In this paper we examine different answers to the question of what we are, focusing in particular on eliminative and reductivist proposals about persons or selves. We conclude that, as of today, dualism seems more reasonable than naturalism, if by naturalism we understand the thesis that psychological entities can be reduced or eliminated.

A 'no-ownership' or 'no-self theory' holds that there is no proper subject of experience; the ownership of experience can only be accounted for by invoking a sub-personal entity. In the recent self-versus-no-self debate, it is widely assumed that the no- referent view of 'I', which is closely associated with Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, implies a no-ownership theory of experience. I spell out this assumption with regard to both non-reflective and reflective consciousness and show that it is false. If (...) the so-called 'self' is an individual, the person, nothing more is required for the ownership of sensations than the non-reflective experiencing, undergoing, or suffering of them, whereas the sense of 'ownership' of reflective consciousness varies according to the type of 'I'-thought in question. Ownership of 'I'-thoughts about one's own actions, for one thing, is a matter of being able to fit future actions to them or answer questions as to why one is doing what one does. (shrink)

In the Treatise, Hume attempts to explain why we all believe that the self is a single unified entity that persists over time, a belief which Hume calls a fiction. In this paper, I demonstrate how Hume uses a type of functional explanation to account for this belief. After explicating Hume's view, I shall argue that it faces two related problems, which constitute a sort of dilemma. In the final section, I show how one of the horns of this dilemma (...) is plausibly what troubles Hume in the famous Appendix passage where he retracts his positive account of personal identity. (shrink)

The Elephant and the Blind is a book about why we need a new culture of consciousness, and how to get it. A culture of consciousness (or Bewusstseinskultur) is a culture that values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way.

I aim to show that, contrary to standard deflationary or eliminativist theories of the self, we can argue from the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness for the thesis that subjects of experience are substances. The phenomenological datum of subjectivity points to a specific metaphysical structure of our experience, that is, towards the substance view rather than the bundle or the minimal self view. Drawing on modern philosophical accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness and (self-) acquaintance, I will argue that a subject is (...) aware of being the one individual who has many experiences and that it is revealed to the subject that it is the bearer of experiences and their unifier. The subject is present in pre-reflective awareness and known as the subject of experiences, and even this minimal self-awareness gives us reason to favour the substance view. Thus, one can demonstrate how the debates on the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness and the metaphysics of selfhood intersect. (shrink)

The initial cause of Cotard delusion is pervasive dyshomeostasis (dysregulation of basic bodily function).This explanation draws on interoceptive active inference account of self‐representation. In this framework, the self is an hierarchical predictive model made by the brain to facilitate homeostatic regulation. The account I provide is an alternative to two factor accounts of the Cotard delusion that treat depersonalisation experience as the first factor in genesis of the Cotard delusion. I argue that depersonalisation experience and the Cotard delusion are produced (...) by different breakdowns in the process of self‐modelling. (shrink)

Thinking about oneself as a subject leaves unanswered fundamental questions about one’s identity as an object: about which thing one is, about what kind of thing one is, and about whether one exists at all. I put forward a new way of thinking about these questions by outlining the subject-as-object problem, a problem for inquiry directed at oneself qua subject. I argue that the source of the problem lies in the relationship between a basic precondition for inquiry – that something (...) be present – and a framework that enables us to conceive of ourselves as inquirers in an objective world – the framework of objectivity. Once the problem is recognized, we can explain why there is always room for questions about one’s identity in response to any account of oneself and one’s relation to the world. (shrink)

Öz: Felsefenin benlik konusundaki geleneksel tutumu töz dualizmine başvurarak açıklanabilir. Çağdaş zihin araştırmalarında benlik ise, daha çok fizik dünyanın gerçekliği dolayımıyla ve genellikle bilinçli zihin durumu olarak olgusallık temelinde araştırılmaktadır. Bu çalışmada ise benliğin olgusallığı, olgu ve kurgu kategorilerinin bilgikuramsal bir çözümlemesi aracılığıyla ve mantığa uyarlık açısından ele incelenecektir. Bu bağlamda “olgu” ve “kurgu”yu bir tür karşıtlık ya da derin farklılıklar içeren iki kavram olarak açıklamanın haklı gerekçelere dayanmadığı öne sürülmektedir. Buna bağlı olarak da herhangi bir zihin araştırmasının benliği olgu (...) saymadan yapılamayacağı savunulmaktadır. Bu çalışmada özellikle deneyime ilişkin yeni bir kavrayışın gerekli olmasının sonucunda benlik tartışmalarının belli türden bir araştırma programı izlendiğinde gündemimize taşıyabileceği olanaklar soruşturulacaktır. (shrink)

The article discusses the problem of whether the self, or the subject, is real. There are several realist and anti-realist solutions to this problem. The author interprets all possible positions concerning this issue as conceptions of a certain relationship between the phenomenal self and the ontological self. In line with what is called phenomenal, or experiential minimalism, the author concludes that the experiential dimension of the self is sufficient for it to be real without qualification. Providing an argument against anti-realism, (...) the author differentiates between strong and reductive realism and maintain that selves criticized by anti-realists like Metzinger are things of strong realism, while in fact selves might turn out to be the things of reductive realism. The author suggests a solution to another problem of the ontology of the self, namely the problem of characterization. By endorsing minimalism, the self is characterized as the experiential faculty. According to the suggested version of minimalism, having experience is a necessary and sufficient condition to be a self or a subject. All other properties ascribed to subjects in philosophical literature are contingent. Properties like these are of course attributes of subjects, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for subjectivity. A subject who loses these properties does not cease to be a subject. On the contrary, a thing which has lost its experiential ability ceases to be a subject. In addition, there are non-human subjects who may lack all subjectivity-related features, except for the experiential faculty, and still be considered subjects. Phenomenal minimalism is a solution to the problem of the reality of selves. Subjects, or selves, are real as things with the experiential faculty. Finally, the author rejects pluralism and conventionalism. Instead, essentialist realism is endorsed. (shrink)

The combination of panpsychism and priority monism leads to priority cosmopsychism, the view that the consciousness of individual sentient creatures is derivative of an underlying cosmic consciousness. It has been suggested that contemporary priority cosmopsychism parallels central ideas in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. The paper offers a critical evaluation of this claim. It argues that the Advaitic account of consciousness cannot be characterized as an instance of priority cosmopsychism, points out the differences between the two views, and suggests an alternative (...) positioning of the Advaitic canon within the contemporary debate on monism and panpsychism. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that phenomenally conscious experiences involve a sense of mineness, since experiences like pain or hunger are immediately presented as mine. What can be said about this mineness, and does acceptance of this feature commit us to the existence of a subject or self? If yes, how should we characterize this subject? This paper considers the possibility that, to the extent that we accept this feature, it provides us with a minimal notion of a subject of experience, and (...) that the phenomenological subject of experience, as it is represented in conscious experience, is the organism. While many philosophers agree that the metaphysical subject of experience is the animal, this claim is much less widespread, maybe even counterintuitive. The argument for this claim alludes to the structure of phenomenal consciousness and to recent work in cognitive science concerning the embodied character of consciousness and cognition. To illustrate the problems of current controversies, not only several recent rejections of a subject of experience are critically discussed, but also Hume’s famous rejection of a subject is criticized making use of epistemological aspects from Kant’s philosophy of mind. The final section situates the present discussion in the context of recently popular predictive coding accounts of perception and perceptual experience. (shrink)

In recent years, the social dimensions of selfhood have been discussed widely. Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? These questions are explored in the following contribution.

Buddhism is sometimes said to hold a pragmatic conception of truth, according to which a statement is true just in case it leads to the attainment of one’s goals. Since a true utterance would then be one that is likely to lead to the attainment of the interlocutor’s goals, this would show that the Buddha was not inconsistent when he said seemingly incompatible things on different occasions: to assess the truth of an utterance one must consider the context, which includes (...) the goals and the capacities and dispositions of one’s interlocutor. Today, there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of consensus concerning the nature of the good life; the liberal state is widely seen as the ideal political formation precisely because it leaves room for individual variation in conceptions of the good. In such a context, adopting a pragmatic conception of truth would have the result that truth was whatever worked for the individual given the goals they happen to hold. Presumably, a Buddhist would reject this idea of true belief as belief that leads to individual gratification. In order to support this rejection, they would need to claim that certain goals are intrinsically more worthy of attainment than others. The question could then be raised whether such a claim is compatible with a pragmatic conception of truth. Various possible responses to this question are explored, the aim being not only to determine what a Buddhist ought to say about truth, but also to find out something about the nature of truth as a value. (shrink)

It is often held that to have a conscious experience presupposes having some form of implicit self-awareness. The most dominant phenomenological view usually claims that we essentially perceive experiences as our own. This is the so called “mineness” character, or dimension of experience. According to this view, mineness is not only essential to conscious experience, it also grounds the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. In this paper, we show that there are reasons to doubt this constituting role (...) of mineness. We argue that there are alternative possibilities and that the necessity for an adequate theory of the self within psychopathology gives us good reasons to believe that we need a thicker notion of the pre-reflective self. To this end, we develop such a notion: the Pre-Reflective Situational Self. To do so, we will first show how alternative conceptions of pre-reflective self-awareness point to philosophical problems with the standard phenomenological view. We claim that this is mainly due to fact that within the phenomenological account the mineness aspect is implicitly playing several roles. Consequently, we argue that a thin interpretation of pre-reflective self-awareness—based on a thin notion of mineness—cannot do its needed job within, at least within psychopathology. This leads us to believe that a thicker conception of pre-reflective self is needed. We, therefore, develop the notion of the pre-reflective situational self by analyzing the dynamical nature of the relation between self-awareness and the world, specifically through our interactive inhabitation of the social world. (shrink)

A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences “belong” to the self. In this paper I argue that this feeling, baptized “mineness” or “subjective presence” : 565–573, 2013) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The “self” to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the (...) world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect the organism needs to explain this unpredicted absence of feeling. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind’s representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization. (shrink)

This dissertation in Theory of Practical Knowledge contends that depression is a disorder of the self. Using the existential-phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that if we want to disclose the basic structure of depressed experience, then we must likewise disclose how selfexperience is inseparable from depressed experience. However, even though depression is a contemporary psychiatric category of illness, it is nevertheless a historically and heterogenous concept. To make sense of depression in the context of contemporary psychiatric practice, I show (...) that depression has historically been characterized by two broad models of causation; that is, a phenomenon that is causally explained by either a biological dysfunction or a psychological conflict. But this stark characterization is not limited just to history; by conducting qualitative interviews with psychiatric professionals, I illustrate how this causal dichotomy remains prevalent in contemporary psychiatric practice. On one hand, the clinicians report dissatisfaction with the depression diagnostic criteria (i.e. it is impersonal or vague), while on the other hand, the clinicians also recognize that a depression diagnosis is useful insofar as a diagnosis facilitates access to various resources associated with psychiatric care. Consequently, clinicians have developed a coping strategy that is witnessed in their empathetic desire to distance patients from their depression diagnosis, which led to statements such as, “you are not the problem, the problem is depression.” One consequence of this approach is that depression is artificially cleaved from the person who experiences depression, which subsequently means that depression is viewed to be something independent of oneself. Because I argue that depression and the self are mutually implicated, it is crucial to disseminate some of the most influential contemporary models of selfhood. I show that the brainbound, situated, psychological, and narrative model of self, all have respective strengths and weaknesses. But I also go beyond these models and characterize selfhood as a developmental phenomenon that is expressed as an embodied-style. This style reflects the way in which we establish perceptual contact with the otherness, without which there could be no self-experience. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that the self is a construct or illusion and simultaneously real. The notion of self is constitutive in metaphysics and operates subconsciously and indirectly in all human activities. The metaphysical self constitutes its own reality. The article is critical of developments in cognitive science and neuroscience where neurocentrism reduces self to brain processes. The tenet is that the self is more than its biological make-up and the measurement of brain processes. The metaphysical as well (...) as illusory aspects of self are discussed. Some important aspects of self that are visited include the construction of the self, its bodylines, contextuality, intentionality and unity. The nature of human intuition as grounded in our evolutionary make-up is proposed as a basis for the unity of the self. The role of the self in religion is briefly dealt with, focusing on the link between the notion of self and the concept of God. (shrink)

The essay is an attempt to make sense of the apparently special relation between self-knowledge and agency. To achieve that goal, the essay translates the account of what it is like to be a human self offered by Sartre into the language of evolutionary psychology. In L’être et le néant, Sartre describes the phenomenology of the self as a series of inescapable choices in a contingent set of circumstances. This essay identifies Sartre’s description with what Baumeister, Maranges and Sjåstad call (...) a matrix of maybe: the mechanism of nonfactual pragmatic prospection found in humans. Consequently, it defines the self as a matrix of maybe operating within a contingency matrix and reflecting on its own operation. Self-knowledge, the essay concludes, seems special because we routinely and erroneously ascribe to the self features of its contingency matrix. Most of our true first-person claims should not be read as I PREDICATE. Instead, they can be explicated as I have to act in a world where C PREDICATE, where C is the relevant part of the contingency matrix. (shrink)

The neuroscience revolution has led many scientists to posit “expansive” or “thinking” brains that instantiate rich psychological properties. As a result, some scientists now even claim you are identical to such a brain. However, Eric Olson has offered new arguments that thinking brains cannot exist due to their intuitively “abominable” implications. After situating the commitment to thinking brains in the wider scientific discussions in which they are posited, I then critically assess Olson's arguments against such entities. Although highlighting an important (...) insight, I show that Olson's objections to the existence of thinking brains fail and that a wider discussion engaging our new empirical findings is actually required in order to resolve the deeper issues. (shrink)