David Hume famously argued that when he went looking for the self by introspecting his own first-person experience he was unable to find it. More recently Kai Vogeley and I argued that neuroscientists have a similar problem.
When they go looking for the self, using advanced imaging technology, they find the self both everywhere and nowhere in the brain.
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Even when we are looking ‘inside’ (introspectively) we expect to find some kind of stable object that we can identify as our ‘self’. What we miss in such projects is what phenomenologists call pre-reflective self-awareness.
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