The Ego Trick Book Summary - The Ego Trick Book explained in key points

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The Ego Trick summary

Name: The Ego Trick
Rating: 3.9 (47 reviews)
Author: Julian Baggini

Julian Baggini

What Does it Mean To Be You?

3.9 (47 ratings)

16 mins

Brief summary

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini explores the concept of the self and argues that it is merely an illusion created by our brains. It challenges us to reconsider our understanding of identity and how we relate to others.

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Theoretical Philosophy

Table of Contents

The Ego Trick
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Challenge your understanding of your “self.”

The person who’s reading this text at this moment is . . . you, right? But who are you, really? Are you the schools you went to, the parents you had and the job you hold? Are you the same person now that you were at the age of three? What if you hear multiple voices inside your own head – whether it’s your conscience, or you have multiple personality disorder and literally experience six distinct voices and personalities? How do you know who is really you, or what makes you “really” an individual?

Philosophers, scientists and religious leaders have been trying to answer these questions for centuries. These blinks don’t pretend to have all the answers, but as you’ll learn, no one has them all anyway!

Jump in to learn about

the likelihood that you have a soul;
the common cause of multiple personality disorder; and
why you might not really have free will.

Do spiritual awakenings reveal the truth of our existence – or are they the result of brain dysfunctions?

In 1982, a woman named Suzanne Segal was waiting for a bus in Paris. Without warning, she forgot everything about her life, including her conception of who she was.

To Segal, the body and brain that she’d had since birth no longer seemed to be hers. Instead, her thoughts of herself encompassed everything and everyone around her. “I” was nothing more than a vast open space, and Segal became certain that she didn’t really exist at all.

For the following ten years, Segal resisted this loss of self and sought help from several therapists. But as her attempts to reconnect with her old self failed, Segal began to wonder if she’d experienced an awakening. Was it possible that losing her identity was a form of transcendence?

Having found similarities between her experience and the Buddhist conception of anatta, a transcendental state of non-being, Segal began to work as a spiritual leader. Yet by 1996, Segal’s sense of anatta began to fall apart at the seams. At times, she even felt like her old self again, and her spiritual messages became confused.

Neuroscience research suggests that some spiritual experiences may, in fact, be the result of brain dysfunctions. Unfortunately, this seemed to be the case for Segal, who could no longer hold a pen or remember people’s names. In February 1997, she was diagnosed with a large brain tumor. She died a few months later, after a brief coma.

Doctors believed Segal’s shift in consciousness back in 1982 was caused by the pressure the tumor was exerting on her brain. However, Segal’s followers disagreed. They believed it was the tumor that caused her to lose her connection to the transcendent, universal consciousness.

The notion of something like a soul is intuitive, but not logical.

The idea that humans have an immortal soul exists in nearly every religion. The idea of the soul, eternal and separate from the mortal body, fascinated ancient philosophers too.

Persian philosopher Avicenna tackled the question of whether the soul is real by creating a thought experiment called the floating man. Avicenna asks us to imagine ourselves without our bodies, perceiving nothing of the world around us and floating in the air without feeling any sensations at all. In this state, would we still be conscious of the fact that we exist?

Multiple personality disorder illustrates the subjectivity of our experience.

Once upon a time, there was a mysterious castle where eleven people lived together. This might sound like the scene for a fairytale, but it is also an apt analogue of the mind of a person with multiple personality disorder.

Multiple personality disorder highlights how subjective our experience of the world is. In 1990, Robert B. Oxnam was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (the scientific term for multiple personality disorder). It was as if there were different personalities using his mind at different times.

Our sense of self, which varies from culture to culture, is shaped by how society perceives us.

Have you ever been so consumed with a personal drama of your own that you completely missed an important event in the world around you? Just as it’s not enough to reflect on your own life to learn about the world, you also need to look outside of yourself to learn about the self.

Our sense of self is shaped by the way we’re perceived in society. This is why it’s vital that the peers of transgender people perceive them the way they perceive themselves – as belonging to whichever gender category they identify with. Society’s validation and acceptance are essential to a strong, stable sense of self.

The existence of the ego is a trick of the mind.

As human beings, we’re terrified of our own mortality. Death marks the end of the complex identities that we feel belong to us. But what if these identities are ultimately illusions? The truth is that the ego is a trick of the mind.

In the eighteenth century, philosopher David Hume developed the idea that the ego is an unstable entity. Our minds, Hume argued, aren’t constant. Instead, they’re an amalgamation of passing ideas, thoughts and emotions.

The idea of the self as an illusion isn’t just found in Western philosophy, but in Buddhist teachings too.

Though the idea of the self as a construct is relatively new to Western philosophy, it’s been central to many other world religions for centuries. Ancient Buddhist wisdom teaches that the self is an illusion.

In the first blink, you were introduced to the concept of anatta, or “no-self.” Recent re-examinations of ancient Buddhist texts suggest that “non-self” might be a more accurate translation. The no-self interpretation implies that there is no self at all and that the whole universe is an illusion.

If we have no soul, we might not have free will either.

The idea that we actually have no hand in the decisions we make, whether we’re deciding between ice-cream flavors or career choices, is as relieving as it is devastating. If none of our “choices” matter, we can all stop worrying about making the right ones. On the other hand, this makes life itself seem pointless and empty.

Whether you believe in the empowering idea of human free will or not depends on which theory of the soul you find most compelling. If you accept the argument that the self is no more than a bundle of fragmentary thoughts and experiences, with your decisions and actions simply the mechanical outcome of the body and brain interacting with environmental changes in alignment with physical laws, you must also deny the existence of free will.

Technological and cultural changes are beginning to transform our sense of self.

In many ways, science fiction authors don’t try to illustrate the future. Their real aim is to make sense of what’s going on in the present as changes leave our world looking less and less like the world of the past. Therefore, perhaps some science fiction exploring the present nature of the self is in order.

Today, the self is very different from what it once was. Society is moving away from the sense of a united, cohesive identity toward sets of multiple identities. Children’s lives used to be comprised of a series of relatively constant and uniform experiences, which led them to develop conventional personalities with a handful of specific cultural eccentricities.

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What is The Ego Trick about?

The Ego Trick (2011) explores the slippery topic of what we call “I” or “me.” These blinks give insight into the many factors that shape our sense of self, including brain function and dysfunction, society, culture and technological changes, and introduce the key philosophical questions behind our ideas about identity, souls and free will.

Best quote from The Ego Trick

We will never know for sure what the true causal factors for Segals experiences were.

—Julian Baggini

Who should read The Ego Trick?

Readers who suspect that our world is illusory
Students seeking a compact introduction to the philosophy of mind
Those interested in the parallels between Western philosophy and Buddhist thought

About the Author

Julian Baggini is a British philosopher and founder of The Philosopher’s Magazine. He is also the author of the bestselling philosophical texts The Pig That Wants to be Eaten and Do They Think You’re Stupid?

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Philosophy Psychology

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