When I was at graduate school I read a passage from John Campbell that lodged itself somewhere in my brain, where it has remained ever since like a philosophical earworm. This is it:
“Our commonsense picture of the causation of conscious thought is that it depends on a background of beliefs, desires and interests, most of which are not themselves conscious at any one time. For example, if you are idly looking out of the window, your idle thoughts will be about people you know or plans you have. Of course, seeing something unexpected, as you look out of the window, can be the cause which opens up new trains of thought. But which trains of thought are opened up will depend on your particular background of beliefs, desires, and interests. Different people could see the same thing yet have quite different thoughts in consequence. This dependence of which thoughts you have on your underlying psychology has to do with our sense of ownership of thoughts: that the particular thoughts you have belong to you…” (my emphasis).
What I found so enticing about this idea was not only that it seemed true in a familiar sort of way—perhaps even obviously so—but for all that, it felt excitingly illuminating about what it is like to have minds like ours. The central idea (as I took it) is this. We don’t simply have thoughts flash into our minds at random, or even in a rational but impersonal sequence. The thoughts I have feel to be mine, in part, because of their emergence from my underlying stable psychology that governs their movements in highly idiosyncratic but familiar-to-me ways. Given the same prompts, your thoughts will go one way and mine another, and this is all part of the glorious sense of individuality—the sense of this-is-me-ness—that we can so easily feel about the goings-on inside our minds.
What goes for thoughts goes, it seems to me, for other elements of our conscious mental lives, too. Take our emotional temperaments. There is a good deal of regularity in the way we feel about things. There is also a lot of variation in the way different people feel about things. The way I feel about the prospect of a bracing nature walk in March, say (answer: like curling up in my snail-shell together with a countervailing dash of self-defiance) or a bookless train-ride (jittery restiveness at long last followed by a feeling of mental unclenching) is likely to pattern differently to the way you tend to feel about these things. Given the same prompts, your emotions may go one way and mine another. This is all part of the wonderful soup of mental distinctiveness that makes having my particular mind feel like me and yours feel like you.
Some of what I am getting at here can be brought out more clearly by considering situations in which these personalized patterns break down. Mental illness of various kinds can aggressively disrupt ordinary patterns of thought and feeling. The same can happen with periods of chronic pain or sickness. Think of those living with dementia, or severe cases of stress, or burn-out. There are plenty of bad-making features attending this sad crowd of human conditions. But one thing that notably typifies them all is a feeling of self-erasure: in one way or another, in all these cases, it is common to hear that the sufferer no longer feels like themselves. A proposal I have made in a couple of places (here and here) is that these two things are linked. My lifelong familiarity with myself leads me to build up a bank of low-lying expectations about where my thoughts and feelings will go in novel situations, and this constitutes at least one meaningful sense of the phrase “a sense of self.” Little wonder that we can feel a dizzying loss of the sense of self when these expectations are—often extensively and often with a sort of violent abruptness—overturned in the sorts of conditions listed above.
One thing I hadn’t considered before, however, is whether the sense of self (so characterized) is really something of value, and if so, what its value consists in. Indeed, it seemed to me plainly obvious that it’s a valuable thing to have—just note the horror in cases where it breaks down. But that in itself isn’t a very satisfying landing place, because it leaves unanswered the question of what the source of the value is. What is the payoff to having such a sense of self when all is going well? Let me have a go at a rough sketch of at least one sort of answer.
The suggested answer is that this sense of self allows us to navigate the world with a stable sense of psychic unity: here I go again, thinking thus and feeling thus, how like me! This is apt to work as a shortcut for the laborious business of emoting and cognizing in novel situations from scratch, so its value might be billed as an effort- or energy-saving adaptation. With a bit of squinting, however, this might make it sound as if its value is precariously close to that of helping us sleepwalk through our lives. This may in turn strike us as a questionable contribution to a flourishing human life, or at least one to be handled with care.
In fact, however, this sleepwalking charge seems to me to be barking up entirely the wrong tree, and indeed it seems to me that quite the opposite is true. By anchoring the continuously emerging conscious stream of mental activity to a stable signature emotional or cognitive style, we are free to experiment and explore the world as ourselves, a unified meaning-giving frame. The alternative is what we might think of as a nihilistic vision of meeting each moment anew, unanchored to an enduring sense of self. This might sound exciting and free. And indeed, in the moment it might feel like it, too! But with no sense that it’s me who’s having these feelings or thinking these thoughts, this is the thin freedom of disengagement from a broader meaning-giving frame. On this way of thinking, it is the nihilists who are sleepwalking, even if they are enjoying some turbulent dreams along the way.
This, in any case, is the line of thinking that Campbell’s earworm has led me to. Of course, given the same prompt, yours might go another way.
Léa Salje
Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on first-person thought and the epistemology of the self. Recent work includes Saying What One Thinks (OUP, 2025) and “Artspeak (Or: What Dorothea Learned in Rome)” in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2026). Her Routledge introductory book to the philosophy of thought, Thought: The Basics, is out summer 2026.
