Self-Experience and the Unconscious

Abstract

In contemporary philosophy of mind and psychiatry, a phenomenon that attracts a lot of attention is a symptom of schizophrenia called thought insertion. People living with thought insertion claim that some of the thoughts they experience are not produced by them and are authored by someone else. To explain this phenomenon, philosophers and psychologists commonly distinguish between the sense of being the subject of one’s mental activity and the agent of that activity, arguing that thought insertion involves a breakdown in the sense of agency for some thoughts. Given this explanation, recent work has concluded that we normally have a substantial experience of ourselves as the thinker of our thoughts. In this thesis, I argue against this conclusion and the explanation of thought insertion underlying it. In the first chapter, I argue that cases of thought insertion do not entail self-experience. In the second chapter I raise two problems for the assumption that there is a sense of agency in thought in the first place. First, I argue that the phenomenology of thinking is passive, not active. Second, by appealing to some recent psychological research claiming that unconscious processes do the real work even in some paradigmatic examples of mental action, I argue this gives us further reasons to doubt that we normally have a sense of agency in thinking. Following this, in the third chapter I show that we can make better sense of thought insertion without appealing to a missing sense of agency in thinking, freeing us from having to assume its ordinary presence in normal subjects to explain thought insertion. I conclude in chapter four by discussing the implications of my arguments along with some directions for further research.