By overlooking this conceptual distinction, self-reference (representational content about self or self-awareness, self as object) is confused with "being a self" (e.g., Gusnard ). It addresses the self as object (having a self), not self as subject (being a self). Much of the self-awareness literature confuses mediated self-reference of higher order cognition with being a self. Many researchers in the fields of cognitive science/neuroscience refer to the ability to recognize self in the mirror, or make judgments involving oneself as evidence of self, but this is one-sided. Nevertheless, the self has turned out to be exceptionally difficult to define, operationalize and study in neuroscience and related disciplines.
We are generally equipped with common-sense folk-psychological views about self and how we experience other selves, which help us get by in everyday situations. The verbal descriptors "I," "me," and "mine," however, are only approximations of the underlying neural processes. "Mineness" is disrupted in hallucinations of a double or Doppelgänger. The experienced body (and implicated neural pathways) is comprised by both a motoric-body (proprioceptive body-schema), the "I" (as agent), and perceptual-body (exteroceptive body-image), the social "me," united provisionally and fragilely by an interoceptive body (the "mineness" of this relationship). These terms remain imprecise due to a fundamental ambiguity that we are both minds, i.e., being a self (so-called first-person experience), and brains or bodies, i.e., having a self (third-person perspective). "Cognitive neuroscience" contains the terms, "mind" and "brain," respectively. This contribution argues the opposite: the "self" informs our hypnagogic imagery precisely to the extent that we are not self-aware.Ĭognitive and clinical neuroscience face very real problems about the nature of the human self, how we define and study "self," and treat individuals when the mind, or brain, becomes so disordered that the experience of self becomes disrupted. The latter approach claims that pre-reflective self-awareness (diminished in schizophrenia) pervades all conscious experience (however, in a manner that remains unverifiable for both phenomenological and experimental methods). To elucidate this approach, I contrast it with the apparently popularizing view that the symptoms of schizophrenia result from what has been called an operative (i.e., pre-reflective) hyper-reflexivity. Literature documents and records cognitive and neural processes of self with an intimacy that may be otherwise unavailable to neuroscience. I further discuss how the proposed mechanisms may be relevant to understanding paranoid delusions in schizophrenia. This paper discusses reasons (phenomenological and neurobiological) why the self projects an imaginary double (autoscopy) in its spontaneous hallucinations and how Kafka's writings help to elucidate the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. Kafka suffered from dream-like, hypnagogic hallucinations during a sleep-deprived state while writing. Little attention has been paid, however, to the possibility that his writings may reflect neural mechanisms in the processing of self during hypnagogic (i.e., between waking and sleep) states. Kafka's writings are frequently interpreted as representing the historical period of modernism in which he was writing.
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