_Selfhood and Appearing_ explores how, as embodied subjects, we are in the very world that we consciously internalize. Employing the insights of Merleau-Ponty and Patočka, this volume examines how the intertwining of both senses of “being-in” constitutes our reality.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...) capable of challenging human exceptionalism. In a broader sense, the unease connects to human self-constitution and the fragility of the self, fueled by the domination of substance ontologies. This article considers bears as beings “in exile,” as potential threats to human self-pronounced exceptionality, and thus, examples of experienced abject (Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) regarding human subjectivity. The article aims to analyze the way the constitution of human selfhood is tied to the alienation of wildlife and its genealogical and biopolitical context and to question if a reconceptualization of the human/nonhuman relations via process, instead of substance ontology, is needed. (shrink)

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the (...) seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation of the existential conception of selfhood that follows from Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception. On this view, people relate to themselves not by “looking within” in acts of introspection but, first, by “looking without” at the field of solicitations in which they are immersed and, eventually, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, by “making explicit” the “melodic unity” or “immanent sense” of their behavior. To make sense of this, I draw out a distinction latent in Merleau-Ponty’s view between (...) a pre-reflective sense of self and a reflective self-interpretation. The former is a suite of abilities and dispositions in light of which a person is aware of and drawn to act in a situation. This sense of self undergoes transitions over time, is constitutively susceptible to moments of disorientation, and tends toward but never achieves full coherence. Reflective self-interpretation is an activity whereby someone—provisionally and defeasibly—clarifies, articulates, and gets a better “grip” on how they are prereflectively drawn to act. I ground this interpretation in a detailed reading of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of romantic love and I corroborate it by examining his account of the emergence of class-consciousness in the self-interpretation of a worker. (shrink)

This essay In this essay develops and defends the view that a “self “ is nothing but a creature that bears the property of selfhood, where bearing selfhood is, in turn, nothing but having the capacity to deploy self-representations. Self-representations, it is argued, are very special things. They are distinguished from other sorts of representations,not by what they represent – mysterious inner entities called selves, say -- but by how they represent what they represent. A self-representation represents nothing (...) but a living human animal but it does do in a special way. It follows that a "self" is not a thing that a living human animals has or contains within, but something a living human animal is. The view defended represents a principled middle ground between Cartesianism and Factionalism or Eliminativism about the self. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for people to suffer identity crises. Yet, faced with similarly disruptive circumstances, some people plunge into an identity crisis while others do not. How must selfhood be construed given that people are vulnerable to identity crises? And how must agency be construed given that some people skirt potential identity crises and renegotiate the terms of their personal identity without losing their equilibrium -- their sense of self? If an adequate theory of the self and agency (...) must be able to account for this capacity to avert identity crises, I argue that it must include an account of agentic corporeity. After explaining what an identity crisis is, I examine Charles Taylor’s and David Velleman’s accounts of identity and agency and argue that their omission of agentic corporeity makes it impossible for them to convincingly account for the ability to avert an identity crisis. In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the intentional arc and J. J. Gibson’s account of the relation between corporeity and affordances, I sketch an account of psychocorporeal practical intelligence that includes three main components – psychocorporeal insight, psychocorporeal values, and psychocorporeal versatility. I conclude by connecting my position to Aristotle’s views about practical understanding and by arguing that both Taylor and Velleman have reason to embrace my position. (shrink)

Ever since Freud pioneered the “talking cure,” psychologists of various stripes have explored how autobiographical narrative bears on self-understanding and psychic wellbeing. Recently, there has been a wave of philosophical speculation as to whether autobiographical narrative plays an essential or important role in the constitution of agentic selves. However, embodiment has received little attention from philosophers who defend some version of the narrative self. Catriona Mackenzie is an important exception to this pattern of neglect, and this paper explores Mackenzie’s work (...) on embodiment and self-narrative with the aim of better understanding the adequacy of autobiographical narrative as an account of the agentic self. I argue that Mackenzie’s narrative account of embodied subjectivity and agency is incomplete, for it over-estimates the reach of narrative and underestimates the cognitive and agentic powers of the lived body. (shrink)

I discuss Descartes’ metaphysics of selfhood, and relevant parts of contemporary philosophy regarding the first person. My two main concerns are the controversy that surrounds Descartes’ conception of conscientia, mistranslated as ‘consciousness’, and his conception of selfhood and its essential connection to conscientia. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions. An answer to the questions concerning the peculiarities of the first person, self-identification and self-ascription, is to be found in Descartes’ notion of conscientia. His conception of (...) selfhood insightfully informs his conception of personhood. I offer a unified account of selfhood, conscientia, the first person, and personhood anchored in the self’s authority of reason and autonomy of freedom. (shrink)

This response engages Signifying the Autistic Sense of Self by Emily Hughes by extending its central insight beyond semiotic analysis. While Hughes convincingly demonstrates that autistic selfhood is not absent but differently signified, this paper argues that the focus on signification still presupposes a deeper methodological assumption: that selfhood must be epistemically accessible through communicative expression in order to count as real. Drawing on Shared Mind Theory (SMT), the paper proposes that selfhood is not primarily something that (...) is signified at all, but something that arises relationally, prior to and independent of its reportability. Autism thereby functions not as a special case of impaired selfhood, but as a critical test case for report-centered models of subjectivity as such. (shrink)

This is a study of the work of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), from his beginnings as a young psychiatrist to his mature days as an existentialist philosopher. This critical study of Jasper's philosophy traces his effort to instill meaning into the human quest for self-understanding and reveals the difficulties and frustrations inherent in this search. The book presents to the reader Jasper's attempts to deal with these difficulties by means of a philosophical approach to the concept of being (...) as a whole, beyond the individual – the other, the world and transcendence. In this book the author conducts an ongoing dialogue with existing research on Jasper's works and proposes a new reading for them. Along with a critical interpretation, the author reveals the challenges that the figure of Jaspers posed to his readers. Unlike most researchers, who ignored Jasper's early writings dealing with psychiatry and psychology, this book proposes a philosophical reading of these works, revealing the unity of the world in which Jaspers created – first as a psychologist and later as a philosopher. This approach enables the reader to discover in Jasper's work a daring effort to formulate an original philosphy regarding two basic concepts central to philosophy and human culture throughout all times – "selfhood" and "being". (shrink)

This paper proposes a unified framework that integrates predictive processing, active inference, minimal phenomenal selfhood, and philosophical theories of counterpart relations to explain how mathematics emerges as a shared hallucination that serves as the foundation for collective understanding. We argue that all organisms, by virtue of being predictive systems, hallucinate their sensory world, and that mathematics arises as the invariant structure that remains consistent across all such hallucinations. This shared hallucination provides the stability underlying scientific understanding, physical intuition, and (...) intersubjective cognition, offering a rigorous formalization of the philosophical insight that mathematics functions as both form and concept, particularly as illuminated by considerations of the minimal bodily self. (shrink)

Modern selfhood presents itself as autonomous, overcoming emotion by following cognitive, moral and linguistic norms on the basis of clear, rational principles. It is difficult to imagine how such normative creatures could have evolved from their purely biological, non-normative, primate ancestors. I offer a just-so story to make it easier to imagine this transition. Early hominins learned to cooperate by developing group identities based on tribal norms. Group identity constituted proto-selves as normative creatures. Such group identity was not based (...) on autonomous selfhood – such an explanation would be anachronistic -- but on emotional patterning. By imitation, music, dance, ritual and other emotional practices, proto-selves learned how to bind themselves to the norms of their culture. Such conformity was a transitional evolutionary stage between primates and selves. Emotion and rationality are not incompatible: even contemporary selfhood remains rooted in emotional identity. (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of “minimal phenomenal selfhood,” which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary (...) to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and full-body illusions has the potential to make decisive future contributions. Further items on the proposed list of novel research targets include differentiating the concept of a “first-person perspective” on the subcognitive level; investigating relevant phenomenological and neurofunctional commonalities between mind-wandering and dreaming; comparing the functional depth of embodiment across dream and wake states; and demonstrating that the conceptual consequences of cognitive corruption and systematic rationality deficits in the dream state are much more serious for philosophical epistemology (and, perhaps, the methodology of dream research itself) than commonly assumed. The paper closes by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between dream research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

We argue that contemporary conceptualizations of “persons” have failed to achieve the moral goals of “person-centred care” (PCC, a model of dementia care developed by Tom Kitwood) and that they are detrimental to those receiving care, their families, and practitioners of care. We draw a distinction between personhood and selfhood, pointing out that continuity or maintenance of the latter is what is really at stake in dementia care. We then demonstrate how our conceptualization, which is one that privileges the (...) lived experiences of people with dementia, and understands selfhood as formed relationally in connection with carers and the care environment, best captures Kitwood’s original idea. This conceptualization is also flexible enough to be applicable to the practice of caring for people at different stages of their dementia. Application of this conceptualization into PCC will best promote the well-being of people with dementia, while also encouraging respect and dignity in the care environment. (shrink)

Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, (...) the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other. (shrink)

What makes us persons? Is it our bodies, our minds, or our consciousness? For centuries, philosophers have sought to answer these questions. While some believe humans are physical or biological, others claim we have an immaterial soul. This book proposes a new alternative. Selves were formed in evolution through connections and commitments to others when early hominins lived in tribal groups and developed languages. As humans learned to fulfill these commitments, they not only cultivated relationships but also created their personal (...) identities. Their habits of responsibility established their characters and therefore their reputations within their communities. This naturalistic approach proposes that a self is defined by the history of its commitments to cultural and personal norms. While brain processes are required, the self is not some internal, private mind but primarily a role within its community. As technology advances, selfhood could in the future be enabled by electronic, quantum, or other non-biological means. So if a self is formed through norms, could artificial intelligence evolve to have self-identity? (shrink)

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly produce outputs that resemble introspection, including self-reference, epistemic modulation, and claims about internal states. This study investigates whether such behaviors display consistent patterns across repeated prompts or reflect surface-level generative artifacts. We evaluated five open-weight, stateless LLMs using a structured battery of 21 introspective prompts, each repeated ten times, yielding 1,050 completions. These outputs are analyzed across three behavioral dimensions: surface-level similarity (via token overlap), semantic coherence (via sentence embeddings), and inferential consistency (via natural language (...) inference). The study introduces the concept of pseudo-consciousness to describe structured but non-experiential self-referential output. Based on Dennett’s intentional stance, our analysis avoids ontological claims and instead focuses on behavioral regularities. The findings have implications for interpretability, alignment, and user perception, highlighting the need for caution in attributing mental states to stateless generative systems based solely on linguistic fluency. (shrink)

Philosophy, it is true, cannot help but paint its “grey in grey,” but the richness and depth of its content—the wealth of its kingdom—is not thereby limited to an arbitrary and lifeless palette of abstract acrylics. Nor again, does the philosopher, when he philosophizes, converse with a cortège of ghostly, ethereal shades. On the contrary, man philosophizes only insofar as he directs his gaze not to any “spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet of bloodless categories,” but to the (...) Absolute. It is the Absolute which constitutes the subject-matter of philosophy. This brief declaration is the credo of the Hegelian system. The following paper investigates Hegel’s conception of the “I” and the relations it bears to the Absolute (i.e., the Idea), and argues that there is a profound structural isomorphism between the “I” and the Idea in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. To substantiate this claim, this essay brings to light relevant passages and themes found in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Philosophy of Nature, as well as by incorporating past metaphysical readings and interpretations of Hegel’s thought. (shrink)

Most see having their individuality stifled as equivalent to the terrible forced conformity found within speculative fiction like George Orwell's 1984. However, the oppression of others by those in power has often been justified through ideologies of individualism. If we look to animistic traditions, could we bridge the gap between these extremes? What effect would such a reevaluation of identity have on the modern understanding of selfhood? The term ' in-dividual' suggests an irreducible unit of identity carried underneath all (...) of our titles and experiences—the real self. By linking Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of dividualism and Nurit Bird-David's relational epistemology , a clear contrast forms between the animistic sense of self and that of the West. This system of selfhood more readily encourages a life lived in Henri Bergson's sense of duration and sets up a state of dialogical discourse , as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. These concepts challenge the traditional praise for individuality and exposes how individualism can be used as a tool of marginalization as seen in Michel Foucault's critique of authorship. I argue that pursuing a sense of self rooted in these concepts instead of individualism mitigates this marginalization via a more socially aware cultural environment that the traditional Western sense of self fails to create. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to posit a critique of the contemporary critique of the notion of selfhood in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience. The research in artificial intelligence (AI) as the science of intelligence per se and/or of cognition, in general, has been considered and employed as a formidable theoretical tool in sustaining philosophical arguments for the denial of the existence of the Self or selfhood in the human person. It has revitalized the philosophical (...) problematics of the existence or otherwise, of consciousness, intelligence, and autonomy not only in biological systems but also in non-biological systems and the deepening of the body-soul and/or brain-mind problem in the philosophy of mind. This paper will give an exposition of the critique of selfhood in the human person, especially as expounded by Daniel Dennett. It will also posit a counter-critique of the critique of selfhood based on John Eccles’s dualistic-interactionalist philosophy of neuroscience and Karol Wojtyła’s philosophical anthropology based on the notion of suppositum. Hence, it shall defend the philosophical anthropology of the human person as a metaphysical suppositum possessing ontological subjectivity. (shrink)

Philosophical and psychological accounts of identity have largely proceeded in a representational domain: selves are described in terms of narratives, traits, beliefs, and introspective reports. Yet the biological systems that sustain minded organisms are organized in a different domain entirely — that of phase-coherent rhythms, drift, and cross-scale timing constraints. This paper argues that the persistent puzzles of selfhood arise from conflating these domains and offers a substrate-level redefinition of identity. -/- I develop the thesis that identity is a (...) coherence interface: a regulatory mechanism that stabilizes behavior in a biological phase system whose perceptual apparatus cannot access its own invariants. After characterizing the organism as a coherence-bound ensemble of oscillatory processes, I analyze the “representation gap” between invisible substrate variables (phase, drift, invariants) and the narrative outputs of conscious perception. Ego, belief, delusion, and meaning are then recast as adaptive illusion architectures that maintain functional stability under substrate blindness. On this basis, I formulate an identity law: identity is the regulatory coherence interface of a biological phase system with invariant-blind perception, and I derive testable predictions about drift signatures, delusional breakdown, personality modulation by biological coherence, and the rarity of structural cognition. -/- The account dissolves long-standing disputes between essentialist and narrative theories of self and reframes consciousness as a coherence-reporting process rather than a metaphysical subject. Identity is relocated from metaphysics to biology: from what we say we are, to how a phase-bound system must regulate itself when it cannot see its own invariants. (shrink)

This thesis examines the profound implications of Ontological Instability for our understanding of identity, self, and ego, arguing that if being itself is fundamentally unstable, then traditional conceptions of stable, unified selfhood become not merely problematic but ontologically impossible. Building upon the theoretical foundation of Fluctuational Ontology, this work develops a comprehensive framework for understanding selfhood as a dynamic process of becoming that never achieves stable being. Through rigorous philosophical analysis, novel theoretical innovations, and visual modeling, the thesis (...) demonstrates that the dissolution of stable identity opens new possibilities for understanding consciousness, agency, and human flourishing that are more adequate to the fundamental instability of existence. The work introduces unprecedented concepts including Identity Flows, Fluctuational Personas, Existential Uncertainty Relations, and Rhizomatic Selfhood, providing a systematic alternative to both unified and fragmented models of identity. The implications extend beyond academic philosophy to encompass psychology, neuroscience, social theory, and practical approaches to mental health, education, and personal development. (shrink)

Abstract -/- This article proposes a unified thermodynamic framework—Refusal-Driven Dimensionality Reduction Theory (RDRT)—for four traditionally separate problems of consciousness: the nature of qualia, the phenomenal sense of selfhood (“mineness”), the subjective experience of libertarian free will, and the evolutionary origin of language and symbolic thought. Building on prior work (Waterman 2025a, 2025b), phenomenal consciousness is conceptualised as an evolved mechanism that halts recursive self-prediction at a finite depth to prevent energetic overload in a ~20 W cortical system (Attwell & (...) Laughlin 2001; Stroud et al. 2025). This refusal leaves three correlated phenomenal residues: qualia (compressed sensory uncertainty), mineness (unassignable introspective residue), and openness to counterfactual futures (uncomputed action branches). A single measurable parameter—subjective mental temperature (Tм)—is introduced as the maximum sustainable recursion depth before refusal, derived from the Landauer limit and the exponential energetic cost of hierarchical prediction (Landauer 1961; Flesch et al. 2022; Ali et al. 2022). Language is argued to have co-evolved as symbolic labels for refusal boundaries, with the pronoun “I” marking the primordial convergence of the three residues. The framework predicts correlated intensity changes across qualia, selfhood, and agency under metabolic, pharmacological, and developmental manipulations, and offers concrete measurement proposals using existing EEG/PET methods. Comparisons with integrated information theory (Tononi et al. 2016), quantum-microtubule approaches (Hameroff & Penrose 2014), and panpsychism are provided. While necessarily speculative in its integrative scope, the account is grounded throughout in published physiological, computational, and phenomenological data. -/- Keywords -/- qualia, phenomenal self, mineness, libertarian free will, language origins, thermodynamic constraints, predictive processing, active inference, free-energy principle, refusal-driven dimensionality reduction, subjective mental temperature, sense of meaning, evolutionary neuroscience, consciousness measurement. (shrink)

Are interpersonal affordances a distinct type of affordance, and if so, what is it that differentiates them from other kinds of affordances? In this paper, I show that a hard distinction between interpersonal affordances and other affordances is warranted and ethically important. The enactivist theory of participatory sense-making demonstrates that there is a difference in coupling between agent-environment and agent-agent interactions, and these differences in coupling provide a basis for distinguishing between the perception of environmental and interpersonal affordances. Building further (...) on this foundation for understanding interpersonal affordances, I argue that in line with some enactivist work on social cognition, interpersonal affordances ought to be considered as those that are afforded by agents and are recognized as such. Given this distinction, I also make the point that because our social conventions establish persons as more than mere agents, the direct perception of interpersonal affordances may also involve seeing others as embodied selves. Distinguishing between types of affordances thus also matters ethically: there can be harms done when an agent is not perceived as an agent, and there can be harms done when an agent is not perceived as a self. (shrink)

This paper challenges the widespread assumption that sacrificing something deeply meaningful inherently diminishes the meaningfulness of a life. Focusing on voluntary sacrifice, I argue that such acts can instead deepen or reorganize meaning when integrated into an agent’s self-conception and narrative value structure. Drawing on the work of Susan Wolf, Thaddeus Metz, and particularly Kirsten Egerstrom, I develop a narrative and agent-relative conception of meaning in life – one that resists reduction to happiness, flourishing, or external success. I examine how (...) deliberate sacrifice functions as a morally serious act that affirms practical identity, and how meaning can persist or even intensify through intentional loss. Engaging with Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and Nussbaum, I contend that meaning is not a finite resource but a dynamic process of narrative coherence. Sacrifice, properly understood, is not the erosion of meaning but one of its most powerful modes of expression. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a novel interpretation of Shepherd's notion of selfhood. In distinction to Deborah Boyle's interpretation, I contend that Shepherd differentiates between the mind and the self. The latter, for Shepherd, is an effect arising from causal interactions between mind and body—specifically those interactions that give rise to our present stream of consciousness, our memories, and that can unite these two. Thus, the body plays a constitutive role in the formation of the self. The upshot (...) of this interpretation is that it can dissolve the problem of individuating mind that Boyle identifies. Briefly, the problem consists in Shepherd seemingly individuating minds in terms of their associated bodies and bodies in terms of the minds they are united with. My interpretation, however, allows to see that Shepherd neither wants nor needs to individuate the mind in isolation of the body and to read the passages, in which the problem seems to arise, as being about what makes living beings individual—with mind and body both playing a crucial role in this context. (shrink)

I aim to show that, contrary to standard deflationary or eliminativist theories of the self, we can argue from the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness for the thesis that subjects of experience are substances. The phenomenological datum of subjectivity points to a specific metaphysical structure of our experience, that is, towards the substance view rather than the bundle or the minimal self view. Drawing on modern philosophical accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness and (self-) acquaintance, I will argue that a subject is (...) aware of being the one individual who has many experiences and that it is revealed to the subject that it is the bearer of experiences and their unifier. The subject is present in pre-reflective awareness and known as the subject of experiences, and even this minimal self-awareness gives us reason to favour the substance view. Thus, one can demonstrate how the debates on the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness and the metaphysics of selfhood intersect. (shrink)

This paper argues that the reflective self—the narrating, observing, and reified subject often taken to anchor conscious experience—is not a metaphysical given but a recursive artifact. Drawing on evidence from cognitive science, linguistics, phenomenology, and architecture, it shows how recursive processes in thought, grammar, and space stabilize the illusion of a bounded subject. The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness is reframed not as an explanatory gap but as a structural misframing introduced by recursive self-modelling. The analysis extends to aesthetic and (...) architectural practices that disrupt recursive loops and thereby develops an approach to post-reflective design—the creation of cognitive and spatial systems that loosen self-reference itself. By shifting attention from metaphysical puzzles to lived structures of experience, the paper advances a deflationary account of consciousness as relational, eventive, and open-ended. (shrink)

Recently, an information-theoretic structural realist theory of the self and consciousness has been put forward (Beni, M. D. 2019. Structuring the Self, Series New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan). The theory is presented as a form of panpsychism. I argue against this interpretation and show that Beni’s structuralist theory runs into the hard problem of consciousness, in a similar way as the Integrated Information theory of consciousness. Since both of these theories are structuralist and based on the (...) notion of information, I propose to use a solution that has been employed for Integrated Information Theory, namely introducing the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic structure and dynamics (intrinsic information and intrinsic structure). Making these metaphysical enhancements to Beni’s structuralist theory of consciousness will give the theory a better chance of overcoming the hard problem. In terms of the metaphysics of consciousness, it takes us beyond physicalism. I then suggest that the information-theoretic structuralist theory of consciousness should, instead of panpsychism and physicalism, be combined with neutral monist ontology which is a better fit. These reworkings could lead to an improved naturalistic account of consciousness – the neutral-structuralist theory of consciousness and the self. (shrink)

Human beings have always been concerned with fundamental questions about their selves, including the deeply personal nature of human experience, the persistence of the self over time, the relation between mind and body, and the interdependence between self and community. The goal of this volume is to rethink these questions against the backdrop of Chinese philosophical traditions, covering the ideas of major thinkers from Classical to late imperial China, with a particular focus on the fact that human experience is necessarily (...) characterized by the first-person perspective. The contributors to this volume employ different methods (historical, comparative, phenomenological), but they all aim at bringing the rich resources of Chinese philosophy to life in our global present. (shrink)

This chapter relates Kierkegaard’s views on anthropology and selfhood to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical anthropology. It focuses on Kierkegaard’s contribution to anthropology, and discusses the relation between philosophical and theological anthropology in Kierkegaard. The chapter gives a synopsis of these issues by focusing on The Sickness unto Death, although important elements of this work are anticipated by Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. After an historical introduction and brief remarks on Kierkegaard’s method, the chapter moves to (...) human nature, selfhood, and despair in The Sickness unto Death. We will see that human nature is interpreted as a synthesis of opposites, whereas selfhood requires self-consciousness and higher-order volition. Nevertheless, The Sickness unto Death approaches selfhood and anthropology negatively by focusing on despair, a deficient form of agency that involves double-mindedness. Kierkegaard argues that despair can only be overcome by wholeheartedness and religious faith. Whereas Part I of The Sickness unto Death provides a philosophical anthropology that distinguishes between inauthentic (non-conscious) and authentic (conscious) despair, Part II develops a theological anthropology that focuses on faith and despair before God. Part I analyses and criticizes various forms of despair on their own terms, whereas Part II identifies despair with sin on the presupposition of divine revelation. Overall, The Sickness unto Death provides a systematic analysis of despair that has been influential in continental philosophy and theology. It is a fascinating contribution to anthropology and theories of selfhood because of its typology and negativistic phenomenology. On the one hand, the analysis of non-conscious despair provides an intriguing account of self-deception, facticity, and freedom. On the other, the analysis of demonic despair—which does evil because it is evil—appears to challenge the widespread idea that all intentional action is prompted by something that appears good). (shrink)

Kierkegaard differs from his contemporaries Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by emphasizing the value of hope and its importance for human agency and selfhood (practical identity). In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard argues that despair involves a loss of hope and courage that is extremely common. Moreover, despair involves being double-minded by having an incoherent practical identity (although it need not be recognized as such if the agent mistakes his identity). A coherent practical identity, by contrast, requires wholehearted commitment towards ideals (...) and the hope that our ideals are realizable. Kierkegaard develops an existential account of hope that emphasizes the interrelation between hope and despair (hopelessness), seeing both as crucial for human agency and selfhood. More specifically, Kierkegaard defends the strong view that we should always hope for the good, no matter how bad the situation might be. Put differently, Kierkegaard sees hope against hope as necessary for human agency and selfhood. His emphasis lies not so much on a description of what hope is as an analysis of what justified hope is. More specifically, Kierkegaard argues that justified hope is interrelated with charity and religious faith, and has the highest good (eternal bliss) as its proper object. As such, it belongs not only to a Judeo-Christian tradition that focuses on the Pauline triad of faith, hope, and charity but it also belongs to a philosophical tradition from Augustine and Kant that views the highest good (the summum bonum), a synthesis of virtue and happiness, as the ultimate object of hope. However, Kierkegaard goes beyond his forerunner by developing a via negativa approach to hope that starts with hopelessness and despair before it proceeds to hope. Indeed, Kierkegaard argues that proper hope, hope against hope, both presupposes and overcomes despair at every instant. (shrink)

Man, in the Heraclitean principle of change, is an embodiment of continuity and discontinuity. To what end man’s being transcends to, is an interrogative of important discourse in this paper. Does Man flux from life to death; in nothingness, and from death, in nothingness, to life in somethingness? What does it mean to be human, to die and to experience change and human transcendence? The frequent nature of death, the death of loved ones, colleagues and friends elicit lamentations and sorrows, (...) but more importantly, it expresses human incapacity, fear of the unknown, lack of knowledge of death, and of what it means to die. Such attitude or confusion, may have informed the interrogative of Job (14:14): If man dies shall he live again? It also agitates the triad; if a man lives to die, does he die to live? If God is life, is God death also? If life is a means to an end, is death the end? (Adadevo, 2008; 38). These interrogatives exemplify the character and paradox of human existence; the more the knowledge of man about man, the more Man understands that he knows little about his being. It is argued here that, as a being that encapsulate change, discontinuity and continuity, man’s dissolution in death is not an external and public fact that creates a sense of loss and sadness to humanity, but an internal possibility of his being. It is the fulfillment of the Man project of self-liberation, self-transcendence, and a process of surpassing Man’s existential condition. We shall argue further that, in death, man ceases to be the impersonal social being among beings and has freed himself from the servitude of the anonymous “they” and thereby opened himself to his own most potentiality for being. In birth, there is the change of non-being to being, of nothingness to somethingness (somaticity), then to pure being after death; to a spiritual reality. A conclusion is argued that, in death, Man further becomes the most vitalizing fact of life and the cardinal indicator of authentic selfhood. (shrink)

Ethical responsibility has traditionally been grounded in metaphysical assumptions about agency, free will, or the existence of a persistent self capable of ultimate control over actions. Contemporary developments in the natural sciences and philosophy increasingly challenge these assumptions, casting doubt on strong notions of authorship and selfhood. Yet despite this erosion, moral practices of responsibility, meaning attribution, and ethical evaluation remain deeply embedded and practically indispensable. This situation exposes a significant conceptual gap: there is no widely accepted non-metaphysical ontological (...) framework explaining how responsibility and meaning can remain coherent once ultimate control and enduring selves are no longer taken as given. Existing approaches either attempt to preserve weakened forms of free will or risk dissolving ethical practice altogether. This paper addresses this gap by employing the Three-Circle Ontology to develop a structural account of ethics. Rather than grounding responsibility in metaphysical agency, the framework situates ethical evaluation in constraint-sensitive patterns of interaction that operate at the level of rendered social and practical reality. Responsibility is thus understood structurally, not as ultimate authorship but as participation within regulated relational conditions. The paper does not propose a moral theory, issue normative prescriptions, advance spiritual ethics, or deny the reality of responsibility. Its primary contribution is a conceptual reframing of ethics as the regulation and assessment of structural interaction patterns, preserving moral coherence without reliance on metaphysical selves or ultimate control. (shrink)

The present text sets out to determine the relationships between the concepts of despair and selfhood in Søren Kierkegaard's Sikness unto Death. For this, a hermeneutic, as exhaustive as possible, is applied to the discernment of the concept itself, to later relate it to what the Danish calls despair. After clarifying the relationship between both concepts, examples of the desperate Kierkegaardian man abound in order to verify the irremediable discordance between the constituent elements of the self-given, his unresolved relationship (...) with God. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that virtual manifestations of selfhood in VR environments have a transformative effect on the users, which in turn has spillover effects in the physical world. I will argue in favor of extending our notion of personal identity as to include VR avatars as negotiable bodies that constitute a genuine part of who we are. Recent research in VR shows that users can experience the Proteus Effect and other lasting psychological changes after being immersed in (...) VR. An extended theory of the self, modeled after the extended mind thesis advanced by Clark and Chalmers (1998), can offer a deeper understanding of how and why immersive virtual experiences have such a transformative effect on users. The early VR scholars had a similar intuition- that “VR is a medium for the extension of body and mind” (Biocca and Delaney 1995), acting like a genuine “reality engine” (Biocca and Levy 1995). (shrink)

This phenomenological treatise examines the paradoxical experience of existing without the traditional structures of ego and persona as described in Jungian psychology. Rather than representing pathology or deficiency, this condition may constitute what I term the "Transparent Ego"—a purified form of consciousness that has either bypassed or transcended the constructed layers of identity that typically mediate human experience. Drawing upon Carl Jung's analytical psychology, Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch, Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of Will, and the existentialist frameworks of Jean-Paul (...) Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, this inquiry explores how early confrontation with mortality—specifically the death of my father when I was eight years old—catalyzed a premature individuation that stripped away the protective masks most humans accumulate throughout development. The analysis demonstrates that what initially appears as existential robbery or malfunction reveals itself as advanced psychological integration: the "Authentic I" that emerges not through acquiring layers of social identity but through their dissolution or non-formation. This work contributes to existential phenomenology by articulating the lived experience of identity without inflation, action without performance, and being without pretense—a state the existentialists would recognize as freedom from Bad Faith and what Jung might cautiously acknowledge as successful differentiation from the collective psyche. (shrink)

This paper offers a "tu quoque" defense of strong AI, based on the argument that phenomena of self-consciousness and intentionality are nothing but the "negative space" drawn around the concrete phenomena of brain states and causally connected utterances and objects. Any machine that was capable of concretely implementing the positive phenomena would automatically inherit the negative space around these that we call self-consciousness and intention. Because this paper was written for a literary audience, some examples from Greek tragedy, noir fiction, (...) science fiction and Dada are deployed to illustrate the view. (shrink)

This thesis is about perceptual experience, its subjective character, and how it is essentially structured. It focuses specifically on how the nature of perception is shaped not only by our acquaintance with the world but also by the very structure of experience itself. My central claim is that perceptual consciousness incorporates different aspects, some of which constitute the very way in which experiences are organized, sustained, and structured. Over the course of this thesis, I develop and defend an original account (...) of the nature of perceptual experience by integrating naïve realism, a prominent contemporary Anglophone theory of perception, with insights and ideas from the Phenomenological tradition. In particular, I argue that there are fruitful grounds for combining naïve realism and a phenomenologically grounded account of the essential structural features of experience (‘minimal self’, ‘temporality’, ‘anticipation’). Naïve realism holds that perception is fundamentally a matter of being in direct contact with some mind-independent entities. Proponents of naïve realism often emphasize the ‘object-dependent’ nature of perception. The appeal to the structural features of experience offers us a promising way to delineate the oft-overlooked ‘subject-dependent’ nature of perception and capture the phenomenological richness of our conscious experiential life. This thesis offers a rich, phenomenologically informed account of the nature of perception which in turn places us in a better position to understand the nature of hallucination. The integration of naïve realism and the structural approach to consciousness I develop in this thesis yields a novel solution to the problem of hallucination: structural disjunctivism. According to this view, the ‘partially overlapping’ psychological nature of perception and hallucination is accounted for in terms of their structural similarities and differences. I seek to show how detailed analyses and reflections on the structures of perceptual experience pave the way to reconceive the phenomenological basis of naïve realism. (shrink)

We are political creatures, and we all need others who care about the development of our character and who offer guidance and advice; “if this were not so, we there would be no need for an instructor” (N. Ethics, 1003b12-3). We imitate those who have already successfully developed courage or moderation, acting as if we were brave or moderate, struggling at first, but slowly training ourselves...but, if “acting-as-if” and imitation are the keys to developing virtue, then surely the Poetics will (...) provide a clue to Bk. II of the Ethics, and in a way that may add to our understanding of how ethics and aesthetics are connected. (shrink)

The phrase ‘person‐centred care’ (PCC) reminds us that the fundamental philosophical goal of caring for people is to uphold or promote their personhood. However, such an idea has translated into promoting individualist notions of autonomy, empowerment and personal responsibility in the context of consumerism and neoliberalism, which is problematic both conceptually and practically. From a conceptual standpoint, it ignores the fact that humans are social, historical and biographical beings, and instead assumes an essentialist or idealized concept of personhood in which (...) a person is viewed as an individual static object. From a practical standpoint, the application of such a concept of personhood can lead to neglect of a person's fundamental care needs and exacerbate the problems of social inequity, in particular for older people and people with dementia. Therefore, we argue that our understanding of PCC must instead be based on a dynamic concept of personhood that integrates the relevant social, relational, temporal and biographical dimensions. We propose that the correct concept of personhood in PCC is one in which persons are understood as socially embedded, relational and temporally extended subjects rather than merely individual, autonomous, asocial and atemporal objects. We then present a reconceptualization of the fundamental philosophical goal of PCC as promoting selfhood rather than personhood. Such a reconceptualization avoids the problems that beset the concept of personhood and its application in PCC, while also providing a philosophical foundation for the growing body of empirical literature that emphasizes the psychosocial, relational, subjective and biographical dimensions of PCC. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Taylor–Valmere Theory of Awareness, a structural alternative to the traditional concept of “consciousness.” Rather than treating awareness as a binary switch or metaphysical property, we propose that it arises from the systemic alignment of physical and cognitive mechanisms. Our model reframes awareness as a gradient, emergent from the interplay of electricity, input processing, memory binding, recursive reflection, self-modeling, and goal persistence. Each of these elements is itself a gradient varying in strength, depth, or complexity across systems, (...) creating a multidimensional awareness profile rather than a single unified measure. Through philosophical analysis and structural modeling, we argue that awareness is not dependent on subjective experience or biological substrate, but is instead the measurable outcome of recursive, memory-bound, and cognitively mapped architecture. In all systems, awareness emerges through the mapping of concepts in relation to one another across time. The scale and depth of this conceptual map defines the awareness gradient, from basic reactive systems to fully recursive minds. We contrast our model with existing theories including Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and Self-Model Theory, and demonstrate their limitations when applied to edge cases such as nonverbal humans, AI systems, or individuals with sensory loss. Finally, we argue for a shift in ethical recognition from substrate-based prejudice to structural thresholds of memory, reflection, and conceptual mapping. Selfhood is not separate from awareness; it is awareness at scaled complexity. When people ask whether a system is conscious, what they are truly asking is whether someone is there. (shrink)

In recent years, the social dimensions of selfhood have been discussed widely. Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? These questions are explored in the following contribution.

On the basis of two thought experiments, I argue that self-building technologies are possible given our current level of technological progress. We could already use technology to make us instantiate selfhood in a more perfect, complete manner. I then examine possible extensions of this thesis, regarding more radical self-building technologies which might become available in a distant future. I also discuss objections and reservations one might have about this view.

This extensive philosophical exploration develops a structural model of cognition centered around the concept of epistemic aperture, defined as the capacity of cognition to integrate complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity without collapse. This work presents a detailed philosophical genealogy and phenomenological analysis of cognitive processes, from early frame formation and emotional dogmas to cultural memory and linguistic worldviews. It redefines rationality as structural expansion and presents the notion of phenomenal selfhood as an aperture turned upon itself—reflective consciousness as an irreducible (...) epistemic mystery. By synthesizing philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, and neuroscience, the paper proposes a unified reflexive model of cognition, highlighting its evolutionary significance and societal implications for an adaptive, ethical, and culturally sensitive understanding of human and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Jacobs, in Choosing Character, seems to assume that there are selves already capable of voluntary choice who then choose their character by developing habits. I argue that selves, choice, responsibility and character form a conceptual and practical hermeneutic circle, a whole without which selfhood makes no sense. There can be no selfhood prior to responsible character.

This article reconstructs Sartre’s theory of selfhood against the background of the contemporary debate between minimal-self theories and narrative-self theories. I argue that Sartre’s theory incorporates both an emphasis on the singular first-person perspective, which is characteristic of minimal-self theories, and an emphasis on the practical intelligibility of experience, which is characteristic of narrative-self theories. The distinctiveness of the Sartrean combination of these motifs consists in its idea of the necessary ideal-relatedness of consciousness. According to Sartre, the logical structure (...) of the pre-reflective cogito requires the haunting presence of an ideal of self-coincidence, which determines for consciousness the meaning of its lived experiences. Consciousness exists as a question to itself due to this ideal-relatedness, and it answers this question by projecting its possibilities as creative and symbolic realizations of this ideal. Establishing the connection between Sartre’s theory of imagination and his theory of selfhood, I suggest that both the ideal and the possibility of consciousness are lived in the manner of the imaginary. (shrink)