Who am I? Self-inquiry as a neurophenomenological approach to consciousness

Inconclusive evidence for leading third-person theories of consciousness has renewed scientific interest in its first-person nature. Self-inquiry, a first-person method from Advaita Vedanta, can be operationalized to meet this need, though it has not received prior empirical study, likely owing to Advaita’s idealism. By bracketing Advaita’s metaphysical commitments and mapping its characterization of consciousness onto the distinctions drawn by consciousness science, self-inquiry can be understood as a systematic phenomenology of selfhood. The method’s rationale is that mental contents perpetuate the “narrative self,” or one’s personal identity, so tracing such contents back to the sense of “I” to which they are referred attenuates the narrative self and discloses the “minimal self.” The minimal self is the pre-reflective first-person perspective of experience that carries a sense of “for-me-ness.” Sustained attention to the minimal self may then facilitate a selfless mode of awareness, or nondual awareness, marked by the absence of felt division between self and world. On this account, the narrative self and the appropriative ownership underlying the minimal self are seen as illusory, while an impersonal, reflexive consciousness remains. This deconstruction of selfhood already has neurophenomenological precedent, though from studies confined to Buddhist practice and reliant on idiosyncratic techniques. Self-inquiry thus holds empirical significance: its stepwise structure offers potential reproducibility across participants, a within-practice control, and a target attentional operation whose proposed distinctiveness can be empirically tested. It may also hold clinical relevance, having been proposed for incorporation into psychotherapy amid growing research into the therapeutic potential of self-attenuation.