(Extract - Concluding Part - Quotations removed)
A SOCIAL–COGNITIVE NEURO-SCIENCE ANALYSIS OF THE SELF
By Stanley B. Klein, Keith Rozendal, and Leda Cosmides
University of California, Santa Barbara
https://www.academia.edu/1449846/A_soci ... f_the_self
"Seemingly unitary self may actually be composed of several different, functionally isolable (though normally interacting) systems :
1. Episodic memories of one’s own life;
2. Representations of one’s own personality traits;
3. Knowledge of facts about one’s own life;
4.An experience of continuity through time: The “I” experienced now is connected to the “I” experienced at earlier points in time (disrupted in some severe cases of amnesia;
5. A sense of personal agency and ownership: The belief or experience that “I” (agency) am the cause of “my own” (ownership) thoughts and actions (impaired in disorders such as autism and schizophrenia;
6. The ability to self–reflect, that is, to form meta-representations where the agent is the self, and make inferences on the basis of them. The data format of a meta-representation allowing self–reflection of this kind would be [Agent :“I”] – [Propositional Attitude : “thought”] – [Proposition : ”that X"] (e.g., “I thought that I would be afraid of the dog”). The ability to represent one’sown mental states is impaired in autism and possibly schizophrenia.
Are each of these six components truly separate? Perhaps not. A mechanism that produces one of these outcomes may also produce others. For example, the ability to meta-represent one’s own mental states may be necessary to have a sense of personal agency and ownership of thoughts, goals, plans, and actions . If so, then the outcomes specified in five and six may be reducible to—or explicable in terms of—a single piece of cognitive machinery.
In other cases, one component of the self (e.g.,episodic memories) may require the operation of another piece of self–relevant machinery (e.g.,meta-representional machinery), yet have additional properties such that the operation of one cannot be explained entirely by invoking the operations of the other. For example, episodic memories may be stored in meta-representations ([Agent:"I"] – [Propositional Attitude: “remember”] – [Proposition: “that I saw, smelled, did, (etc) X”]; such that damage to the ability to manufacture or retain agent source tags causes impairment in episodic memory; Yet many amnesics appear to have intact meta-representational machinery, despite an inability to retrieve episodic memories — suggesting that there is a specialized archive in which episodic memories are stored. On this account, the episodic memory system requires meta-representational abilities to function properly, but it has other (proprietary) components as well.
Our point is this: To understand what it means, cognitively, to have a “self”, divide and conquer may be the best research strategy, and the fractionation provided by neuro-psychological data may provide the best database. Although the corpus of relevant neuro-psychological cases is still small, it already suggests that “the self” is actually composed of a number of functionally independent systems. By developing a careful model of each, one can eventually put the pieces together. Detailed, computationally explicit models of each piece will allow one to discover which(apparently separate) components are actually the outputs of a single mechanism; when one component of the self requires another component to operate properly, without being reducible to that component; and when two components of the self co–exist and jointly contribute to mental life, without requiring one another to operate. Paradoxically, a research strategy that assumes the self is divided may be the fastest way to learn how the parts come together to create the unitary self of our phenomenal experience."