spiritual self understanding the self essay

The Nature of Self Perspectives from Buddhism and cognitive science. A conversation with Anne Klein and Anil Seth

Four human figures hold hands, composed of many cut out circles that blend into more circles, symbolizing the interconnected nature of self. We invite readers to explore your own interpretation. Artist: Sirin Thada

One of the most fundamental ways that we can be changed by contemplative practice relates to our sense of self. Both the Buddhist tradition and modern cognitive science have converged on core ideas suggesting that our everyday sense of existing separately from the world around us, and consistently over time, is mistaken. And realizing the interconnected, dynamic, and context-dependent nature of the self is a key insight to reduce suffering.

Mind & Life’s Science Director, Wendy Hasenkamp, spoke with experts from these two traditions to learn more about how they approach this important concept, and implications for expanding our view of self. Rather than summarize their points, we wanted to share their conversation directly with readers, in the spirit of dialogue across traditions that’s been core to Mind & Life since the beginning. (Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity, with the approval of all participants.)

Wendy Hasenkamp : Let’s start from the Buddhist side. Anne, from your perspective and the lineage that you’ve studied, can you speak to the normal, everyday experience of self, and why we experience it that way? And, as I imagine we’ll also get into, why our everyday sense of self is mistaken?

Anne C. Klein : Sure. And I should say, to start, there’s no such thing as “Buddhism.” It’s Buddhist traditions, plural. I am coming mainly from the Indian and Tibetan traditions, which are closely related. So, what does the self look like from these Buddhist traditions? What it looks like, and what it feels like is something sustained, something continuing.

I think there are actually two things going on. There’s, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And if we look behind that, there’s a sense that I’m going to be here tomorrow, and it’s going to be the same me and it’s going to be the same you, and the same room, and all of that. So there’s definitely an abundance (an overabundance from the Buddhist perspective) of an idea of continuity and permanence. Certainly, we’re aware of change, but it’s accompanied by a sense that the same self is experiencing different things, which is quite different from the self itself, as it were, being continually renewed, reconstructed, and so forth. So, there are palpitations of permanence, which Buddhism immediately points out as “wrong view.” It’s mistaken. The sense of solidity, and that the self is somehow a unitary thing, is wrong.

And it’s also a pretty stable impression, until one looks into it. The mind that analyzes will pretty quickly discover that it can’t really lay a hand, so to speak, on the self. And that is the perspective that the Buddhist traditions encourage. The kind of analysis that neuroscience is doing—looking very granularly at things, brain activity, et cetera, the various neurological and bodily events that give rise to a sense of self—that’s an explanation that is useful on all sides, east and west. But what Buddhist traditions are interested in is how that sense of self is mistaken.

So we have assumptions, the generally untended, unconscious assumptions that we make about me. “I am.” What the Buddhist traditions are interested in is identifying very carefully what we think and what we feel, because both help us identify the mistake that we’re making. To understand really what we are, we first have to unmask what we think we are. And then we have to look into that more closely to discover what we really are, because what we think we are doesn’t actually serve us. We don’t recognize the totally interdependent nature of ourselves.

To some degree, we can and do realize interdependence, and science certainly does. One thing that strikes me is that science seems to be looking at things and pulling them apart, and noting the constructed nature of experience in a way that’s very much in alignment with Buddhism. But I can’t quite tell—I’ll just put this out there for you, Anil—how much scientists are taking this in the direction of the contemplative. Which is to say, developing techniques so that we can experience the self in the actual, constructed, interdependent way it actually exists.

And why do we think that way about the self? Well, the Buddhists say we think that way because that’s how things look to us. And the senses are actually set up for failure, as far as a direct perception goes, about a lot of things. There is a very important category in the Buddhist traditions of valid perception, correct perception. It does exist, particularly in the sutra systems—inference, inferential cognition based on reasoning, that’s a valid perception. There’s smoke, which means there’s fire, et cetera. It’s a valid perception.

For Buddhists, direct perception is valid because it reflects the precise details of everything that appears to it. Sensory perception is very important. It doesn’t have the mistake of conceptual thought, which is always mistaken—even if it’s right! It’s always mistaken because in the inner world of the thinker, the thing that you’re thinking about, the image you have, at some level seems to be the real thing. You don’t feel that a tree is in your head exactly… you feel like you’re really thinking about a real tree. And for the early Buddhist systems, that’s wrong. Thought is wrong in that respect, direct perception is not.

In the Mahayana, or Great Way traditions, direct perception is mistaken in a way, too. It’s mistaken because it always looks like there’s something “over there.” The here and there problem. The self and other, the in and out, the me and you problem. These are problems that Buddhism is very interested in solving. From the Buddhist perspective, this issue is the root of desire and hatred, which is the root of all suffering—the failure to recognize the wholeness of our experience, which includes the world that seems to be external.

Wendy Hasenkamp : Thank you so much, Anne. Anil, I’m sure you have lots of thoughts from the cognitive science perspective.

Anil Seth : I do. That was a wonderful introduction and summary, and there’s definitely a lot to talk about there. My own disclaimer is I’m not here to represent a single universal consensus view from cognitive science—there’s a lot of disagreement and I am ignorant of a lot of things that are said in these fields about the self. So, I’m only speaking from what I know.

Now, if I’m thinking about this same overall question of what does the self look like, and why do we think about the self this way… From the perspective of cognitive science and neuroscience and a more Western analytic, philosophy of mind perspective, there has been a lot of development.

A good place to start (a bit of a straw man) is of course, with Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” Implicit in that statement is that the self is associated with a disembodied, rational mind. That was a view that had become very much part of the architecture of how we think about modern cognitive science—the Cartesian divide—where rationality is associated with being human, it’s associated with being conscious. And we’re left with this view of the self as intimately bound up with rationality, with thoughts, with cognitive processes of some sort, with the idea that the self is this thing, this essence, this identity that is the recipient of perceptions, that does the perceiving, that then figures out what to do next. That, in your example of “I’ll see you tomorrow,” is that center of rational mind that is present from one day to the next, that will see you tomorrow. I like the way you put it, that it’s the same self experiencing different things—this idea of continuity, which becomes reified into essence. But fortunately, partly through its interaction with some of the more spiritual Eastern traditions , this view of the self has been challenged, I think in very helpful ways.

Another line in which self has been challenged is in the work of neurologists and psychiatrists, showing that the self cannot be this unitary essence of a person, because it can disintegrate in various ways that are difficult to explain in terms of the Cartesian self or soul. You see people who lose certain aspects of (what seem to be definitional of) self, while others remain. So people can lose their memories of what’s happened to them, they can lose the ability to lay down new memories, yet in many ways seem to be the same person and still have the experiences of being embodied, of volition, of free will, of agency—all these things can be intact. Other people can lose those aspects of self, for instance people with a condition called akinetic mutism, where they lose the ability to make any voluntary actions. Colloquially, one might say they’ve lost their free will, but other aspects of self remain. So, all of these individual cases speak against this unitary essence of self. Oliver Sacks and others have written beautifully about this, collecting and describing a menagerie of examples.

And then there’s just been this general shift, which I’ve been particularly attracted to over the years, from the self as something relatively disembodied and abstract, to something that is fully and fundamentally about the body. This is a shift that we see more generally in cognitive science, too. Cognitive science was dominated, and still is to a considerable degree, by this computational metaphor of the mind—that the way to understand what the mind does, and its relation to the brain and the body, is as a software program relates to the computer that runs it. This, I think, is not a helpful way to think about the relations between self, mind, brain, body, and world.

There’s been this general shift… from the self as something relatively disembodied and abstract, to something that is fully and fundamentally about the body.

And of course, this is not a new insight; it’s been there actually from the very origins of cognitive science in the mid 20th century. People working within a tradition that was then called cybernetics were fully aware that in many ways, the brain is fundamentally a control system. It’s trying to control the body in an environment; it’s not detached from the body or the brain. But as this computational metaphor of mind gained strength (and it did so because it was very productive—people could build computational models, they could get computers to play chess, to solve these tasks that were thought to be foundational to human rationality), there was just less emphasis on the hardware that was underlying these abilities and on what that hardware was doing. And the body became just this vehicle that would move the brain from meeting to meeting. That was its purpose.

More recently, there’s been a fundamental shift, recognizing that the reason we have brains is not to solve abstract problems, to be this disembodied seat of Cartesian rationality. Instead, it is to keep the body alive. And this is true not just for humans; it’s true for all species. Thought of in this way, the experience of self plays out on many different levels for humans. Indeed it plays out at “higher,” more abstract levels. We are capable of stringing memories together over time, having this sense of continuity of identity, this narrative self. We’re also, as I think you, Anne, pointed out beautifully in your podcast interview with Wendy, this intrinsic interdependence. We are made by, partly constituted by, our relations with the world and with others. Our sense of self is refracted through the minds of our social networks.

But then there are all these other aspects of self, too. There’s the sense of seeing the world from a particular perspective, a first-person point of view. That seems to be a fundamental aspect of what the experience of selfhood is like. Then there’s the experience of being the author of our thoughts, the instigator of our actions—an aspect of self we might often call free will.

Then even below that, we have the more deeply embodied aspects of self. And these begin with emotions and moods. Experiences of emotions and moods are fundamental parts of what it is to be a self. And emotions, when you probe them by reflecting on their experiential nature, are deeply embodied. We feel emotion in our bodies. And in fact, it’s when we stop allowing ourselves to feel emotions in our bodies that we can get into trouble, and start ruminating, and our emotions can lead us astray. And it’s by relocating our emotional experience within our bodies that I think we’re able to build emotions more productively into our lives.

Even more fundamentally, beneath moods and emotions, there seems to be this basic, shapeless, formless experience of just being alive. I suggest that the fundamental roots of selfhood lie in this experience of being a living organism, which makes us fundamentally different from computers or robots. In the human body, brain, biological organism, there’s no sharp divide between the mindware and the wetware, as there is between the software and the hardware in a computer.

These days, we talk about enactive cognitive science, embodied cognitive science, extended cognitive science —each emphasizing in different ways how brain, bodies, and environments are intimately coupled. These are very important developments, because they invert how we think about the self. Instead of starting with a disembodied rational mind, we realize that a rational mind is never completely separate from the body. Antonio Damasio pointed this out long ago in Descartes Error—without input from the body, without an appreciation of the bodily context, we make poor decisions.

There’s one other thing that I wanted to comment on that you said, which I thought was really a very rich area of resonance, which is this idea of ‘direct’ or ‘correct’ perception. Again, there are a number of views in cognitive science about this, the extent to which direct perception—this immediate access to the world ‘as it is’, or the body ‘as it is’—happens, or is possible. I tend to favor a more indirect view that everything that we experience is constructed to some extent, but of course, it’s not constructed arbitrarily. I tend to think of ‘useful’ perception rather than correct or incorrect perception. As the saying goes, we perceive the world not as it is, but as we are.

In this podcast episode, Anil further discusses the role of the body in perception, the self as a construction, and more.

So yes—we smell smoke, we see flames, there is a fire there. But the way in which the smell of the smoke and the visual experience of seeing the fire appears in our experience is not actually what’s there. Still, it’s a very useful experience. In my language, it’s a very useful brain-based prediction about the causes of sensory inputs that themselves don’t have any smell or color, but they do reflect what’s happening in the world. There is something objective actually happening in the world, something that has biological relevance, and something that we perceive as such, in our experience of seeing flames and smelling smoke.

There are many ways in which we can consider what it means to say that something really exists. This question gets very deep, and answers will depend on whether you ask a religious scholar, or a theoretical physicist, or a cognitive scientist. I’ve come to think of the self as existing in a somewhat similar way to, let’s say, how the color red exists (or any color). Colors don’t exist objectively in the world as mind-independent properties, but it’s nonetheless extremely useful for our visual systems to construct experiences of color. Colors reveal that an object or surface is the same object or surface, even as lighting conditions change. And this is useful in many ways. You can tell any number of stories about why it’s useful that our visual systems create colors from a continuous colorless electromagnetic spectrum.

The same line of thinking usefully illuminates the way we think about the self. There is no actual objective mind-independent essence of selfhood, but it’s still a very useful aspect of our experience for the brain to construct. And it’s also very useful for it to be constructed as being continuous over time.

Why is this? Why do we experience ourselves as being relatively unchanging over time? Well, to some extent, it is because we are relatively unchanging over time. If I walk from this room to the next room, it’s the same body that goes with me, it’s pretty much the same bodily self, even though the room is no longer the same room. So indeed, there is a continuity to the experienced self that is perhaps stronger than the rest of our experiences. But I think we probably experience the self as even more continuous than the objective continuity of that which underpins these experiences of self warrants. I think that may be because it’s almost as if the self is bringing itself into being through predicting itself to be continuous over time.

To come back to a leitmotif of our conversation, this idea about how things appear to us being how things actually are… A guiding principle for me is to take that as always an open question, and as a challenge. And to assume that how things seem is probably not how they actually are, ever. This does not mean that how things seem is wrong, or has no value. It just means we shouldn’t reify how things seem as how they actually are—whether it’s a particular way of experiencing the self, a way of experiencing color, a way of experiencing free will, or any other thing that appears in the flow of our experience.

Wendy Hasenkamp : I think it’s really interesting, the difference between these perspectives on the role of perception, and the accuracy of direct perception (or not). It sounds like, Anil, from the cognitive science side, you’re suggesting that as the perceptual information comes in, it’s already constructed and filtered through the patterns we’ve developed from our past experience. From the Buddhist side, I have a sense that there’s a distinction between the original raw perception, and then the conceptual layering that comes after. I’m wondering if that might be something that’s going on here between your perspectives.

Anne C. Klein : That’s so interesting. And what a wonderful narrative, Anil. I’ve been trying to track a path to juxtapose analogs or parallel processes that are similar in Buddhism and yet different. And one of them was this concept of prediction that you’ve talked about so elegantly, Anil, and that I think you also were just pointing to, Wendy.

For a Buddhist, it usually gets translated as imputation. We’re imputing, where we see a bunch of dots, let’s say. At first it’s not clear. And then I draw a few more dots [drawing two slanted lines meeting at the top] and maybe it’s a ball rising and falling. And then, as you watch your mind, very slowly, watch what happens. There’s a moment where your perception changes… [drawing a series of dots connecting the other two lines] and all of a sudden, “Oh, it’s the letter A!” So you can ask, what exactly happened? You can feel it, if you’re attuned to it.

Anil Seth : That’s a good example of exactly what I was talking about, when I was talking about prediction.

Anne C. Klein : Right. And what’s similar in Buddhism is the Sanskrit term arthakriya, this idea of the ability to perform a function. What these things that we’re describing do, that are called conventional phenomena, is that they perform functions. It’s true that I make up the idea of a pen far beyond what exists here, but it’s also true that I recognize that this is something I can write with. And I can; I cannot write with a cup. These are conventionally valid distinctions. So I think that’s important and it’s definitely a resonance.

One of the most important distinctions made in Buddhist theories of mind and awareness is between conceptual thought and direct perception—thought is abstract, it will not get to the real experience. Not only is wisdom famously inexpressible, but as we used to say in grad school, the taste of an orange is also inexpressible. You can’t really go there with thought and with words.

So, if I say ‘the ocean’—we’re not looking at the ocean right now, alas. So we all know what the ocean is, but there’s no direct experience of it in this moment… It’s just a mental image and it may not even be a representational mental image, but just something that allows me to know what ‘ocean’ is. It might just be the letters of the word that appear in my mind. But even if I imagine the ocean, it’s an abstraction compared to the real thing. My image is not going to be responsive to granular changes, shifts in light and wind, and all of that, the way direct perception is. And to bring in the body, as you were mentioning—Buddhists have very sensitive understandings of the body, and a lot of similar ideas about emotions being in the body—in thinking about perception, the body is also most easily, in a way that’s different from other things, accessible to direct experience.

Anil Seth : Absolutely. To me, one of the big challenges, but also interesting differences when it comes to perceptions of the body compared to perceptions of the world (whether it’s an ocean or whatever else), may be that there is a sense of enhanced directness for body-related experience, simply because the brain is more directly connected to the body than it is to the outside world. The brain is connected to the interior of the body, through sensory channels. We call these interoceptive channels. There’s the vagus nerve, and many other bundles of nerves, that signal things like how the heart is beating, what the gastric tension is like. And of course, we’ve got a nervous system in our gut as well. And there’s also circulating hormones. There are all sorts of ways in which the brain and body are in more direct contact than the brain and the world beyond the body.

So there are differences between our perceptions of the world and of the body, but I think that there are also similarities. In both cases, the signals that are impinging on the brain from the body (and the brain itself is part of the body), never reveal their causes transparently. The brain always still has to do some work of interpretation. And we notice this in our lived experience, too. Let’s say my heart is racing. What does that mean? Am I afraid or am I excited? That interpretation is not just given by perception of an accelerated heart rate; it depends on the larger contextual interpretation of what the body is doing—as the psychologists William James and Karl Lange pointed out long ago.

And then the idea of this separation between abstract conceptualization and direct perception—this idea certainly has resonances in cognitive science, too. In this context, we talk about the concept of cognitive penetration. To what extent are our perceptual experiences affected by—penetrated by—our cognitive framing?

Classical cognitive science would impose a fairly sharp distinction—here we have perception, and here we have cognition. They interact, but they don’t interpenetrate. From my perspective, this view is now giving way to a more continuous view of how different levels of abstraction interact so that our expectations, our cognitive framing, can indeed influence (in some cases down to low levels of granularity) what our perceptual experience is like.

Recognizing this offers opportunities for change as well, because if we learn to frame things in different ways, then we may be able to change our experiences. This is perhaps getting back to a question you raised, Anne—what is the scientific view of the self delivering, in terms of methods for changing our experience? I think probably not a lot that wasn’t already there in the Buddhist traditions of learning to pay attention to our experiences…

Anne C. Klein : Perhaps. There is also the interesting question of, what is the purpose of this change? Why shift our understanding of self? Francis Bacon said, the purpose of science is to relieve the human condition, and Buddhism says the purpose of practice is to leave the human condition. In Buddhist traditions, the purpose of practice is to deliver us from the samsaric world. So that’s a little different. But what you’re saying is very important; again a kind of analog in the Buddhist traditions is the emphasis on many different practices related with the body.

And earlier as you were offering this wonderful narrative of the development in the west of certain ideas of the self… There is a similar development in Buddhism, with a tremendous emphasis on the body—mindfulness of the breath, mindfulness of the body. From the perspective of wanting to cultivate attention, presence to the body is important because the body is always in the present . Whereas our minds, according to most Buddhist ways of describing this, are actually very rarely in direct experience of the present. We wander the halls of our own minds into the past and future, or in fabrications about the present. We are not anchored in present experience.

From the perspective of wanting to cultivate attention, presence to the body is important because the body is always present.

There may be a moment of a kind of mental direct perception. There’s some debate about this, but in some Buddhist traditions, there’s this idea that it’s only the first moment of cognition that is valid. And it’s an interesting position, because I think humanly, we know that the first moment, first meeting, first impressions… there’s something about a first moment. It’s fresher. You don’t yet have an overarching structure and idea of what you subsequently impute and then take to be real and consistent—“Oh, you’re the same person you were here half an hour ago, still here.”

Then practices that involve changing the body into ‘light’—these are very common, particularly in the Tibetan traditions, and also perhaps more common in the early South Asian traditions than we have recognized until recently. And that is a very interesting kinesthetic experience to feel that ‘light’ is moving through your body. Light, Energy, Prana, it’s lung in Tibetan, translated as wind. Actually, what it is, is movement. And I think there’s no denying there’s movement all around in the body, movement of a sort between cells in the brain, so this idea of energy is not a New Age idea. This is a very well constructed idea in many Asian traditions, medically, cosmologically, that there’s movement in the body. There are flows, that’s undeniable. And these relate to the physiology of the body.

So it’s not all about the mind in meditation. This has been a distortion in the west with mindfulness (although if you do it, you pretty quickly discover that of course it’s not just the mind). The mind looking at the breath, changes the whole feel of the body. And feeling that your body is light or could be imagined as light, it just means that there’s an invitation to experience at a more subtle level the movements in the body, perhaps.

Listen as Anne elaborates on Eastern conceptions of the subtle/energy body, the construction of the self and other, and how the body can help us break out of rigid self concepts.

Wendy Hasenkamp : You’ve both named the body as a key to helping us shift to a more correct understanding of self. And Anne, you’ve shared ideas from a few different contemplative approaches. Anil, you said maybe science doesn’t really reach much farther than what contemplative traditions or practices have already allowed. Did either of you want to say anything more on that?

Anil Seth : Maybe I will—I think I was probably being a little unkind to the science on this. I think there are a lot of implications within the scientific tradition that follow from understanding the constructed nature of experience, and the constructed nature of the experience of self. There are many implications for how we think about mental illness, how we think about fractures within society, all these sorts of things. These are not out of alignment (as far as I understand) with what a Buddhist perspective would offer, but they don’t necessarily rely on that perspective to have some impact. The scientific view of perception as prediction, and of selfhood as a variety—or collection—of perceptions is already becoming helpful in clinical practice and therapeutic contexts. These advances all turn on cultivating an awareness that how things appear in experience need not be reified into how they are. And that applies to the self, too.

The scientific view of perception as prediction, and of selfhood as a variety—or collection—of perceptions is already becoming helpful in clinical practice and therapeutic settings.

Thinking this way can change how certain therapies are done—for example, how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) might be articulated, perhaps focusing more on experiences as well as thoughts and behaviors. And this view may also shed some light on why CBT is effective—why framing things differently, thinking about things differently, may actually have benefits, for example by actually changing perceptual experience.

More generally, this way of thinking about perception and self is giving a new framework for a lot of practices that already have an evidence base for how they affect people. There’s now a deeper understanding of, for instance, what happens when we pay attention to what’s going on in our body, an understanding that may appeal to specific neural mechanisms. It’s worth saying that these mechanistic explanations need not be overly reductionist—for example by highlighting specific brain regions—but can instead emphasize a process, in this case the process of perceptual prediction and its role in bodily regulation. For my money, this kind of process-based explanation does a much better job of reconnecting the brain, mind, and body in ways that help make sense of therapies like CBT.

Wendy Hasenkamp : So we’ve talked a lot about why our everyday perception of self is wrong, and some ways to help shift that. I’d like to close with the question of, why does it matter that we develop a more correct understanding of self?

Anil Seth : I think that there’s enormous value in cultivating a wider appreciation that the way the world and the self appears to one person, is both dependent on others (we are socially interdependent creatures), but also different from others.

It’s because perceptual experience often has the character of seeming objectively real, that it’s sometimes so difficult to understand another’s perspective. When we experience something as ‘really existing’—be it something in the world, or an aspect of self—it’s incredibly hard to appreciate that someone else may be having a very different experience, even within a shared environment. There’s an important question lurking here: why do we experience things as being objectively real, when they are in fact constructions? A superficial answer is that it would be very inefficient for evolution to design our perceptual systems in a way so that we experienced things as generally being unreal. It makes biological and evolutionary sense that if color is a useful way to interpret a visual scene, then of course we’re going to be designed so that color appears to be really part of the world.

The subjective reality of our perceptual experiences is therefore a feature of our minds and brains, but it’s also a bug when it comes to resolving discrepancies, to understanding each other. And I think there’s broad social value in recognizing that even though the world seems objectively to be a particular way, and even though there is an objective reality (I’m certainly not saying that everything is up for grabs), that objective reality might nonetheless be experienced in a different way by a different person. We need to escape not only from the social media echo chambers of what we happen to believe and what news we listen to, but also from the perceptual echo chambers of how we experience the world around us. Because (again it’s my view) there’s never any actual direct perception, there’s only ‘less indirect’ perception. This potential for social recalibration is one reason why all this is important, and one way in which I think the two perspectives do align, but coming from different angles and bringing different things to the table.

Anne C. Klein : Absolutely. The constructivist nature, or as Buddhists will say, recognizing the dependently arisen nature—the imputed nature, the nominally constructed nature—is crucial to liberation, and from a practical perspective for the social, cultural reasons you name. And just because that’s how it is, and our understanding is clearly enhanced by knowing how things work.

I think what’s really difficult is pulling apart the idea that it’s just imputed from the fact that it still functions. Going back to our example, it’s only when you look at the dots that an A occurs; there is no intrinsic A, but it’s still functional. This is the hard thing to understand in Buddhism and I think it’s hard in terms of science also, and that’s why there’s this pushback. But this is why, for certain important Middle Way Buddhist philosophies, direct perception isn’t 100% correct… What would correct even mean?

Anil Seth : Exactly, exactly. That’s the thing. There’s this implicit idea that if only we saw things accurately, if only our perception was completely accurate… but what does that even mean? It doesn’t really make sense to think that perception could ever be 100% accurate. But it can be useful.

Anne C. Klein : It’s clearly useful. And what is it useful for? This would be a whole other conversation, but maybe just to throw it in, I mentioned that Francis Bacon said the purpose of science is to relieve suffering endemic to the human condition. Buddhism says the purpose of practice is not to relieve, but to leave the human condition and its suffering. Buddhist traditions are therefore keen to investigate the nature of knowing itself. That’s the ultimate challenge in contemplative practice. And it’s an ultimate challenge, as you so elegantly described, for the science of mind.

It’s wonderful to be able to be part of such a conversation. Thank you, Anil, and thanks to Mind & Life.

Anil Seth : Thank you very much too. There is so much that we can agree on.

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Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Knowing Yourself: The First Step in the Spiritual Life

July 11, 2013 by Patricia Pearce

In this blog I write a lot about the spiritual life, which I see as having three components:

• coming to know yourself
• nurturing a relationship with the Reality beyond yourself
• bringing your way of being in the world into closer and closer alignment with what the first two reveal to you

In this post I’m going to share some of my thoughts on the first aspect: coming to know yourself.

Why Bother Knowing Yourself?

In my view, coming to know yourself is an essential aspect of the spiritual life because the more we know ourselves the more accurate our perceptions will be of everything else. Conversely, the less we know about ourselves, the more distorted our perceptions will be and the less able we will be to live into our fullest potential because we’ll be imprisoned by the scripts and identities that have been given us by others.

Although in this age of psychology and self-help programs we might be inclined to see self-knowledge as a Johnny-come-lately concern, knowing oneself has in fact been a focus of spiritual teachings for thousands of years.

The ancient Chinese text the Tao te Ching says: “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.” Self-knowledge takes us beyond mere information into that elusive thing called wisdom, wisdom that can never be attained, no matter how intelligent we may be, if we remain ignorant about ourselves.

Jesus was touching on a similar theme when he said, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” In other words, only by becoming aware of and dealing with our own shortcomings will we be able to see clearly enough to be helpful to others.

When we become aware of the “log” in our own eye we won’t make the mistake of going around trying to “fix” other people. Rather, we will relate to them with the compassion that comes from having faced our own struggles honestly, the compassion without which healing can never happen.

Knowing ourselves also opens the door to our freedom. When we are ignorant of the belief systems, assumptions and behavioral patterns that are operating within us (and that we often mistake for being us), we remain in captivity to them, unable to make wise decisions for ourselves, unable to overcome the self-limitations that may have been instilled in us, unable to recognize when we are being manipulated by those who may consciously or unconsciously seek to activate our fear and prejudice for their own purposes.

The more we come to know ourselves the more we will be able to invite healing and transformation into our lives, to embody compassion, to face our challenges as opportunities for growth, and to experience life as a meaningful adventure.

How Do You Come to Know Yourself?

So knowing yourself is helpful. Fine. But the obvious question is: How do we do it? How do we cultivate self-knowledge? There are probably as many ways as there are people, and in the end I think each of us has to discover and develop what works best for us. I’ll share with you some of the ways I do it.

I’m sure you can guess the first: meditation . Meditation helps me foster the ability to notice my thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them, a crucial skill to have if I ever hope to live in the world as a free, non-reactive, peaceful presence.

Another practice I employ is working with my dreams . My dreams never fail to give me ample insights about myself, pointing out inner dynamics that are ready to be recognized and transformed.

A third practice I use is active imagination . This is a practice Carl Jung introduced, and it is a way to enter into intentional dialogue with the many aspects of myself. We each embody multiple facets, interests and desires, and they can sometimes engage in an inner tug-of-war that keeps us paralyzed and confused about our priorities and the life direction we want to take. Active imagination helps us listen to each of those aspects whose voices need to be heard and honored before they will join together as allies rather than adversaries.

Creative expression can also be a portal for self-knowledge. Nearly 20 years ago I happened upon a book which has since become well-known and which changed my life: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The reasons why it was the right book at the right time for me is a longer story that perhaps I’ll tell at another time. For now, suffice it to say that over these last two decades, as I’ve explored my creativity, I have discovered aspects of myself I would never otherwise have gotten to know.

Journaling is yet another practice which I do daily, and it grew out doing of The Artist’s Way. Through journaling I often uncover inner dynamics, priorities, assumptions and motivations that I was previously unaware of.

Another powerful way to cultivate self-knowledge is closely tied to meditation: non-judgmental witnessing . By non-judgmental witnessing I mean simply noticing the thoughts, feelings and reactions that are arising in me in any given moment and — this is key — witnessing them without judging them as good or bad. Coming to know yourself, in the end, can lead to personal transformation, but in my experience that transformation comes only through acceptance and love, not through self-condemnation or striving.

The Spiritual Life Is Life

I suspect many of us think of our spiritual life as the time that we set apart from our daily activities to focus on our spirituality, the time we spend sitting on the meditation cushion, or in the pew. But I see the spiritual life as a life that is centered in spiritual awareness , and the time on the cushion or in the pew is just the beginning. That is simply the time when we let ourselves be reminded of who we are, where we came from, and why we’re here. Unless we take that awareness into the rest of our lives, it serves little purpose.

Likewise, you can have spiritual teachers by the dozens, but unless you implement the teachings for yourself they won’t do a thing for you. You have to care deeply enough about your own freedom and growth that you’re willing to do what is necessary to water the seeds of your spiritual awareness, the way you would water the flowers in your flowerbed. Nobody can do it for you.

Knowing yourself, of course, is a major theme in Buddhism, and, as the Buddha taught, the more you come to know yourself the more you will realize there is no self. After peeling back the layers of constructed identity, eventually we discover all that’s left is Mystery — a Mystery we are part of.

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Collage by Patricia Pearce. All rights reserved.

July 19, 2013 at 4:08 PM

Sometimes awakening can be like a heart attack. The initial experience is devastating, frightening and life changing. I found myself living, for most of my life, in a fantasy. It was so much easier to retreat into this fantasy than deal with the conflicts and anxieties and even joys of reality. For me, at least recently, journaling has helped. I like to write by hand, pen to paper. It’s slower and allows for more contemplation. Katie Aikens recently reflected on St. Paul’s comments of the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit. I think that the life of the flesh, which involves thinking that one has unbridled freedom to the point of chaos, involves this selfish fantasy. To know oneself leads to having compassion for others. Then freedom is bounded by that compassion. Knowing oneself leads to genuine humility and acceptance. Isn’t it ironic that compassion, humility and acceptance lead to freedom? The terms seem so opposite.

July 20, 2013 at 6:18 PM

Richard, so many things in what you shared really jumped out at me. The analogy of the heart attack is so insightful. The disorientation that comes can be pretty extreme and it’s helpful (though rare) to have others who can hold space for you as you undergo the transition.

Your comments about the tendency toward fantasy brought to mind something from one of my newest favorite books, Improv Wisdom , where the author, Patricia Ryan Madson, talks about the importance of “facing the facts.” She says, “The most consistent road to unhappiness I know is turning a blind eye to reality.” (p. 78) She maintains that if we want to respond to life creatively we must first honestly face reality.

I also really appreciated what you shared about your journaling practice. I have also found keeping a journal to be so helpful. It’s a way for me to come to clarity about issues that might otherwise just keep spinning around and around in my head, and I learn so much about myself along the way. Like you, I write in my journal by hand even though most of my other writing I do at the keyboard. There is something about setting pen to paper that makes it a different experience for me. More raw. More free-flowing.

What you said about self-knowledge leading to compassion rung so true for me. I, too, find that the more I come to know all the various aspects of myself (some of which I’d rather just go away) the more understanding I am of other people in their struggles. I absolutely loved your insight about how that compassion then serves as a boundary to reckless “freedom”. So beautifully put! Thank you!

I’d love to hear more about the “heart attack” experience(s) if you’re willing to share, either here or by emailing me at ppearce(at)patriciapearce.com.

Peace, Patricia

September 11, 2013 at 12:19 AM

Patricia, you often express in words EXACTLY how I feel. Indeed, the spiritual life IS life. One way that helps me is mindfulness. Of course, the goal is to be mindful all the time, but I find great joy and meaning in taking minutes in my too busy day to, for example, taste all the flavors available in one bite of something, or to feel how utterly luxurious my cat’s fur is. Peace and blessings.

September 11, 2013 at 10:51 AM

Amen! It’s in those moments of mindfulness that life leaps into Technicolor. I find often that if I’m doing a review of my day before going to bed it’s those moments of complete lucidity and presence that were the most precious of the entire day. And they usually happen when I’m fully attentive to simple things. It turns out those “simple” things are packed with awe.

January 14, 2021 at 1:16 AM

My name is kifayat ullah man too and my mothers name is nishata I’m a muslim. When ever I’m closing my eyes I’m seeing all over world on my sight and when I open my eyes I can not see any thing and some time im going dreaming my self what ever have been happing on my sight of eye that is going true on my present day Or too many present months

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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

“i” and “me”: the self in the context of consciousness.

• Cognition and Philosophy Lab, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between “Me” and “I” (see Table 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience 1 . This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011 ; Liang, 2014 ; Sui and Gu, 2017 ; Truong and Todd, 2017 ) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or “I.”

TABLE 1. Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”) and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958) , that in this context “Me” (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Blanke, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of “I” (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition 2 by understanding the self-as-subject, or “I,” as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [Figure 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger’s (2003 , 2010 ) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal “I” 3 ( Prinz, 2012 ), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal “I” [or the Wittgenstein’s (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal “Me.” Table 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

FIGURE 1. An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) distinctions between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”). In the original formulation, James’ (1890) “Me” includes also physical objects and people (material and social “Me”) – they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

TABLE 2. Examples of theories of the self-as-object (“Me”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

“Me” As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890 , p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word “Me” to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James’ (1890) view, it reflects “all the things” which have the power to produce “excitement of a certain particular sort.” This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014 ; Guillot, 2017 ). What are “all the things”? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to “objects” which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of “things” – conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James’ (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define “Me” as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996) , who begins “ The conscious mind ” by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following 4 : visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se , such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James’ (1890) terms, “objects” in a stream of consciousness: “all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking” (p. 325).

The self understood as “Me” can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness (Figure 2 ). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person’s face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to “Me,” the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008 ; Payne et al., 2017 ; Woźniak et al., 2018 ). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971 ; Blakemore et al., 1998 ; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009 ). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ; Constable et al., 2018 ). This was anticipated by James’ (1890) notion of the material “Me,” and is typically regarded as reflecting one’s extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about “Me” or about something/someone else.

FIGURE 2. A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical “I,” the phenomenal “Me,” and the phenomenal “I,” which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal “Me.” Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as “I experience X.” In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one’s own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions – thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of “Me” (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale ( Aron et al., 1992 ). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one’s self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to “Me” allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one’s body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one’s possessions one can speak about one’s extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to “Me” introduced here. The first one is as follows:

(1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always “mine,” such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as “I,” i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000 ; Christoff et al., 2011 ; Blanke et al., 2015 ) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999 ; Craig, 2010 ; Seth et al., 2011 ; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 ; Salomon, 2017 ). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as “my” experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of “Me.” They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one’s body and those coming from another person’s (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between “my” versus “other’s” proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal “Me” and phenomenal “not-Me” will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016 ). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009 ). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being “not-mine,” leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000 ; Kaufman, 2004 ). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario – rather than two pieces of the same organ being “wired” to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 )? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of “Me” then the answer becomes simple – the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal “Me,” for example in a form of background self-experience, or “phenomenal background” ( Dainton, 2008 , 2016 ), rather than the phenomenal “I.”

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

(2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either “me” or “other,” but their subject is always “I.” As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal “I” and not the phenomenal “Me.”

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one’s thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: “there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask ‘are you sure it is you who have pains?’ “would be nonsensical” ( Wittgenstein, 1958 ). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject (see Table 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say “I see a photo of my face in front of me” I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal “I” (self-as-subject) and phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word “I” (or “my”). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises – to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014 ). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal “I,” i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal “Me” – a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008 ; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009 ; Martin and Pacherie, 2013 ). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one’s thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Billon, 2013 ; Guillot, 2017 ; López-Silva, 2017 ). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership 5 over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one’s thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one’s thoughts “as someone else’s,” or at least “as not-mine.” However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I’ve taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have “objectified” them to experience that they have a quality of “feeling as if they are not mine.” Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal “I” turns out to be a part of thephenomenal “Me.”

If my thoughts do not constitute the “I” then how do they fit into the structure of “Me”? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute “Me,” while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as “mine” belong to “Me.” How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger’s (2003 ; 2010 ) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017) :

Savage suggests that on LSD “[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes” (1955, 11), (…) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017 , p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object (“Me”) are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel “mine” as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as “mine.” As a result, this thinking phenomenal “I” experienced in feeling of ownership over one’s thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian “Me.” As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal “I,” just multilevel phenomenal “Me.” However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else’s (a demon’s or some malicious puppet master’s), she can still claim that:

Yes, “I” experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon’s.” My thoughts feel as “not-mine,” however, it’s still me (or: “I”) who thinks of them as “not-mine.”

As such, one escapes “objectification” of “I” into “Me” by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-“I.” However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: “I” (I 1 ) experience that the “fake I” (I 2 ), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else’s (e.g., as nasty green demon’s). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal “I” is I 1 , since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal “I” into another “fake-I” (and consequently making it a part of “Me”).

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal “I” understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly “on the run” from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep “I,” which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep “I” cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of “Me.” Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep “I”: in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016 ) who argue that “all conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent.” It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather “refers to the distinct manner, or how , of experiencing” ( Zahavi, 2014 ).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016 ). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the “ how of experiencing” of another person. For example, can I experience my sister’s for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep “I” is to reject that the subject of experience, the “I,” is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000 ; Prinz, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between “Me” and “I” as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: “(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem” ( James, 1890 , p. 401).

“I” As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890 , pp. 330–331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of “I” emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do “fly about loose,” devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone’s or something’s consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012 ; Strawson, 2003 ; Searle, 2005 ; Dainton, 2016 ). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of “what it is like to be a bat” ( Nagel, 1974 ), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical “I,” as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal “I” (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical “I” does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical “I,” but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as “me,” nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as “I.” In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which “is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (…) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction” ( Windt, 2015 ). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience – the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015 ; Metzinger, 2018 ), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of “Me.” Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016 ), possess conscious experience 6 . If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between “Me” and “not-Me.” However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011 ) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table 3 ). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987 ; Strawson, 2000 ; Dainton, 2008 ), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005 ), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003 ). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

TABLE 3. Examples of theories of the self-as-subject (“I”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015 , Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical “I.”

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014 ; Tononi et al., 2016 ) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational “complex” which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max ). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max . The complex that specifies a person’s day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max – that is, it should be the “major” complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca’s area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical “I” can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010 ). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions – for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical “I”? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical “I” can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical “I” can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some “self” (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism’s consciousness this metaphysical “I” would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not “co-conscious” with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical “I” cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical “I” persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000 , 2010 ). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical “I” turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical “I,” and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical “I” is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal “Me,” where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between “Me” and “I.” I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2010 ), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical “I”).

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 , 2010 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ; Hohwy, 2013 ; Clark, 2016 ). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one’s internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called “variational free energy,” which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 ). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014 ), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007 ), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011 ; Seth, 2013 ), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014 ; Friston and Frith, 2015 ), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ; Fotopoulou, 2012 ). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 ) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (…) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 , p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016 ; Williams, 2017 ) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand’s movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017) , the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003 ; Chalmers, 2004 , for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006 , 2014 , for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories – the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James’ (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal “Me” – by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical “I”? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal “Me,” the issues pertaining to the metaphysical “I” are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013 , Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011 ; Dehaene, 2014 ). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995 ) – a functional mechanism which allows that “some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others” ( Dehaene, 2014 ). However, the problem of the metaphysical “I” becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness – the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called “hard problem” ( Chalmers, 1996 ).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference 7 ) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical “I.”

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical “I” (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of “Me,” it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of “I.”

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between “Me” and “I” may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal “I” can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal “Me” [which can be understood as Metzinger’s (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between “I” and “Me,” which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While “Me” can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, “I” is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables 2 , 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal “I” as just a part of the phenomenal “Me,” has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as “I” from the perspective of “Me” may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term “I” when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction (“Me” versus “I”) which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term “I” in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as “sense of ownership over an experience” to reflect what is meant by “I” in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., “sense of ownership of interoceptive signals” when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of “Me” versus the experience/sense of “I” (rather than just “Me” and “I”). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

• ^ Therefore, whenever I use the term “I” I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term “Me” I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James’ (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table 1 ). I also assume, following James (1890) , that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.
• ^ Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of “I” as subject and “I” as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.
• ^ Whenever I use the prefix “phenomenal” I mean “the conscious experience of.” For example, when I write phenomenal “I”, I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience (“I”). In a similar fashion I use the prefix “metaphysical” when I mean “the metaphysical entity of.”
• ^ Chalmers (1996) also lists “sense of self,” although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.
• ^ Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.
• ^ “IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior” ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 460).
• ^ For example, he writes: “So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness” ( Friston, 2018 , p. 1).

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Keywords : self, consciousness, self-consciousness, sense of self, self-as-subject, self-as-object, predictive coding, IIT

Citation: Woźniak M (2018) “I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness. Front. Psychol. 9:1656. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01656

Received: 20 March 2018; Accepted: 17 August 2018; Published: 04 September 2018.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2018 Woźniak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Mateusz Woźniak, [email protected] ; [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Self, From a Psychological Perspective

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The concept “self” has shifting meanings as a result of it originating in religious ideas about the soul, being heavily philosophized during the Renaissance and most recently being the topic of scientific research. The dominant contemporary definition is that self is the thoughts and images people have about themselves. Such a definition opens up the self to empirical research by asking people, in various ways, what they think about themselves. However, the self was not always conceived of as an empirical phenomenon.

The concept of the “self” grew out of religious thinking about the soul. Early thought experiments by Avicenna and Descartes tried to demonstrate that the thinking mind exists independently of all things material and thus that it belongs to the immaterial realm of the soul. Descartes was particularly influential in arguing for an ontological dualism between material and immaterial realms. In practice, this...

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Gillespie, A. (2013). Self, From a Psychological Perspective. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1012

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Why Is Spirituality Important?

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There is a growing body of evidence indicating that spiritual practices are associated with better health and wellbeing for many reasons, including:

Contemplative practice is good for you.

Contemplative practices are activities that guide you to direct your attention to a specific focus—often an inward-looking reflection or concentration on a specific sensation or concept. Many spiritual traditions have a long history of using contemplative practices to increase compassion, empathy, and attention, as well as quiet the mind.

• Meditation can induce feelings of calm and clear-headedness as well as improve concentration and attention. Brain researcher Richard Davidson’s research shows that meditation increases the brain’s gray matter density, which can reduce sensitivity to pain, enhance your immune system, help you regulate difficult emotions , and relieve stress . Mindfulness meditation in particular has been proven helpful for people with depression and anxiety , cancer , fibromyalgia, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis , type 2 diabetes , chronic fatigue syndrome, and cardiovascular disease .
• Prayer may elicit the relaxation response, along with feelings of hope, gratitude, and compassion—all of which have a positive effect on overall wellbeing. There are several types of prayer , many of which are rooted in the belief that there is a higher power that has some level of influence over your life. This belief can provide a sense of comfort and support in difficult times—a recent study found that clinically depressed adults who believed their prayers were heard by a concerned presence responded much better to treatment than those who did not believe.
• Yoga is a centuries-old spiritual practice that aims to create a sense of union within the practitioner through physical postures, ethical behaviors, and breath expansion. The systematic practice of yoga has been found to reduce inflammation and stress, decrease depression and anxiety, lower blood pressure, and increase feelings of wellbeing.
• Journaling is another, often overlooked, contemplative practice that can help you become more aware of your inner life and feel more connected to your experience and the world around you. Studies show that writing during difficult times may help you find meaning in life’s challenges and become more resilient in the face of obstacles.

A spiritual community can improve your life.

Many spiritual traditions encourage participation in a community. Spiritual fellowship, such as attending church or a meditation group, can be sources of social support which may provide a sense of belonging, security, and community. Strong relationships have been proven to increase wellbeing and bolster life expectancy, which is perhaps why one study found a strong association between church attendance and improved health, mood, and wellbeing.

Spiritual strength can help you overcome hardships.

Having a strong spiritual outlook may help you find meaning in life’s difficult circumstances. Southwick describes the story of a woman who overcame the post-traumatic stress following an abduction and rape by believing that her trauma “served as a platform for her personal development, forcing her to evaluate her life and gradually change it for the better. She credits her ability to move forward with her life…to her dedication to spirituality.”

The spiritual practice of recognizing the interconnectedness of all life can also help buffer the pain that comes with difficult experiences. Researcher Kristin Neff says that “if we can compassionately remind ourselves in moments of falling down that failure is part of the shared human experience, then that moment becomes one of togetherness rather than isolation. When our troubled, painful experiences are framed by the recognition that countless others have undergone similar hardships, the blow is softened.”

Spiritual people make healthier choices.

Adhering to a particular spiritual tradition may bring an indirect health benefit because many traditions have rules about treating the body with kindness and avoiding unhealthy behaviors. Research shows that perhaps because of these tenets, people who practice a religion or faith tradition are less likely to smoke or drink, commit a crime, or become involved in violent activity, and they are more likely to engage in preventative habits like wearing seatbelts and taking vitamins.

Spirituality may help you live longer.

An exhaustive review that compared spirituality and religiousness to other health interventions found that people with a strong spiritual life had an 18% reduction in mortality. Giancarlo Lucchetti, lead author of the study, calculates that the life-lengthening benefits of spirituality can be compared to eating a high amount of fruits and vegetables or taking blood pressure medication. Although some researchers have suggested that the extent of spirituality’s benefit on health is exaggerated, most researchers agree there is a positive relationship between religious and spiritual practices and better health outcomes.

Forgiveness is good medicine.

Letting go of blame and negative feelings after a hurtful incident is a practice that is reflected by a number of spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. Modern science shows the health benefits of forgiveness are numerous: better immune function, longer lifespan, lowered blood pressure, improved cardiovascular health, and fewer feelings of anger or hurt.

Prayer for peace

In whatever form you use, prayer benefits health through the physiological effects of positive emotion.

Select a daily reading (for example, a psalm or an excerpt from a book of meditations. Read it slowly, connecting with the words, and reflecting on them. You may want to read the passage several times. To enter a contemplative state more quickly, it helps to do this at the same time and place each day.

Listen to, and reflect upon, the following prayer for peace.

May I be at peace May my heart remain open May I awaken to the light of my own true nature May I be healed May I be a source of healing for all beings.

Bohlmeijer, E., Prenger, R., Taal, E., Cuijpers, P. (2010). The effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy on mental health of adults with a chronic medical disease: a meta-analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research; 68 (6):539-44.

Brassai, L., Piko, B. F., & Steger, M. F. (2011). Meaning in life: Is it a protective factor for adolescents' psychological health? International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 18 (1), 44-51.

Charles, J.P. (2010). Journaling: creating space for "I". Creative Nursing;16 (4):180-4.

Davidson, R.J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S.F., Urbanowski, F., Harrington, A., Bonus, K., Sheridan, J.F. (2003). Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine; 65 (4):564-70.

Grant, J.A., Courtemanche, J., Duerden, E.G., Duncan, G.H., Rainville, P. (2010). Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators. Emotion; 10 (1):43-53.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7 (7), e1000316.

Hölzel, B.K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S.M., Gard, T., Lazar, S.W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research;191 (1):36-43.

Katzman, M. A., Vermani, M., Gerbarg, P. L., Brown, R. P., Iorio, C., Davis, M., et al. (2012). A multicomponent yoga-based, breath intervention program as an adjunctive treatment in patients suffering from generalized anxiety disorder with or without comorbidities.  International Journal of Yoga,   5 (1), 57-65. 

Koenig, L.B., Vaillant, G.E. (2009). A prospective study of church attendance and health over the lifespan. Health Psychology;28 (1):117-24.

Lucchetti, G., Lucchetti, A.L., Koenig, H.G. (2011). Impact of spirituality/religiosity on mortality: comparison with other health interventions. Explore; 7 (4):234-8.

McCullough, M. E., Hoyt, W. T., Larson, D. B., Koenig, H. G., & Thoresen, C. (2000). Religious involvement and mortality: A meta-analytic review. Health Psychology: Official Journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association, 19 (3), 211-222.

McCullough, M.E., Willoughby, B.L. (2009). Religion, self-regulation, and self-control: Associations, explanations, and implications. Psychological Bulletin;135 (1):69-93.

Merkes, M. (2010). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for people with chronic diseases. Australian Journal of Primary Health;16 (3):200-10.

Murphy, P.E., Fitchett, G. (2009). Belief in a concerned god predicts response to treatment for adults with clinical depression. Journal of Clinical Psychology; 65 (9):1000-8.

Musial, F., Büssing, A., Heusser, P., Choi, K.E., Ostermann, T. (2011). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for integrative cancer care: a summary of evidence. Forsch Komplementmed;18 (4):192-202.

Neff, K. (2011). Self - compassion . New York: Harper Collins.

Pennebaker, J. W., Chung, C. K. (in press). Expressive writing and its links to mental and physical health. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Oxford handbook of health psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sengupta, P. (2012). Health impacts of yoga and pranayama: A state-of-the-art review. International Journal of Preventative Medicine;3 (7):444-58.

Southwick, S., Charney, D. (2012). Resilience: The science of mastering life’s greatest challenges. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Yadav, R. K., Magan, D., Mehta, M., Mehta, N., & Mahapatra, S. C. (2012). A short-term, comprehensive, yoga-based lifestyle intervention is efficacious in reducing anxiety, improving subjective well-being and personality. International Journal of Yoga, 5 (2), 134-139.

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Your Spiritual Self

Your Spiritual Self is you in your most beautiful and powerful form.  It is the authentic self, the unconditioned part, the you without patterns.

This is personal for each of us, so no need to get caught up on the language.  Some may identify with Higher Self, The Universe, God, Higher Power, your inner Buddha, your true being…  It’s the part of you that is connected to everything, the part that is love.

Throughout the world, in all of the great spiritual traditions, there is a teaching about “Divinity” being within us.  From Native American, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, to Christianity, all the way to great mystics and scientists. From traditions that subscribe to the idea of “God,” to traditions that honour the earth or the Light within humanity. We all seem to agree that we are more than a Body . There is light/God/Divine consciousness within us.

On your Process you got to know this part of yourself, as we call it, your Spiritual Self. Your own goodness and authenticity. Your Spirit, untouched by patterns, is the source of your resilience. The source of your inner wisdom.

• “To find Buddha all you have to do is see your nature. Your nature is the Buddha.” – Bodhidarma, 5th Century Buddhist Monk
• “God dwelleth in all hearts.” – Bhagavad Gita
• “The One God is hidden in all living things.” – The Upanishads (Hinduism)
• “All animals have power because the Great Spirit dwells in all of them.” – Lame Deer, Sioux Chief
• “The Kingdom of God is within you.” – Jesus
• “When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.” – Albert Einstein

Visioning with your Spiritual Self

Here’s a powerful little piece of popular neuroscience – your brain learns as well from what you imagine as from what you experience. Think about it. How often is your Dark Side doing your visioning for you? It imagines the terrible possibilities, or tells you that you can’t be, do, or have what you want?

Let your Spiritual Self do the visioning and paint the pictures of your life on the Right Road. Remember that “being” begets “doing,” and in your visioning, let your primary focus be on imagining the qualities of being that give you a life you love. Feel those qualities right then and there in your visioning. Embody them as if it is happening now.

• How do you want to feel in your home, your work, your relationships with yourself and others?
• And living with that quality of being, what might you be doing?

When we are fixed on what we must “do,” or “have,” to “be” happy, happiness could walk right up and wave at us and we wouldn’t even see or recognise it! When our vision includes the qualities of being we wish to cultivate, our body learns to recognise when we are on track, when we are living into our vision.

The Dark Side filters out possibility, new awareness, new qualities of being in our perception of our experience, and instead highlights evidence that validates our doubts, keeping us in the small box of our past limitations. “See, I really didn’t change anything at the Process – here’s proof.”

When we are living from what we love and care about, or as the mythologist Joseph Campbell said, “following our bliss,” we are letting our Spiritual Self guide us. We are living on purpose. Try it in big and small ways. You can vision one day or five years or simply an upcoming event – think pre-cycling! Then take action to manifest your vision by finding that first right sized step and taking it.

Today’s action step: Go to your Process workbook, take out your vision now, and revisit it.

If your Intellect gets in the way of accessing your Spiritual Self, simply recall a moment in time, when you were peaceful and content.  This may be associated with nature, love, creativity, or anything else which induced a sense of serenity.  In your mind’s eye, notice how you look; your facial expression, your posture, your eyes… and you can immediately reconnect to yourself in your most beautiful form.

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Self-Reflection on the Spiritual Path

• Buddhist Philosophy
• By Phakchok Rinpoche
• December 26, 2018

Self-reflection is crucial for humans to flourish–both on the mundane and on the spiritual path.  Phakchok Rinpoche teaches here in an excerpt from a recent visit to Gomde Austria , making the point that regular reflection is really the deep meaning of mindfulness.

Rinpoche asks a question: Do we begin every meditation session by reflecting on our actions and our character? Do we know our own ground?

Self-reflection: Top Priority

However, if we don’t spend time in self-reflection, we continue making mistakes.  And that means we continue as sentient beings rather than transforming into buddhas.  Sentient beings don’t improve because they keep repeating mistakes.  But self-reflections helps us to avoid that pitfall.

That’s not new information for many of us–we’ve heard this message before.  Indeed, self-reflection is not unique to Buddhist thought. As the mosaic pictured here reminds us, the ancient Greeks and Romans advised seekers to “Know Thyself”. But we we need to check–are we making self-reflection a top priority?

Meditation Becomes Mainstream

Rinpoche jokes that these days many doctors and those in the medical profession even remind us to relax, let go,  practice meditation, watch our breath–to keep ourselves physically healthy. Now, mindfulness and meditation is becoming more mainstream–and this is a good thing.  But, we can’t leave meditation at watching the breath.

On top of that, we need to also practice reflection.  And we have to remember all our different roles and responsibilities–are we upholding all our responsibilities and treating people kindly? Moreover, we honestly look at our behavior–our thoughts, words and actions. And if we see that we made mistakes, we remind ourselves–this is what being mindful really means.  If we’re not mindful, we may not watch our speech–and we say things we later regret, or things that cause others pain. Without self-reflection, we won’t notice these small slip-ups.

Self-reflection On Crucial Points of Practice

This reflection time also gives us an opportunity to recall key points of teaching.  We can remind ourselves of our motivation–taking time to generate, and really feel bodhicitta, for example.  And we take the time to notice that we were lazy, or distracted, or agitated–and we then reset our intention. This is the way to practice spiritual self-reflection. As we familiarize ourselves with this process, we can go deeper in our reflection.

Self-reflection on Our Own Negative Emotions

We start by looking at our own negative emotions–which emotion causes us most problems? Really take some time to check each one of the negative emotions.  In Buddhist teachings, we speak of five negative or destructive emotions : anger, pride, jealousy, attachment and ignorance.   We watch our own behavior and examine in a detailed way–where do we repeatedly make mistakes? Ignorance, Rinpoche remarks, comes down to not seeing our own mistakes. When we are ignorant, we don’t want to admit our mistakes and we don’t have any motivation to improve. When we have a method to improve, and we understand that but don’t apply the method–that is ignorance.

Reflection Exercise

In the morning, before you go about your daily activities, take just a few minutes to reflect on your motivation and your intentions.  If there is a quotation from a teaching that inspires you, read that silently, or aloud.  If there is a spiritual figure who inspires you, look at a photo or representation of that being. Think about how you wish to transform. If you know that you may encounter difficult situations in your day, reflect on how you can prepare yourself to meet those with an open and kind heart.

You may want to think of a word or phrase to repeat silently to yourself during the day to keep you on track.  And if you know that you are struggling with one of the negative emotions, gently remind yourself of that–and set the intention not to give into that habit. Some people find it helpful to use a written note as a reminder.  Experiment with what works for you–you can be playful in your reflection, not harsh and self-critical. in this way, if you catch yourself under the influence of negativity, you can laugh at yourself–aha–that’s anger–and then you give yourself space to shift gears. You may find that just catching yourself in this way, and identifying the emotion, immediately deflates its power.

Again, at the end of the day, spend a few moments in self-reflection.  Think about your actions, your words and your thoughts during the day.  Were you able to maintain awareness? If you made mistakes, acknowledge those and reflect on how you might have acted differently. Don’t dwell on negativity or judge yourself harshly–instead, simply think–next time I will react differently. As you go to sleep, make the commitment to continue your transformation.

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Ignorance must include the possibility of being ignorant of being ignorant – that is to say, not knowing that we are ignorant.

[…] you would like to examine the mind in more depth, please also take some time to review our blogs Self-Reflection on the Spiritual Path and Mental Maintenance Creates […]

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