This is a new and revised edition of Robert W. Fuller's analysis of how our understanding of selfhood affects our sense of individuality, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Who Am I?
Am I My Body?
Am I My Mind?
Am I My Witness?
Are You a Home for Identities?
Am I My Soul?
Am I My Consciousness?
Postmodernism's Coup de Grace to the Self
Self
Is a Misnomer
The Co-Creation of Identity
The Superself: Genome, Menome, and Wenome
Recognition and Malrecognition
What Is Man?
What Kind of Computer Is the Brain?
The Self Is Dead. Long Live the Superself.
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Books by Robert W. Fuller
Who Am I?
Confusion about fundamental notions such as selfhood, identity, and consciousness distorts personal relationships, underlies ideological deadlock, aggravates partisan politics, and causes unnecessary human suffering.
A better understanding of selfhood holds the promise of resolving perennial quarrels and putting us all on the same side as we face the challenges in a global future, not least of which will be coming to terms with machines who rival or surpass human intelligence.
While we all casually refer to our self, no one knows quite what that self is. Nothing is so close at hand, yet hard to grasp as selfhood. To get started, think of your self as who or what you’re referring to when you use the pronouns me,
myself,
or I.
Am I My Body?
As infants, we’re taught that we are our bodies. Later, we learn that every human being has a unique genomic blueprint that governs the construction, in molecular nano-factories, of our physical bodies. But we do not derive our identity from our genome or from the body built according to that blueprint. By the time of adolescence, most of us, though still concerned about physical appearance, and in particular sexual attractiveness, have begun to shift our primary identity from our body to the thoughts and feelings that we associate with our minds.
Am I My Mind?
The mind is embodied in the connectivity of the central and autonomic nervous systems that determine our behavior, verbal and otherwise. By analogy with the genome, the map of neural connections is sometimes referred to as the connectome. The connectome for
