The Philosophical View of the Self
MIND
 Rene Descartes
o The Father of Modern Philosophy and the Father of Modern
Mathematics
o A French Philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer of the
Age of Reason who lived from 1596-1650
 In his book, The Meditation of First Philosophy, he claims that
we have so much to doubt; in fact he said, Much of the things
that we think of and believe are mostly bound to commit error
or mostly something that we should doubt and this things that
we know perhaps may turn to be false.
 When we know a thing and debate its truthfulness, and when
we come to a point, we do not have any doubts to that things,
that’s the moment we should stop doubting. As human beings,
we have this intuition that.
o If something is so clear and lucid, as not to be even doubted, then
that’s the only time when one should actually buy a proposition.
 John Locke
o “Cogito, ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am.”
 Cogito – to think; ergo – therefore; sum – I am
 The fact that one thinks should lead one to conclude without a
trace of doubt the he exists. The mere fact that we think is the
evidence that we think.
o To put it simply, according to Descartes, the only thing certain is that
we have the ability to doubt, and when we doubt we are thinking,
there fore there must be something that is doing the thinking, hence
that something must EXIST
o The Self According to Descartes
 The essence of existing as a human identity is the possibility
of being aware of our selves
 Being self-conscious in this way is integral to having a
personal identity
 Essence of yourself – you are a “thinking thing”
 Descartes is a rationalist
 Conceived of the human person as having a BODY and a
 The self then for Descartes is also a combination of two
distinct entities, the cogito the things that thinks, which is the
mind, and the extenza or extension of the mind, which is the
body
 For him, the body is nothing but a machine that is attached to
the mind. The human person has it but not what it makes man
a man.
 “I am, I exist, that is certain. But for how long? For as long I am
thinking. I am then in the strict sense only a thing that thinks
that is I am a mind or intelligence or intellect or reason but for
all that I am a thing which is real and which truly exist. But
what kind of thing? As I have just said a thinking thing.”
 The mind is the one that controls the whole body, the
body is just a subordinate of the mind, moves or acts if
the mind tells it to do so.
o Locke’s “ON PERSONAL IDENTITY”
 The Self is consciousness
 Empiricism
o Knowledge originates in our direct sense experience.
 Tabula rasa – blank slate
 When we were born, we were a blank piece of coupon
bond, we are a tabula rasa
 This tabula rasa will be encoded with data as soon as we
experience things through our five senses
o A person is also someone who considers itself to be the same thing in
the difference times and different places.
o Conscious awareness and memory of previous experiences are the
keys to understanding the self.
 We gain knowledge by experiences.
o It is in consciousness alone that identity exist, not in the body and
soul.
  Aside from body and soul, there is consciousness, which is a
criterion for our existence.
o Every aspect of your physical body (substance) is integrated with
your personal identity.
 Personal identity is distinct from whatever substance it finds
itself associated with
 David Hume
o Was a Scottish Philosopher, Economist, and Historian born on April
26, 1711 and died on 1776
o He was a fierce opponent of Rationalism of Descartes
o He has come to be considered as one of the most important British
philosophers of all time
o He believed that, as he put it, “the science of man is the only solid
foundation for the other sciences.”
o That human experience is as close are we are ever going to get the
truth, and that experience and observation must be the foundations
of any logical argument.
 He is an empiricist
o The self is nothing else but a bundle of impressions.
 David Hume said that if one tries to examine his experiences,
it can only be categorized into two:
 IMPRESSIONS
 basic the objects of our experience or sensation
 It is the result of direct experience both
internally and externally, it is engraved in the
soul with great vivacity
 Core of our thoughts
 “lively” and “vivid”
 Our descriptions of things based on our
experiences of those things
 IDEAS
 copies of impressions because of these they are
not as lively and vivid as our impressions
 By way of abstraction, what is your knowledge
of that thing
 It means the image of these impressions
which are weakened
 While impression is received from outside the
idea is a simple copy, a reproduction of the
spontaneous impression
 When one imagines the feeling of being in love
for the first time
 The sourness you taste in your mouth when
you think of eating green mangoes
o The Self according to David Hume
 For him, as an empiricist, to believe that one can know only
what comes from senses and experiences, Hume argues that
self is nothing like what like his predecessors thought of it.
The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body.
One can clearly see that empiricism runs in Hume’s veins.
 Jack knows that Jill is another person, not because he
saw Jill’s body but because Jack can see Jill and he
knows that she is Jill
 Empiricism: id the school of thought that espouses the idea
that knowledge can only be possible if it is sensed and
experienced. Men can only attain knowledge experiencing.
 Personal Identity (Self) is founded on consciousness
(memory/ impressions), and not on substance of either the
soul or the body
 “A bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed
each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a
perpetual flux and movement.”
 We know things because we’ve experienced them.
 Men simply want to believe that there is a unified
coherent self, a soul or mind
 In reality, what we think of is a unified self; our self is a
combination all of our experience
 The bottom line is our self is a bundle or collection of
different perceptions, and different sensory experiences.

 Immanuel Kant: WE CONSTRUCT THE SELF
o The Mind organizes the impressions.
 Kant refuted the empiricism of Locke and Hume.
 Thinking of the self as a mere combination is problematic.
 He thinks that everything that men perceives around them
are not just randomly infused into the human person without
an organizing principle that regulates the relationships of
these impressions which is the mind.
o Kant’s standpoint, it’s our self that makes experiencing an intelligible
world possible because of it’s the self that is responsible for
synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a meaningful
whole.
 The role of the mind is a synthesizer, the mind consolidates all
of the data we perceive.
o The self is a subject, an organizing principle that makes a unified and
intelligible experience possible.
o The self is a product of reason, a regulative principle because the self
“regulates” experience by making unified experience possible
o IMMANUEL KANT = DESCARTES’ RATIONALISM + HUME’S
EMPIRICISM
o Kant recognized both the Rationalism of Descartes and the
Empiricism of Hume, and combined the two in understanding reality
and the self.
o Reason/ Mind (Rationalism) and Experiences/ Impressions
(Empiricism) are both equally important in achieving a complete
understanding of the world and of the self.
 GILBERT RYLE: The Self is how we behave
o “I act therefore, I am”
 For Ryle, what truly matters is the behavior a person
manifests in a day to day life
o In his famous book, the Concept of Mind, he claimed that the mind
does not exist. The self is only a construct that we have as a result
of human behavior whose motivations are nothing sort of
mysterious.
o “I act therefore, I am” – is a principle that reduces all human action
into a materialistic determinism.
o The self is best understood as a pattern of behavior, the tendency or
disposition for a person to behave in a certain way in certain
circumstances.
 It seems that our actions are already destined, in a certain
circumstance there is already a certain reaction that our body
prepared to react to that circumstance.
 For Ryle, he suggested that the self is an entity one can locate
and analyze but simply the convenient name to refer to all the
behaviors that people make. The self is just a name to refer
our behavior.
 Paul Churchland
o Humans have known since we recorded the history of the close
intimate relationship with the mind and the body. The health of our
bodies, the things that we ingest, the experiences that we endured,
all of these dimensions of our physical self have a profound effect on
our mental and emotional functioning. Similarly, our emotional
states have a dramatic impact on our physical self.
o For example, consider the single word “heart” displays this intimate
connection between emotional and the physical, we use heart to
express what we feel.
o Modern science is able use advance equipment and sophisticated
techniques to unravel and articulate the complex web of connections
that bind consciousness and body together into an integrated self.
o There is a scientific research devoted to explore the relationship of
the mind and the brain and the information being developed by that
research.
o Scientists are increasingly able to correlate specific areas of our brain
with the areas of mental functioning.
o To fully understand the nature of the mind, we have to fully
understand the nature of the brain.
o Neurophysiology
o There is no difference between the mental state and the brain state.
o Central Argument: The concepts and theoretical vocabulary we use
to think about ourselves such as our belief, desire, fear, sensation,
pain, joy actually misrepresent the reality of the minds and the
selves.
 These concepts are but a common sense, folk psychology. It
rather obscures than clarifies the nature of human
experiences.
o He is an eliminative materialist – someone who believes that we are
but material objects, the brain’s function is already known.
 They do not acknowledge the presence of the soul.
o The most compelling argument for developing a new conceptual
framework and vocabulary founded on your science is a simple fact
that the current folk psychology has done a very poor job in
accomplishing the main reason of existence.
o Let us find a scientific explanation that explains the scientifically the
activities of our mind, the activities going on in our brain.
o Let us explain the self in a neurological level.
o They contend that mental states are identical with reduceable to or
explainable in terms of physical brains states.
 What we are is what the brain does.
o Churchland’s argument that the psychologic conceptual framework
currently used by most academic disciplines and popular culture, may
end up not being completely eradicated and replaced by a
neuroscience framework.
o Eliminative Materialism – radical claim that our ordinary, common
sense and understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some
or all of the mental states posited by common sense do not actually
exist.
 This new conceptual framework will be used on and will
integrate all that we are learning about how the brain works
on a neurological level.
 Believe that we need to develop a new vocabulary and
conceptual framework that is grounded in neuroscience and
that will be a more accurate reflection of human mind and
self. Churchland proceeds to state the argument that he
believes support his position.
 Maurice Merleau – Ponty: The Self is Embodied
Subjectivity
o Phenomenologist – who asserts that the mind and body bifurcation
is a futile endeavor and an invalid problem.
o “I live in my body”
 An entity that can never be objectified or know in a
completely objective sort of way, as opposed to the “body as
object” of dualists
o Mind-body intertwined
 “There is not a duality of substances but only the dialectic of
living in its biological milieu.”
 Natural synthesis of biology and mind
 The body itself is the knowing subject
o All experience is embodied
o The living body, his thought, emotions and experiences are all one.
o He dismisses the Cartesian dualism – a plain misunderstanding
 There is no separation between the cogito and the extenza, it
is all but one
o For Merleau-Ponty, it’s moments of immediate, prereflective
experience that are the most real. It is the Lebenswelt or “lived
world” which is the fundamental ground of our being and
consciousness.
o The Self According to Merleau-Ponty
 The mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be
separated from one another
 One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied
experience
 All experience is embodied. One’s body is his opening toward
his existence to the world.
  According to Merleau-Ponty, if we honestly and accurately
examine our direct and immediate experience of ourselves,
these mind/ body “problems” fall away. A Merleau-Ponty
explains, “There is not a duality of substances but only the
dialectic of living in its biological milieu”. In other words, our
“living body” is a natural synthesis of mind and biology, and
any attempt to divide them into separate entities are artificial
and nonsensical.
 The Self for Merleau-Ponty is simply the consciousness of a
body which is embodied in the world capable of experiencing
and which is a natural synthesis of mind and biology
(Embodied Subjectivity)

The Self
 Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Plato and Aristotle
o “The self is an immortal soul that exists over time.”
o Made up of material body and immaterial soul
o Matter (Substance) and Form (Material Body)
 Descartes and Locke
o Rationalists
o Descartes – cogito and extenza
o Locke – only self-consciousness exists
 Hume – bundle of changing perceptions
 Kant – mind that synthesizes our sensory experiences
 Churchland – the self can be explained in the neurological level
 Ryle – The self is how we behave
 Merleau-Ponty – the self is embodied objectivity