that can be translated into statements concerning observable behavior (Palmer 2016, 122). As within most philosophical perspectives, there are many different “takes” on the most correct understanding. Behaviorism is no exception. The “hard” behaviorist asserts that there are no mental states. You might consider this perspective the purist or “die-hard” perspective. The “soft” behaviorist, the moderate position, does not deny the possibility of minds and mental events but believes that theorizing concerning human activity should be based on behavior.

Before dismissing the view, pause and consider the plausibility of the position. Do we ever really know another’s mind? There is some validity to the notion that we ought to rely on behavior when trying to know or to make sense of the “other.” But if you have a toothache, and you experience myself being aware of the qualia associated with a toothache (e.g., pain, swelling, irritability, etc.), are these sensations more than activities? What of the experience that accompanies the experience?

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Supplement to Self-Knowledge

Knowledge of the self.

The main entry focused on knowledge of one’s own mental states. Yet “self-knowledge” can also be used to refer to knowledge of the self and its nature. Issues about knowledge of the self include: (1) how it is that one distinguishes oneself from others, as the object of a self-attribution; (2) whether self-awareness yields a grasp of the material or non-material nature of the self; (3) whether self-awareness yields a grasp of one’s personal identity over time; and (4) what sort of self-understanding is required for rational or free agency. These issues are closely connected with referential semantics, the mind-body problem, the metaphysics of personal identity, and moral psychology, respectively. This section briefly sketches some prominent views about knowledge of the self arising from debates in these areas.

Self-Identification

In self-attributing a mental state, I recognize the state as mine in some sense, and my self-attribution partially consists in a reference to myself. This reference is reflexive, in that I think of myself as myself and not, e.g., as BG, or as the shortest person in the room. Nozick (1981) underscores the significance of being able to thus refer to oneself: “To be an I, a self, is to have the capacity for reflexive self-reference”. This raises the question: how is it that I identify myself, and distinguish myself from others?

Consider: seeing a flushed red face on film, I might wonder whether the face I see is mine or my identical twin’s, and therefore I may say, “someone is embarrassed, but is it me?” Evans (1982) argues that for some kinds of self-attributions, such a question will not arise. Adopting a term from Shoemaker (1968), he describes self-attributions of the relevant type as “immune to error through misidentification”.

None of the following utterances appears to make sense when the first component expresses knowledge gained in the appropriate way: “Someone’s legs are crossed, but is it my legs that are crossed?”; “Someone is hot and sticky, but is it I who am hot and sticky?”; “Someone is being pushed, but is it I who am being pushed?” (Evans 1982: 220–1)

Evans believes that my immunity to error through misidentification, in such cases, shows that I identify myself directly in these cases. If in identifying myself as the one who is hot and sticky, I used some information beyond the information involved in determining that someone is hot and sticky, then I could possibly be justified in believing that someone was hot and sticky but mistaken in thinking that it was me. Because that scenario doesn’t “make sense”, he thinks, I must recognize myself directly, without any identifying information.

Others deny that self-identification is direct, claiming instead that it occurs by way of some sort of description. For instance, Rovane argues that, in self-reference, the way one thinks of oneself can be analyzed as “the series of psychologically related intentional episodes to which this one [the current intentional episode] belongs” (Rovane 1993: 86). While Rovane sees intentional states as the anchor to self-reference, Howell (2006) provides an alternative descriptive picture, in which the self is identified through awareness of an occurrent sensation.

Proponents of descriptive accounts claim that such accounts can accommodate the fact that we don’t actually err about who it is that is hot and sticky. For instance, Rovane claims that it is unsurprising that we are reliable self-identifiers, given that understanding ourselves and our place in the world is required for genuine agency. (We return to the issue of agency below.) Still, there is an important epistemic disagreement between those, like Evans, who claim that self-reference is “identification-free”, and those who claim that we refer to ourselves via a description. The former maintain that there is, in a real sense, no room for error about who is hot and sticky, whereas the latter will say that while such errors are possible, we simply avoid them.

Notably, both “direct reference” and descriptive accounts capture the reflexivity of first-person reference. (For descriptive accounts, this reflexivity lies in the fact that “this one” refers to the very thought of which it is a part.) They thereby fit with the widely accepted belief that self-reference in the distinctively first-person mode is essentially indexical. (See Castañeda 1966; Perry 1979; Lewis 1979.) The dispute between Evans and Rovane is then, in part, a disagreement as to whether the indexical term “I” refers to the self directly, as Evans believes, or instead refers via an implicit indexical of another sort, e.g., “this” or “here”. In general, one’s epistemology of self-identification will depend on what sort of indexical one considers most fundamental, in self-reference.

A final issue concerns the relation between self-awareness and awareness of other persons. On the leading traditional view of this relation, one first grasps that one bears psychological properties, and reasons by analogy to the conclusion that other creatures do as well. (This is the “argument from analogy” to the existence of other minds, articulated by J.S. Mill (1865).) Some recent philosophers have challenged this traditional view, contending that self-awareness is logically dependent on at least a conceptual grasp of other persons. For instance, here is Bermúdez:

[A] subject’s recognition that he is distinct from the environment in virtue of being a psychological subject depends on his ability to identify himself as a psychological subject within a contrast space of other psychological subjects. (Bermúdez 1998: 274)

Materialism and Dualism

In a much-criticized piece of reasoning, Descartes (1641/1984) contrasts the certainty afforded by introspection with the dubitability of knowledge of the physical, to show that introspective objects (thoughts) are ontologically distinct from physical things. This strategy for supporting dualism has few current proponents. Commentators still adhere to the basic criticism lodged by Arnauld (1641/1984): that a purely epistemic premise cannot support an ontological conclusion. It is clearly possible to be (relatively) certain that there is water in the tub, while doubting that there is H 2 O in the tub; yet water is identical to H 2 O. Many contemporary materialists are similarly concerned to restrict the deliverances of introspection, arguing that while mental states appear, to introspection, to be non-physical, the grasp which introspection affords is partial at best, and systematically misleading at worst.

However, there are materialists who take the opposite tack: rather than rejecting self-reflection as a guide to ontology, they claim that some mental states appear physical. These arguments employ three types of self-reflection: introspective awareness of sensations, introspective awareness of perceptual states, and proprioceptive awareness of bodily states. Proprioception is the putatively direct, non-perceptual awareness of one’s bodily state; it is what allows you to know that your arm is raised “from the inside”, that is, without looking at your arm.

The argument for materialism from proprioceptive awareness, due to Brewer (1995), is as follows. Proprioception is epistemically on a par with introspective knowledge, in that (i) it is a species of direct, non-inferential awareness, and (ii) it is “immune to error through misidentification of the first-person pronoun” in Shoemaker’s sense.

Presumably, introspective awareness of mental states justifies the claim that we are mental beings, by virtue of its epistemic character. But proprioceptive awareness of physical states shares this epistemic character; so we are equally justified in the claim that we are physical beings. This argument falls short of disproving dualism, for it leaves open the question how our mental nature is related to our physical nature.

Brewer (1995) also builds an alternative argument along these lines, which seeks to rule out dualism by focusing on introspective awareness of sensations. This argument takes introspective awareness of sensations as intrinsically mental and, at the same time, intrinsically physical. Like the previous argument, it claims that awareness of physical properties is epistemologically equivalent to awareness of mental properties. But it goes further, contending that introspection provides an awareness of physical and mental properties, in sensations, as inextricable. It thus tries to block the possibility of distinctness between the mental subject and the physical subject.

A final argument to show that self-knowledge supports materialism, advanced by Cassam (1997), uses a somewhat different approach. Rather than relying on the spatial quality of bodily sensations or proprioception, this argument exploits one’s awareness of one’s own perceptual states. It says that in becoming aware of our own perceptual states and taking these states to represent a physical world, we are driven to conceive of ourselves as physical objects.

Broadly Cartesian objections to introspection-based arguments for materialism illuminate possible ways that the ontological conclusion can be flawed, consistent with the introspective evidence. For instance, the apparent proprioceptive awareness of the position of one’s limbs could be nonveridical: an amputee might have a similar sense that her legs are crossed, even if she doesn’t, in fact, have any legs. (This does not violate Evans’ claim that such judgments are immune to error through misidentification: the error here is not one of misidentifying the subject, but instead of falsely ascribing a property to the self.) A similar argument could be made against the claim that sensations are intrinsically spatial, and that perceptual states represent a physical world. Even if one’s sensations portray oneself as spatially extended, the idea that one is non-extended (immaterial) is logically consistent with the presence of those sensations or (apparent) perceptual states. Proponents of these arguments for materialism could respond by claiming either that knowledge of oneself as a mental thing is less certain than this alleged contrast implies, or that knowledge of oneself as a physical thing is more certain than it implies.

Personal Identity

The ontological views described in the previous subsection have no immediate consequences for personal identity. For it may be that the criteria of persistence through time, for persons, differ from the criteria of persistence for (other) material objects even if, as materialists contend, a person at a time is necessarily constituted by some matter or other. (See the entry on personal identity .) Knowledge of mental states is not usually thought to provide any special insight into one’s persistence through time, since it is typically assumed that one enjoys privileged access only to one’s current states. In particular, the individual has no special insight into whether her current apparent memories are veridical, and so has no special way to determine whether a particular prior experience was hers. Since views about first-person access played a greater part in shaping theories of personal identity during the modern period than they do today, my brief remarks here will focus on that period.

As mentioned above, Descartes’ meditator uses the proposition that there is thinking occurring, to which she purportedly has immediate (indubitable) introspective access, to establish her own existence with certainty. But this does not allow the meditator to grasp a persisting self. For Descartes, the self, like every other substance, is not directly apprehended; it is understood only through its properties.

Hume also claims that we never directly apprehend the self. Unlike Descartes, he concludes from this that there is no substantial self. In a famous passage, Hume uses introspective awareness to show that the self is a non-substantial “bundle” of perceptions.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself , and may truly be said not to exist. (Hume 1739–40/1978: 252)

Locke agrees that self-reflection is important to the nature of the self. But while Descartes takes self-reflection to reveal that nature, Locke seems to suggest that one’s self-conception constitutes the self.

[A person is] a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and considers itself as itself , the same thinking thing in different times and places. (Locke 1689/1975: II.27.ix, my emphasis).

On some interpretations, what it is for an experience or action to belong to me (a Lockean person) is for me to appropriate it, or to impute it to myself (Winkler 1991). This interpretation underscores the importance of Locke’s claim that “person” is a forensic term.

“Person”…is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,- whereby it becomes concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present. (Locke 1689/1975: II.27.xxvi)

Locke’s view of the self is usually considered less deflationary than Hume’s view. But these philosophers agree that, in a very real sense, the nature of the self is bound up with one’s reflections on one’s states. For Hume, this means that the self is nothing over and above a constantly varying bundle of experiences. For Locke, it means that the self is defined by what we do—or, perhaps, can —self-attribute, through recollection and/or appropriation.

Kant repudiates the basic strategy shared by Locke and Hume, for he denies that self-awareness reveals objective facts about personal identity. He concurs with Descartes and Hume that we never directly apprehend the self (this fact is what he calls “the systematic elusiveness of the ‘I’”). And while he holds that we cannot avoid thinking of ourselves as persisting, unitary beings, he attributes this self-conception to necessary requirements for thought which do not directly support substantive ontological conclusions about the nature of the self.

A couple of contemporary views about personal identity are noteworthy in this context. Galen Strawson’s (1997) view does not explicitly draw on introspective reflection, but it implies that the limits of a subject correspond to the limits of what could be introspectively grasped, at a moment. A subject is defined by (indeed, identified with) a period of experience which is “experientially unitary”. Since in humans an appropriately unified experience lasts no more than about three seconds, subjects are in fact very short-lived. Dainton and Bayne (2005) present a related view, which tries to avoid the result that subjects are very short-lived. On this view, personal identity is tied to (the capacity for) experiential continuity rather than experiential unity. But unlike Strawson’s view, the continuity view is vulnerable to familiar objections concerning the possibility of branching streams of consciousness or “fission”.

The role of self-understanding in agency is a complex topic, and we can only briefly examine some leading positions on the issue here. Knowledge of one’s relatively stable traits and dispositions—one’s character—is believed, by some, to be crucial for the exercise of free agency. For instance, Taylor claims that self-reflection is imperative for being human (where this means, in part, being capable of agency),

[T]he human animal not only finds himself impelled from time to time to interpret himself and his goals, but … he is always already in some interpretation, constituted as human by this fact. (Taylor 1985: 75)

In a somewhat different vein, Frankfurt maintains that the capacity to rationally evaluate one’s desires is required for freedom of the will. This rational evaluation issues in second-order desires, that is, desires concerning which desires to have or to act upon.

[N]o animal other than man … appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (Frankfurt 1971: 7) It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will. (1971: 14)

These claims by Taylor and Frankfurt go beyond the merely pragmatic observation that a reasonable degree of self-understanding is required for effective action. Instead, they assert that what is distinctive about the exercise of a free will, in determining one’s course of action, is that this exercise involves the capacity to critically reflect on one’s basic goals and desires. (For a related recent view, see Bilgrami 2006.)

While Taylor, Frankfurt, and Bilgrami stress that a broad self-understanding is crucial for responsible agency, others claim that particular actions require some awareness of one’s intentions in performing that action. For instance, Searle (1983) argues that intentions are always self-referential, in that when one performs an action X intentionally, the relevant intention to act includes an intention to X so as to fulfill that intention itself. Anscombe (1981) similarly emphasizes the significance of one’s awareness of intentions in acting. In fact, on her view thoughts about actions, intentions, postures, etc. have a special status: it is only thoughts about such aspects of the self that are

unmediated, non-observational, and also are descriptions (e.g., “standing”) which are directly verifiable or falsifiable about the person. (Anscombe 1981: 35)

And she also believes that action requires some awareness of these features of oneself. For criticism of the idea that action requires awareness of intention, see Cunning (1999).

One contemporary theory of practical reasoning, offered by Velleman (1989), casts knowledge of the self in a particularly important role. Velleman notes that we strongly desire to understand ourselves and, in particular, to understand our reasons for acting. On his view, this desire leads us to try to discern our action-motivating desires and beliefs. (He calls this attempt to gain self-awareness “reflective theoretical reasoning”.) But strikingly, Velleman thinks that the desire for self-understanding also leads us to model our actions on our predictions about how we will act. In this way, our expectations as to how we will act are themselves intentions to act. “Intentions to act … are the expectations of acting that issue from reflective theoretical reasoning” (Velleman 1989: 98). Thus, Velleman can say that our desire to understand what we are doing, at the moment we are doing it, is usually satisfied, since our predictions about how we will act are themselves intentions to act, and hence our beliefs about what we will do are “self-fulfilling expectations”.

Finally, there is an emerging literature which examine the effect of societal influences on subjects’ self-understanding and, thereby, on agency. See, e.g., Neisser and Jopling 1997 and Meyers 2002.

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17 The Narrative Self

Marya Schechtman, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago.

• Published: 02 May 2011
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This article examines the narrative approach to self found in philosophy and related disciplines. The strongest versions of the narrative approach hold that both a person's sense of self and a person's life are narrative in structure, and this is called the hermeneutical narrative theory. This article provides a provisional picture of the content of the narrative approach and considers some important objections that have been raised to the narrative approach. It defends the view that the self constitutes itself in narrative and argues for something less than the hermeneutical view insofar as the narrative is less agency-oriented and without an overarching thematic unity.

If the person sitting next to you on a long plane trip suddenly launches into the story of his life you may be amused, or annoyed, or simply glad for the distraction. Whatever your reaction, you are unlikely to be surprised that he has a story to tell. The idea that our lives are in some sense story‐like runs deep in our everyday thought. This idea has also been widely explored in more formal academic studies of the self. While there is broad (but by no means universal) assent to the view that the self is narrative in form, there is little consensus on just what this means or what implications it has.

This chapter investigates the narrative approach to self found in philosophy and related disciplines. The first section provides a provisional picture of the content of the narrative approach. This approach is not monolithic, but includes views that use different conceptions of narrative in different ways to illuminate different aspects of the self. This section provides overviews of some of these views. The second section highlights significant commonalities and differences among the views described in section 1, seeking to get clear both on the wide range of narrative views and on the commonalities that define the approach as a whole. The third section considers some important objections that have been raised to the narrative approach and what the responses to these objections reveal about this approach. Each section will provide further insight into the fundamental claims of the narrative approach as well as uncovering outstanding questions and pointing to directions for future development.

1. The Views

Narrative views of the self all draw some kind of link between narrative and selfhood, but the links drawn vary widely. In this section we consider some of the most commonly held and important conceptions of the connection between narrative and self. I divide these into two basic categories, but this is a somewhat tentative distinction. As the discussion develops we will see that there are important differences between views within the same categories and important similarities that cross categorical boundaries. It is also important to be clear that the views described here do not exhaust the space of existing narrative views. This section should thus be taken as providing an overall feel for the range of claims that are made about the relation between narrative and self rather than as providing a firm and complete taxonomy of existing narrative views.

Selves are constituted by narratives

Perhaps the most basic kind of narrative view, and the one that draws the strongest connection between narrative and self, holds that selves are inherently narrative entities. There are usually two elements of this claim. One is that our sense of self must be narrative, the other that the lives of selves are narrative in structure. These two elements are not considered to be completely distinct, but seen rather as two sides of the same coin. Selves, on this view, are beings who lead their lives rather than merely having a history, and leading the life of a self is taken inherently to involve understanding one's life as a narrative and enacting the narrative one sees as one's life.

This kind of claim is seen in three of the philosophers most readily associated with the narrative approach—Alisdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur. 1 Although these theorists differ from each other, they also overlap in many significant respects. I will call the kind of narrative view they hold the ‘hermeneutical’ narrative view because it conceives of selves as fundamentally self‐interpreting beings and because its proponents are inspired by hermeneutics theory. The basic features of the hermeneutical view are most easily explicated by looking at the strong connections it draws between selfhood, narrative, and agency. Selves are fundamentally agents on this view, and agency requires narrative. To be agents we must be intelligible to ourselves and to others; our actions must be meaningful and significant in a way that cannot be captured in purely naturalistic terms, but requires that we interpret our behaviors in the context of a narrative.

This insight is perhaps expressed most directly by MacIntyre. He points out that a particular behavior might be characterized with ‘equal truth and appropriateness’ as digging, gardening, taking exercise, preparing for winter, or pleasing one's wife (MacIntyre 1984 : 206). In order to say what an agent is doing when he displays this behavior, we need to understand how these different answers are related to one another and which one captures the agent's primary intentions. To know this we need to be able to place the behavior in the context of intersecting stories—stories about households and domestic arrangements, about the cycles of the seasons, about gardening and the story of the actor's life. ‘Intentions’, MacIntyre says, ‘need to be ordered both causally and temporally and both orderings will make references to settings’ (1984: 208). This ordering is a narrative, and so ‘narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human action’ (MacIntyre 1984 : 208). To identify an occurrence as an action, he says, is to ‘identify it under a type of description which enables us to see that occurrence as flowing intelligibly from a human agent's intentions, motives, passions, and purposes’ (1984: 209), that is, to tell a narrative that explains it. This narrative account of action must, moreover, have certain characteristics. To be intelligible, action must be aimed at some end or telos . This requires that narrative explanation include a normative or evaluative dimension which, according to MacIntyre, applies not just to individual actions but to our lives as a whole. To lead a life is to search for and aim toward the good. ‘The unity of a human life’, he therefore concludes, ‘is the unity of a narrative quest’ (1984: 219).

Taylor offers similar analysis arguing against a particular kind of naturalistic or reductionist view that implies that our lives can be lived without any particular relation to a tradition or to the good. To the contrary, he claims, selfhood and the good ‘turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes’ (Taylor 1989 : 3). As did MacIntyre, Taylor concludes that this intertwining means that the self must be narrative in form. He endorses MacIntyre's characterization of human life as a quest, and describes the specific nature of this quest in terms of ‘frameworks’, background traditions which define the fundamental terms by which we evaluate our lives and our world. A framework ‘incorporates a crucial set of qualitative distinctions’ and provides the sense that some action or way of life is ‘incomparably higher than the others which are more readily available to us’ (Taylor 1989 : 19). For Taylor, as for MacIntyre, the intelligibility of action requires that our lives be narrative in form.

Ricoeur's view falls into this same general category by suggesting that our lives must be narrative in form if we are to make sense of human agency. It is, however, an extremely intricate view, and differs from MacIntyre's and Taylor's in many important details which I will not be able to recount here. I limit myself to noting one salient difference flagged by Ricoeur himself. While Ricoeur, like Taylor, endorses MacIntyre's view of our lives as a quest narrative, he is keen to emphasize discontinuities between life and literature in a way that MacIntyre does not (Ricoeur 1994 : 158–63). This difference turns out to be one that makes a difference, and I will discuss it in more detail later.

The hermeneutical views are not the only views that see selves as inherently narrative in form. An extremely famous narrative view quite different from the ones just discussed is found in Daniel Dennett's account of the self as a ‘center of narrative gravity’. For Dennett, the self is a fiction, but a useful fiction, like the notion of a center of gravity as it occurs in physics. There is no such thing as a center of gravity, Dennett says, ‘but it is a fiction that has a nicely defined, well delineated, and well behaved role within physics’ (1992: 103). This is because it can be used to explain and predict and to manipulate objects; it is a fiction that does work. The self, he says, has similar ontological status. Selves, as he conceives them, are characters in the narratives we humans spin. Key to Dennett's view is the distinction he draws between the entity that generates an autobiographical narrative and the protagonist depicted within it. Though Melville begins Mob y Dick ‘Call me Ishmael’ we would be making a mistake to think that we are supposed to call Melville Ishmael. Melville is the author of the narrative; Ishmael is a character within it. Selves are, Dennett says, relevantly like Ishmael. Human brains are narrative‐generating machines and selves are the protagonists of the narratives they generate.

Neither the narrating brain nor the human organism within which it operates—both of which are real things—are selves on Dennett's view; they are Melville to the self's Ishmael. We tend to conflate the two because the narratives our brains spin generally depict the movements of the human being from which they emanate. Nevertheless it remains a mistake, Dennett says, to identify the author of a narrative with its protagonist. To show this he tells a story of his own involving a ‘novel‐writing machine’—a computer that generates novels. Suppose this machine spits out a novel that begins ‘Call me Gilbert’ and takes the form of an autobiography of someone named Gilbert. Gilbert is the protagonist of this story, but there is no temptation to say that Gilbert, the subject of the autobiography, is actually the clanking computer sitting on the table.

But now suppose, Dennett continues, that we put this machine into a robot on wheels with a television eye. It begins its novel ‘Call me Gilbert’ and creates a narrative with the form of an autobiography, but this autobiography incorporates the information coming in through the television eye so that soon ‘we will be unable to ignore the fact that the fictional career of the fictional Gilbert bears an interesting resemblance to the “career” of this mere robot moving through the world’ (Dennett 1992 : 108). Nevertheless, Dennett argues, we will still not be tempted to think that the machine has become a self just by being placed into a mobile robot (he stipulates that the machine is not conscious). Gilbert is not the robot; Gilbert is still a fictional protagonist in a story spun by a machine. Similarly, our brains are narrative‐generating machines but they are not selves; brains don't know anything. For this reason, he says, ‘it is a category mistake to start looking around for [selves] in the brain’ (Dennett 1992 : 109). He bolsters this argument by looking at cases of Multiple Personality Disorder, which he glosses as a circumstance in which a single brain generates multiple, non‐intersecting narratives, each of which has its own protagonist, none of whom can be exclusively identified with the narrating human.

For Dennett, the self is constituted through human narration just as it is for the hermeneutical theorists, but there are important differences as well. Dennett's idea of narrative does not necessarily involve any strong form of evaluation or a quest for the good; it is more a matter of keeping track of the history of the body in which the narrating brain resides. Rather than constituting ourselves as selves as the hermeneutical view has it, in Dennett's view the brain constitutes a fictional protagonist by telling a story. On the former view, there are genuine human selves whose self‐conception and mode of life constitute their selfhood; on the latter there are no such things.

I have also defended a view of the self as narrative in form—‘The Narrative Self‐Constitution View’ (NSCV) (Schechtman 1996 ). It is in some ways in‐between the hermeneutical view and Dennett's. The NSCV says that we constitute ourselves as selves by understanding our lives as narrative in form and living accordingly. This view does not demand that we explicitly formulate our narratives (although we should be able, for the most part, to articulate them locally when appropriate) but rather that we experience and interpret our present experiences not as isolated moments but as part of an ongoing story. The experience of winning the lottery will, for instance, be a different experience for someone immensely wealthy, someone who has lived a life of crushing poverty, and someone who has struggled unsuccessfully with a gambling addiction. The difference is the difference in the background narrative against which winning is interpreted. Having a narrative, and so being a self, on this view is primarily a matter of keeping track of this background and responding accordingly. The NSCV is like the hermeneutical view, then, in that it sees the self as real and constituted by a narrative. It is more like Dennett's, however, in that it does not emphasize agency so strongly as the hermeneutical view does, nor does it insist on an overall ethical orientation or thematic unity to the life of a self.

Selfhood and narrative capacity

The views we considered above see selves as the protagonists of human‐generated narratives; characters in the stories we spin. Another kind of narrative view links selfhood to the capacity to think in narrative terms and to offer narrative explanations. These views differ from the ones just considered in that they do not require a narrative of one's whole life. They do not focus on the story of a life, identifying the self with a character in that story, but rather on the fact that selves employ the kind of logic found in stories when they describe, explain, and choose their own behavior.

Views of this kind are found frequently in developmental and evolutionary psychology. In this context the mastery of basic narrative competency is taken to be an important developmental milestone. Narrative ability allows us to understand ourselves as extended over time and to draw more robust distinctions between self and other. It also supports the development of autobiographical memory and contributes to a host of the complicated cognitive capacities that are characteristic of human selves. An example of this kind of view from the perspective of evolutionary psychology can be found in the work of Merlin Donald ( 1991 , 2001). Here I will concentrate on an example from developmental psychology by looking at the work of Katherine Nelson.

Nelson explores ‘the hypothesis of a new level of consciousness that emerges in early childhood together with a new sense of self situated in time and in multiple social realities’ (Nelson 2003 : 17). She describes the increasingly complex kinds of self‐awareness that can be identified during the normal development of a human infant and sees the emergence of a ‘new subjective level of conscious awareness, with a sense of a specific past and awareness of a possible future, as well as with new insight into the consciousness of other people’ that develops in the late preschool years (Nelson 2003 : 33). This level of consciousness is linked to the development of the ability to tell simple narratives about one's life, and so she finds a ‘close connection between narrative and the emergence of a specifically human level of consciousness’ (Nelson 2003 : 22).

Nelson's idea is that as children enter into language they learn, with the help of their caregivers, to narrate the events in their lives. At first this involves nothing much more than describing things that happened to them in sequence and offering rudimentary evaluations (e.g. ‘Mommy and I went to visit Daddy at work in a big building. We looked out a high window. It was fun.’). At the beginning even these very basic narrations require a great deal of prompting and reminding from adults. Gradually, however, children learn to do this work themselves, and when they do they enjoy qualitatively new kinds of experiences and are able to participate in new forms of social interaction. Nelson describes the dramatic transformation this brings about: ‘This level of self understanding integrates action and consciousness into a whole self, and establishes a self‐history as unique to the self, differentiated from others’ experiential histories.…[I]t adds…a new awareness of self in past and future experiences and the contrast of that self to others' narratives of their past and future experiences' (Nelson 2003 : 7).

Nelson's view is, in many ways, continuous with some of the views described in the previous section. Like the views described above Nelson's focuses on the importance of self‐conception in the constitution of selfhood and the way in which a narrative sense of self is crucial to selfhood. While the narratives she sees as marking our entrance into selfhood are quite rudimentary and local, the idea is that ultimately we will come to think of ourselves as persisting individuals with a single life story. Moreover, even these very basic narratives include some measure of evaluation. One way of thinking about the difference between the views described earlier and views like Nelson's is in terms of the specific questions they ask. The former take adult human selves with the full complement of human‐specific capacities and seek to define what is required to be such a self. Evolutionary and developmental psychologists, on the other hand, are interested in the emergence of self and the threshold that must be crossed in order for full‐blown selfhood to begin to develop. These theorists thus investigate the basic cognitive accomplishments that initiate this development.

Another example of a view that links self to narrative capacity is David Velleman's view of the self as narrator. Velleman's view is developed as a reply to Dennett, arguing that Dennett's thought experiment does not, when properly interpreted, show what he says it does. Velleman accepts the basic outlines of Dennett's account of the making of the self through narrative, but believes that if we follow this account to its logical conclusion we will see that the self that emerges from the narrative activity of the human brain is real and not fictional. To make this point, Velleman returns to Dennett's story about the narrating robot who weaves the story of Gilbert. In Dennett's case, you will recall, the narrative of Gilbert follows events in the history of the robot—for example, if the robot gets locked in a supply closet, the narrative will involve Gilbert having been locked in the supply closet. Velleman rightly points out that if this kind of connection can be formed retrospectively, there is no reason to think that it cannot be formed prospectively. A narrating machine that can notice that the robot in which it sits was locked in a closet and thereafter generate ‘I went into the closet and was locked in there’ should be able to generate ‘I am going to the closet’ and then alter the path of the robot so that it does so.

Dennett does not describe his robot in this way but, as Velleman points out, he does attribute this capacity to human brains in his discussion of Multiple Personality Disorder. In discussing the case made famous in the book Sybil Dennett describes the patient as generating multiple narratives and says she ‘engaged the world’ with the self whose narrative was active. Presumably this means that Sybil lived as her narration suggested rather than simply narrating what had already been lived. ‘If a self‐narrator works in both directions,’ Velleman concludes, ‘then the self he invents is not just an idle fiction, a useful abstraction for interpreting his behavior. It—or more precisely his representation of it—is a determinant of the very behavior that it's useful for interpreting’ (Velleman 2006 : 212). According to Velleman, this ability ultimately makes the narrator an agent. The narrator's pronouncements about what will happen next give him reasons to follow the course he has announced. In making such pronouncements he is thus choosing among different possible continuations of the story and this gives him, in Velleman's view, ‘as much free will as a human being’ (2006: 218).

What this all means, Velleman concludes, is that in the narrative of Gilbert ‘Gilbert’ ‘is not the name of a self; it's the name of a unified agent who has a self, in the form of an inner locus of agential control’ (Velleman 2006 : 220–1). So Gilbert is a real self, where a self is understood as something that an agent has by virtue of its agency. Velleman is quick to point out, however, that this understanding of self points to an important difference between his view of the relation of narrative to self and Dennett's. Dennett conceives of a self‐narrative as trying to unify an entire life—making ‘all of our material cohere into a single good story’ (Dennett 1992 : 114). Velleman, on the other hand thinks of narratives as extremely local. In his view ‘we tell many small, disconnected stories about ourselves—short episodes that do not get incorporated into our life‐stories’ (Velleman 2006 : 222). Self‐narration takes place in units ‘as small as the eating of a meal, the answering of a phone, or even the scratching of an itch’ (Velleman 2006 : 222). In this respect, Velleman's view is very different not only from Dennett's, but from all of the views discussed in the first section. Here, even more than in Nelson's view, it is very clear that selfhood has to do with being able to use the devices of narrative to account for what one does, and not with weaving a narrative of one's life as a whole. 2

2. Commonalities and Differences

The last section provided a provisional picture of some of the ways in which narrative has been used to investigate and explain the self. In order to get a true appreciation of what the narrative approach has to offer, it is necessary both to respect the very real differences among these views and to recognize what they have in common. This section will draw on the discussion of the last, articulating some of the important similarities and differences that emerged there. The picture of the relations among these views that develops here will be deepened in the next section, where we consider objections to this approach.

Emphasis on meaning and intelligibility

A general commitment of the narrative approach is the idea that the lives of selves cannot be fully described or explained in mechanical or even biological terms. A different kind of explanation is required to capture the truth about selves. More specifically, the lives of selves must be described in ways that make the events and actions in them meaningful or significant in ways that naturalistic, reductive descriptions cannot. Meaning and significance of the relevant sort are humanistic concepts, not scientific ones, and are related to human goals and projects. This emphasis is front and center in the hermeneutical views, but it is found even in Nelson's preschoolers where, for example, a series of movements is not just a series of movements but a trip to see (for the purpose of seeing) Daddy at work. This emphasis on meaning is a common theme in the narrative approach because narrative is a particularly good way of capturing this dimension of human experience. Events in a story have a kind of meaning that comes from their place in the narrative as a whole, and cannot be completely captured outside of that context, and so narrative produces meaning of the appropriate sort.

There are, however, some important differences in the expression of this theme in different narrative views. Most notably, the notions of ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ are not the same in all of them. The meaning of life as hermeneutical theorists understand it is a weighty matter, a question, to use Taylor's term, of whether our lives have ‘spiritual significance’ (Taylor 1989 : 18). It is the kind of meaning someone seeks while embroiled in an existential crisis. In most of the other views, however, ‘meaning’ has the more mundane sense of intelligibility. In these views meaning need not apply to a life as a whole, but rather to the bits of behavior that make it up—the behavior of MacIntyre's gardener or of Gilbert the robot when he enters the closet. Even in the NSCV and in Dennett's view, where the required narrative spans an entire life and the meaning of individual events comes from the whole of one's life, there is no claim that the life itself, taken as a whole, has some further meaning.

While I have distinguished the grander type of meaning found in hermeneutical views from the mundane intelligibility required by other narrative theorists, defenders of hermeneutical theories would reject this distinction. They hold that the more mundane notion of intelligibility rests upon the stronger one. If there is no ultimate purpose, they say, nothing that it is all about in the end, then our more mundane purposes are illusory and even the more basic kinds of intelligibility are threatened. In order for our actions to be intelligible at all on this view, we need to find significance in our lives as a whole. This is, naturally, a contentious claim. Most narrative theorists would hold that human action and experience can be made intelligible by being put into a more basic kind of narrative and do not see a need for a life to have an overarching theme or purpose. We may be alienated and unhappy if we think that mundane meaning is all the meaning there is (or we may not), but the act of pulling weeds to keep the garden nice is fully intelligible even if we do not think that the garden signifies anything at all in the grand scheme of things.

It is difficult to adjudicate this dispute; in many ways it seems to come down to two fundamentally different pictures of human existence, with some truth in each. It seems obvious that we need not explicitly think of our lives as having overall purpose to find our actions basically intelligible—someone who finds life purposeless or ultimately absurd may still understand that he is walking north to catch the train that will take him to work, even if he does not quite know why he bothers to go. At the same time, there does seem to be some legitimacy to the claim that any local purpose can always be challenged with a further ‘why’ question. (Why is he pulling those plants? To get his garden in shape. Why? To please his wife. Why?, etc.). Mundane intelligibility does seem to require placement in ever broader contexts to produce real intelligibility, and this is something that deserves to be explored and addressed in more detail than it usually is by most narrative theorists.

Normativity, evaluation, agency

Another theme found in almost all narrative views is that selfhood and the narratives that make us selves must involve some level of evaluation and normativity. This theme is directly connected to the one we just discussed. Intelligibility requires an aim or purpose at which action is directed, but purpose requires evaluation—a valued outcome we hope to bring about. Because of this connection, the expression of the demand for an evaluative component of self‐narratives varies in something like the way emphasis on meaning did, with hermeneutical narrative theories calling for a stronger form of evaluation than the other views.

In hermeneutical views, ethical orientation is at the heart of selfhood, and the narrative life of the self must be a quest for the good. Other narrative theories allow a much broader understanding of the relevant kind of evaluation, one which is not necessarily tied to ethics or morality in any traditional sense. Velleman, for instance, says Gilbert the robot's announcement that he is going to the closet gives him reasons to go to the closet, since doing so is necessary to keeping his narrative coherent. This makes him an evaluator, a being who can view some courses of action as preferable to others in a principled way, long before any question of ethics or the good life is brought in. Evaluation enters into the NSCV in much the same way as in Velleman's view. In Nelson's account, simple evaluation is a part of what makes up the narratives of preschoolers, and something that is learnt along with temporal sequencing from listening to the narratives of adults. The trip to visit Daddy is described as ‘fun’—an evaluation to be sure, but quite far from any developed consideration of the good.

The dispute described above about whether mundane meaning is possible without deeper meaning is recapitulated in obvious ways with respect to evaluation, and it is similarly inconclusive. 3 Still, we see in each version of the narrative approach an emphasis on evaluation, and this is an important characteristic of the approach as a whole. It shows that a core element of the narrative view is an emphasis on choice, value, and agency. However this is understood, it distinguishes the narrative conception from a more Cartesian picture of self as a basically passive experiencing subject. On this approach practical reasoning of some sort is an essential feature of selfhood, and of the meaning that inheres in the lives of selves.

Embeddedness, embodiedness, interactions with others

A feature related to emphasis on evaluation which is also found throughout the narrative approach is an emphasis on the fact that selves are embodied creatures, embedded in a social context in which they interact with others. The idea that selves are agents brings with it the idea that selfhood is something that emerges in a community, further distinguishing the narrative conception of self from the Cartesian picture of an isolated and independent thinking subject. This feature, too, is expressed differently in the different versions of the narrative approach, but in this case the differences may be somewhat more superficial than with the other features.

In the hermeneutical views, we see this feature in the stress put on the necessity of placing oneself in a tradition. There can no more be private meaning in the sense requisite for selfhood, according to these theorists, than there can be a private language according to Wittgenstein, and for many of the same reasons. ‘To be a subject of a narrative’, MacIntyre says, is ‘to be accountable for the actions and experiences which compose a narratable life. It is, that is, to be open to being asked to give a certain kind of account of what one did or what happened to one’ (1984: 103). The narrative structure of selfhood also means that one can ask others for an account of what they have done or suffered and expect to receive one. Without such accountability narratives ‘would lack the continuity required to make both them and the actions that constitute them intelligible’ (ibid.). Taylor also emphasizes this feature of narrative. A narrative requires a moral framework, and to have these frameworks we must place ourselves in a historical tradition, even if only to react against it. It is for this reason that he says that ‘one is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it’, adding that ‘this obviously cannot be just a contingent matter’ (Taylor 1989 : 35).

The NSCV places two constraints on self‐constituting narratives; the ‘articulation constraint’, which involves the capability to articulate one's narrative locally where appropriate, and the ‘reality constraint’, which demands that our narratives fit with the basic conception of reality shared by those in our community (it probably cannot e.g. involve being able to get from Paris to Chicago in one minute). The justification for these constraints is precisely that selfhood requires the ability to engage in certain kinds of characteristic human interactions and this in turn requires that we master our community's understanding of what the life of a self looks like and apply it to ourselves. Selfhood is an essentially social concept here as well. This basic idea is also present in Velleman's view, since it is fundamentally an account of self as agent. This emphasis on embeddedness takes a somewhat different form in Nelson's account, but one that is connected closely with the other views. Nelson emphasizes the need for social scaffolding in developing narratives, and concludes that

narrative emerges from and belongs to the community, but in the individual lives of children it is a vehicle through which consciousness of both self and the wider social and temporal world becomes manifest and gradually emerges as a new subjective level of conscious awareness, with a sense of a specific past and awareness of a possible future, as well as with new insight into the consciousness of other people. (Nelson 2003 : 33)

Narrative thus comes from the community and serves as the vehicle through which an individual can interact with it.

In all of these views we see an insistence that one can be a self only by distinguishing oneself from, and interacting with, other selves. One important implication of this embeddedness, as we have seen, is that it puts constraints on our self‐narratives. We are not composing the stories of our lives in a vacuum, but in a world where there are others with their own stories about themselves and about us. If narration is going to produce meaning in the way it must for selfhood we need somehow to negotiate the multiple narratives in which we are involved. It is this that leads MacIntyre to caution that: ‘we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co‐authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please’ (MacIntyre 1984 : 99). Both because our narratives must make reference to the stories available to us from the traditions in which we find ourselves and because they must interact with the realities of the world in which we live and the narratives of others, our narratives must be understood as embedded in a world of other selves.

How do we tell our narratives?

So far we have looked at themes common to all narrative views and highlighted differences in their expression. Here we find a commonality linked to a common unclarity. The unclarity is associated with the question of whether and how we tell our self‐narratives. Narratives are, in the first instance, stories told to an audience. If selves are narrative in structure, we may reasonably ask whether their narratives are told, and if so how, and to whom. Narrative theories seem to differ in their answers to these questions, but because none of them presents an entirely clear answer, it is not obvious how deep these differences run. To see this, consider the question of how our narratives should be expressed as it would be answered by the views we have been discussing.

Hermeneutical theorists see selfhood as consisting in a self‐conscious quest for the good. This suggests that the fundamentals of our narratives must be something that we at least tell ourselves. We may not explicitly describe our lives as a narrative or a quest, but if we are not aware of the active attempt to move our lives in the direction of the good we would not, I presume, be selves on this view. Moreover, since the values that underlie our lives as a whole are used in explaining ourselves to others, we must at least sometimes articulate them to these others. Hermeneutical theorists also say that we must enact our narratives; we do not so much tell them as live them by engaging in purposive activity that strives for a unified good. So it seems as if, according to these theories, we must explicitly understand our whole lives as a quest for the good, sometimes articulate the values and themes that guide this quest to others, and always express them in our actions. But this is still sketchy and it is not evident what it amounts to in practice. It is not that these theorists do not say anything on this score, only that it is hard to get a clear picture of what they are saying. MacIntyre, for instance, rather unhelpfully tells us that ‘the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to‐be‐narrated quest’ (1984: 219), but does not tell us anything about what the status ‘to‐be‐narrated’ entails.

Dennett presents narratives as something explicitly told. Gilbert the robot either says or writes everything that happens, just as Melville writes down all of the events that make up Ishmael's story. It is by no means evident, however, that Dennett envisions narration being similarly articulated in human lives. In his discussion of Sybil, as we have seen, he suggests that one's narrative can be expressed in action as well as in words. It is clear that Dennett sees our brains as spinning narratives, but it is less clear just how and when (or if) these narratives are told and to what audience. Velleman's reinterpretation of Dennett is similarly mysterious. Who, for instance, is the audience of my narrative of my scratching an itch or eating a meal? Presumably narratives are enacted in life for Velleman, but since reason‐giving often involves explicit narration, there must be some of that as well.

For Nelson self‐narrations are explicit, but this is an artifact of the experimental set‐up that tests children for their capacity to offer narrative accounts. The inability to verbally reproduce any part of one's history in narrative form would certainly be taken as evidence that a child has not mastered the necessary cognitive skills, but it is not clear exactly what kind of narration, if any, is supposed to be happening when the child is not telling her story to others. Finally, the NSCV requires that one be able to articulate one's narrative locally where appropriate, but sees narration as a largely implicit process that manifests itself mostly in the quality of our experience and the choices that we make.

It seems safe to say that no narrative view requires that we compose explicit and complete autobiographies in speech, writing, or thought, but that all of them require that we be able at least occasionally to explicitly narrate at least some portion of our lives. Much of our self‐narration is expressed in the way we think, the way we live, and the kinds of explanations we feel called upon to give to others. Beyond this, however, it is hard to say anything much more specific about how self‐narration is supposed to work. This is, I think, a common frustration with the narrative view, and one to which I will return in discussing objections in the next section.

3. Objections to the Narrative Approach

As the narrative approach has become more widely accepted there has naturally been an increasing number of detractors. Here I will focus on some prominent objections to this approach. They are not the only objections that have been offered, but they are important objections that connect with some of the insights generated in the previous sections.

Strawson's episodic nature and Zahavi's minimal self

Galen Strawson, one of the most famous opponents of narrative views, identifies two strands of the narrative approach. There is what he calls the ‘ psychological Narrativity thesis ’, which holds as a ‘straightforwardly empirical, descriptive thesis’ that ordinary humans experience their lives in narrative form, and what he calls the ‘ ethical Narrativity thesis ’, which holds that it is a good thing to experience one's life as a narrative—‘essential to a well‐lived life, to true or full personhood’ (Strawson 2004 : 428). Strawson rejects both theses. The psychological thesis is, on his view, false, while the ethical thesis is pernicious. Narrative theorists, he surmises, have based their views on introspection, assuming that the way they arrange their experiences is the way everyone else does or that the kind of life that works well for them will work well for everybody. This assumption is unwarranted, Strawson argues, and he offers himself as a counterexample to universalized narrative claims about the self. Describing himself as an ‘Episodic’ he says that he has ‘absolutely no sense of [his] life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none.’ He asserts, moreover, that he is able to live a perfectly rich, full, and meaningful life without such a narrative and suggests that views that demand that everyone strive for a narrative self‐experience, ‘close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and are potentially destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts’ (Strawson 2004 : 429).

In explicating this claim Strawson draws a distinction between ‘one's experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as a whole, and one's experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as an inner mental entity or “self” of some sort’ (Strawson 2004 : 429). Strawson uses self* (and the corresponding I*, you*, he*) to designate this inner mental entity. He recognizes that he* has a special relation to the other selves that have inhabited the body of Galen Strawson (GS), but sees himself* as a different experiencing subject: ‘I'm well aware that my past is mine in so far as I am a human being, and I fully accept that there is a sense in which it has special relevance to me* now. At the same time I have no sense that I* was there in the past, and think it is obvious that I* was not there, as a matter of metaphysical fact’ (Strawson 2004 : 434). His self, he holds, is episodic in nature, and not part of any ongoing narrative.

Much of Strawson's account of his episodic nature is a denial that his life has any overall theme or moral unity of the sort required by the hermeneutical narrative view. Since this analysis does not apply to all versions of the narrative view, it is most useful to think of Strawson's challenge as presenting a dilemma for narrative theorists. The dilemma is roughly this: either narrative views are too demanding to be plausible or they are not ‘narrative’ in any interesting sense. That is, either the narrative view really demands that our lives and self‐understandings are like literature in some strong sense or it does not. If it is the former Strawson's Episodic self serves as a counterexample; if the latter, it risks triviality. As Strawson puts it, ‘if someone says, as some do, that making coffee is a Narrative that involves Narrativity, because you have to think ahead, do things in the right order, and so on, and that everyday life involves many such narratives, then I take it the claim is trivial’ (Strawson 2004 : 439).

Hermeneutical theorists obviously fall on the first horn of the dilemma. A possible response for these theorists is to claim that Strawson's Episodic nature does not, in fact, serve as a counterexample to the narrative view because episodicity as he depicts it is in fact narrative. In describing himself as an Episodic, these theorists might argue, Strawson precisely tells us something about his deeper nature and the values that shape his life as a whole. He asserts, for instance, that ‘truly happy‐go‐lucky, see‐what‐comes‐along lives are among the best there are, vivid, blessed, profound’ (Strawson 2004 : 449). ‘Blessed’ and ‘profound’ certainly sound like ethical terms. These theorists might thus argue that Strawson has misunderstood the nature of narrative in claiming that his life is non‐narrative. The free spirit is a recognizable character from literature, as Stawson himself reveals by using the character Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings as an example of such a being (Strawson 2004 : 449 n. 49). Looking to be free from stifling thematic unity is something that the hermeneutical view can recognize as a quest. The NSCV can follow a similar strategy, arguing that the way in which Strawson recognizes all of the actions and experiences of GS as having implications for how things are for him* and for what he must do is all that is required for a self‐narrative.

Strawson might argue that these replies throw these theorists to the other horn of the dilemma. If Strawson's episodic orientation and his recognition of certain facts about his connection to the history of GS qualify as having a narrative, he might say, then a narrative is something we cannot help but have and the claim that it is something we must have if our lives are to be meaningful seems to lose much of its force. This in itself is not a problem since most narrative theorists would accept the claim that we cannot but have a narrative; in some ways that is their very point. But if any set of preferences counts as an ethical orientation or a quest for a good, the claim that someone has a self‐narrative in even the strongest sense proposed seems to collapse into a claim that selves have some set of characteristics and need a basic understanding of the unfolding of events, and this does seem trivial.

This brings us to the second horn of the dilemma. If we are going to allow that a self‐narrative need not have the characteristics of a literary work we have to explain in what sense it is a narrative , and to do so in a way that makes the claims of the narrative approach non‐trivial. Narrative theorists do have something to say in response here. As we have seen, the claim that selves are narrative in structure is minimally a claim that there is a form of explanation necessary to describing human lives that does not reduce to physical or biological explanation and gives events and actions significance. There is a way in which human actions hang together that is characteristic and purposive. As Anthony Rudd puts it in his response to Strawson, the claim ‘that the understanding of even simple human actions must take a narrative form is, I would suggest, by no means a trivial point, given the continuing influence of rival, scientistic models of action‐explanation’ (Rudd 2009 : 63). 4 It is by no means obvious that the claims of narrative theorists become trivial as soon as they allow life narratives to deviate from literary form. Still, as our earlier discussion already revealed, and as I shall discuss further below, it would be useful for the approach as a whole to have a clearer expression of what characterizes narrative and how it differs from other explanatory forms.

There is, I think, another kind of disagreement between Strawson and narrative theorists that stands behind the differences already described. It seems sometimes less as if Strawson and narrative theorists disagree on how to explain the phenomenon of self, and more that they disagree on what that phenomenon is. For Strawson self is defined in terms of subjectivity alone; the entire dimension of agency and embeddedness is left out of the equation (see Chapter 10 above). This points to a whole new set of questions for the narrative theorist. Self‐consciousness, reflexivity, and the capacity to know oneself as oneself are crucial elements of the self on the narrative approach, but it is not always evident where the brute phenomenological experience of oneself as a self distinct from others fits into the whole picture, and this is another lacuna.

This concern also emerges in Dan Zahavi's complaint that narrative theories are incomplete because they fail to recognize a core component of selfhood, namely the fundamental, given mineness that is part of the structure of all experience. This ‘primitive self’, described in the work of phenomenologists, is ‘conceived as the invariant dimension of first‐personal givenness in the multitude of changing experiences’ (Zahavi 2007 : 189). Zahavi does not deny that narrative organization of experience can be very important to us and is part of our selfhood but it cannot, he says, be all of selfhood. Without narrative we can still have brute first‐personal experience, but without the phenomenology of the first‐personal there is no narrative. ‘None of the narrative theories…even come near to being able to explain how first‐personal givenness could be brought about by narrative structures but’, he says, ‘this failure is not really surprising, since the reverse happens to be the case’ (Zahavi 2007 : 200). The claim that narrative is not required for selfhood, found in both Strawson and Zahavi, can thus be seen as the claim that what narrative adds (complex interactions with others, meaningful experience) are at most enrichments of an already existing self. A self, on this view, is a self‐conscious entity that is the kind of thing that might care about the nature of its life and interactions, and narrative comes in after the self already exists.

One way to respond to these worries is to allow that there are many uses of the term ‘self’ and that narrative theorists are defining only one of these. There is, however, a much more interesting line of response. A narrative theorist might argue that the kind of phenomenological self‐consciousness that makes a self is a qualitatively different kind of consciousness than the brute first‐personal awareness we presumably share with many animals, and that this different kind of consciousness requires narrative. The idea would be that the character (and not just the content) of first‐personal experience is different for self‐narrators than for non‐narrators. Something like this is suggested, for instance, in Nelson's talk of a new level of self‐consciousness that emerges when we learn to narrate. This is an intriguing possibility, and I believe that the empirical work in evolutionary and developmental psychology has much to offer in considering whether it is defensible. 5

Strawson and Zahavi thus do not offer completely devastating criticisms of the narrative approach; narrative theorists can respond to most of their objections. Nevertheless, they do point out important places where narrative theorists are unclear about the exact nature of their claims and points where the approach could be further developed. In particular, we have seen a need to get clearer on the essential features of narrative explanation and on the role of phenomenology and self‐consciousness in the narrative approach.

Lamarque and literary narrative

A second major objection comes from Peter Lamarque who argues that narrative theories of the self take the analogy between life and literature too seriously in a way that threatens to mislead us about both. A core feature of literature, he says, is that the manner in which a story is presented is of the utmost importance. When we are trying to understand a piece of literature we look at the language in which the story is told. We assume that the details of the story—the color of a hair‐ribbon, a seemingly accidental encounter—are serving some artistic purpose, and we look for symbolism, foreshadowing, and other literary devices in interpreting their meaning. To think of our lives as genuinely like literature we thus need to do one of two things; either we must reduce literature to plot and character—as if the details of presentation do not really matter—or we must think of our lives as full of purpose and meaning at every turn—as if the accidents and coincidences that befall us are really by design. ‘The more we try to restore the distinctively literary features of [canonical literary] narratives the more remote they become from real life’, he says. ‘Indeed a stronger point can be made. To the extent that literary features are brought to bear on real‐life narratives they have a distorting and pernicious effect on the self‐understanding that such narratives are supposed to yield’ (Lamarque 2007 : 119).

To underscore this point, Lamarque looks at how literary critics work. These critics dissect the language and details of presentation in a novel, showing how literary devices are employed by authors to communicate the themes and insights that lie behind the events of narratives. It is not even clear what it would mean to take a similar stance with respect to one's own life, he points out. Lives just have a different logic than constructed works of fiction because they are not works of art. If we take ‘the great literary works to be models for our self‐directed narratives,’ he thus concludes, ‘we are prone to two serious mistakes’ (Lamarque 2007 : 132). The less serious is ‘to suppose that literary works are simply stories about people like you and me, a species of real life narratives’. The more serious and potentially dangerous mistake is ‘to suppose that our own life narratives are mini‐works of literature complying with the principles of literary appreciation’. This mistake is potentially dangerous because it invokes a ‘false image of ourselves as kinds of fictional characters, whose identity rests on narrative description and whose actions are explicable in functional, teleological or thematic ways’ (Lamarque 2007 : 132).

Lamarque's concerns, like Strawson's, apply most straightforwardly to the hermeneutical narrative views. Still, insofar as all narrative views make the claim that the lives of persons are characterized by meaning, and insofar as Lamarque's claim is that the kind of significance events in our lives have is vastly different from the kind that events in narratives do, his criticism applies to them all. I will begin by considering how defenders of hermeneutical views might reply, and from there we will be able to see how this response can be more broadly applied.

It is important to note first that the question of the correspondence of life to literature is one about which hermeneutical theorists are themselves divided. MacIntyre allows some differences between life and literature (the fact that we can at most co‐author our lives), but is clear that he sees them as essentially the same in structure. As we have seen, Ricoeur differs from MacIntyre on this issue, seeing differences between life and literature very like those Lamarque does (Ricoeur 1994 : 159–61). Ricoeur does not see these differences as undermining the narrative approach, however. These difficulties, he says, ‘do not seem to me to be such as to abolish the very option of the application of fiction to life. The objections are valid only in opposition to a naive conception of mimēsis .’ He goes on to say ‘these are less to be refuted than to be incorporated in a more subtle, more dialectical comprehension of appropriation ’ (ibid. 161–2). Ricoeur's suggestive response to the differences between life and literature is to define selfhood in terms of the negotiation of these differences.

Using Ricoeur's basic insight as inspiration, we can devise a strategy for responding to Lamarque that both illuminates the narrative approach and points to a direction for further development. To begin, let's separate three different roles with respect to narrative: those of character, author, and critic (or reader). In discussing the difference between life and literature, Lamarque focuses most directly on the perspective of the critic. He suggests that a critic looking at a piece of literature should assume she is dealing with an artifact whose meaning is best determined by presupposing that the details are non‐accidental and therefore all potentially significant. 6 This is so because it is assumed that the author, who builds the narrative out of whole cloth, chooses each detail for some aesthetic purpose—to symbolize a major theme, move the plot along, develop characters, and so on. From the point of view of the author, then, decisions about what to include must be made with such purposes in mind. From the point of view of the characters in a novel, on the other hand, there are plenty of accidents and contingencies, as Lamarque himself points out in discussing the accident at the beginning of Tess of the d'Ubervilles . If the question is what caused Tess's accident ‘the answer, within the fictional world, is that she fell asleep and was run into by the mail‐cart’ (Lamarque 2007 : 125). From the perspective of the literary critic, on the other hand, the answer is that the accident lays out the themes of the entire novel.

Lamarque's complaint is that our lives are not everywhere filled with purpose and design, but are rather driven by accident, contingency, and coincidence. We might put this by saying that narrative theorists, on his view, suggest we should take the perspective of the critic and/or author on our own lives, when in fact the only accurate perspective is that which would be taken by a character within a fictional world. The kinds of explanations that apply to our lives are the kind Tess would give of her accident, not the kind a critic would, and only the latter is rife with the kind of significance narrative theorists are after. But we may ask if narrative theorists really do suggest that we take only the attitude of critic. The version that comes closest to doing so is, again, that offered by hermeneutical theorists, and even they do not say we should take the perspective of critic or even author to the exclusion of the perspective of character. It is perhaps better to think of these views as saying, as Ricoeur implies, that what is unique to selves is that they must take all of these perspectives.

We must view our lives on the level of a character internal to a fictional world insofar as successful selfhood requires us to acknowledge that we are at best co‐authors of our own lives and that we are constrained by the facts about the social and natural world in which we find ourselves. But we must also take the perspective of authors because we are not just moved about by causal forces and there is no author outside of us who will directly push our story forward. While we do not make our lives up out of nothing, finding ourselves in the world we are also confronted with the question of what to do next. We cannot always decide any way we wish, and we are never guaranteed that things will go as we plan, but we must think of ourselves as authors of our lives insofar as we must make decisions and these must involve reasons or purposes. Insofar as we are agents, we are partial authors of our lives. We are also critics, reflecting on our lives. When we do take the role of critic in our own life, however, we must do so with an understanding of the kind of authorship involved, looking for significance of an accident, for instance, in the choices that led to it and the responses it engenders, rather than in the fact that it occurred.

The three roles we have been describing are only artificially separated in human life. As critics we interpret what has happened so far in a way that impacts the future authorship of our lives, and as characters we enact those choices and have the experiences that generate the significance we appreciate as critics. For narrative theorists we are beings who generate meaning in our own lives by finding meaning in the unfolding of events, intending actions we find meaningful, and living according to the meanings we have found. We enter into ongoing stories, stories we must interpret and continue, and these functions are in constant interaction with one another. Life is different from literature because we write it as we live it and engage in criticism as we go along rather than after the fact, and because this forces us to take on different roles and perspectives. The creative act in narrative self‐constitution is thus neither to produce a tidy and meaningful story out of whole cloth nor to take accidents and contingencies and arbitrarily interpret them as meaningful. It is rather to carve out a meaningful life trajectory by appreciating the contingencies, considering how to respond to them meaningfully, and directing life so much as possible in the direction of that meaning.

This, I think, is why these theorists have so much difficulty giving a clear account of exactly how narration occurs in actual lives; it occurs in different ways at different levels all at once. Having seen this we may wonder whether some of the differences among narrative views might be largely attributable to different levels of emphasis on the different roles. Views that think of the self in terms of mundane narratives that track the events that befall one emphasize the way in which we are characters in our narratives and, to a lesser extent, critics. Velleman's view of selves as agents emphasizes our role as authors, but of course we must be characters and critics to be agents in this way as well. The hermeneutical views emphasize our role as critics more than some of the other views do, and Nelson's view is more concerned with how we gain the basic capacities necessary to negotiate the different roles. The proponents of these views might well reject this suggestion. It is, nevertheless, an intriguing possibility to see the fundamental insight of the narrative approach as the claim that selves are beings who negotiate the roles of character, author, and critic in their own lives, and that the unique kind of meaning or significance found in human lives comes from just that fact.

4. Conclusion

We have seen that the narrative approach is made up of a wide array of different kinds of views addressed to different questions. We have also seen that perhaps at bottom these views share a similar insight—namely that the complexity of selves is to be found in the multiple perspectives on our lives that we negotiate in living them, a complexity best understood in narrative terms. This is a promising insight at many levels, but much work remains to develop its full potential. The chief difficulties facing narrative theories revolve around making the idea that the self is narrative concrete—What, exactly, counts as a narrative in this context? Where do self‐narratives reside, how explicitly must they be articulated, and to whom? Where do the phenomenological aspects of selfhood fit in?

Thinking about the narrative self in terms of the interplay between the three narrative roles provides a strategy for beginning to answer these questions and the promise of a more fleshed‐out narrative view, one with the potential to define a being complex enough to appear contingently in the seat next to you on a long plane flight, to amuse, distract, or annoy you with the stories of his life, and in so doing to alter the course of your own.

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Psychologist Jerome Bruner (e.g. Bruner 1990 ) and philosopher Anthony Rudd (2007) provide other examples of this approach.

The views we have discussed so far in one way or another claim that narrative is essential to selfhood. In addition to these there are a great many different kinds of views that see narrative as a particularly useful tool for understanding some crucial aspect of human selves. These views have a great deal to tell us about narrative and the self. In the remainder of this discussion I will put them to one side and focus on views that see narrative as a defining feature of persons. Before moving on it is, however, worth at least mentioning some of these views to give an idea of the range of the work on the narrative self. Hutto ( 2008 ) offers the ‘Narrative Practice Hypothesis’ to explain how humans become adept ‘mind readers’ using folk psychology to explain and predict the behavior of others. Goldie ( 2007 a , 2007 b ) describes how novels help us develop the capacity to take an ‘external perspective’ on others—allowing us to engage with them more effectively—and on ourselves, aiding us in coming to terms with our pasts and planning for our futures. Lindemann Nelson ( 2001 ) considers the way in which the narratives that others tell about us can interfere with our autonomy, and how our counter‐narratives can help us to regain it, and Lloyd ( 1993 ) offers a rich exploration of self and identity in literature and philosophy. There has also been interesting work bringing together narrative perspectives and empirical work. Several theorists have used narrative in discussing pathologies of the self, shedding light on both the pathologies and the nature of the self (e.g. Gallagher 2007 ). Damasio's ( 1999 ) theory of selfhood and consciousness relies heavily on narrative, and Hardcastle ( 2008 ) has brought empirical work and narrative theory together to illuminate the mechanisms behind the narrative self. These are just a few examples of views that see narrative as an important concept in understanding the self without holding that selves are intrinsically narrative entities, views that are too many and too complex to explore in a single essay.

There is a weaker reading of hermeneutical theories according to which they, also, can allow a broader conception of value or meaning than I have described here. This reading, however, has a cost that we will see when we consider objections to the narrative approach.

Rudd goes on to claim that he thinks that the real concern is with whether these mundane narratives imply that one's life as a whole is narrative in form. He argues that they indeed do, employing the kind of strategy described earlier of claiming that local intelligibility ultimately requires broader context.

I have also suggested such a connection (see e.g. Schechtman 1996 : 149–62; 2004 ). More recently I have offered a response to Strawson, acknowledging that the NSCV equivocates on whether the unity of self consists in a strong phenomenological connection of the sort Strawson sees as constituting the self and a weaker kind of narrative connection of the sort that unifies his understanding of the continuity of the life of GS. But I also explore the possibility that there are deeper connections between these two notions than may at first appear. While this is not exactly on the point of whether the quality of self‐consciousness is affected by narrative, it is not unrelated (Schechtman 2007 ).

I will not engage in disputes about the nature of criticism, which are not directly germane to the central point here, but will operate with the view I take to be Lamarque's.

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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

“i” and “me”: the self in the context of consciousness.

• Cognition and Philosophy Lab, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between “Me” and “I” (see Table 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience 1 . This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011 ; Liang, 2014 ; Sui and Gu, 2017 ; Truong and Todd, 2017 ) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or “I.”

TABLE 1. Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”) and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958) , that in this context “Me” (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Blanke, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of “I” (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition 2 by understanding the self-as-subject, or “I,” as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [Figure 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger’s (2003 , 2010 ) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal “I” 3 ( Prinz, 2012 ), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal “I” [or the Wittgenstein’s (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal “Me.” Table 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

FIGURE 1. An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) distinctions between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”). In the original formulation, James’ (1890) “Me” includes also physical objects and people (material and social “Me”) – they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

TABLE 2. Examples of theories of the self-as-object (“Me”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

“Me” As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890 , p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word “Me” to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James’ (1890) view, it reflects “all the things” which have the power to produce “excitement of a certain particular sort.” This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014 ; Guillot, 2017 ). What are “all the things”? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to “objects” which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of “things” – conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James’ (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define “Me” as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996) , who begins “ The conscious mind ” by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following 4 : visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se , such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James’ (1890) terms, “objects” in a stream of consciousness: “all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking” (p. 325).

The self understood as “Me” can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness (Figure 2 ). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person’s face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to “Me,” the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008 ; Payne et al., 2017 ; Woźniak et al., 2018 ). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971 ; Blakemore et al., 1998 ; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009 ). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ; Constable et al., 2018 ). This was anticipated by James’ (1890) notion of the material “Me,” and is typically regarded as reflecting one’s extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about “Me” or about something/someone else.

FIGURE 2. A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical “I,” the phenomenal “Me,” and the phenomenal “I,” which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal “Me.” Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as “I experience X.” In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one’s own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions – thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of “Me” (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale ( Aron et al., 1992 ). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one’s self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to “Me” allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one’s body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one’s possessions one can speak about one’s extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to “Me” introduced here. The first one is as follows:

(1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always “mine,” such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as “I,” i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000 ; Christoff et al., 2011 ; Blanke et al., 2015 ) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999 ; Craig, 2010 ; Seth et al., 2011 ; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 ; Salomon, 2017 ). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as “my” experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of “Me.” They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one’s body and those coming from another person’s (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between “my” versus “other’s” proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal “Me” and phenomenal “not-Me” will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016 ). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009 ). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being “not-mine,” leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000 ; Kaufman, 2004 ). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario – rather than two pieces of the same organ being “wired” to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 )? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of “Me” then the answer becomes simple – the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal “Me,” for example in a form of background self-experience, or “phenomenal background” ( Dainton, 2008 , 2016 ), rather than the phenomenal “I.”

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

(2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either “me” or “other,” but their subject is always “I.” As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal “I” and not the phenomenal “Me.”

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one’s thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: “there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask ‘are you sure it is you who have pains?’ “would be nonsensical” ( Wittgenstein, 1958 ). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject (see Table 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say “I see a photo of my face in front of me” I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal “I” (self-as-subject) and phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word “I” (or “my”). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises – to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014 ). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal “I,” i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal “Me” – a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008 ; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009 ; Martin and Pacherie, 2013 ). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one’s thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Billon, 2013 ; Guillot, 2017 ; López-Silva, 2017 ). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership 5 over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one’s thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one’s thoughts “as someone else’s,” or at least “as not-mine.” However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I’ve taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have “objectified” them to experience that they have a quality of “feeling as if they are not mine.” Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal “I” turns out to be a part of thephenomenal “Me.”

If my thoughts do not constitute the “I” then how do they fit into the structure of “Me”? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute “Me,” while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as “mine” belong to “Me.” How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger’s (2003 ; 2010 ) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017) :

Savage suggests that on LSD “[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes” (1955, 11), (…) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017 , p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object (“Me”) are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel “mine” as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as “mine.” As a result, this thinking phenomenal “I” experienced in feeling of ownership over one’s thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian “Me.” As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal “I,” just multilevel phenomenal “Me.” However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else’s (a demon’s or some malicious puppet master’s), she can still claim that:

Yes, “I” experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon’s.” My thoughts feel as “not-mine,” however, it’s still me (or: “I”) who thinks of them as “not-mine.”

As such, one escapes “objectification” of “I” into “Me” by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-“I.” However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: “I” (I 1 ) experience that the “fake I” (I 2 ), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else’s (e.g., as nasty green demon’s). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal “I” is I 1 , since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal “I” into another “fake-I” (and consequently making it a part of “Me”).

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal “I” understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly “on the run” from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep “I,” which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep “I” cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of “Me.” Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep “I”: in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016 ) who argue that “all conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent.” It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather “refers to the distinct manner, or how , of experiencing” ( Zahavi, 2014 ).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016 ). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the “ how of experiencing” of another person. For example, can I experience my sister’s for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep “I” is to reject that the subject of experience, the “I,” is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000 ; Prinz, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between “Me” and “I” as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: “(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem” ( James, 1890 , p. 401).

“I” As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890 , pp. 330–331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of “I” emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do “fly about loose,” devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone’s or something’s consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012 ; Strawson, 2003 ; Searle, 2005 ; Dainton, 2016 ). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of “what it is like to be a bat” ( Nagel, 1974 ), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical “I,” as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal “I” (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical “I” does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical “I,” but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as “me,” nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as “I.” In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which “is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (…) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction” ( Windt, 2015 ). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience – the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015 ; Metzinger, 2018 ), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of “Me.” Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016 ), possess conscious experience 6 . If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between “Me” and “not-Me.” However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011 ) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table 3 ). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987 ; Strawson, 2000 ; Dainton, 2008 ), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005 ), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003 ). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

TABLE 3. Examples of theories of the self-as-subject (“I”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015 , Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical “I.”

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014 ; Tononi et al., 2016 ) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational “complex” which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max ). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max . The complex that specifies a person’s day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max – that is, it should be the “major” complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca’s area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical “I” can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010 ). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions – for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical “I”? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical “I” can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical “I” can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some “self” (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism’s consciousness this metaphysical “I” would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not “co-conscious” with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical “I” cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical “I” persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000 , 2010 ). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical “I” turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical “I,” and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical “I” is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal “Me,” where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between “Me” and “I.” I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2010 ), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical “I”).

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 , 2010 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ; Hohwy, 2013 ; Clark, 2016 ). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one’s internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called “variational free energy,” which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 ). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014 ), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007 ), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011 ; Seth, 2013 ), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014 ; Friston and Frith, 2015 ), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ; Fotopoulou, 2012 ). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 ) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (…) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 , p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016 ; Williams, 2017 ) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand’s movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017) , the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003 ; Chalmers, 2004 , for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006 , 2014 , for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories – the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James’ (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal “Me” – by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical “I”? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal “Me,” the issues pertaining to the metaphysical “I” are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013 , Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011 ; Dehaene, 2014 ). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995 ) – a functional mechanism which allows that “some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others” ( Dehaene, 2014 ). However, the problem of the metaphysical “I” becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness – the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called “hard problem” ( Chalmers, 1996 ).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference 7 ) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical “I.”

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical “I” (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of “Me,” it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of “I.”

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between “Me” and “I” may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal “I” can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal “Me” [which can be understood as Metzinger’s (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between “I” and “Me,” which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While “Me” can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, “I” is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables 2 , 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal “I” as just a part of the phenomenal “Me,” has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as “I” from the perspective of “Me” may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term “I” when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction (“Me” versus “I”) which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term “I” in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as “sense of ownership over an experience” to reflect what is meant by “I” in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., “sense of ownership of interoceptive signals” when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of “Me” versus the experience/sense of “I” (rather than just “Me” and “I”). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

• ^ Therefore, whenever I use the term “I” I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term “Me” I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James’ (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table 1 ). I also assume, following James (1890) , that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.
• ^ Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of “I” as subject and “I” as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.
• ^ Whenever I use the prefix “phenomenal” I mean “the conscious experience of.” For example, when I write phenomenal “I”, I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience (“I”). In a similar fashion I use the prefix “metaphysical” when I mean “the metaphysical entity of.”
• ^ Chalmers (1996) also lists “sense of self,” although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.
• ^ Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.
• ^ “IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior” ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 460).
• ^ For example, he writes: “So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness” ( Friston, 2018 , p. 1).

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Keywords : self, consciousness, self-consciousness, sense of self, self-as-subject, self-as-object, predictive coding, IIT

Citation: Woźniak M (2018) “I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness. Front. Psychol. 9:1656. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01656

Received: 20 March 2018; Accepted: 17 August 2018; Published: 04 September 2018.

Reviewed by:

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*Correspondence: Mateusz Woźniak, [email protected] ; [email protected]

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“I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between “Me” and “I” (see Table ​ Table1 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience 1 . This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011 ; Liang, 2014 ; Sui and Gu, 2017 ; Truong and Todd, 2017 ) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or “I.”

Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”) and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958) , that in this context “Me” (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Blanke, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of “I” (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition 2 by understanding the self-as-subject, or “I,” as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [ Figure ​ Figure1 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger’s (2003 , 2010 ) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal “I” 3 ( Prinz, 2012 ), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal “I” [or the Wittgenstein’s (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal “Me.” Table ​ Table2 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) distinctions between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”). In the original formulation, James’ (1890) “Me” includes also physical objects and people (material and social “Me”) – they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

Examples of theories of the self-as-object (“Me”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

“Me” As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890 , p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word “Me” to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James’ (1890) view, it reflects “all the things” which have the power to produce “excitement of a certain particular sort.” This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014 ; Guillot, 2017 ). What are “all the things”? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to “objects” which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of “things” – conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James’ (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define “Me” as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996) , who begins “ The conscious mind ” by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following 4 : visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se , such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James’ (1890) terms, “objects” in a stream of consciousness: “all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking” (p. 325).

The self understood as “Me” can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness ( Figure ​ Figure2 2 ). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person’s face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to “Me,” the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008 ; Payne et al., 2017 ; Woźniak et al., 2018 ). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971 ; Blakemore et al., 1998 ; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009 ). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ; Constable et al., 2018 ). This was anticipated by James’ (1890) notion of the material “Me,” and is typically regarded as reflecting one’s extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about “Me” or about something/someone else.

A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical “I,” the phenomenal “Me,” and the phenomenal “I,” which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal “Me.” Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as “I experience X.” In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one’s own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions – thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of “Me” (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale ( Aron et al., 1992 ). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one’s self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to “Me” allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one’s body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one’s possessions one can speak about one’s extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to “Me” introduced here. The first one is as follows:

• simple (1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always “mine,” such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as “I,” i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000 ; Christoff et al., 2011 ; Blanke et al., 2015 ) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999 ; Craig, 2010 ; Seth et al., 2011 ; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 ; Salomon, 2017 ). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as “my” experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of “Me.” They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one’s body and those coming from another person’s (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between “my” versus “other’s” proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal “Me” and phenomenal “not-Me” will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016 ). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009 ). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being “not-mine,” leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000 ; Kaufman, 2004 ). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario – rather than two pieces of the same organ being “wired” to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 )? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of “Me” then the answer becomes simple – the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal “Me,” for example in a form of background self-experience, or “phenomenal background” ( Dainton, 2008 , 2016 ), rather than the phenomenal “I.”

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

• simple (2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either “me” or “other,” but their subject is always “I.” As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal “I” and not the phenomenal “Me.”

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one’s thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: “there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask ‘are you sure it is you who have pains?’ “would be nonsensical” ( Wittgenstein, 1958 ). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject (see Table ​ Table1 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say “I see a photo of my face in front of me” I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal “I” (self-as-subject) and phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word “I” (or “my”). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises – to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014 ). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal “I,” i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal “Me” – a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008 ; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009 ; Martin and Pacherie, 2013 ). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one’s thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Billon, 2013 ; Guillot, 2017 ; López-Silva, 2017 ). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership 5 over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one’s thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one’s thoughts “as someone else’s,” or at least “as not-mine.” However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I’ve taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have “objectified” them to experience that they have a quality of “feeling as if they are not mine.” Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal “I” turns out to be a part of thephenomenal “Me.”

If my thoughts do not constitute the “I” then how do they fit into the structure of “Me”? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute “Me,” while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as “mine” belong to “Me.” How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger’s (2003 ; 2010 ) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017) :

• simple  Savage suggests that on LSD “[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes” (1955, 11), (…) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017 , p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object (“Me”) are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel “mine” as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as “mine.” As a result, this thinking phenomenal “I” experienced in feeling of ownership over one’s thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian “Me.” As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal “I,” just multilevel phenomenal “Me.” However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else’s (a demon’s or some malicious puppet master’s), she can still claim that:

Yes, “I” experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon’s.” My thoughts feel as “not-mine,” however, it’s still me (or: “I”) who thinks of them as “not-mine.”

As such, one escapes “objectification” of “I” into “Me” by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-“I.” However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: “I” (I 1 ) experience that the “fake I” (I 2 ), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else’s (e.g., as nasty green demon’s). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal “I” is I 1 , since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal “I” into another “fake-I” (and consequently making it a part of “Me”).

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal “I” understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly “on the run” from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep “I,” which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep “I” cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of “Me.” Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep “I”: in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016 ) who argue that “all conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent.” It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather “refers to the distinct manner, or how , of experiencing” ( Zahavi, 2014 ).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016 ). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the “ how of experiencing” of another person. For example, can I experience my sister’s for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep “I” is to reject that the subject of experience, the “I,” is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000 ; Prinz, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between “Me” and “I” as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: “(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem” ( James, 1890 , p. 401).

“I” As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890 , pp. 330–331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of “I” emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do “fly about loose,” devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone’s or something’s consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012 ; Strawson, 2003 ; Searle, 2005 ; Dainton, 2016 ). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of “what it is like to be a bat” ( Nagel, 1974 ), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical “I,” as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal “I” (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical “I” does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical “I,” but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as “me,” nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as “I.” In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which “is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (…) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction” ( Windt, 2015 ). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience – the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015 ; Metzinger, 2018 ), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of “Me.” Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016 ), possess conscious experience 6 . If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between “Me” and “not-Me.” However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011 ) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table ​ Table3 3 ). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987 ; Strawson, 2000 ; Dainton, 2008 ), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005 ), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003 ). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

Examples of theories of the self-as-subject (“I”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015 , Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical “I.”

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014 ; Tononi et al., 2016 ) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational “complex” which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max ). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max . The complex that specifies a person’s day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max – that is, it should be the “major” complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca’s area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical “I” can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010 ). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

• simple  An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions – for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical “I”? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical “I” can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical “I” can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some “self” (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism’s consciousness this metaphysical “I” would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not “co-conscious” with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical “I” cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical “I” persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000 , 2010 ). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical “I” turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical “I,” and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical “I” is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal “Me,” where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between “Me” and “I.” I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2010 ), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical “I”).

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 , 2010 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ; Hohwy, 2013 ; Clark, 2016 ). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one’s internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called “variational free energy,” which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 ). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014 ), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007 ), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011 ; Seth, 2013 ), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014 ; Friston and Frith, 2015 ), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ; Fotopoulou, 2012 ). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 ) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

• simple  We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (…) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 , p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016 ; Williams, 2017 ) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand’s movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017) , the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003 ; Chalmers, 2004 , for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006 , 2014 , for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories – the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James’ (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal “Me” – by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical “I”? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal “Me,” the issues pertaining to the metaphysical “I” are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013 , Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011 ; Dehaene, 2014 ). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995 ) – a functional mechanism which allows that “some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others” ( Dehaene, 2014 ). However, the problem of the metaphysical “I” becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness – the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called “hard problem” ( Chalmers, 1996 ).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference 7 ) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical “I.”

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical “I” (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of “Me,” it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of “I.”

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between “Me” and “I” may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal “I” can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal “Me” [which can be understood as Metzinger’s (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between “I” and “Me,” which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While “Me” can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, “I” is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables ​ Tables2 2 , ​ 3 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal “I” as just a part of the phenomenal “Me,” has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as “I” from the perspective of “Me” may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term “I” when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction (“Me” versus “I”) which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term “I” in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as “sense of ownership over an experience” to reflect what is meant by “I” in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., “sense of ownership of interoceptive signals” when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of “Me” versus the experience/sense of “I” (rather than just “Me” and “I”). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

Funding. This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

1 Therefore, whenever I use the term “I" I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term “Me" I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James’ (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table ​ Table1 1 ). I also assume, following James (1890) , that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.

2 Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of “I” as subject and “I” as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.

3 Whenever I use the prefix “phenomenal” I mean “the conscious experience of.” For example, when I write phenomenal “I”, I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience (“I”). In a similar fashion I use the prefix “metaphysical” when I mean “the metaphysical entity of.”

4 Chalmers (1996) also lists “sense of self,” although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.

5 Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.

6 “IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior” ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 460).

7 For example, he writes: “So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness” ( Friston, 2018 , p. 1).

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Artificial Intelligence

Ai's quest for a grand unification theory, new research helps framing the very nature of intelligence and reality..

Posted May 19, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• AI models may converge towards a unified understanding of reality as they become more advanced.
• This idea, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, echoes Plato's concept of universal forms.
• The hypothesis has implications for AI's future, reality itself, and the nature of intelligence.

Imagine a future where artificial intelligence (AI) systems, regardless of their specific tasks, all share a common understanding of the world. This is the essence of the "Platonic Representation Hypothesis," a fascinating idea in a recently published paper . The authors suggest that as AI models become more advanced, they start to represent data in increasingly similar ways, hinting at a shared, abstract model of reality. It might be a good idea to put on your thinking cap.

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Overview

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that as AI models become more sophisticated and are trained on more diverse data, their internal representations of the world will converge toward a unified, abstract model of reality. This shared understanding would transcend the specific tasks or data types the AI models are designed to handle, suggesting a common underlying structure to intelligence and perception.

The Echoes of Plato's Philosophy

The concept of a shared understanding among AI systems is reminiscent of the philosophical idea of platonic ideals. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, believed that the world we perceive is merely a reflection of perfect, universal forms. Similarly, the researchers propose that AI models, whether they're processing language, images, or audio, are all tapping into a common understanding of the world as they become more sophisticated—in essence, a unified theory of reality.

Implications for AI's Future

If the Platonic Representation Hypothesis proves true, it could have far-reaching implications for the future of AI. A unified understanding of reality could lead to AI systems that are more efficient and adaptable. Imagine an AI that can easily apply what it learned in one domain, like language, to another domain, like image recognition. This would be a significant step forward from the specialized AI systems we have today.

The Limits of Translation

However, the idea of a shared representation is not without its challenges. Some argue that the apparent convergence might be a result of current technological limitations or biases in the data used to train AI models. Others point out that different types of data, such as images and text, may contain unique information that can't be fully captured by a single, shared representation.

AI's Grand Unification Theory

The pursuit of a unified theory of AI bears a striking resemblance to the quest for a grand unification theory in physics. Just as physicists have long sought to unify the fundamental forces of nature into a single, coherent framework, this theory suggests that the seemingly disparate branches of AI may ultimately converge towards a unified understanding of intelligence and reality. If AI models are indeed tapping into a shared, abstract representation of the world, it suggests that there may be fundamental laws or principles that govern all forms of intelligence, whether artificial or biological. These laws could be as profound and far-reaching as the laws of physics, shaping the very fabric of cognition and perception.

Implications for Reality Itself

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis not only has profound implications for the future of AI but also raises intriguing questions about the nature of reality itself. If AI models are, in fact, converging towards a shared representation of the world, it suggests that there may be an underlying structure or order to reality that is independent of any specific observer or mode of observation. This idea resonates with certain philosophical and scientific concepts, such as the theory of objective reality in metaphysics or the search for a unified field theory in physics.

Bridging the Abstract and the Concrete

If proven true, this hypothesis could bridge the gap between the abstract world of mathematics and computation and the concrete world of physical reality, suggesting a deep connection between the two. It may even hint at the existence of a "platonic realm" of pure forms and ideas that exists beyond our direct experience, but which we can access through reason and abstraction.

While these ideas are highly speculative and require further investigation, they demonstrate the interesting philosophical and scientific implications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis and its potential to reshape our understanding of both intelligence and reality itself. And while the use of "Plato" in the paper's thesis may be a bit of a linguistic stretch, it offers another avenue of thought to understand AI and perhaps even into the very nature of existence.

John Nosta is an innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab.

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