When we act, we feel "I am leading these actions", and I am their source and initiator. When we accept experiences, no matter how different their contents are, they all seem to be presented in a "center" in a unified way. When we look back on the past and look forward to the future, we will feel that we are continuing in time. The rich experience and history preserved in memory are regarded as "my experience" and "my history", thus becoming a whole. It is the above phenomenon that makes people tend to believe that behind all our experiences, actions and history, there is a "center" and "headquarters" of the spiritual world-all experiences meet here, all actions are issued from this, all thoughts are generated from this, and all personal memories are unified here, which is "self".
Because people have a very strong intuition about the reality of self in daily life, this position has been supported and developed by many scholars in the field of philosophy. Among them, Descartes is the most representative. Descartes took "I think, therefore I am" as the first principle of his philosophy, established the reality of self, and then regarded self as an independent "spiritual entity", which supported and occupied all our thinking and psychological states and controlled our bodies. ([1], pages 3-4)
In addition to playing an important role in philosophical discussion, "self" is also an extremely important concept for many related empirical disciplines. For example, in the study of personality psychology, "so-and-so is an introvert" and "so-and-so is a self-centered person" on the premise of the existence of "self". Developmental psychology directly takes the development of "self" as an important research object. Social psychology also inevitably needs to borrow the concept of "self" to discuss topics such as self-esteem, self-deception, and the relationship between self and others and society.
However, whether in history or in recent years, there are always many scholars who deny the reality of self. They declared that "ego is just an illusion". In the next part, this paper will introduce several representative anti-realism views about self.
Second, anti-realism about self.
1. Hume's anti-realism
In the theory of human nature, Hume systematically examined people's cognitive ability and reflected on "self". In Hume's view, the so-called "self" is just a bundle of perception bound by imagination, which is a kind of fiction. ([2], p. 284)
According to the self-concept of "common sense-Descartes", "self" is continuous and unchangeable in time, and it is also the subject of any current experience. Hume questioned these two views.
To understand Hume's self-theory, we first need to review his position of empirical epistemology. Like all modern empiricists, Hume believes that experience is the source of all human knowledge, including the knowledge about "self". All human experiences gained through cognitive ability are called "perception" by Hume. The basic unit of perception is called "impression". Impression is divided into "sensory impression" and "reflective impression". Among them, the former is primitive and directly obtained through sensory stimulation, while the latter is the product of thinking directly or indirectly operating the former. All experiences are present experiences.
Hume's investigation of self begins with the question: If the self is the same as people imagine, what is the basis of this same self in experience? Hume's answer is: there is no basis or principle that can guarantee that a self lasts for the same time. Hume's thought can be roughly reconstructed into such an argument:
If we are not sure whether the ego is the same in time, can we settle for the second best, at least confirm that the ego exists as the subject behind these experiences in any current experience? The answer given by Hume is still no.
As far as I am concerned, when I feel the so-called self deeply, I will always encounter some special feelings, such as cold or hot, bright or dark, love or hate, pain or joy, and so on. At any time, I can't catch an unconscious person myself ... ([2], p. 282)
From the standpoint of empiricism, we can always experience various concrete experiences. No matter how much we tend to think that there is a subjective self behind these experiences, it can never be directly presented in the experience.
In this regard, Hume came to the conclusion that the ego is just a "bundle of perception" linked by human imagination, which is a kind of fiction. Although Hume regards self as a kind of fiction based on imagination, he still admits that it is a very useful fiction. Just like causality, the fiction of self can help people's life practice. ([2], p. 284)
Hume's theory of self is generally called "the theory of self". In his view, there is no "self" outside concrete experience. On the contrary, it is "bound" by various experiences, has no independent basis, and only comes from imagination and fiction.
2. Anti-realism from the research results of brain science
The important position of the concept of "self" and the rapid development of brain imaging technology in recent decades have made more and more empirical scientists take exploring the physiological mechanism behind self as their research goal. In short, they want to find their place in the brain. Different from Descartes, contemporary psychologists and neuroscientists seldom take Descartes' "spiritual entity" seriously, but many of them agree with Descartes' "headquarters self" intuition from common sense. They hope to find a special functional area in the brain that plays the role of "headquarters". All information is gathered here, all orders are issued from here, and a unified "self-awareness" is also produced here. When we found this headquarters, we found ourselves in the brain.
At first, this work seems to be progressing smoothly, and a large number of achievements are constantly emerging. However, people soon found that these achievements did not really help us to position ourselves, but made people feel confused.
Tilo Kircher and others found that autobiographical memory, personal beliefs, self-face recognition and other self-related cognitive abilities are closely related to the activities of the left hemisphere. ([3], pp. 133- 144) On the contrary, Steven Platek and others declared: "More and more evidence shows that self-related information (such as autobiographical memory, self-face recognition and theory of mind) is related to the activities of the right frontal cortex". ([4], pp.8 1-85), while the sense of self-continuity and unity, agency and body-centered perspective seem to be produced in the medial prefrontal cortex. ([5], pp. 1938- 1945) Recently, researchers also found that the activities of the prefrontal cortex are often related to people's reflection and evaluation of themselves. ([6], pp. 440-457)
In an important review, neuroscientists Seth Gillihan and Martha Farah, after summarizing a lot of research on the neural mechanism of "self" for decades, found that brain functional areas related to "self" are extremely widely distributed in the brain-"self" seems to be everywhere in the brain (Figure1(. Page 94) The original intention of related research is to find a specific functional area corresponding to the "self" in the brain, and this conclusion of "ubiquitous" implies that there is no such special area in the brain at all, and it does not exist.
A summary of brain imaging research on self-correlation phenomenon
This conclusion seems to support Hume's self-doubt: there is no reality in the self itself, it is a by-product of the symphony of decentralization in the brain, and no matter how real it looks, it is just an illusion.
3. Dennett's anti-realism
Among contemporary philosophers who hold anti-realism self-view, Daniel Dennett is the most representative. Like Hume, Dennett's self-theory is based on the criticism of common sense-Descartes' self-view. Different from Hume, Dennett made more use of the results of empirical research besides philosophical reflection.
Dennett summed up the common sense-Descartes' self-concept with a very vivid concept-"Descartes' Theater". ([8], p. 10 1) According to Descartes' self-concept, there seems to be a theater in the center of the brain, which plays all kinds of information summarized from outside or inside. Sitting in front of this screen is a "little man" watching all this. This little man is himself. Based on the achievements of contemporary empirical scientific research, Dennett resolutely opposes the idea that there is a center in the brain that brings everything together.
As a substitute of Descartes Theatre, Dennett put forward his "multiple draft mode". According to Dennett's "multiple draft model", the brain is a highly parallel and decentralized information processing system. All external stimuli and psychological activities are simultaneously modified, processed and explained by multiple lines. The so-called "draft" means that only a few of all these processed contents can "win" in the competition and present them. The remaining "drafts" will either disappear soon or be preserved to prepare for the future process. There is no "headquarters" to summarize and select all the information, but a "free competition" mechanism dominates them. ([8], pp. 253-254)
After rejecting Descartes' "theater" and "villain", Dennett's picture seems to leave no room for himself. Although he may be happy to accept this result, he still needs to explain people's strong intuition about themselves in daily life. In this regard, Dennett put forward his "narrative self" theory.
Dennett expounded his narrative self-theory from the "self-protection" instinct of all living things. Simply put, the instinct of "self-protection" refers to the instinct of all living things to preserve the integrity of their own physiological and psychological structures and draw a boundary between themselves and the outside world. Through the innate ability of living things, we can define the boundary between self and non-self in different ways. Take Dennett as an example. Spiders weave webs and beavers build dams to divide the boundaries. Like all living things, human beings enjoy this instinct, but they also have some cognitive characteristics that other known species do not have, that is, highly developed memory ability and language ability. Dennett wrote in this regard:
Our strategies for self-protection, self-control and self-definition are not weaving webs or building dams, but telling stories, especially building stories that we want to tell others-and ourselves-who we are. ([8], page 4 18)
For Dennett, the "self" of human beings is the product of the combination of the self-protection instinct of all living things and the unique cognitive ability of human beings. If we want to know our "self", we need to explore our "story" carefully. All these "stories" revolve around this fictional center, which Dennett calls the "narrative center of gravity". ([9], page 105- 106) For Dennett, "self" is nothing more than this "narrative focus". (See Figure 2)
Dennett's concept of "narrative center of gravity" comes from the extension of the concept of center of gravity in physics. We will think that all objects have a center of gravity. In Dennett's view, the self is to human beings as the center of gravity is to general physical objects. The center of gravity is the point where the gravity of all the constituent particles of an object passes through, while the self is the "psychological center of gravity" that integrates all the narratives about me. Just as the "center of gravity" is not a physical reality, but a theoretical fiction, so is the "self". People invented "center of gravity" to understand the behavior of physical objects, while "self" was invented to understand and integrate psychological phenomena.
At this time, an easy question is that taking "self" as the focus of narrative structure seems to imply that there is a "narrator" before "narrative", which will mean a subject existing before the narrative structure. Dennett took this into consideration, and he emphasized that our narrative behavior was not consciously carried out. Our brains are constantly evaluating, explaining and constructing-in short, "narrating"-fragments of our lives, forming autobiographical memories. The so-called "self" is produced from this series of unconscious brain processes. ([1 1], page 169)
Dennett takes himself as the "narrative center of gravity", and it is easy to produce another kind of anti-realism. This is due to the structural characteristics of human memory. Contemporary research on human memory mechanism shows that human memory is not a simple process of storing and extracting information. In fact, human memory is more like a "factory" than a "warehouse". Whether in writing, saving or reading, the memory mechanism will process and modify the original information. ([12], page1-1)
Neuroscientist Michael gazzaniga's research on schizencephaly is an impressive case. Gazzaniga found that there is a mechanism in our left brain to interpret and process information and produce corresponding memory through the study of schizencephaly, which he called "interpreter". In gazzaniga's experiment, when the command "laugh" appeared in the left visual field (the visual field processed by the right brain) of the subjects with schizencephaly, the subjects would laugh immediately. But when the researcher asked him why, he wouldn't say that he laughed because of the instruction, but would say, "You guys come to test me every month. How can I live?" Experiments show that because the information channels in the left and right hemispheres are cut off, the subjects with schizencephaly cannot know the behavioral reactions or emotional reasons caused by information input from the right hemisphere, but their brains will automatically memorize these emotions or behaviors autobiographically, thus producing a "reasonable" self-narrative, thus maintaining the coherence and integrity of self-awareness. ([13], page 139 1- 1400)
In addition to the study of schizencephaly, there is a lot of evidence that the memory of normal people also has highly constructive characteristics. In an experiment by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others, she showed the subjects a false advertising picture, which showed a child taking a photo with bugs bunny in Disneyland. After questioning, more than one-third of the respondents said that they remember seeing bugs bunny in Disneyland-this is obviously false, because bugs bunny is a character of Warner Bros. and does not belong to Disney ([14], page 1-23). Rufus commented: "Whenever we recall an event, we must rebuild our memory, and all the recalled memories will definitely change ... When truth and reality pass through the filter of our memory, they are no longer objective, but subjective and interpreted reality." ([15], page 20)
Therefore, Dennett's "self" based on autobiographical memory seems to be difficult to tell us how much real "self-narrative" it reflects. This seems to further strengthen the view that "ego is just an illusion".
Third, is the ego really just an illusion?
To sum up, the challenge to self-reality mainly comes from three interrelated directions. First of all, Hume believes that we can neither find the basis of the same self in experience nor determine the self as the subject of experience at any moment. Secondly, brain imaging research shows that there is no special functional area in the brain to deal with self-related processes. In other words, the ego as the "spiritual world conductor" has no material basis. Finally, Dennett's theory of self not only refuses to acknowledge the ontological status of self, but also implies an epistemological anti-realism. It seems that the "narrative self" composed of autobiographical memories cannot guarantee to provide us with a "self-narrative" that conforms to the actual situation.
In this part, this paper will respond to these three challenges respectively.
1. Responding to Hume's anti-realism
Based on his empirical epistemology, Hume refused to admit everything that could not be obtained through empirical reflection. Because Hume thinks that we can't find "self" in experience, he refuses to admit the reality of self and boils it down to "a bunch of perceptions" bound by imagination. This paper holds that Hume's self-theory is unacceptable, because Hume's empirical epistemology position is unacceptable in practical scientific research.
Mature scientific theories often contain various theoretical entities, such as "electron", "gravitational field" and "gene". Scientists recognize the ontological status of these theoretical entities, not because they can directly observe these theoretical entities, but because they can use these theoretical entities to reasonably explain important natural phenomena such as photoelectric effect, celestial movement and heredity.
The problem of self is similar. Even if we admit that "self cannot be observed by experience" like Hume, it does not necessarily mean that we must cancel the true status of self. Because "whether self can be observed by experience" should not be the only criterion to determine its existence. In addition, we should also consider its explanatory effect. Just as we can explain many physical phenomena we care about through theoretical entities such as "electrons" which are also unobservable, "ego" can help us explain many important psychological phenomena more reasonably. As mentioned above, with all the actions, we will have a feeling of "I am leading these actions" directly; All experiences are also experienced by us with the imprint of "my experience"; At the same time, our autobiographical memory is a highly unified whole. The most reasonable inference for all these psychological phenomena is that there is a "self" behind them-even if it is probably not Descartes' "spiritual entity". In the discussion about scientific realism, this view is called "the influence on the best explanation". ([16], pp. 88-95) This paper holds that "the best explanatory reasoning" is also applicable to the discussion about self.
On the other hand, in Hume's "bondage theory", Hume only regarded himself as an "illusion" bound by different perceptions, but also gave up the ability to explain almost all self-related phenomena. Even for common psychological phenomena such as "self-control", Hume's "bondage theory" is difficult to give a reasonable explanation. Hume's self-theory can be regarded as a typical example of abusing Occam's razor principle. Philosophers with strong empiricism like Hume often pursue extreme simplicity in metaphysics. However, it needs to be clear that simplicity in metaphysics does not mean simplicity in explanation. In fact, too much pursuit of metaphysical simplicity often leads to clumsiness, complexity and powerlessness in explanation.
A good theory should seek a balance between the simplicity of metaphysics and the effectiveness of explanation, rather than pursuing one aspect unilaterally. Hume's self-theory obviously can't meet this requirement.
2. Respond to anti-realism from brain science research
According to common sense-Descartes' view of self, self is like a "headquarters of spiritual world". Then, a natural idea is that if such a "headquarters" does exist, we should be able to find a special functional area in the brain to play the role of "headquarters" and handle all self-related processes. However, brain imaging research in recent decades shows that many self-related processes, such as self-face recognition, kinesthetic and autobiographical memory, are widely distributed in the brain and are responsible by different brain mechanisms. This result seems to "falsify" the existence of the self.
This paper holds that "there is no special functional area to deal with all the self-related processes" does not directly indicate that the self does not exist. In fact, "self" is related to different brain mechanisms, which only shows that "self" is a complex system constructed by different mechanisms and does not correspond to a single and specialized functional area. We can use "self system" to represent the whole brain mechanism responsible for different self-related processes. Psychologists and neuroscientists come to the conclusion that "self does not exist" according to the results of brain imaging research, which actually confuses the concepts of "construction" and "fiction" and jumps directly from the former to the latter.
A case in point is our immune system. The immune system has many characteristics similar to its own system. It has the basic ability to split "he-I" and can effectively protect us from external invasion such as bacteria and viruses. At the same time, the immune system, like its own system, does not have a unified "headquarters" to "gather everything". It consists of central immune organs and peripheral immune organs, which include thymus, bone marrow, spleen, lymphoid tissue and many other sub-parts. Only under the interaction of all these components can the immune system realize its immune function. In fact, except the immune system, almost all the daily necessities we can see and touch are made up of different parts to some extent. A table consists of a desktop, legs and drawers, and there is no "table itself" outside them; A watch consists of a dial, a surface, gears, a strap, etc. There are no "observing entities" outside them. So, can we say that "the immune system is fictional", "the table doesn't exist" and "the table is just an illusion"? This is obviously absurd. Similarly, we should not directly deny the existence of self.
A more reasonable explanation for the findings of existing brain imaging research should be that the ego is a decentralized complex system, not an illusion.
3. Respond to Dennett's anti-realism
Dennett's anti-realism includes two levels. First of all, according to the results of contemporary empirical scientific research, he advocated replacing "Cartesian Theater" with "multiple draft model". In the picture described by the "multiple draft model", we can't find the position of common sense-Descartes' "headquarters". Secondly, Dennett's "narrative self" is based on autobiographical memory. The study of memory mechanism shows that human memory is highly constructive. Therefore, it seems very suspicious how much of the "narrative" that constitutes the "self" is in line with the facts.
Because Dennett's "multi-draft model" is based on the research results of contemporary brain science, we can respond with the same reason. As long as we regard the self as a decentralized complex system, rather than a common sense-Cartesian "headquarters", there is no inevitable contradiction between Dennett's "multiple draft model" and the reality of the self, so I won't go into details here.
In Dennett's anti-realism about self, the second level, that is, anti-realism based on the constructive characteristics of memory, deserves more attention. There is no denying that autobiographical memory is extremely important to the self. Especially in the composition of our "self-concept", it plays an important role. In addition, memory is closely related to the development of personality. Therefore, if the reliability of memory is questioned, it will definitely have a great impact on the self. However, this paper holds that even if the memory mechanism is actually a "processing factory" rather than a "warehouse", it will not directly threaten the reliability of memory.
Similarly, in the discussion of scientific realism, "miracle argument" is a widely influential defense strategy. The general idea is that if the theoretical entity in the best scientific theory is only fiction, then the great success of science can only be regarded as a miracle. ([17], page 73) The defense strategy of "miracle argument" can also be used in the reliability of memory. No matter what the mechanism of memory is, it is an undeniable fact that in the long process of evolution, memory ability has helped human beings survive and achieved great success; At the same time, with memory, we can continue our daily life smoothly. The construction mechanism of memory has not turned our lives upside down, nor has it made the whole human society chaotic. If the memory of our success and order is only "fictional" to a great extent, then it is undoubtedly a great miracle. In short, the constructiveness of memory mechanism cannot be directly equated with unreliability. It is undoubtedly an excuse to use the constructiveness of memory to support the anti-realism about self.
Four. Conclusions and comments
So far, this paper introduces several main anti-realism about self, and responds to them respectively. We should not accept Hume's anti-realism based on empirical epistemology, because his extreme empirical epistemology position cannot be adopted in practical scientific research. The conclusion that there is no "central command" in the brain from contemporary brain science research is not contradictory to the reality of self, because we don't necessarily need to regard ourselves as "central command". It is more realistic and feasible to regard the self as a decentralized complex system. The constructive characteristics of memory do not necessarily mean that memory is unreliable, because if memory is unreliable to a great extent, then the great success that human beings have achieved by relying on memory ability can only be a miracle.
It is worth noting that in the relevant discussions, although anti-realists strongly deny the reality of self, they generally accept common sense-Cartesian self-concept. What they call "self" as an "illusion" is basically common sense-the "central command" in Descartes' view of self. This may be the crux of the problem. From the discussion in the last article, we can see that the basic reason why the anti-realists advocate canceling the self can be summarized as follows: No matter from philosophical reflection or experience, we can't find a common sense-Cartesian "self". However, this paper holds that it is more constructive to put forward a more reasonable "post-common sense-Cartesian self-concept" and clarify the mechanism behind it. This is the urgent task at present.