What is the self?

In 2007, at the beginning of the new atheist movement, the philosophers who later became known as “the four horsemen” or “the heralds of religions’ unravelling” – Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett – met for a conversation. This exchange was filmed, and the video went viral on YouTube. The transcript of the famous conversation was bundled in a book, with essays by three of the participants, Dawkins,

Harris, and Dennett, and an introduction by Stephen Fry. Hitchens had died before the book was published. The surviving philosophers have continued to meet for debates on the causes of human behaviour.

Before I state that the solid self with the free will to choose is an illusion, we must define what we mean by ‘illusion’ and by ‘the self ’ and by ‘will’.

According to Jay L. Garfield in an interview with Sam Harris, an illusion is something that exists in one way, but it appears in another way. For example, a mirage exists as a pattern of refracted light but appears to be water.

Studying the self is like studying how deep the water of a mirage is. We must also define what we usually mean when we say: ‘self ’. The self is the thing we think we are, the ‘me’ that owns our body and mind, the ‘me’ that is the subject of mental states, and the ‘me’ that acts upon the world but is not from this world. The self-illusion is the feeling that we are a passenger in the body, a sense that we are behind our eyes, in the head, as a centre; the feeling that experiences and actions happen in inner space only. It is, therefore, better to think of ourselves as ‘persons’, rather than selves; things that are part of the world, act upon the world, embedded in the world, interdependent, causal conditioned, and interacting with others. Why is this important? Because, morally, the self-illusion functions as the foundation of moral reactive attitudes such as blame and anger: we forget about causal relationships. The

free-will-illusion is part of the self-illusion. Will is seen as exempted from causality.