Abstract
The articles by Goering, Klein, Dougherty, and Widge and Gilbert and colleagues are impressive examples of how a psychiatric intervention like deep brain stimulation (DBS) touches upon deep neuroscientific and neurophilosophical issues. Briefly, Gilbert and colleagues investigate subjective experience of the self and report self-estrangement in some DBS patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), while Goering, Klein, Dougherty, and Widge discuss the feasibility of closed-loop DBS and its potential effects on personal identity and agency. I highlight two areas for discussion: (i) neuroscientific and neurophilosophical determination of self and self-estrangement, and (ii) neuronal mechanisms of closed-loop DBS and their involvement of the self.