Open Collections

Abstract

What are we? What is our nature, as persons and selves? I challenge existing views, including a dominant family of views that identifies the self with self-consciousness: the Conscious Self theory. When trying to reconcile empirical findings about the mind, this perspective has tended to lead to irrealism about the self. I also argue that views that emphasize the individual body or organism fail to comprehensively explain our nature. In their place, I propose an alternative social view that I call Socio-functionalism, according to which the self depends for its existence on its relations to others. Consider this analogy. A single neuron plucked from the brain, no matter how closely studied in isolation, will not tell us about the nature of a particular thought. And that is because, though neurons realize the information processing functions that make up thoughts, neurons are not themselves thoughts. Instead, the mind is defined by its functional relations within an appropriately organized cognitive system. The traditional individualistic way we have understood the self, similarly, plucks the individual from the social system. Though an isolated individual may have a body and mind—just as an isolated neuron may have a cell membrane and electrical potential—that entity is no more a self than a neuron is a thought. Socio-functionalism says that the self is a position in social space—defined as a socio-functional mechanism in an appropriately organized social system. This is not just the trivial claim that the self relates with, or is in causal interaction with, others. It is the stronger claim that, were those relations to not exist, we would not exist. Socio-functionalism is a naturalistic theory of the self, building on ideas in contemporary philosophy of science, such as the mechanistic view and the generalized selected effects theory. Traditionally, naturalistic theories of the self have drawn from psychology and neuroscience. Socio-functions, being underwritten by biological functional mechanisms, shift the focus to domains that have been relatively overlooked in their application to the self: such as the biology of sociality, cognitive anthropology, systems theory, and social neuroscience.