572 vI. SELF‑ AND S OCIAL P ROCESSES
activation patterns that humans share with 
other animals who also show evidence of 
having a self?
How Does the Brain Build a Sense of Self?
The self is clearly dependent, in some man -
ner, on the brain. If we did not have a brain, 
we would not have a self. But, as Hofstadter 
and Dennett (1981) pondered, “Who, or 
what, is the you that has the brain?” (p. 5). 
At the heart of the mind–body debate is the 
puzzle of how a mass of tissue and the firing 
of brain cells can possibly produce a mind 
that is aware of itself and that can experi -
ence the color orange, the feeling of pride, 
and a sense of agency. Historically, the pri -
mary philosophical stance was to accept the 
mind–body duality and assume that the self 
is not a physical entity but rather arises from 
a soul or spirit. For example, Van Leeuwen -
hoek (1632–1723) believed that the brain 
contains a special, vital animal spirit that 
embodies consciousness.
Most scientists have rejected dualism and 
generally champion some form of material -
ism. Francis Crick (1994) illustrates this posi -
tion: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your 
memories and your ambitions, your sense of 
personal identity and free will, are in fact no 
more than the behavior of a vast assembly of 
nerve cells and their associated molecules” 
(p. 3). More recently, Dehaene et al. (2017) 
argued that: “What we call consciousness 
results from specific types of information 
processing computations, physically realized 
by the hardware of the brain. . . . Although 
centuries of philosophical dualism have led 
us to consider consciousness as unreducible 
to physical interactions, the empirical evi -
dence is compatible with the possibility that 
consciousness arise from nothing more than 
specific computations” (p. 492). Reflecting 
the central message of these quotes, Den -
nett (2005, 2018) asserts that, ultimately, a 
mechanistic approach to consciousness will 
explain it just as deeply and completely as 
other seemingly more concrete natural phe -
nomena, such as metabolism and reproduc -
tion.
Those adopting a computational view of 
the mind believe that at least some aspects of 
the self can be explained by neural informa -
tion processing: “Computation has finally 
demystified mentalist terms. Beliefs are in -scriptions in memory, desires are goal inscrip -
tions, thinking is computation, perceptions 
are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying 
is executing operations triggered by a goal” 
(Pinker, 1997, p. 78). From this perspective, 
self- representations, self-  awareness, self-  
regulation, and other self processes can be 
explained through the same neural mecha -
nisms that account for the way the mind 
encodes, stores, retrieves, and manipulates 
information about the world. The computa -
tional view of the mind has also spawned the 
provocative thesis that the self is an illusion— 
there is no central executive coordinating our 
thoughts and feelings (Dennett, 2015, 2017, 
2018). Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin 
Minsky (1985) describes the mind as a “soci -
ety of agents,” organized hierarchically into 
nested subroutines with a set of master deci -
sion rules. Although it may seem like there is 
an agent running the “society,” in fact, it is 
just the collective action of neural informa -
tion processing in multiple parts of the brain. 
Consciousness emerges as different groups 
of neurons—  dealing with vision, memory, 
touch, and other capacities—  are activated. 
From this perspective, “There is no seat of 
consciousness, no internal theater where 
consciousness is a permanent spectator. In -
stead, what we experience as consciousness 
is this constant procession of waxing and 
waning of neuronal groupings” (Greenfield, 
1996, p.  159).
Unfortunately, attempts to understand 
exactly how the brain builds a sense of self 
have not been particularly successful and 
speculative accounts abound. For example, 
two Nobel laureates—  Crick (1994) and 
Edelman (1989, 2005)—have each provided 
accounts of the neural substrates of con -
sciousness, but these accounts have little in 
common. Clearly, our current understand -
ing of the neural mechanisms underlying the 
self is woefully inadequate. If we accept the 
materialist position and search for the neural 
mechanisms involved in self processes, we 
need to go further than grand speculation 
about a “society of agents” or the “waxing 
and waning of neuronal groups.” We need 
to approach the problem of how the brain 
produces a sense of self using the full array 
of methods used by cognitive neuroscien -
tists. Below, I discuss several neuroscientific 
methods that have been used to study the 
self and self-  related phenomena.