Understanding the Self Biologically

Abstract—In Total Recall the hero discovers that his good-guy self is just implanted memories. His body used to be occupied by another, vicious self, whose allies want back. This fantasy gains some plausibility from the traditional conception of the self as a collection of experiences kept in memory — a unified conscious self that makes our experiences feel ours. Great fiction, bad neuroscience. There is no central brain structure that corresponds to that self, and some scientists have concluded that the self is an illusion. The notion that the self tags our experiences as ours seems to be wrong. And the idea that the self is a collection of remembered experiences turns out to be false. We propose instead a revolutionary biological conception of the self: The brain has evolved to constitute a self that is mostly unconscious and distributive, which does away with the paradoxes, explains all the seemingly contradictory experimenta