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Sentirsi esistere. Inconscio, coscienza, autocoscienza
No full textLa tesi centrale di questo volume è che l’io, o meglio l’autocoscienza in quanto consapevolezza di sé nell’introspezione, è un’attività di riappropriazione narrativa dei prodotti finali di una macchina computazionale incon¬scia; e questa attività ha un carattere essenzialmente autodifensivo, essendo retta dall’esigenza primaria e universale di costruire e proteggere un’identità la cui solidità e chiarezza è il fondamento degli equilibri intrapersonale e interpersonale dell’organismo umano.
La cassetta degli attrezzi con cui intendiamo dare corpo a questa tesi è quella della filosofia della mente informata dalle scienze cognitive. È con questi strumenti che ci proponiamo di elaborare una teoria naturalistica dell’autocoscienza, al cui interno classici temi psicoanalitici quali l’inconscio, l’autoinganno e i meccanismi di difesa possano essere letti in una luce nuova e più rigorosa
A third person approach to self-consciousness
No full textSeveral authors have recently defended the idea that there is a “pre-reflective self-consciousness”, or “pre-reflective self”, which is regarded as a very precocious psychic function that grounds every conscious act. In particular, Prebble, Addis & Tippett (2013) argue that this kind of self-consciousness is a fundamental prerequisite for episodic memory and is very similar to the Jamesian notion of I, or subjective self (as opposed to Me, or objective self). In this paper we will argue that the identification of the Jamesian notion of I with pre-reflective self-consciousness is a misunderstanding of James’ account and that self-consciousness is, properly said, the result of a gradual process of objectification, which requires conscious (but not self-conscious) activities of representation. Indeed, the subjective self (or self-consciousness), far from being the grounding source of every conscious mental activity, is the result of a complex neurocognitive and psycho-social construction, where the understanding of other minds both ontogenetically precedes and grounds the understanding of our own minds
Disentangling the Self. An Outline of a General Theory of Self-Consciousness
No full textIn this article we explore the implications of a definition of self-consciousness as a process, by which we mean the self-representing of a multilevel system (the human organism) whose teleology is focused on self-defense.
The first step in our investigation is the criticism of the notion of “prereflective self-consciousness”, an alleged minimal form of self-consciousness that is thought to be the non-conceptual, non-objectifying and non-representational basis of forms of self-consciousness that are cognitively more advanced, like those involved in mirror self-recognition, introspection, the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or the construction of a self-narrative. Our case against prereflective self-consciousness sets the stage for a developmental story about how a narrative identity is progressively constructed from body awareness, which becomes bodily self-awareness between 18 and 24 months of age. This paves the ground for an approach to narrative self-construction, which, drawing on findings in developmental, dynamic, social and personality psychology, aims to distance itself from the hermeneutical and eliminativistic forms of narrativism
Functions, Levels, and Mechanisms: The Explanation in Cognitive Science and its Problems
No full textIn the first part of the paper we describe the philosophical debate on the expansions of cognitive science into the brain and into the environment, take sides against the “revolutionary” positions on them and in favor of a “revisionist” approach, and conclude that the most appropriate model for cognitive sciences is pluralistic. This is meant in a twofold sense. On the one hand, mental phenomena require a variety of explanatory levels, whose inter-relations are of two kinds: decomposition and contextualization. On the other hand, the arguably quasi-holistic character of some cognitive tasks suggests that the mechanistic style of explanation has to be integrated in these cases with a dynamicist explanatory style. This theoretical picture, however, raises two classes of problems: (i) the compatibility between the mechanistic-computationalist explanation and the dynamicist one; (ii) the nature of theoretical entities and relations postulated at the different levels of a pluralistic model involving computational explanations. Each point will be discussed in the second part of the paper
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