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What separates the self from what we observe externally?

Date published: 8/21/2008

IF YOU WANT an easy way to psych yourself out, I highly recommend staring at yourself in a mirror for a long period of time. It can get very crazy.

After a few minutes of looking at your own face, you're suddenly hit by the feeling that you, yourself, are just as much a physical thing in the world as every other person--it's a vulnerable feeling. And it's more than just that; after seeing yourself, your brain starts to work on you the way it would work on other people. In other words, it makes you into a separate person--you start looking at yourself as if you were not really you, but some random stranger in the mirror.

And that makes sense, because I can only imagine the different neurological processes that make seeing your own face and body tell you that that is your own self. They can't be separated that far from the processes of seeing other people's faces and bodies, and thinking they're someone else. This idea of ownership, though--is it really justified?

Do I have legs and feet? Who is doing the "having"? I am, in part, my legs and feet. But to say I own them simply begs the question.

This "I, me, mine" language can extend all the way up to the most intimate parts of our sense of self: "my ego," "my mind," "myself." At first, you would think the self, or the ego, would own legs and feet and hands and such; but even these words get the "my" in front of them. So who in the world owns this ego?

Another fun trick is to stare at a series of words, reading them over and over. Eventually, all meaning of the words will fall off, and they just look like a foreign language of completely random squiggles. Close inspection often makes the taken-for-granted become unfamiliar. Similar things happen with the mirror trick. We always take for granted our sense of self, our bodies being who we are--but what is this body and the name I attach to it? How did he get here?

Date published: 8/21/2008