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Brand Deisler’s Linguistically Attributed Biographical Self and Conscious Action
The Self as a Biography Built From Others’ Words
Guillermo Brand Deisler proposes that the human Self is built developmentally from other people’s talk about a child: statements such as ‘Peter fell’ or ‘Peter will visit the park tomorrow’ construct a biography around the child’s name, which becomes coupled to the organism’s own accumulated history. Once stable, this biographical entity becomes the referent to which the brain unconsciously attributes actions, and an action is ‘conscious’ in his technical sense when it is attributed to the Self in this way. The theory takes basic sentience as given and explains how experience becomes organized around a persisting person.
Guillermo Brand Deisler
What consciousness is
Brand Deisler identifies the human Self with a biographical entity constructed through linguistic attribution and conscious action with action that unconscious functioning attributes to that entity; he does not identify phenomenal consciousness itself with anything.
Mind and body
All processes sustaining action occur in the organism, while actions are individuated at the biographical level. He calls the Self a ‘living entity’ without a body of its own, yet it depends entirely on the organism’s material organization and has no causal power outside it.
Mechanism
Coincident attributions (‘Peter is running’ while the child runs) couple the name-centered biography to the organism, while non-coincident attributions (‘Peter broke the glass yesterday’) make the referent independent of present activity.
Core claims
- The human Self is neither innate nor presupposed but is built from other people’s third-person statements about the child.
- The attribution that makes an action the Self’s own is unconscious and need not take the form of inner speech.
- Remembering, in his restricted sense, is integrating earlier content into the present as belonging to the Self’s biographical past.
- Information about one’s own name, reputation, commitments, or future gains unusual relevance and so shapes attention and experience.
Criticisms
Calling the Self a ‘living entity’ rests on a broad operational definition of life and is philosophically contestable. Using ‘conscious action’ for action attributed to the Self departs from the usual sense of the term, since such actions need not be experienced.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- The theory presupposes a sentient organism and does not say whether a machine could have that sentience, though a language-built Self could in principle be attributed to one.
- Survival beyond death: No
- Since the Self depends entirely on organization realized in the organism and has no causal power outside it, nothing of it survives the organism’s death.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- Personal meaning comes from the socially constructed biography of a person, with no cosmic purpose.
- Virtual immortality: Uncertain
- A biography could be recorded or modeled, but the theory ties the Self to a living organism’s Functional Autobiography and does not address transfer.
Related theories
- Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model (Overlap)
- Damasio's Homeostatic Feelings and Emergence of Consciousness (Overlap)
- Metzinger's No-Self Representational Theory of Subjectivity (Compatible)
- Toomela’s Language-Mediated Structural-Systemic Theory (Overlap)
Sources
- Conscious Action and the Self: How the Organism Constructs a Biographical Entity That Comes to Carry Out Actions, Guillermo Brand Deisler (2026)
- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, A. Damasio (1999)
- Consciousness Explained, D. C. Dennett (1991)
- Mind, Self, and Society, G. H. Mead (1934)
- Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, L. S. Vygotsky (1978)