Chapter 16: Egos, bundles and theories of the self

Who is reading this book? Who is conscious of the writing on the page, the attempt to understand and answer the question, or the sounds of revelry in the next room? Questions about the nature of consciousness are intimately bound up with those about the nature of self because it seems as though there must be someone having the experience: that there cannot be experiences without an experiencer. Our experiencing self seems to be at the centre of everything we are aware of at a given time, and to be continuous from one moment to the next. In other words, it seems to have both unity and continuity.

In everyday language, we talk constantly about our ‘self’. It seems that we not only think of this self as a single thing but give it all sorts of attributes and capabilities. In ordinary usage, the self is the subject of our experiences, who carries out actions and makes decisions, a unique personality, and the source of desires, opinions, hopes, and fears. This self is ‘me’; it is the reason why anything matters in ‘my’ life. But where or what is this ‘me’? Are you ready to question everything you know boys and girls?

One way of escaping the problem might be to declare that I am my whole body, and there is no need for a self as well. This would be fine, except that most people don’t feel that way.  We feel like something more than just the body.

That this apparently natural way of thinking about ourselves is problematic has been recognised for millennia. In the sixth century BC, the Buddha challenged contemporary thinking with his doctrine of anatta. This is often, perhaps inaccurately, translated as ‘no-self’, when really he was rejecting the common idea that we consist of a separate and continuous entity. Instead, he claimed that the self is just a name or label given to a collection of parts, in the way that we give the name ‘carriage’ to a set of parts – a suggestion that seems as hard to understand and accept today as it was then.

The central question is why it seems as though I am a single, continuous self who has conscious experiences. Possible answers can be divided into two major types. The first, ego theories, claims that it is true: there really is some kind of continuous self that is the subject of my experiences, that makes my decisions, and so on. The second, bundle theories, accepts that it seems this way but claims that really there is no underlying continuous and unitary self. The illusion that there is has to be explained some other way.

Ego theories are undoubtedly the more popular. Many religions entail notions of spirits or souls, including both Christianity and Islam, which teach that the soul is a continuing entity that is central to a person’s life, underlies moral responsibility, and can survive the death of the physical body. Among the major religions, Buddhism alone denies the existence of such entities.

Bundle theories take their name from the philosophy of David Hume, who argued in A Treatise of Human Nature that we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. All our sensations, impressions, and ideas seem to be tied together because memory gives them apparent continuity, and as such is the source of personal identity. There is no additional unified entity that experiences things or holds the experiences together.

What are multiple personalities?

Stupid question. You study psychology, of course you know about multiple personalities. Now called Dissociative Identity Disorder, it is the phenomenon when a personality is shattered into two or more pieces, creating identities that are separate and unaware of each other. The book talks about the ego and bundle theories in relation to this disorder. Do exercise 1 for this.

What does ‘thought is the thinker’ mean?”

William James wrote extensively about both self and consciousness, and his ideas are still widely respected today. James built his theory first and foremost on the way it seems. Central to the concept of personal identity, he said, is the feeling of unity and continuity of oneself - one’s own thoughts have a warmth and intimacy about them that distinguishes them from others’ thoughts  – although where exactly to draw the boundary between one’s own and others’ thoughts is not always clear.

James divides the self into two ever-present elements: the ‘me’ and the ‘I’. The ‘me’, the empirical self or objective person, includes three aspects:

• The material self – including body and possessions
• The social self – including how we behave with and are seen by others.
• The spiritual self – this may seem an odd name to use today, but it includes mental dispositions and abilities, religious aspirations, and moral principles. This includes subjective experience.

The ‘I’ lies beyond all this: it is the subjective knowing thought, or pure ego, the self that I care about, the felt nucleus of my experience. This is ‘the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal’. He describes the two main ways of dealing with it in a way that should by now seem thoroughly familiar to us: the soul or denying the consciousness is even real.

James proposes the following: ‘The phenomena are enough, the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the ultimate known law’. What he means is this; At any moment in time, there is a passing thought (he calls this special thought the Thought) that incessantly remembers previous thoughts and appropriates some of them to itself. In this way, what holds the thoughts together is not a separate spirit or ego, but only another thought of a special kind. This Thought identifies and owns some parts of the stream of consciousness while disowning others. It pulls together thoughts it finds ‘warm’ and calls them ‘mine’. The next moment another Thought takes up the expiring Thought and appropriates it. It binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself. In this way, the passing Thought seems to be the Thinker. The unity we experience is not something separate from the Thoughts. Indeed, it does not exist until the Thought is there.

Thus; The thought is the thinker.

What are neuro-scientific theories of the self?

Man, I really don’t feel like writing about any more theories, but here we go. Many neuroscientists deliberately avoid talking about the self and self-consciousness. Others discuss self-awareness as a sub-category of awareness in general, and some consider how the self-concept develops and how it can go wrong (as in amnesia or blindsight). Only a few attempt to explain why the self seems to be a continuous agent and a subject of experience. Their most common strategy is to equate the self with one particular brain process or functional area of the brain – something which has been proven not to work because it’s not located in one brain area, but alright, I suppose we should talk about it. Here is a list with short recaps of studies;

• Ramachandran: concludes that a single unified self ‘inhabiting’ the brain is an illusion, but also that ‘It is not difficult to see how such processes could give rise to the mythology of a self as an active presence in the brain – a “ghost in the machine”
• Antonio Damasio: draws on his studies of brain damage and psychopathology to distinguish the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self. The sense of self has a preconscious biological precedent in the simplest organisms and is a set of neural patterns which map the state of an organism moment by moment. More complex organisms have ‘core consciousness’, which is not dependent upon memory, reasoning, or language, and is associated with the core self, ‘a transient entity, ceaselessly re-created for each and every object with which the brain interacts’.
• Bernard Baars: the GWT - the self-system is part of the context hierarchy that influences what gets onto the stage. Indeed, it is the dominant and unifying ‘deep context’.
• Stanislas Dehaene: doesn’t think there is a necessary link between consciousness and self-consciousness. For him, being conscious of some aspect of oneself is just another form of conscious access to the workspace. Instead of the information being about colour or sound, it is about one of the various mental representations of ‘me’ – my body, my behaviour, my feelings or thoughts. When I reflect upon myself, the observed and the observing ‘I’ are simply encoded within different brain systems.

How about just theories about the self and body?

Again, here’s a list;

• Buddhism: distinguishes between perspectival ownership, where the experience presents itself as distinctive to the subject of the experience, and personal ownership, a stronger sense of identifying oneself as the owner of an experience: thinking of it, whether reflectively or pre-reflectively, as being mine or apprehending it as part of me.
• Albahari: thinks that having a sense of self requires not just perspectival ownership but personal ownership: not just being a point of view but drawing boundaries between what belongs to ‘me’ or other. But for her, crucially, having a sense of self is not the same as having a self. The sense of self exists but the self itself does not. Our experiences precede and create our sense of self rather than the other way round.
• Dennett:  (again, oh my god) multiple personality seems strange only because we falsely think that selves are all-or-none and must exist one to a body. Abandoning this idea allows us to accept fragmentary selves, partial narratives, and multiple selves that are just as real as the more common one-to-a-body type. There might even be fewer than one self to a body, as in the case of the twins Greta and Freda Chaplin, who seemed to act as one, and speak together or in alternation.
• Kurzweil: human selves will not be tied to the survival of human bodies one day -  our immortality will be assured by technological progress. All we need to do is to increase the speed and accuracy of the scanning processes already available, copy the relevant aspects of a brain’s organisation into a computer, and – hey presto – we live on.
• Brooks: ‘We will not download ourselves into machines; rather, those of us alive today, over the course of our lifetimes, will morph ourselves into machines’. So, cyborgs then?

So, what now?

The idea of self links up with every other topic we have considered in this book. It is integral to why we think there is a problem of consciousness in the first place. It seems to provide a subject for the feeling of what-it’s-like-to-be . . . me, you, a bat or anybody.

It is the entity that declares it couldn’t be under an illusion about something as dear to it as its own experiences. It is what feels as though it resides in your brain, or at least somewhere in your head, whether in a comfy seat in your own private theatre or just in the sense you have that there is unity, all the time, with you at its centre. It is ‘you’ who pays attention, decides to act, and disappears in unconsciousness. It is you for whom consciousness must have evolved, and you who is convinced that being an octopus is not like being you, and that being a machine is like being nothing at all, let alone like being like you. You are the one who chooses – or not – to expand your mind with drugs or meditation, or to lose yourself and briefly be someone else in a story or a film.

It is you who seems to be only half-present in dreaming? Do you feel any differently about any of this now, having read this far? Does the you who might feel differently feel any less solid, or maybe more?

Exercises

16.1. Think about the multiple personality disorder. How could you link this to the ego theories? And now bundle theories? What do you think is more likely? If unsure, check out pages 439-443.