The Self and the Myth of the Inner Owner

If emotion is not something felt inside the brain, and belief is not something stored inside the head, then the concept of the self is standing on increasingly thin ice.

And yet, the self is usually treated as the most obvious of all psychological facts. We are told that there is a me inside — a unified subject who has emotions, holds beliefs, forms intentions, makes decisions, and owns experiences. This self is presumed to be located somewhere behind the eyes, coordinating the machinery.

Neuroscience often softens the language, but rarely abandons the structure. The self becomes a “self-model,” a “narrative centre of gravity,” a “default mode network construct.” The metaphors change; the owner remains.

From a relational ontology perspective, this persistence is telling. The self is not a discovery. It is a commitment.

The Self as an Explanatory Placeholder

Like the mind’s eye and inner emotions, the self functions as an explanatory placeholder: a convenient fiction that allows us to stop asking questions.

Why did this thought arise? Because I thought it.

Why did this feeling occur? Because I felt it.

Why did this decision happen? Because I chose it.

The self is the thing that “has” experiences — which conveniently exempts experience itself from further analysis.

But once we abandon the assumption that phenomena must be owned by an inner subject, the self begins to look less like a cause and more like an effect — a stabilising pattern across relational activity.

No Inner Owner, No Inner Theatre

The self inherits all the same problems as the mind’s eye.

Just as there is no inner screen on which images appear, there is no inner homunculus watching those images, feeling those feelings, or endorsing those beliefs. Every attempt to locate the self inside the brain results either in infinite regress (“who is observing the observer?”) or in quiet hand-waving.

From a relational perspective, this is the wrong question entirely.

There is no thing that is the self, waiting to be found. There is a pattern of coordination that gets misconstrued as an owner.

The Self as a Relational Achievement

What we call “the self” is better understood as a stable construal that emerges across repeated relational cuts:

• linguistic participation (“I,” “me,” “mine”)

• social address and accountability

• memory as narrated continuity

• affective orientation and expectation

• practical agency within shared systems

None of these requires a central owner. What they require is coherence across interaction.

The self is not inside the system. The self is the system’s coherence as apprehended from within a particular perspective.

Crucially, this coherence is not guaranteed. It varies across contexts, cultures, developmental histories, and pathologies — which should already have alerted us that the self is not a natural object.

Why the Brain Keeps Getting Credit

Neuroscience finds correlations between brain activity and self-related reports, and then quietly promotes correlation into location.

But this is the same mistake we saw with emotion and belief. The brain is a necessary participant in the coordination — not the site where the phenomenon resides.

The self is not in the brain any more than a conversation is in a telephone.

What Happens When the Self Fractures

Dissociation, depersonalisation, derealisation, and certain meditative states are often described as disorders or anomalies of the self.

From a relational ontology perspective, they are something else entirely: moments where the usual coherence fails to stabilise.

There is no self “breaking apart.” There is a different pattern of relational organisation — one that no longer supports the familiar narrative of ownership.

This is deeply unsettling precisely because the myth of the self has been doing so much invisible work.

The Self as Myth, Not Illusion

Calling the self a myth is not to deny experience, agency, or responsibility. It is to re-locate them.

Myths are not falsehoods; they are stabilising stories that make a form of life possible. The self is one such story — powerful, useful, and deeply entrenched.

But it is not a thing in the head.

And once we see that, a great deal of psychological theorising begins to look like mythology mistaken for anatomy.

The Cut Ahead

If the self is not an inner owner, then intention, agency, responsibility, and consciousness itself can no longer be treated as private possessions of a brain-bound subject.

They, too, will require re-cutting.

That is where this series is heading.

Belief and the Myth of Mental States

We speak of beliefs as things we have.

We hold beliefs, acquire beliefs, revise beliefs, lose beliefs. They are described as internal states — propositions stored somewhere in the mind or brain — waiting to be expressed in words or actions. Cognitive science refines the picture with talk of representations and encodings, but the core assumption remains unchanged: belief is a mental object with a location.

Yet belief is one of the least object-like phenomena we know.

Beliefs contradict one another, shift with context, surface in action but not in speech, disappear under pressure and reappear without warning. People sincerely avow beliefs they do not act on, and act on beliefs they explicitly deny. If beliefs are inner states, they are remarkably ill-behaved ones.

The problem is not with belief. It is with the state model.

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The temptation to locate belief

The urge to locate belief is understandable. Beliefs persist over time. They influence behaviour. They seem to explain why people do what they do. If something persists and has effects, surely it must be somewhere.

But this reasoning once again smuggles in a metaphysical assumption: that persistence requires storage, and that influence requires an inner cause. Belief is thereby turned into a thing, and the brain becomes the obvious place to put it.

What is missed is that belief does not persist as content. It persists as orientation.

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Belief as orientation, not possession

From a relational perspective, a belief is not a proposition stored in the head. It is a stabilised way of taking the world — a patterned disposition to interpret, expect, respond, and act.

To believe that fire burns is not to host a sentence internally. It is to approach flames with caution, to withdraw when heat is felt, to warn others, to structure action accordingly. The belief is not behind these behaviours; it is their coherence across situations.

This is why belief can remain operative even when it cannot be articulated, and why articulation alone does not guarantee belief. Saying is one possible instantiation of belief, not its container.

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Context sensitivity without contradiction

One of the persistent puzzles about belief is its context sensitivity. People appear to believe one thing in one situation and another elsewhere. This is often treated as inconsistency, irrationality, or failure of self-knowledge.

But if belief is orientation rather than state, this variability is exactly what we should expect. Orientations are activated, constrained, and reshaped by situations. Different contexts afford different actions and interpretations, and belief is enacted accordingly.

There is no hidden store of propositions being selectively accessed. There is only a system negotiating its way through varying circumstances, drawing on its history to stabilise behaviour where it can.

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Neural correlates without stored propositions

As with memory and emotion, neural activity plays a crucial role in belief — but not as a storage medium for propositions.

Neural patterns reflect constraints on orientation: sensitivities to evidence, habits of inference, affective weightings, and learned associations. These constrain how situations are taken up, but they do not encode beliefs as discrete semantic objects.

To say that a belief is “represented in the brain” is to confuse the conditions under which a belief can be enacted with the belief itself.

The brain does not contain beliefs.

It participates in believing.

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Change, persuasion, and breakdown

Belief change is often modelled as updating internal representations in response to new information. But persuasion rarely works this way. Facts alone seldom overturn beliefs; shifts in trust, identity, emotion, and social alignment often matter far more.

This makes little sense if belief is a proposition stored internally. It makes perfect sense if belief is an orientation embedded in a network of relations. To change belief is to reorganise that network — to alter what counts as salient, credible, threatening, or desirable.

Beliefs do not flip; they reconfigure.

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Belief without interiority

Once belief is understood as relational orientation, the question “Where is belief located?” loses its footing. There is nothing to locate.

Belief happens:

• in patterns of action,

• in expectations and interpretations,

• in the continuity of response across situations.

The brain is indispensable to these patterns, but it is not their container. Locating belief in the brain mistakes a necessary participant for the phenomenon itself.

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From belief to possibility

Beliefs are often treated as constraints on possibility — limits imposed by what one takes to be true. But relationally understood, belief is also what makes coordinated action possible at all. It stabilises a way of moving through the world, allowing some possibilities to be pursued while others recede.

Belief is not a mental state behind experience.

It is one way experience holds together over time.

The myth of mental states dissolves, and with it the idea that belief must be stored, accessed, or located. What remains is a system oriented toward the world, continually re-stabilising itself as circumstances change.

Belief, like memory and emotion, is not in the brain.

It is in the doing.