Why know thyself

I suspect that the last of these options best reflects your choices. You do much of what you do because you think it meshes with the kind of person you think you are. And this goes for many of our daily choices. We all have fairly stable ideas about what kind of people we are. There is, however, a deep problem with this mental set-up: people change. There are tumultuous periods when we change drastically — in times of romantic love, say, or divorce, or having children.

Often we are aware of these changes. But most changes happen gradually and under the radar. Another, more troubling one, is that the more your desire for something is frustrated, the more you tend to dislike it. These changes happen gradually, often without us noticing anything.

The problem is this: if we change while our self-image remains the same, then there will be a deep abyss between who we are and who we think we are. And this leads to conflict. To make things worse, we are exceptionally good at dismissing even the possibility that we might change.

We all think that who we are now is the finished product: we will be the same in five, 10, 20 years. But, as these psychologists found, this is completely delusional — our preferences and values will be very different already in the not-so-distant future. Why is this such a big issue? In some cases I consider it like this. There is the main individual state, uneasiness, over in the left-hand corner. Presently is this like a man feeling an electrical jolt, say, or feeling the surface of a coat?

A lot seems counter-factual and ridiculous Brainology. A philosophical position of very great interest is seond person knowledge about ourselves, a knowledge that is neither equal to first person knowledge of ourselves or to the third person point of view. Instead of discussing this, my point of view is that we can learn much about ourselves and others by studying the second person access to ourselves.

Thanks Olav. If you prefer to call self-knowledge based on testimony second-person self-knowledge, no problem. What matters, anyway, is the fact that testimony is a source of self-knowledge.

More on this in the second post, which is now out. I understand: Stimuli to brain reveal states of mind which can be identified as in two parts. These are all based on neuronal reactions. These are first- personal traits and 2. A mental activity Correlated to brain activity related to stimuli and neuronal reactions. The mental parts correlated to neuronal reactions is the present interacting self. We can call them mental reactions to stimuli.

We can know the mental state in a higher level consciousness directly. The lower level consciousness is capable of knowing the activity portion. Our character can be known indirectly through several observations of behaviour,indirectly.

Search: Search. School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. Contact us. What is the extent of self knowledge? What is this concept of knowledge all about a person? Is it physical or metaphysical? What is the underlying benefit of self identity to self and others and lots more. These form the major constituents of this paper.