The Self: I, Me and My Self - Lone Indulgences  

By Akshai Jain  

Who is the 'I' of a soliloquy? Why do children refer to themselves by name rather than in the first person singular? If you were disembodied in one location and reconstructed in another, would you still be yourself?

What about that tune you were humming when you morphed? We may still be a long way from Star Trek, but scientists in Australia have recently managed to teleport a beam of light. 'I' has literally been the bugbear of religion, philosophy and science, across all cultures. Conceptions of the self invariably lead us down slippery slopes of exploration into the nature of identity, and possibly ethnicity.

Theories of the self abound in western and Indian philosophy. Descartes looked out from his lonely rock of scepticism into the deluge of misleading sense impressions. Everything he saw and heard was subject to the whims of a malicious demon, and was therefore untrustworthy. The only thing he could be certain of was the fact of his doubting: therefore, 'I doubt, therefore I am' and 'I think, therefore I am' or 'cogito ergo sum' .

David Hume's scepticism saw the self as an agglutinated hodge-podge of ephemeral sense impressions. Efforts to move beyond this pastiche of impressions petered into mere nothingness. Vedantic conceptions of the self are determined by the karmic bondage; the true self for the vedantins is that which is one with the all- encompassing reality or brahman . Bondage is the identification of the self with the body, liberation is identification with the eternal and universal soul. The 'self', that elusive entity, has however, slipped through the most intricate of webs.

We could start with the trappings of daily life and peel away the layers of externality. Imagine yourself in a philosophical mood, on a landscape of rolling greens. The gentle roll of the hills pleases the senses, the fragrance of flowers tickles the nose - is it possible that this 'world' is not quite the way it seems? We might think of our notions of the world as forming a multi-level system.

At the top are notions that seem independent of our sensory apparatus. These are, in common parlance, 'objective' representations: The trees, the hills. The lower levels contain buffers for various relationships to us, associated with different pragmatic or epistemic relations of increasing specificity: metaphors, poetry and finally science.

As we gather more information about objects that we are pragmatically related to, we pass this information up the levels. We recognise and store these relations in ways that are increasingly independent of 'our selves'. We pass information down the levels when we recognise an object and act on it in a way that is independent of its present relation to us. The 'world out there, as it is', is therefore affected by the 'I' construct. A deconstruction of the self is Adrian's thread to the ontological maze.

One approach is the semantic characterisation of self notions. We can think of a special self-notion on analogy with the indexical 'I'. Just as the utterances of 'I' stand for their utterers, these special self notions would stand for the thinkers to whom they belong. Beliefs with self notions as constituents would be self beliefs. The notion that you acquire when you look at the fellow in the mirror, recognise him and link 'that man' with your indexical self-notion, is the bedrock of identity.

The self, though, is also aware. However, a consciousness, which reflects on itself, would require a supra- consciousness as platform, ad infinitum. The only way to get out of the infinite regress is by positing a pre-reflective consciousness, the awareness of 'being' which is innate and which is what makes us essentially human. This article, by design, is ambiguous. But then, so are you and so am 'I'.

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See also: The Self, God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul)