The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self Read Online Free Page B

far. Philosophers disagree vehemently on whether science can ever solve this problem, or whether this problem is illusory, one that might disappear as we understand the brain in more and more detail. This bookdoes not offer neuroscientific solutions to the hard problem of consciousness—there are none, yet.
    But this book does address the nature of the self. One way to think of the self is to consider its many facets. We are not just one thing to others or even to ourselves; we present many faces. The great American psychologist William James identifiedat least three such facets: the material self, which includes everything I consider as me or mine; the social self, which depends on my interactions with others (“a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind”); and the spiritual self (“a man’s inner or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions”).
    The search for the self is also well served by thinking of it in terms of two categories: the “self-as-object” and the “self-as-subject.” It turns out that some aspects of the self are objects to itself. For instance, if you were to say, “I am happy”—the feeling of happiness, which is part of your sense of self at that moment, belongs to the self-as-object category. You are aware of it as a state of your being. But the “I” that feels happy—the one that is aware of its own happiness—that’s the more slippery, elusive self-as-subject. The same “I” could also be depressed, ecstatic, and anything in between.
    With this distinction in mind, if you take Laureys’s studies, which show that in healthy subjects the frontoparietal network activity constantly switches back and forth from internal to external awareness, what seems to be changing is the content of one’s consciousness: from awareness of external stimuli to awareness of aspects of one’s self. When you are self-aware, in that you are conscious of your own body, your memories, and your life story, aspects of the self become the contents of consciousness. These comprise the self-as-object.
    It’s possible that parts of this self-as-object are not beingexperienced vividly in Cotard’s syndrome. Whatever it is that tags objects in our consciousness as mine or not-mine, self or not-self, may be malfunctioning (we’ll see in coming chapters some mechanisms that could be behind such tagging). In Graham’s case,the
mineness
or vividness that is usually attributed to, say, one’s body and/or emotions was maybe lacking. And the resulting untenable belief that he was brain dead entered his conscious awareness unchallenged, given his underactive, low-functioning lateral frontal lobes.
    But regardless of what one is aware of, isn’t there someone who is always the subject of the experience? Even if you are completely absorbed in something external, say, a melancholic violin solo—and the contents of your consciousness are devoid any self-related information, whether of your body or worries about your job—does the feeling that
you
are having that experience ever go away?
    To help us get closer to some answers, we can turn to insights of people suffering from various perturbations of the self, which serve as windows to the self. Each such neuropsychological disorder illuminates some sliver of the self, one that has been disturbed by the disorder, resulting at times in a devastating illness.
    These words from Lara Jefferson’s
These Are My Sisters: A Journal from the Inside of Insanity
leave us in no doubt of the damage wrought to the self in a schizophrenic person: “Something has happened to me—I do not know what. All that was my former self has crumbled and fallen together and a creature has emerged of whom I know nothing. She is a stranger to me. . . . She is not real—she is not I . . . she is I—and because I still have myself on my hands, even if I am a maniac, I must deal with me somehow.”
    But