Quote Originally Posted by somavision View Post
Is this going to start getting into philosophy and such? If so, I can see it getting messy...
Perfect.

Quote Originally Posted by somavision View Post
From my laymans point of view the issue seems to be around the semantics of 'you' and 'I', I would think that James' distinction of the existential and catagorical selves could be useful.
A citation would be helpful. In the meantime there's this, which I'm guessing is in the same spirit:

Quote Originally Posted by http://www.simplypsychology.org/self-concept.html
The term self-concept is a general term used to refer to how someone thinks about or perceives themselves.

The self concept is how we think about and evaluate ourselves. To be aware of oneself is to have a concept of oneself.

Baumeister (1999) provides the following self concept definition: ""the individual's belief about himself or herself, including the person's attributes and who and what the self is"".
Self Concept is an important term for both social psychology and humanism.

Lewis (1990) suggests that development of a concept of self has two aspects: -

(1) The Existential Self

This is the most basic part of the self-scheme or self-concept; the sense of being separate and distinct from others and the awareness of the constancy of the self” (Bee 1992).

The child realizes that they exist as a separate entity from others and that they continue to exist over time and space. According to Lewis awareness of the existential self begins as young as two to three months old and arises in part due to the relation the child has with the world. For example, the child smiles and someone smiles back, or the child touches a mobile and sees it move.

(2) The Categorical Self

Having realized that he or she exists as a separate experiencing being, the child next becomes aware that he or she is also an object in the world. Just as other objects including people have properties that can be experienced (big, small, red, smooth and so on) so the child is becoming aware of him or her self as an object which can be experienced and which has properties. The self too can be put into categories such as age, gender, size or skill. Two of the first categories to be applied are age (“I am 3”) and gender (“I am a girl”).

In early childhood. the categories children apply to themselves are very concrete (e.g. hair color, height and favorite things). Later, self-description also begins to include reference to internal psychological traits, comparative evaluations and to how others see them.
So, predicated on the assumption that a self and one or more non-selves exists, the existential and categorical selves can be broadly described as identificatory attachments to mental constructs arising from persistent belief in phenomenal object-subject relations.

Quote Originally Posted by somavision View Post
Perhaps it could be clarified "The existential self cannot be anything that is pointed to."
I'd argue the truth of this statement by leaning on Uncle Herc once again, who said "You cannot step into the same river twice, young homie, for the waters are ever flowing on." So if one were to point to oneself to convey "This is me", that action would spur an accretion of perceptions begetting memories and thoughts, and the self who indicated itself would have changed before the gesture was completed.

Secondly, if we accept that we cannot perceive, rationalize, or communicate perfectly, and if we accept that the existential self arises from the mind as a result of phenomenal events, then we can see that this existential self is but a nonequivalent representation of the objective self. And so we cannot point to this simulacrum of the self and rightfully say that it is what we are.