You are a self: the kind of thing that is a who, with all the dignity and responsibility afforded by that status, the kind of thing that has a distinctive perspective on events—on your past as you remember it, your future as you anticipate it, and your present as you experience it. Your grasp of the concept of the self allows you to think about all this and whatever else might make you unique, whether that is your distinctive personality, your social relations, or a characteristic stock of beliefs, drives, and intentions that constrain and enable you to make a difference in the world. However, despite the many and various familiar ways in which your concept of the self figures in your mental life, it is surprisingly difficult to settle the question of what the self actually is. Its fundamental nature remains as disputed today as it did in ancient times. Moreover, the sheer range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists studying “the self” raises questions about whether the self is a single thing, or, indeed, whether it is merely a fiction that serves a useful role in organizing thought.

History

The self is an ancient and abiding concern, tying together a broad range of themes across philosophical and modern scientific traditions (Sorabji, 2006). One notable theme is the question of whether selves are fundamentally immaterial (or spiritual or incorporeal). Plato, for instance, argued that the self must be pre-existent at birth and survive the body’s death (Robinson, 2002). Descartes famously thought that in his access to his own mental activity, he had proof of his own existence as a thinking thing, conveying this in the argument known by the phrase ego cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am (Descartes, 1644/2010). As he could conceive of himself as a self without his body, in his view, this demonstrated the fundamental distinction between the two (Descartes, 1639/2017). Although no longer commonly endorsed by philosophers, many still find the idea that we are fundamentally distinct from our bodies intuitive (Berent, 2023; Bloom, 2003; Chudek et al., 2018), including prominent neuroscientists of the 20th and 21st century such as John Eccles (Eccles & Popper, 1984) and Stan Klein (Klein, 2014).

Another notable theme is the unity (or disunity) of the self. To account for mental conflict and differences in personality, Plato suggested that the self was an uneasy unity of separate sources of psychological activity (Brown, 2012). In recent history, especially with the emergence of psychology as a discipline, research on the self has been less concerned with unity but rather with a differentiation between different forms of self. William James’ distinguished between the material self made up of an individual’s physical attributes and possessions, the social self defined by social relations, and the spiritual self made up of thoughts and streams of experiences (James, 1890). However, three forms of self is relatively modest as things go. In an influential article, Neisser argued that there are at least five essentially different selves: the ecological self (of perception and action), the interpersonal self (of social interaction), the extended self (of memories and expectations), the private self (of “inner” experiences), and the conceptual self (of beliefs and theories about oneself based on social and personal narratives; Neisser, 1988). In one exchange published at the end of the 20th century, there were roughly 26 different notions of self in play (Strawson, 1999).

Core concepts

Minimal selfhood

Despite the variety of thoughts you may entertain and experiences you may enjoy or suffer, each of these thoughts and experiences are presented for you. For some theorists, observations such as this implicate a form of selfhood, the minimal self, as the common element in any adequate description of conscious mental life (Zahavi, 2005).

Although some reject the theoretical and phenomenological basis for the notion of a minimal self (e.g., Alweiss, 2022), it has been used extensively in recent research in cognitive science. Psychiatrists have employed the notion as a means of conceptually unifying schizophrenia spectrum disorders and distinguishing them from other mental disorders (Parnas & Henriksen, 2019). It has also been associated with the function of the default mode network—a network spanning the frontal and parietal lobes that is active during wakeful rest—and has formed an important part of theories of self-consciousness in conditions of unresponsive wakefulness (Lane, 2020). Some theorists distinguish between two modalities of self-consciousness pertaining to minimal selfhood: the sense of ownership of an individual’s experiences and the sense of agency over actions (Gallagher, 2000).

Narrative selfhood

Focus on the most basic form of self-consciousness might seem to miss what makes you distinctive, what make you who you are. For many researchers, narrative is a concept that is especially useful in capturing this as a drawing together of events characterizing the life of what is sometimes called a narrative self (Gallagher, 2000; McLean, 2008).

There is a broad recognition amongst theorists that narratives play important roles in how people think about themselves. In social psychology, narratives are seen as fundamental to your sense of the coherence, continuity, and meaning of your life (McLean, 2008). Philosophers have focused especially on how narratives can serve as rationalizations for actions and the basis for attributing responsibility to yourself (Schroeder, 2022). However, a notable divide amongst theorists concerns the reality of the self reflected in such narratives (Velleman, 1996; Schechtman, 2011). A line of thought running from Buddhist to contemporary philosophy and psychology is that the idea of the self is a useful fiction—useful because it ties together an understanding of otherwise meaningless events made meaningful by your presence as the protagonist, but a fiction because it is an entity invented to fulfill this role (Dennett, 1992; Siderits, 2016).

Bodily selfhood

There is also a common sense answer to the question of what you are: you are the creature in front of the screen reading this text, a thing that is now thinking about a snack and (hopefully) capable of digesting it, a thing that gradually changes its size and is capable of (rather more swiftly) changing its location—in short, you are a bodily self (Bermúdez, 2018; de Vignemont & Alsmith, 2017).

There are two very different ways of developing the notion of bodily selfhood found in the philosophical literature. One approach, associated heavily with the phenomenological tradition, insists that your embodiment is a presupposition of your conscious life, as it shapes its essentially subjective structure (Wehrle & Doyon, 2023). This approach is generally hostile to the common sense idea that, as a body, you are an object amongst other objects in the world (Merleau-Ponty, 2002; Sartre, 1943/1992). By contrast, many analytic philosophers of the late 20th century connect the body’s psychological significance to its nature as a physical object (Bermúdez et al., 1995). The guiding idea is that the ability to be aware of oneself as a subject is intertwined with awareness of an objective world (Bermúdez, 1998; Cassam, 1997). Your bodily nature provides a distinctive set of possibilities and limitations that enables you to perceive objects as parts of an objective reality and, simultaneously, to be aware of yourself as an object within that world (Evans, 1982; Strawson, 1966).

Questions, controversies, and new developments

The unity of the self

The material self, social self, spiritual self, ecological self, interpersonal self, extended self, private self, conceptual self, minimal self, narrative self, bodily self: clearly, cognitive scientists have a tendency to posit forms of selfhood in accordance with salient distinctions among “self” phenomena—that is, phenomena that seem readily understood in terms of the notion self (80 of which are taxonomized by Thagard & Wood, 2015). Are these different forms of selfhood each different selves or merely aspects of a single self? The question is more pressing when one takes it personally, so to speak—is there a single you with many aspects, or are there as many of you as there are forms of selfhood?

Some philosophers boldly argue that the different ways we have of thinking of ourselves (e.g., in thinking about our continued existence, our character, our responsibility for our actions) need not pick out a single thing (Velleman, 1996). A similar claim is sometimes made by psychologists (Neisser, 1988) and neuroscientists (Klein, 2010). However, it is unclear how such claims are supposed to be supported by empirical evidence. Those who have attempted to make an empirical case do so on the basis of dissociations between different kinds of memory systems (Klein, 2010; Neisser, 1988). At best, what this shows is that there are distinct mechanisms subserving various ways you have of thinking about yourself. It is not obvious what value there is in making the further claim that these ways of thinking about yourself pick out distinct selves.

A diagnosis of the problem here may be that much cognitive scientific research on the self treats the term as a way of referring to a special form of mental representation (or a complex of such forms). For instance, much neuroscientific research on minimal selfhood is really research on structured models of the environment relative to the organism, sometimes called minimal self-models (Limanowski & Blankenburg, 2013). Much social psychological research on narrative selfhood is really research into the ways in which narratives determine the content and role of a mental representation referred to as a self-concept (Baumeister, 1999; Markus & Wurf, 1987; McLean, 2008). Similarly, cognitive psychological research on bodily selfhood is really research on forms of mental representation of the body, such as the body image or body schema (Longo, 2017). Accordingly, when cognitive scientists claim that your self is not unified, what they may be highlighting are the differences between the many ways of mentally representing yourself.

The reality of the self

It is worth distinguishing between the claim that the concept of self is in some way misleading and the claim that selfhood itself is not a feature of reality. For instance, philosophers (e.g., Metzinger, 2003), psychologists (e.g., Hood, 2012), and psychoanalysts (e.g., Engler, 2003) have variously claimed that the self is an illusion. This leaves open the possibility that further inquiry might reveal what selves truly are —to our great surprise, perhaps. Similarly, it is sometimes claimed that there is a naïve or folk idea of the self and that nothing in reality answers to that description; this leaves open the possibility that naïve or folk ideas have simply mislead us about our nature.

By contrast, to argue that the self is not real, one must target a specific set of ideas about the fundamental nature of the self, perhaps developed from naïve or folk ideas as a starting point (Metzinger, 2011). For instance, one source of skepticism about the reality of the self is a reaction to the idea that the self must be a substance (an idea closely associated with Plato and Descartes), a technical term which suggests a fundamental and independent element of reality. If selves are conceived as substances in this sense, then there are various ways of arguing that selves do not exist: one could argue that they are not fundamental—perhaps they depend upon neurocomputational processes (Metzinger, 2003)—one could argue that that they are not independent—perhaps they are a product of social interaction (Hood, 2012)—or one could even argue that there are no fundamental and independent elements of reality—a view held variously by Buddhists (Siderits, 2016) and some philosophers of physics (Ladyman & Ross, 2007).

Broader connections

Understanding the nature of the self has implications for various fields, ranging from psychology and neuroscience to metaphysics. The notion of selfhood is inherently connected to the notion of self-consciousness [see Self-Consciousness]. Much research on the self in psychology and neuroscience is focused on how memory systems subserve the different ways in which you can think about yourself across time. Technological advancements such as virtual reality provide opportunities for developing and maintaining very rich conceptions of yourself that may be seemingly distinct from but yet connected to your material reality [see Virtual Reality]. Many find compelling the idea that the self is fundamentally immaterial, and this is part of what makes the mind–body problem so difficult [see The Mind-Body Problem].

Further reading

• Gallagher, S. (Ed.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of the self. Oxford University Press.

• Hood, B. (2012). The self illusion: How the social brain creates identity. Oxford University Press.

• Schechtman, M. (2024). The self: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

• Sorabji, R. (2006). Self: Ancient and modern insights about individuality, life, and death. Oxford University Press.