Imagine what it would be like to hold the unshakable conviction that you are dead, or that a functioning body part attached to you is not part of you, as if your very essence or, in religious terms, your "soul," didn't extend into that body part. Imagine that conviction is as rock solid as your own conviction that you, and what you regard as your body, really do exist as a unified entity that constitutes a self to which you're referring when you use the words I or me. Difficult to imagine, no?
For those confused by the term, I would describe the self as that sense of conviction, across time and situation, that you are one and the same essential entity. This holds true even as the contents of your mind, your accumulating experiences, your body and your abilities may change dramatically. You are still you, no matter what changes occur in your mind and your body.
Of course, in the act of using the words you and yours in the description above, I'm guilty of begging the question, presupposing that everyone reading this intuitively feels that they are such an entity or self, and that we all know what that means. But we also use expressions like "I'm not myself," or "he's not himself," and we may describe someone with advanced dementia by saying: "that's not him" or "he's no longer there." So we also have a sense that this essential entity that exists through dramatic changes in composition can also be disrupted.
Really, the problem of nailing down the notion of "self" is as much a philosophical problem, as it is a psychological conundrum. We can come up with different slants in our understanding and attempt various definitions, but there is always something elusive about the concept of the self.
In the podcast posted below, NPR's Terry Gross interviews journalist Anil Ananthaswamy, whose book, The Man Who Wasn't There, investigates the underpinnings of the sense of self through a discussion of dramatic examples of disrupted selfhood, with particular attention to the neurological substrates of the self.
I award this podcast five stars for a thought-provoking discussion.
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