The Story and the Dilemma

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Clinical Aspects ◽  
Body Consciousness ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Religion And Art

This section tells the story of my mother's stroke and what I have learnt from it about mind, body, consciousness, and the self, arguably the most cross-disciplinary topic of all. What gives us our sense of personal identity – our body? Our mind? Their union? And what if one of them is diminished – say, as a result of an accident; what then, do we stop being ourselves? This opening chapter sets the scene for the debate that follows, on this most fascinating mystery of all – our own self and consciousness. We question the still dominant dualist approach of the mind, seeking a more holistic view of the self; to this end, we believe that adding relevant experiential aspects will help complement the theory. Thus, an interdisciplinary, trans-theoretical account is needed in this endeavour. In this chapter, we introduce the dilemma and draw the main lines of argumentation related to it. In Chapter 2, we discuss the first experiential (in other words, the clinical) aspects of the mind, and neuroscientists' view of it, followed – in Chapter 3, by social aspects and psychologists' contributions to the subject. Chapter 4 will add more idiosyncratic aspects to the debate, such as the spiritual profile of a person, more often discussed in philosophy, religion, and art.

scholarly journals Exploring, modelling, and simulating the Feeling of Comfort in residential settings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
German Molina
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Building Science ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

<p><b>The fact that comfort is a subjective state of the mind is widely accepted by engineers, architects and building scientists. Despite this, capturing all the complexity, subjectivity and richness of this construct in models that are useful in building science contexts is far from straightforward. By prioritizing usability, building science has produced models of comfort (e.g., acoustic, visual and thermal) that overly simplify this concept to something nearly objective that can be directly associated with people’s physiology and measurable and quantifiable environmental factors. This is a contradiction because, even if comfort is supposed to be subjective, most of the complexity of “the subject” is avoided by focusing on physiology; and, even if comfort is supposed to reside in the mind, the cognitive processes that characterize the mind are disregarded. This research partially mitigates this contradiction by exploring people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition within the context of their comfort and by proposing a way in which they can be incorporated into building science research and practice. This research refers to these elements together—i.e., people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition—as “the mind”.</b></p> <p>This research proposes a new qualitative model of the Feeling of Comfort that embraces “the mind”. This model was developed from the results of a first study in which 18 people—from Chile and New Zealand—were asked to describe “a home with good daylight” and “a warm home” in their own words. These results were then replicated in a second study in which another group of 24 people—also from Chile and New Zealand—described “a home with good acoustic performance”, “a home with good air quality” and “a pleasantly cool home”. The Feeling of Comfort model not only was capable of making sense of the new data (gathered in this second study) but also proved to be simple enough to be useful in the context of comfort research and practice. For instance, it guided the development of a quantitative Feeling of Comfort model and also of a prototype building simulation tool that embraces “the mind” and thus can potentially estimate people’s Feeling of Comfort.</p> <p>This research concludes that embracing “the mind” is not only possible but necessary. The reason for this is that “the mind” plays a significant role in the development of people’s comfort. Thus, theories and models of comfort that ignore it fail to represent properly the concept of comfort held by the people for whom buildings are designed. However, incorporating “the mind” into building science’s research and practice implies embracing tools, research methods and conceptual frameworks that have historically not been used by such a discipline. Specifically, it concludes that building science should normalize a more holistic view of comfort and perform more exploratory and qualitative research.</p>

scholarly journals Exploring, modelling, and simulating the Feeling of Comfort in residential settings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
German Molina
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Building Science ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

<p><b>The fact that comfort is a subjective state of the mind is widely accepted by engineers, architects and building scientists. Despite this, capturing all the complexity, subjectivity and richness of this construct in models that are useful in building science contexts is far from straightforward. By prioritizing usability, building science has produced models of comfort (e.g., acoustic, visual and thermal) that overly simplify this concept to something nearly objective that can be directly associated with people’s physiology and measurable and quantifiable environmental factors. This is a contradiction because, even if comfort is supposed to be subjective, most of the complexity of “the subject” is avoided by focusing on physiology; and, even if comfort is supposed to reside in the mind, the cognitive processes that characterize the mind are disregarded. This research partially mitigates this contradiction by exploring people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition within the context of their comfort and by proposing a way in which they can be incorporated into building science research and practice. This research refers to these elements together—i.e., people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition—as “the mind”.</b></p> <p>This research proposes a new qualitative model of the Feeling of Comfort that embraces “the mind”. This model was developed from the results of a first study in which 18 people—from Chile and New Zealand—were asked to describe “a home with good daylight” and “a warm home” in their own words. These results were then replicated in a second study in which another group of 24 people—also from Chile and New Zealand—described “a home with good acoustic performance”, “a home with good air quality” and “a pleasantly cool home”. The Feeling of Comfort model not only was capable of making sense of the new data (gathered in this second study) but also proved to be simple enough to be useful in the context of comfort research and practice. For instance, it guided the development of a quantitative Feeling of Comfort model and also of a prototype building simulation tool that embraces “the mind” and thus can potentially estimate people’s Feeling of Comfort.</p> <p>This research concludes that embracing “the mind” is not only possible but necessary. The reason for this is that “the mind” plays a significant role in the development of people’s comfort. Thus, theories and models of comfort that ignore it fail to represent properly the concept of comfort held by the people for whom buildings are designed. However, incorporating “the mind” into building science’s research and practice implies embracing tools, research methods and conceptual frameworks that have historically not been used by such a discipline. Specifically, it concludes that building science should normalize a more holistic view of comfort and perform more exploratory and qualitative research.</p>

scholarly journals The Heideggerian critique of Kant’s moral subject

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gábor Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Functional Model ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Moral Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Physical Features

The paper discusses Kant’s concept of the subject through Heideger’s critique. Heidegger deconstructs the structure of Kant’s idea of personal identity as the moral subject. In the 13th paragraph of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger distinguishes three basic aspects of Kant’s idea of the self: the personalitas transcendentalis, the personalitas psychologica, and the personalitas moralis. The personalitas moralis is defined as the sphere of pure morality, the intelligible realm of freedom. This is an aspect of the individual beyond physical features and also beyond the determinism of laws of nature. The causality by freedom forms the basis of practical actions ordered by moral law. Therefore, it acts as the highest level determinism of Being in human existence. Heidegger’s conclusion shows Kant’s failure in delineating a functional model of the moral subject but accepts Kant’s contribution to laying the foundations of such a theory.

The Intertexts of ‘Seeing’ and ‘Non-Seeing’ in Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le papillon

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enda McCaffrey
Keyword(s):  
Visual Impairment ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Herve Guibert

This article examines the complexity of the relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘non-seeing’ and its connection to a knowledge of the Self in Julian Schnabel’s film Le Scaphandre et le papillon. It is argued that ‘seeing’ is an impediment to an understanding of the visible world, while variations on ‘non-seeing’ enhance knowledge of visibility and Self. In the context of the filmic text, knowledge is associated specifically with the act of retrospectivity in writing and in the mind. This reading of the film as a retrospective and visually veiled event is reinforced and enhanced by reference to the work of two contemporary French writers. Visual impairment is the subject of Hélène Cixous’s autobiographical text Savoir. For Cixous, myopia and its ‘seeing’ are linked to a knowledge that is only attainable retrospectively through nostalgia. The work of Hervé Guibert draws on the philosophical and literary implications of half-sightedness and blindness as gateways to a different expression of knowledge and ‘sight’ that take their inspiration, by contrast, from a ‘continuum’ of invisibility in which ‘non-seeing’ is represented as a continuous seeing in thought.

The Mother

2018 ◽  
pp. 55-89
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Cognitive Functions ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
The Self ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
True Self ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter turns to philosophers and artists, seeking their views on the dilemma of consciousness and the self, as well as the related mind/body problem. Does consciousness – and personal experience – arise from the neurological functions of the brain (and if so, how), or is it but a shard of the flow of universal consciousness – and if so, is the mind only a channel of energy and should we forget about our cognitive functions, or train to use them in a different way? What does it mean to have a strong sense of personal identity – where does the ‘true self' lie? Having learnt from neuroscientists and most psychologists that our self seems to exceed the scope and depth of both body and mind, we hope that philosophy and art might guide us towards this ‘other' realm where our sense of identity emerges from.

scholarly journals Against deflation of the subject

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 1102-1121
Author(s):  
Janko Nesic
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Subjective Character ◽  
Combination Problem ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
The Subject

I will argue that accounts of mineness and pre-reflective self-awareness can be helpful to panpsychists in solving the combination problems. A common strategy in answering the subject combination problem in panpsychism is to deflate the subject, eliminating or reducing subjects to experience. Many modern panpsychist theories are deflationist or endorse deflationist accounts of subjects, such as Parfit?s reductionism of personal identity and G. Strawson?s identity view. To see if there can be deflation we need to understand what the subject/self is. One aspect of consciousness left unexplored and unappreciated by panpsychist theories is pre-reflective self-consciousness/self-awareness. Theories of the self, inspired by phenomenology, that are serious about subjectivity, could be of use in arguing against the deflationary reductionism of the experiencing subject. These theories show that there is more to the subject of experience than just its experiences (qualities). Even without arguing for any precise account of the nature of the self, it can be shown what phenomenology of subjective character of consciousness and pre-reflective self-awareness contributes to the combination problem debate.

scholarly journals The problem of personal identity in modern domestic and foreign philosophical research (analytics of scientific databases)

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 36-49
Author(s):  
Regina Penner ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Scientific Databases ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities

Introduction. According to the well-established opinion of specialists in social sciences and humanities, a person diffracts his selves in the modern world: real spaces (professions, statuses) and virtual (accounts, profiles). In the diffraction of a person through spaces of different order, each “new” self acquires relative autonomy (a trace of the self in the network, which is present regardless of the attitude to it), and at the same time there remains the connection that, as it were, keeps the self with his digital images and “prints”. The main questions of the article are: in what relation and in relation to what is it possible to talk about the identity of a modern person; what fundamentally significant do the researches on human identity give us today; what do those who ask questions about personal identity in the digital age focus their attention on? In order to answer these questions, let us turn to scientific articles from domestic and foreign journals. This article presents the analytics of publications from Scopus and RSCI databases, in which the problem of personal identity is posed. The purpose of the article is to analyze scientific publications on human identity and summarize the main ideas presented in those publications. Methods. The research is based on general scientific methods, analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, and abstraction. The author analyzes scientific publications on the basis of the interpretation method and a systematic approach method. Content analysis was used as a method, but it was used within the scope of the purpose. The publications were selected on the basis of the authors’ research of various aspects of identity and the difference in interpreting the phenomenon. Results. Analysis of Scopus publications made it possible to assert that the problem of identity is moving out of the anthropological context and acquiring new technical and technological frameworks (for example, scholars are raising the problem of the digital data identity, digital identification in the context of online transactions). At the same time, the anthropological view of identity remains. It is found for instance in the context of narratives, texts of a person about self that are posted on the Internet. In this context, the concept of “Person Life View” (M. Schechtman) is presented as a variant of a person’s holistic view of the self. The analysis of domestic publications makes it possible to conclude that representatives of social sciences and humanities in their research strive to overcome the dynamic view of a person (dissolving of identity or an absent self), are in search of models of “stability” of identity. Conclusion. Posing the question about the personal identity of a modern person, it seems that the border between the directly human (consciousness and body, for example) and the technical and technological (the Internet and the objective world) is becoming more and more destabilized every day. This predetermines the direction of the research. Contemporary scholars, who publish the results of their work in journals included in scientific databases, are faced not only with the problem of substantiating human identity as a theoretical concept that reflects the modern situation, but also with the problem of finding models in which a person is able to embody the idea of “stability” of identity in the everyday life.

How Sense-phenomenal Theory of Personal Identity Might Legitimize Racism

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Maduka Enyimba ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Discrimination ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Features

The major concern of the problem of personal identity gravitates around the question of whether a person’s identity is located in the mind or in the body. Scholars have developed different theories such as survivalist and physicalist criteria among others in response to this question. In this paper, I engage with the theory of sense-phenomenalism as an aspect of the physicalist criterion of personal identity to show how it might legitimize racism and colour-branding. Sense-phenomenalism is a body-only model of personal identity that holds that an individual’s identity is determined by the physical features sensually perceptible by other humans in the society. I argue that sense-phenomenalism by reposing a person’s identity on his/her bodily traits might foster social discrimination, deepen the dichotomy between the self and the other and enhance the fabrication of justifications for the denial of individual’s rights.

Mind, bundle theory of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stewart Candlish
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Bundle Theory ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Additional Burden ◽  
The Mind

This theory owes its name to Hume, who described the self or person (which he assumed to be the mind) as ’nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’ (A Treatise of Human Nature I, IV, §VI). The theory begins by denying Descartes’s Second Meditation view that experiences belong to an immaterial soul; its distinguishing feature is its attempt to account for the unity of a single mind by employing only relations among the experiences themselves rather than their attribution to an independently persisting subject. The usual objection to the bundle theory is that no relations adequate to the task can be found. But empirical work suggests that the task itself may be illusory. Many bundle theorists follow Hume in taking their topic to be personal identity. But the theory can be disentangled from this additional burden.

Hume on Personal Identity

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galen Strawson
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Bundle Theory ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Self Examination

This paper considers Hume’s account of personal identity in his Treatise of Human Nature. It argues for three connected claims. (1) Hume does not endorse a “bundle theory” of mind, according to which the mind or self is simply a “bundle” of perceptions; he thinks that “the essence of the mind [is] unknown to us.” (2) Hume does not deny the existence of subjects of experience; he does not endorse a “no self” or “no ownership” view. (3) Hume does not claim that the subject of experience is not encountered in experience. The paper also examines Hume’s phenomenological account of self-experience—of what he comes across when he engages in mental self-examination by “entering intimately into what I call myself”—and his psychological account of how we come to believe in the existence of a persisting self as a result of the mind’s “sliding easily” along certain series of perceptions.

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