Vogeley, K. and Gallagher, S. 2011. The self in the brain. In S. Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self (111‐36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Self in the brain 1 Kai Vogeley and Shaun Gallagher 1. Introduction In 1977 the philosopher Karl Popper and the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist John Eccles published The Self and its Brain, one of the first contributions in modern neurophilosophy. In that book they defended a dualism that viewed the self as an autonomous entity that interacted with, and in fact controlled brain processes. This view, which Eccles (1989, 1994) further defended and developed, was not at all representative of either the philosophical or neuroscientific communities of the time, and it was, in terms of its general, non-reductionist philosophical position, comparable to Descartes’s famous doctrine of the pineal gland as the site of interaction between mind and brain. According to Popper, “the action of the mind on the brain may consist in allowing certain fluctuations to lead to the firing of neurones” (p. 541). Eccles, famous for his work on synaptic mechanisms, proposed that the probabilistic operations of synaptic connections could be the place of interaction. “The self-conscious mind acts upon … neural centres, modifying the dynamic spatio-temporal patterns of the neural events” (Popper & Eccles, 1977, p. 495). The work by Popper and Eccles motivated a debate in the journal Neuroscience between the philosopher Mario Bunge, who defended an emergentist view, and the neuroscientist Donald McKay, who staked out a position between materialism and dualism (Bunge 1977, 1979; McKay 1978, 1979, 1980). McKay argued that we should “start from our immediate experience of what it is like to be a person” (MacKay, 1978, p. 601). He proposed that since each change in our experience corresponds to a change in brain activity, we have both first-person data and third-person data about the same entity, the conscious self, but that one set of data was not reducible to the other set, despite the high, possibly even perfect, degree of correlation. It is, he suggested, like 1 Shaun Gallagher’s work on this chapter was, in part, supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0639037, and the European Science Foundation’s Eurocore program: Consciousness in a Natural and Cultural Context, BASIC project. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or ESF.