What is the self?

I don’t think you can separate the two. Your mind affects your body and your body affects your mind. One does not survive well without the other. So I would have to say, I count them both equally in who I am.

I would say the Self is both body and mind. Self control…self respect…self reliance…self destruct…self absorbed…
They all refer to both mind and body.

@Pandora and @filmfann – Would you be “you” without a body? And when you refer to “mind”, assuming you mean the emergent property of the brain, would a permanent loss of consciousness without loss of body still == “you”?

My husband maintains that his mother died in 1988. She just spent three days at our house. I think our “self” is our mind. As we cannot have a mind without a body – at least to our current knowledge, and we consider a person to be dead when their consciousness permanently leaves their body, I’m comfortable with this notion.

^ But do changes in the brain destroy the self? If I develop a brain tumor and as a result, my personality completely changes, am I “me”? Is there a default brain state that = the self? What about experience and aging? Is the “self” an amorphous time-dependent entity that is essentially a label we use to describe the current state of the brain? And most importantly, if free will is an illusion (on some level), does that play into this discussion at all? In other words, I assume that a self devoid of free will is similar to labeling the heart or lungs as the “self”.

Going back to my mother in law:

In 1988, a vessel in her brain burst. A good chunk of her brain was removed in order to save her life. As a result, she didn’t remember her fiance. He was completely removed from her brain. The last five years of her life were gone, and the rest of it is complete Swiss cheese. She’s also left with a diminished ability to make short-term memories.

If we’re the sum of our experiences, she is less of the person she was before the aneurysm, because her experiences were removed from her.

What is the ultimate difference between identical twins? They occupy different spacetime, and they have different empirical experiences. One twin is not the same as the other, because they view the world from different pedestals, and each current experience draws on the former experiences.

I think if you remove one’s past experience – the ultimate reference point they use in making judgments on their current surroundings – you’re no longer dealing with the same person as you had when their mind was intact.

I used to think that self was a purely mental image but my daughter in law was badly injured in an accident a few years back and it has taken her a long time to become her “self” again. A lot of her self image was tied up with her body and adjusting to life in a wheelchair was a long and difficult process. Today she is much more the way I remember her being before the wreck.
This experience has led to my rethinking of my original beliefs and question what exactly self is. I have not dispensed with the idea that it is a mental image, just modified it to the extent that how we view ourselves is greatly influenced by what we can do physically. Not saying that you cannot be whole if your body does not respond to your every command, but that you need to be accepting of the physical limitations imposed upon you in order to have a positive self image.

I use the existential definition. One becomes aware of oneself as an emptiness. We are what is left over from what we perceive. We differ from other animals in that we not only make choices but we know that we make choices and so are responsible for defining ourselves through what we choose.

According to many people, like German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, our brain only generates the illusion of self in a deterministic universe.

On the other end of the coin many varieties of eastern and western mysticism, new age teachings and even some secular philosophies claim that self is only an illusion too, though for much different reasons. Many religious philosophies claim that self is just God itself creating this illusion for itself in order to have a meaningful experience, and to have something to relate to. Some other beliefs state that self is an illusion, because of a collective consciousness (sometimes known as the cosmic consciousness).

Many nontheists that reject determinism, along with many monotheistic based religions really do believe in the concept of a true self, and one with free will. My own answer here is I don’t know.