What I Talk About When I Talk About “I”

The Confusion and Paradox of the Selves and of No Self

Who am I when I say, "I am"? It’s a question that has haunted philosophy, psychology, and mysticism for centuries. In both Eastern and Western traditions, from Descartes' cogito to the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, the self is an elusive, shifting thing—something we claim to know intimately and yet cannot quite pin down. It is both embodied and relational, constructed yet felt, solid in our experience but conceptually slippery.

If you've followed my previous writing, you'll know that I’ve framed selfhood as something emergent: an ongoing dance between body and world, a stream of conscious experience that can’t be neatly divided into inner and outer. But to take that further, we will also need to explore not just the ‘I’, but also the ‘not-I’ and the ‘not, not-I’—modes of being that challenge our usual categories and push us into the paradox of selfhood.

What I Talk About When I Talk About ‘I’

Modern psychology often frames the self through a threefold lens: the individual, the relational, and the collective (Nehrlich et al, 2017). We identify as individuals, but we also build our sense of self through relationships—our social attachments shaping values, behaviors, and emotions. Beyond that, we define ourselves through collective identity, aligning with groups and drawing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. These layers of selfhood feel natural because they are embedded in behavior, in thought, and even in our neurobiology.

Yet, despite this complexity, most people default to a highly personal, inward sense of self. We feel like we exist somewhere between the head and the chest, depending on cultural norms—either as a mind behind the eyes or a heart at the center of experience (Adam, 2015). This localization of self is intuitive, but ultimately misleading. We don’t exist in isolation; we are process, we are context, we are movement.

The Self is a Wind We Know by the Trees

We don’t see the wind, but we see the trees move. Likewise, we don’t directly perceive our self—it emerges in the way we navigate the world, in our sensory experience, in our ability to act. Most people are attuned to the five external senses, but less so to the internal senses, like proprioception (where the body is in space) and interoception (how the body feels from the inside). These shape how we experience reality, yet we often treat them as background noise.

Interoception, in particular, is a crucial but underexplored piece of the self. It tells us when we are hungry, when we are safe, when we are afraid, when we feel ‘at home’. It is also deeply tied to emotions—our most primal, pre-linguistic responses to the world. And yet, like all perception, it is shaped by context and interpretation. What feels like fear in one culture might be framed as excitement in another. The experience is universal, but the meaning is not (Siegal et al, 2018).

And what happens when the body itself becomes an object, a thing to be controlled? In carceral environments, for example, the self is systematically broken down. Prisoners experience a fundamental shift in embodiment—a dulling, a withdrawal from selfhood as a survival mechanism. Their very being is shaped by the structure of power, micromanaged into docility (Leder, 2005). Even rehabilitation programs, like yoga or mindfulness in prisons, can serve as tools of pacification, promoting compliance rather than liberation (Godrej, 2020). The self, then, is not just a personal experience but a political one.

The Paradox of the Self and No-Self

So what, then, is the self? Jonarden Ganeri (2015) offers a useful framework, drawing from Indian philosophy. He describes different models: reductionist (the self as a sum of mental states), emergentist (the self as more than its parts), constitutive (the self as relational), and adjectival (the self as dependent on experience but not necessary for it). In Buddhist thought, we even get the radical rejection of selfhood entirely—the self is just a stream, and any sense of continuity is an illusion.

This perspective might feel extreme, but it aligns with modern neuroscience. The self is not a fixed entity but a shifting, modular process—an illusion that arises from embodied action and social interaction. And yet, even knowing this, we continue to experience selfhood. The illusion, once seen through, does not simply vanish.

Breaking the Chains

We are embodied, relational, and shaped by the flow of energy and information around us. But we are also caught in ideological constructs of selfhood—trapped in metaphysical assumptions that can be limiting. If we unbind ourselves from these, we open up new possibilities for transformation.

In another blog I’ll explore the experience of the ‘not-I’—the act of stepping outside the self, whether through performance, ritual, or psychological shifts. What happens when we try to become something other than ourselves? And what does that tell us about the nature of identity itself?

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