Is the self real?
Is there a 'you' behind your experiences, or only the experiences?
I
The self is an illusion
There is no single, enduring, unified self behind experience. There are only experiences, causally connected, which the mind represents as belonging to a self.
- Best argument
- Introspection never reveals a self, only particular states. Neuroscience finds no single place where 'it all comes together'; the brain is a parallel system of competing processes. Split-brain cases and dissociative conditions show that the apparent unity can come apart. The simplest explanation is that the unified self is a model the brain builds, not a thing it contains.
- Strongest objection
- An illusion needs someone to have it. If the self is an illusion, who is being fooled? The very act of looking for the self seems to require a looker.
- The reply
- Defenders answer that the illusion is had by the system as a whole, which is real; what is illusory is the system's picture of itself as containing a separate inner owner. A mirage is real light even though the water is not.
- Defended by
- David Hume, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Derek Parfit, Thomas Metzinger
II
The self is real and simple
The self is a genuine, unified subject of experience, and its existence is the one thing we cannot doubt.
- Best argument
- René Descartes argued that every doubt is itself a thought, and every thought has a thinker. Thomas Reid insisted that the self is not a bundle but that which has the bundle: 'I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers.' Experience is always experience for someone; this first-person point of view cannot be dissolved into its contents.
- Strongest objection
- That experiences always have a point of view does not show that the point of view is a persisting substance. It might be a feature of each experience, not a thing that lasts from one to the next.
- Defended by
- René Descartes, Thomas Reid, Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
III
The self is a construction, and real
The self is not a hidden object, but neither is it nothing. It is a real pattern: a story, a centre of gravity, a way the organism organises itself.
- Best argument
- Daniel Dennett calls the self a 'centre of narrative gravity'. A centre of gravity is not a physical particle, yet it is real and useful. In the same way, the self is the character at the centre of the story the brain tells about itself. It is constructed, but constructed things, like nations, money and laws, can be entirely real.
- Strongest objection
- Critics on one side say this is just the no-self view in polite language. Critics on the other say it leaves out the felt, first-person subject, which is not a character in a story but the one experiencing the story.
- Defended by
- Daniel Dennett, Galen Strawson
For the full background, variations and open questions, read the entry: Is the self an illusion?.