Blurred: Selves Made and Selves Making: (357 Cognitive Science)

The question of the self, of what the self is (or even if there is a self), has been one that has grown alongside humanity – has haunted humanity – throughout our history. Blurred: Selves Made and Selves Making guides the reader down these dark corridors, shining light on the specters of theories past and unveiling a new self-view to hover afresh, beckoning to roadways beyond. In this remarkably interdisciplinary study, philosophy of mind joins with contemporary neuroscience and cutting-edge psychology to lay bare the how of identity formation, judgment, and behavior generation. Drawing on thinkers from both the Continental and Analytic traditions, consciousness is explored and a uniquely realist self-concept presented that, if adopted, offers a life lived otherwise.

Table of Contents:
 Acknowledgements 1 Background and Literature Review: four Representative Accounts  1.1 A Path Through the Thicket  1.2 Four Accounts of the Self   1.2.1  The Soft Anti-realist Position   1.2.2  The Hard Anti-realist Position   1.2.3  The Soft Realist Position   1.2.4  The Contextualized Soft Realist Position  1.3 Answers? – Guiding Questions 2 Laying the Groundwork: psychological and Embedded Factors, Proposing an Alternate Soft Realist Self Theory  2.1 Situating  2.2 Psychological Issues and the Self   2.2.1  Cognitive Structure   2.2.2  Going Back to Kristjánsson’s Sets   2.2.3  Going Back to Hume   2.2.4  Selves, Personal Identity, and Whole Persons   2.2.5  Intuitions and Emotions  2.3 Bodily and Embodied Issues  2.4 A Word on Consciousness and Category Mistakes  2.5 Certain Uncertainty, Randomness, and Limited Choice  2.6 Taking Less (but taking) 3 Phenomenological Approaches to the Self: objections, replies, and 0bjections  3.1 Review and Preview  3.2 A General Objection and Reply  3.3 Phenomenologically based Accounts and Related Issues   3.3.1  Phenomenology 1: strawson’s Thin Self/minimal Subject   3.3.2  Phenomenology 2: dainton’s Phenomenal Self   3.3.3  Phenomenology 3: going Back to Husserl   3.3.4  Phenomenology 4: heidegger on the Self  3.4 Concluding Introduction 4 Galen Strawson’s Panpsychism, Subjecthood, and the Self  4.1 A Starting Point  4.2 Panpsychism and Subjecthood   4.2.1  Strawson’s Total Physicalism   4.2.2  Responses to Strawson and Related Panpsychist Concerns  4.3 Seductive, but only a Shimmering 5 Consciousness, Qualia, and the Self  5.1 Modern Neuroscience and the Structure of Consciousness   5.1.1  Consciousness, Intent, Thinking: definitions   5.1.2  The Gap, the Hard Problem, the Neuronal to Experience Straits: navigating   5.1.3  An Aside: always Conscious?  5.2 Qualia and the Self   5.2.1  ‘What it is Like’   5.2.2  Artificial Intelligence and the Self: the Importance of Qualia   5.2.3  Software, Hardware, and Wondering about the Real  5.3 A Query at Arrival 6 Metaphysics and Time: the Reality of a realist self and its (re-)making  6.1 Metaphysics for a Realist Self  6.2 Time, the Made Self, and the Making Self  6.3 Exhausted Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Andrew Oberg, Ph.D. (2019), University of Wales-Trinity Saint David, is an associate professor at the University of Kochi, Japan. He has published widely in studies on the self and being, along with full-length fictional works: 'andrewoberg.blogspot.com'.