On self- and other-interpretation - Daniel Dennett In TLS (in 1988):

‘What is a self? I will try to answer this question by developing an analogy with something much simpler, something which is nowhere near as puzzling as a self, but has some properties in common with selves.
What I have in mind is the centre of gravity of an object. This is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a centre of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has no mass; it has no colour; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like, a theorist’s fiction.’

(…)

‘A self is also an abstract object, a theorist’s fiction. The theory is not particle physics but what we might call a branch of people-physics; it is more soberly known as a phenomenology or hermeneutics, or soul-science (Geisteswissenschaft). The physicist does an interpretation, if you like, of the chair and its behaviour, and comes up with the theoretical abstraction of a centre of gravity, which is then very useful in characterizing the behaviour of the chair in the future, under a wide variety of conditions. The hermeneuticist or phenomenologist – or anthropologist – sees some rather more complicated things moving about in the world (human beings and animals) and is faced with a similar problem of interpretation. It turns out to be theoretically perspicuous to organize the interpretation around a central abstraction: each person has a self (in addition to a centre of gravity). In fact we have to posit selves for ourselves as well. The theoretical problem of self-interpretation is at least as difficult and important as the problem of other-interpretation.’ (…)

‘In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Sherlock Holmes’s nose can be supposed to be normal. Another question: Did Sherlock Holmes have a mole on his left shoulder-blade? The answer to this question is neither yes nor no. Nothing about the text or about the principles of extrapolation from the text permits an answer to that question. There is simply no fact of the matter. Why? Because Sherlock Holmes is a merely fictional character, created by, or constituted out of, the text and the culture in which that text resides.’

(…)

‘When a novelist sets down words on paper, this critic says (one often hears claims like this, but not meant to be taken completely literally), the novelist actually creates a world. A litmus test for this bizarre view is the principle of bivalence: when our imagined critic speaks of a fictional world he means a strange sort of real world, a world in which the principle of bivalence holds. Such a critic might seriously wonder whether Dr Watson was really Moriarty’s second cousin, or whether the conductor of the train that took Holmes and Watson to Aldershot was also the conductor of the train that brought them back to London. That sort of question can’t properly arise if you understand fiction correctly, of course. Whereas analogous questions about historical personages have to have yes or no answers, even if we may never be able to dredge them up.
Centres of gravity, as fictional objects, exhibit the same feature. They have only the properties that the theory that constitutes them endowed them with. If you scratch your head and say, “I wonder if maybe centres of gravity are really neutrinos!” you have misunderstood the theoretical status of a centre of gravity.’ (…)
‘We can still maintain that the robot’s brain, the robot’s computer, really knows nothing about the world; it’s not a self. It’s just a clanky computer. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. It doesn’t even know that it’s creating a fictional character. (The same is just as true of your brain; it doesn’t know what it’s doing either.) Nevertheless, the patterns in the behaviour that is being controlled by the computer are interpretable, by us, as accreting biography – telling the narrative of a self. But we are not the only interpreters. The robot novelist is also, of course, an interpreter; a self-interpreter, providing its own account of its activities in the world.’

(…)

‘We cannot undo those parts of our pasts that are determinate, but our selves are constantly being made more determinate as we go along in response to the way the world impinges on us. Of course it is also possible for a person to engage in auto-hermeneutics, interpretation of one’s self, and in particular to go back and think about one’s past, and one’s memories, and to rethink them and rewrite them. This process does change the “fictional” character, the character that you are, in much the way that Rabbit Angstrom, after Updike writes the second novel about him as a young man, comes to be a rather different fictional character, determinate in ways he was never determinate before. This would be an utterly mysterious and magical prospect (and hence something no one should take seriously) if the self were anything but an abstractum.’

(…)

‘We are all, at times, confabulators, telling and re-telling ourselves the story of our own lives, with scant attention to the question of truth. Why, though, do we behave this way? Why are we all such inveterate and inventive autobiographical novelists? As Umberto Maturana has (uncontroversially) observed “Everything said is said by a speaker to another speaker that may be himself.” But why should one talk to oneself? Why isn’t that an utterly idle activity, as systematically futile as trying to pick oneself up by one’s own bootstraps?’ (…)

‘According to him [Michael Gazzaniga], the normal mind is not beautifully unified, but rather a problematically yoked-together bundle of partly autonomous systems. All parts of the mind are not equally accessible to each other at all times. These modules or systems sometimes have internal communication problems which they solve by various ingenious and devious routes. If this is true (and I think it is), it may provide us with an answer to a most puzzling question about conscious thought: what good is it? Such a question begs for an evolutionary answer, but it will have to be speculative, of course. (It is not critical to my speculative answer, for the moment, where genetic evolution and transmission break off and cultural evolution and transmission take over.)’ (…)
‘The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you’re making a category mistake. After all, when a human being’s behavioural control system becomes seriously impaired, it can turn out that the best hermeneutical story we can tell about that individual says that there is more than one character “inhabiting” that body. This is quite possible on the view of the self that I have been presenting; it does not require any fancy metaphysical miracles. One can discover multiple selves in a person just as unproblematically as one could find Early Young Rabbit and Late Young Rabbit in the imagined Updike novels: all that has to be the case is that the story doesn’t cohere around one self, one imaginary point, but coheres (coheres much better, in any case) around two different imaginary points.’

(…)

‘As David Hume noted, no one has ever seen a self, either.’

Read the article here.

No one has ever seen a center of gravity nor a self.
And there are more imaginary points around which our lives cohere than just one, also that is helpful, maybe bot in court.
My other fictional self may have killed the poor widow with an axe. I apologize on behalf of him.
Morality requires a different kind of fiction.

The self is a fiction with consequences in the real world.

If we can live without this fiction remains debatable. I don’t think so.
There are more centers of gravity, and we keep on renewing the past by reinterpreting our own history, but the fiction that we know our history, that we are kept together by one fictional self remains extremely powerful. After all, perhaps this fiction is what we call sanity.