The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation.
Frontiers in Psychology 2021 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.698778 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Agency Body ownership Minimal self Self representation |
| Citations | 7 |
| Key points | Proposes that self-representation arises from binding sensory codes of one's own actions into a Me-File, consistent with a Humean bundle-self theory and the Theory of Event Coding. |
Abstract
Numerous authors have taken it for granted that people represent themselves or even have something like "a self", but the underlying mechanisms remain a mystery. How do people represent themselves? Here I propose that they do so not any differently from how they represent other individuals, events, and objects: by binding codes representing the sensory consequences of being oneself into a Me-File, that is, into an event file integrating all the codes resulting from the behaving me. This amounts to a Humean bundle-self theory of selfhood, and I will explain how recent extensions of the Theory of Event Coding, a general theory of human perception and action control, provide all the necessary ingredients for specifying the mechanisms underlying such a theory. The Me-File concept is likely to provide a useful mechanistic basis for more specific and more theoretically productive experimentation, as well as for the construction of artificial agents with human-like selves.