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The Self: From Soul to Brain
This work constitutes the proceedings of a New York Academy of Sciences conference held in September 2002. It seeks to take stock of understanding of the self and its relation to the brain, and consider future directions for scientific research in a multidisciplinary context.
- GenresPsychologyPhilosophy
317 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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June 24, 2024
PAPERS FROM A CONFERENCE DEALING WITH OUR SENSE OF “SELF”
This book is a reprinting from the October 2003 edition (Volume 1001) of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
The editors wrote in the Preface, “we have inherited notions---such as the soul, spirit, mind, self, and person---that have shaped our view for millennia of who we are as individuals, as members of social groups, and as a species. Through traditionally the province of the humanities, questions about the self have begun to be tackled by modern science… the more common approach has come from the social sciences. This approach … views the self as a distinctly human achievement closely associated with the human capacity for consciousness, and thus, for self-reflection and self-awareness… The unconscious mind, by contrast, is typically viewed as a storehouse of bestial impulses and a source of trouble rather than of healthy mental activity.
“Cognitive and brain scientists… have in recent years begun to consider this puzzle. And the view that is emerging [is] that the self normally involves processes that operate both consciously and unconsciously… this conception of the self in terms of component processes, such as memory and emotion, makes neuroscience research on these processes relevant to the self. How, then, do these diverse views and approaches to the self … relate? This was the main question that inspired… [the] conference… which took place in September 2002… Many of the key papers are included in this volume… The goal of this conference was not to settle the question about what the self is. The aim was instead to highlight some of the variety in the different approaches, and to look for common points of interest.”
Patricia Churchland suggests, “An appealing hypothesis… is that the self/nonself distinction… is ultimately responsible for consciousness… as wiring modifications enable increasingly sophisticated simulation and deliberation, the self-representational apparatus becomes correspondingly more elaborate… Thus, chimpanzees, but not frogs, know whether they can be seen by a subordinate female but not the dominant male… Whether neuroscience can build on these foundations to discover full and detailed explanations of all self-representational phenomena remains to be seen… An abiding challenge in neuroscience is to discover the basic principles governing the integration of information at various levels of brain organization and at various time scales.” (Pg. 36-37)
Daniel Dennett states, “Efforts to identify the self---a mortal and immaterial soul, you might say---with a particular subsystem in the brain run into snags at every turn. I call this the fallacy of the Cartesian Theater, the place in the brain where it all comes together for conscious appreciation and decision. This just cannot be right. All the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be distributed around to various lesser agencies in the brain. But some people just hate this idea. They think, mistakenly, that unless there is a Cartesian Theater, there is no consciousness. They are wrong for many reasons, not least of which is that the SPECS for such an organ or faculty of the body turn out to be, shall we say, optimistic. We are just not that unified.” (Pg. 39-40)
Theologian Nancey Murphy asks, “What should neuroscientists know about religious views of the self[?]… I shall first offer … [an] overview of what assorted segments of our society believe about the nature of the person. Second, I shall argue that there is no necessary conflict between NORMATIVE Christian views and current scientific views. In particular, Christian scholarship rejected body-soul dualism at least 50 years ago, leaving the way open for agreement with science on the purely physical makeup of humans… I suggest that if there is a point of contention between science and Christian scholarship it is more philosophical than theological; it regards the issue of reductionism.” (Pg. 51-52)
Michael Lewis observes, “I would … argue that this idea of self is a particularly powerful one; it is an idea with which I cannot part… I have no knowledge of a large number of my motives… that control large segments of my life. I have no explicit knowledge of how my thoughts occur. Nevertheless, I know that I think and feel even without this knowledge. This is my explicit consciousness… it is nonetheless the case that what is known by my self-system is greater than what I can state I know… My self, then, is greater than the me, the explicit me being only a small portion of myself… The idea that I KNOW is not the same as the idea that I KNOW I KNOW. The explicit aspect of the self that I refer to is that which knows it knows.” (Pg. 106)
Daniel Wegner explains, “The basic idea of the theory of apparent mental causation is that conscious intention and action are caused by unperceived forces: You think of lifting that finger and then lift that finger---not because conscious thinking causes doing, but because other forces of mind and brain (that are not consciously perceived) cause both the thinking and the doing. On the basis of your conscious perceptions… it is impossible to tell in any given case whether your thought was causing your action, or something else was causing both of them. The deep intuition we all have about the power of our conscious will arises because thought and act are the only recognizable objects in our mind’s self-portrait. We experience consciously wiling our actions… We INFER that our thought causes our action.” (Pg. 214)
Later, he adds, “Why would previews of action come to mind so regularly before action if NOT to cause action?... we must wonder why thoughts that look and feel like intentions might have evolved in humans when they may not have the function of causing action… [The] evolutionary story for conscious previews draws upon their usefulness in establishing personal experiences of will---and so in creating a deep sense of authorship… the experience of conscious will … highlights the actions that feel as though they are our own, and this marker function is sufficiently important for human social life that it could well motivate the processes that produce previews… The person who feels will for an action typically then feels responsibility for that action, and so will also be susceptible to moral emotions such as pride and guilt depending on the action’s effects.” (Pg. 221-222)
Antonio Damasio states, “I believe the self is based on a neurobiological process. I also believe that the key to the self is the representation of the community of the organism… a likely support for the representation of organismic continuity is the neural system responsible for the representation of our own bodies. At this point we should consider this an intuition. However, it is a plausible intuition, one which can inform valuable hypotheses, and it is not mine alone. There is a venerable tradition of seeing the self as connected to a representation of the body.” (Pg. 254)
Joseph LeDoux argues, “Unlike the notion of a person, the notion of the self can be thought of along an evolutionary continuum. While only humans have the unique aspects of the self made possible by the human brain, other animals have the kinds of selves made possible by their brains… there is considerable overlap in the non-conscious aspects of the self between species… Once we accept that the self of a human can have conscious and non-conscious aspects, kit becomes easy to see how other animals can be thought of as having selves… the existence of a self thus comes with the territory of being an animal.” (Pg. 297-298)
Jacek DeBiec and Joseph LeDoux note, “There is nothing more intimate than the sense of oneself…. This unique source of knowledge implies both the content and the persistence of who we think we are… the scientific perspective on the self … actually goes far beyond ordinary observation. Is this ‘self’ that emerges from scientific studies still the same self you think about when you say ‘I’? Proponents of the introspective-based subjective knowledge approach would probably answer ‘no.’ .. On the phenomenal level, humans do not have a direct experience of their brains as they do of their hands…. From the point of view of the subjective self, observational and experimental data cannot replace personal experience, and cannot substitute for anything as evident as the ‘I.’ … How can I refer to myself in terms of brain, which is not ‘mine,’ that does not belong to my ‘self’?” (Pg. 307)
This book contains a wide variety of perspectives, and will be of great interest to those studying the brain, the mind, and the self.
This book is a reprinting from the October 2003 edition (Volume 1001) of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
The editors wrote in the Preface, “we have inherited notions---such as the soul, spirit, mind, self, and person---that have shaped our view for millennia of who we are as individuals, as members of social groups, and as a species. Through traditionally the province of the humanities, questions about the self have begun to be tackled by modern science… the more common approach has come from the social sciences. This approach … views the self as a distinctly human achievement closely associated with the human capacity for consciousness, and thus, for self-reflection and self-awareness… The unconscious mind, by contrast, is typically viewed as a storehouse of bestial impulses and a source of trouble rather than of healthy mental activity.
“Cognitive and brain scientists… have in recent years begun to consider this puzzle. And the view that is emerging [is] that the self normally involves processes that operate both consciously and unconsciously… this conception of the self in terms of component processes, such as memory and emotion, makes neuroscience research on these processes relevant to the self. How, then, do these diverse views and approaches to the self … relate? This was the main question that inspired… [the] conference… which took place in September 2002… Many of the key papers are included in this volume… The goal of this conference was not to settle the question about what the self is. The aim was instead to highlight some of the variety in the different approaches, and to look for common points of interest.”
Patricia Churchland suggests, “An appealing hypothesis… is that the self/nonself distinction… is ultimately responsible for consciousness… as wiring modifications enable increasingly sophisticated simulation and deliberation, the self-representational apparatus becomes correspondingly more elaborate… Thus, chimpanzees, but not frogs, know whether they can be seen by a subordinate female but not the dominant male… Whether neuroscience can build on these foundations to discover full and detailed explanations of all self-representational phenomena remains to be seen… An abiding challenge in neuroscience is to discover the basic principles governing the integration of information at various levels of brain organization and at various time scales.” (Pg. 36-37)
Daniel Dennett states, “Efforts to identify the self---a mortal and immaterial soul, you might say---with a particular subsystem in the brain run into snags at every turn. I call this the fallacy of the Cartesian Theater, the place in the brain where it all comes together for conscious appreciation and decision. This just cannot be right. All the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be distributed around to various lesser agencies in the brain. But some people just hate this idea. They think, mistakenly, that unless there is a Cartesian Theater, there is no consciousness. They are wrong for many reasons, not least of which is that the SPECS for such an organ or faculty of the body turn out to be, shall we say, optimistic. We are just not that unified.” (Pg. 39-40)
Theologian Nancey Murphy asks, “What should neuroscientists know about religious views of the self[?]… I shall first offer … [an] overview of what assorted segments of our society believe about the nature of the person. Second, I shall argue that there is no necessary conflict between NORMATIVE Christian views and current scientific views. In particular, Christian scholarship rejected body-soul dualism at least 50 years ago, leaving the way open for agreement with science on the purely physical makeup of humans… I suggest that if there is a point of contention between science and Christian scholarship it is more philosophical than theological; it regards the issue of reductionism.” (Pg. 51-52)
Michael Lewis observes, “I would … argue that this idea of self is a particularly powerful one; it is an idea with which I cannot part… I have no knowledge of a large number of my motives… that control large segments of my life. I have no explicit knowledge of how my thoughts occur. Nevertheless, I know that I think and feel even without this knowledge. This is my explicit consciousness… it is nonetheless the case that what is known by my self-system is greater than what I can state I know… My self, then, is greater than the me, the explicit me being only a small portion of myself… The idea that I KNOW is not the same as the idea that I KNOW I KNOW. The explicit aspect of the self that I refer to is that which knows it knows.” (Pg. 106)
Daniel Wegner explains, “The basic idea of the theory of apparent mental causation is that conscious intention and action are caused by unperceived forces: You think of lifting that finger and then lift that finger---not because conscious thinking causes doing, but because other forces of mind and brain (that are not consciously perceived) cause both the thinking and the doing. On the basis of your conscious perceptions… it is impossible to tell in any given case whether your thought was causing your action, or something else was causing both of them. The deep intuition we all have about the power of our conscious will arises because thought and act are the only recognizable objects in our mind’s self-portrait. We experience consciously wiling our actions… We INFER that our thought causes our action.” (Pg. 214)
Later, he adds, “Why would previews of action come to mind so regularly before action if NOT to cause action?... we must wonder why thoughts that look and feel like intentions might have evolved in humans when they may not have the function of causing action… [The] evolutionary story for conscious previews draws upon their usefulness in establishing personal experiences of will---and so in creating a deep sense of authorship… the experience of conscious will … highlights the actions that feel as though they are our own, and this marker function is sufficiently important for human social life that it could well motivate the processes that produce previews… The person who feels will for an action typically then feels responsibility for that action, and so will also be susceptible to moral emotions such as pride and guilt depending on the action’s effects.” (Pg. 221-222)
Antonio Damasio states, “I believe the self is based on a neurobiological process. I also believe that the key to the self is the representation of the community of the organism… a likely support for the representation of organismic continuity is the neural system responsible for the representation of our own bodies. At this point we should consider this an intuition. However, it is a plausible intuition, one which can inform valuable hypotheses, and it is not mine alone. There is a venerable tradition of seeing the self as connected to a representation of the body.” (Pg. 254)
Joseph LeDoux argues, “Unlike the notion of a person, the notion of the self can be thought of along an evolutionary continuum. While only humans have the unique aspects of the self made possible by the human brain, other animals have the kinds of selves made possible by their brains… there is considerable overlap in the non-conscious aspects of the self between species… Once we accept that the self of a human can have conscious and non-conscious aspects, kit becomes easy to see how other animals can be thought of as having selves… the existence of a self thus comes with the territory of being an animal.” (Pg. 297-298)
Jacek DeBiec and Joseph LeDoux note, “There is nothing more intimate than the sense of oneself…. This unique source of knowledge implies both the content and the persistence of who we think we are… the scientific perspective on the self … actually goes far beyond ordinary observation. Is this ‘self’ that emerges from scientific studies still the same self you think about when you say ‘I’? Proponents of the introspective-based subjective knowledge approach would probably answer ‘no.’ .. On the phenomenal level, humans do not have a direct experience of their brains as they do of their hands…. From the point of view of the subjective self, observational and experimental data cannot replace personal experience, and cannot substitute for anything as evident as the ‘I.’ … How can I refer to myself in terms of brain, which is not ‘mine,’ that does not belong to my ‘self’?” (Pg. 307)
This book contains a wide variety of perspectives, and will be of great interest to those studying the brain, the mind, and the self.
Displaying 1 of 1 review