Modeling the Apparent Self

Abstract

After radical blows inflicted by empiricist or pragmatist thinkers like David Hume or William James, cognitive science is today largely rejecting Descartes’ view of the self as an internal and unified “thing” or substance. The growing amount of books by foremost philosophers of mind (Metzinger 2009) and neuroscientists (Hood 2012; Gazzaniga 2012) on the so-called “illusion of self” (Albahari 2006; see also Siderits et al. 2011) is the most tangible sign of how the current dominating theory is rather that we are not who we feel or think we are. If hardly anybody questions that our common phenomenological sense of being or having a self is real, the illusion would reside precisely in a misalignment between this phenomenological feeling and a different underlying ontology. This debate has led to a vital new “tradition of disagreements” (Gallagher 2012, 122–127), with a variety of competing or complementing explanatory models attempting to account for what is illusory about the self, for what is not, and for how this illusion is generated. These models will be progressively reviewed throughout this chapter, as the theoretical ground against which to understand and analyze Beckett’s own variety of modeling solutions in exploring what he also called, in a letter to George Duthuit on July 27, 1948, “the illusion of the human and the fully realised” (BL II, 86).