Being I: Between Neuroscience and Morality
Abstract
Anil Seth, in his book Being I, recently translated (as La creación del yo), intends to provide a neuroscientific explanation of consciousness and “selfhood”. Seth continues Daniel Dennett’s approach and, ultimately, the empiricist critique of metaphysics that starts from Hume. For Seth, selfhood is a complex perception, interlocked with different ingredients (corporal, perceptive, volitional, narrative and social) that the author fails to explain why or how they are linked to each other. For Dennett, it is an abstraction that corresponds to a center of narrative gravity and to feelings of guilt and responsibility that are socially useful, but which does not respond to any unitary center of human experience. To Dennett’s and Seth’s questioning of the identity and constancy of the self, we object to three things: firstly, neuroscientific theorizations do not in any way capture how we experience ourselves ordinarily and unitarily as subjects. Secondly, they fail to articulate among themselves the relevant ingredients of selfhood, i.e. why the narrative self, which takes on the burden of the past, could or should feel guilty before the community. Thirdly, they do not manage to explain (from what has been said) either the possibility of moral progress of the person themselves or, concerning others, experiences as crucial as love.
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