Chapter
Sixteen
Egos, bundles, and theories of self
Is GWT an ego or bundle theory? In GWT, the self is not an illusion; it is the most
enduring level of the dominant context hierarchy. As with Gazzaniga’s interpreter
and MacKay’s executive (oddly, Baars never seems to mention the top level of
MacKay’s schema, the self-supervisory system), the self-system is physically
instantiated, and presumably one could, as with ego theories, count how many
there were in a given brain. However, Gazzaniga, MacKay, and Baars should pre-
sumably be happy to step into the teletransporter because the physical systems
ought to be completely reconstructed by the machine.
The continuity of self is also real in GWT. Selves persist because self-systems do –
though both can break down and reintegrate, with time, effort, and stress (1988,
pp. 343–344). But the unstated problem here is how a mass of neurons with
changing interconnections and ephemeral activity can be a continuous experi-
encing self. So this theory faces all the problems that remained for James, and the
additional problem of explaining how physical continuity translates into experi-
ence. Perhaps we should conclude with Baars’s own words: ‘Yo u are the perceiver,
the actor and narrator of your experience, although precisely what that means is
an ongoing question’ (1997b, p. 142).
In his neuronal update of GWT, Stanislas Dehaene disagrees with those who, like
Damasio, think there is a necessary link between consciousness and self-con-
sciousness. For him, being conscious of some aspect of oneself is just another
form of conscious access to the workspace. Instead of the information being about
colour or sound, it is about one of the various mental representations of ‘me’ – my
body, my behaviour, my feelings or thoughts. When I reflect upon myself, the
observed and the observing ‘I’ are simply encoded within different brain systems
(2014, pp. 24–25). But this does not really explain the sense of continuity that one
brain system seems able to confer compared to others.
Whether these neuroscientific theories are ego or bundle theories depends on
whether they propose a continuing neural basis to the self. Some recent research
on individual differences in the functional organisation of the brain suggests there
may be such a basis. Functional connectivity patterns (especially those in the
fronto-parietal network) can be used as a ‘fingerprint’ to reliably identify individ-
uals from a large group, regardless of whether their brains are resting or engaged
in a specific task (Finn et al., 2015). This suggests that brain activity might provide
a basis for the self ’s continuity, and its distinction from others. Research on func-
tional connectivity as a predictor of attentional ability (Rosenberg et al., 2017) and
on how general intelligence emerges from differences in network architecture
(Barbey, 2017) adds further weight to the idea that significant aspects of what we
think of as self can be understood as linked to various kinds of persistent neural
structures.
LOOPS, TUNNELS, AND PEARLS
ON A STRING
‘I am a strange loop’, proclaims mathematician and cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter (2007). ‘I am a mirage that perceives itself ’. Famous for his book Gödel,
Escher, Bach (1979), Hofstadter delights in recursive, self-reflexive, or loopy math-
ematical structures. He recounts a childhood shopping trip with his parents to try