In this interesting interdisciplinary writing, Eakin is trying to draw on Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological theories on consciousness to shed new light on our reading of autobiography, especially on our understanding of narrative identify.

Eakin was fascinated by Damasio’s “the movie-in-the-brain” metaphor about self and consciousness. Damasio believes, according to my interpretation of Eakin’s interpretation of Damasio’s theories, it is the brain that generates our conscious mental states, such as our seeing a red rose. Those conscious mental states are like “the movie-in-the-brain”. Meanwhile, the brain also generates a sense of self or self-consciousness, which is like “the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie within the movie”. To me, Damasio is supporting some form of materialism about consciousness and trying to locate the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain. One of the major challenges facing any materialist theory is to explain conscious mental states from the first-person point of view: how can we explain why there is something it is like for us to see a red rose from our subjective point of view? Contemporary philosophers call this challenge “the explanatory gap” or “the hard problem of consciousness”. Of course, it is beyond the scope of Eakin’s discourse to further survey Damasio’s theories and to see if those theories can give a plausible reply to “the explanatory gap” objection. I believe such an endeavor is necessary if Eakin wants to give his literature theory a solid philosophical basis, though it seems Eakin was willing to admit that his discussion was indeed speculative (p. 68).

Damasio’s movie metaphor and the later music metaphor are very insightful and inspiring in the sense that they reject the split between the perceiver and the perceived, the subject and the object, the moviegoer and the movie, and the self and the narrative, and thus allow us to look at self and narrative identity from entirely different perspectives. One immediate merit of Damasio’s metaphor is that it avoids the need to posit the existence of a “homunculus” in our brain who is equipped with the knowledge necessary to interpret and organize different images formed in the brain. Since the homunculus must have its own brain to be knowledgeable, the “binding problem” starts again ad infinitum —we have to posit another homunculus inside the first homunculus’s brain! Self is no longer an innate endowment and stable entity as we traditionally understand it. Rather, self is in the narrative and in a process of constant change, and a persistent self-identity and unchanged observer outside the narrative over our lifetime is just an illusion. I agree with Eakin that this new attitude towards self can help us appreciate autobiography more insightfully in the sense that it prods us to look at not just the I-characters and the I-narrators but the whole I-narrative to locate the content of self-experience. But again, this attitude seems to me very speculative and lacking in philosophical and even scientific validity. It seems to explain away the “binding problem” instead of explaining it.

Regarding the section Doing Consciousness, I just could not see the logical connection between the results of the latest psychological experiments that deny our long held belief in free will and Eakin’s conclusion that autobiography is a doing or a performance.