Todd E. Feinberg

Feinberg, a neuropsychiatrist, draws on his expertise to dive into the problem of the self. He explores various neurological disorders that blur the self-world boundary and gives a theory for how the self is constructed in the mind.

In the first part of the book, he defines four types of disorders. The first are those that make us block a part of ourselves off as not being part of the self. Stroke victims who disidentify with an arm are one example. They think the arm belongs to someone else, or give it a name and treat it like an annoying friend. Other disorders affect the way we recognize extensions of the self, such as friends or belongings. For example, sufferers of Capgras syndrome, which effects the emotions of recognition, can still see that those around them look like their loved ones. But now feeling the jolt of recognition, they believe that their spouse and children have been replaced by imposters. The third type of disorder, personal confabulation, makes people invent stories about themselves. They may have forgotten their real identity or are in denial of psychological trauma, so they externalize it (“my brother just had a stroke”). The last type of disorder involves people not recognizing themselves in the mirror. These people will even stand in front of the mirror and yell at this mocking person who copies one’s own actions.

Then Feinberg presents his theory of how the self is constructed. He’s an emergentist: from smaller systems, larger ones emerge that cannot be reduced to their parts. So just as atoms form parts of the cell, which in turn for the cell, so brain cells which form parts of the brain also construct the self. The “self” is not to be identified with one part of the brain, as Descartes thought, but is a dynamic construct emerging from many lower-level functions of the brain. Feinberg postulates two emergentism: that it is unpredictable how lower-level systems create higher-level ones, and that the lower levels are constrained by the activity of the higher levels. So the “self” constrains its parts by ordering them, but the parts constrain the self, as in these neurological disorders. Finally, the “self” as Feinberg describes it is defined by purpose. Rather than some static notion of the soul, the self can be defined as whatever function, purpose, or meaning all the parts of the mind are working in concert toward. It’s a telenomic system.

Feinberg’s clinical examples are interesting, but I don’t see how they connect to the second half of his book. If the self-world boundary as is malleable as he demonstrates, would this not defeat any notion of the self and lead us into Humean non-self? And while I think emergentism is the right direction for philosophers of mind to go in, by no means is it a complete theory. We still don’t have a clear idea of how higher levels or organization are formed from lower. Why do certain cells elicit consciousness and not others? Feinberg is better with clinical experience than with philosophy. I would read this book for the first half, but read someone else for the philosophical reflections.… (plus d'informations)