Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Søren Kierkegaard

Our sense of self is almost certainly overstated. So much of what we think of as our inmost self is better understood as material processes that could be considered ours only insofar as they occur in our bodies, and it seems that our bodies can only be considered ours tautologically. After all, if my body is composed of my limbs, my organs, my senses, and so on, then where is the self that is the subject of all of those objects? It wouldn't seem to be my soul, since that's another object of this undefinable subject self. At the cellular level, there's an ongoing process of regeneration from external resources. At the quantum level, we can't even claim that any of the most fundamental particles of our being are the same from one instant to the next. The only constant in our material self is change, exchange with our environment. Our self appears to persist only in the grossest and most approximate form--a shared fiction that dissolves on closer examination.

For thousands of years, Buddhists have seen the self as an illusion, if not exactly for the reasons listed above. And they see the self not only as an illusion, but as the primary attachment that is the cause of most of our suffering. In their experience, intense mindfulness or meditation will lead to the extinguishing of that false sense of a distinct self and of all of the suffering to which it is subject. In the West, the Abrahamic religions have generally taken a dualistic approach to the notion of self, positing an immortal soul that animates a material existence. This soul would presumably be that which couldn't be explained as a result of material processes--perhaps our will and/or our self-awareness.

The last two centuries have seen a concerted assault on the realm that would be left to the soul. From Darwin and Freud through the Extropians, developers of artificial intelligence, and manufacturers of antidepressants, the purview of the soul is in retreat on all sides, as the Western view approaches that of Buddhism. There is less and less of what we feel and think and of how we behave that can't be explained in purely materialist terms. The essence of such efforts is Freud's dismissal of the importance of consciousness toward the end of The Interpretation of Dreams:

What role is left in our account for once-omnipotent consciousness, which hid everything else from sight? No more than that of a sensory organ for perceiving psychical qualities.

So consciousness is a portion of our material selves that is receptive to perception, like the film in a camera. Or as some Buddhists have characterized the situation, "[t]he false idea is that reality and the consciousness that grasps it are two different things." This would seem to resolve things neatly in favor of a monistic view wherein the self, if it can even be said to be any more than an illusion, is of no more significance than any other material configuration. And while I think this perspective is conducive to insight, I don't think it's complete. Illusions are subjective, not objective--they require a subject, someone or something to be deceived. Who or what is the recipient of these perceptions of psychical qualities? Who or what is looking at the pictures on the film? Though Darwin's theories admirably describe how changes in species may be perpetuated or not in a given environment, they're vague on exactly what causes those changes. I can see how matter that has become alive and animals that have become self-aware would be perpetuated, but I can't see how they became alive and self-aware.

Perhaps I'm being naive and stubborn, but surely there is something exceptional in our self-awareness. Based on my own experience, I'm willing to concede that everything I feel and do has some material basis, that the voice in my head that narrates my experiences to me is a composite of all manner of drives, impulses, disorders, and dysfunctions. But I'm not yet willing to surrender the ineffable miracle of that which witnesses my feelings and actions, the unitary listener in my head. This creates a paradox in my otherwise monistic dogma. I do think there's a self that bears witness to existence--it may be part of existence, but it's qualitatively different from existence. Yet like Kierkegaard and the Buddhists, I believe that wisdom is only accessible via paradox. Kierkegaard suggests that:

It is so far from the truth that the age will be saved by the idea of sociality, of communion, that this idea constitutes, on the contrary, the skepticism needed for the development of individuality properly to occur, in so far as every individual either is lost or, disciplined by abstraction, finds himself religiously. The principle of association (which can at best have validity with respect to material interests) is, in our time, not affirmative but negative; it is an evasion, a diversion, an illusion, whose dialectic is this: as this principle strengthens individuals, it also enervates them; through solidarity it strengthens numerically, but this from the ethical point of view is also to debilitate. Only when the single individual has acquired in himself an ethical stance in the face of the whole world can there be any question of genuinely uniting; otherwise, the union of the individually weak becomes just about as uncomely and corrupt as child marriages.

Perhaps our self is real (a subtle schism in the unity of existence), but serves only as a means to a greater communion (to be resolved into a richer unity).