Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

by Jay L. Garfield

Just so, a plethora of subconscious perceptual and cognitive processes can jointly generate the representation of unitary objects in a unified experiential field. There is no need for their interaction to be integrated or managed in any single neural or cognitive structure. Indeed, this is precisely how the brain appears to work. The fact that the field and the objects in it are experienced in introspection as unified does not entail that this unity is achieved by a unified subject of consciousness, any more than the fact a legislature passes a single bill entails that there is a single legislator, no more than the fact that a student earns a single degree entails that she was taught only by a single teacher. It entails only that there is a set of processes robust and integrated enough to create a single manifold of experience. An organism may be necessary for this task, but not a self. So, even the unity of experience would not entail the existence of a unified subject of experience; nor does a unified object presuppose a unified subject. This shows that the inferences in both the argument from the unity of the subject and in the argument from the unity of the object fail to establish the reality of the self.