Thoughts on “Puzzling Out the Self”

Frederick Luis Aldama and Partrick Colm Hogan turn to advances in the brain sciences to pick up the age-old question and discussion: what constitutes the self? Their conversation begins with a discussion of the neurochemical makeup of the brain and addresses the more global recursive activities that involve all parts of the brain as it is exists in a body that is grown within a social context shaped by time and place. Such a materialist based understanding of the self (as opposed to, say, the anti-foundational skepticism of yesteryear), based on an understanding of our shared evolutionary history that has grown shared cognitive and emotive capacities cross-culturally, supports the view that all of human beings should have the same rights and opportunities to develop fully their cognitive and emotive selves, to realize their causal and counterfactual potentials in the form of science, narrative fiction—or anything yet to be imagined

Cognition · Cognitive science · Construal level theory · Construals · Context (archaeology) · Conversation · Counterfactual thinking · Emotive · Epistemology · Linguistics · Materialism · Narrative · Skepticism · Sociology · Communication · Embodied and Extended Cognition · History · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Neuroscience · Neuroscience, Education and Cognitive Function · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology