If experience is not built from objects, action does not originate in agents, and meaning does not function representationally, then the idea of a self with an inner core begins to wobble.
That wobble is often met with resistance. The self, after all, seems immediate. More than immediate — intimate. Whatever else may be doubted, I appear to be right here.
This post does not deny that appearance. It asks what kind of appearance it is.
Not to erase the self, and not to thin it into abstraction, but to ask a prior question: what if the self is not a thing at all — not even an inner one?
Why a Core Feels Necessary
The idea of a core self promises continuity.
It explains how you can change while remaining the same person; how memories belong to you; how commitments persist across time. It also promises moral anchoring: a someone to whom actions and responsibilities can be attached.
Without a core, it can feel as though identity dissolves into fragments — roles, moods, situations — with nothing holding them together.
But again, this is pressure toward a particular explanatory picture, not proof that the picture is required.
Ordinary Fractures
Consider how easily the sense of self shifts.
You are not the same self when writing as when speaking to a close friend, or when responding to a threat, or when daydreaming. You may later read something you wrote years ago and think, sincerely, “I don’t recognise that person.”
None of this feels pathological. It feels normal.
If there were a single inner core doing the owning and persisting, these shifts would be mysterious. Why would the core present itself so differently, so selectively, so unevenly?
If, instead, the self is something that emerges within activity, these shifts are exactly what we should expect.
The Self as Trajectory
On the ontology developed in this blog, the self is understood as a trajectory of construals.
It is not a substance that persists through time, but a relatively stable pattern across changing situations — a way experience, action, and meaning keep getting re‑coordinated.
Memory, on this view, is not a storehouse owned by a self. It is one of the mechanisms by which this trajectory maintains coherence. Commitments, habits, sensitivities, and skills play similar roles.
There is continuity — but it is achieved, not given.
First‑Person Experience Revisited
What, then, of the undeniable sense of being a self?
That sense is real, but it does not point to an inner object. It points to a mode of organisation. Experience is often organised around a centre of concern: what matters here, what is at stake, what must be responded to next. The word “I” names that centre, not a thing behind it.
This is why the sense of self intensifies under pressure and recedes in absorption. When coordination tightens — in danger, in decision, in self‑presentation — the self feels solid. When coordination flows — in skilled action, play, or deep focus — the self thins out or disappears.
Nothing has been lost. The pattern has simply changed.
Identity Without Essence
From this perspective, identity is not a hidden essence but a profile of stability.
You are recognisable because certain patterns re‑actualise: ways of responding, valuing, speaking, hesitating, committing. These patterns are constrained by history and situation, but they are not fixed once and for all.
This makes identity neither arbitrary nor absolute. It is resilient without being rigid.
Crucially, this account explains both change and responsibility without invoking an inner core that must somehow remain untouched by either.
What Becomes Visible
When the self is no longer treated as a thing with a core, several features come into focus:
Selfhood is situational, not global.
Continuity is patterned, not substantial.
Authenticity is relational, not inward discovery.
Psychological distress often involves rigidification, not fragmentation.
Most importantly, the familiar anxiety — “If there is no core self, am I nothing?” — is revealed as a category mistake.
The self was never a thing that could vanish.
A Self That Can Move
To relinquish the idea of a core is not to lose oneself. It is to gain room to move.
A self understood as trajectory can change without self‑betrayal, take responsibility without metaphysical burden, and remain recognisable without being frozen.
In the next post, we will step back from individual life and address a broader concern: how a world shared across persons can remain real once objects, agents, representations, and cores have all been re‑ordered.
For now, it is enough to see this: