A path through philosophy
What is the self?
Is there a real, enduring self — a soul, a mind, an 'I' — or not?
Who, or what, are you? Follow the question of the self and mind from the Buddha's 'no-self' through the soul and the thinking subject to the modern problem of consciousness.
- 1
There is no permanent self (anatta): the person is a changing stream of processes, and clinging to a fixed 'I' is a root of suffering.
- 2
The true self is the immortal soul, distinct from the body, which pre-exists it and survives its death.
Responding tothe identification of self with body
- 3
- 4
The 'floating man', suspended without any sensation, still knows that he exists — so the self is an immaterial substance, known directly.
- 5
I am essentially a thinking thing, a mind really distinct from the body — the certain 'I' of 'I think, therefore I am'.
Responding todoubt about the body's existence
- 6
The self is not a substance but continuity of consciousness and memory: you are the same person so far as you remember being.
Responding toDescartes
- 7
Look within and you find only a 'bundle' of perceptions, never a simple, enduring self — the 'I' is a fiction.
Responding toLocke
- 8
Yet experience requires a unifying 'I think' that can accompany all my representations — a transcendental, not observable, self.
Responding toHume's bundle
- 9
The unified 'I' is a grammatical illusion; the self is really a shifting multiplicity of drives and forces.
Responding tothe metaphysics of the soul
- 10
Return to consciousness itself: the self shows up in the intentional structure of experience, as that to which the world is given.
- 11
There is no fixed self given in advance; we are nothing but what we make of ourselves through free choice.
Responding toevery essentialist self
- 12
The deepest puzzle remains: why is there any inner experience — any 'what it is like' to be a self — at all?
Responding topurely physical theories of mind