scholarly journals Losing Meaning: Philosophical Reflections on Neural Interventions and their Influence on Narrative Identity

Neuroethics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muriel Leuenberger

AbstractThe profound changes in personality, mood, and other features of the self that neural interventions can induce can be disconcerting to patients, their families, and caregivers. In the neuroethical debate, these concerns are often addressed in the context of possible threats to the narrative self. In this paper, I argue that it is necessary to consider a dimension of impacts on the narrative self which has so far been neglected: neural interventions can lead to a loss of meaning of actions, feelings, beliefs, and other intentional elements of our self-narratives. To uphold the coherence of the self-narrative, the changes induced by neural interventions need to be accounted for through explanations in intentional or biochemical terms. However, only an explanation including intentional states delivers the content to directly ascribe personal meaning, i.e., subjective value to events. Neural interventions can deprive events of meaning because they may favor a predominantly biochemical account. A loss of meaning is not inherently negative but it can be problematic, particularly if events are affected one was not prepared or willing to have stripped of meaning. The paper further examines what it is about neural interventions that impacts meaning by analyzing different methods. To which degree the pull towards a biochemical view occurs depends on the characteristics of the neural intervention. By comparing Deep Brain Stimulation, Prozac, Ritalin, psychedelics, and psychotherapy, the paper identifies some main factors: the rate of change, the transparency of the causal chain, the involvement of the patient, and the presence of an acute phenomenological experience.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Joseph Ulatowski ◽  

There are different approaches to the narrative self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have an important role to play in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself. I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life. I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight into the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves. This paper mines a vein of research on narratives for insights into selves without being bewitched into accepting implausible conclusions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 263 (3) ◽  
pp. 2949-2960
Author(s):  
Hirofumi Onitsuka ◽  
Tetsuro Shoji ◽  
Katsuya Uchida ◽  
Akira Miki

The evaluation of temporal and spatial fluctuations of energy using compressible fluid analysis is proposed as an effective method to clarify the fundamental mechanism of the self-sustained oscilla-tions in a actual recorder. The main factors of the self-sustained oscillations are investigated in more detail by evaluating not only the steady state of the sound where the flow field and the sound field are completely coupled, but also the characteristics at the attack transient of the sound before the coupling is established. By analyzing the large energy fluctuations that occur just below the edge of the labium in the attack transient, it was shown that this phenomenon may be one of the main causes of the self-sustained oscillations. And the characteristics of the energy fluctuations and sound power generation during the steady state of the sound are discussed. It was also focused on the energy variations in another region that is near the exit of the windway.


2001 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-493
Author(s):  
Stanton Wortham

In The grammar of autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays: that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two dimensions of the work distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms – modals – as the key to narrative self-construction.


1992 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 376-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Watson ◽  
Ronald J. Morris ◽  
Ralph W. Hood

Current controversies over religious orientation center on issues that appear to be partially nonempirical, normative, and sociological. These issues, in other words, may be ideological. In exploring this possibility, the present study had different religious orientation types evaluate items from the Quest Scale. For a group with an intrinsic commitment, a number of items proved to be antireligious in their implications while one was proreligious. This intrinsic interpretation of Quest also predicted relative mental health, including superior identity formation; and this was especially true for intrinsic subjects themselves. For no other type was the self-definition of Quest as robustly or as discriminatively linked to psychological well-being. The original Quest Scale was tied to poorer self-functioning. Overall, these data demonstrated the importance of measuring not just personal beliefs, but the personal meaning of those beliefs as well.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelie D. Dietrich ◽  
Johannes A. Koeppen ◽  
Carsten Buhmann ◽  
Monika Pötter-Nerger ◽  
Hans O. Pinnschmidt ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Przemysław Zawadzki

AbstractThe aims of this paper are to: (1) identify the best framework for comprehending multidimensional impact of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on the self; (2) identify weaknesses of this framework; (3) propose refinements to it; (4) in pursuing (3), show why and how this framework should be extended with additional moral aspects and demonstrate their interrelations; (5) define how moral aspects relate to the framework; (6) show the potential consequences of including moral aspects on evaluating DBS’s impact on patients’ selves. Regarding (1), I argue that the pattern theory of self (PTS) can be regarded as such a framework. In realizing (2) and (3), I indicate that most relevant issues concerning PTS that require resolutions are ontological issues, including the persistence question, the “specificity problem”, and finding lacking relevant aspects of the self. In realizing (4), I identify aspects of the self not included in PTS which are desperately needed to investigate the full range of potentially relevant DBS-induced changes—authenticity, autonomy, and responsibility, and conclude that how we define authenticity will have implications for our concept of autonomy, which in turn will determine how we think about responsibility. Concerning (5), I discuss a complex relation between moral aspects and PTS—on one hand, they serve as the lens through which a particular self-pattern can be evaluated; on the other, they are, themselves, products of dynamical interactions of various self-aspects. Finally, I discuss (6), demonstrating novel way of understanding the effects of DBS on patients’ selves.


Author(s):  
Fredrik Svenaeus

Psychopharmacological drugs have effects on selfhood in ways that often overlap with the treatment of mental disorders, but the effects also go beyond the domain of disorder into the sphere of enhancement. To what extent this is and will be the case depends, of course, on the definition and understanding of mental disorder. The psychotropic effects on selfhood can be mapped out by distinguishing groups of traits that belong to personality and that form dimensions of selfhood, but they can also be distinguished by acknowledging different layers of selfhood-pre-reflective embodied self, reflective self, and narrative self. The effects of psychopharmacological drugs in some cases normalize the alienating experiences of the breakdown of pre-reflective selfhood, in other cases they rather bring about changes in basic dimensions of selfhood and personality, such as temperament and emotional dispositions.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Freeman

Despite the belief that narrative may serve as an important vehicle for exploring human experience and selfhood, there frequently exists the paradoxical supposition that narrative accounts cannot help but falsify life itself: Insofar as time is viewed in fundamentally linear terms and experience, in turn, is viewed as that which simply "goes on" in time, narratives may be viewed as entailing an imposition of literary form upon that which is ostensibly formless. After considering the idea of mythical time, tied to the image of the circle, and the idea of historical time, tied to the image of the line, it is suggested that human experience and selfhood are themselves woven out of the fabric of narrative. In light of contemporary understandings of the self, particularly those promoted in certain quarters of post-structuralist and social constructionist thought, it is further suggested that the narrative fabric of the self has become frayed. By rethinking the interrelationship of time, experience, and self via the idea of narrative, there emerges the opportunity to recognize more fully the profound continuities between myth and history as well as life and literature. (Hermeneutics, History, Myth, Narrative, Self, Time)


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 658-670 ◽  
Author(s):  
SVEN NYHOLM ◽  
ELIZABETH O’NEILL

Abstract:In this article, we engage in dialogue with Jonathan Pugh, Hannah Maslen, and Julian Savulescu about how to best interpret the potential impacts of deep brain stimulation on the self. We consider whether ordinary peoples’ convictions about the true self should be interpreted in essentialist or existentialist ways. Like Pugh, Maslen, and Savulescu, we argue that it is useful to understand the notion of the true self as having both essentialist and existentialist components. We also consider two ideas from existentialist philosophy—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas about “bad faith” and “ambiguity”—to argue that there can be value to patients in regarding themselves as having a certain amount of freedom to choose what aspects of themselves should be considered representative of their true selves. Lastly, we consider the case of an anorexia nervosa patient who shifts between conflicting mind-sets. We argue that mind-sets in which it is easier for the patient and his or her family to share values can plausibly be considered to be more representative of the patient’s true self, if this promotes a well-functioning relationship between the patient and the family. However, we also argue that families are well advised to give patients room to determine what such shared values mean to them, as it can be alienating for patients if they feel that others try to impose values on them from the outside.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Bulley ◽  
Karolina Maria Lempert ◽  
Colin Conwell ◽  
Muireann Irish

Intertemporal decision-making has long been assumed to measure self-control, with prominent theories treating choices of smaller, sooner rewards as failed attempts to override immediate temptation. If this view is correct, people should be more confident in their intertemporal decisions when they “successfully” delay gratification than when they do not. In two pre- registered experiments with built-in replication, adult participants (n=117) made monetary intertemporal choices and rated their confidence in having made the right decisions. Contrary to assumptions of the self-control account, confidence was not higher when participants chose delayed rewards. Rather, participants were more confident in their decisions when possible rewards were further apart in time-discounted subjective value, closer to the present, and larger in magnitude. Demonstrating metacognitive insight, participants were more confident in decisions that better aligned with their independent valuation of possible rewards. Decisions made with less confidence were more prone to changes-of-mind and more susceptible to a patience-enhancing manipulation. Together, our results establish that confidence in intertemporal choice tracks uncertainty in estimating and comparing the value of possible rewards – just as it does in decisions unrelated to self-control. Our findings challenge self- control views and instead cast intertemporal choice as a form of value-based decision-making about future possibilities.


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