⁂ Concepts · Mind · No. 88
Self

Split-brain testing: the hemisphere that answers supplies a story either way.

Self

The subject to whom experiences and actions are attributed - and whether anything answers to that description.

Theme
Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition
Cross-tradition
Term fixed
1694

In plain terms

Experiences seem to come with an owner. It is not merely that a pain occurs; it is that someone has it, and the same someone had yesterday's pain and will make tomorrow's decision.

When you look for that owner, though, you find only more experiences. Hume made the point by reporting that whenever he went looking for himself he stumbled on some particular perception and never on the perceiver. There is no experience of being a self alongside the experiences of the world.

So either the self is something real that cannot be observed, or it is a construction - a pattern the mind builds out of memory, body and narrative, so useful and so continuous that it is mistaken for a thing. Both answers have been held by serious people for a very long time.

As a philosopher would put it

Locke separates person from man and from substance, and grounds personal identity in continuity of consciousness rather than in any underlying stuff. Hume takes the next step: there is no impression of a self, so the idea is illegitimate, and the mind is a bundle of perceptions with no principle of union beyond association.

Kant's reply is that a bundle could not be a bundle without unification. The transcendental unity of apperception - that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations - is a formal condition of experience rather than an object found in it, which makes the self real as a structure and unavailable as a thing.

The Indian traditions ran this argument earlier and further apart. Nyāya defends a substantial self by inference; Sāṃkhya distinguishes the witnessing puruṣa from all mental activity; Advaita identifies the self with Brahman; and Buddhism denies a self entirely, analysing it into aggregates. Contemporary work divides between narrative accounts, minimal-self accounts grounded in bodily ownership, and Metzinger's position that the self is a model the brain runs and never a thing at all.

Where you meet it

In the 1960s a small number of patients with severe epilepsy had the corpus callosum cut to stop seizures spreading between hemispheres. The surgery worked, and the patients seemed entirely normal.

Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga then tested them with each hemisphere shown different information. Presented with a word only to the right hemisphere, a patient would deny having seen anything - and the left hand would draw it. Asked why they had done something the right hemisphere initiated, the left hemisphere produced a confident and false explanation, apparently without noticing.

Sperry received a Nobel Prize in 1981. What the work established is disputed and the disputes continue, including whether the results show two centres of experience or one with disrupted access. What is not disputed is the confabulation: the part of the brain that answers questions supplies a unified story regardless of whether it had access to the cause. That is the self doing exactly what the constructivist accounts say it does.

What is actually disputed

Whether there is a self or only a self-model.

The deflationary case is strong and old: no experience presents a self, the appearance of unity is manufactured, and the confabulation results show the manufacturing at work. Metzinger's version is that no such thing as a self exists, and that what exists is a transparent model the system cannot see as a model.

The reply is that a model has to be a model for something, and that the demand to find the self as an object among objects is misconceived - Kant's point, that it is a form of experience and not an item in it. Between these sit the narrative accounts, on which the self is real in the way an institution is real: constructed, dependent on practices, and not therefore a fiction. What almost nobody now defends is the pre-Lockean substantial soul.

Commonly confused with

  • Personal identity 1694 Personal identity asks what makes someone the same person over time. The self is the question of whether there is a subject at all, and one can be answered without the other.
  • ego in the psychoanalytic sense Freud's ego is one agency among three in a specific model. The philosophical self is the whole question of subjecthood.

Defined against

  • Anātman The most sustained denial of the self ever argued, and the reason this entry cannot be written as though the question were settled

Philosophers

  • John Locke The self as continuity of consciousness rather than substance
  • David Hume No impression of a self, therefore no legitimate idea of one
  • Immanuel Kant The unity of apperception as a condition rather than an object
  • Sigmund Freud The self decentred, with most of it outside awareness
  • Buddha The aggregates, and no owner behind them

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Ātman c. 700 BC · Anātman c. 450 BC · Personal identity 1694 · Consciousness 1641 · Authenticity 1927

The question is far older, but Locke's chapter of 1694 is where the self becomes a distinct philosophical topic in Europe rather than a synonym for the soul.