Consciousness and the Self: New Essays

Introduction

In our everyday activities, the self is ever-present in the back of our minds. We remember what we did the moment before and we think about what we want to do next; we feel happy and energetic, or bored and tired; we have a sense of our goals when we act; we think about what we would like to eat for dinner and we know what our favorite TV show is. In our interactions with others, we think about how they see us, whether they like us or are impressed by us. We have certain emotions related to this keen awareness of ourselves: we feel embarrassed, remorseful, ashamed, proud, or confident because of things we have done or did not do. We see ourselves as continuous in time: what happened to us in the past affects who we are and what we believe now; we make plans for the future because we believe that the future self will be us and will be affected by our current plan and behavior. Even though we do not have an internal mirror to see ourselves, our every thought seems to revolve around the sense of a self. But what is the self? How is our sense of the self established in the first place?

The title of this book is Consciousness and the Self. The main focus of the collected essays is not to establish a metaphysical claim about the existence or the nature of the self, but to investigate the connection between our conscious life and our sense of the self; in other words, the phenomenological routes to the self. Whether or not we can establish the existence of a self, we undeniably have a sense of our self in our daily conscious life, in our reflections, sensations, discourses, memories, and our life plans. Phenomenally, I know what it is like to be me, and no one else can have my phenomenal awareness of my self. My self and my awareness of myself seem essentially intertwined.

Descartes’ famous cogito, ergo sum points out the necessary presence of a self in consciousness: The I necessarily exists as the subject of thinking. It is a thinking thing embodied in the act of thinking itself. Descartes says, “So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Descartes [1641] 1984, 17). The I is essential to consciousness; all thinking requires a thinker. If I reflect on my act of thinking, then I know that there must be an I doing the thinking. Descartes’ argument can be interpreted as deriving certainty of the second-order self-reflective thought on the first-order thinking. The certainty is only established for synchronic unity in thinking – at each single moment of thinking, I know that I exist as the thinker.

John Locke, however, emphasizes the diachronic unity of the self in all our conscious moments:

When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self: – it not being considered, in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same or diverse substances. For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being, and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.

(Locke [1689] 1975, 335)

In this passage, Locke sums up the connection between consciousness and the self: consciousness is that which makes up the self – both the presence of the self in occurrent conscious moments, and the persistence of the self in consciousness extended backwards in time. Self-consciousness is essential to personhood, and personal identity is grounded on one’s memories or ownership of past deeds: I was the one who did this. The ascription of a past life to oneself is based on the assumption of a self that persists from the past to the present. Such persistence of the self, according to Locke, is sustained in consciousness alone, wherever that consciousness resides – whether in a single immaterial substance, or a succession of immaterial substances, or even, as he was willing to consider, in the brain, a succession of complexes of material substances.

Nevertheless, David Hume raises skepticism about our ability to perceive the self. Hume says,

All [our particular perceptions] are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately considered, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing to support their existence. After what manner therefore do they belong to self, and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.

(Hume [1739] 2000, 252)

Hume’s skepticism is about our supposedly intimate consciousness of what we call “the self.” He holds that for any real idea, there must be a preceding impression from which one derives the idea. However, our impressions are of our constantly changing perceptions, sensations, passions and emotions, and the like. We do not have such an impression of an everlasting self, persisting through all these changing impressions. If we do not have an impression of the self, then we cannot be said to have a clear idea of the self. The mind is like a kind of theater, according to Hume, “where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume [1739] 2000, 253). There is nothing unified, invariable and persistent behind all these perceptions that we can call “the self.”

Hume’s comment points out a paradoxical double role that the self plays in self-awareness: the self as the subject and the self as the object. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, there are two different uses of the word ‘I’: “the use as object” and “the use as subject.” When the word ‘I’ is used to pick out a particular person of which a description can be judged to be true or false, as in “I have a bump on my forehead,” it is used as object; on the other hand, when ‘I’ is used to report a sense of agency, as in “I think it will rain,” it is used as subject (Wittgenstein [1958] 1969, 66–67). In self-awareness or self-knowledge, both uses seem to be present. “I believe that I am the tallest person in the class”; “I know that I am not sad about her departure.” How can there be two selves indicated in these self-reports, or is it just one self who knows, perceives, thinks about, or is aware of, the same self? How can the same self be both the knower and the known?

Hume’s claim can be taken to be a rejection of the self as an object of knowledge, or a rejection of any such unified entity as the self. Both rejections have their defenders. In Notebooks, Wittgenstein exclaims: “The I is not an object. I objectively confront every object. But not the I” (Wittgenstein 1984, 80e). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche questions the Cartesian certainty in deducing the existence of an I from the act of thinking: “The philosopher must say to himself, ‘When I dismantle the process which is expressed in the sentence “I think,” I come upon a series of daring assertions whose grounding is difficult, perhaps impossible – for example, that I am the one who thinks, that there must be some general something that thinks, that thinking is an action and effect of a being which is to be thought of as a cause, that there is an “I.”’ . . .” (Nietzsche [1886] 2009, Part I, 16). Nietzsche also questions the unity of consciousness: “we always have only a semblance of unity” (Nietzsche [1901] 1968, 489). His hypothesis of the self is “the subject as multiplicity”: the subject I is merely the sum of multiple perspectives, interpretations, and drives. Our customary use of the first-person word ‘I’ may have begun as a mere historical accident of grammatical habits of separating a subject and a predicate in our sentences, which later created an illusion that there really is a self to which we can refer.

In contemporary analytic philosophy, Daniel Dennett represents the skeptical, eliminativist view of a single self as the subject in consciousness. Based on current neuroscientific discoveries, Dennett argues against what he calls “the Cartesian Theater model.” The Cartesian Theater model projects a single self as the observer of one’s flow of consciousness, the I who is both the Cartesian thinker and the one who engages in self-inquiry. However, Dennett argues, neuroscience has discovered that “there is no single point in the brain where all information funnels in,” and “there is no observer inside the brain” (Dennett 1992, 103). The correct picture of our consciousness is to think of parallel information processing tracks in the brain, producing constantly revised “drafts” that interpret and reinterpret what we are experiencing. Hence, we do not have a single narrative of our conscious life that belongs to a single agent; what we have instead are multiple drafts undergoing continuous “editorial revision.”

While there are some contemporary analytic philosophers, like Dennett, who are skeptical of the self, there are far more who affirm its existence and seek to clarify its nature. Sydney Shoemaker (1986) agrees with Hume that there is no such thing as an introspective sense impression of the self. He argues that introspection involves relational knowledge that stands between an act and an object, but the self, being a mental subject, cannot itself be the object of introspective awareness. In other words, the self as the I cannot at the same time be the me of the same self. However, the word ‘I’ is more fundamentally used as subject than as object, according to Shoemaker. ‘I’ refers to the subject of statements and each person’s system of reference has the person himself as an “anchoring point” (Shoemaker 1968, 567). Roderick Chisholm (1969) argues that Hume’s mistake begins with his using “perception” as a mode of self-awareness, since the self is not supposed to be a perceivable object, but that which sees, hears, loves, or hates. He also points out that Hume’s argument is self-defeating because in Hume’s self-report, there was already an I who “stumble[s] on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure” (Hume [1739] 2000, 252). This Hume-person who made the discovery is the subject I who apprehends all these perceptions in Hume’s self-report. Therefore, that very Humean denial already proves an awareness of the self as subject. Even if the I cannot be an object of introspection, perception, or awareness, the I as subject seems indispensable.

Not only must there be an I who is the doer of deeds and the thinker of thoughts, but also there must be an unmistakable I, since an erroneous identification of the self is impossible. Wittgenstein argues that when ‘I’ is used as subject, there is no possibility of error in self-identification. If I say “I have a toothache,” for example, it would be impossible that “I should have mistaken another person for myself” (Wittgenstein [1958] 1969, 67). Shoemaker (1968) also argues that when we use the word ‘I’ as the subject of our statements, we do not need to go through an identification process through which we identify ourselves as having the properties asserted in those statements. The reason is twofold: first, if we have to identify the self through some descriptive predicates, we must already possess a basic form of self-knowledge that we have these identifying features; second, identification goes with the possibility of misidentification, but in the case of the self, there is no possibility of misidentification. Therefore, basic self-knowledge is not based on identification of the self. For Shoemaker, self-knowledge or self-awareness comes in the form of self-predication: when one ascribes some particular predicates to oneself, such as “am hungry,” “see a garden in front of me,” “feel sad,” “am in pain,” one manifests self-knowledge or self-awareness. Shoemaker calls these special predicates P*-predicates, “each of which can be known to be instantiated in such a way that knowing it to be instantiated in that way is equivalent to knowing it to be instantiated in oneself” (Shoemaker 1968, 565). Shoemaker argues that the self-ascription of these P*-predicates is immune to error through misidentification – I cannot fail to identify myself when I use the word ‘I’ even though I could be mistaken about my beliefs about myself. If I ascribe to myself that I am in pain, for example, then I know that I am in pain. Self-knowledge is demonstrated in one’s ability to use these P*-predicates since using them presupposes having self-awareness. Our linguistic competence in self-ascribing P*-predicates constitutes self-awareness.

In Shoemaker’s analysis of self-knowledge, we see that self-reference is closely related to self-awareness. One could argue that our sense of the self is manifested in the linguistic usage of the first-person pronoun ‘I,’ which permeates our thinking and speaking. Even a person who suffers total amnesia is able to report: “I don’t know who I am”; even a person with prosopagnosia would report, upon seeing her own image, “I don’t recognize her.” As long as a person can use the word ‘I’ in any statement, he or she has a sense of the self however meager the information is. As Gareth Evans claims: “the essence of self-consciousness is self-reference” (Evans 1982b, 191). Such a linguistic habit of using the first-person pronoun is not a mere “historical accident,” as Nietzsche has assumed, but an inevitable development of our language because of the way we think about and talk about ourselves. Hector-Neri Castañeda argues for such inseparability between self-reference and the self: “[A] correct use of ‘I’ cannot fail to refer to the entity to which it purports to refer . . . The first-person pronoun, without predicating a selfhood, purports to pick out a self qua self, and when it is correctly tendered it invariably succeeds” (Castañeda 1969, 161). Self-reference cannot fail to refer to the self, and this would then be the way to establish the self as subject. This is the classic Cartesian move, though not necessarily the Cartesian ego – an immaterial thinking substance. P. F. Strawson also claims that it seems to be “generally agreed” that an individual’s use of ‘I’ is guaranteed against two kinds of failure: the failure of lack of reference and the failure of incorrect reference (Strawson 1994, 210).

G. E. M. Anscombe, however, disagrees. In “The first person,” Anscombe argues that the word ‘I’ is not a referential term, and the use of ‘I’ does not guarantee that there is anything being referred to. She thinks that we derive a “grammatical illusion of a subject” from the seemingly self-referential nature of the first-person pronoun (Anscombe [1975] 1994, 159). Her argument can be defused by the view presented in John Perry’s classic essay “The problem of the essential indexical.” Perry analyzes ‘I’ as an essentially indexical term. An essential indexical depends on the context in which it is used to pick out the referent, and no other term could replace it without losing some of the explanatory force this term carries. The use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ indicates a direct relationship between the speaker’s conception and the speaker herself. His analysis of the referential nature of ‘I’ is externalistic and contextual: the usage of the ‘I’-word itself, uttered by a particular speaker in a given context, secures the speaker as the referent. This view does not need to posit a Cartesian ego or any privately introspected self. Rather, it places the self in the midst of our language game and identifies the speaker as the subject. This is a self in the public sphere.

Galen Strawson (2009) points out a dual use of the word ‘I’ and its two associated conceptions of the self as subject: “when I think and talk about myself, my reference sometimes extends only to the self that I am, and sometimes it extends further out, to the human being that I am” (Strawson 2009, 31). The former use of ‘I’ refers to the subject of consciousness, as it is phenomenally presented to oneself, as how one conceives of oneself, how one is viewed or considered “from the inside”; the latter use of ‘I’ refers to the whole human being, spatially and temporally located in the world, as the subject of physical or mental attributes, the agent of actions, the owner of moral and legal responsibilities. We can call the former “the phenomenal I,” and the latter “the public I.” Or we can also say that the former is the subjective self while the latter is an important part of the objective self. Thomas Nagel (1983) proposes a conception of the objective self, according to which the self (TN) is projected into the centerless world, singled out by a complete set of publicly identifiable properties and viewed from an impersonal standpoint. Nagel argues that each one of us has, or should have, an objective self at our core. Owen Flanagan (this volume) depicts a conception of the person as he or she really is, from God’s point of view, as the person’s “actual full identity.” The self one conceives from the first-person point of view in all likelihood does not reflect the whole person truthfully or completely, seen from the impersonal standpoint or from God’s point of view. There are definitely gaps between what we represent ourselves to be and what we really are. The self viewed from the subjective standpoint and the person from an objective standpoint may not match up, and here we see that the notions of self and person diverge. This divergence also leads to possible problems in self-knowledge: what we think about ourselves, in terms of our mental states or psychological attributes, could have missed the mark of what kind of person we truly are and what kind of beliefs we truly have.

The reliability of self-knowledge can be subject to the same Humean skepticism: how do we introspect our own beliefs and desires? The question is again whether our own mental states could be the object of our knowledge. Gareth Evans (1982b) suggests that the way to gain self-knowledge is not “looking within,” but to look at the outside world to form a judgment about the world. When the subject wishes to know whether he believes that P, he “does not in any sense gaze at, or concentrate on, his internal state. His internal state cannot in any sense become an object to him. (He is in it.)” (Evans 1982b, 204, original italics). Evans advocates an externalist view of self-knowledge: “In fact, we only have to be aware of some state of the world in order to be in a position to make an assertion about ourselves” (Evans 1982b, 207–08). Alex Byrne (2005) follows Evans and proposes an externalistic epistemic method of self-knowledge. He argues that reliable self-knowledge is easily obtainable if one simply follows a “self-verifying” epistemic rule, which he calls BEL: If p, believe that you believe that p. This rule is self-verifying because if one follows it, then one’s second-order belief about one’s own belief will be true. In other words, one gains reliable self-knowledge by following this epistemic rule. The advantage of Byrne’s self-verifying principle is that it does not call for a special “internal mechanism” or an “inner sense” for our self-knowledge. As long as one perceives the conditions of the world and is rational enough to follow this epistemic rule, one knows what one believes.

Hume’s concern about the introspectability of the self’s presence and mental states can also lead to a question about the introspectability of the self ’s experiences, path of life, and personhood in general. Can we have a conception of the self that is not completely determined from the individual’s point of view, the individual’s self-ascription of beliefs, desires, and other psychological traits, and the individual’s ownership of his or her deeds in memories? In other words, how do we establish an objective personhood that is not purely derived from the individual’s phenomenal consciousness? The psychological account given by Locke seems insufficient as an account of personhood. Bernard Williams (1957) proposes that we use bodily continuity as a necessary condition of personal identity. He argues that the memory criterion cannot be divorced from the body criterion, since the only condition under which x has a veridical memory of y’s doing A is that x = y, and for x and y to be the same person is to have the spatio-temporal continuity between their bodies. There may be imaginary cases of soul swapping or body switching, but if we go for a more realistic approach, according to Williams, “the facts of self-consciousness prove incapable of yielding the secret of personal identity, and we are forced back into the world of public criteria” (Williams [1957] 1999, 15). David Wiggins (1967) also uses spatio-temporal continuity as the criterion of personal identity. In recent literature, Eric Olson’s (1999) account of personal identity appeals to the biological organism that human beings are, or biological continuity, as the criterion. He rejects the psychological criterion completely and suggests that a human person is just a living human animal. This view has been called “animalism.” All these approaches can be seen as an attempt to establish personhood from an objective or at least public perspective, one that is not confined to the individual’s consciousness.

The collected essays in this book continue these discussions in a new light. The first set of essays begins with the Humean denial. Some take up Humean skepticism about locating the self through our introspection while some aim to defeat it. The second set of essays deals with the issue of self-knowledge and the third set of essays explores the relation between personhood and one’s consciousness.

David Rosenthal argues that Hume’s denial of the self is based on an unfounded assumption that perception is the only means through which one could be aware of a self. Having an occurrent, assertoric thought about one’s self as being present is another way for one to be aware of it. Rosenthal’s HOT theory defines ‘conscious mental state’ as the mental state in which one has a suitable thought that one is, oneself, in that state. If one thinks that one is in a mental state, say, thinking about which movie to go see, then one not only is conscious of the thought but also is conscious of the thought as belonging to oneself. The sense of self emerges as the owner of these conscious mental states. Uriah Kriegel argues that self-awareness is always minimally in the “peripheral” of our conscious phenomenal experience. A phenomenal experience is how the experience is an experience for me, the subject of the experience. Without the subjective aspect, the experience itself would not even be an experience for anyone. We may not be able to find the subject in our phenomenal experience, but the subject is always there in our consciousness. Jesse Prinz, on the other hand, elaborates on Humean skepticism and argues against the possibility of finding, in our phenomenology, the self as the subject. Prinz rejects what he calls “the phenomenal I,” not what he calls “the phenomenal me.” According to Prinz, we never can have an experience of ourselves as the subject of our experiences; what we have are just our experiences, our mental states, our perceptions of the world. We do not experience ourselves as the “owner” of conscious mental states as Rosenthal claims; nor do we have any qualitative experiences associated with a subject for whom those qualitative experiences are experiences as Kriegel claims. All three views can be seen as examining the self as subject; in particular, the subjective self, or the self viewed “from the inside.”

On the public self, we have essays by John Perry and Lucy O’Brien. John Perry examines the nature of “self-beliefs” or “I-thoughts,” and places their origin in the world. One gathers “information” about oneself by multiple means, some of which are publicly assessable. The self does not have to be a private entity, knowable only to the subject. Lucy O’Brien focuses on the self-consciousness involved in one’s awareness of others’ gaze, which she calls “ordinary self-consciousness.” On O’Brien’s conception of the self, the I is both the object of others’ scrutiny and the subject who experiences the variety of emotions associated with being thus self-aware. There seems to be a double role for the self here: the first self is the publicly observable person (the public I) while the second self is the subject I who is imagining how others examine the pubic self.

The gap between the subjective self and the objective self leads to the issue of authoritative self-knowledge. The issue of self-knowledge is another theme explored in this book. If there is a unified self within our consciousness, then to know what one thinks, what one believes, or what one desires should be the most reliable, immediate, and authoritative form of knowledge. The Cartesian claim of infallible self-knowledge has been taken to assume the subject’s having a “privileged access” to the content of her own mind. However, even with the most honest intention, we do not have a complete grasp of ourselves. If personhood is construed purely subjectively, from the individual’s self-conception, then it can deviate from the individual’s real personality traits, moral character, true memories, and current intentions. Fred Dretske, Alex Byrne, and Eric Schwitzgebel examine different aspects of knowledge about one’s self, including one’s beliefs, desires, and moral attitudes. Dretske argues that “from the inside,” the individual has no privileged evidence to the fact that she is thinking. Byrne suggests that we make judgments of desirability on the state of affairs in the world as a way to know our own desires. Schwitzgebel points out that our internal conception of ourselves frequently falls short of capturing our true selves. All three views can be seen as defending an externalist position on self-knowledge.

Finally, the last thread in this book is a reflection on the Lockean conception of personhood and persistence of the self in time on the basis of consciousness. Sydney Shoemaker defends a “neo-Lockean” theory of personal identity, using psychological continuity as the criterion for personal identity. Owen Flanagan appeals to William James’ notion of consciousness and argues that personal identity should be based primarily on the Jamesian person. Even though the two views differ, they both appeal to the individual’s consciousness to assign personal identity, and they both argue that the criterion cannot be determined purely “from the inside”: for Shoemaker, it is the causal profiles of one’s psychological properties; for Flanagan, it is the complete consciousness, the actual full identity not founded on the individual’s autobiographical memories, that constitutes personhood.

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS

In “Awareness and identification of self” David Rosenthal defends his higher-order thought (HOT) theory of self-awareness. Rosenthal addresses three concerns that the HOT theory may not be adequate as a theory of self-awareness. The first problem is that some of our thoughts about ourselves involve the so-called “essential indexical” – they are thoughts about one’s referring to oneself with a first-person mode. These thoughts seem to be antecedent to one’s having a higher-order thought about one’s mental states; hence, some other account needs to be given to explain how we generate this form of self-awareness. The second problem derives from Sydney Shoemaker’s well-known claim of “immunity to error through misidentification.” According to Shoemaker, there is no possibility of misidentification of one’s self as the subject of experience because there was no identification of the self to begin with. The HOT theory needs to provide a story about how this immunity is secured merely by higher-order thoughts. The third concern is that even if the HOT theory can explain our self-awareness of our mental states, it might not be able to explain our self-awareness as “physically functioning creatures”; namely, how we interact with other objects in the world, how we move, act, etc. There has to be unity between our awareness of our mental states and our awareness of ourselves as physical beings. It is unclear how the HOT theory can give us this unity.

Rosenthal’s answer to all three objections is to separate a dispositional account of self-awareness from his actualist HOT account of self-awareness. In the case of essential indexicals, he argues that essential indexicals only involve one’s disposition to identify oneself as the person having a particular thought, and not necessarily an actual self-referring thought with a specific identifying content. Therefore, it is not the case that a unique unmediated self-referring thought precedes any higher-order thought that involves self-awareness. Rosenthal further argues that since one has a disposition to identify one’s self as the same agent being aware and having the experience, there is a form of identification of the self, albeit a “thin” self-identification, as he calls it. It is a thin self-identification because it is a mere disposition, not necessarily explicit in occurrent thoughts. If there is identification, then there is a possibility of misidentification, and thus one is not completely immune to error through misidentification. Rosenthal lists one case in which such misidentification does take place: the case of dissociative identity disorder, or what is more commonly known as “multiple personality disorder.” He thinks that this case shows that we do have a disposition to identify the self as the agent with conscious mental states. Finally, with the issue of unity of self-awareness in both mental and physical conditions, Rosenthal’s answer is that we identify ourselves with various means and in various contexts, and together these self-identifications form a unified sense of the self. These heterogeneous self-identifying thoughts reflect one’s beliefs about oneself. These self-beliefs are typically cast in first-person terms in the mental analogue of the first-person pronoun ‘I.’ Our linguistic practice and our commonsense assumption are such that we use ‘I’ in our first-person thoughts to refer to the same individual. Rosenthal argues that identifying the same single self underlying all our conscious states is a disposition of ours, even though such a disposition is not always manifested; in other words, we do not always have occurrent thoughts about the unity of the self. It may even be the case that there is after all nothing that is a unified self, which underlies all our experiences. Nonetheless, our disposition to identify a single self explains why HOTs, which are first-person thoughts, generate a compelling sense of the unity of the self. In Rosenthal’s theory of self-awareness, our linguistic practices involving the first-person pronoun ‘I’ as self-reference and our higher-order first-person thoughts about our own mental states are closely connected.

In “Self-representationalism and the explanatory gap,” Uriah Kriegel explains how his self-representational theory of consciousness can handle the explanatory gap problem. The idea of self-representationalism is basically that a mental state is phenomenally conscious if and only if it represents itself in the right way. Kriegel thinks that there is a strong connection between phenomenal consciousness and self-consciousness: phenomenal consciousness involves essentially “a subtle, primordial kind of self-consciousness” (51). Self-representationalism takes phenomenally conscious states to contain two components: the qualitative character of the experience, which is how the perceived quality appears to be, and the subjective character of the experience, which is how the perceived quality appears to me, the subject of the experience. For an experience to be an experience, there has to be a self at the receiving end, processing the information. The experience is an experience “for me”; as Kriegel puts it, “its for-me-ness is what makes it an experience at all” (52).

Under self-representationalism, the subjective character of phenomenal consciousness presupposes a self at the center of the experience, since it is the self’s awareness of the experience (“in the right way”) that makes it a phenomenal experience. The agent’s awareness of a mental state M is simply the agent’s being in a mental state M* that represents M in the right way. The way self-representationalism differs from Rosenthal’s HOT theory of consciousness is that M* is not a separate, higher-order state of M; rather, M* = M. Kriegel presents a master argument for self-representationalism in section 1 of his chapter. His basic idea is that M*, the mental state that represents an experience as an experience for me, is itself a conscious mental state. If M* is a separate state, however, then it requires a further mental state, call it M**, to represent it and to render it conscious. This further requirement would in the end bring us to an infinite regress of postulating higher-order mental states to make the lower-order states conscious. Since that is not an acceptable option, M* must not be a separate state from M. Therefore, M* = M. However, M is not a simple state, according to Kriegel, but rather a complex state that has two proper parts: M1 (the qualitative character) and M2 (the subjective character). M is self-representing iff M2 represents M1 directly, and thereby representing M (the complete phenomenally conscious state) indirectly. This complex structure gives Kriegel a clue on how to locate the neural structure that implements phenomenal conscious states.

Kriegel distinguishes two phenomena of self-consciousness: transitive self-consciousness and intransitive self-consciousness. The former depicts a relation between the subject and the experience the subject is conscious of having, as in, for example, “I am self-conscious of perceiving the laptop.” The latter depicts the mode in which the subject has that experience, as in “I am self-consciously perceiving the laptop.” Kriegel argues that these two are distinct phenomena, and it is the intransitive self-consciousness that captures the subjective character of phenomenal consciousness. The explanatory gap problem between phenomenal consciousness and physical properties turns out to be the issue of how to reductively explain the subject’s intransitive self-consciousness in terms of the neural activities in her brain. Kriegel’s solution to the explanatory gap problem is, in a nutshell, to find the neural structure that implements the self-representing nature of phenomenally conscious mental states. He hypothesizes that, in the case of visual perception, neural activation in the right part of visual cortex (V4) realizes M1 (qualitative character), while neural activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) realizes M2 (subjective character), and there is neural synchronization between them that joins M1 and M2 into a unified single state, M. The binding among neural activation in different brain areas constitutes a unified conscious experience. With this hypothesis about the neural foundations for phenomenal consciousness, in particular, for intransitive self-consciousness (i.e. subjective character of phenomenal consciousness), Kriegel embarks on his solution to the explanatory gap problem. Using the sorites series as an analogy, Kriegel first argues that the explanation of intransitive self-consciousness (or even phenomenal consciousness) in terms of neural processes follows a logical sequence, with each step closely connected to the previous step, but resulting in a huge gap between the first and the final step. What generates the explanatory gap is simply when we try to comprehend the whole sequence “in a single intellectual act,” we cannot see the explanatory derivation (62). We may be inclined to conclude that the apparent gap exists only in our understanding, not in the explanation itself, and thus there is no genuine explanatory gap. However, this is not the approach that Kriegel takes. He actually acknowledges the existence of an explanatory gap, and suggests that what the logical explanatory sequence renders is epistemic transparency, but not epistemic reduction. The sequence of explanation gives reductive explanation step by step, but as he argues, “the relation of reductive explainability is not transitive” (65); hence, the whole sequence itself does not produce reductive explanation of intransitive self-consciousness in terms of synchronization with dlPFC activity, even though the former is ontologically reducible to the latter.

In “Thinking about the self” John Perry further develops his theory of self-belief – the belief one has about oneself from the perspective of the self. Perry begins by explicating the connection between belief, language, and the world. He thinks that beliefs in general are not fully determined internally and individualistically, because contents of beliefs involve circumstances in which the person situates, along with her relations to the objects and her relations to other thinkers or speakers. Beliefs, as well as other forms of cognition such as perception, are embedded in a system of information. The system of beliefs may be interrelated internally, but ultimately the function of belief is played out in what Perry calls the “information game”: an agent picks up information about the external world in a given context, stores the information in the system, and later uses the information on a pertinent occasion. Perry describes different sorts of information games: straight-through, tracking, detach and recognize, and finally, communication. To him, beliefs play a causal role in storing and acting on the information that the agent picks up about objects in the world. Perry further explains the structure of belief: belief involves notions or ideas; the former are ideas of things while the latter are ideas of properties or relations. When the agent perceives someone or something and establishes an epistemic or pragmatic relation with the perceived object, the agent forms a “buffer,” which is simply a notion attached to the perception of the object. Once the perceived object is out of sight, the original buffer becomes a “detached notion,” which is stored for later use. Our beliefs, along with other forms of cognition, provide us with databases of buffers or detached notions of objects we interact with in our navigation through the world.

A belief is a representational state, and the content of the representational state specifies the conditions for its truth. These will be, roughly, the conditions under which an action, motivated by the belief in concert with a desire, will result in satisfaction of the desire. If the representational state represents a particular object, then the object is an “articulated constituent” of the content. If, on the other hand, the representational state is not explicitly about any object, yet the whole representational system insures that a particular object belongs in the content, then that object is an “unarticulated constituent” of the content. Either way, the object stands in an appropriate epistemic and pragmatic relation to the agent through the agent’s belief.

Given this externalistic and pragmatic picture of belief, Perry examines the nature of self-belief. Self-beliefs are typically expressed with first-person self-assertions, but the first-person pronoun ‘I’ is not essentially involved in self-belief. Perry argues that our self-belief involves our notions about ourselves – our “self-notions,” and we are either an articulated or unarticulated constituent of the content of our self-belief. Our self-beliefs are like other beliefs in certain ways: they also connect us to an individual who plays some epistemic and pragmatic roles in our lives, except that the individual bears an “identity” relation to ourselves. Perry calls our self-notions “self-buffers,” but unlike other buffers, self-buffers do not get detached from the perceived object – my self-buffer will always be attached to my self. As Perry puts it: “Once you have the connection right, it is good for life” (93).

The method with which one obtains information about one’s self and thereby forms a self-belief makes self-belief stand out from other kinds of belief. One could obtain information about oneself the same way one obtains information about others: looking them up on Facebook, or in a phone book, or the like. Perry argues that among the different methods one could use to pick up information about oneself, some are normally self-informative while some are necessarily self-informative. For example, seeing myself in the mirror is normally self-informative, but there are conceivably scenarios in which what I see is actually someone else. Having a pain sensation or having a thought about something, on the other hand, necessarily gives information only about one’s self and only accessible from the perspective of the self. These methods are self-informative because they render information of oneself that is typically not available to others. However, if my self-belief is formed in a normally self-informative way, then I may still need some method of identification to learn that what I believe is true of me. If my self-belief is formed in a necessarily self-informative way, on the other hand, then my belief has the feature of immunity to error through misidentification since it is not possible that anyone but me could obtain this belief in the way I do. If I am thinking that I think that Picasso was a great painter (a case of Rosenthal’s HOT), then there can be no mistake that I am the one having this thought – there is no possibility of misidentification. Perry thus argues that Rosenthal (this volume) fails to provide strong reasons to abandon Shoemaker’s immunity to error through misidentification claim.

In “Ordinary self-consciousness,” Lucy O’Brien explores another way in which one is self-conscious: under others’ gaze (literally and metaphorically). It is a kind of self-consciousness that involves one’s being “conscious of oneself as an object represented by others” (101), and is closely linked to other self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride. O’Brien argues that this kind of self-consciousness is a pervasive phenomenon in our daily experience; hence, she calls it “ordinary self-consciousness.” Her usage is probably more in agreement with ordinary language than with philosophical terminology of ‘self-consciousness.’ According to G. E. M. Anscombe, the term ‘self-consciousness’ by the nineteenth century acquired a sense in ordinary language to mean “awkwardness from being troubled by the feeling of being an object of observation by other people” (Anscombe [1975] 1994, 145). This chapter gives a structured analysis of this mental phenomenon.

According to O’Brien, ordinary self-consciousness (OSC) involves a duality of perspectives – the perspective of the subject and the perspective of the evaluator (as seen or imagined by the subject). The structure of OSC thus includes several dimensions, from the identity of the evaluator, the nature of the evaluative schema, to the degrees of weight given to the evaluator or the evaluative schema. O’Brien takes OSC to be an affective state, whose intensity depends on how one gives weight to the others who are presumably judging oneself with their own evaluative schema. What she depicts in this chapter is the phenomenology of OSC, and the awareness of the self is placed in the center of one’s evaluation of oneself through the eyes of the projected others.

In “Waiting for the self,” Jesse Prinz brings up a position that could challenge all the above views about one’s self-awareness. He argues against any separate phenomenal qualities associated with the subject of the self in addition to perceived qualities of things in the world, or sensations, and emotions. Prinz takes an eliminativist’s stance on I-qualia – on his view, there is simply no qualitative experience of the self as subject, though he does not deny that one could experience the self as an object.

In this chapter, Prinz examines several recent studies in contemporary neuroscience that aim to locate the neural correlate of self-awareness. His targets include studies done by Goldberg et al. (2006) to find the difference in brain activities while the subject is engaged in self-related tasks and while the subject “lost herself” in rapid processing tasks, Damasio’s (1999) hypothesis of a “core-self” as the background feelings of our various bodily states, attempts made by Blanke and Metzinger (2009) and Tsakiris et al. (2007), among others, to identify brain structures associated with the sense of body ownership, and the theory of authorship or agency (Wolpert et al. 1995; Frith et al. 2000; Hohwy 2007) of our own physical and mental acts. In all these cases, Prinz argues, the authors fail to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the experience of a self as subject. The brain areas identified as the neural correlate of self-awareness, the superior frontal gyrus (SFG), the right temporoparietal junction, the right posterior insula, or the posterior parietal cortex, all seem to be involved in other activities as well and thus the empirically established correlations do not substantiate the claim for self-awareness. The lack of corresponding phenomenal experiences, such as the background feelings of our bodily states or the integrated bodily representations, also does not prevent the agent from having a sense of the self. Furthermore, with the ownership theory in particular, Prinz argues that ownership is a two-place relation and we will be either going into infinite regress to find the thing that unifies the relata, or to acknowledge that we only have a bound whole, with no single part of the brain being responsible for self-awareness. Prinz acknowledges that the authorship theory seems to offer the best model for self-awareness, since agency and subjectivity are interconnected. However, he argues, even if the subject experiences a sense of control in comparing the anticipated act and the performed act, this experience generates merely a sense of self as object, not a self as subject, because what the subject perceives is the act, not the actor. There is no phenomenology of the I after all.

While Prinz questions the reliability of introspection in finding a subject I in one’s thought, Fred Dretske continues to question the reliability of introspection in finding the act of thinking itself. In “I think I think, therefore I am – I think,” Dretske goes back to Descartes’ classic Cogito argument and challenges the very first premise: I am thinking. How do we know, he asks, that we are thinking? What evidence do we have for proving that we do think? Dretske argues that once we are pressed to supply a proof, we will come up empty-handed. The question is not about what we think, to which we do have a privileged access and on which we do have a unique authority; the question is about the fact that we think, and with this we cannot find proof. The former question is about the content of our thought; the latter is about the act of thinking itself. From the external point of view, other observers can point to evidence that we are thinking: our rational behavior, for example. We can appeal to the same set of evidence too. What Dretske argues is not skepticism about us as thinking beings, but skepticism about our having any privileged and direct access to the act of thinking. We do not have any internal sense with which to be aware of our own thinking. We do not feel anything special when we think, and there is nothing in particular that we are aware of. The act of thinking can be publicly observable, and there can be publicly identified evidence, but there is nothing from the subject’s point of view, from the inside, that proves to the subject that she is thinking. There is simply no “phenomenology of thought.”

Dretske’s chapter leads into the issue of self-knowledge. Even though Dretske is skeptical of our self-knowledge of the fact that we think, he does not dispute that we have authority, and even a kind of infallibility, in our knowledge of the content of our thought. In “Knowing what I want,” Alex Byrne extends his externalistic epistemic principle of self-knowledge of one’s belief to self-knowledge of one’s intention and desire. Byrne argues that on the principles of economy and unification, we should assume that one’s epistemic capacities to know one’s own mind should be the same across different mental categories: belief, perception, sensation, and desire, unless evidence speaks to the contrary. We have seen that with the case of belief, the epistemic rule one should employ to gain self-knowledge is BEL: If p, believe that you believe that p. The comparable epistemic rule Byrne comes up with for desire is DES: If φing is a desirable option, believe that you want to φ. If one follows this rule, then one gains knowledge of what one desires to do. Byrne’s self-verifying principle seems to be based on realism with regard to both truth and desirability of states of affairs. If these features are “out there in the world,” then as long as one is rational enough to acknowledge p is true, or φing is desirable, then one knows what one believes and what one desires. The underlying requirement for successful self-knowledge is human rationality and cognitive acuity. But the question is: are we really so rational and so perceptive? Eric Schwitzgebel next points to evidence that we are not.

In “Self-ignorance,” Eric Schwitzgebel defends skepticism about self-knowledge and argues that we do not know much about the content of our stream of consciousness. Schwitzgebel focuses on the phenomenology of experience, and presents difficulties for self-knowledge based on how our experience is presented to us. We do not, for example, have a clear visual imagery of the content of our perception, and we cannot quite capture our ongoing “emotional phenomenology.” Schwitzgebel cites some empirical studies that demonstrate people’s fallibility in their judgments on what they think, how they feel, and the content of their perceptual experience. He thinks the problem is even more pronounced when it comes to our self-knowledge of our attitudes that reflect our general values and our background assumptions about the world. Covert sexists or racists would be a case in point. It is not that these people know what they are like and are in self-denial; it is rather that they do not really know their true beliefs. The problem is massive, according to Schwitzgebel, since it pertains to our self-knowledge (or the lack thereof) about other general features of our mentality, such as our intelligence, our moral character, our personality traits. If we use Perry’s notion of file for self-beliefs, then we can say that we store many false self-beliefs in our file of ourselves.

The final two chapters in this book deal with the issue of personal identity – the same self in time. In “Personhood and consciousness,” Sydney Shoemaker defends a “neo-Lockean” theory of personal identity and analyzes the same self in terms of the causal profiles of psychological properties. The causal profiles of psychological properties determine both the synchronic unity (as in the case of perception or action production) and the diachronic unity (as in the case of memory) relations of their instantiation tokens. In his chapter, Shoemaker’s focus is on the diachronic unity of instances of psychological properties. He argues that just as one does not introspect the self as an object, one does not have a “past self” or “me-ness” in the content of one’s memory either. We all claim to remember things that we ourselves have done or gone through, but the first-personal claim is not substantiated by our memory itself. There is no phenomenological difference between one’s veridical memory and one’s seeming memory of someone else’s past experience – what Shoemaker calls “quasi-memory.” The ‘I’ referred to in a memory statement “I went to China last year” could turn out to be someone else that I took to be myself.

To demonstrate the plausibility of quasi-memory, Shoemaker gives the story of Parfit people, which is a “spin-off from Derek Parfit’s example of persons who reproduce by fission” (Shoemaker 2009, 88). Parfit people originate as we do, but around the age twenty-one, each of the Parfit people goes through a natural fission process. “In the fission a person’s body divides into two exactly similar bodies, and each of the bodies is the body of a person psychologically continuous with the original person” (Shoemaker 2009, 88). One special feature of Shoemaker’s Parfit people is that only one of the two successors is allowed to live on, while the other (randomly chosen) would be put to death painlessly shortly after the fission takes place. Furthermore, the surviving person would be unaware of what had happened and would inherit the original person’s beliefs, attitudes, projects, and all personality traits as if no fission had taken place. Tyler Burge calls the sequence of an individual’s total mental states a “mental career” of the agent (Burge 2003, 324). Shoemaker calls the career of the Parfit people a “quareer” – quasi-career, in that it consists of both the personal career of the original person and the personal career of the surviving offshoot. The two personal careers are linked by the surviving offshoot’s quasi-memory of the original person’s life plan. In other words, quareers are sustained by quasi-memories. The survivor’s quasi-memory of the past would be like genuine memory “from the inside” – except that he and the original person were not the same person. In this case their use of the word ‘I’ should be translated as “I*” since it is not the same as our first-person pronoun. Reference using the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in a memory claim does not guarantee veridical designation of the I, when a proper causal theory can be devised as in the case of the Parfit people. In such a case, the subject is not immune to error through misidentification in his or her memory statement. Nonetheless, Shoemaker claims that in creatures like us, our memory statement preserves the same immunity to error through misidentification as our present-tense psychological judgments have. The conditions under which a memory is genuine and self-reference is successful in memory statements are not determined from the inside, from within the subject’s consciousness, but are determined by causal facts about the subject and the subject’s history – for example, the fact that we are not Parfit people. From the first-person perspective, one does not have the means to separate quasi-memories from genuine memories; in other words, one cannot judge with infallibility whether the remembered self is the same self. This is an externalist theory of personal identity.

Finally, in “My non-narrative, non-forensic dasein: the first and second self,” Owen Flanagan defends a view of personal identity which he derives from William James’ conception of person. He argues that the Lockean conception of person, which Shoemaker adopts as the starting point of his theory of personal identity, is “woefully inadequate” because it relies too much on autobiographical memories to constitute sameness of self. The problem with this account is that it appeals to a purely subjective condition, one’s consciousness, to try to establish an objective forensic standard for personhood, which cannot be matched up by the subjective condition. One’s complete personhood cannot be fully captured by one’s autobiographical memories alone, since there are many important things that one has forgotten, has denied to oneself, or has never registered. There are also many insignificant events in our life that could have a causal impact on us, or are causally connected to things that matter to us. When the person’s identity is conceived first-personally, on the basis of one’s consciousness, as Locke has it, it is called “self-experienced identity (SEI)” or “self-represented identity (SRI).” On the other hand, a person’s full life’s history, viewed from God’s point of view, would include everything the person experiences, whether he owns it or not. Flanagan calls it the person’s “actual full identity (AFI).” If by ‘person’ we mean moral and legal agency, we cannot confine personhood to the subject’s self-representations alone. For the notion of person to be used as a forensic concept, it has to include AFI.

William James provides an alternative conception of personhood, according to Flanagan, which can supplement Locke’s conception. James depicts one’s consciousness as “the free water of consciousness,” which flows through both “substantive” and “transitive” states of mind in our daily life, not missing any detail. Even though the substantive part of our consciousness may be more important and more interesting to us, there is no exact science that tells us that those transitive states of mind do not have any causal impact on what makes us who we are. What Flanagan proposes in this chapter is to combine both accounts, and to place the Jamesian notion of personhood as primary (“the first self”) while the Lockean notion would be derivative from this primary notion (“the second self”). The Jamesian persons need not be linguistic, conceptual, or social creatures; they could very well be cavemen and hunter-gatherers, as Flanagan sees it. They are “persons” because they have experiences and memories, but they are not “forensic persons” because “[t]he relevant legal and moral practices that define forensic persons into existence did not yet exist” (234). The Lockean notion of person is a modern invention that reflects our sense of legal and moral responsibilities, but the Jamesian notion of person depicts a fuller sense of the self, not just “from the inside.”

Current literature on consciousness seems to manifest a fascination with issues such as phenomenal consciousness, qualia, the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, reductionism or non-reductionism. All of these issues are grounded on the subject of consciousness, the subject for whom the experiences are experiences. Physicalism aims to give a full picture of the world, including the nature of human consciousness. But such an objective depiction from the third-person point of view seems bound to leave out the subjective aspect of experience and the subject I who has those experiences. From the first-person standpoint, there is undeniably a self of which one is conscious and to which one refers. No matter how current neuroscience can prove the absence of processors for the self in our brain’s areas, the self is deeply rooted in our consciousness. Tell any person on the street that there is no single subject of her experience or that the self is a mere illusion created by our linguistic habits, she will just reply, “I don’t believe it.” Her very statement demonstrates her sense of the self. We human beings, as linguistic, cultural, and reflective persons, have this indubitable sense of the self. “From the inside,” we may not know what we truly believe or desire, we may not have an accurate self-assessment of our personality and moral character, and we may not be able to tell whether our memory captures our true identity. Nonetheless, we know there is an I in our consciousness.