self? Can it really help us to find the conceptual essence of selfhood, to
pinpoint what all self-conscious beings in the universe have in common?
Is it really a step toward the big picture mentioned in the Introduction?
The answer is yes: What we really want are the constitutive conditions
for selfhood. We want to know what is truly necessary and what is perhaps
only sufficient to bring about an Ego, the fundamental feeling of
“being someone.” For example, in our quest for the core of the conscious
self, it would be progress if one could differentiate between what is
merely causally enabling, and what is strictly necessary under the laws of
nature holding in this universe. Our experiments demonstrate that
agency is not necessary, because they selectively manipulate only two dimensions:
self-identification (with the content of a conscious body image)
and self-localization (in a spatial frame of reference). They do so
with the subject in a passive condition, without will or bodily agency.
This shows how the target phenomenon—self-consciousness—can be
causally controlled by multisensory conflict alone. That is important because
if we combine the discovery that this can be achieved simply by creating
a conflict between sight and touch with the fact that the shift in
visual perspective during OBEs can also be caused by an epileptic seizure
or by direct stimulation with an electrode in the brain, we get a much better
idea of what the simplest form of self-consciousness might be. It must
be something very local, something in the brain itself, and it is independent
of motor control, of moving your body. We know more: A seeing self also is not necessary. You can shut the
windows in front of the little man behind your eyes by closing your
eyelids. The seeing self disappears; the Ego remains. You can be a robust,
conscious self even if you are emotionally flat, if you do not engage
in acts of will, and also in the absence of thought. Emotions, will,
and thoughts are not necessary to the fundamental sense of selfhood.
Every meditator (remember chapter 1) can confirm that you may settle into a calm, emotionally neutral state, deeply relaxed and widely alert,
a state of pure observation, without any thought, while a certain elementary
form of bodily self-consciousness remains. Let us call this
“selfhood-as-embodiment.”
So what is the essence? Location in space and time plus a transparent
body image seem to be very close. The rubber-hand illusion manipulates
only the experience of ownership of body parts. The full-body illusion
manipulates ownership of the body as a whole. Could this finally be
the simplest form of selfhood, something we could metaphorically describe
as the fundamental experience of “global ownership”? This, I believe,
is a misleading idea. Global ownership is a dangerous concept,
because it introduces two distinct entities plus a relation, the body and
an invisible self, someone who possesses the body. It is the body that
possesses itself: Owning something means to be able to control it, and
selfhood is intimately related to the very moment in which the body discovers
that it can control itself—as a whole. It is exactly what happens
when you wake up in the morning, when you “come to yourself.”
Here is an interim theory: Minimal self-consciousness is not control,
but what makes control possible. It includes an image of the body in
time and space (location) plus the fact that the organism creating this
image does not recognize it as an image (identification). So we must
have a Now, plus a spatial frame of reference, and a transparent bodymodel.
Then we need a visual (or auditory) perspective originating
within the body volume, a center of projection embedded in the volume
of the body. But the really interesting step is the one from the minimal
self to a slightly more robust first-person perspective. It is the step
from selfhood-as-embodiment to selfhood-as-subjectivity.
The decisive transition takes place when the system is already given
to itself through minimal self-consciousness and then, in addition, represents
itself as being directed toward an object. I believe this happens
exactly when we first discover that we can control the focus of attention.
We understand that we can draw things from the fringe of consciousness
into the center of experience, holding them in the spotlight of attention
or deliberately ignoring them—that we can actively control what
information appears in our mind. Now we have a perspective, because we have an inner image of ourselves as actually representing, as subjects
directed at the world. Now we can, for the first time, also attend to our
own body as a whole—we become self-directed. Inwardness appears.
The essence of this slightly stronger form of selfhood—what a philosopher
might call its “representational content”—is attentional agency
plus the realization that the body is now available for global control. It is
inner knowledge, not of ongoing motor behavior or of perceptual and
attentional processing directed at the world or single body parts, but of
the body as a single multisensory whole, which now becomes functionally
available for global control. Conscious selfhood is a deep-seated
form of knowledge about oneself, providing information about new
causal properties. This inner knowledge has nothing to do with language
or concepts. An animal could have it.
What exactly is this “coming to”? Here is another lesson to be learned
from the careful study of OBEs: Some OBErs act, but others have a passive
experience of floating in a body image; often the second body is not
even available for conscious control, yet the sense of selfhood is robust.
In a recent study, 53.1 percent of subjects reported not being able to
control their own movements (whereas 28.1 percent did, and others
didn’t experience motion at all). So it clearly is the more subtle experience
of controlling the focus of attention, which seems to be at the heart
of inwardness—selfhood-as-subjectivity is intimately related to “modeling
mental resource allocation” as some sober computational neuroscientist
might say. The correct philosophical term would be “epistemic
control”: The mental action of expanding your knowledge about the
world, for example, by selecting what you will know, while at the same
time excluding what you will, for now, ignore. What this adds is a strong
first-person perspective, the experience of being directed at an object.
Subjective awareness in this sense of having a perspective by being directed
at the world is body image (in space and time) plus the experience
of attentional control; inwardness appears when we attend to the
body itself. Recall how, in chapter 2, I said that consciousness is the
space of attentional agency. Selfhood as inwardness emerges when an
organism for the first time actively attends to its body as a whole. If a
global model of the body is integrated into the space of attentional agency, a richer phenomenal self emerges. It is not necessary to think, it
is not necessary to move; the availability of the body as a whole for focal
attention is enough to create the most fundamental sense of selfhoodas-
inwardness—that is, the ability to become actively self-directed in attention.
The body model now becomes a self-model in a philosophically
more interesting sense: The organism is now potentially directed at the
world and at itself at the same time. It is the body as subject.
But again—who controls the focus of attention? In our Video Ergo
Sum study, who is the entity misidentifying itself? Might we nevertheless
have a soul, or some sort of astral body, that could survive even bodily
death and experience some kind of illusory reincarnation? Will we soon
achieve artificial immortality by entering into software worlds designed
by human beings, through advanced Magritte-style “forbidden reproduction,”
deliberately identifying ourselves with virtual bodies and virtual
persons we have created for ourselves? Is the phenomenal world itself,
perhaps, just virtual reality?
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