The self as organizer

Rajesh Kasturirangan

pp. 51-64

in: Sangeetha Menon, Anindya Sinha (eds), Interdisciplinary perspectives on consciousness and the self, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

We experience the world as a coherent, complete and seamless whole, despite the impoverished character of our representations of the world. Vision scientists study our perception of a stable three-dimensional world in the presence of fleeting two-dimensional stimuli; I believe that the problem of coherence and stability extends far beyond the domain of vision to the study of the mind as a whole. This chapter is an exploration of the "whole world" experience through the lens of cognitive science; I claim that neither traditional computational approaches nor the more recent embodied approaches to the mind account for the wholeness of the world. Instead, I argue that the whole world experience points to the existence of the self as an organizer that structures experience and makes it whole. If so, the self has a much larger role to play in the mind sciences than is currently acknowledged, and the study of the self is a bridge between traditional concerns of metaphysics and the modern cognitive sciences.