CHAPTER
Egos, bundles, and theories of self
sIxteen
Who is reading this book? Who is conscious of the writing on the page, the
attempt to understand and answer the question, or the sounds of revelry in the
next room?
Questions about the nature of consciousness are intimately bound up with those
about the nature of self because it seems as though there must be someone hav-
ing the experience: that there cannot be experiences without an experiencer. Our
experiencing self seems to be at the centre of everything we are aware of at a
given time, and to be continuous from one moment to the next. In other words, it
seems to have both unity and continuity. In Chapter 6, we explored some reasons
for questioning the idea that conscious experience is unified, but we might still
be tempted to attribute unity and continuity to the self who has the experiences.
More problems arise, however, when you ask what kind of thing that experiencer
might be.
In everyday language, we talk unproblematically about our ‘self ’. ‘I’ got up this
morning, ‘I’ like muesli for breakfast, ‘I’ can hear the robin singing, ‘I’ am an
easy-going sort of person, ‘I’ remember meeting you last week, ‘I’ want to be
an engine driver when I grow up. ‘I’ distinguish ‘myself ’ from ‘you’ and ‘yourself ’.
It seems that we not only think of this self as a single thing, but accord it all
sorts of attributes and capabilities. In ordinary usage, the self is the subject
of our experiences, an agent who carries out actions and makes decisions, a
unique personality, and the source of desires, opinions, hopes, and fears. This
self is ‘me’; it is the reason why anything matters in ‘my’ life. But where or what
is this ‘me’?
‘An experience is
impossible without an
experiencer’(Frege, 1918/1967, p. 27; in
Strawson, 2006, pp. 189–190)‘I am conscious that
I exist, and I who know
that I exist enquire into
what I am’(Descartes, 1641/2008, p. 81)