The Self Revisited: Linking Old Ideas to the Backbone of the Mind

Two Ways of Seeing the Self

Throughout history, the self has been viewed in two contrasting ways:

William James (1890) spoke of the “I” (the knower) and the “Me” (the known), emphasizing the individual’s sense of agency. Markus and Kitayama (1991) later contrasted the Western “independent self” with the East Asian “interdependent self,” shaped by relationships. Henri Tajfel’s “social identity theory” (1970s) showed how our sense of self is strongly influenced by group membership. And modern psychology describes people as having multiple selves—different roles at home, work, or in public.

The backbone of the mind (BM) model takes the first view only—the self as an isolated individual—while setting aside the second (the social self).

The Backbone of the Mind (BM)

The BM as described in The Superorganismic Human is both a neural network and a psychological map of how the mind works. It charts the flow:

stimulus → perception → desire → reason → decision → action.

This captures the “engine” of our mental life. It is consistent with several classical views:

– Buddha’s five aggregates (anatta) – body, sensations, perceptions, mental habits, and consciousness. The BM is the same kind of composite process, not a fixed soul.

– Hume’s bundle theory – the self is a collection of perceptions tied by memory. The BM is exactly this bundle in action.

– Damasio’s layered self – proto-self, core self, autobiographical self. These can be mapped onto BM’s body, present desires, and memory.

– Francis Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis” – the self is the activity of nerve cells. The BM is a neural circuit explaining how that activity produces experience.

Continuity of Self

Because the BM is born with the body, grows with it, and dies with it, it gives the self a sense of continuity as long as we live. This echoes several thinkers:

– John Locke (1690) – memory provides identity: if you remember an act, it was you.

– Paul Ricoeur (1992) – two kinds of identity: “idem” (sameness) and “ipse” (keeping one’s word, integrity).

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1943) – the self grows through choices, always in the making.

– Dan McAdams (1993) – people weave their lives into a coherent narrative, linking past and future.

– Erik Erikson (1950) – identity develops through psychosocial stages across the lifespan.

The BM shows why all of these accounts are plausible: it is a system that generates continuity through memory, narrative, and embodied growth.

The Self as Agent

The BM also explains why we feel like an agent. Thought is not just passive—it knows what it thought. This sense of self-awareness recalls:

– René Descartes (17th c.) – the mind as a thinking substance: “I think, therefore I am.”

– Immanuel Kant (18th c.) – the “unity of apperception,” the principle that all thoughts must belong to the same self.

In the BM, this agency is not metaphysical. It is simply the system recognizing its own operation—an emergent form of unity.

Filling in the Gaps

The BM also seems capable of generating “missing parts,” filling holes in perception or memory. This parallels several modern theories:

– Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain studies – the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” inventing explanations for actions.

– Thomas Metzinger (2009) – the self is a transparent model, an “ego tunnel” created by the brain.

– McAdams again – the self repairs its coherence by telling stories, even when facts are lost.

This shows how the BM does not simply process input; it actively constructs a coherent picture of self and world.

Synthesis

Traditional accounts of the self—individual vs. social, bundle vs. unity, narrative vs. substance—often appear fragmented.  The backbone of the mind brings them together:

– It is process-based, like Buddha and Hume.

– It has continuity, like Locke, Ricoeur, and McAdams.

– It provides unity of agency, like Descartes and Kant.

– It can construct illusions, like Gazzaniga and Metzinger.

– It grounds development, like Erikson and Sartre.

The BM thus functions as a bridge model: biological and neural at its base, psychological and philosophical in its expression. It explains why the self feels both fragile and enduring, both personal and constructed.

Closing Reflection

When people sip their coffee in the morning and feel “I chose this,” what they sense is the BM at work: body, memory, thought, and decision woven into one moment. It is not a ghost in the machine, nor a pure illusion, but a living process that grows, changes, and ends with the body.

The social self—the person as a cell in the greater superorganism—belongs to another level of reality. But within the individual, the backbone of the mind provides the clearest framework yet for understanding why the self appears as it does, why it persists, and why it matters.