What is the true nature of the self? Hello everybody, first post in the forum! (Be kind :) ) Thinking about the top post, I believe there should be a distinction between what I think they call the minimal self, the sense of unity of the self of a single moment and the diachronic self, that persists through time and has some kind of identity.
From what I understand most people accept the unity of the minimal self as something that is real, that it is built on neurobiological processes and that it is embodied. These processes produce the experience of self (sense of agency, sense of ownership, the immunity principle of self and the non-conceptual first-person content of self). There are some who deny this unity (no-self theories) and I think they support that the sense of self is a set of symbols that appear and disappear in random ways. To be honest I do not find these no-self theories convincing, because, as the critics of these theories say, if it is random then it should not be always present in me (or maybe some moments I should have 2 or even more selves in me) and it should not be present in every person out there.
The continuity-identity of self on the other hand, is much more controversial and this is probably the one that is considered an illusion. Those that support this illusion claim, I think mainly say that a) there is no part of the mental states that constitute the minimal self that remains unchanged through time, so there is no core that is “saved” to form the identity of self (something that would remain constant, could be the physical manifestation of self) and b) any causal relation between changing states is not sufficient to form a diachronic identity (one way I understand it is that my last moment being alive is causing my first moment being dead, but the self is not there any more, so causality does not save the self. There are also the Parfit examples.)
But if the diachronic self is an illusion, there are two possibilities, that this illusion is constructed randomly or that there is a neuronal mechanism that produces it. If it is random, shouldn’t we get exceptions? Moments when I lose myself or find multiple “my selves”? How something random can be so catholic in the population? If on the other hand is based on a mechanism (neuronal process), why not say that this process (whatever might actually do) is the basis of self?
Finally, I would like to point out that we are talking about the illusion of self, then we are talking about the illusion of free will and then we are talking about the illusion of the subjectivity of consciousness. I would say, once it is luck, twice a coincidence, three times a patern. Three phenomena not completely unrelated that we are called to basically disregard them as fake and irrelevant. Maybe, the simplest answer could be to acknowledge that we simply don’t understand them yet.