This paper investigates a central form of self-consciousness from an interdisciplinary perspective: the sense of self-as-subject.[1] How philosophers understand this form of consciousness has been influenced by two ideas. One is Wittgenstein’s distinction between “I”-as-object and “I”-as-subject. In the Blue Book (1958), he says that: “there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask ‘are you sure it is you who have pains?’ would be nonsensical”. The other is Shoemaker’s immunity principle. Developing Wittgenstein’s distinction, Shoemaker (1968) argues that we are “immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronouns (IEM)”. Many consider IEM to be solely addressing semantic or conceptual issues. But for philosophers of mind, it decisively sets apart two types of self-consciousness. When one is conscious of oneself-as-object, error is always possible; however, when one is conscious of oneself-as-subject, a particular sort of mistake about who the subject is becomes impossible.
The first goal of this paper is to propose an alternative explication of the sense of self-as-object and the sense of self-as-subject. I aim to provide an account that is both phenomenologically precise and empirically useful. The distinction, I will suggest, can be better understood as two types of self-experience: a sense of body ownership and a sense of experiential ownership. I will argue that sometimes it makes perfect sense to ask a subject “are you sure it is you who feels pain?” For brevity, I will call this type of question the “Wittgenstein Question”. I will also argue that IEM, or at least some versions of it, faces counterexamples from empirical research. The second goal of this paper is to examine empirical accounts related to the sense of self-as-subject. There are currently many neuroscience programs devoted to self-consciousness, and recently some researchers claim to have explained the neural mechanisms of the sense of self-as-subject. Investigating these programs will reveal how philosophy can contribute to neuroscience in understanding this target phenomenon.
I discuss the sense of body ownership in section 2, and explain how it helps to clarify the sense of self-as-object. Section 3 introduces the notion of experiential ownership. I use this notion to specify what it is like to experience the self-as-subject. A crucial claim is that being the subject of an experience does not imply experiencing oneself as the subject of experience. If this is correct, at least some forms of IEM fail. Consequently, if we want to talk about a sense of self-as-subject we need more empirical studies. Section 4 examines Damasio’s account of the core-self and Panksepp’s affective neuroscience. Both claim to explain the neural basis of the sense of self-as-subject, but I argue that they only address the sense of self-as-object. In section 5, I criticize two proposals that some neuroscientists use for explaining the sense of self-as-subject: neural synchrony and subcortical-cortical midline structures (SCMS). The overall positive lesson we can take from these accounts will be presented in the final section.