Interpretive Frame
This article situates my own understanding of the emergent self—rooted in sensemaking, relationality, and systems of power—alongside several influential thinkers who also treat the self as something that emerges: Francisco Varela, William Hasker, Daniel Stern, Daniel Dennett, Stuart Kauffman, and Eckhart Tolle. Rather than trying to reconcile these perspectives into a single theory, I treat them as lenses that sharpen different aspects of what we call “self” and reveal the stakes of how we define it.
1. My Starting Point: The Emergent Self as Sensemaking-in-Context
In my work, the emergent self is not a thing we have but an ongoing process of becoming. I view the emergent self, not as a noun, but as a verb. It is an action shaped through experiences, interpretations, and responses—what I describe as the EIR cycle—across multiple levels:
- Micro: embodied emotion, memory, and meaning-making
- Meso: relationships, institutions, communities, and practices
- Macro: culture, ideology, history, and systems of power
The self is continually being formed as we make sense of our lives within stories, norms, and structures that are themselves contested. Humiliation, recognition, trauma, and resistance all become critical moments in which interpretations can tighten into constraint or open into new possibilities of becoming. The emergent self, in this view, is always relational, interpretive, and morally charged—never merely an internal psychological state.
Against that backdrop, the scholars below can be read as conversation partners. Each asks: What is it that emerges? From where? And to what effect?
2. Biological and Systemic Emergence: Varela and Kauffman
Francisco Varela approaches emergence through biology and cognitive science. With Maturana, he developed the notion of autopoiesis—living systems as self-producing, operationally closed yet structurally coupled with their environments. In his “enactive” approach to cognition, mind is not a representation machine inside the head but a history of embodied interaction in which a sense of self arises from the autonomous organization of the system.
Varela sometimes speaks of the self as a “virtual” identity: a useful, experientially real pattern generated by ongoing processes rather than a substantial entity. This echoes my own emphasis on the self as process rather than object, though Varela’s focus is primarily on biological and sensorimotor dynamics, whereas mine is explicitly socio-cultural and power-aware.
Stuart Kauffman also works at the level of complex systems, asking how order arises “for free” in biological and chemical networks. He describes autocatalytic sets—networks of reactions that collectively sustain themselves—as paradigmatic of emergent organization. While Kauffman is less directly concerned with subjective experience, his work underwrites a general claim: once systems reach a certain complexity, novel properties appear that cannot be reduced to their parts.
Where I converge with Varela and Kauffman is in treating emergence as patterned, lawful, and relational rather than mystical. Where I diverge is in scope: their primary concern is life and complexity as such; mine is how biographical, cultural, and political processes shape the lived experience of being a self who can be humiliated, silenced, recognized, or empowered.
3. Defending or Deconstructing the Self: Hasker and Dennett
William Hasker, in The Emergent Self, argues for emergent dualism. On his view, the human mind or soul is not a pre-given spiritual substance, but something that emerges from the complexity of the brain and yet becomes a distinct, non-physical reality with its own causal powers. This allows him to reject both strict materialism and traditional Cartesian dualism. For Hasker, the emergent self is robust enough to ground agency, moral responsibility, and even survival after death.
My own position is almost the reverse. I do not posit a separate metaphysical entity that emerges from the brain. Instead, I treat “self” as a relational-interpretive construct—a pattern of meanings, expectations, and responses sedimented over time. Where Hasker asks whether the self can be ontologically independent, I ask how selves are socially and symbolically constructed, and whose voices and bodies are recognized as fully human in the first place.
Daniel Dennett pushes in yet another direction. He describes the self as a “center of narrative gravity”—a useful fiction generated by the stories we tell about our lives. There is no inner homunculus (Latin for “little man.”); instead, multiple “drafts” of experience compete, and the self is the pattern we project onto this ongoing editorial process.
Dennett and I share a resistance to seeing the self as a hidden essence. Both perspectives foreground narrative and interpretation. But Dennett tends to treat the self’s “fictionality” as a largely neutral or even liberating fact about cognitive architecture. In my perspective, narrative is never neutral: stories are embedded in hierarchies of power and recognition. Some narratives are enforced through humiliation and exclusion; others become acts of resistance and reclamation.
4. Developmental and Experiential Emergence: Stern and Tolle
Daniel Stern, a developmental psychologist, traces how an infant’s sense of self emerges in layered forms. In The Interpersonal World of the Infant, he describes phases such as the emergent self, core self, subjective self, and verbal self, each organized around new capacities for sensing continuity, agency, and intersubjectivity. Selfhood, for Stern, is not given at birth; it is co-created through patterns of interaction with caregivers.
Stern’s account aligns strongly with my emphasis on relational formation. Both approaches assume that selves are forged in contact—through affective attunement, misattunement, repair, and the stories that eventually wrap around these experiences. Where I extend Stern is in linking these early relational patterns to social structures and historical narratives: families do not exist outside of racism, fatphobia, sexism, or class stratification, and infants come to inhabit selves already marked by those forces.
Eckhart Tolle, by contrast, speaks from a contemplative and spiritual angle. In The Power of Now and related teachings, he distinguishes between the egoic self—constructed through identification with thought, emotion, and what he calls the pain-body—and a deeper awareness rooted in present-moment presence. Here, the task is to awaken from the narrative and emotional identifications that keep us trapped in suffering.
There is both resonance and tension between Tolle’s view and mine. I agree that rigid identification with old narratives can keep people locked into cycles of shame and reactive response. At the same time, I resist any move that treats suffering—especially humiliation or trauma—as merely a matter of individual ego. For me, healing requires not just inner presence but transforming the social conditions that repeatedly wound certain bodies and identities.
5. Convergences: What These Perspectives Share
Across these very different thinkers, several common threads appear:
- Anti-essentialism:
None of these accounts treats the self as a simple, pre-packaged essence. Whether through systems theory (Varela, Kauffman), developmental psychology (Stern), emergent dualism (Hasker), narrative construction (Dennett), or spiritual practice (Tolle), the self is something that comes into being over time. - Process and Pattern:
Each perspective understands selfhood as a pattern in motion—a dynamic configuration of biological, cognitive, relational, or spiritual processes. This is very close to my EIR framing, where selves are ongoing responses to experience rather than static identities. - Opacity and Partiality:
All acknowledge that our access to the self is indirect. We encounter ourselves through stories, sensations, reflections, or contemplative insight, never from a God’s-eye view. My work joins this by emphasizing that our sense of self is always mediated by language, culture, and power.
6. Divergences: Where the Paths Split
Despite these overlaps, there are sharp differences:
- Metaphysical stakes:
Hasker’s emergent self is ultimately a non-physical substance with potential post-mortem existence. Dennett’s self is closer to a convenient fiction. My own work sidesteps the metaphysical question and focuses on how the experience of being a self is shaped by social narratives and structures. - Level of primary analysis:
Varela and Kauffman focus on biological and systemic emergence; Stern focuses on early relational development; Tolle on inner awareness and spiritual liberation. My lens is deliberately multi-level and socio-political: humiliation, dignity, intersectionality, and structural violence are central, not peripheral. - Normativity and justice:
Only some of these thinkers foreground questions of justice. Kauffman’s and Varela’s work is largely descriptive; Dennett is interested in philosophy of mind; Hasker in metaphysics and theology. My project, by contrast, treats the emergent self as always entangled with power, oppression, and the possibility of resistance—how bodies marked as “fat,” “disabled,” “queer,” or “other” are invited into some futures and barred from others. - What counts as “maturity” or “awakening”:
For Stern, healthy emergence involves integrated, attuned relational patterns across developmental stages. For Tolle, awakening is dis-identification from ego and identification with presence. For me, emergence is less about reaching a final state and more about cultivating the capacity to re-interpret experience, reclaim dignity, and participate in more just relational worlds.
7. The Emergent Self as a Sensemaking Project
Placed alongside these scholars, my view of the emergent self functions as a bridge:
- Like Varela and Kauffman, it honors complexity, feedback, and non-linearity.
- Like Stern, it understands selves as co-created in relationships.
- Like Dennett, it treats narrative as constitutive of selfhood.
- Like Tolle, it recognizes that awareness of one’s own patterns can be liberating.
- Unlike many of them, it insists that systems of power and humiliation are not background noise but central conditions under which selves emerge.
On this site, every article participates in that broader sensemaking project. Each theoretical lens—whether drawn from biology, philosophy, psychology, or spirituality—is not a final answer but a tool for asking better questions:
- How did my self come to feel inevitable in the form it now takes?
- Which stories, systems, and relationships have been shaping me without my consent?
- What becomes possible when I reinterpret those experiences and respond differently—individually and collectively?
The emergent self, in that light, is not a destination but an ongoing inquiry: a way of paying attention to how we are being made and unmade, and how we might participate more deliberately in the futures we are capable of becoming.
How to Cite This Article
Green, R. K. (2025). The emergent self in context: Sensemaking, complexity, and the many ways a self comes to be. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/the-emergent-self-in-context-sensemaking-complexity-and-the-many-ways-a-self-comes-to-be/
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