Self And Self-illusion

In our personal daily experience,we perceive our self as a unitary independent pole agent and we feel that we are the owner and initiator of our bodily experience and actions.From Descartes to the advocators of the substance theory of the self,efforts trying to find or prove the existence a real unitary independent substantial self have continued.In contrast,the inability to find a particular neural substrate of the self has tempted some researchers to doubt that there is a self and some suggest that our sense of self is a complete illusion.However,neither of these two extreme views-either the self is a real,independent thing or there is no self at all——will work.The former cannot provide solid evidence for the existence of the self as an entity while the latter is not able to explain why such an illusion could persistently and stably exists in everyone's experience.Confronted with such dilemma,constructivism of the self criticizes both extreme views and points beyond them into a new direction suggesting that the self is neither a thing or an entity nor an illusion,but may rather be a process.It is an ongoing process that enacts an "I" and in which the "I" is no different from this process itself.The idea that self is a construction of a process could be defended from multiple levels,such as biological,psychological,and social levels.However,at all of them bodily self is the most basic and fundamental aspect.As phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher pointed out,what we are looking for is something that is basic,direct or original enough that we are willing to call "self".Therefore in order to understand how the self has been constructed,we need to understand how such minimal self has been constructed.While understanding the construction of minimal self inevitably needs to emphasize the deconstruction and construction that happened to bodily self.And the research of bodily self,either in phenomenology or cognitive science,is actually the investigation of sense of ownership and sense of agency.Sense of ownership refers to the sense that I am the one who is the owner of a movement or undergoing an experience.And sense of agency refers to the sense that I am the one who is causing or generating an action.These two experiences have been considered crucial in the process of our self-recognition and they constitute the experience of minimal conscious self.The most ideal way to investigate sense of ownership and sense of agency would be compare conditions in which these two distinct experiences do or do not exist.We would thus need cases from neuropathology where sense of ownership or sense of agency is disturbed,from which we can see the deconstruction of sense of ownership and sense of agency,and then understand the importance of these two experiences for the stable and unitary sense of self.We also need illusion experiments from cognitive science studies in which sense of ownership and sense of agency have been manipulated,from which we can see the construction of sense of ownership and sense of agency,and then understand how the self will be constructed as a process.After introducing studies from neuropathology and illusions,this paper will discuss two experiments.They were designed and performed in a virtual reality environment based on the logic of the rubber hand illusion.The first experiment showed how the sense of ownership over virtual hand is moderated by context-induced spatial reference frames as well as the possible process and mechanism of sense of ownership,which suggests the distinction between self and non-self may be flexible and the body image as the basis of self-recognition might also be plastic.The second added the motor factor into the design,and investigated how sense of ownership and sense of agency could be manipulated and how they can further affect emotions,such as anxiety,which demonstrates the dissociation and interaction between sense of ownership and sense of agency and implies some relationships between minimal self and narrative self.We only studied a small part of self-related problems,but through the construction of sense of ownership and sense of agency,especially interactions between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms,we can understand the construction theory better.Finally,based on all the above work,this thesis provides an argument for the constructive perspective of the self:1.The self is a construction of components.The minimal self consists of sense of ownership and sense of agency,which are dissociative but intimately connected,whose interactions guarantee the presence of the minimal self in a stable and unitary way.2.The self is a construction of structures.There are different levels in both sense of ownership and sense of agency,from the low awareness level to the high meta-representational level.In the framework of the predictive coding model,probabilistic representations act as a top-down influence on expectations explaining away bottom-up prediction errors so as to maintain the unity of sense of self.3.The self is a construction of processes.The constructive process of self obeys the rule of free-energy principle,which suggests in order to minimize surprise,the brain maintains stability by updating probabilistic representations.In other words,the brain estimates whether the possibilities of different states are high or low all the time,and keeps them in a balanced way,so that the likelihood that a rubber hand is "me" increases during the illusion while the likelihood that one's own body is"me" will decrease.The process that brain tries to minimize surprise is a dynamic estimating process,and the self is just constructed during such a process.This thesis tries to provide a defense for the construction theory of the self from an interdisciplinary perspective.However,we realize now such philosophical-scientific approach is still at its very early stage characterized by the continuous run-in of macroscopic philosophical analysis and microscopic empirical investigation.We need continual interaction and cooperation between philosophy and science to achieve a full-fledged understanding of bodily,psychological,social and cultural self.