Self-help, Self-love, Selfie: What Is a Self Anyway?

If you’re self-obsessed, you’re not alone. We all matter to ourselves a lot. And yet for all our self-interest, we really haven’t ever had a solid science of self-hood. Here are fifteen popular but lame notions, old and new, spiritual and pseudo-scientific, about what a self is and who has got one, followed by the clearest science I’ve found on the subject.

1. Your spirit: You’ve got a body, but you are a spirit or soul separate from all that blood and gut physical matter. Spirits have power to change physical things, but they aren’t physical themselves. They’re from a different realm. How do they work? That’s a beautiful mystery. Just dig the mystery. Don’t try to answer that question.
2. God’s spirit channeled: God or the “higher power” is the one true self, the spirit in the sky. Definitely from another realm. He doesn’t just move matter; He willed matter into being. As the master self, he decided to create you as a self, too. He could have made you anyway He wanted, but willed to give you a will of your own.
3. No self: You think you’re a self, but it’s all in your mind. There are no selves. Everything is just matter in motion. Once you free yourself from thinking of yourself as self, you’ll enjoy your self more. Wait…I mean.
4. Central receiver: Your self is the nerve center at the middle of all the emotional and mental action. You’re the feeler, the thinker, the news-getter. That’s you in the spotlight.
5. A local God: You are your goals, commitments, faiths and dedications, the things you want. And given the law of attraction, you can make anything happen if you will it into being hard enough.
6. Your DNA: DNA is a chemical that copies itself like other chemicals do. But somehow this “replicator” has accumulated all sorts of ornamentation to make itself copy better. So you are either your DNA or just its ornamentation. If you’re the ornamentation, then your self is just a chemical’s way of making more of itself.
7. Your naughty naughty ego: Self is a greedy illusion that makes you selfish, when you should be generous. Whenever you do things for your self, you're indulgent. Shame on you. If we could all just get over ourselves, we'd be willing to sacrifice everything for each other, and then no one would ever have to sacrifice anything, and the world would be a happier place.

8. The only true thing: The world is all illusion. The self chooses the illusory world it wants and makes it so. Therefore, the only thing that can change or needs to change is your beliefs. Whatever your self believes is made true just by you believing it.
9. Your Gullibility: Humans are selves, but other organisms aren’t. Descartes said plants and animals are just machines, but you’re a self because you can think. He tried to figure out if there was anything we couldn’t be fooled about, and decided it was “I think therefore I am a self,” by which he meant the fact that we can be fooled into thinking the wrong things proves we exist as conscious thinking selves. To which Thomas Hobbs said, That’s a leap, dear Descartes: you think therefore all we know is that matter is capable of thinking.
10. Heavy equipment operator: You’re the guy inside your head running things. You’ve got monitors and levers. You’re the captain of the spaceship that is you. But wait, who runs the captain? Does he have a captain in his head, too?
11. No self again, ‘cause we’ve looked: The scientists have looked high and low, and all they find are chemical mechanisms, no spaceship captain, just physics and chemistry doing the same kind of stuff they do elsewhere. There’s no self and not because it’s therapeutic for your self to believe it, but because we can’t find it.
12. Selves have special powers: Selves have these powers above and beyond physical cause and effect. They’re not spiritual or magical, just everyday powers like desire, appetite, the pursuit of happiness, desire for success. These immaterial powers can move matter. So yes, when the cue ball hits the eight ball, that’s just physics, but why into the corner pocket? Because the pool shark desired it to go there. Selves can just do that kind of thing move matter with will.
13. Your self-awareness: Selfs are things that know that they're selves. Banana slugs don't so they're not selves. But you know you're a self, so you are one.
14. Robot: The self is a hardwired computer with peripheral devices. Since we’re just computers, then computers are just like us. Get enough physical cause and effect working intricately together, and you’ve got a self, whether it’s a computer or a living being. Storms aren’t selves even though they’re a lot of physical cause and effect working intricately together, too. Why? Who knows.
15. Quantum consciousness: Quantum mechanics and conscious selfhood are both magic-like mysteries, so they must be the same thing. In both, we see spontaneous behavior that seems to transcend cause and effect, so your self’s free will, must be caused by quantum freedom. Never mind that we don’t see anything like will in quantum behavior, and we can’t help but see selves as willful, wanting, striving for things that matter to them. Ignore that, and you can pretend that the conscious self is just quantum mechanics.

Here’s the best science I can find on the nature of selves, a theory developed by my colleague Terrence Deacon, a professor at Berkeley:

There’s a big difference between strictly cause-and-effect behavior, and the means-to-ends striving we find in living selves. Striving starts with life, so the trick is to figure out how the first selves ever emerged from strictly cause-and-effect behavior.

Now if you go look for striving, you find it’s made of cause-and-effect behavior. When you reach for ice cream, every part of that behavior is cause-and-effect.

But not just any cause-and-effect. Rather, it’s highly restricted, constrained cause and effect. Of all the things your body could do, it does a very limited or narrowed range, first and foremost the stuff that keeps you going.

When a self dies, what ends is the constraint on your behavior. Your physical stuff is suddenly free to do way more things. So if you want to find the self, look at how the constraints on what you could do get maintained, and in particular, look for systems that have a loop going:

Selves do limited work to maintain the constraints that limit their work to maintain the constraints that limit their work to maintain the constraints....

The constraints are what get passed from generation to generation, so you, a self, are one from 3.7 billion years of uninterrupted maintenance of those constraints that focus your work on maintaining your constraints - in effect, work that keeps your act together, work that keeps your cause-and-effect behavior focused on keeping you going, rather than spilling any which way.

That loop is the origin of selves, and Deacon has a model for how such loops could ever get started in a universe without selves to design it in. Computers aren’t selves, since they don’t have that loop going. But even the earliest life forms are selves, albeit not self-aware like us, but still and always maintaining that constraint/work loop.

I’m about done writing a book called “On the origins of selves: How means-to-end striving emerged in a cause-and-effect universe” that distills Terry’s ideas (I’ve worked with him for 18 years developing the theory). That’s some fun striving this self gets to do these days.

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