The self as a system Philipp Rau
Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield
[email protected]
sheffield.academia.edu/rau
The system view
What is ‘the self’? • • • • •
A subject of experience? (Kant, G Strawson) All different concepts
The locus of ‘personal identity’? (Locke) —need for conceptual A narrative construct? (Bruner, Dennett) clarification A moral or social agent? (Mead,Velleman, Doris) Nothing at all? (Hume, Metzinger)—a philosophers’ illusion?
Desiderata for a theory of the self A working definition: Self is that conscious thinking thing . . . which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself . . . (Locke, 1690, II.xxvii.17)
More basically, having a self involves being able to see oneself as ‘me and me again’ (Sorabji, 2006)—awareness of oneself as
(a) a distinct individual and (b) as the same individual over time.
A theory of the self should account for these capacities. N.B. Personhood is not required for a self: ‘person’ is a ‘forensic term’ (Locke, 1690, II.xxvii.26); to be a person is to be embedded in a complex social/normative framework. Awareness of oneself as a distinct and continuing individual—i.e. having a self—seems a necessary condition for this, but personhood involves other qualities beyond that.What these are is a separate (and controversial) philosophical question.
Why selves aren’t narrative A currently fashionable view among philosophers (Dennett, MacIntyre, Taylor) and psychologists (Bruner) takes the self to be a narrative construct. We live our lives as narratives—so the story goes—and the protagonist of one’s life narrative, or indeed that narrative itself, is the ‘self’. The problem: who then is the author, or narrator, of our life stories? And what about people who have little or no narrative capacity or inclination? => narrative self-representational capacities
≠ the self
= the self
This view is not yet a fully-fledged theory of the self, but a conceptual recommendation: take the self to be the complex, dynamic functional system of an organism’s self-representational/self-monitoring processes. They include proprioception, awareness of our affective and cognitive states, impulse control and deferred gratification, autobiographical remembering, situating oneself in one’s social interactions, valuing things for oneself… as well as lower-level processes like homeostatic functions and sensorimotor integration, which provide the ‘neural platform’ for higher-level self-representation (Churchland, 2002). The system view thus naturalizes the self, in that it is firmly rooted in evolved, empirically observable processes and capacities—which we share with many other species. The persistence conditions of the self-as-system are those of its neural infrastructure: a living, functioning brain. There are no disembodied or immortal selves. And the persistence of the self is not dependent on ‘psychological continuity’—rather, the self is the system that (barring malfunctions!) provides us with psychological continuity.
Defects and disorders As a complex system, the self comprises multiple dissociable processes, which can operate (and fail) independently. Thus, the system view is consistent with diverse psychopathologies that affect some elements of the self but not others, e.g.: In cases of advanced dementia, most explicit autobiographical memory is lost or inaccessible. On a Lockean view of the self (Locke, 1690), such memory loss would entail the loss of self. But dementia patients often retain other components of their selves—affective dispositions, some capacity for selfrecognition, knowledge of character traits, and other implicit memories (Hehman et al., 2005). Since the self as a system is not an all-or-nothing affair, some of its functions may be preserved while others deteriorate. Conversely, it is possible for explicit autobiographical memory to be intact while other self-representational processes are impaired, as in schizophrenia, where a sufferer’s thoughts are misattributed to outside sources (‘hearing voices’, ‘thought insertion’). Here too it would be unhelpful to characterize this condition as a wholesale loss or ‘dissolution’ of the self. Rather, it is a malfunction of one specific self-representational capacity—the ability to identify oneself as the author of one’s thoughts.
Questions for further research + narrative capacity
In fact, the capacities that allow for self-awareness, at a given time and over time, and that we deploy in autobiographical narration—e.g. monitoring our affective, proprioceptive, and cognitive states, executive function, a sense of agency and temporality—precede narrative capacity and can operate without it, and probably without the capacity for language. It makes more sense, therefore, to situate the self conceptually in these underlying self-monitoring and self-representational capacities of the organism than in its narrative productions. Thus the self is the producer, not the product, of our narratives.
I thank George Botterill, Pat Churchland, Shaun Nichols, and Tony Prescott for advice and discussion, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Jacobsen Trust for research funding.
The self as a system is the subject of an already flourishing multidisciplinary research programme: • What other animals have selves, and to what extent? • How and where—if at all—are distinct self-representational processes integrated in the brain? • What are the neural defects that give rise to the symptoms of schizophrenia and other disturbances of self-awareness? • Can we create artificial selves in robots? And if so, should we? • How does reconstructive autobiographical remembering fit with the predictive processing model of cognition?
References Churchland, P. S. 2002. Self-representation in nervous systems. Science 296: 308–310. Hehman, J.A., German, T.P., and Klein, S.B. 2005. Impaired self-recognition from recent photographs in a case of late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Soc. Cogn. 23: 118–123. Locke, J. 1690/1997. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Penguin. Sorabji, R. 2006. Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
