Damascene Philosophy

QuestionsX

Is the self an illusion?

Look inward for the one who is looking, and you find thoughts, feelings and sensations. You never seem to find the looker.

Reading time
4 min
Difficulty
Intermediate
Branch
Identity
First posed
The Buddha, c. 5th century BCE; independently David Hume, 1739

The question

Try a small experiment. Close your eyes and look for your self: not your body, not a particular thought, but the 'I' that has all your thoughts and experiences. What do you find?

Most people who try this honestly report something odd. They find sensations, a sound, an itch, a passing memory, a flicker of worry. They find a sense of location behind the eyes. But the owner of all these, the solid self that seems to sit at the centre, does not show up as an object among the others.

David Hume made exactly this report in 1739: 'when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other... I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.' He concluded that the self is 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions'. More than two thousand years earlier, the Buddha had taught anatta, 'not-self': that none of the components of experience, body, feeling, perception, mental formations or consciousness, is a permanent self, and that clinging to the idea of one is a root of suffering.

“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other.”

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Why it matters

If there is no enduring self, much of what we fear and want looks different. Death would be the ending of a process rather than the destruction of a thing. Self-interest would lose some of its special claim over concern for others, since the boundary between 'me' and 'not me' would be less deep than it seems.

The question has also moved from monasteries into laboratories. Neuroscientists study how the brain constructs a sense of self, and how that sense dissolves in meditation, certain drugs, and some neurological conditions.

Key terms

  • Bundle theoryThe view, classically stated by David Hume, that the self is nothing over and above a bundle of perceptions, thoughts and feelings, with no further owner.
  • Anatta (not-self)The Buddhist teaching that there is no permanent, unchanging self; a person is a changing stream of physical and mental processes.
  • SelfThe subject of experience: the 'I' that thinks, feels and acts. Whether it is a thing, a process, a story or an illusion is disputed.
  • Personal identityWhat makes a person at one time the same person as someone at another time.
  • Narrative selfThe view that a self is constituted, or at least shaped, by the story a person tells about their own life.

The positions

Position 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.

Position 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.

Position 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.

Arguments and objections

The self is an illusion

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.

The self is real and simple

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.

The self is a construction, and real

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.

Who argued what

Variations

The chariot

In the Buddhist text known as the Questions of King Milinda, the monk Nāgasena asks the king how he arrived. By chariot. Is the chariot the wheels? The axle? The frame? None of these alone. Is it something apart from them? No. 'Chariot', Nāgasena concludes, is a convenient name for parts in an arrangement, and so is 'Nāgasena'.

Ego dissolution

People who take high doses of psychedelics, or meditate intensively, sometimes report losing the sense of being a separate self while remaining fully aware. If experience can continue with no felt self, that is evidence the self is a feature of experience rather than its precondition.

Go deeper

Hume's second thoughts

In an appendix to the Treatise, Hume admitted he was unsatisfied. He could not explain what ties the bundle of perceptions together into one mind, since he held that perceptions were distinct and the mind never perceives any real connection between them. 'I find myself involved in such a labyrinth', he wrote. Philosophers still debate what exactly troubled him.

The minimal self

Phenomenologists such as Dan Zahavi distinguish a 'narrative self', the story of who you are, from a 'minimal self', the bare sense that an experience is yours. They argue the narrative self is constructed and fragile, while the minimal self is built into the structure of experience itself.

Schools of thought: Empiricism

Related ideas

Question

Are you the same person you were at eight?

Almost every cell, belief and memory has changed. Something makes that child you. The question is what.

Question

Are you your memories?

John Locke argued that you extend exactly as far back as you can remember. The idea is powerful, and it has holes you could drive a carriage through.

Thought experiment

Two minds in one head?

When surgeons cut the connection between the brain's hemispheres, each side began to act as if it had a mind of its own.

Thought experiment

Would you step into the teleporter?

It scans you, destroys your body, and builds a perfect copy on Mars a moment later. The copy wakes up remembering stepping in. Did you travel, or did you die?

Question

Is the mind just the brain?

Thoughts seem to have no weight, colour or location. Brains have all three. How are the two related?

Further reading and sources

Open questions

  • If there is no self, who is reading this?
  • Would seeing through the self make you care less about your own death?
  • Can a story be real enough to be you?

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