I recently came across the work of Galen Strawson, a British philosopher who is a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. His work generally revolves around issues like the philosophy of mind and consciousness. While I don’t necessarily share his conclusions, his ideas have made me reflect on my own positions. I spent some time getting my head around his views on panpsychism, and although intriguing, I am unconvinced that his idea—that everything has consciousness, but subjectivity emerges only when matter is arranged in a particular way—solves any problem that the mainstream scientific perspective (in which consciousness emerges when a certain threshold of complexity is reached) does not.

           So, I turned my attention to his intriguing thoughts on the nature of the self, which made me reflect on my own conceptual model. Strawson introduces a distinction between people who think of their identities diachronically and those who experience identity episodically. Although “diachronic” typically refers to the historical development of cultures or languages over time, Strawson uses it specifically to describe individuals who conceptualize their lives as a continuous, unfolding narrative—like a single character with a clear beginning, middle, and end. These diachronic individuals strongly identify with their past and future selves, believing themselves to be the same person throughout time. In contrast, episodic individuals experience their lives as discrete moments without significant psychological continuity. Strawson suggests we can recognize among our friends and acquaintances whether they are diachronic or episodic. When we speak of “self,” therefore, Strawson believes it is important to distinguish which sense we are using the word in.

           I am not sure how useful these terms are when I think about myself. My own sense of self feels more amorphous. It shifts depending on what I’m thinking about or focused on at the time. As long as I can remember—since roughly age six or seven—I have been a computer game player, and I’ve enjoyed a broad range of genres, but probably most of all, strategy games. Zoomed out, concerned more with trajectory than granularity. We can argue chicken or egg: do I play strategy games because I’m predisposed to strategic thinking, or have the games made a strategist out of me? Probably a bit of both. So, I imagine possible futures, I see desirable outcomes and less desirable outcomes, and I seek to nudge reality toward the desirable—desirable for myself and my family. I, of course, have a conception of self in this; part of what it is to determine desirability is to know thyself. There are things that seem more or less universally desirable, some that are subjectively desirable, and some things which seem ideologically desirable. So, this framing obviously suggests that I am in Strawson’s diachronic category. As far as I’m concerned, this future person is me—and I’m doing my best to steer myself not according to the expectations of others or society, but toward what is good for me. A harmony between spirit and form.

           On the other hand, I do have an Eastern spirituality, non-dualist bent, though it tends to slip through my fingers when I hold it too tightly. I am particularly taken with the teachings of Rupert Spira, a British spiritual philosopher. (Incidentally, I am unaware of any kind of comparative analysis between the work of Spira and Strawson. I do feel there is a remarkable amount of similarity, though I doubt Strawson would appreciate the comparison.)¹

           Spira invites us to turn attention inward—back upon the one doing the experiencing. This awareness, this seamless sense of being, seems to dissolve the coherence of Strawson’s categories. Strawson’s framing feels more concerned with the conceptual scaffolding we build on top of our experiencing self than with the immediacy of experience itself.

           I think the central issue here is what we even mean by “the self” or “I,” and I agree with Strawson that much of the confusion stems from the lack of a clear definition—religions, philosophers, and psychologists all use these words differently. Take, for example, the Buddhist teaching of ‘no-self’; even within Buddhist scholarship, there is disagreement around what this teaching really means. There is no eternal self? No consciousness? Strawson agrees with the ‘no-self’ position up to a point—that there is no single, enduring, unchanging Self (like a soul)—but he disagrees inasmuch as, when experience occurs, there is a unified subject of that experience. I think I would agree with these two points, but I think about it a bit differently. When I think of what ‘I’ is, I think it operates on at least three levels. There is the character which is Lewis, which shows up to people as a particular persona in the world—and when that character uses the word ‘I,’ people assume it is he that is being referred to. There is the interior ‘I,’ which appears to be like the interior operator—the one weighing things up and making choices. And finally, there is—and there is not really a good word for this—the screen of consciousness across which all experience arises.

           The first of these “I’s” is the persona, which is almost entirely illusory, and of course shifts dramatically across the course of one’s life. It is greatly determined by roles, social networks, appearance, association, and cultural climate; it is probably both the least important and yet the most consequential. The interior ‘I,’ I think, is probably what most people consider their true self—the place where likes, wants, and secret desires reside. Within this ‘I,’ we have an illusion of agency. But of course, we have been set on a course by forces we cannot know. The wind blows aimlessly, and the sails of our being are carried onward. To these two “I’s,” I am in accord with the Buddhist position: there is no fixity of soul, no true self—but there is an ‘I,’ there is consciousness, there is a window upon which, from some timeless place, everything is seen, and heard, and felt. The ‘I’ is beyond names or categories and is ultimately unaffected by the thoughts, dreams, or physical condition of this “me.”

           The more one looks for a fixed self, the more it slips away. All that remains is awareness itself, watching it all unfold.

📚 Bibliography

• Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, 2009.

• Spira, Rupert. The Essence of Non-Duality: Ego, Love, Awareness, Death & Happiness.
  YouTube, uploaded by Science and Nonduality.
  Watch on YouTube

• Strawson, Galen. What are Selves?
  YouTube, uploaded by Closer To Truth.
  Watch on YouTube