Home

We all have a sense of our self as the center of gravity of character with a feeling of its continuity and repeatability over time. We do not feel the existence of a self is problematic nor that it is an illusion or mix of momentary impressions. The self cannot be isolated on introspection yet it grows and endures as a relatively stable entity over all the changing acts, thoughts and desires of a life. While we have many modes of self-expression according to the occasion, each momentary self is felt to be a manifestation of the one genuine self. The inability to identify or define the self as it fluctuates with the situation does not persuade us of an absence or lack of personal identity. Experience is “taken in” and responded to by a self that stands behind as observer or agent. A feeling of identity, individuality or personhood, binds successive states of consciousness together or, as I would prefer to say, the feeling of self-identity is the ground for the succession, providing unity to perceptions in the observer’s field. According to the modality, the self feels “situated” at the center of its experience, as in pain, or at the circumference, as in vision. The visual world is not a jumble of objects but a coherent picture. This is less so in dream, but then, the dream-self differs from that of wakefulness. The self is host and source of the varied thoughts and acts of a life, and except for illness, in which it is threatened with loss, has a development that is more or less continuous.

The self’s experiences are not felt as impersonal events that occur at the same time or in the same brain. Hume’s bundle of images is a cohesive whole each waking moment and over intervals, such as sleep, intoxication or altered states. Events in the mind and acts in the world, as well as external objects, are felt as my events, or as happening in or to me. Even events that are distinct from the self impact in a way that has consistency and organization. We recognize the randomness of events and, to an extent, their unpredictability, but at the same time we acknowledge a lawfulness and causal order, even if it is obscured by contingency. We say the self, through interpretation, gives meaning to randomness. However, meaning is not applied to events that impinge from outside; events arise through planes of meaning-laden images. All objects arise in this way, some felt as part of the observer, others as its possessions, still others as extrinsic. Thought is an activity that issues from the self, even if thought thinks up the thinker. The same process that lays down the core and empirical self continues into thought, act and object, the latter being a part of the self that thinks them up.

Inner events and outer perceptions are generated with the self of that occasion. This does not mean that a perception of a green object evokes a green self, though severe pain is identified with a self in which pain is pervasive. In perceiving an object, the self, indeed the entire perception, is generated with the object. Some phenomena seem to be produced by a self that voluntarily summons them up, others confront the self or coalesce with it. A feared or loved object can be identified with a fearful or loving self. With intense feeling in pain, fear, panic, love, with a relaxation of boundaries, the self can become one with its perceptions. Feeling may so dominate a self that it is replaced by the object that seems to induce it. Severe pain fills the mind to the point that other objects are scarcely noticed. Intense fear or love focuses on the object or situation at the expense of other feelings, thoughts or objects in the field. Feeling flows out of the self to concentrate in the object, replacing other lines of development. When feeling overwhelms the partition of the core to the empirical self, the mental state may recede to foundational drive-categories.

All acts and objects develop out of a self that is laid down prior to conscious action and perception. The priority is the antecedence of earlier to later in the mental state. Objects are necessary for the self to actualize; they depend on the self as their source. Equally, the self degrades when objects disappear. We assume, falsely, that the self, as observer, is an adjunct to an object, or that perception is an accessory. This entails that self and object are separate entities with discrete brain loci or networks. To study perception, language or action without including the observer (or agent) leaves out the essential aspect, namely, the guiding or organizing substrate and origin.

For a self to attend to its derivations is quite natural and remote from attending to itself, which requires the agent to be the object of the same mental state. This turns the initial phase of the mental state into its terminus, or involves a regress from distal to proximal that occurs chiefly in meditative or mystical states, in which the self is more intuited than examined. The bundle of percepts accessible to Hume’s intuition is a manifestation of the earliest phase in partition. The self that Hume could not describe is a category prior to the images that were accessible to his introspection[1]. Moreover, such inner percepts or images are not random assortments; they assume a direction and coherence by virtue of the self that precedes them. Deeper than its implementations, the self fractionates to images that then pass (are transformed) to acts and objects.

The self feels it is an agent to objects that are its own ramifications, even an “owner” or possessor at the center of a personal universe. Some states of mind and body are felt to belong to a self that suffers or enjoys them. There is a powerful sense that all personal images, even occasions in the world, belong ab origo to the self, even if they are shared with others. The sense of ownership – my house, my car – expresses the value that flows distally into inanimate objects as an accrual through an economic vetting of what flows naturally into animate ones, such as in a person that is loved. To attempt to possess an object is to affirm its belongingness. The impression of a self as the owner of acts and images is reinforced in the variance of the world and mental contents in the face of the self’s relative stability.

In a normal brain, all mental phenomena or bodily events are experienced as belonging to the self, a dependency seen in pathological disorders. In psychosis, thought-possession and delusion occur in an individual frightened by and subordinate to his own image-productions. Thoughts seem to come from outside like alien intrusions, or they objectify like objects. while objects become thought-like. The once-sharp transition from concept to object, or mind to world, is indistinct. The unity of self, image and object is on display in that change in one entails change in the other. Such disorders are not to be dismissed as meaningless perturbations. In the terror visited on a self confronted with a rupture of the illusory separation of mind and world, they illustrate the internal relatedness of phases in mental process.

The sense of ownership is confirmed when the self feels detached from its own thoughts. The voices that speak to the schizophrenic, the thoughts that come to him from outside, the objects that take on psychic properties all reinforce the observation that inner and outer are outcomes of psychic process. In phantom limb, as in some forms of body agnosia, or stimulation of brain areas for movement and vocalization, bodily and psychic events may seem detached. Limb movement on excitation of motor cortex does not have volitional feeling. We have some idea of this experience from nocturnal jerks of the legs, when we are uncertain if movement is voluntary or spontaneous, i.e. self-generated or extrinsically induced. Such movements are like objects in relation to the self. The intermediate position of such phenomena – clearly endogenous but neither image nor object - accounts for their unreality, or the uncertainty of their psychic origin.

Dreams can be experienced in this way, as images inserted into the mind with the self a spectator. The passivity to dream and to certain forms of imagery results from the lack of self-image separation, due to incomplete actualization and a loss of volitional feeling. The sense of agency is the link from self to image in visual and auditory imagery, as in the verbal imagery of inner speech (Brown, 2008). The loss of agency in dream or hallucination deprives the self of the feeling that it generates the image so it feels assaulted or possessed by the image instead of producing it. The agency of inner speech or the preverbitum is transformed outward into an hallucinatory voice. A subtle interplay of such attitudes and feelings occurs in relation to image type and degree of objectification. In the controversial state of multiple personality, which colleagues assure me is a largely factitious condition, personalities are neither distinct nor uncoupled from the core self. A variety of conditions relating to the normal and pathological brain refute the non-self of philosophical writings and the Anatman theory of Buddhism, or as Danto put it, the notion of cravings without a craver. In exposing the fragility of belongingness, they erode arguments on external relations to objects and are clues to the nature (of the illusion) of the self.

Though some writers, e.g. McTaggart (1916), have argued that “the self is a substance with attributes”, it is widely accepted that the self is not a “thing” or substance, though this would explain its relative stability. A substantial self grows by accretion with extrinsic relations to acts and ideas that can be severed without consequence. While a self of internal relations seems anchorless, it has the stability of a category and the fluidity of relationality. Such a self is not detached from objects but ingredient. For the former, the feeling of ownership is problematic; for the latter, it is the feeling of detachment. These difficulties are bound up with the psychology of agency and receptiveness.

There are two categories of the self, a deep core or unconscious self aligned with values, implicit beliefs and character, and a liminal, conscious or empirical self that adapts to momentary needs and future expectations. One hears a person say, I was not myself, by which is meant the “I” or ego of a given situation did not reflect the underlying beliefs and values of the “me” or the core. That many search for the genuine self or sense of identity speaks to the intuition of an abiding core that underlies its varied manifestations. The distinction is embodied in the unconscious and timeless self of the “me”, and the conditional or temporal self of the “I”, one constant and authentic, another transient and adaptive; one that endures the change in events, another hostage to the passing scene. Yet there is no accepted account of core and empirical self, how they develop, their relation to mind or brain and the basis of identity.

Legend: The fine structure of the mental state. The core self is derived to the empirical self, which in turn leads to objects in the world. Corresponding with the object-development there is a transition from drive through desire to object value. The affect-charged category of the core self is the initial drive-representation. This is derived to conceptual feeling, then to object value. The transition from core to world is a continuum; the entire sequence constitutes a momentary mental state or an act of cognition. The correlation with forebrain anatomy has been discussed in prior works (see Brown, 1988 et seq.).

It is easier to deny the existence of the self than to explain its nature, or the mass delusion of its existence. Yet apart from psychological investigations of the development of the self in children, e.g. self-recognition, knowledge of private states or those of others, and apart from speculative treatises on self and subjectivity (e.g. Schelling, 1800/1978), there is little or no study of the intrinsic basis of self-development in relation to brain and other aspects of mentation. The self is often conceived as a metaphor for a unified collection of elements, reminiscent of Buddhist commentary on the identity of a chair, which exists as the category of parts that serve as categories for other parts. One property of the self is unity of experience, yet current thinking in psychology presumes a multiplicity of interconnected brain and psychic elements with unity the result of an extrinsic device for binding brain and mental events, such as a grandmother (command) cell or brain rhythm. On this view, multiplicity is unified by a neuron or set of neurons, or by a rhythm or oscillator entraining modules. These are extrinsic mechanisms that, like the old pineal theory, are presumed to bind a manifold of elements.

A process theory of the formative structure of the self in relation to categories in the mental state does not have the problem of an extrinsic function or device. The realization (Fig. 1) of unconscious core to a self conscious of images and the world, occurs over a series of category-item or whole-part shifts, each partition providing sub-categories for the next. The core arises as a simultaneous act-object, an incipient action organized about the axial musculature and a pre-object close to, or part of, the space of the body. This construct is activated in upper brain stem, hypothalamus and/or limbic system. The ethological concept of releaser captures the immediacy of the core to instinctual drive. The template is aligned with constructs inherited from animal mind, parsed by early learning to individuality.

The onset of a simultaneous (pre) action/perception differs from the sequential nature of reflex, as in a sensori-motor loop (Weiszacker, 1939/58). The simultaneous construct arising in the joints of brainstem reflex was proposed many years ago (Brown 1986), but the reflex model found the greater audience, expanding to the point of conceiving the mind as a complexity of reflex design.[2] The fundamental step in the appearance of mind out of reflex is replacement of seriality by simultaneity, with the core and its derivations surrounded by sensori-motor tiers (Fig. 2). The arousal of incipient mind in the internuncial pool of upper brainstem occurs as a primitive drive-representation, and continues into acts and objects in separate yet parallel and reciprocally-connected paths. This entails that modalities of perception are specified out of a synaesthetic multi-modal potential. The commonalty of action and perception prior to individuation is the source of the unity of later partitions. Consistent with the speciation of generic forms in evolution, unity at the onset distributes to diversity, which is an outcome, not a starting point.[3]

Legend: The core develops in the internuncial pool of brainstem reflex, shifting the closed loop of serial transition to simultaneous phases in act and object formation. The core individuates in parallel over endogenous phases in mind, surrounded by external, non-psychic tiers of sensory constraint and motor implementation.

The drive-representation of the core is a category of wide scope and little specificity Unconscious experience provides infrastructure for what the organism will become. Syncretic cognition in the juvenile is antecedent to mature thought (though not dream), and thus cannot be revived in waking consciousness. In the implicit beliefs and values, in the drives of self-preservation and in the effectuation in body space, the core is part of the body schema. In contrast, memories that can be revived, conscious values and beliefs, are not instigators of behavior but are in a more superficial relation to personality.

The “me” is the initial separation from the other. There are intermediate phases from the unconscious or implicit “me” of awareness to the “me” of conscious introspection. In the child, the “me” precedes the “I”. Does the “me” announce a division of child from world? Is the child’s “me” the whole of its subjectivity, i.e. the child as a person? Is it the beginnings of a self? The self-referential behavior of apes seems to say, “give that to me!” Before this, the subject is carved out to an increasing degree from its environment. The “isolation cry” of infant monkeys, correlated with mesial limbic-derived neocortex, a region associated in fMRI studies with self-referential behavior, is the rudiment of a primitive utterance… an ancestor of the self calling out, “help me”.

Does the core self of childhood inhabit the mature self, or is it erased and forgotten? The forgotten experiences and ingrained values of youth, the relation to others, animal knowledge and instinctual tendencies grow to configurations that guide adult behavior. The child is truly father to the man, for the mature self is latent in biases laid down in the juvenile brain. The healthy child is aligned with its destiny when it is striving to be an adult. The healthy adult feels what is authentic in character by not letting go of the child.

When the child says “I”, a new world appears. Does the “I” imply a self or is it a verbal gesture? The child needs no concept of other minds to call people by their names, or use the “you”. A person or an object seen in a “different light” – one says, with “new eyes” - is not seen again the same way. Once the first-person develops, it is not readily given up. Indeed, it grows stronger, fortified against every assault.

The “me” can give rise to many possible “I”s but the “I” of that moment is a commitment. We see a transition from the implicit unconscious to the conscious explicit in all areas of cognition, e.g. a word that individuates from the “mental lexicon”, a recollection from the “memory store”. We see the correlates of this dissociation (transition) in pathology, e.g. procedural learning in amnesics, perception in hemianopia, semantic priming, preserved inference in total aphasics. The transition from concept to object, store to item, lexicon to word, or unconscious to conscious, is not a transfer of like to like, as if the depth were a mere container. The transition of category to instance, or whole to part, occurs over a qualitative series of covert phases. Conscious particulars are not dormant constituents waiting for activation; they become what they are in a passage to the definite.

Thoughts come into the mind like objects, passively. Inner speech (verbal imagery) is often conceived as the principle constituent or derivation of the self, and a medium of thought. It can be experienced in relation to speech or speech perception, as something that happens to the self like an auditory perception, or as something the self does like a speech act (Brown, 2008). In the passive condition, inner speech is “heard” by the self rather than produced by it. If the phenomenon intensifies, it leads to auditory hallucination. In the active condition, inner speech seems like an arrested utterance (preverbitum) that is a product of the “I”. This “I”, identified with the conscious self or ego, is felt as an instrument of its agency.

The silent, “I feel, I want..” of inner speech is experienced as a unit. Like the “I” in “I think”, it does not fully convey the wholeness of self. One could think one thing and say or feel another. For the self, the “I” is prominent less in action than states of indecision. Every action delimits the self’s potential. What one says, except in states of strong belief or emotion, does not adequately satisfy the possibilities of self-realization. Even in states of strong emotion, when the self is not hindered by uncertainty, a person may apologize for an outburst, saying, “I don’t know what came over me”, as if the self is distinct from, and overcome by, its own emotions.

Such observations lead one to ask if the “I” is agent or constituent. How is an act or a statement “connected” to the self? A self that is strongly felt when words are not its medium implies that it is not identical with the inner flow of language. The self does not carry the whole force of the personality, but is an occasion of its employment. It is like asking, when I snap my fingers is my “whole self” behind the act. Rilke put this quandary well when he wrote, “I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action”.

What does it mean to say “deep down” someone is awful, nice, etc. We mean by this the bedrock of character in a person that action conceals and displays. We may sense a dissociation of character and conduct in a given situation, from which we infer a core self that is more enduring and authentic than its passing implementations. There are many possible selves in the passage from depth to surface and many possible worlds, but only so many forms of character. The greater the depth the more generic the core, even to community and humanity. The core exhibits individuality in tendency more than type, a tendency that strengthens in going to individuality. Desires (fears, etc.), then preferences and tastes are specific to the person. The derivation to consciousness, to conceptual-feeling, idea, image and affect, is a transition from category to particular.

The core is closer to what is innate than the conscious self, yet the distinction is unlike that of innate and acquired. The acquired is a progressive refinement of the innate. Sensation delimits the intrinsic force lines of embryogenesis (Pribram, 1991; Brown, 1990) that continue after birth in the mental state. What is “outside” mind never gets in but sculpts a psychic model. The external is simulated by limits placed on intrinsic pattern. Sensation constrains but does not enter this endogenous process.

The archaic gives the recent its force. The “must” of drive is the foundation of the mind/brain state, mitigated to the “perhaps” of interest. Feelings tend to be muted as objects actualize. Intense feeling can express depth and authenticity, or passionate vacuity. Feeling has “depth” when it involves the whole person. Genuine depth is inferred but not displayed in manifest feeling. Depth is tacit knowledge supporting consciousness, a conceptual or emotional breadth infused with intensity by which thought is filled and informed. Intensity and narrow range are more important than generality or scope. Wide knowledge gives understanding (wisdom) when learning is conceptual, coherent and organic. Elements added piecemeal give disunity and artifice. Depth is an ineffable fringe enriched from below by concepts, a tacit knowledge conveyed in silence, an ambiguity behind words that gives them power. Wittgenstein wrote that his thoughts took on their power not from the words but from a light shining on them from below.

Can we zero in more precisely on the core self? On the one hand, character is judged by conduct that includes verbal acts and gestures. On the other, accountability is subverted by justifications and excuses. When a person is angry we say he is frustrated or feels inadequate (unloved, etc.). Events in the life story as clues to understanding a behavior allude to sub-surface constructs that generate behavior. Traits are insinuated to comply with a past shaping a present, Disappointment gives way to joviality, anger to affection. Do we want to say the self is a collection of such moods?

Many a self that never materializes is latent in the core. One who only contemplates suicide may yet have the inclination. Some who have never contemplated suicide might kill themselves in adversity. What is conceived, considered, rejected, whatever goes into an idea, a feeling or a decision, issues from the “me” or core self. The “not-me” is not what is outside the “me” but what is alien to the “I”. The core self is grounded in the wholeness of organism. It is undecided what is outside the “me” since, like the unconscious, it has no posterior limit. The “I” partitions the core, setting the explicit self against the “non-I”, including in its potential all past and possible selves.

Much of the “non-I” is what is latent in the core. As the core crystallizes into a conscious self, other possible selves are bypassed or subdued. What survives is what is obligated by the situation. The core does not deliver any conceivable self, only what is permissible given the person’s habits, predispositions and experiences. The conscious self arises each moment out of an implicit struggle. At every phase in the transition to an object, alternative possibilities are eliminated by intrinsic (habit) and extrinsic (sensation) constraints on the actualization. The idea of a conscious veto is merely consciousness of constraints close to the termination.

Selves that survive into consciousness, as well as those unborn, have a share in the core. The share of a potential thought or feeling that has not yet been experienced is the ground of creativity and self-discovery. What are the limits of the unconscious self? The non-actual contributes to the fringe of character behind the self of the occasion. Does this background make contact with the universal or a frontier with nature?

The ever-present “I” is the dominant element of discourse; I think, I feel, and so on. Even a neutral statement such as “grass is green” implies, “I profess, believe, claim etc., that grass is green”. The self is the unacknowledged agent (or victim) for all personal events, which are its predicates. Thought is predicative. The self, or the topic of thought, is in the background since it is already known to the thinker (Vygotsky, 1962). The “I” precedes its predicate and is only included with it as a kind of endorsement. The self is quietly enlisted as a substrate in the subject-property or topic-action relation.

The self declares its individuality in carving out the person in relation to others. A subject requires an object. Selves require others for their own individuation. To be selfless is not to be without a self, but to revive the other in the self before it individuates. The reaching-out of genuine compassion begins with an exploration of the underpinnings of autonomy. Cobb (1973) writes, after Whitehead (PR 288), that all real togetherness is derived from the indefinable togetherness that is found in a single experience. Self and other are generated within the now of the present. In genuine compassion, the self is a predicate for the other. This is pronounced in visionaries, or in psychotics obeisant to their own images. Probably, some commotion in a life is necessary to give up striving and become the felt object of another person’s need.

Except in pathological conditions, behavior “attached” to the “I” can be cut off and the “I” remain intact. The “I”’s actions can be prevented, many beliefs can be attacked or modified without great sacrifice, the “I” can be disgraced, praised, condemned, undermined and undergo radical change, but it is not effaced unless its neural correlates are damaged. It it is difficult to imagine a person without an “I”, an ego. Even the most unselfish, broken or compassionate of individuals begins a sentence with “I …”

Systems of praxis such as Buddhism are based on giving up the “I”. Self-denial is a different order than dissolution. It is one thing to argue there is no self and quite another not to have one. Similarly, to think the world is illusion is one thing; to feel it is another. The disappearance of the “I” that is the goal of meditation (Brown, 2008a), could it be achieved, would leave a state of awareness in non-conscious mind. Some claim this mind is one with nature, and that the subject/world separation is lost. Loss of self is a return to lack of specification and autonomy. In meditation, the expansion of the present accompanies a dilation of the “I”, with loss of the consciousness of time-order. In a present without past or future, events are simultaneous. The simultaneity of an expanded now may recapture an awareness in which the self, external space and time order are undifferentiated. In the retreat from consciousness to awareness, concepts are said to be relinquished, but with no self, there is no consciousness of oneness. Perhaps the state is comparable to animal awareness.

To insist the self is illusory is to evoke the experience of non-self, not feel the absence of self. What sort of experience would this be? If I accept the illusion of self, what am I left with? A self that believes it is an illusion? If I am convinced my self is an illusion, what is there to take its place? The illusion of a self, conscious of being illusory would seem to arise on the intuition of something deeper, more genuine or real. The origin of the illusion of self has rarely been discussed, though along with the reality of the world, it is the most powerful illusion we have.

The self distinguishes the illusory and the real by comparing one illusory object with another, e.g. relating the self to objects or brain physiology, and asserting one of them as real (Brown, 2004a). But the “real” is an object of consciousness. It is perverse to treat the self as illusion and its objects as real. If an illusory self could not have knowledge of the real, objects perceived by an illusory self are also illusory (Vaihinger, 1924-1965). This depends on whether the real is equivalent to the non-illusory and if so, what reality takes the place of the illusion?

Consider brain and perception like a celluloid film and moving picture. The celluloid is felt to be more real than the movie because it does not represent something other than what it is, whereas events in the film have no actual correlates. We might think a documentary is more real than an ordinary film, but we are still looking at images, not “real” objects. Since all films (and objects) are images, it is not the imaginal or perceptual quality that counts for the unreality. There is a presumption that some mental objects – ideas more than dreams, words more than ideas, objects more than words - are more real than others, independent of whether or not the self is illusory.

The distinction of “I” and “me” is more on the order of actual and potential than knower and known (James, 1890). The knowing self – the liminal “I” at the threshold of consciousness - knows what it gives rise to. The subliminal “me” that remains beneath as potential for the “I” is unconscious and inaccessible, aligned with the tacit knowledge or capacity (competence) to know. The known self is not actually known, it is felt, intuited, sought after, even as it participates covertly in thought.

In spite of the ubiquity of the “I” and its desires (needs, hopes, fears, etc.), when one is asked what exactly is this “I”, the most common reaction is puzzlement or a description of what the person or others think the self is like. To say one is sad, conflicted, etc., is to announce a feeling or state of mind at a given moment; not describe the self. The statement, “I am sad”, means I have an experience of sadness, not “I have a sad self”. At most it implies that one (ordinarily transient) property of the self is sadness. The cogito has an agent and an action. It describes the agency and the felt connection to the act, but the agent – the “I” - is inferred from the activity of thinking. The point is, the “I” cannot be delved into or adequately defined beyond a description of its states.

If the “I” is obscure, the “me” is impenetrable. We get a sense of the effort to access the unconscious when a dream, and the self of that dream, fade on awakening. The dream lapses to the shadows leaving a bare intuition of what it may have been like. On waking, the person may say, “I was terrified (excited, happy, etc.). He may offer that “such and such was happening to me”. The “me” is not the self of the dream, which is passive. It is not the knowledge base postulated by James; not an active self or agent (see below). The existence of a core self, as with all unconscious events, is inferred from what becomes conscious. The existence of a core is based on the multiplicity of evanescent selves against a backdrop of a more constant character, and the tacit or unconscious beliefs and values that deposit the conscious self.

Such observations raise the question of the relation of psychic events to the terms used to describe them. Do terms create events or do events call up the terms? Do the terms point to events for which language is inadequate? Are they markers of development that help in the partition of the psyche? Do words such as “I”, “you” and “me” identify, label, reveal or delimit psychological states? Do they just serve linguistic roles? Is the other specified perceptually in the “you”, partitioned inferentially as a self with thoughts and feelings?

The self in dream

The dream of the Brahma is interrupted every so many years by brief episodes of awakening after which the Brahma again falls asleep and a new world begins. Does life consist of two dreams only one of which seems real? If a dream anticipates the waking perception of the other, am I foreshadowed in other people’s dreams? William James wondered if his dreams were getting mixed up with those of others. Freud also mentioned communication in dream. Sleep-talkers converse!

Dreams not only recur, they may have historical continuity similar to waking life. The core self, and its derivation to the self of dream, might be affected as much by events in the dream as those of waking experience. However, the passivity of the dream self does not usually allow for the interpretation of an event as an external assault. Dream is not felt to endure the accidents of life that make living so perilous. In waking, what others say or do has an impact. In dream we do not hold others responsible. If we are besieged by others in the dream it is not altogether clear their actions are volitional. We infer intent to others in a dream but if we are not ourselves agents, how can we dream that others are acting volitionally? It may be that agency accompanies the image outward, as in psychotics who are passive to an hallucinatory command. If one has no control over the events of a dream, how can others in the dream exhibit such control? Here we are at the boundary of purposiveness and intentionality (see below).

The dream self (see Revonsuo, 2005) differs from the waking self as an image from a perception. The feeling of passivity to an image shifts to a feeling of volition, and then to a fully independent object. As the object individuates, the passive self of dream transforms to the feeling of agency in wakefulness. The bifurcation out of the self to a “detachment” of objects, and agency on them, reflects a bias to perception or action. In the transition to consciousness, there is also an elaboration of serial time.[4] The dream has no past or future. The self may resemble that of an earlier time or a fantasy that is not temporally “tagged”. It is closer to the imagery of waking consciousness than the unconscious but it is not the “me” that underlies the conscious self. Unlike the self of the dream, the “me” of the core is unknowable. The dream self is closer to a conscious self but it lacks external objects to ground the flow of images. The images are perceived as external and real in the dream because there is no further exteriorization within which they are bundled or to which they can be compared.

The recurrent imagery of dream and myth and their common themes, symbols and modes of thought (e.g. Jung, 1928; Levy-Bruhl, 1985) imply the existence of unconscious archetypes. Does the core rise out of a common ancestral pool or is the family resemblance in ancestral pattern driven by innate schemas active to a varying degree in each person in the originating constructs? The pattern suggests that the generality of the schemata adapts to the locality of culture and experience in a journey from the inheritance of the animal core to the uniqueness of individual consciousness.

Without external objects, the self has a before and after, but no past or future, no time order, no agency. The before is truly past and no longer exists, while the past of memorial experience is the present content of a dream. Hallucination tends to be more vivid than waking objects. Similarly, the present of dream-imagination, in consequence of the lack of “real” objects, looms larger than the present of ordinary wakefulness. The dream-present is a knife-edge of change, lacking the duration that arches over successive events in waking consciousness. The conscious present has a revived past, or one in decay, to anchor the disparity between “memory” and “perception” that is essential to the virtual duration of the now. The theoretical significance of the dream is in showing how the simultaneity of the unconscious, and the before and after of the dream, anticipate the temporal order of the world. Dream is an intermediate phase that, without a perceptual surface, is a before and after or earlier and later, with a present filled by, but not in relation to, a personal past.

More than in waking life, the dream self swims in a soup of its own creation. We assume the content of dream reflects the thoughts and feelings of the dreamer, even if we do not attribute the character of the dream self to the core. The dream content and the dream self are interpreted as distorted products of the psyche. Like the dream image, the dream self is a content, not an agent or source. Psychoanalysis depends very much on this assumption. Fears, wishes and their symbolic distortions are thought to reveal the hidden nature of the self, as participant or onlooker. The self of the dream is equally conditioned by symbolic ancestry. In contrast, what one consciously perceives would not appear to tell us much, if anything, of the observer’s life. However, if the dream self and its images are preliminary to the conscious self and its objects, some thread of connectivity from imagination to perception should be evident. The objects we choose to look at or avoid are a guide to our interests and values, as is their meaning, which is imported into objects from antecedent phases in their formation. Creative imagery and aesthetic perception exploit this continuum.

To say, as Sartre did, by fiat rather than theory of mind, that a person is the sum of his acts, ignores the zone of privacy that underlies occasions of satisfaction. Even from the standpoint of moral conduct the account is wanting. Though trivial, it is more accurate to ascribe the core to a physiological ground from which the empirical self arises than to conceive it as the quantity of its outcomes. Moreover, the person is not on immediate display. One still has to infer the reasons, motives, feelings, conflicts, that lie behind an act.

A person is his existence, and existence is more than action. Existence embraces the becoming through which entities actualize. Entity-formation is becoming. The category (duration) over this formativeness is being. The objective or externalized segment of the mental state – an act or sequence of muscular excitations - is not the output of an assembly belt or production line. One does not dispense with the preceding stages once the final one is reached. Nor is an object assembled from the parts, which instead are the result of analysis to an objective goal. An act of cognition is an epoch with overt and covert phases, consisting of a formative sequence of rhythmic levels constrained to “physicalize” an event. Qualitative change in the dynamic of the act is no less part of the act than its perceptible outcome. Similarly, the antecedent events leading to the object are not causal phases that vanish when their work is over, but are ingredient in the mental state of which the object is an outcome.

We could say, a person is the sum of his states, the major portion of which is inaccessible even to him. Is this like saying the world is the sum of its states since the world began? Can we think of the world like the mind as an overlap of epochs rather than an accumulation of slices? To think otherwise reduces each slice to the minimal duration of, say, a chronon (Whitrow, 1972), ignores the change within duration and the process it conceals. The epoch of a state cannot be dissected to causal parts since the “parts” exist as parts of the whole of the epoch.

The conscious self is still early in the mental state; motility, speech, objects, are later, yet the state is an indivisible whole comprised of a totality of phases. The potential of the core, the thoughts, feelings and images of the conscious self, the final commitment in speech, action and perception, are “gathered together” in a single traversal from tendencies or dispositions to concrete particulars. The entire mental state is an atomic unit that includes conduct, the inner life, and its antecedents in thought, dream and the unconscious.

Self and category

The description of states of the conscious self gives a narrative of character and needs. The saga of a life is an irresistible tale, especially to the one who lives it. The personal history, the stacking of episodes and their mutations, creates the category of a continuous self. The repeatability of the category in overlapping pulses (James, 1890; Brown, 2004) contributes to the self-identical nature of personality across events. In this way the identity of a categorical self is preserved over successive acts of cognition.

The relation of the “me” to the “I”, the core to the liminal self, can also be compared to that of concept to object. A concept gives rise to, and can be inferred from, the properties of an object. Similarly, the attributes of the self are inferred from its actions, as the properties of a horse constitute the defining features of the concept of “horseness” The term horse makes explicit the concept behind it, which becomes still more explicit with a particular horse. A concept is derived from a category, ultimately from categorical primes in the core. The self-concept, like other concepts, incorporates experiential, perceptual and meaning relations. Concepts are richer and less factual than objects, and for the ordinary person less real (e.g. Collingwood, 1924).

The category of the core delivers the self and conceptual feeling as sub-categories. Consequent derivations are tributaries in a categorical “structure”. Inner and outer events – thoughts and acts/objects – are implementations of concepts that issue from the core. Consider a table as an exemplary piece of furniture. A lamp is in the same category (furniture) but a less familiar example. The identity of the self is like that of a prototypical item in a category of possible states. The habitual self recurs in this wider category that “contains” potential archetypal (unconscious) selves given the experiential history of the individual. The most representative or prototypical (conscious) self is the most common derivative, or exemplar, for that individual. The habitual or dominant self contrasts with its less familiar or atypical manifestations, as a table does with a lamp, including aggressive, romantic, foolish, impulsive, spiritual, and other selves that are possible given the person’s capacities and experiences. The dominant self is replaced by an atypical self at the category boundary in a state of intoxication, hypnosis, religious conversion or pathology. Should an unfamiliar self recur at the expense of the prototypical self, it gradually becomes an habitual mode of expression. The new self then forms the nucleus of a novel category and can rightly be said to be the self of a new person.

In a similar way, a peripheral member of a category (furniture) such as a lamp can become the center of another category, such as a source of illumination. The new category forms around the boundary item and excludes members of the former category for novel objects such as lightning and the sun. When the self undergoes a radical shift, it incorporates attributes appropriate to the new personality, retaining some vestiges of the prior self in over-learned skills and traits of character.

Categories are not containers into which like items are placed, but involve inter alia complex aspects of space and time. In one sense a category can be said to be timeless, for it remains essentially unchanged with respect to its inclusion criteria, even as novel members are added. A new animal or plant that is discovered or manufactured must respect the properties of membership to remain in the category, or it will form another category at the boundary of the old one.

While a category can be conceived as timeless, concrete existents in the category will vanish as do all particulars. However, as tokens of those particulars, i.e. as sub-categories, they too can be said to persist as timeless representatives of their types. If the abstract category is timeless, the core and conscious self, as prototypical exemplars of the person, are conditioned on the time and space they generate, and on which they depend. The categorical self of a person might be construed as timeless, ideal or immortal for those individuals whose attributes or accomplishments are remembered. Yet even for those innumerable others who are forgotten, it is the timelessness of the category that inspires the belief that individuals persist after death as souls, or as ideas in god’s mind. Since the self undergoes natural and pathological change and final extinction, it would seem that only in the realm of spirit can it be construed as ideal or eternal.

Time and space are specified out of the core: space as objects grow out of concepts, time as duration is incremented by events. Time penetrates space in the virtual duration of events, space penetrates time in the fiction of changeless existents. The unity and tension of the temporal and spatial is the relation of the dynamic to the static. We also see this in the choice of an object or event ontology (Brown, 2005a), in the contrast of duration and instantaneity, or of change and stability.

Subjective time develops in a transition from the simultaneity of the core to temporal order in the world. Inwardly, time is counted in duration, externally in increments. Temporal order is realized as the unity of the core objectifies into the multiplicity of the world. The simultaneity of duration is “unpacked” into an event-manifold. A global pre-object distributes a succession of perceptual events. The actualization of entities is the aim of a unidirectional process of self-realization. In mind, self-actualization realizes event-categories at the outer (external) pole of the subjective.

In this temporal realization, space transforms outward over levels on an axis from the body through the immediate surround to an independent world. The intrapsychic space of the vegetative life is preliminary to the extra-personal but intrapsychic, egocentric space of dream, which itself is preliminary to an independent Euclidean space of object-relations. The self cannot survive without object-space and event-time. It rapidly degrades when objects are lost, as in sensory deprivation or snow blindness. The corollary of a loss of objects is a failure in self-realization. This is striking in cases with destruction of the visual and auditory areas of the brain, when the waking self regresses to that of dream or psychosis (Brown, 1999). The duration required for events to be perceived as stable objects is also the basis for the perception of events. The persistence of an object over some minimal duration to be perceived for what it is entails a recurrence within successive nows. A tree that exists for a millisecond is not perceived at all. Sustained recurrence creates objects, novelty in the recurrence creates events. All objects are events in which change (recurrence) is more or less imperceptible.

Duration is the “glue” of continuity that carves events out of flux. Time is not a uniform flow but a replacement of changing objects across intervals, themselves changeless, thus non-existent. The continuity of the self, of inner and outer, and the recognition of sameness or difference, owes to the overlap in a succession of present moments. Specifically, the overlap of the present (now) in the replacement of a categorical self and its objects is the basis for the near-identity of recurrences. The scenario of incessant change with relative stability of inner and outer is comprehensible in terms of categories sufficiently flexible to accommodate deviance and sufficiently habitual to cancel brief atypical replications.

[1] An attempt to describe an imageless phase in thought was the programme of the Wurzburg school of psychology.

[2] Since the seminal work on reflex by Sherrington, Cajal, Herrick and others, the synaptic model, in which A connects to B, B to C, and back to A, has provided a theoretic framework for the study of complex systems in mind/brain; even now, it is a distant cousin to box and arrow diagrams and circuit boards. Yet some of its most distinguished disciples, e.g. Eccles (1970) have argued that cognition is more likely explained by field or wave effects than all-or-none excitation and inhibition on the model of the synapse.

[3] Does the uniformity of the core relate to still deeper Jungian archetypes from which all individualities develop?

[4] See McTaggart (1934/1968) on the A and B time series