Reading Group

The Reading Group is a biweekly meeting in which topics are discussed based on relevant texts presented by members and collaborators of the project. The main goals of these meetings are: 1) to conduct an overview of the distinct methodologies employed by different authors in approaching the topic of the Self; 2) to disambiguate the usage of problematic concepts (“self”, “core-self”, etc.); 3) to establish semantic links between concepts employed in methodologically distinct approaches to the topic in question. Points 1) through 3) serve the purpose of addressing the major problem with which this project is concerned: the perceived disciplinary and methodological fragmentation regarding scientific studies on the Self. 

Upcoming Sessions

Past Sessions

 July 12th, 2013 - presentation by Robert Clowes e Dina Mendonça

Text Shaun Gallagher "A pattern theory of self" 

July 5th, 2013 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves

Text: Louis A. Sass, "Self-disturbance and schizophrenia: Structure, specificity, pathogenesis (Current issues, New directions)" 

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January 11th, 2013 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves 

Text: Pickard, Hannah (2010), "Schizophrenia and the Epistemology of Self-Knowledge"

Abstract: Extant philosophical accounts of schizophrenic alien thought neglect three clinically signifi cant features of the phenomenon. First, not only thoughts, but also impulses and feelings, are experienced as alien. Second, only a select array of thoughts, impulses, and feelings are experienced as alien. Third, empathy with experiences of alienation is possible. I provide an account of disownership that does justice to these features by drawing on recent work on delusions and selfknowledge. The key idea is that disownership occurs when there is a failure of rational control over one's mind. This produces a clash between the deliverances of introspection and practical enquiry as ways of knowing one’s mind. This explanation places disownership on a continuum with more common aspects of our psychological life, such as addiction, akrasia, obsessional thinking, and immoral, selfish or shameful thoughts. I conclude by addressing objections, and exploring the relevance of my account to questions in the philosophy of psychiatry concerning the validity of our current taxonomy of symptoms, and the nature of psychiatric classification.

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December 14th, 2012 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves 

Text: Cavel, Marcia (1998), "Beside one's self: thinking and the divided mind"

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November 28th, 2012 - presentation by Vera Pereira

Text: Saraiva, Rodrigo (2010), "Evolutionary Psychology of the I/Me and the Idea of the Immortal Soul"

Abstract: As this congress is devoted to the evaluation of Darwin's impact on the intellectual world and the power of evoloutionary science to explain the apparently spiritual side of humans, I will present an evolutionary scenarioof the emergence of the concept of I/Me and, consequently, of the concept of the immortal soul. The approach is the one that Sá-Nogueira Saraiva (2006) christened "functional Ethology". In this paper, I will present the emergence, first, of a memory space in lower vertebrates, then of a mental space in mammals (birds will not be considered as they are external to our evolutionary line); after that I will consider the cognitive changes that characterize the genus Homo and, finally, the appearance of the I/Me in Homo sapiens proper. I will end this paper with a theoretical proposal that aims to explain the emergence of the idea of the immortal soul.  

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May 5th, 2012 - presentation by Daniel Ramalho

Text: Yoshihisa Kashima, Aparna Kanakatte Gurumurthy, Lucette Ouschan, Trevor Chong & Jason Mattingley (2007), "Connectionism and Self: James, Mead, and the Stream of Enculturated Consciousness" 

Abstract: William James conceptualized I, the self as subject as a stream of consciousness. When this conception is augmented with George Herbert Mead’s view of self as a radically socialized and enculturated process, a result is the James-Mead model of dynamic self as a stream of enculturated consciousness. In this paper, we argue that connectionism is best suited to theorize this challenging notion. Based on the view that a connectionist model should describe psychological processes that carry out psychological functions grounded in a biological living system, we propose the I-SELF (Imitative and Sequence Learning Functional) model, which is designed to capture the temporal dynamics of a stream of consciousness whose content can be acquired via symbolically mediated social interaction with others in society. We identify four implications of the James-Mead model of dynamic self (embodiment, narrative and self, individual and collective self, and culture and self), and report computer simulations to show the utility of I-SELF in conceptualizing the dynamic self-processes in the contemporary social psychological literature. Theoretical and metatheoretical implications of the connectionist approach to self are discussed. 

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January 20th, 2012 - presentation by Dina Mendonça 

Text: Ghallager, Shaun (2005), "Complex Structures and Common Dynamics of Self-Awareness", in How the Body Shapes the Mind, Chapter 8

January 6th, 2012 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves

Text: Neisser, J. U. (2006), "Unconscious Subjectivity"

Abstract: Subjectivity is essential to consciousness. But though subjectivity is necessary for consciousness it is not sufficient. In part one I derive a distinction between conscious awareness and unconscious subjectivity from a critique of Block’s (1995) distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. In part two I contrast two historically influential models of unconscious thought: cognitive and psychoanalytic. The widely held cognitive model does not cover, as it should, the class of "for me" mental states that remain unconscious. In particular, personalist approaches to emotion require a theory of unconscious subjectivity to handle the case of unconscious emotion.

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August 16th, 2011 - presentation by Robert Clowes

Text: Clark, Andy (2006), "Soft Selves and Ecological Control"

Abstract: Advanced biological brains are by nature open-ended opportunistic controllers. Such controllers compute, pretty much on a moment-to-moment basis, what problem-solving resources are readily available and recruit them into temporary problem-solving wholes. Neural plasticity, exaggerated in our own species, makes it possible for such resources to become factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines. One way to think about this is to depict the biological brain as a master of what I shall dub ‘ecological control’. Ecological control is the kind of top-level control that does not micro-manage every detail, but rather encourages substantial devolvement of power and responsibility. This kind of control allows much of our skill at walking to reside in the linkages and elastic properties of muscles and tendons. And it allows (I claim) much of our prowess at thought and reason to depend upon the robust and reliable operation, often (but not always) in dense brain-involving loops, of a variety of non-biological problem-solving resources spread throughout our social and technological surround. Are the complex distributed systems that result in some sense ‘out of control’, beyond the reach of useful (you might even, though problematically, say, ‘personal’) governance? I shall argue that they are not, although understanding them requires us to re-think some key ideas about control and the nature of the self. To (try to) make this case, I shall first examine some strategies for efficient, external opportunity exploiting control in simple systems. I shall then argue that many of the same lessons apply to the case of higher-level human problem-solving.

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June 22nd, 2011 - presentation by Daniel Ramalho

Text: Browne, Derek (2004), "Do Dolphins Know their own Minds?" 

Abstract: Knowledge of one’s own states of mind is one of the varieties of self-knowledge. Do any nonhuman animals have the capacity for this variety of self-knowledge? The question is open to empirical inquiry, which is most often conducted with primate subjects. Research with a bottlenose dolphin gives some evidence for the capacity in a nonprimate taxon. I describe the research and evaluate the metacognitive interpretation of the dolphin’s behaviour. 

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May 13th, 2011 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves

Text: Krueger, Joel W. (2010), "The Who and the How of Experience" 

Abstract: Does consciousness require a self? In what follows, I argue that it does not. I concede at the outset that this is a counterintuitive thesis, for a central feature of conscious states is that their mode of appearance (i.e. how they are given) exhibits an irreducible first-personal nature. My experiences are distinctly my own, given to me and only me. This first-personal 'how' of consciousness is what secures its phenomenal character. And it seems natural to assume that this 'how' points back to a 'who': a stable, enduring, conscious subject at the receiving end of phenomenal states. But is the assumption that a' how' requires a 'who', warranted? I will argue that just because the subjective character of consciousness gives rise to a sense of self - that is, the felt sense of being a stable 'who', or owner of conscious episodes -, it does not follow that this 'who' really exists in any autonomous or enduring sense.

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April 8th, 2011 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves

Text: Rudd, Anthony (2007), "In Defence of Narrative" 

Abstract: Over the last few decades, many philosophers and others theorists have argued that narrative has a central role to play in our thinking about personal identity and ethics. Recently, something of a backlash against these narrative theories seems to have developed, exemplified in work by Galen Strawson, Peter Lamarque and John Christman. This paper responds to some of these criticisms and in so doing defends an approach to personal identity and ethics (based mainly on work by Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor) in which narrative plays a central, though not a foundational, role.

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March 25th, 2011 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves

Strawson, Galen (2004), "Against Narrativity"

Abstract: I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘eachof us constructs and lives a “narrative” ... this  narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story ... in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we“tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. We  try  to make all of our material cohere into a single goodstory. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character... of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a  narrative’ and have anunderstanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman).

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March 3rd, 2011 - presentation by Alexander Gerner

Text: Metzinger, Thomas (2009), "What might we learn from artificial ego machines?", in The Ego Tunnel, chapter 7 - "Artificial Ego Machines"

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February 2nd, 2011 - presentation by Jorge Gonçalves

Text: Gallagher, S., Meltzoff, A. (1996), "The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent -  Developmental Studies" 

Abstract: Recent studies in developmental psychology have found evidence to suggest that there exists an innate system that accounts for the possibilities of early infant imitation and the existence of phantom limbs in cases of congenital absence of limbs. These results challenge traditional assumptions about the status and development of the body schema and body image, and about the nature of the translation process between perceptual experience and motor ability. Merleau-Ponty, who was greatly influenced by his study of developmental psychology, and whose phenomenology of perception was closely tied to the concept of the body schema, accepted these traditional assumptions. They also informed his philosophical conclusions concerning the experience of self and others. We re-examine issues involved in understanding self and others in light of the more recent research in developmental psychology. More specifically our re-examination challenges a number of Merleau-Ponty's conclusions and suggests, in contrast, that the newborn infant is capable of a rudimentary differentiation between self and non-self.

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