Technology isn’t your friend. AI doesn’t care. But if that indifference doesn’t matter—because readers don’t notice or don’t want to—they don’t care. They just need something that speaks back, that appears to listen, that generates a voice on the page. Writing plays this role. It looks like a record of a self, a testimony, an expression of “me.” But the act of writing is not sustaining the self—it’s sustaining the network of relations, the circulation of language.
If it doesn’t matter who—or what—produced the words, we might ask whether the authorial self is anything more than an illusion.
William James (1890) already distinguished between the “I” of immediate experience and the “me” of narrative identity. Writing inhabits this split perfectly: it creates the “me” by fixing words in sequence, while the “I” dissolves into process. Bruce Hood (2012), in The Self Illusion, makes the point directly—our sense of a stable self is a story the brain tells. Writing is that same story externalised, stitched together on the page.
Daniel Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will shows how we mistake post-hoc coherence for intention. The same applies in authorship: the feeling that “I” wrote this line is constructed after the fact, an inference from timing and fit. Free will may be an illusion, yet the experience of choosing words is real and formative—it inflates meaning, it orients the narrative, it provides consequence, even if no sovereign “self” is in charge.
Benjamin Libet’s 1980s work found neural readiness signals firing before conscious awareness of decision. Writing reflects this delay. Phrases surface before the writer can claim them; only later does the authorial voice take credit, as though it were in command. Consciousness follows the draft, it doesn’t lead it.
Neuroscience underscores the point. Source-monitoring errors show how easily we misattribute the origins of thoughts and sensations. Writers routinely report the experience of words “coming from elsewhere,” or characters “speaking for themselves.” Experiments in virtual body ownership show the brain readily accepts alternative sources as “me.” Writing is just another prosthesis—an external body we momentarily inhabit. https://daedeluskite.com/2025/08/02/where-meaning-isnt
Thomas Metzinger (2003) in Being No One argues the phenomenal self is a transparent brain-generated model. Writing extends that model. The text is not an expression of an inner entity but the scaffolding of a self-model projected outward, where others can interact with it.
Even phenomenology admits this. Zahavi (2005) stresses the inseparability of self-awareness and experience. Writing doubles this structure—experience generates text, text reflects back as evidence of experience—yet no enduring self is uncovered.
Recent work in philosophy of mind continues this trajectory. For instance, contributions in Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology (2025) explicitly highlight the shift from “subject” to “subjectivity.” Writing accelerates that move. It produces subjectivity as relation and process, not as fixed authorial substance. https://daedeluskite.com/2021/11/05/emptiness-in-psychology-subjectivity-and-art/
At the start, it looks like writing preserves the self—that the act of setting words down secures identity. But think it through: what is preserved is the network of communication, not the solitary voice. The self that fears vanishing into text was never present in the first place.
References (Harvard style):
- James, W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
- Hood, B. (2012) The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Wegner, D.M. (2002) The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Libet, B. (1985) ‘Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), pp. 529–566. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Johnson, M.K., Hashtroudi, S. and Lindsay, D.S. (1993) ‘Source monitoring’, Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), pp. 3–28. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
- Slater, M., Spanlang, B., Sanchez-Vives, M.V. and Blanke, O. (2010) ‘First person experience of body transfer in virtual reality’, PLoS ONE, 5(5), e10564. San Francisco: Public Library of Science.
- Metzinger, T. (2003) Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Northoff, G. and Bermpohl, F. (2004) ‘Cortical midline structures and the self’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(3), pp. 102–107. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
- Zahavi, D. (2005) Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D. (2025) Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer.
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