Chapter
Sixteen
Egos, bundles, and theories of self
Similar problems have plagued many thinkers since. In philosophy, there are
numerous theories of the nature of self (or what persons are), of personal identity
(or what makes someone the same person over time), and of moral responsibility.
In psychology, researchers have studied the development of the sense of self in
children, the construction of social selves, self-attribution, the factors affecting
personal identity, dissociative states, and various pathologies of selfhood. We
cannot consider all of these here, so in this chapter we will concentrate on a few
of those theories that are most relevant to consciousness.
The central question is why it seems as though I am a single, continuous self who
has conscious experiences. Possible answers can be divided into two major types.
The first claims that it is true: there really is some kind of continuous self that is
the subject of my experiences, that makes my decisions, and so on. The second
accepts that it seems this way but claims that really there is no underlying con-
tinuous and unitary self. The illusion that there is has to be explained some other
way. Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit (1984, 1987) described these two types as
‘ego theories’ and ‘bundle theories’, citing the Buddha as the first bundle theorist.
Ego theories are undoubtedly the more popular. Many religions entail notions of
spirits or souls, including both Christianity and Islam, which teach that the soul is
a continuing entity that is central to a person’s life, underlies moral responsibility,
and can survive the death of the physical body. Among the major religions, Bud-
dhism alone denies the existence of such entities.
Perhaps this is not surprising when we learn that young children seem to be nat-
ural dualists. According to psychologist Paul Bloom, children as young as three
see the world as containing two distinct domains, bodies and souls. By five or
six they may have learned that the brain does lots of useful things, like thinking
and solving problems, but they still imagine it as ‘a tool we use for certain mental
operations [. . .] a cognitive prosthesis, added to the soul’ (Bloom, 2004, p. 201).
Other research found that when 5–6-year-olds were given a hamster that had
apparently been duplicated by a very special machine, they thought that fewer
of the original’s episodic memories than its physical properties would be trans-
ferred to the duplicate hamster (Hood et al., 2012). Interviewed about the func-
tioning of dead agents, children as young as four know that biological functions
(such as needing the toilet or food) stop at death, but they make no distinction
between psychobiological or perceptual states on the one hand and epistemic or
emotional states on the other, often believing that both continue after death. As
they get older, they are more likely to separate these out, with older children and
adults attributing beliefs, emotions, and desires to the dead, but not perceptions:
‘default “afterlife” beliefs are pruned in a systematic fashion during development’
(Bering and Bjorklund, 2004, p. 229). One interpretation is that we attribute to
the dead those mental states that we cannot imagine being without (Bering,
2002). This may be one reason why ego theories are so prevalent and hard to
shift: because we cannot imagine being without what feels like a conscious self,
we may be tempted to grant it continuity beyond death as well as in life.
Most forms of substance dualism are ego theories because they equate the sepa-
rate mind, or non-physical substance, with the experiencing self. One example is
Popper and Eccles’s dualist interactionism (Chapter 6), in which the self-conscious
mind controls its brain and scans the brain’s activity. But the distinction between
‘a Bundle Theorist
denies the existence
of persons . . . Bundle
Theory is hard to believe’(Parfit, 1987, pp. 20, 23)