Chapter
Sixteen
Egos, bundles, and theories of self
you can experience your arms and legs as your arms and legs,
experience certain cognitive processes in your brain as your
thoughts, and experience certain events in the motor parts of
your brain as your intentions and acts of will.
On Metzinger’s ‘self-model theory of subjectivity’, self is the
content of the PSM, and ‘Consciousness is the appearance of
a world’ (2009, p. 15). This world seems to be a single and uni-
fied present reality, but what we see, hear, taste, and smell is
limited by the nature of our senses, so that our model of real-
ity is a low-dimensional projection of a much vaster physical
reality. It is a virtual reality constructed by our brains. So our
conscious experience of the world is not so much an image of
reality as a tunnel through it.
Why then does it feel as though there is always someone in
that virtual reality? How does it become an ‘ego tunnel’? There
are two reasons. First, our brain’s world simulation includes an integrated inner
image of ourselves, the PSM, that is anchored in bodily sensations and includes
a point of view. Second, much of the self-model is ‘transparent’. This may seem
an odd term, but what Metzinger means is that we do not realise it is a model;
instead, we take it for a direct window on reality. Just as we don’t see the trans-
parent lens when we look through a telescope, so we don’t see the neurons firing
when we look at the world around us. The self-model theory of subjectivity ‘is that
the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large part of the PSM
in your brain is transparent’ (2009, p. 7).
PSM theory is a bundle theory in Parfit’s terms. As Metzinger puts it, ‘no such
things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever was or had a self ’ (2003, p. 1).
The impression that we are a persisting self is created by the PSM which models
the self this way. As for consciousness, this ‘appearance of a world’ is a very spe-
cial phenomenon because it is part of the world and yet contains it at the same
time. But what does the appearance of a world mean? If the cells in your LGN or
early visual cortex construct a representation of the retinal image, does this mean
a world appears? Or must that world appear for someone? PSM theory tries to
explain how inwardness is created when reality appears within itself, and claims
that it is this inwardness which accounts for subjectivity.
Like Hofstadter, Metzinger believes that explaining the nature of self explains subjec-
tivity. This is similar to Graziano’s attention schema theory, in which the self (includ-
ing the body schema) is constructed as part of the attention schema, along with the
world being attended to and the process of attention; the self is only a self model,
but it is constructed by the same process that makes us conclude we are conscious.
After herdsmen and tunnels, another striking metaphor is at the heart of British
philosopher Galen Strawson’s account of self: ‘many mental selves exist, one at a
time and one after another, like pearls on a string’ (1997, p. 424). Strawson’s pearls
are particular patterns of neural activity, or states of activation, that come and go.
He throws out the idea that either agency or personality is a necessary feature of
the self and, most controversially, also denies that selves have long-term continu-
ity over time. Each self may last a few seconds, or a much longer time, but then it
disappears and a new one appears.
‘nobody ever was or had
a self ’(Metzinger, 2003, p. 1)FIGURE 16.9 • According to the pearl view of
self, many mental selves exist,
one at a time and one after
another, like pearls on a string.