In 20 minutes Susan Blackmore runs through her theory of the self as illusion, uses some basic neuroscience to back it up and concludes that we’re not the same person from one minute to the next. I can’t be the only person to hear this and think that its absurd. While we can all admit that we all change, I am by no means the same person today that I was when I was five, but to say that today I’m not the same person I was yesterday is a bit more than can easily be swallowed.

Her analysis of the relevant neuroscience is accurate and does make her thesis a bit more plausible. As she states, there is no one place in the brain where our experience is put all together as one whole. One part of the brain translates light in our eyes into images. Another part converts sound waves into sounds we hear. There is no point in the brain that we can point to with certainty and say that is where the “self” is formed; that’s where our experiences come together, that’s where our actions are decided; that is the part of the brain responsible for self. It doesn’t exist and strongly supports Blackmore’s argument that Self is an illusion.

She takes a step too far though when she insists that self is illusion because the self changes moment to moment. While brain chemistry may change moment to moment we can not conclude that the self does as well. In fact, this assertion discredits her previous argument that the self was an illusion because it didn’t exist in the brain. If our illusion of self were changing moment to moment then it wouldn’t sound like such a strange idea to us when she first states it. In fact, she wouldn’t need to defend that stance if it were actually the human experience for the self to change so frequently.

She comes around to the idea of the ever changing self by beginning with the question, “are you conscious?” and asking people to ask themselves this question on a regular basis. She describes a sensation of becoming conscious and eventually decided that the self that became conscious today is not the one that became conscious yesterday. She states that our idea of the self as a unified, continuous experiencer is false, but I would have to disagree. One has to already, in some sense of the word, be conscious in order to ask the question, am I conscious. The sense of becoming conscious that she describes is not simply becoming conscious in general but rather becoming conscious, or you might say aware, that you are conscious. At this point in her lecture she begins to speak about mindfulness but I can’t help but think that she hasn’t read much work on the subject since I have and what I have just stated is much more along that line of thought then her theory which she claims is in line with it.

This idea of the ever changing self is not truly one of mindfulness. I have studied and practiced mindfulness and meditation for a while now and have never come across this idea in any of the works on the topic that I have reviewed. To make a conscious effort to be self-aware does not translate into being aware of a different self every time one becomes aware. In fact, the goal is to hold this sense of awareness for as long as possible which would be an impossible task if the self were not a continuous thing.

As a student of philosophy also I feel the need to point out one over-arching flaw in Blackmore’s argument. Her biggest piece of evidence for her theory is neuroscience. In her description of the science she is using as evidence she clearly states that there is no place in the brain responsible for self and given the scientific facts that is indisputable. However, she then assumes that the self cannot be a unified or continuous thing because our experiences aren’t unified in the brain. If self is not in the brain then we cannot base our ideas about self on how the brain works.

Since we all have a sense of self we can assume it is a real thing, even if we concede Blackmore’s point that it is an illusion, it is still real to each individual. If we say this thing we all have is not in the brain then it follows that it must be located somewhere else. We can guess that this “somewhere else” is also where other things we all perceive but can’t find in the brain are such as a sense of morality, sense of faith, etc. It would also be easy to argue that this “somewhere else” is where we get the things that make us human and separate us from other animals. All animals have a brain but as far as we know only humans have a sense of self, an overwhelmingly strong sense of justice, faith, and the ability to think critically and reason about abstract ideas. All these things are shared experiences of humans and not all brain possessing animals. They are also the things that remain relatively the same in us even though we change overall as we age. I would argue that this “Somewhere else” is the “Self” Blackmore has disregarded as illusion and ever changing. It’s what some might call the soul and others the mind. What is clear is that it does exist and is not part of the brain.

Perhaps Blackmore should not have been so quick to completely discard Cartesian dualism…