Thomas Metzinger has argued that the persisting self is neither an illusion (in the sense of a perceptual experience whose content is incorrect) nor a genuine entity in the sense of an object existing outside the mind like a body or a neural state. Instead the self is a creature of experience itself, a phenomenal representation constructed by the brain to control the body. This representation is in effect an avatar that unifies experiences of ownership (the sense of the integrity of bodily boundaries), perspective on experience (which I have not talked about in this essay), and selfhood (“a single coherent and temporally stable phenomenal subject”.) An especially attractive aspect of Metzinger’s view is that he treats the nature of the avatar as an empirical matter so that our understanding of its properties can be refined in the face of further discoveries.
Metzinger’s view nicely captures what is right and wrong in the illusory view of the self. The illusory view is correct that the self is not an object to be experienced in the same way as we experience perceptual or somatic objects. The self is a way of experiencing the interaction of the body and the world. It is a creature of experience, constructed by the brain to navigate the organism through the world. The self exists as a virtual phenomenal entity in virtue of the integrative processes that create and sustain it.
The Fat Controller view of the self also has some of the picture correct. Self-awareness is needed for higher order cognitive control to integrate and organise experience moment to moment and to assimilate those experiences to an ongoing autobiography for longer-term cognitive control. However there is no single cognitive process with an identifiable neural substrate that represents an organiser/narrator. Also, and this is where Metzinger is correct, there is a genuine experience of being a person in control, but this experience is the experience of integration itself, which suggests that it is a process which can disintegrate and degrade in different ways and to different degrees. It also suggests, although I have not discussed it here, that experience of the self is a prefrontal achievement since prefrontal structures are specialised for “large world” integrative processing (the orchestration of synchronised activity across widely distributed brain areas).
The Embodied Self view is of course very close to the one I have discussed here. I have argued that a particular type of bodily feeling is what goes awry in depersonalisation and hence that those feelings produce the experience of the self. While this is correct, we need to recall that Damasio distinguished between the “core self”, which is very close to the phenomenon I have described, and the autobiographical self. Sometimes he treats the autobiographical self as a more abstract or narrative construct. I have tried to show that the integration of the core self with the autobiographical self comes, as it were, for free, given the automatic links between affective processing and the processes which construct the autobiographical self. It is impossible to rehearse episodes of one’s autobiography without a sense of presence–unless, of course, one has DPD or the Cotard delusion. But those cases demonstrate the component structure of the avatar.
Finally, the narrative view captures the crucial role of temporal integration in the experience of the self. But the self is not just a fictional protagonist in the brain’s stories (though it is that). The specialised simulation mechanisms that generate the actual and potential autobiographies automatically integrate each episode with affective feeling. That feeling allows us to experience in the process of recollection, imagination or narration the significance of each episode to our unique organismic trajectory. That, and the ability to incorporate and act on those feelings, is all the selfhood anyone needs.