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In philosophy, the self is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes.
The first-person perspective distinguishes selfhood from personal identity. Whereas "identity" is (literally) samenessShoemaker, D. (Dec 15, 2015) "Personal Identity and Ethics", section "Contemporary Accounts of Personal Identity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta - "... how can identity - sameness - be based on a relation (consciousness) that changes from moment to moment?" and may involve categorization and labeling, selfhood implies a first-person perspective and suggests potential uniqueness. Conversely, "person" is used as a third-person reference. Personal identity can be impaired in late-stage Alzheimer's disease and in other neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, the self is distinguishable from "others". Including the distinction between sameness and otherness, the self versus other is a research topic in contemporary philosophy and contemporary phenomenology (see also psychological phenomenology), psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and neuroscience.
Although subjective experience is central to selfhood, the privacy of this experience is only one of many problems in the philosophy of self and the research study of consciousness.
What the Freudian tradition has subjectively called, "sense of self" is for Jungian analytic psychology, where one's identity is lodged in the persona or ego and is subject to change in maturation. Carl Jung distinguished, "The self is not only the center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality...".Jung, Carl. CW 12, ¶44 The Self in Jungian psychology is "the archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche ... a transpersonal power that transcends the ego."Jung, Carl. (1951) CW 9ii, The Self. Princeton University Press.Sharp, Daryl (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts. Inner City Books. p. 119 As a Jungian archetype, it cannot be seen directly, but by ongoing individuating maturation and analytic observation, can be experienced objectively by its cohesive wholeness-making factor.Jung, Emma & von Franz, Marie-Louise. (1998). The Grail Legend, Princeton University Press. p. 98.
Meanwhile, self psychology is a set of psychotherapeutic principles and techniques established by the Austrian-born American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut upon the foundation of the psychoanalytic method developed by Freud, and is specifically focused on the subjectivity of experience, which, according to self psychology, is mediated by a psychological structure called the self.Wolf, E. S. (2002). Treating the self: Elements of clinical self-psychology. Guilford Press. Examples of psychiatric conditions where such "sameness" may become broken include depersonalization, which sometimes occurs in schizophrenia, where the self appears different from the subject.
For example, facial and pattern recognition take large amounts of brain processing capacity but pareidolia cannot explain many constructs of self for cases of disorder, such as schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. One's sense of self can also be changed upon becoming part of a stigmatized group. According to Cox, Abramson, Patricia Devine, and Hollon (2012), if an individual has prejudice against a certain group, like the elderly and then later becomes part of this group. This prejudice can be turned inward causing depression.
The philosophy of a disordered self, such as in schizophrenia, is described in terms of what the psychiatrist understands are actual events in terms of neuron excitation but are delusions nonetheless, and the schizo-affective or a schizophrenic person also believes are actual events in terms of essential being. PET scans have shown that auditory stimulation is processed in certain areas of the brain, and imagined similar events are processed in adjacent areas, but hallucinations are processed in the same areas as actual stimulation. In such cases, external influences may be the source of consciousness and the person may or may not be responsible for "sharing" in the mind's process, or the events which occur, such as visions and auditory stimuli, may persist and be repeated often over hours, days, months or years—and the afflicted person may believe themselves to be in a state of rapture or possession.
Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama's theory of the interdependent self hypothesizes that representations of the self in human cultures fall on a continuum from independent to interdependent. The independent self is supposed to be egoistic, unique, separated from the various contexts, critical in judgment, and prone to self-expression. The interdependent self is supposed to be altruistic, similar with the others, flexible according to contexts, conformist, and unlikely to express opinions that would disturb the harmony of his or her group of belonging. However, this theory has been criticized by other sociologists, including David Matsumoto for being based on popular stereotypes and myths about different cultures rather than on rigorous scientific research. A 2016 study of 10,203 participants from 55 cultural groups also failed to find a correlation between the postulating series of causal links between culture and self-construals, finding instead that correlations between traits varied both across cultures did not correlate with Markus & Kitayama's identifications of "independent" or "interdependent" self.
The self has a particular prominence in the thought of René Descartes (1596-1650).
In philosophy, the problem of personal identity is concerned with how one is able to identify a single person over a time interval, dealing with such questions as, "What makes it true that a person at one time is the same thing as a person at another time?" or "What kinds of things are we persons?"
A question related to the problem of personal identity is Benj Hellie's vertiginous question. The vertiginous question asks why, of all the subjects of experience out there, this one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—is the one whose experiences are live? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.) Hellie's argument is closely related to Caspar Hare's theories of egocentric presentism and perspectival realism, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.
Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by J. J. Valberg in justifying his personal horizon view of the self, and by Thomas Nagel in The View from Nowhere. (1997). 9780195113556, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195113556 (2025). 9781317494188, Routledge. ISBN 9781317494188 Tim S. Roberts refers to the question of why a particular organism out of all the organisms that happen to exist happens to be you as the "Even Harder Problem of Consciousness".
Open individualism is a view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future. It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with "Empty individualism", the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern that instantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and "Closed individualism", the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time.
Open individualism is related to the concept of anattā in Buddhist philosophy. In Buddhism, the term anattā () or anātman () is the doctrine of "non-self" – that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon. While often interpreted as a doctrine denying the existence of a self, anatman is more accurately described as a strategy to attain non-attachment by recognizing everything as impermanent, while staying silent on the ultimate existence of an unchanging essence. In contrast, dominant schools of Hinduism assert the existence of Ātman as purusha or witness-consciousness, "reifying consciousness as an eternal self."
One thought experiment in the philosophy of personal identity is the teletransportation paradox. It deals with whether the concept of one's future self is a coherent concept. The thought experiment was formulated by Derek Parfit in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons. Derek Parfit and others consider a hypothetical "teletransporter", a machine that puts you to sleep, records your molecular composition, breaking you down into atoms, and relaying its recording to Mars at the speed of light. On Mars, another machine re-creates you (from local stores of carbon, hydrogen, and so on), each atom in exactly the same relative position. Parfit poses the question of whether or not the teletransporter is actually a method of travel, or if it simply kills and makes an exact replica of the user.Parfit, Derek. " Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” in Mindwaves, ed. Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield. Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 351–6. Then the teleporter is upgraded. The teletransporter on Earth is modified to not destroy the person who enters it, but instead it can simply make infinite replicas, all of whom would claim to remember entering the teletransporter on Earth in the first place. Using thought experiments such as these, Parfit argues that any criteria we attempt to use to determine sameness of person will be lacking, because there is no Further facts. What matters, to Parfit, is simply "Relation R", psychological connectedness, including memory, personality, and so on.
One description of spirituality is the Self's search for "ultimate meaning" through an independent comprehension of the sacred. Another definition of spiritual identity is: "A persistent sense of Self that addresses ultimate questions about the nature, purpose, and meaning of life, resulting in behaviors that are consonant with the individual’s core values. Spiritual identity appears when the symbolic religious and spiritual value of a culture is found by individuals in the setting of their own life. There can be different types of spiritual Self because it is determined by one's life and experiences."Kiesling, Chris; Montgomery, Marylin; Gwendolyn Sorell; Colwell, Ronald. "Identity and Spirituality: A Psychosocial Exploration of the Sense of Spiritual Self"
Human beings have a Self—that is, they are able to look back on themselves as both subjects and objects in the universe. Ultimately, this brings questions about who we are and the nature of our own importance.Charon, Joel M. Ten Questions: A Sociological Perspective. 5th edition. Thomson & Wadsworth. p. 260 Traditions such as in Buddhism see the attachment to Self is an illusion that serves as the main cause of Dukkha and unhappiness.
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