The Living Order of the Self

Our Self Deserves More than One Perspective

The self is a central but controversial topic in psychology. This is because there are many misunderstandings surrounding the self. Historical misunderstandings arise from linking the self to an immortal soul. There is also still the common view that the two worlds of the physical and the mental exist separately.

Breathing fresh air together watching the waves

Source: Guille Pozzi/Unsplash

In addition, there are persistent misunderstandings arising from the tendency to reify processes. One is the tendency to see the self as something that exists on its own.

These two problems still permeate our everyday psychology: the belief in two separate worlds, a mental and a physical, and a relational process made into an isolated thing.

The self loses its problematic status when only one world, the natural world in which we live, remains, and when the self is not seen as a thing with active, will-related properties.

Our Self Seen from In and from Out

Developing a clear vision on the self is not an easy task, because we immediately collide with cultural barriers. Culture is rooted in institutions that define, divide, and seek to maintain power. The institutions provide the order and the organization of society.

Change happens agonizingly slowly here, unlike technological change, which can happen spectacularly on a very large scale. It is perfectly possible for a culture to use the latest war technology based on a belief in two separate worlds.

Luckily, very creative solutions are emerging in today’s psychology of the self. One of them is Joseph LeDoux's proposal to define a human being from the four realms of existence—bodily, neural, cognitive, and conscious— as “an ensemble of being” that can replace the self. (LeDoux 2023) This is a strong proposal where the third-person perspective dominates.

Shaun Gallagher, editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, offers a recent model built from the perspective of 4E cognition. (Gallagher 2024) This is a proposal where the first-person perspective is also strongly present. Both perspectives provide a solid foundation for nuanced thinking about the psychology of the self.

The Self Is a Dynamic Relation

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions about the reality of space and time states:

“The conclusion is revolutionary. It leaps beyond the idea that the world is made of a substance that has attributes and forces us to think about everything in terms of relations.” (2021, 120)

The same is true for the self. The self is dynamical, ongoing relation, it is a pattern of processes that include bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive, intersubjective, narrative, ecological, and normative factors. (Gallagher 2024) This perspective has far-reaching consequences: When the order of the self-pattern is disrupted or broken, self-disorder is the inevitable result. (2024, 4)

The Self Expresses the Intrinsic Order of Our Life

Many religious people find it difficult to accept that the self is a living process rooted in the natural world. This is because valuable conceptions of immortality and the soul have been compromised. It is hard for many to accept that consciousness would stop when the life process stops and not continue to exist in a kind of mental world separate from the living and mortal world.

Acceptance of immortality is the basis of many religious beliefs that have significant emotional value in many cultures. The materialistic alternative offered by physicalism is too meaningless and unfulfilling for many. Perhaps the problem lies in a far too poor conception or description of matter?

The Self is Our Natural Order

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Within the conception of the self as a pattern consisting of many dynamical components in relation, it is possible to debate in a healthy and nonviolent way which and how many components are needed in this pattern, and how they affect each other. What is relevant is that many important scientists of consciousness propose the same ordered ground from which the self arises.

There is Antonio Damasio’s contribution to the science of consciousness:

“The secret of consciousness is gathering knowledge and exhibiting that knowledge as a certificate of identity for the mind” (2021, 154).

From his Self Comes to Mind perspective, he speaks of a minimal self as an order rising from the interoceptive mind. (2010, 2018, 2021)

Similarly, in his new science of consciousness, Anil Seth clarifies the experience of the deep subjective order beneath ourselves:

“… we will do well to appreciate the deep roots of all perception in the physiology of the living” (2021, 193).

This minimal but living self is also the prereflective starting point in the phenomenological view from within. This prereflective, experiential self is the minimal order from which the particular wholes of entangled experiences, feelings, beliefs, expressions and social interactions arise. It is the “structural feature of a first-person consciousness constrained by bodily factors; the sense of agency, which can involve various sensory-motor modalities, such as proprioception, kineaesthesia, touch, and vision.” (Gallagher 2024, 19)

This natural, intrinsic, unified order is the experiential core of our self. It is the unbroken order from which we become who we are.

The Intrinsic Unified Order of the Self

This order is the intrinsic aspect of the structure of every experience, momentarily built from the integration of mental contents, fundamentally needed to regulate the metabolic and homeostatic needs of our life. The unified order of the self is distributed in a relational fashion across brain, body, and exchanges with the environment.

Changes in the order of the system can push the whole pattern of the self in one way or another, from health and well-being to physical disease and mental disorder. The self is a pattern of processes that contain a natural order. Once this natural order becomes disturbed or damaged, a survival challenge unfolds.

It is as if the natural order of photosynthesis (the energy buildup for life) becomes disordered, life will be deeply challenged; it is as if the natural order of cellular respiration (the energy release for life) fails, our life energy collapses. Both are complex sets of interacting processes containing a natural order—like our self.

We live in the natural order of only one world. The order of our self is the protagonist of our mental strength and emotional health. There is no such thing as a self that exists by itself; this is the illusionary self that we have to give up. There is only a natural order of living relationships, tested over billions of years of evolution, from which we emerge as a self-pattern or as an ensemble of being, second after second.