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philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
, the self is an individual's own
being Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing. Existence is often contrasted with essence: the essence of an entity is its essential features or qualities, which can be understood even if one do ...
,
knowledge Knowledge is an Declarative knowledge, awareness of facts, a Knowledge by acquaintance, familiarity with individuals and situations, or a Procedural knowledge, practical skill. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is oft ...
, and
values In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of some thing or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live ( normative ethics), or to describe the significance of different a ...
, and the relationship between these attributes. The first-person perspective distinguishes selfhood from
personal identity Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time ...
. Whereas "identity" is (literally) sameness and may involve
categorization Classification is the activity of assigning objects to some pre-existing classes or categories. This is distinct from the task of establishing the classes themselves (for example through cluster analysis). Examples include diagnostic tests, identi ...
and labeling, selfhood implies a first-person perspective and suggests potential uniqueness. Conversely, "person" is used as a third-person reference. Personal identity can be impaired in late-stage
Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease and the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems wit ...
and in other neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, the self is distinguishable from "others". Including the distinction between sameness and otherness, the self versus other is a research topic in contemporary
philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
and contemporary phenomenology (see also psychological phenomenology),
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
,
psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior. ...
,
neurology Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix wikt:-logia, -logia, "study of") is the branch of specialty (medicine) , medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous syst ...
, and
neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...
. Although
subjective experience In philosophy of mind, qualia (; singular: quale ) are defined as instances of Subjectivity, subjective, consciousness, conscious experience. The term ''qualia'' derives from the Latin neuter plural form (''qualia'') of the Latin adjective '':wi ...
is central to selfhood, the privacy of this experience is only one of many problems in the philosophy of self and
scientific Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
study of
consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of a state or object, either internal to oneself or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate among philosophers, scientists, an ...
.


Psychology

The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology forms the distinction between two elements I and me. The self as ''I'', is the subjective knower. While, the self as ''Me'', is the subject that is known. Current views of the self in psychology positions the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity. Self, following the ideas of
John Locke John Locke (; 29 August 1632 (Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.) – 28 October 1704 (Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.)) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thi ...
, has been seen as a product of
episodic memory Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred ...
but research on people with amnesia reveals that they have a coherent sense of self based on preserved conceptual autobiographical knowledge. Hence, it is possible to correlate cognitive and affective experiences of self with neural processes. A goal of this ongoing research is to provide grounding insight into the elements of which the complex multiple situated selves of human identity are composed. What the Freudian tradition has subjectively called, "sense of self" is for Jungian analytic psychology, where one's identity is lodged in the persona or ego and is subject to change in maturation. Carl Jung distinguished, "The self is not only the center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality...". The Self in Jungian psychology is "the archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche ... a transpersonal power that transcends the ego." As a Jungian archetype, it cannot be seen directly, but by ongoing individuating maturation and analytic observation, can be experienced objectively by its cohesive wholeness-making factor. Meanwhile, self psychology is a set of psychotherapeutic principles and techniques established by the Austrian-born American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut upon the foundation of the psychoanalytic method developed by Freud, and is specifically focused on the subjectivity of experience, which, according to self psychology, is mediated by a psychological structure called the self. Examples of psychiatric conditions where such "sameness" may become broken include depersonalization, which sometimes occurs in
schizophrenia Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...
, where the self appears different from the subject.


Psychiatry

The 'Disorders of the Self' have also been extensively studied by psychiatrists. For example, facial and
pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...
take large amounts of brain processing capacity but pareidolia cannot explain many constructs of self for cases of disorder, such as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. One's sense of self can also be changed upon becoming part of a stigmatized group. According to Cox, Abramson, Devine, and Hollon (2012), if an individual has prejudice against a certain group, like the elderly and then later becomes part of this group. This prejudice can be turned inward causing depression. The philosophy of a disordered self, such as in
schizophrenia Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...
, is described in terms of what the psychiatrist understands are actual events in terms of neuron excitation but are delusions nonetheless, and the schizo-affective or a schizophrenic person also believes are actual events in terms of essential being. PET scans have shown that auditory stimulation is processed in certain areas of the brain, and imagined similar events are processed in adjacent areas, but hallucinations are processed in the same areas as actual stimulation. In such cases, external influences may be the source of consciousness and the person may or may not be responsible for "sharing" in the mind's process, or the events which occur, such as visions and auditory stimuli, may persist and be repeated often over hours, days, months or years—and the afflicted person may believe themselves to be in a state of rapture or possession.


Neuroscience

Two areas of the
brain The brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head (cephalization), usually near organs for ...
that are important in retrieving self-knowledge are the medial prefrontal cortex and the medial posterior parietal cortex.Pfeifer, J. H., Lieberman, M. D., & Dapretto, M. (2007). "I know you are but what am I?!": Neural bases of self and social knowledge retrieval in children and adults. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19(8), 1323-1337. The posterior cingulate cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex are thought to combine to provide humans with the ability to self-reflect. The
insular cortex The insular cortex (also insula and insular lobe) is a portion of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus (the fissure separating the temporal lobe from the parietal lobe, parietal and frontal lobes) within each brain hemisphere ...
is also thought to be involved in the process of
self-reference Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields. In natural or formal languages, self-reference ...
.Modinos G, Renken R, Ormel J, Aleman A. Self-reflection and the psychosis-prone brain: an fMRI study. Neuropsychology erial online May 2011;25(3):295-305. Available from: MEDLINE with Full Text, Ipswich, MA. Accessed November 7, 2011.


Sociology

Culture Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
consists of explicit and implicit patterns of historically derived and selected ideas and their embodiment in institutions, cognitive and social practices, and artifacts. Cultural systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other, as conditioning elements of further action. The way individuals construct themselves may be different due to their culture. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama's theory of the interdependent self hypothesizes that representations of the self in human cultures fall on a continuum from ''independent'' to ''interdependent''. The independent self is supposed to be egoistic, unique, separated from the various contexts, critical in judgment, and prone to self-expression. The interdependent self is supposed to be altruistic, similar with the others, flexible according to contexts, conformist, and unlikely to express opinions that would disturb the harmony of his or her group of belonging. However, this theory has been criticized by other sociologists, including David Matsumoto for being based on popular stereotypes and myths about different cultures rather than on rigorous scientific research. A 2016 study of 10,203 participants from 55 cultural groups also failed to find a correlation between the postulating series of causal links between culture and self-construals, finding instead that correlations between traits varied both across cultures did not correlate with Markus & Kitayama's identifications of "independent" or "interdependent" self.


Philosophy

The philosophy of self seeks to describe essential qualities that constitute a person's uniqueness or a person's essential being. There have been various approaches to defining these qualities. The self can be considered as the source of consciousness, the agent responsible for an individual's thoughts and actions, or the substantial nature of a person which endures and unifies consciousness over time. The self has a particular prominence in the thought of
René Descartes René Descartes ( , ; ; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and Modern science, science. Mathematics was paramou ...
(1596-1650). In addition to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) on "otherness", the distinction between "you" and "me" has been further elaborated in Martin Buber's 1923 philosophical work ''Ich und Du''. In philosophy, the problem of
personal identity Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time ...
is concerned with how one is able to identify a single person over a time interval, dealing with such questions as, "What makes it true that a person at one time is the same thing as a person at another time?" or "What kinds of things are we persons?" A question related to the problem of personal identity is Benj Hellie's vertiginous question. The vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, ''this'' one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are ''live''? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.) Hellie's argument is closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of
egocentric presentism Egocentric presentism is a form of solipsism introduced by Caspar Hare in which other persons can be conscious, but their experiences are simply not . Similarly, in related work, Hare argues for a theory of perspectival realism in which other pe ...
and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews. Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J. J. Valberg in justifying his horizonal view of the self, and by Thomas Nagel in '' The View from Nowhere''. Tim S. Roberts refers to the question of why a particular organism out of all the organisms that happen to exist happens to be you as the "Even Harder Problem of Consciousness". Open individualism is a view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future. It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with "Empty individualism", the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern that instantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and "Closed individualism", the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time. Open individualism is related to the concept of anattā in Buddhist philosophy. In Buddhism, the term anattā () or anātman () is the doctrine of "non-self" – that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon. While often interpreted as a doctrine denying the existence of a self, ''anatman'' is more accurately described as a strategy to attain non-attachment by recognizing everything as impermanent, while staying silent on the ultimate existence of an unchanging essence. In contrast, dominant schools of Hinduism assert the existence of Ātman as pure awareness or witness-consciousness, "reify ngconsciousness as an eternal self." One thought experiment in the philosophy of personal identity is the teletransportation paradox. It deals with whether the concept of one's future self is a coherent concept. The thought experiment was formulated by Derek Parfit in his 1984 book '' Reasons and Persons.'' Derek Parfit and others consider a hypothetical "teletransporter", a machine that puts you to sleep, records your molecular composition, breaking you down into atoms, and relaying its recording to Mars at the speed of light. On Mars, another machine re-creates you (from local stores of carbon, hydrogen, and so on), each atom in exactly the same relative position. Parfit poses the question of whether or not the teletransporter is actually a method of travel, or if it simply kills and makes an exact replica of the user. Then the teleporter is upgraded. The teletransporter on Earth is modified to not destroy the person who enters it, but instead it can simply make infinite replicas, all of whom would claim to remember entering the teletransporter on Earth in the first place. Using thought experiments such as these, Parfit argues that any criteria we attempt to use to determine sameness of person will be lacking, because there is no further fact. What matters, to Parfit, is simply "Relation R", psychological connectedness, including memory, personality, and so on.


Religion

Religious views on the Self vary widely. The Self is a complex and core subject in many forms of
spirituality The meaning of ''spirituality'' has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape o ...
. Two types of Self are commonly considered—the Self that is the ego, also called the learned, superficial Self of mind and body, egoic creation, and the Self which is sometimes called the "True Self", the "Observing Self", or the "Witness". In
Hinduism Hinduism () is an Hypernymy and hyponymy, umbrella term for a range of Indian religions, Indian List of religions and spiritual traditions#Indian religions, religious and spiritual traditions (Sampradaya, ''sampradaya''s) that are unified ...
, the Ātman (Self), despite being experienced as an individual, is actually a representation of the unified transcendent reality,
Brahman In Hinduism, ''Brahman'' (; IAST: ''Brahman'') connotes the highest universal principle, the ultimate reality of the universe.P. T. Raju (2006), ''Idealistic Thought of India'', Routledge, , page 426 and Conclusion chapter part XII In the ...
. Our experience of reality doesn't match the nature of Brahman due to māyā. One description of spirituality is the Self's search for "ultimate meaning" through an independent comprehension of the sacred. Another definition of spiritual identity is: "A persistent sense of Self that addresses ultimate questions about the nature, purpose, and meaning of life, resulting in behaviors that are consonant with the individual’s core values. Spiritual identity appears when the symbolic religious and spiritual value of a culture is found by individuals in the setting of their own life. There can be different types of spiritual Self because it is determined by one's life and experiences."Kiesling, Chris; Montgomery, Marylin; Sorell, Gwendolyn; Colwell, Ronald. "Identity and Spirituality: A Psychosocial Exploration of the Sense of Spiritual Self" Human beings have a Self—that is, they are able to look back on themselves as both subjects and objects in the universe. Ultimately, this brings questions about who we are and the nature of our own importance. Traditions such as in
Buddhism Buddhism, also known as Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and List of philosophies, philosophical tradition based on Pre-sectarian Buddhism, teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or ...
see the attachment to Self is an illusion that serves as the main cause of
suffering Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, may be an experience of unpleasantness or aversion, possibly associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual. Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence (psyc ...
and unhappiness.


See also

* Anatta— "not-self", Buddhist concept stating there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or essence in living beings *
Attention Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...
* Ego death * *
I (pronoun) In Modern English, ''I'' is the singular, first-person pronoun. Morphology In Standard Modern English, ''I'' has five distinct word forms: * ''I'': the nominative (subjective) form **''I'' is the only pronoun form that is always capital ...
* Individuation * Jīva (Jainism), or Atman, used within Jainism to identify the soul * Meditation * Moral psychology * Open individualism * Outline of self * Person (disambiguation) * Self remembering * Self-awareness * Social projection * Vertiginous question * Will (philosophy)


References


Sources

* * * * * *


Further reading

* Anthony Elliott, ''Concepts of the Self'' * Anthony Giddens, ''Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age'' * Ben Morgan (2013). ''On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self.'' New York: Fordham UP * Bernadette Roberts
''What is Self? A Research Paper''
* Charalambos Tsekeris
''Contextualising the self in contemporary social science''
* Charles Taylor, '' Sources of the Self: the making of the modern identity'' * Clark Moustakas, ''The self: explorations in personal growth'' * Fernando Andacht, Mariela Michel,
A Semiotic Reflection on Selfinterpretation and Identity
' * Jean Dalby Clift, ''Core Images of the Self: A Symbolic Approach to Healing and Wholeness'' * Richard Sorabji, ''Self: ancient and modern insights about individuality, life, and death'' * Robert Kegan, ''The evolving self: problem and process in human development'' * Thomas M. Brinthaupt, Richard P. Lipka, ''The Self: definitional and methodological issues'' * 1910–1999., Eknath, Easwaran, (2019). The Bhagavad Gita. Nilgiri Press. ISBN 1-58638-130-X. OCLC 1043425057 {{Authority control Concepts in metaphysics