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What Is Self-Concept?

The Fundamental "Who Am I?" Question

Verywell / Cindy Chung 

• What is Self-Concept?
• How It Develops
• Can It Be Changed?

Other Self-Concept Theories

Frequently asked questions.

Self-concept is the image we have of ourselves. It is influenced by many forces, including our interaction with the important people in our lives. It is how we perceive our behaviors, abilities, and unique characteristics. For example, beliefs such as "I am a good friend" or "I am a kind person" are part of an overall self-concept.

Other examples of self-concept include:

• How you view your personality traits , such as whether you are an extrovert or introvert
• How you see your roles in life, such as whether you feel that being a parent, sibling, friend, and partner are important parts of your identity
• The hobbies or passions that are important to your sense of identity, such as being a sports enthusiast or belonging to a particular political party or religious group
• How you feel about your interactions with the world, such as whether you think that you are contributing to society

Our self-perception is important because it affects our motivations , attitudes, and behaviors . It also affects how we feel about the person we think we are, including whether we are competent or have self-worth.

Self-concept tends to be more malleable when we're younger and still going through self-discovery and identity formation . As we age and learn who we are and what's important to us, these self-perceptions become much more detailed and organized.

At its most basic, self-concept is a collection of beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others. It embodies the answer to the question: " Who am I? " If you want to find your self-concept, list things that describe you as an individual. What are your traits? What do you like? How do you feel about yourself?

How Carl Roger's Defines Self-Concept

Humanist psychologist  Carl Rogers believed that self-concept is made up of three distinct parts: ideal self, self-image, and self-esteem. His theory explains what it means when these parts are congruent or incongruent with reality that impacts your self-concept.

Three Parts of Self-Concept

Rogers described the self-concept as being composed of three parts:

• Ideal self : The ideal self is the person you want to be . This person has the attributes or qualities you are either working toward or want to possess. It's who you envision yourself to be if you were exactly the person you wanted to be.
• Self-image : Self-image refers to how you see yourself at this moment in time. Physical characteristics, personality traits , and social roles affect your self-image.
• Self-esteem : How much you like, accept, and value yourself contributes to your self-concept. Self-esteem can be affected by a number of factors, including how others see you, how you think you compare to others, and your role in society.

Incongruence and Congruence

Self-concept is not always aligned with reality. When it is aligned, it is said to be congruent . If there is a mismatch between how you see yourself (your self-image) and who you wish you were (your ideal self), your self-concept is incongruent . This incongruence can negatively affect self-esteem .

Rogers believed that incongruence has its earliest roots in childhood. When parents place conditions on their affection for their children (e.g., only expressing love if children "earn it" through certain behaviors and living up to the parents' expectations), children begin to distort their memories of experiences that leave them feeling unworthy of their parents' love.

Unconditional love , on the other hand, helps to foster congruence. Children who experience such love—also referred to as family love —feel no need to continually distort their memories in order to believe that other people will love and accept them as they are.

Unconditional Love

Unconditional love , on the other hand, helps to foster congruence between self-concept and reality and thereby nurtures positive self-esteem.

How Self-Concept Develops

Self-concept develops, in part, through our interaction and observation of others. In addition to family members and close friends, other people in our community and in the media can contribute to our self-identity.

Someone believes in you. For instance, one study found that the more a teacher believes in a high-performing student's abilities, the higher that student's self-concept. (Interestingly, no such association was found with lower-performing students.)

The characters we identify with. Self-concept can also be developed through the stories we hear. For example, one study found that female readers who were "deeply transported" into a story about a leading character with a traditional gender role had a more  feminist self-concept  than those who weren't as moved by the story. Thus, relating to and identifying with the character may affect your emotional response and confirm or alter your own ideas about yourself.

The media. Both mass media and social media also play a role in self-concept development. When these media promote certain ideals, we're more likely to make those ideals our own. The more often these ideals are presented, the more they affect our self-identity and self-perception.

Can Self-Concept Be Changed?

Self-concept is not static, meaning that it can change. Our environment plays a role in this process. Places we are exposed to, especially those that hold a lot of meaning to us, actively contribute to our future self-concept through how we relate these environments to ourselves and how society relates to them.

Self-concept can also change based on the people with whom we interact. This is particularly true for individuals in our lives who are in leadership roles. They can impact the collective self (the self in social groups) and the relational self (the self in relationships).

In some cases, a medical diagnosis can change self-concept by helping people understand why they feel the way they do—such as someone receiving an autism diagnosis later in life, finally providing clarity as to why they feel different.

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As with many topics within psychology , several other theorists have proposed different ways of thinking about self-concept.

Social Identity

Social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed social identity theory, which states that self-concept is composed of two essential parts:

• Personal identity : The traits and other characteristics that make you unique
• Social identity : Who you are based on your membership in social groups, such as sports teams, religions, political parties, or social class

This theory states that our social identity influences our self-concept, thus affecting our emotions and behaviors. If we're playing sports, for instance, and our team loses a game, we might feel sad for the team (emotion) or act out against the winning team (behavior).

Multiple Dimensions

Psychologist Bruce A. Bracken had a slightly different theory and believed that self-concept was multidimensional, consisting of six independent traits:

• Academic : Success or failure in school
• Affect : Awareness of emotional states
• Competence : Ability to meet basic needs
• Family : How well you work in your family unit
• Physical : How you feel about your looks, health, physical condition, and overall appearance
• Social : Ability to interact with others

In 1992, Bracken developed the Multidimensional Self-Concept Scale, a comprehensive assessment that evaluates each of these six elements of self-concept in children and adolescents.

Self-concept development is never finished. Though self-identity is thought to be primarily formed in childhood, your experiences as an adult can also change how you feel about yourself. If your self-esteem increases later in life, for instance, it can improve your self-concept.

Our self-concept can affect the method by which we communicate. If you feel you are a good writer, for instance, you may prefer to communicate in writing versus speaking with others.

It can also affect the way we communicate. If your social group communicates a certain way, you would likely choose to communicate that way as well. Studies on teens have connected high self-concept clarity with more open communication with parents.

Self-concept refers to a broad description of ourselves ("I am a good writer"), while self-esteem includes any judgments or opinions we have of ourselves ("I feel proud to be a good writer"). Put another way, self-concept answers the question: Who am I? Self-esteem answers the question: How do I feel about who I am?

Our self-concept impacts how we respond to life, so a well-developed self-concept helps us respond in ways that are more positive and beneficial for us and those around us. One of the ways it does this is by enabling us to recognize our worth. A well-developed self-concept also helps keep us from internalizing negative feedback from others.

Different cultures have different beliefs. They have different ideas of how dependent or independent one should be, as well as religious beliefs and views of socioeconomic development.

All of these cultural norms influence self-concept by providing the structure of what is expected within that society and how one sees oneself in relation to others.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

“i” and “me”: the self in the context of consciousness.

• Cognition and Philosophy Lab, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between “Me” and “I” (see Table 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience 1 . This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011 ; Liang, 2014 ; Sui and Gu, 2017 ; Truong and Todd, 2017 ) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or “I.”

TABLE 1. Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”) and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958) , that in this context “Me” (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Blanke, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of “I” (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition 2 by understanding the self-as-subject, or “I,” as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [Figure 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger’s (2003 , 2010 ) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal “I” 3 ( Prinz, 2012 ), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal “I” [or the Wittgenstein’s (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal “Me.” Table 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

FIGURE 1. An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) distinctions between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”). In the original formulation, James’ (1890) “Me” includes also physical objects and people (material and social “Me”) – they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

TABLE 2. Examples of theories of the self-as-object (“Me”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

“Me” As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890 , p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word “Me” to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James’ (1890) view, it reflects “all the things” which have the power to produce “excitement of a certain particular sort.” This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014 ; Guillot, 2017 ). What are “all the things”? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to “objects” which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of “things” – conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James’ (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define “Me” as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996) , who begins “ The conscious mind ” by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following 4 : visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se , such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James’ (1890) terms, “objects” in a stream of consciousness: “all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking” (p. 325).

The self understood as “Me” can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness (Figure 2 ). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person’s face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to “Me,” the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008 ; Payne et al., 2017 ; Woźniak et al., 2018 ). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971 ; Blakemore et al., 1998 ; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009 ). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ; Constable et al., 2018 ). This was anticipated by James’ (1890) notion of the material “Me,” and is typically regarded as reflecting one’s extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about “Me” or about something/someone else.

FIGURE 2. A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical “I,” the phenomenal “Me,” and the phenomenal “I,” which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal “Me.” Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as “I experience X.” In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one’s own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions – thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of “Me” (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale ( Aron et al., 1992 ). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one’s self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to “Me” allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one’s body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one’s possessions one can speak about one’s extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to “Me” introduced here. The first one is as follows:

(1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always “mine,” such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as “I,” i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000 ; Christoff et al., 2011 ; Blanke et al., 2015 ) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999 ; Craig, 2010 ; Seth et al., 2011 ; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 ; Salomon, 2017 ). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as “my” experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of “Me.” They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one’s body and those coming from another person’s (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between “my” versus “other’s” proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal “Me” and phenomenal “not-Me” will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016 ). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009 ). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being “not-mine,” leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000 ; Kaufman, 2004 ). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario – rather than two pieces of the same organ being “wired” to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 )? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of “Me” then the answer becomes simple – the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal “Me,” for example in a form of background self-experience, or “phenomenal background” ( Dainton, 2008 , 2016 ), rather than the phenomenal “I.”

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

(2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either “me” or “other,” but their subject is always “I.” As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal “I” and not the phenomenal “Me.”

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one’s thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: “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” ( Wittgenstein, 1958 ). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject (see Table 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say “I see a photo of my face in front of me” I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal “I” (self-as-subject) and phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word “I” (or “my”). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises – to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014 ). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal “I,” i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal “Me” – a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008 ; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009 ; Martin and Pacherie, 2013 ). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one’s thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Billon, 2013 ; Guillot, 2017 ; López-Silva, 2017 ). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership 5 over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one’s thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one’s thoughts “as someone else’s,” or at least “as not-mine.” However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I’ve taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have “objectified” them to experience that they have a quality of “feeling as if they are not mine.” Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal “I” turns out to be a part of thephenomenal “Me.”

If my thoughts do not constitute the “I” then how do they fit into the structure of “Me”? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute “Me,” while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as “mine” belong to “Me.” How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger’s (2003 ; 2010 ) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017) :

Savage suggests that on LSD “[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes” (1955, 11), (…) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017 , p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object (“Me”) are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel “mine” as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as “mine.” As a result, this thinking phenomenal “I” experienced in feeling of ownership over one’s thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian “Me.” As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal “I,” just multilevel phenomenal “Me.” However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else’s (a demon’s or some malicious puppet master’s), she can still claim that:

Yes, “I” experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon’s.” My thoughts feel as “not-mine,” however, it’s still me (or: “I”) who thinks of them as “not-mine.”

As such, one escapes “objectification” of “I” into “Me” by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-“I.” However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: “I” (I 1 ) experience that the “fake I” (I 2 ), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else’s (e.g., as nasty green demon’s). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal “I” is I 1 , since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal “I” into another “fake-I” (and consequently making it a part of “Me”).

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal “I” understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly “on the run” from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep “I,” which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep “I” cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of “Me.” Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep “I”: in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016 ) who argue that “all conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent.” It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather “refers to the distinct manner, or how , of experiencing” ( Zahavi, 2014 ).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016 ). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the “ how of experiencing” of another person. For example, can I experience my sister’s for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep “I” is to reject that the subject of experience, the “I,” is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000 ; Prinz, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between “Me” and “I” as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: “(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem” ( James, 1890 , p. 401).

“I” As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890 , pp. 330–331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of “I” emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do “fly about loose,” devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone’s or something’s consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012 ; Strawson, 2003 ; Searle, 2005 ; Dainton, 2016 ). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of “what it is like to be a bat” ( Nagel, 1974 ), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical “I,” as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal “I” (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical “I” does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical “I,” but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as “me,” nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as “I.” In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which “is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (…) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction” ( Windt, 2015 ). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience – the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015 ; Metzinger, 2018 ), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of “Me.” Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016 ), possess conscious experience 6 . If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between “Me” and “not-Me.” However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011 ) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table 3 ). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987 ; Strawson, 2000 ; Dainton, 2008 ), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005 ), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003 ). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

TABLE 3. Examples of theories of the self-as-subject (“I”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015 , Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical “I.”

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014 ; Tononi et al., 2016 ) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational “complex” which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max ). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max . The complex that specifies a person’s day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max – that is, it should be the “major” complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca’s area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical “I” can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010 ). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions – for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical “I”? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical “I” can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical “I” can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some “self” (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism’s consciousness this metaphysical “I” would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not “co-conscious” with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical “I” cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical “I” persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000 , 2010 ). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical “I” turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical “I,” and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical “I” is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal “Me,” where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between “Me” and “I.” I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2010 ), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical “I”).

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 , 2010 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ; Hohwy, 2013 ; Clark, 2016 ). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one’s internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called “variational free energy,” which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 ). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014 ), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007 ), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011 ; Seth, 2013 ), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014 ; Friston and Frith, 2015 ), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ; Fotopoulou, 2012 ). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 ) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (…) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 , p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016 ; Williams, 2017 ) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand’s movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017) , the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003 ; Chalmers, 2004 , for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006 , 2014 , for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories – the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James’ (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal “Me” – by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical “I”? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal “Me,” the issues pertaining to the metaphysical “I” are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013 , Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011 ; Dehaene, 2014 ). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995 ) – a functional mechanism which allows that “some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others” ( Dehaene, 2014 ). However, the problem of the metaphysical “I” becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness – the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called “hard problem” ( Chalmers, 1996 ).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference 7 ) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical “I.”

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical “I” (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of “Me,” it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of “I.”

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between “Me” and “I” may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal “I” can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal “Me” [which can be understood as Metzinger’s (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between “I” and “Me,” which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While “Me” can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, “I” is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables 2 , 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal “I” as just a part of the phenomenal “Me,” has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as “I” from the perspective of “Me” may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term “I” when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction (“Me” versus “I”) which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term “I” in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as “sense of ownership over an experience” to reflect what is meant by “I” in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., “sense of ownership of interoceptive signals” when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of “Me” versus the experience/sense of “I” (rather than just “Me” and “I”). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

• ^ Therefore, whenever I use the term “I” I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term “Me” I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James’ (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table 1 ). I also assume, following James (1890) , that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.
• ^ Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of “I” as subject and “I” as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.
• ^ Whenever I use the prefix “phenomenal” I mean “the conscious experience of.” For example, when I write phenomenal “I”, I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience (“I”). In a similar fashion I use the prefix “metaphysical” when I mean “the metaphysical entity of.”
• ^ Chalmers (1996) also lists “sense of self,” although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.
• ^ Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.
• ^ “IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior” ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 460).
• ^ For example, he writes: “So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness” ( Friston, 2018 , p. 1).

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Keywords : self, consciousness, self-consciousness, sense of self, self-as-subject, self-as-object, predictive coding, IIT

Citation: Woźniak M (2018) “I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness. Front. Psychol. 9:1656. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01656

Received: 20 March 2018; Accepted: 17 August 2018; Published: 04 September 2018.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2018 Woźniak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Mateusz Woźniak, [email protected] ; [email protected]

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A far better question to ask yourself: "How would I like to experience my life?"

Posted June 2, 2010 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Asking "Who am I?" implies a person can only be one, fixed thing – a belief which only causes more anxiety.
• A better question to ask instead of "Who am I?" is "How would I like to engage life?"
• Believing that one has complete self-knowledge and not knowing oneself at all are both states of limited growth.

This question—asked so often—suggests that there is actually a plausible answer. Almost as if our being were a fixed thing.

People who ask this sort of question are typically struggling with their identity and are searching for a core sense of themselves. The irony is that the more you seek to identify who you are, the more fragile you are likely to feel about yourself. There may be an inverse correlation between the question being asked and the ease with which you experience your life.

How would you like to engage life?

The emphasis shouldn't be on discovering who you are ( what is buried beneath) but on facilitating the emergence of what you'd like to experience.

Our identity should be seen as an ongoing process. Rather than a static snapshot, we should embrace a flowing sense of self, whereby we are perpetually reframing, reorganizing, rethinking, and reconsidering ourselves. How different would life be if rather than asking "Who am I?" we contemplated how we'd like to engage life?

A sense of inadequacy often informs the question around "Who am I?" As people engage the deepening complexity of understanding themselves, they would fare much better to devote themselves to the unfolding process of life. Witnessing our thoughts, not reacting out of old habit, and becoming present enable us to better craft our lives. As such, the identity that we seek fires the wave of life, enriched by the flow.

Extremes of the identity continuum

Imagine that you've been in prison for 20 years, incarcerated since the age of 18. You literally have no adult life experience outside of the penitentiary. Your sense of self is tragically limited. You might ask yourself, "Who am I? This would likely provoke a fragile sense of self that paradoxically might leave you most apprehensive about your imminent release. You'd hardly choose to remain imprisoned until you could find your identity. You'd have to permit that new sense of self to flow from your new experiences.

I have worked with people who have been married more or less for their entire adult lives. Upon divorce , they are often confronted with a distressing thought. They claim that they don't know who they are. More to the point, they may not know who they are as a single, autonomous adult, not partnered. After all, how could they? Rather than remaining mired in fear , you'd need to summon up a sense of wonder and adventure. There is a new sense of self waiting to be born. You get to re-craft yourself along the way.

At the other end of the identity continuum are those who claim to know themselves so well. This other extreme also signifies a fragility about one's identity. To know yourself so well leaves no room for growth. Even more, it suggests a deep vulnerability that is being defended against—as if it were too dangerous to take a closer look.

Who you are is a state of flowing potential

It makes perfect sense to seek a deeper sense of self. To become intimately aware of your thoughts, feelings, hopes, and fears is obviously advisable. The key is to engage your sense of self as malleable, more like a willow tree than a sturdy oak. The willow is flexible and survives the storm as it bends with the wind, whereas the more rigid oak is more likely to crack.

The universe purportedly exists in a state of flowing potential. And it is essential to understand that we are indeed part of that universe. The goal then is to access that potential, keeping the parts of our identity that continue to serve us well and shedding the old, habitual pieces that constrain us. This process is known as positive disintegration. This permits us to find a balance between the extremes previously discussed and enter into a relationship with the self that commits to our personal evolution.

Check out Mel's live, interactive zoom course, Overcoming Anxiety

Mel Schwartz, L.C.S.W., is a psychotherapist and marriage counselor who works toward creating resilient relationships and fostering authentic communication. His website is Melschwartz.com.

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MY SUNSHINE

" if you can't find the sunshine, be the sunshine.", reflection on the psychological perspective of self ( part 1).

WILLIAM JAMES: THE ME-SELF AND THE I-SELF I believe that the self has 2 divisions, the ” ME- SELF” and the ” I-SELF”. I agree that the “I-self” is the thinking self because this “self” is what I know that I describe my self to others. For example, my teacher in senior high school in entrepreneur asked me why I can be an entrepreneur? I answered her that ” being an entrepreneur you have to be a risk taker and I myself know that I am a risk taker because i believe it’s better to try than to lose the chance I have.” From there I describe myself for what I know who I am that others may/can see. On the other hand, the “Me-self” is what I develop as I meet people in my life or some situations develop me that make myself who I am today. For instance, before I have low confidence. But as I grew older and high school life is my turning point where my confidence boosts up as I become the president of the club, team captain of the badminton team and create my own organization in my previous school. My confidence develop through time and through the situations I encounter.

REMEMBER: EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD MAY CHANGE EVEN YOU. CARL RODGERS: SELF THEORY: REAL & IDEAL SELF I believe that myself won’t be possible without the real and ideal self. I need to balance the true me and the person I want to be to be able to be happy because if not this may cause loneliness, depression or anxiety. Example, I am a person who is happy go lucky and a jolly person but at the same time I want to have a high grade or to be an academic scholar. Being an academic scholar I need to have a grade not lower than 1.75 in the semester grade. I need to study hard to be able to achieve that goal. I would be happy if I’ll be making it but in the process if I know I am not who I am like I am not that happy because I put too much pressure and if I didn’t make it, it may cause loneliness or so. Then, my mom told me that even though I won’t make it it’s fine as long as I pass my course.

REMEMBER: HAPPINESS WILL ALWAYS NOT BE FOUND IN THE END, BUT RATHER HAPPINESS MAY FOUND IN THE PROCESS.

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Self, From a Psychological Perspective

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Consciousness ; Identity ; Self-awareness

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The concept “self” has shifting meanings as a result of it originating in religious ideas about the soul, being heavily philosophized during the Renaissance and most recently being the topic of scientific research. The dominant contemporary definition is that self is the thoughts and images people have about themselves. Such a definition opens up the self to empirical research by asking people, in various ways, what they think about themselves. However, the self was not always conceived of as an empirical phenomenon.

The concept of the “self” grew out of religious thinking about the soul. Early thought experiments by Avicenna and Descartes tried to demonstrate that the thinking mind exists independently of all things material and thus that it belongs to the immaterial realm of the soul. Descartes was particularly influential in arguing for an ontological dualism between material and immaterial realms. In practice, this...

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Gillespie, A. (2013). Self, From a Psychological Perspective. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1012

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How to Write a Psychology Essay

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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On This Page:

Before you write your essay, it’s important to analyse the task and understand exactly what the essay question is asking. Your lecturer may give you some advice – pay attention to this as it will help you plan your answer.

Next conduct preliminary reading based on your lecture notes. At this stage, it’s not crucial to have a robust understanding of key theories or studies, but you should at least have a general “gist” of the literature.

After reading, plan a response to the task. This plan could be in the form of a mind map, a summary table, or by writing a core statement (which encompasses the entire argument of your essay in just a few sentences).

After writing your plan, conduct supplementary reading, refine your plan, and make it more detailed.

It is tempting to skip these preliminary steps and write the first draft while reading at the same time. However, reading and planning will make the essay writing process easier, quicker, and ensure a higher quality essay is produced.

Components of a Good Essay

Now, let us look at what constitutes a good essay in psychology. There are a number of important features.

• Global Structure – structure the material to allow for a logical sequence of ideas. Each paragraph / statement should follow sensibly from its predecessor. The essay should “flow”. The introduction, main body and conclusion should all be linked.
• Each paragraph should comprise a main theme, which is illustrated and developed through a number of points (supported by evidence).
• Knowledge and Understanding – recognize, recall, and show understanding of a range of scientific material that accurately reflects the main theoretical perspectives.
• Critical Evaluation – arguments should be supported by appropriate evidence and/or theory from the literature. Evidence of independent thinking, insight, and evaluation of the evidence.
• Quality of Written Communication – writing clearly and succinctly with appropriate use of paragraphs, spelling, and grammar. All sources are referenced accurately and in line with APA guidelines.

In the main body of the essay, every paragraph should demonstrate both knowledge and critical evaluation.

There should also be an appropriate balance between these two essay components. Try to aim for about a 60/40 split if possible.

Most students make the mistake of writing too much knowledge and not enough evaluation (which is the difficult bit).

It is best to structure your essay according to key themes. Themes are illustrated and developed through a number of points (supported by evidence).

Choose relevant points only, ones that most reveal the theme or help to make a convincing and interesting argument.

Knowledge and Understanding

Remember that an essay is simply a discussion / argument on paper. Don’t make the mistake of writing all the information you know regarding a particular topic.

You need to be concise, and clearly articulate your argument. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences.

Each paragraph should have a purpose / theme, and make a number of points – which need to be support by high quality evidence. Be clear why each point is is relevant to the argument. It would be useful at the beginning of each paragraph if you explicitly outlined the theme being discussed (.e.g. cognitive development, social development etc.).

Try not to overuse quotations in your essays. It is more appropriate to use original content to demonstrate your understanding.

Psychology is a science so you must support your ideas with evidence (not your own personal opinion). If you are discussing a theory or research study make sure you cite the source of the information.

Note this is not the author of a textbook you have read – but the original source / author(s) of the theory or research study.

For example:

Bowlby (1951) claimed that mothering is almost useless if delayed until after two and a half to three years and, for most children, if delayed till after 12 months, i.e. there is a critical period.

Maslow (1943) stated that people are motivated to achieve certain needs. When one need is fulfilled a person seeks to fullfil the next one, and so on.

As a general rule, make sure there is at least one citation (i.e. name of psychologist and date of publication) in each paragraph.

Remember to answer the essay question. Underline the keywords in the essay title. Don’t make the mistake of simply writing everything you know of a particular topic, be selective. Each paragraph in your essay should contribute to answering the essay question.

Critical Evaluation

In simple terms, this means outlining the strengths and limitations of a theory or research study.

There are many ways you can critically evaluate:

Methodological evaluation of research

Is the study valid / reliable ? Is the sample biased, or can we generalize the findings to other populations? What are the strengths and limitations of the method used and data obtained?

Be careful to ensure that any methodological criticisms are justified and not trite.

Rather than hunting for weaknesses in every study; only highlight limitations that make you doubt the conclusions that the authors have drawn – e.g., where an alternative explanation might be equally likely because something hasn’t been adequately controlled.

Compare or contrast different theories

Outline how the theories are similar and how they differ. This could be two (or more) theories of personality / memory / child development etc. Also try to communicate the value of the theory / study.

Debates or perspectives

Refer to debates such as nature or nurture, reductionism vs. holism, or the perspectives in psychology . For example, would they agree or disagree with a theory or the findings of the study?

What are the ethical issues of the research?

Does a study involve ethical issues such as deception, privacy, psychological or physical harm?

Gender bias

If research is biased towards men or women it does not provide a clear view of the behavior that has been studied. A dominantly male perspective is known as an androcentric bias.

Cultural bias

Is the theory / study ethnocentric? Psychology is predominantly a white, Euro-American enterprise. In some texts, over 90% of studies have US participants, who are predominantly white and middle class.

Does the theory or study being discussed judge other cultures by Western standards?

Animal Research

This raises the issue of whether it’s morally and/or scientifically right to use animals. The main criterion is that benefits must outweigh costs. But benefits are almost always to humans and costs to animals.

Animal research also raises the issue of extrapolation. Can we generalize from studies on animals to humans as their anatomy & physiology is different from humans?

The PEC System

It is very important to elaborate on your evaluation. Don’t just write a shopping list of brief (one or two sentence) evaluation points.

Instead, make sure you expand on your points, remember, quality of evaluation is most important than quantity.

When you are writing an evaluation paragraph, use the PEC system.

• Make your P oint.
• E xplain how and why the point is relevant.
• Discuss the C onsequences / implications of the theory or study. Are they positive or negative?

For Example

• Point: It is argued that psychoanalytic therapy is only of benefit to an articulate, intelligent, affluent minority.
• Explain: Because psychoanalytic therapy involves talking and gaining insight, and is costly and time-consuming, it is argued that it is only of benefit to an articulate, intelligent, affluent minority. Evidence suggests psychoanalytic therapy works best if the client is motivated and has a positive attitude.
• Consequences: A depressed client’s apathy, flat emotional state, and lack of motivation limit the appropriateness of psychoanalytic therapy for depression.

Furthermore, the levels of dependency of depressed clients mean that transference is more likely to develop.

Using Research Studies in your Essays

Research studies can either be knowledge or evaluation.

• If you refer to the procedures and findings of a study, this shows knowledge and understanding.
• If you comment on what the studies shows, and what it supports and challenges about the theory in question, this shows evaluation.

Writing an Introduction

It is often best to write your introduction when you have finished the main body of the essay, so that you have a good understanding of the topic area.

If there is a word count for your essay try to devote 10% of this to your introduction.

Ideally, the introduction should;

Identify the subject of the essay and define the key terms. Highlight the major issues which “lie behind” the question. Let the reader know how you will focus your essay by identifying the main themes to be discussed. “Signpost” the essay’s key argument, (and, if possible, how this argument is structured).

Introductions are very important as first impressions count and they can create a h alo effect in the mind of the lecturer grading your essay. If you start off well then you are more likely to be forgiven for the odd mistake later one.

Writing a Conclusion

So many students either forget to write a conclusion or fail to give it the attention it deserves.

If there is a word count for your essay try to devote 10% of this to your conclusion.

Ideally the conclusion should summarize the key themes / arguments of your essay. State the take home message – don’t sit on the fence, instead weigh up the evidence presented in the essay and make a decision which side of the argument has more support.

Also, you might like to suggest what future research may need to be conducted and why (read the discussion section of journal articles for this).

Don”t include new information / arguments (only information discussed in the main body of the essay).

If you are unsure of what to write read the essay question and answer it in one paragraph.

Points that unite or embrace several themes can be used to great effect as part of your conclusion.

The Importance of Flow

Obviously, what you write is important, but how you communicate your ideas / arguments has a significant influence on your overall grade. Most students may have similar information / content in their essays, but the better students communicate this information concisely and articulately.

When you have finished the first draft of your essay you must check if it “flows”. This is an important feature of quality of communication (along with spelling and grammar).

This means that the paragraphs follow a logical order (like the chapters in a novel). Have a global structure with themes arranged in a way that allows for a logical sequence of ideas. You might want to rearrange (cut and paste) paragraphs to a different position in your essay if they don”t appear to fit in with the essay structure.

To improve the flow of your essay make sure the last sentence of one paragraph links to first sentence of the next paragraph. This will help the essay flow and make it easier to read.

Finally, only repeat citations when it is unclear which study / theory you are discussing. Repeating citations unnecessarily disrupts the flow of an essay.

Referencing

The reference section is the list of all the sources cited in the essay (in alphabetical order). It is not a bibliography (a list of the books you used).

In simple terms every time you cite/refer to a name (and date) of a psychologist you need to reference the original source of the information.

If you have been using textbooks this is easy as the references are usually at the back of the book and you can just copy them down. If you have been using websites, then you may have a problem as they might not provide a reference section for you to copy.

References need to be set out APA style :

Author, A. A. (year). Title of work . Location: Publisher.

Journal Articles

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (year). Article title. Journal Title, volume number (issue number), page numbers

A simple way to write your reference section is use Google scholar . Just type the name and date of the psychologist in the search box and click on the “cite” link.

Next, copy and paste the APA reference into the reference section of your essay.

Once again, remember that references need to be in alphabetical order according to surname.

Psychology Discussion

Essay on the self: top 8 essays | self | psychology.

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After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Meaning of Self 2. Concept of Self 3. Need for the Concept 4. Significance 5. Development and Formation 6. Acquisition of Language 7. Self and Social Behaviour 8. Self-Related Issues.

Essay on the Self

Essay Contents:

• Essay on the Meaning of Self
• Essay on the Concept of Self
• Essay on the Need for the Concept of Self
• Essay on the Significance of the Self
• Essay on the Development and Formation of the Self
• Essay on the Acquisition of Language in the Process of Self-Development
• Essay on the Self and Social Behaviour
• Essay on the Self-Related Issues

Essay # 1. Meaning of Self:

Different psychologists and sociologists have tended to look at the self in different ways. There are some writers who look at the self as a structural part of the total system of personality and as a differentiated system indicating the characteristic of a person as perceived by him. According to this view, the self emerges and grows as a result of learning, as part of the process of socialisation and becomes a structural part of the personality.

If such a view is strictly accepted, then it may suggest that after a certain time the self stops growing. Some leading psychologists like Allport Snygg & Combs; Sheriff and Cantril. use the term self and ego synonymously. According to these writers, there is no need to make a distinction between the self and ego.

On the other hand, there are some other writers like Murphy who try to make a distinction between the self and the ego. According to him the ‘self includes individual as known to the individual and the ‘ego’ refers to a group of activities connected with the enhancement and defence of self.

In this view the ‘self is used as a structural unit consisting of many attitudes,’ perceptions and beliefs of an individual relating to himself. The ‘ego’ on the other hand is perceived as another unit primarily involving instrumental activities connected with the development of the self, its enhancement, etc.

Ausubel makes a distinction preferring to restrict the term self to a cluster of perceptual and cognitive components, whereas the ‘ego’ is considered to be more inclusive, including in addition, effectively charged variables or components like values, attitudes and sentiments. Ausubel further proceeds to indicate that the ‘self’ and the ‘ego’ together constitute the personality.

We have, in the above paragraphs, given the reader some idea of the controversy and divergence of views in studying and understanding the self. Taking into account this controversy, Allport came out with the suggestion that both the terms mentioned be discarded and instead suggested the term ‘proprium’. But it may be seen that much of this controversy is not relevant to the interests of modern social psychologists.

Social psychologists today are primarily interested in studying and understanding the concept of self in relation to the issue of how an individual develops a sense of personal and social identity and individuality which in turn results in selective, consistent, stable and continuous behaviour.

More than this, in the light of the clinical evidence available and also evidence from experiments in social psychology, the social psychologist is interested in how failure to develop a proper ‘self can result in maladjusted behaviour and dysfunctional behaviour. This is the view of leading social psychologists like Newcomb, Secord and others.

In-spite of the variations, there are some points of agreement, the most important being that the ‘self’ is not innate and that it develops and evolves as a result of social interaction with varied individuals and agencies starting from infancy.

Here, it has been found that while novel or new interactions and interactions concerned with affective process and need gratification play a more crucial role in the development of the self, repetitive interactions or passive interactions do not appear to be very crucial. In psychoanalytic terms the’ self arises and grows in the process of ‘reality distinc­tion’.

It is agreed that the formation of the self is not a case of the development of a unitary structure. It is a result of development marked by various stages characterised by different types of qualitative differences. It develops first as a distinct sense of one’s body and its parts from its surroundings.

It becomes progressively a more complex conceptual system, consisting of evaluative categories with associated traits or attributes. New acquisitions, qualities (e.g.., adolescence, old age, acquisition of new interpersonal roles and social status) continue to be incorporated in the system during the lifespan as observed by Murphy, Snugg and Combs and others.

We may now perhaps attempt an answer to the question-what is self? A review of the various studies and views on the concept of self appears to suggest that the best way of looking at the ‘self is to view it as a system of interrelated dynamic components which we may call as attitudes.

For our purpose here attitude may be satisfactorily defined as internal predisposition in an individual, acquired through experience, which makes him selectively respond to stimuli from the environment, experience certain emotional states or feelings in their presence and further be motivated or impelled by these predispositions to respond to or react in a particular manner.

In this context, some psychologists have even talked of ‘selves’ rather than a single ‘self to highlight the multi-dimensional and complex nature of the self. Among such writers was William James. More recently, certain other theorists from the angle of personality research and clinical psychology, like Murray, have also used concepts like ‘actual self, ‘ideal self, ‘moral self and so on.

But for the purpose of the discussion of the concept of ‘self in this article and also keeping in mind the more recent trends of thinking among contemporary social psychologists, we may use the term ‘self in a generic sense rather than talk of ‘selves’. In the light of the above the description of the self by Sheriff appears to be relevant.

According to Sheriff, ‘self is a developmental formulation in the psychological make-up of the individual consisting of inter-related attitudes that the individual has acquired in relation to his body and its parts, his capacities and to objects, persons, family, groups, social values, goals and institutions which define and regulate his relatedness to them in concrete situations and activities’.

The components or attitudes involved are usually strong in affective terms or intensity and are fairly specific in direction, and relate to people and issues indicating most favourable or un-favourable relations. They often reflect an individual’s deeply cherished inclinations, commitments and a high degree of involvement.

Needless to say, when such attitudes mediate or intervene in specific interactions or activities, the latter are likely to be influenced by the characteristics of these attitudes like direction and intensity, which results in consistency, stability and predictability of behaviour.

Under such conditions we may describe the behaviour as ‘involved’ behaviour. Human, social interactions show varying degrees of involvement. Tension-reduction interactions and habitual responses do not indicate much of a degree of involvement whereas unusual reactions or situations, complex situation or situations where one’s stakes are high tend to result in high degree of involvement.

The role and influence of the ‘self is directly related to the degree of involvement. Perhaps, one may describe it the other way also. When ‘self attitudes enter the picture this results in a high degree of involvement. Thus, the self attitudes provide the individualistic component in behaviour, particularly social behaviour.

The loss of individuality, loss of direction, ritualism and other forms of behaviour, is evident in certain clinical groups where it has been found that the ‘self formation has been faulty or inadequate and provides a strong evidence for understanding the importance of the self.

Essay # 2. Concept of Self:

The concept of self was also invoked to analyse and explain social behaviour. In the early days of psychology no clear-cut distinction was made between individual behaviour and social behaviour.

Dynamically oriented psychologists like Allport, Murray and Rogers who were pioneers in dealing with the concept of self did not make a distinction between individual behaviour in a non-social situation and in a social situation. In their view, every behavioural act is a total molar and meaningful act embedded in the subjective personality system or the self-system in a person.

According to the views of these psychologists, the individual was the centre of analysis. It was only subsequently with the emergence and development of the social learning theories, particularly of the stimulus response (S-R) hue, that concepts like self, personality etc. were relegated to the background in favour of concepts like drives, reinforcement, etc.

Very soon however, it was realised that terms like self, personality, ego, etc., cannot be permanently kept out in an examination and analysis of social behaviour, excepting at the cost of losing sight of obvious truth. It was against this background that the concept of self made a re-entry into social psychology, though, perhaps, in a changed form and with a changed meaning.

According to Rotter the term self has been employed in psychology with three different connotations:

(a) A wholistic gestalt view which emphasises internal and subjective expe­riences including self-evaluation. Here the term self means, an agency which is internal and which influences, mediates and moderates behaviour including social behaviour.

(b) A second view tends to hold all behaviour as a consequence of the dynamic processes and interactions among the different aspects of the self or personality. The typical example of such an approach is the classical psychoana­lytic view of behaviour as resulting from the dynamic interactions among the forces of the id, the ego and the superego.

This type of view is also reflected in the self theories of Rogers, Lecky and many others. (These views employ concepts like self-consistency, self-congruence, self-ideal discrepancy, as primary motivat­ing factors in human behaviour, social behaviour).

(c) A third view holds that the self itself is a force which motivates the organism and initiates action directed towards integration, actualization or expres­sion. Classical Jungian views and even the Maslowian concept of self-actualization belong to this category.

According to this approach, motivation and goal direction of behaviour are entirely attributed to the ‘self as an internal entity in the individual life. Such a view probably is in agreement with the concept of self found in our own traditional Upanishads.

All these different conceptualizations of the self have been used in explain­ing social behaviour. While many of these approaches which have employed the concept of the self in explaining social behaviour, have been traditional, descrip­tive, and analytical, more recent theories and approaches which are inclined towards empirical and experimental studies of social behaviour have also employed the concept of self but with different meanings.

More than the concept of self as such, they use self-derived and self-related concepts like self-esteem, self-perception and objective self-awareness and many other terms.

Thus, the self-concept continues to occupy an important place in contemporary social psychology though in a form far different from the traditional views. The ‘self’ therefore has returned to centre stage of psychology after being discarded. The return has been very grand.

Essay # 3. Need for the Concept of Self :

Terms like soul, self and spirit have occupied a prominent place in the discussions and writings of the logicians, philosophers and students of religion. Religious texts are full of discussions about the nature of ‘self and ‘soul’.

The Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita deal extensively with the concept of self. But, in all these discussions the concept of self was mostly employed in a metaphysical sense and in the context of understanding the essential nature of man and his relationship with the ‘cosmic self or the ‘ultimate self etc. But even here some of the discussions, particularly in the Upanishadic texts looked at the self from a functional point of view.

The self was often described in such terms as ‘seer’, ‘doer’ etc. hinting at some of the problems which have been analysed and studied in relation to the self, in contemporary psychology.

Though some of the early psychologists like William James, Baldwin and also sociologists like Coolie and Mead took a very active interest in describing and analysing the term ‘self in terms of its development and functions, scientific psychology in its initial stages out of its obsession to imitate physics, chemistry and physiology shunned the use of the term ‘self particularly because of the phobia that it may lead psychology away from the objective method and result in subjective and speculative analysis.

William James analysed the self in terms of its elements or parts including bodily features, behavioural characteristics, abilities and skills, desires and aspirations and also social affiliations and arriving at certain skills of maintaining self-esteem. He also made reference to the self being influenced by what one feels about ‘others evaluation of oneself. James interesting formula for arriving at a person’s self-esteem was

Self-esteem = Success/Pretensions

Subsequently a number of psychologists who may be identified by various terms like personal psychologists, ideographic psychologists and many others as Calkins, Stem, and Allport have tried to reintroduce the concept of self in psychology particularly in clinical psychology and social psychology and of course in studying personality.

Why do we need a concept of self? One of the characteristics of human behaviour is that it is total, meaningful, stable and consistent except in case where a person is mentally disturbed. If we analyse behaviour into various units or elements, still there remains the significant problem of explaining and understanding the integration, stability and continuity, often over years, in human behaviour.

Apart from this, it is also seen that our behaviour is very often guided by both situational conditions and basic needs. A person who is feeling hungry does not eat anything and everything because he is hungry. He may like to eat the proper food at the proper place and at the proper time.

Similarly, in most of our activities we find certain basic stabilising influences and considerations of a psychological nature emerging from within the individual and influencing our actual behaviour. Phenomena like these necessitate a concept like ‘self, otherwise human behaviour can very often be a mess.

Fortunately, it is not so in many instances. Many instances of individual differences in behaviour are also explained by a concept like self Two or three people under the same situation behave differently.

One person is ready to fall at somebody’s feet and flatter him however worthless the latter may be to attain personal ends; whereas others refuse to bow down to mediocres. The lives of Socrates, Galileo and other people who were prepared to die rather than give up their convictions are standing examples.

Many of our social restraints are sustained because of the role played by the concept of ‘self. Thus it may be seen that the ‘self concept helps us to understand many characteristics of human behaviour like ‘totality’, ‘meaningfulness’, ‘stability’, ‘continuity’ and ‘individuality’ and also the bizarre nature of behaviour of those who are severely disturbed mentally and in whom the self is disturbed.

Essay # 4. Significance of the Self:

The wide ranging and crucial role of the self in the behaviour of the individual has come to be recognised increasingly. The influence of the ‘self on behaviour operates both consciously and unconsciously and is much more noticeable where motivated and need satisfying interactions are involved, and also in situations where there is a choice.

In the words of Shoben, in any case self involved behaviour seems close to impossible to explain on the basis of a tension reduction model, and postulation of self-involvement seems necessary to account for the pursuit of long-term goals, so typical of human motivation’.

While the role of self is more prominent in goal-directed activities, its role and influence extend to many other spheres of activity like perceiving, thinking, learning and other cognitive processes and of course in many complex activities like decision-making.

Needless to say, goal setting and even task performance are known to be influenced by the self Adjustive and coping behaviour of varied kinds are also influenced by the self There is considerable evidence from the clinical side for this.

Thus, choice of behaviour, consistency, integration, continuity and a number of attributes of human actions seem to be very much influenced by the self in the words of Sheriff, “in brief, the growing interest in a self-concept reflects the search for integrating concepts, particularly motivation, where empirical work has tended to be fragmentary”.

Studying motivation in isolation from personality has lead to a very strange situation. It has fallen short in providing an adequate account of human motivation. The self enters into the operation of human motives as a regulative factor. So too the self enters into other psychological processes.

Involvement of the self in these processes is reflected in the consistency and continuity of behaviour in a person. In fact self-involvement in particular aspects of the kaleidoscopic stimulus world is the basis for the experience of continuity in personal identity.

It is evident that continuity, integration, consistency and identity are the most crucial characteristics of social behaviour. Any attempt at prediction and control of social behaviour depends on an understanding of these processes for its success. The more complex the social interaction, the greater is the relevance of the above characteristics.

It is the self which gives an individuality to a person particularly in his social behaviour. Further, the behavioural processes, like perceiving, thinking and decision making form the foundations of social behaviour. Needless to say, long-term goal-setting is the most typical hallmark of social behaviour and the role of the self here is critical.

Essay # 5. Development and Formation of the Self:

The self, is entirely a product of learning and experience. Self-formation and development go hand in hand with the general psychological development and growth, including physical growth. The development of the self is again a very integral part of the process of socialisation.

One of the pioneering attempts to deal with the process of development and formation of self was that of the distinguished sociologist G H Mead. In his classical work, ‘Mind, Self and Society’, Mead made attempts to examine the process of the development of the self. This approach may be characterised as ‘dynamic interactional’.

The self, according to Mead, arises and develops as a result of social interaction. Every individual, as he grows, enters into a greater number and variety of interactions. As a result of these interactions, two types of perceptions arise in the individual about himself.

The first set is what he calls the T perceptions and the second the ‘Me’ perceptions. The student can perhaps guess the difference between these two types of perceptions. In the course of a series of interactions with the others and also as he grows and also as the variety of interactions expand, the child learns to look at itself from two angles, one from his own angle, as he perceives himself, i.e. himself as the subject.

These perceptions are known as “I” perceptions. At the same time, he also learns to look at himself through the eyes of others and other important persons whom Sullivan would describe as ‘significant adults’ i.e., the individual learns to look at himself as he believes others are looking at him. These are called “Me” perceptions.

Over a period of time and with repeated interactions we find the emergence of a generalized and integrated ‘I’ and also a generalized and integrated ‘Me’. Further integration takes place and ultimately form the generalized ‘Me’ and the generalized ‘I’ emerges as an integrated concept of ‘self.

The effectiveness of the individual depends on whether he or she, succeeds in reaching this stage, where the discrepancies between the generalized and the ‘I’ generalized ‘Me’ are minimal. Some writers would probably refer to the former as ‘subjective self and the latter as ‘objective self.

Here it may be noticed that even the objective self evolves out of subjective perceptions and understanding. Hence our understanding of ‘others perceptions of ourselves’ is invariably influenced to some extent or other by subjective elements.

It has been shown in this context that one of the most significant factors in the development of the self is interaction with other children or peer groups, where all are equal. Peer group relations are usually based on equality and reciprocity and this helps the child to arrive at a more valid and stable picture of himself.

The studies of Piaget have produced ample evidence to this effect. Another point that may be noted here is that while the formation of the ‘self is a continuous process, at the same time, there are some critical stages in human life which are crucial. This is because during these periods the individual is subject to critical bodily changes and also consequent social expectations.

Two such periods are, the transition from childhood to adulthood, or ‘adolescence’ and old age. The former corresponds to what Freud would call the ‘latency period’ or what Sullivan would describe as the ‘juvenile era’. The interaction between the subjective self or the ‘I’ and the objective self invariably results in a continuous process of evaluation of the both.

This process of development gets facilitated by another factor. The older child by virtue of his membership in the peer group gets an opportunity to validate the ‘I’ and ‘Me’. We may here make a reference to Sullivan’s concepts of ‘reflected appraisals’ and ‘consensual validations’.

According to Sullivan these two processes are very crucial in the formation of the self. The former involves evaluation by the individual of himself in retrospect, thinking back and the latter involves evaluation against outside criteria like reactions of others.

Such processes result in greater integration, consistency and continuity of behaviour. If the environment of the child does not permit the operation of such evaluative behaviour then the result is a defective, disturbed or distorted self.

While the above account gives a general schematic idea of the process of self-development or self-formation, it should be borne in mind that the actual pace and manner of development varies from group to group and individual to individual.

The earliest awareness of self finds expression through an experienced and expressed distinction of one’s own physical body from the surroundings and what has sometimes been referred to as the ‘Me’ and ‘not Me’. This may be described as what Murphy would refer to as the ‘perceptual stage’.

Thus the initial stage in the development of the self is a sense of physical identity of one’s own body as an entity independent of and separate from the environment. Perhaps, in reaching this stage there may not be much of individual or group differences unless there are marked variations in the early socialisation processes particularly weaning behaviour.

But, once the individual crosses this stage, a number of factors like the amount of interaction with others, the variety of interactions, the reactions of others like parents in terms of acceptance, rewarding, punishing, approving, criticising of these assume importance. The impact of such social interaction and reaction is very crucial to the development of self.

Essay # 6. Acquisition of Language in the Process of Self-Development:

A real milestone in the process of self-development is the acquisition of language, particularly spoken language. This achievement is very significant from the point of view of the development of the self during the later stages. Language serves as a very powerful tool in enabling the person to arrive at primary representations and conceptualizations.

The early ‘perceptual self-identity’ based on a distinction of one’s body from external reality gradually got modified and transformed into evaluative classifications and categorisation of one’s own body and its various parts, resulting in what is known as ‘body image’.

The ‘body image’ incorporates within it a number of attitudes favourable or unfavorable towards one’s own body as a result of verbal interaction and representation. Increased ability for verbal behaviour contributes to a greater degree of consistency and also generality. Language helps in abstraction and also the ‘living’ of a particular situation in its absence both retrospectively and prospectively.

A review by Sheriff and Sheriff of a number of studies has shown that consistency in competing with others, in cooperating with others, in expressing sympathy at another’s distress, in responsibility for self and others and in setting goals for one’s own performance, appear gradually as the child participates in social and cooperative forms of play in contrast to the earlier side by side or parallel play.

The process definitely is made possible to a considerable degree by verbal interaction. Gradually, apart from consistency, one also moves towards continuity as the time perspective expands and concern with the immediate perspective gives way to an extended view involving past, present and future. Once again verbal ability and verbal interactions are very important.

As described by Kurt Lewin, the life space expands in three dimensions, space, time and reality- irreality. The points of reference cease to be confined to the immediate present or the concrete here and now. This expansion of the life space also results in gradual expansion and differentiation of the self itself.

Essay # 7. Self and Social Behaviour:

The role of the self in the context of ‘individual behaviour’, in terms of integration, consistency and continuity and that the importance of the self for social behaviour has not been made very clear as seen in the case of the manic- depressives where at one phase the individual is highly excited, feels on top of the world and resulting in ideas of grandeur.

The other phase of depression shows the opposite features of self-deprecation, blaming oneself etc. McDougall’s theory of sentiments and his explanation of manic-depressive pathology on the basis of inadequate integration of self-assertion and self-submission may not be very acceptable today.

But, certainly his concept of self-regard was the forerunner of many later concepts and research. Another leading theorist of a later date, Cattell, employing more sophisticated and complex analysis of personality also postulated a concept ‘self-sentiment’.

More recently, another term, ‘self-esteem’ has come into existence and has been studied extensively, particularly in relation to different forms of social behaviour. People who can be classified into ‘low esteem group’, ‘high esteem group’ etc., have been compared to see whether there are significant differences in their social behaviour patterns and whether one could draw the social behaviour profile of such groups differing in the level of self-esteem.

Essentially, the term self-esteem refers to the way in which an individual evaluates himself in relation to others, on a number of criteria like achievement, success, capacity, etc. In brief, self-esteem may be described as the degree to which a person likes himself and rates himself as capable, satisfactory, etc.

How does a person evaluate himself or how does self-esteem develop?

Certainly this depends on one’s experiences of success or failure. A person who has met with only failures in his various experiences perhaps will have a low degree of self-esteem. But, here again, standards of comparison are derived from cultural and social roots.

According to Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, people in general evolve their own implicit or explicit standards of comparison based on their observation of performance and behaviour and those whom they otherwise consider their peers or equals. A number of studies have demonstrated the role of such comparisons in evaluating oneself.

The norms and values held in a particular culture or society do also influence one’s self-esteem. Certainly, in a society which lays emphasis on individualism, achievement and success, the standards of comparison are likely to be higher. Similarly, in modern societies, individuals occupying higher social positions have been found to show a higher degree of self-esteem by Himmelweit.

The earlier trends in American societies was that individuals belonging to minority groups tended to be lower in self-esteem, but such trends have been shown to be disappearing as found by Lensing & Zagorun. Some studies like those of Fey, Riese and others have shown that people who are popular and liked tend to have a higher degree of self-esteem than people who are unpopular and not liked.

In their classical investigations Sears, Maccoby and Lewin suggested that the degree of self-esteem or self-approval-disapproval, to a large extent depends on how early an individual recognises the standards employed by others for approving or disapproving one’s conduct, action, achievement, etc.

Essay # 8. Self Related Issues:

(i) self-esteem :.

Self-esteem assumes significance for understanding social behaviour in view of the fact that it has been shown to be an influential factor associated with different categories of social behaviour. A person’s willingness to interact with others, itself has been shown to be related to the degree of self-esteem.

On the other hand, sometimes individuals with low self-esteem may actually engage in compensatory arrogant and aggressive behaviour which can be obnoxious and irritating, particularly in small group situations. Apart from this, studies have also shown that the degree of ‘self-esteem’ is related to susceptibility to stress, rigidity, resistance to change, persuasion and different kinds of social behaviour.

An important characteristic of ‘self-esteem’ is that it is motivating. Very often people resort to defensive behaviour to maintain their self-esteem. This has been particularly pointed out in studies relating to behaviour where we attribute characteristics to others.

Investigations in the field of attribution behaviour, have pointed to the role of self-esteem in influencing ego defensive attribution behaviour as reported by Heider; Jones & Davis, Kelly and others. Thus we see that esteem as a characteristic process associated with self ‘formulation’ and ‘functioning’ is of significant importance in analysing and understanding social behaviour.

(ii) Reference Groups:

Our concept of self is very much related to the environment. The process of self-formation is very much influenced by the environment, events in the environment and other people. Thus an important factor here is the ‘reference group’ or groups. Reference group or groups as described by Sherif and Sherif are categories of people to whom people relate themselves psychologically.

These may be age groups, socio-economic groups, church affiliation groups, religious groups, interest groups etc. In complex differentiated societies the self concept has points of anchorage in different sub-groups.

When a person is asked to answer the question ‘who am ‘I’ the normal response starts with the name and identity in terms of social classification, identifying him and placing him in a particular category as reported by Kuhn & Mcfarland.

The psychological implications of this is that the self-image of an individual is influenced by the characteristics of the group to which he refers himself to, whether he belongs to that category or not. Thus, most people in modem society are influenced by so called middle-class values, whether they actually belong there or not.

The concept of reference groups therefore helps us to explain and account for many of the self-characteristics and identifying the people with whom an individual relates himself.

In the words of Sherif when the person locates himself within a set or group of people, the relative status of the group in the social organization and his own position within it serve as standards (anchors) for appraisals of performance by himself and others.

An effect of this anchoring on particular group standards is a resulting stabilisation of performance, self-confidence and various other behavioural characteristics. Allport, Sherif and Carter, Seigal and Seigel have reported that attitudes of a person tend to taper towards the attitudes of a group if that group also is a reference group.

Individual differences in importance or value attached to the various components of self-esteem are to a large extent traceable to reference groups. Thus in many instances attitude change or behaviour change becomes possible only if we can understand the reference groups or reference set of the individual. Reference group relations often involve high ego involvement and can result in resistance to change.

(iii) Self-Radius :

Closely related to the issue of ‘reference group’ or self-set is the ‘self- radius’. Reference groups play a central role in determining one’s behaviour and evaluation of one’s behaviour. But over and above the fact of reference, each one’s self extends a little beyond the reference group’s.

Thus, while self-esteem and also approval and disapproval of behaviour may be determined and influenced by one’s immediate reference group like family, peer groups, etc., at the same time self is also influenced by groups and issues and events a little more distant both in space and also psychologically.

Such influence, concern and involvement may be only personal and may not influence actual behaviour. Most of us are disturbed by acts of violence, discrimination and other forms of barbarity going on in different parts of the world. Thus when a large number of young people were mercilessly shot by the Chinese Communist regime, a few years ago when they were agitating for democratic rights, we were upset.

Many of us were disturbed by the famine conditions in Somalia, when we see the photographs in newspapers and magazines. Similarly, many of us feel happy and also share the sense of achievement, when somebody in a far off place achieves something great like landing on the moon or conquering the Mount Everest. This phenomenon of the extension of one’s self-involvement and concern varies from person to person in its extensity and distance.

Some people have a less extended involvement and some people a more extended involvement. Thus the psychological extent of one’s concern and sensitivity or involvement is known as ‘self-radius’. Some people are least disturbed or concerned about things and events which happen somewhere and do not have any immediate concern for them. Such people are more circumscribed in their lives.

The greater the self-radius, the more is the person’s concern and involvement with events and happenings further away. Great personalities like Buddha, Christ, and Mother Theresa were concerned about events and issues concerning entire humanity and their self-radius was very high. On the other hand people with narrow moral values and prejudices, who are dogmatic have a much shorter ‘self-radius’.

Another variation of this radius belongs to the time dimension. Some individuals are very proud of the ancient culture and heritage of the society than others whereas others are not. Some individuals are more bothered about events, things and remote happenings of both past and future, while others have more concern with things in the immediate present.

A child is more concerned and involved about events and things ‘here and now’ compared to an adult. The term self-radius then represents a person’s perspective varying from proximate to distant and also varying on the past, present, future continuum.

Thus people with global and universal outlook have a much longer self-radius than most of us. While an extended self-radius may not always influence our behaviour, it certainly has an emotional impact on us.

(iv) Self-Values :

Values are vectors or variables which influence our behaviour. Values are very close to our ‘selves’. While other variables like attitudes may not be very close to the self-concept, our values very often become part of our self-system.

Some psychologists even make a distinction between self-values and social values. Values have been shown to influence our personal behaviour, choice reactions, responses, etc. Honesty, openness, integrity, etc., are examples of personal values which become integral parts of one’s self-system.

(v) Self-Disclosure :

In recent years, psychologists who have been interested in dealing with personality problems and also concerned with bringing about changes in behaviour, values, motives and attitudes of others have found that many such changes become possible effectively only if an individual’s self-system is involved.

The concept of ‘self-disclosure’ has been brought into use in this context, by Rokeach while dealing with the problem of bringing about changes in values. Rokeach has developed a technique which uses the concept of self-disclosure.

This implies that a person who wishes to bring about value changes and attitude changes in others can achieve greater success by making himself open and disclosing himself. Such disclosure of oneself has been found to have greater impact on behaviour change, attitudes and values.

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“I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as “Me” and the self as “I”. This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former (“Me”) corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter (“I”) reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger’s (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-“I” [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958) ] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between “Me” and “I” (see Table ​ Table1 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience 1 . This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011 ; Liang, 2014 ; Sui and Gu, 2017 ; Truong and Todd, 2017 ) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or “I.”

Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”) and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between “Me” and “I” in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958) , that in this context “Me” (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009 ; Blanke, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of “I” (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition 2 by understanding the self-as-subject, or “I,” as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [ Figure ​ Figure1 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger’s (2003 , 2010 ) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal “I” 3 ( Prinz, 2012 ), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal “I” [or the Wittgenstein’s (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal “Me.” Table ​ Table2 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein’s (1958) distinctions between self-as-object (“Me”) and self-as-subject (“I”). In the original formulation, James’ (1890) “Me” includes also physical objects and people (material and social “Me”) – they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

Examples of theories of the self-as-object (“Me”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

“Me” As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890 , p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word “Me” to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James’ (1890) view, it reflects “all the things” which have the power to produce “excitement of a certain particular sort.” This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014 ; Guillot, 2017 ). What are “all the things”? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to “objects” which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of “things” – conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James’ (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define “Me” as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996) , who begins “ The conscious mind ” by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following 4 : visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se , such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James’ (1890) terms, “objects” in a stream of consciousness: “all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking” (p. 325).

The self understood as “Me” can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness ( Figure ​ Figure2 2 ). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person’s face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to “Me,” the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008 ; Payne et al., 2017 ; Woźniak et al., 2018 ). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971 ; Blakemore et al., 1998 ; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009 ). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ; Constable et al., 2018 ). This was anticipated by James’ (1890) notion of the material “Me,” and is typically regarded as reflecting one’s extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014 ). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about “Me” or about something/someone else.

A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical “I,” the phenomenal “Me,” and the phenomenal “I,” which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal “Me.” Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as “I experience X.” In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one’s own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions – thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of “Me” (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the “Inclusion of Other in Self” scale ( Aron et al., 1992 ). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one’s self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to “Me” allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one’s body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one’s possessions one can speak about one’s extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to “Me” introduced here. The first one is as follows:

• simple (1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always “mine,” such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as “I,” i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000 ; Christoff et al., 2011 ; Blanke et al., 2015 ) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999 ; Craig, 2010 ; Seth et al., 2011 ; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 ; Salomon, 2017 ). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as “my” experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of “Me.” They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one’s body and those coming from another person’s (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between “my” versus “other’s” proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal “Me” and phenomenal “not-Me” will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016 ). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009 ). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being “not-mine,” leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000 ; Kaufman, 2004 ). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario – rather than two pieces of the same organ being “wired” to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014 )? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of “Me” then the answer becomes simple – the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal “Me,” for example in a form of background self-experience, or “phenomenal background” ( Dainton, 2008 , 2016 ), rather than the phenomenal “I.”

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

• simple (2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either “me” or “other,” but their subject is always “I.” As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal “I” and not the phenomenal “Me.”

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one’s thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: “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” ( Wittgenstein, 1958 ). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of “I” as object and as subject (see Table ​ Table1 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say “I see a photo of my face in front of me” I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal “I” (self-as-subject) and phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word “I” (or “my”). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises – to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014 ). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal “I,” i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal “Me” – a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008 ; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009 ; Martin and Pacherie, 2013 ). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one’s thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Billon, 2013 ; Guillot, 2017 ; López-Silva, 2017 ). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership 5 over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one’s thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one’s thoughts “as someone else’s,” or at least “as not-mine.” However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I’ve taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have “objectified” them to experience that they have a quality of “feeling as if they are not mine.” Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal “I” turns out to be a part of thephenomenal “Me.”

If my thoughts do not constitute the “I” then how do they fit into the structure of “Me”? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute “Me,” while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as “mine” belong to “Me.” How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger’s (2003 ; 2010 ) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017) :

• simple  Savage suggests that on LSD “[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes” (1955, 11), (…) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017 , p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object (“Me”) are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel “mine” as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as “mine.” As a result, this thinking phenomenal “I” experienced in feeling of ownership over one’s thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian “Me.” As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal “I,” just multilevel phenomenal “Me.” However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else’s (a demon’s or some malicious puppet master’s), she can still claim that:

Yes, “I” experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon’s.” My thoughts feel as “not-mine,” however, it’s still me (or: “I”) who thinks of them as “not-mine.”

As such, one escapes “objectification” of “I” into “Me” by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-“I.” However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: “I” (I 1 ) experience that the “fake I” (I 2 ), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else’s (e.g., as nasty green demon’s). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal “I” is I 1 , since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal “I” into another “fake-I” (and consequently making it a part of “Me”).

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal “I” understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly “on the run” from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep “I,” which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep “I” cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of “Me.” Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep “I”: in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016 ) who argue that “all conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent.” It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather “refers to the distinct manner, or how , of experiencing” ( Zahavi, 2014 ).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016 ). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the “ how of experiencing” of another person. For example, can I experience my sister’s for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep “I” is to reject that the subject of experience, the “I,” is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000 ; Prinz, 2012 ; Dainton, 2016 ), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between “Me” and “I” as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: “(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem” ( James, 1890 , p. 401).

“I” As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890 , pp. 330–331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of “I” emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do “fly about loose,” devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone’s or something’s consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012 ; Strawson, 2003 ; Searle, 2005 ; Dainton, 2016 ). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of “what it is like to be a bat” ( Nagel, 1974 ), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical “I,” as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal “I” (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical “I” does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical “I,” but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as “me,” nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as “I.” In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which “is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (…) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction” ( Windt, 2015 ). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience – the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015 ; Metzinger, 2018 ), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of “Me.” Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016 ), possess conscious experience 6 . If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between “Me” and “not-Me.” However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011 ) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table ​ Table3 3 ). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987 ; Strawson, 2000 ; Dainton, 2008 ), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005 ), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003 ). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

Examples of theories of the self-as-subject (“I”) in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015 , Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical “I.”

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014 ; Tononi et al., 2016 ) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational “complex” which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max ). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max . The complex that specifies a person’s day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max – that is, it should be the “major” complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca’s area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical “I” can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010 ). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

• simple  An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions – for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical “I”? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical “I” can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical “I” can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some “self” (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism’s consciousness this metaphysical “I” would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not “co-conscious” with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical “I” cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical “I” persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000 , 2010 ). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical “I” turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical “I,” and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical “I” is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal “Me,” where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between “Me” and “I.” I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2010 ), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical “I”).

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 , 2010 ; Friston and Kiebel, 2009 ; Hohwy, 2013 ; Clark, 2016 ). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one’s internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called “variational free energy,” which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2009 ). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014 ), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007 ), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011 ; Seth, 2013 ), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014 ; Friston and Frith, 2015 ), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013 ), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010 ; Fotopoulou, 2012 ). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 ) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

• simple  We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (…) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017 , p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016 ; Williams, 2017 ) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand’s movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017) , the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003 , 2010 ), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003 ; Chalmers, 2004 , for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006 , 2014 , for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories – the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James’ (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal “Me” – by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical “I”? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal “Me,” the issues pertaining to the metaphysical “I” are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013 , Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011 ; Dehaene, 2014 ). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995 ) – a functional mechanism which allows that “some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others” ( Dehaene, 2014 ). However, the problem of the metaphysical “I” becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness – the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called “hard problem” ( Chalmers, 1996 ).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference 7 ) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical “I.”

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal “Me” (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical “I” (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of “Me,” it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of “I.”

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between “Me” and “I” may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal “I” can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal “Me” [which can be understood as Metzinger’s (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between “I” and “Me,” which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While “Me” can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, “I” is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables ​ Tables2 2 , ​ 3 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal “I” as just a part of the phenomenal “Me,” has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as “I” from the perspective of “Me” may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003 , 2009 , 2010 ), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term “I” when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction (“Me” versus “I”) which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term “I” in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as “sense of ownership over an experience” to reflect what is meant by “I” in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., “sense of ownership of interoceptive signals” when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of “Me” versus the experience/sense of “I” (rather than just “Me” and “I”). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

Funding. This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

1 Therefore, whenever I use the term “I" I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term “Me" I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James’ (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table ​ Table1 1 ). I also assume, following James (1890) , that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.

2 Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of “I” as subject and “I” as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.

3 Whenever I use the prefix “phenomenal” I mean “the conscious experience of.” For example, when I write phenomenal “I”, I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience (“I”). In a similar fashion I use the prefix “metaphysical” when I mean “the metaphysical entity of.”

4 Chalmers (1996) also lists “sense of self,” although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.

5 Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.

6 “IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior” ( Tononi et al., 2016 , p. 460).

7 For example, he writes: “So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness” ( Friston, 2018 , p. 1).

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Why I Am Who I Am?: Self Assessment Essay

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The youth is the period when a person asks the question “Why I am who I am?” oftener than earlier or later in life, and the reason is that the answer to this question allows for determining the goals and perspectives for the future. It is important to answer this question at the stage of choosing a career, a college to enter, and a place to live among other important milestones (Akdeniz and Stark 36; Sedikides and Brewer 12-18; Van der Werff et al. 627). When responding to this question, I should state that I am who I am because of the impact of my family’s values and traditions, social norms and widely accepted moral norms, as well as my vision of education and career.

The first important aspect that predetermined my development as an individual is family values and traditions. My parents and relatives influenced my vision of the world, my approach to treating other people, and my interest in learning and developing myself. In my childhood, I always knew that my relatives love me, my opinion is respected, and my needs are addressed. In this supportive environment, I learned the importance of keeping faith with close people, setting goals, and achieving them. My parents also demonstrated how important it is to be honest, persistent, and motivated.

The second factor that contributed to my personal development is moral norms and principles adopted in the society where I live. In spite of being focused on the values followed in my family, I also interacted with my friends, peers, and educators in a specific environment, and these surroundings also taught and formed my personality. I learned how to communicate with other people with the focus on respect and integrity. I also learned how to be empathetic and sensitive. Furthermore, I became more flexible and tolerant, and I view these qualities as associated with maturity.

The third point that is considered as influential in the context of my development is the accentuated role of education and career in my society. In my childhood, I began to understand that knowledge is one of the individuals’ powers (Friedman and Schustack 87; Reichard et al. 138; Tyler et al. 78). Thus, I started to pay more attention to learning and setting goals for my education. Later, these goals became formed as specific objectives for the career progress. As a result, now I can describe myself as a goal-oriented, self-educated, self-regulated, highly motivated, and skillful person who has a personal development plan for the future.

I should conclude that I am who I am because of a range of factors. Still, it is possible to determine the most influential ones among these aspects. I believe that my care environments and surroundings significantly influenced my vision of myself and goals while leading to the development of a person who is adapted to live in the modern world, who follows moral norms, and who values family traditions.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I would like to thank you for all your support and help provided throughout my life. Your support is extremely important for me because it is hard to overestimate how critical it is to understand that there are always people who believe in me. You are always ready to listen to me, provide a piece of advice, say something encouraging, and help see the path to follow. When I say that your support is important for me, I mean all kinds of it because your investment in my development is difficult to be measured or valued.

I also wish to thank you for all life lessons I could learn from communicating with you, spending much time together, observing your behaviors and reactions in different situations. I believe that parents can contribute to the development of their children when they act as the best examples for them. Thus, I can state that you were the best role models for me because it is problematic to learn without imitating somebody. Since I could imitate your attitudes to life and behaviors, I could succeed. What is more important is that you taught me how to be a happy person, and this was the best lesson for me. I have learned how to cope with stress and issues that seem to be unresolvable, how to pursue my goals, how to value other people’s opinions and advice, how to not only seem to be independent but also be independent and responsible for one’s actions and decisions.

I also want to thank you for your efforts to make our house the best place to live in. Moreover, you created a wonderful world for me, and I am still sure that our family is the best and friendliest one among all others. I am proud to be your child. It is rather difficult to mention all the points for which I am grateful, and I apologize for that. However, I want you to know that each part of my life is influenced by your example and your energy.

Works Cited

Akdeniz, Can, and Jonas Stark. The Self Improvement Book: A Guide Book for Success and Personal Development . Best Business Books, 2014.

Friedman, Howard S., and Miriam W. Schustack. Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research . Pearson, 2016.

Reichard, Rebecca J., et al. “Believing Is Becoming: The Role of Leader Developmental Efficacy in Leader Self-Development.” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies , vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 137-156.

Sedikides, Constantine, and Marilynn B. Brewer, editors. Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self . Psychology Press, 2015.

Tyler, Tom R., et al., editors. The Psychology of the Social Self . Psychology Press, 2014.

Van der Werff, Ellen, et al. “I Am What I Am, by Looking Past the Present: The Influence of Biospheric Values and Past Behavior on Environmental Self-Identity.” Environment and Behavior , vol. 46, no. 5, 2014, pp. 626-657.

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Psychological Disorders: a Student's Perspective

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