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Authors: Richard David Precht
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the brain. Most skirted the question entirely. Immanuel Kant, for example, used vague language in describing the self as an ‘object of inner sense’ as opposed to the ‘object of the outer senses,’ the body. This hazy statement keeps the issue up in the air.
Philosophy thus leaves the question of the self largely unresolved . The basic idea is that you don’t talk about the self, you have it. It is not surprising that neuroscience cannot seem to find the self; the way neuroscientists examine the brain would not reveal it. In their world there is no self that could be pinpointed somewhere on a map of the brain, and hence the self does not exist.
But don’t we continually experience our selves anyway? Could it really be that these experiences are misleading us? Isn’t it indisputable, then, that there is a sense of self, albeit a nebulous one? Might the self extend over the entire brain – perhaps even throughout the entire nervous system – or at least through many key parts of it? Couldn’t a melody arise from the concert of neurons in the brain, a melody of the self, so to speak, which may not be ascertainable biologically, but indisputably exists on a psychological level even so? Just as the description of each individual instrument in a concert hall does not yield a symphony, one simply cannot get at the self with the methods of brain anatomy. Couldn’t we see it that way?
Perhaps. But neuroscience has a second way of getting to the root of the question: by examining people who deviate from the norm, patients with disorders that shut down, debilitate, or distort their sense of self. The famous British neurologist and psychologist Oliver Sacks spent forty years with patients in these situations. Sacks himself is a very colorful and high-profile personality, and his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat describes the lives and worlds of people with identity disorders; Sacks calls them ‘travelers to unimaginable lands – lands of which otherwise we should have no idea or conception.’ One is a musician who suffers a tiny injury to the left hemisphere of the brain and begins toexperience profound visual agnosia, an inability to recognize objects. If he means to grab his hat, he reaches for his wife’s face instead. Another is a professor of music who pats the heads of parking meters, thinking they are children; and yet another patient, an elderly woman suffering from neurosyphilis (‘Cupid’s disease’), develops an insatiable appetite for younger men.
The phenomena that Sacks was able only to sketch more than twenty years ago have since been explored from many angles. Many neuroscientists tend to the view that there is not a single self, but rather many different states of the self. My corporal self makes me aware that the body in which I am living is really my own body; my locational self tells me where I am at a given time; my perspectivist self tells me that I am the center of the world experienced by me; my ‘I’ as experiential subject tells me that my sensory impressions and feelings are really my own and not those of others; my authorship and supervisory self makes it clear to me that I am the person who has to accept responsibility for my thoughts and actions; my autobiographical self makes sure I do not step out of my own role and that I experience myself throughout as one and the same person; my self-reflexive self enables me to think about myself and to play the psychological game of ‘I’ and ‘me’; and my moral self works as conscience to tell me what is good and what is bad.
There are disorders in which one or another self does not function correctly, as in Oliver Sacks’s stories. If these patients are examined using imaging procedures (see ‘The Cosmos of the Mind,’ p. 20), the areas of the brain that are apparently not working normally can be identified. The corporal self and the locational self, for example, are associated with the work of the parietal lobe, and the
Philosophy thus leaves the question of the self largely unresolved . The basic idea is that you don’t talk about the self, you have it. It is not surprising that neuroscience cannot seem to find the self; the way neuroscientists examine the brain would not reveal it. In their world there is no self that could be pinpointed somewhere on a map of the brain, and hence the self does not exist.
But don’t we continually experience our selves anyway? Could it really be that these experiences are misleading us? Isn’t it indisputable, then, that there is a sense of self, albeit a nebulous one? Might the self extend over the entire brain – perhaps even throughout the entire nervous system – or at least through many key parts of it? Couldn’t a melody arise from the concert of neurons in the brain, a melody of the self, so to speak, which may not be ascertainable biologically, but indisputably exists on a psychological level even so? Just as the description of each individual instrument in a concert hall does not yield a symphony, one simply cannot get at the self with the methods of brain anatomy. Couldn’t we see it that way?
Perhaps. But neuroscience has a second way of getting to the root of the question: by examining people who deviate from the norm, patients with disorders that shut down, debilitate, or distort their sense of self. The famous British neurologist and psychologist Oliver Sacks spent forty years with patients in these situations. Sacks himself is a very colorful and high-profile personality, and his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat describes the lives and worlds of people with identity disorders; Sacks calls them ‘travelers to unimaginable lands – lands of which otherwise we should have no idea or conception.’ One is a musician who suffers a tiny injury to the left hemisphere of the brain and begins toexperience profound visual agnosia, an inability to recognize objects. If he means to grab his hat, he reaches for his wife’s face instead. Another is a professor of music who pats the heads of parking meters, thinking they are children; and yet another patient, an elderly woman suffering from neurosyphilis (‘Cupid’s disease’), develops an insatiable appetite for younger men.
The phenomena that Sacks was able only to sketch more than twenty years ago have since been explored from many angles. Many neuroscientists tend to the view that there is not a single self, but rather many different states of the self. My corporal self makes me aware that the body in which I am living is really my own body; my locational self tells me where I am at a given time; my perspectivist self tells me that I am the center of the world experienced by me; my ‘I’ as experiential subject tells me that my sensory impressions and feelings are really my own and not those of others; my authorship and supervisory self makes it clear to me that I am the person who has to accept responsibility for my thoughts and actions; my autobiographical self makes sure I do not step out of my own role and that I experience myself throughout as one and the same person; my self-reflexive self enables me to think about myself and to play the psychological game of ‘I’ and ‘me’; and my moral self works as conscience to tell me what is good and what is bad.
There are disorders in which one or another self does not function correctly, as in Oliver Sacks’s stories. If these patients are examined using imaging procedures (see ‘The Cosmos of the Mind,’ p. 20), the areas of the brain that are apparently not working normally can be identified. The corporal self and the locational self, for example, are associated with the work of the parietal lobe, and the
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