The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini

A book exploring what constitutes the single 'I' that appears to be going on inside our heads.  As well as dipping into cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of self, the book looks ate various human case studies of individuals that give us insights into the system from those suffering from dementia, with various brain defects and damage, through to those with depression or undergoing gender reassignment.

In the end the book explains that what appears to us to be a singular self, is in fact just a trick, played on us by our brains as a complicated bundle of mental processes go about their daily function (normally with very little input or control from us).

To underestimate the extent to which the medium of our existence – the particular body each of us is given – shapes the person we become would be folly. But to think the person just is the medium is equally misguided. more at location 252
Unable to write or take notes, he had to think and remember what he wanted to say, and then dictate it to others. As a result, his memory improved considerably. But ‘The pleasures of mental agility are much over-stated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.Read more at location 303
The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.Read more at location 385
Commissurotomy therefore seems to show that selves can be divided – at least temporarily – or that they needn’t have just one centre of consciousness after all.Read more at location 504
The unity and permanence we feel over time largely depends on our ability to construct an autobiographical narrative that links our experiences over time. But individual experiences and sense of self at any particular time can vary enormously. What is more, the autobiographical self is very good at self-revision. In effect, we are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner autobiographies coherent.Read more at location 566
To put it another way, the self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined.Read more at location 574
Many philosophers have argued that we are constituted by a psychologically continuous web of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories. Dementia says, well, okay, let’s pick that web apart, piece by piece and see if anything of you remains.Read more at location 630
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world.Read more at location 694
They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and sensations were not physical things. The category mistake was to conclude that they must therefore be a different kind of thing, a non-physical thing. But there is another, more plausible alternative: they are not things at all. Rather, thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity.Read more at location 903
It’s a bit like a picture made up of hundreds of black and white dots. It could be that 90 per cent of the dots are identical, but the 10 per cent that differ create a totally different image.Read more at location 1177
‘The point of philosophy,’ wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’1Read more at location 1647
The Ego Trick should be seen in this way. There is no single thing which comprises the self, but we need to function as though there were. As it happens, the mind, thanks to the brain and body, has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve that enable us to do this. Because it succeeds, selves really do exist. We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.Read more at location 1709
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it.Read more at location 1757
Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is taken into dry dock for repairs. The masts are broken, so these are replaced. The hull is rotting, so that too is rebuilt with new timber. Then it’s noticed the deck is looking a bit worn, so that too is replaced. And so on, until no parts of the ship are the same as when it came in. So is it the same ship? And what if someone took all the old bits and put them back together? Would that have a stronger claim to being the original ship of Theseus?Read more at location 1899
Everyone is familiar, I think, with the realisation that our competence to use a word accurately often exceeds our ability to define it precisely. Wittgenstein’s insight is that this is not paradoxical, but a reflection of the true nature of meaning itself.Read more at location 1953