The Self: From Soul to Brain

Ethology and Sociobiology, 1989

In the last three decades we have seen the pendulum of scientific fashion rapidly swinging away from the austere tenents of behaviorist doctrines and back towards the legitimization of the inner life of the mind. In its wake it has brought with it both a renewed interest in "innate knowledge"-ranging from the linguistics of Noam Chomsky to the sociobiological theorizing of E. 0. Wilson-and an exploding science of cognition-ranging from the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget to the serious consideration of animal thinking by Donald Griffin. This revolution is also cross-pollinated by the all-pervading growth of the information sciences, especially by research in artificial intelligence. As a result whole realms of investigation which hitherto have been only the province of philosophers are now becoming serious concerns of scientists in many fields. In this context a book by two of the most influential scholars of our time purporting to provide a new approach to the relationship between the mind and brain should be greeted with great excitement. Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles, each of whom is without peer in their respective fields (the philosophy of science and neurophysiology, respectively), bring into focus the most central and least understood problem in the study of cognition: the nature of the self. To this problem they each bring their enormous talents and complementary backgrounds, as well as providing their readers with a glimpse of their lively conversations on the topic. Here is an opportunity to observe two great minds at work critically reviewing the many philosophical perspectives and neuropsychological findings bearing on the problem. They have brought together a wealth of information from two very different disciplines and have made them accessible to a wide audience. Both writers have approached their subject with a sense of perspective and reflection that provides a rich sense of their personal involvement with the problem. Both have the gift of writing in a casual and nontechnical style, often rapidly summarizing complex topics in a few paragraphs, without completely sacrificing the subtlety of the arguments or losing the narrative flow amidst a flurry of technical jargon. Unfortunately, those readers who are looking for a fresh and powerful new vision of this question will be disappointed at yet another footnote to Plato and Descartes dressed up in antireductionist and neurophysiological terminology. The book is organized into three distinct sections. The first section, by Popper, presents his theory of mind-body interactionism, including an explanation of his three-world system and a critical survey of the mind-body Ethology and Sociobiology

Antonio Damasio's routine of writing a book every few years addressing the neuroscience of the brain's construction of mind, consciousness, emotions, and self has the fortunate effect of creating some transparency in neuroscientific research. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain is the latest presentation in the narrative that began with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Damasio, 1994), further developed in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , and was followed by Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain .

Self Comes to Mind continues a narrative that begins with Descartes Error (1994), continued with The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), and further developed by Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003). These books are meant to be accessible to the general public, but are also useful to those professionals and researchers, who are not neuroscientists, seeking a review of recent neuroscientific empirical developments and thinking concerning self and consciousness. These books summarizing one person's effort to capture the complex phenomena of self, consciousness and mind totally within the neurological processes of the central nervous system take their place in a large corpus of literature concerning self that is complex and sometimes difficult. “Few ideas are as weighty and as slippery as the notion of self,” to borrow Jerrold Seigel’s apt characterization in the introduction to his account of the western intellectual discussion of its varied and changing ideas of self, The Idea of the Self (Seigel, 2005, p. 3).

In S. Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self (111-36)., 2011

The New School psychology bulletin, 2008

Neuroscientific research methods, such as brain imaging techniques, have increasingly been applied to social cognitive research efforts and, in particular, to the study of the self. In this essay we discuss the ability of such research to shed light on the emergent, dynamic psychological phenomenon of self. Although neuroscientific tools can be useful for gaining general knowledge about associated underlying structures, a careful consideration of the methodological and theoretical issues discussed herein is necessary to avoid simplifying or reifying the self.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2010

What is the self? Philosophers and psychologists pursuing an answer to this question immediately find themselves immersed in a host of questions about mind and body, subject and object, object and process, the homunculus, free will, self-awareness, and a variety of other puzzling matters that largely have eluded satisfying theoretical explication. In this paper I argue that some of this difficulty is attributable to our implicit, phenomenologically-based belief that the self is unitary entity-i.e., a singular ''I" that remembers, chooses, thinks, plans, and feels. In this article I address the question of what the self is by reviewing research, conducted primarily with neuropsychological participants, that converges on the idea that the self may be more complex and differentiated than many previous treatments of the topic have assumed. Although some aspects of self-knowledge such as episodic recollection may be compromised by cognitive and neurological disorders, other aspects-for instance, semantic trait summaries-appear largely intact. Taken together, these findings support the idea that there is no single, unified ''I" to be found. Rather, I argue ''the" self may best be construed as a set of interrelated, functionally independent systems.  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Cogn Sci 2010 1 172-183 WHAT IS THE SELF? T he phenomenology is universal. Each of us has the experience of a unitary self, an 'I' that remembers, chooses, thinks, plans, and feels. Yet it has been notoriously difficult to provide an account of just what this thinking, feeling, remembering, and planning entity is. Gordon Allport expressed this concern in the following famous quote: 'Who is the I that knows the bodily me, who has an image of myself and a sense of identity over time, who knows that I have propriate strivings? I know all these things, and what is more, I know that I know them. But who is it who has this perspectival grasp?.. . It is much easier to feel the self than to define the self.' (see Ref 1; p. 128

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2013

My brain and I are inseparable. I am who I am because my brain is what it is. Even so, I often think about my brain in terms different from those I use when thinking about myself. I think about my brain as that and about myself as me. I think about my brain as having neurons, but I think of me as having a memory. Still, I know that my memory is all about the neurons in my brain. Lately, I think about my brain in more intimate terms-as me.-Churchland, 2013, p. 11

Outline: The concept of self is very complex and it has been the domain of philosophy for centuries. One of the challenges for the scientific study of the Self is to give a coherent and operational definition of this topic. Recent theoretical proposals suggests that the Self is a multi-faceted construct encompassing different level of representations ranging from low-level bodily and multisensory integration processes such as body schema, body ownership, agency and first-person perspective, to high cognitive processes such as personality-traits, expectancies and values, and autobiographical memory. Nevertheless, to date researches on the Self remain confined in a specific domain with little or no interactions between scientists working on different aspects of Self-representation. We will present a philosophical overview on the notion of explicit and implicit Self and we will give a comprehensive view of the neuroscientific findings on different levels of Self-representation and thei...

Trends in Cognitive Science 4, No. 1: 14-21, 2000

Several recently developed philosophical approaches to the self promise to enhance the exchange of ideas between the philosophy of the mind and the other cognitive sciences. This review examines two important concepts of self: the ‘minimal self’, a self devoid of temporal extension, and the ‘narrative self’, which involves personal identity and continuity across time. The notion of a minimal self is first clarified by drawing a distinction between the sense of self-agency and the sense of self-ownership for actions. This distinction is then explored within the neurological domain with specific reference to schizophrenia, in which the sense of self-agency may be disrupted. The convergence between the philosophical debate and empirical study is extended in a discussion of more primitive aspects of self and how these relate to neonatal experience and robotics. The second concept of self, the narrative self, is discussed in the light of Gazzaniga’s left-hemisphere ‘interpreter’ and episodic memory. Extensions of the idea of a narrative self that are consistent with neurological models are then considered. The review illustrates how the philosophical approach can inform cognitive science and suggests that a two-way collaboration may lead to a more fully developed account of the self.

2011

Empirically informed accounts of the origin of selfhood tend to subscribe to one or the other of two competing schools of thought: (1) social constructionism about the self or (2) individualistic theories that locate the origin of the self in the cognitive system of the individual organism. According to social constructionism, it is only by the acquisition of socially instituted responses (specifically, of language) that the individual constructs a self. Thus, G. H. Mead holds that social processes are a necessary condition for the ability to recognize oneself as an object (self-objectification), and for an integrated sense of self to emerge. I shall oppose such purely social constructionist accounts of the self with a neuro-cognitive theory of selfhood. Drawing on work by neuroscientists and neurophilosophers (A. Damasio, P. S. Churchland), I shall argue that the self is at least in part constituted pre-socially, at the level of the individual, by the self-representational capacities of the mammalian brain. The integration of the self and the capacity for self-objectification will be shown to have a neurobiological origin. This account will be defended against objections that neuro-cognitive theories of selfhood are empirically false or explanatorily poor. But while neuro-cognitive theories of the self deny that the self is purely social in origin, this does not entail that the self is not shaped by our social interactions. Evidence from both developmental psychology and neuroscience (Decety & Chaminade) suggests that social interactions do play a role in the shaping of the self in human development. It will be proposed, therefore, that a ‘multi-dimensional account’ (D. Zahavi) of the self should include both neurobiological and social factors, without however imperilling the priority of the neurobiology of selfhood over its social psychology.