What Actually Is the Self?

When you start digging into psychology, one of the first things you run into is the so-called ‘Self’. Much of psychology is describing the Self and its relationships with Others — meaning, other Selfs. But what does the ‘Self’ actually mean?

The Astonishing Hypothesis

Philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) posed in his dualistic view that we consist of both a body and a separate mind. The self, in his view, is the mind that thinks. In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, British scientist Francis Crick (1916–2004) — who jointly won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for co-discovering the double helix structure of DNA — proposed what many scholars nowadays maintain, namely that without the physical brain, there is no mind, and therefore, no self. This would — as a side note — take away the possibilities of an afterlife or reincarnation. The mind and the self would cease to exist if the body died. I could fill a cabinet with writings and discussions on this topic alone.

The Mind and Free Will

However controversial the last statement might already seem to many, some modern thinkers take things a step further still. American philosopher and…