If the self is not a fixed, private owner of experience (as Buddhist, phenomenological, externalist and literary accounts each suggest), who is responsible for what a mind does?

Moral life seems to assume a stable self that acts, chooses and answers for its actions. Yet philosophy, in India and elsewhere, has repeatedly questioned that assumption. Vasubandhu argues there is no self to be found; phenomenology asks whether the self is first of all a “we”; externalism locates the mind partly outside the head; a poet may live as a plurality of selves; and modern physics asks what the observer is. This project follows that question through Poorvam’s published conversations, essays and articles. It does not defend one theory. It lets a reader move between Indian and Western accounts of self and mind and ask what each implies for responsibility, freedom and ethical reasoning. Scope: Poorvam’s own talks, interviews, essays and articles; out of scope for now: passage-level citation of classical texts.