“Who is the I that knows the bodily me, who has an image of myself and a sense of identity over time, who knows that I have propriate strivings?” I know all these things, and what is more, I know that I know them. But who is it who has this perspectival grasp? It is much easier to feel the self than to define the self (Allport 1961, p. 128)
I think Allport has it the wrong way round. It is easy to define the self, as he in fact does, as the thing that thinks, feels, perceives and has a sense of identity over time. It is hard, however, to a find an entity that fits the definition. This is so even though, according to Allport, experiencing being a self is unproblematic (“it is easier to feel the self”). In fact, the experience of being someone is actually very elusive, phenomenologically and conceptually. On some accounts self-awareness is actually the experience of Being No-One[1] (Metzinger 2003). In this chapter I use disorders of self-awareness to develop an account of the experience which gives rise to the feelings referred to by Allport. In the final sections we shall see whether our experience is of being someone, no-one, or something other than a self. Perhaps a body. Or the process of thinking.
The conclusion is that self-awareness is almost a necessary or inevitable illusion when the mind is functioning smoothly. The experience of being a self is produced by mechanisms that compute the relevance of sensory (including, and especially, bodily) information to a variety of organismic goals represented at different levels of explicitness in a cognitive hierarchy. The computations relate information to those goals, not to selves. Those computations of goal relevance produce consequent bodily feelings. Those, and only those, feelings give us the phenomenal information we need to plan, remember, and interact with other people and the world as though we are unified selves. Thomas Metzinger argues that integration of information in experience amounts to the construction of a phenomenal avatar, which the brain uses to manoeuvre the organism through the world (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; Metzinger 2011). I agree, and the rest of the chapter can be seen as an attempt to anatomise that avatar. I use evidence from psychiatric disorders involving the experience of depersonalisation to decompose the causal and cognitive structure of experiences reported as self-awareness.