My journey started as a small child looking into the mirror and realising that I, whoever “I” was, existed. Now, nearly 7 decades later I look into a mirror. What do I see?
I obviously look very different. I have different interests and desires, I behave very differently when confronted by situations now than I would then. I have acquired many memories and much knowledge about the world around me. My personality is in many ways not the same as it was then. My “self” has developed as I have lived and experienced, made choices and seen their outcomes. From the outside, I am not the same person that I was as a child.
And yet I am the same person. I have a contiguous set of memories bridging the time gap. I identify with the child, the young man etc. who made choices which I would not make now. But I am the person who made those choices, nobody else did.
The question of a “self” which persists through time, and maybe eternity, depends entirely on the fact that I, together with my fellow creatures, am conscious. I have conscious experiences.
Whatever is the essence of “self”, it is not the same as personality, character, desires, choices or the material out of which my body is made.
I may act out of character but that does not make me a different person with a different centre of consciousness. Likewise my tastes may changes over time, or in response to chemical stimulii, and this may affect my choices. But I am still the same person, I have the same centre of consciousness.
My body changes over my life span and most of the molecules my body is made from will be different. I may, although I have not, even lose body parts or have prosthetic limbs fitted but I am still the same person.
If we are going to get closer to finding out what it is that makes me “me” or you “you” then we need to look beyond the physical.
People as varied as neuroscientists [1-
Some physicalists would point to the fact that the brain develops from babyhood onwards and that the mind develops, heavily influenced by environment and experience, and say that this is all there is.
The Buddhist “Middle Way” [6] says that our ordinary and everyday concept of the self is actually that of being a subject of experience and an agent of action. It is not having an “inner substantial essence”. When such an essence is looked for, it is not found. The conclusion drawn is that the self is not an independent entity but that the self is a dependently arisen series of events. In this view, “self” is not a thing but a process.
Some, following David Hume, would say that the self is purely a bundle of perceptions which follow on from each other which appear to be connected in a way which is analogous to frames of a movie having the appearance of a continuous whole.
Annake Harris [4] gives the analogy of an ocean wave which appears to have an enduring identity but is actually not a static thing but a process. The brain consists of processes in Nature which are constantly changing and evolving. The boundary between ourselves and the world and between ourselves and each other is not as solid and firm as it appears to us.
A similar analogy is used in Eastern philosophy which compares individuals to be like waves on an “ocean” of consciousness.
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Other analogies, which go beyond physicalism or non-
So, instead of supporting the concept of non-
In addition, there are unanswered questions raised by non-
Sam Harris [5] freely acknowledges that experience is subjective and cannot be reduced to physics. However, he appears to try to do just that. “There is no place in the brain for the ego to be hiding”.
If the self is an illusion, in the sense of it not being what it seems, then there is still someone experiencing the illusion. What we perceive as the world outside may well be the result of signal processing in the brain producing a controlled hallucination. It may be just a model of the real thing which helps us to survive and interact with it, but that does not change the fact that “I” am experiencing that hallucination.
Even when there is an experience of “ego dissolution” as the result of meditation or psychedelics, there is still an “I” persisting through that experience who can tell the tale. The experience happens to the practitioner specifically and not to anyone else.
If the brain “creates me”, then what determines which “me” is created? Why is “my” experience associated with “this” brain and body and nobody else’s?
As in the case of consciousness in general, these questions point to the mind being something more than physical matter even if what that “more” is remains to be known if, indeed, it can be known to humans. It is said that “we cannot be what we observe” and that may place an impenetrable epistemological block to finding out.
However we can know that we have hit that block, even if we cannot know what is beyond it, and we can acknowledge that physicalism is inadequate to find out everything about life, the Universe and everything.
[1] Bruce Hood, “The Self Illusion”, Constable 2011, 978-
[2] Bruce Hood, “The Self Illusion: How Your Brain Creates You” 2012, https://youtu.be/ZIDWcWn21gg
[3] Anil Seth, “Being you”, Faber and Faber, 2021, 978-
[4] Annaka Harris, “Glitches in reality” 2025, https://youtu.be/_Ig9MOv54cg
[5] Sam Harris, “The Self is an illusion”,2014, https://youtu.be/fajfkO_X0l0
[6] Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Sleeping”, Columbia University Press, 2017, 978-