Three conceptions of the self for applied purposes (original) (raw)

The contribution of prefrontal executive processes to creating a sense of self

Vidya Prasarak Mandal

According to several current theories, executive processes help achieve various mental actions such as remembering, planning and decision-making, by executing cognitive operations on representations held in consciousness. I plan to argue that these executive processes are partly responsible for our sense of self, because of the way they produce the impression of an active, controlling presence in consciousness. If we examine what philosophers have said about the "ego" (Descartes), "the Self" (Locke and Hume), the "self of all selves" (William James), we will find that it fits what is now known about executive processes. Hume, for instance, famously argued that he could not detect the self in consciousness, and this would correspond to the claim (made by Crick and Koch, for instance) that we are not conscious of the executive processes themselves, but rather of their results.

The self: as a construct in psychology and neuropsychological evidence for its multiplicity

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2010

What is the self? Philosophers and psychologists pursuing an answer to this question immediately find themselves immersed in a host of questions about mind and body, subject and object, object and process, the homunculus, free will, self-awareness, and a variety of other puzzling matters that largely have eluded satisfying theoretical explication. In this paper I argue that some of this difficulty is attributable to our implicit, phenomenologically-based belief that the self is unitary entity-i.e., a singular ''I" that remembers, chooses, thinks, plans, and feels. In this article I address the question of what the self is by reviewing research, conducted primarily with neuropsychological participants, that converges on the idea that the self may be more complex and differentiated than many previous treatments of the topic have assumed. Although some aspects of self-knowledge such as episodic recollection may be compromised by cognitive and neurological disorders, other aspects-for instance, semantic trait summaries-appear largely intact. Taken together, these findings support the idea that there is no single, unified ''I" to be found. Rather, I argue ''the" self may best be construed as a set of interrelated, functionally independent systems.  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Cogn Sci 2010 1 172-183 WHAT IS THE SELF? T he phenomenology is universal. Each of us has the experience of a unitary self, an 'I' that remembers, chooses, thinks, plans, and feels. Yet it has been notoriously difficult to provide an account of just what this thinking, feeling, remembering, and planning entity is. Gordon Allport expressed this concern in the following famous quote: 'Who is the I that knows the bodily me, who has an image of myself and a sense of identity over time, who knows that I have propriate strivings? I know all these things, and what is more, I know that I know them. But who is it who has this perspectival grasp?.. . It is much easier to feel the self than to define the self.' (see Ref 1; p. 128

A Contemporary and Interdisciplinary Definition of the Self

This article addresses contemporary definitions of the self in both philosophical and cognitive neuroscience literature. In this article, I attempt to operationally define the self by amalgamating Gallagher’s model of the narrative and minimal self with evidence from both psychological and cognitive neuroscience. Gallagher defines the narrative self as reflecting on past experiences and future endeavors. The narrative self shapes our expectations, beliefs, thoughts, feelings and actions and is susceptible to these beliefs, thoughts, feelings and actions when making decisions. Using this definition, Gallagher describes the narrative self as an ensemble of selves, a forever changing entity, contingent on mood, state and motivation. On the other hand, the minimal self is simply the self in the present objective state, irrespective of a person’s memories or future decisions. As Gallagher had described it, the minimal self is composed of the sense of ownership and the sense of agency. The sense of ownership is the acknowledgment of one’s own sense of self, which can be understood as a separate entity from non self objects. The sense of agency, however, is the understanding that the individual is the source of an action. In the next section, I discuss the operational definition of the self within the cognitive neuroscience literature. Using these philosophical definitions, I offer a bridge between these perspectives by comparing Gallagher’s narrative self with the default mode network.

Looking For the Self in Cognition

The main aim of this essay is to bridge the gap between the Self, the Other and the world. To this end, it would try to highlight the reversible relation btween the three constants. In order to lead up to this relation, the essay would try to delve into the emergence of self-awareness and selfhood and its relation with consciusness. At the outset, a brief history of philosophy of mind would be provided in order to show the birth of alienation between the subject and the world and how this paved the way for scientism. The essay advocates the notion of the Minimal Self or the Expriential Self as proposed by Dan Zahavi and try to show that accepting such a deflationary notion of selfood as the founding brick for more mature and robust notions of selfhood could potentially make the chiasmic relation between the Self, the Other and the world more conspicuous. The essay would also attempt to answer a previously encountered criticism regarding the conscious status of pre-reflective self-awareness. It would argue in favour of the indispensability of pre-reflective self-awareness as pure consciousness and nothing less and highlight the dimension of otherness in the embodied consciousness. Finally, the essay would try to argue in favour of a kind of minimal self-alienation which would prevent the subjective being from becoming stagnant and would preserve its becoming.

The Centered Self

Self to Self, 2005

We have many expressions to describe a person who is trustworthy and true-a rock, a brick, a Mensch. In a more analytical mood, we describe such a person as grounded or centered. I want to consider what it is to be grounded or centered, and then to explain what being grounded or centered has to do with being trustworthy and true. My account begins with a quality generally regarded as distinctive of persons-namely, self-awareness. 1 Of course, a brick or a rock isn't self aware; but a person can be * An ancestor of this paper, entitled "A Sense of Self", was presented as one of the Jerome Simon lectures at the University of Toronto; to a conference on personal identity and practical reason at the University of Illinois, Chicago; to the Moral Philosophy Seminar at Oxford University; and to the Philosophy Departments at the University of Virginia, NYU, and Tufts University. "A Sense of Self" was the target of a paper delivered by Maik Tåndler to the Göttinger Philosophisches Kolloquium in January 2003, where much helpful discussion ensued; and it was the topic of discussion at a September 2003 meeting of the Ohio Reading Group in Ethics. Thanks are due to

Gallagher, S. 2000. Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science.

Trends in Cognitive Science 4, No. 1: 14-21, 2000

Several recently developed philosophical approaches to the self promise to enhance the exchange of ideas between the philosophy of the mind and the other cognitive sciences. This review examines two important concepts of self: the ‘minimal self’, a self devoid of temporal extension, and the ‘narrative self’, which involves personal identity and continuity across time. The notion of a minimal self is first clarified by drawing a distinction between the sense of self-agency and the sense of self-ownership for actions. This distinction is then explored within the neurological domain with specific reference to schizophrenia, in which the sense of self-agency may be disrupted. The convergence between the philosophical debate and empirical study is extended in a discussion of more primitive aspects of self and how these relate to neonatal experience and robotics. The second concept of self, the narrative self, is discussed in the light of Gazzaniga’s left-hemisphere ‘interpreter’ and episodic memory. Extensions of the idea of a narrative self that are consistent with neurological models are then considered. The review illustrates how the philosophical approach can inform cognitive science and suggests that a two-way collaboration may lead to a more fully developed account of the self.

Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive sci-ence

2000

Ever since William James 1 categorized different senses of the self at the end of the 19th century, philosophers and psychologists have refined and expanded the possible variations of this concept. James' inventory of physical self, mental self, spiritual self, and the ego has been variously supplemented. Neisser, for example, suggested important distinctions between ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual aspects of self 2. More recently, when reviewing a contentious collection of essays from various disciplines, Strawson found an overabundance of delineations between cognitive, embodied, fictional and narrative selves, among others 3. It would be impossible to review all of these diverse notions of self in this short review. Instead, I have focused on several recently developed approaches that promise the best exchange of ideas between philosophy of mind and the other cognitive sciences and that convey the breadth of philosophical analysis on this topic. These approaches can be divided into two groups that are focused, respectively, on two important aspects of self-the 'minimal' self and the 'narrative' self (see Glossary).