Self-consciousness, generally understood as one’s awareness of oneself as oneself, has been a complex phenomenon not yet well-defined. A satisfactory definition is supposed to capture certain features of the kind of mental states in which we have a sense of ourselves. On the one hand, there are features belonging to the structure of such experiences in general, regardless of what those experiences are about and what personality the experiences belong to. This includes, for example, the irreducibility of the first-personal familiarity with such experiences to third-personal descriptions and the immunity to error when the subject identifies herself as the owner of the experiences. On the other hand, self-consciousness is always about a specific self with history and as a unified identity throughout a series of experiences. The question arises as to whether there could be an elementary definition of self-consciousness that accounts for both the structural and specific aspects of the self above, as well as how they rely on each other. As a response, Dan Zahavi proposes the idea of minimal self-consciousness^[1]. A subject is self-conscious in the minimal sense when she has first-personal access to a piece of experience, and the continuity of this access through a series of experiences in time constitutes her specific identity.

Following Zahavi, I explore the experiential manifestation of the concept of the minimal self. I suggest that it adds a useful layer to the existing notions of self-consciousness to the extent that it could be used to distinguish different senses of losing one’s self in pathological cases. Studies of developmental psychology and psychological disorders provide situations where a complex notion of the self achieved through multiple high-level cognitive faculties is decomposed into the minimal self, and these situations allow us to revisit the elementary conditions of having a feeling of the self. I analyze three cases from psychological disorders: schizophrenia, deep brain stimulation, and split-brain experiments. I interpret them respectively as the loss of the minimal self, the subsistence of minimal self under the interruption of personal identity in time, and the subsistence of minimal self under the synchronous split of personality in a body. In these cases, the apparent discrepancy between what immediately constitutes the self and what the persons believe to be their selves shows that minimal self-consciousness is distinct from other thematic forms of self-consciousness, including conceptual self-knowledge, the identity of personality, and autobiographical narratives. I also show that as an indispensable structure of the experiences that are felt to belong to oneself, minimal self-consciousness functions as the basis for the other forms of self-consciousness to be reunified over pathological interruptions. It is the persistence of the first-personal immediacy in time and in those experiences that enables the reorganization and reunification of one's conceptual self-knowledge and self-narrative in the face of temporal or spatial interruptions.

References:

[1] Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. MIT Press.

[2] Neisser, U. (1988). Five Kinds of Self‐Knowledge. Philosophical Psychology, 1(1), 35-59.

[3] Fivush, R. (2001). Owning Experience: Developing Subjective Perspective in Autobiographical Narratives. In C. Moore & K. Lemmon (Eds.), The Self in Time: Developmental Perspectives (pp.35-52). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

[4] Parnas, J. & Sass, L. (2011). The Structure of Self-Consciousness in Schizophrenia. In S. Gallagher (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self (pp. 521-546). Oxford University Press.

[5] Nyholm, S. and O’Neill, E. (2016). Deep Brain Stimulation, Continuity over Time, and the True Self. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 25(4), 647-658.

[6] Schechter, E. (2018). Self-Consciousness and" Split" Brains: The Minds' I. Oxford University Press.