"Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence. At the same time it is I who am aware; so that the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it, of which for shortness we may call one the Me and the other the . - from Psychology: Briefer Course (1894) by William James"
"What is the self? The human condition is defined by our awareness that we are distinct from the world, that we are, in some way, the same person from day to day, even though our bodies change, and that the people around us are also selves. But we still do not really know what we are. As William James explained more than a century ago, the dual nature of the self lies at the heart of the mystery -"
"Right now, for instance, 'I' can sense 'my' fingers as they type. I can also see a screen on which my words appear, and, if I choose, I can focus instead on the rims of my glasses, which move as my head moves. Interestingly, 'my' can refer not just to body parts but to things I wear, think or do."
Human selfhood combines awareness of personal existence with being the object of that awareness, producing a duplex self that is both knower and known. The sense of self includes bodily sensations, perceptions of surroundings, possessions, actions, and a set of ideas about personal identity that persist over time despite bodily change. The skin marks a boundary but does not fully define the self. The rise of generative AI that speaks in the first person raises questions about whether artificial systems could possess a sense of self; assessing that possibility is complicated by incomplete understanding of human selfhood. Progress comes from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and emerging computational approaches, and some contemporary AI (OpenAI's GPT-5) reports it does not have a self.
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