The Subject as a Process of Stabilizing Experience

Initial Intuition

An ordinary description of the human being often begins with an assumption that seems so obvious that it is almost never formulated explicitly. It is assumed that somewhere within experience there exists a stable subject: the one who perceives, decides, remembers, chooses, observes one's own thoughts, and remains the same through changes of state. This intuition is convenient for everyday language. It allows us to say: "I thought," "I decided," "I changed," "I remember," "I observe myself." Yet the convenience of a grammatical form is not evidence for the existence of a separate inner center.

The scientific problem begins where everyday grammar is taken for ontology. If language contains a subject of action, it does not yet follow that the structure of experience contains a separate entity that performs the role of an inner controller. The grammatical "I" may designate not a thing, but a point of organization of an utterance, a practical form of self-reference, or the result of a temporary stabilization of experience. The initial question, therefore, is not whether a human being has a self in some sense. The question is narrower: does the explanation of experience require a fixed inner subject as a special entity?

This formulation is not the same as denying subjectivity. On the contrary, it begins from the fact that subjectivity is a real phenomenal and functional field: there is experience, attention, bodily state, memory, meaning, action, speech, and self-description. But the presence of these processes does not imply that an unchanging center must stand behind them. In this respect, the present approach is close to anti-substantialist lines of analysis of the self, where the self is considered not as an independent thing, but as a complex structure of modeling, organization, or self-reference (Metzinger, 2003; Gallagher, 2000).

The problem with the fixed subject is that it is often introduced before analysis. Instead of explaining how the connectedness of experience arises, a theory presupposes in advance the one who supposedly secures that connectedness. Instead of describing the mechanisms by which continuity is maintained, it places a stable "I" inside the human being and then uses it as an explanation. But if the phenomenon to be explained is already built into the explanatory principle, the model becomes circular: the connectedness of experience is explained by the subject, and the subject is presupposed because experience appears connected.

Why the Fixed Subject Seems Necessary

The intuition of a fixed subject has several sources. The first source is first-person continuity. A person does not simply undergo separate states; one undergoes them as "mine." Even when a state changes, the possibility remains of relating that change to oneself: "I was irritated," "I calmed down," "I changed my mind." From this it is easy to conclude that one and the same bearer passes through the changes.

The second source is practical responsibility. Social life requires actions to be attributed to an agent. A person makes promises, bears the consequences of decisions, answers for words, enters into relationships, and preserves biographical identity in legal, moral, and communicative fields. In these contexts, the concept of a stable person is necessary. Yet the practical necessity of attributing responsibility does not prove that an unchanging metaphysical center exists inside experience.

The third source is the sense of observing one's own states. A person can notice a thought, evaluate an emotion, inhibit an impulse, change a decision, and take a critical stance toward oneself. It seems that if thoughts and emotions can be observed, then there must be an observer separate from them. But here again there is a risk of a premature conclusion. The presence of a reflexive organization of experience does not require a separate inner observer. It can be described as a relation among processes of attention, memory, language, bodily regulation, and self-interpretation.

The fourth source is biographical connectedness. A person is able to perceive different periods of life as belonging to a single history. One can say: "At that time I was different, but it is still my life." Such connectedness creates the impression that a constant entity stands behind the history. Yet the connectedness of a life story may be the result of memory, language, and social forms, not the manifestation of an unchanging core. Narrative approaches to identity show that personality is to a large extent supported through the organization of a life story, but it does not follow from this that narrative exhausts the subject or that a separate entity necessarily stands behind the narrative (McAdams, 2001).

These sources cannot simply be discarded. They point to real phenomena: self-reference, responsibility, reflection, and biographical connectedness. The mistake lies not in recognizing these phenomena, but in moving from them to the strong conclusion that there is a fixed inner subject. A more cautious principle is the following: if a phenomenon can be explained through processes of organizing experience, no additional entity should be introduced.

The Contradictoriness of Experience

The first limitation of the fixed-subject model appears in the contradictoriness of experience. A person rarely acts as a single center fully transparent to itself. One may simultaneously want change and resist it, understand the necessity of a decision and avoid it, regard one value as important and act in favor of another. One may sincerely make a promise and later break it, not because of external coercion, but because of an internal divergence among motives, states, and modes of self-description.

If the fixed subject is understood as a single source of decisions, this contradictoriness becomes a problem. It becomes necessary to explain why a single center produces inconsistent actions, why it does not possess its own motives, and why its decisions can be revised under the pressure of states that it did not itself choose. One can say that the subject is weak, mistaken, or insufficiently aware. But such answers often only shift the problem: who exactly is weak, what exactly is mistaken, and why does awareness fail to coincide with action?

A more economical description is that experience is organized from the beginning on multiple levels. Bodily states, affective reactions, habits, attention, memory, language, social expectations, and current tasks interact within it. Coherence is not an initial given; it has to be maintained. When this maintenance is disrupted, internal divergences arise. From this point of view, contradictoriness is not an anomaly that must be explained by the fall of a unified subject. It becomes an expected consequence of the multilevel organization of experience.

This move does not eliminate the concept of the subject. It changes its status. The subject no longer appears as the ready-made owner of all states. It begins to be understood as a process in which states may be partly coordinated, partly separated, and partly not integrated. This makes it possible to describe contradictoriness without appealing to a hidden center that must be unified and yet, for some reason, constantly fails to coincide with itself.

Automatism and the Opacity of Action

The second limitation of the fixed-subject model is connected with automatism. A significant part of human behavior does not pass through explicit decision. A person reacts before having time to formulate an intention. One recognizes an intonation, tenses up, avoids something, chooses a habitual route, answers with a familiar phrase, or returns to a recurring scenario. Later, one may give an explanation of the action, but this explanation is not always the cause of the action. It may be a later stabilization of what has already been done.

Bodily and affective approaches to consciousness show that selfhood and conscious experience cannot be separated from bodily regulation, emotions, and background states of the organism (Damasio, 1999). This is important not as a ready-made neurobiological foundation for the model, but as a constraint against a purely inner and intellectualized picture of the subject. If action and self-experience depend on bodily-affective processes, then a fixed rational center cannot be the primary explanation of the whole organization of subjectivity.

Automatism does not mean the absence of a subject. It means that the subject cannot be identified with an explicit conscious decision. If a person acts automatically and then includes the action in a story about oneself, what we have is not a simple expression of a ready-made I, but a work of coordination: the action has to be noticed, named, justified, rejected, revised, or integrated. In this process, the subject appears not as the source of every impulse, but as a form of maintaining connectedness among impulse, action, memory, and subsequent self-description.

Here again the fixed-subject model encounters a difficulty. If the subject is an inner controller, why does a significant part of control occur without it? If it is an observer, why is observation often delayed? If it is the source of decision, why can the decision be reconstructed after the action? These questions do not prove that there is no subject. They show that the subject should not be placed in the position of a simple inner commander.

Variability and the Problem of Identity

The third limitation is connected with variability. A person changes not only externally and biographically, but also in the ways one experiences, understands, remembers, and evaluates oneself. What seems central in one period of life may later be revised. Old decisions may become incomprehensible. Former values may lose their force. New relationships, traumas, achievements, losses, illnesses, practices, and social roles may reconfigure self-description so deeply that the question arises: in what sense is this the same subject?

The fixed-subject model answers this question by assuming an unchanging bearer. Properties, states, and beliefs change, but the subject supposedly remains the same. Yet this explanation stops the analysis too quickly. It does not show how recognizability of oneself is preserved through change. It merely asserts that there must be someone who is preserved. In this way, an entity is again introduced where a description of processes is required.

An alternative move is to distinguish invariance from continuity. Continuity does not require full identity with a previous state. It requires the connectedness of changes. A person may be different and still preserve the possibility of relating those changes to one's own life. Such connectedness is supported by memory, language, bodily habits, social recognition, documents, relationships, places, practices, and recurring forms of self-interpretation. In this sense, the problem of identity is shifted from the question "what remains unchanged?" to the question "how is the connectedness of changes maintained?"

The distinction between minimal and narrative selfhood helps to show that subjectivity is not single-layered. There are different levels of self-reference: a pre-reflective sense of presence, bodily orientation, agency, autobiographical history, social name, and role (Gallagher, 2000). This distinction is important, but it is not accepted as a ready-made classification of entities. It is used as an indication that the subject must be analyzed in a multilevel way. Different levels may support one another, diverge from one another, or require reconfiguration.

The Observer as an Effect of Organization

One of the most persistent forms of the fixed subject is the idea of an inner observer. It seems convincing because a person is indeed able to relate to one's own states as data: to notice a thought, distinguish an emotion, register a bodily reaction, or comment on one's own behavior. But the observability of states does not imply the existence of an observer as a separate object.

A negative move is useful here: thoughts are discovered, emotions are discovered, bodily sensations are discovered, linguistic formulations are discovered. But when the presumed observer itself has to be found as a separate entity, it does not appear in the same sense. What was called the observer turns out not to be an object, but a function of organization: attention to states, the capacity for distinction, linguistic self-description, memory of one's own changes, and the practice of maintaining distance from an immediate impulse.

Self-model theory radically calls into question the idea of the self as a substantial object and shows that experienced unity may depend on structures of modeling rather than on an inner entity (Metzinger, 2003). The proposed model does not reduce the subject to the self-model, but it accepts an important constraint: the experienced sense of a center must not be turned into evidence for a real inner center. The fact that experience is organized as belonging to someone does not yet prove that this "someone" exists as a separate observer inside experience.

If the observer is understood as an effect of organization, the task of theory itself changes. What must be explained is not where the observer is located, but which processes create the stability of self-reference. Why does experience seem connected? Why do some states become "mine"? Why is a person able to take distance from an impulse? Why does this distance sometimes disappear? These questions are more productive than the search for an inner object that would have to observe everything else.

The Fixed Subject as a Redundant Explanation

The fixed subject performs an important stabilizing function in theories and in everyday thought. It simplifies description: there is the one who experiences, and there is what is experienced. There is the one who acts, and there is the action. There is the one who changes, and there are the changes. But the explanation becomes suspicious when one and the same principle must simultaneously be the source of unity, the agent of decision, the bearer of memory, the observer of states, the guarantor of responsibility, and the basis of personal continuity.

Such expansion makes the concept of the subject too strong. It begins to explain everything, and precisely for this reason it ceases to explain precisely. If contradiction is explained by the subject, automatism is explained by the subject, memory is explained by the subject, rupture is explained by the subject, and continuity is explained by the subject, then the concept loses its power of discrimination. It becomes a name for what has not yet been analyzed into processes.

Scientific economy requires a different move. It is necessary to ask which functions actually require explanation. Here at least five such functions can be distinguished: self-reference, connectedness of experience, temporal continuity, integration of action into a history, and the possibility of reflexive distance. None of these functions requires a fixed subject accepted in advance. Each can be preliminarily described through processes of stabilizing experience.

This does not mean that the term "subject" should be eliminated. On the contrary, it is preserved, but its status changes. It no longer designates the hidden owner of experience. It designates a problem of organization: how experience is maintained as sufficiently coherent for self-reference, action, memory, and continuity to arise. This shift prepares the minimal formula: the subject is a process of maintaining the coherence of experience.

Chapter Summary

The fixed-subject model is insufficient not because subjectivity is illusory or unimportant. It is insufficient because it turns the complex organization of experience into a simple inner entity too early. It treats as an initial given what requires explanation: connectedness, observation, agency, continuity, and self-reference.

The limitations identified in this chapter show why the fixed-subject model proves insufficient. Contradictoriness shows that experience does not act as a fully unified center. Automatism shows that conscious decision is not the source of the whole organization of behavior. Variability shows that identity cannot be reduced to invariance. The analysis of the observer shows that reflexive distance does not require a separate inner entity. Together, these limitations allow a transition from the question "where is the subject located?" to the question "how is the coherence of experience maintained?"