ABSTRACT
When Gottfried Leibniz (1765/1896) rejected the Cartesian position that a soul or immaterial “subject of consciousness” is implicitly conscious of itself being conscious of physical “objects of consciousness,” he posited instead that some neural states are paralleled by conscious sensations, other neural states by an illusory experience of “self as subject,” and that conscious sensations are sometimes accompanied by this experience of self-consciousness, other times not. During normal dreaming, for example, the visual sensations experienced in one’s dream are not accompanied by one’s waking sense of self-consciousness that one is having the experience, not unless one wakes up with the sensations still in mind and then experiences one’s waking sense of self-consciousness in relation to those sensations. Thus, as Morton Prince (1910) noted,
Whether we are self-conscious of any given state of consciousness must depend, it would seem, upon whether the brain process, correlated with it, is synthesized in a particular way with the larger system of brain processes which is correlated at a given moment with the self-conscious. . . . And in so far as a brain process can occur detached from the main system of processes, so far can consciousness occur without self-consciousness. (p. 94)
Where Leibniz’s and Prince’s positions on self-consciousness fall short, however, is in not explicating how the experience of “self as subject” might have evolvedhow it might have been naturally selected to perform a function more adaptive than simply imparting to us the illusion of “having” our sensory experiences. This shortcoming has recently been remedied by source-verification theory’s functional understanding of the self-conscious experience of “self as subject.”
