The Self
The idea of the self has always been an idea with infinite possibility, as well as,
a subject in science without evidence to deduce its existence. There have been many scientists spending their entire lives studying neurology, and they still haven’t found a link to a self from past the mechanisms in the brain in your head, that run consciousness. The scientific discovery that the cognitive self has never been doesn’t mean there is no such thing--or maybe this only means that the self is more vast--and we haven’t been able to find its limit. The philosophical contemplation of the self is endless, and generally we become part of what we do in life from things like our jobs or hobbies within society to our dreams of the future, we notice our self apart from the rest. Doctors are called doctors, if someone earns a prestigious title it means they have spent their time becoming something.
And this is traceable, observable, and identifiable in our every day-to-day movement. When we exercise our body changes, there are signs that we can see showing the self in action. While the self is still a mystery to science as far as we can understand it, there are many other ways of finding yourself. We have a self, and it isn’t clear exactly what
that is, but what is clear is that we can accomplish anything. People will spend their
whole lives studying material in hopes that they will one day be seen as something like
a doctor, lawyer, or something else that takes a lifetime to study to be.
The supernatural is an option that would explain what is happening, now we don’t ever fully grasp the supernatural which is why this may just be the kind of answer that exists: there may be something out of our control which is affecting our life. This answer appeals to those who see rational behavior as something that supports the self’s ability to make every movement seem important. Many theories of the self are put together from a wide variety of collections hoping to catch its meaning somewhere in the whole scheme of things. This theory stems from the idea that there is a direct causal relationship between the nature of our daily lives, and consciousness, which could be a link to finding out about the self. Some claim the self isn’t real, and that we are a cog in the rest of the machinery.
We are seen as a network of feelings that flow from our environment, and from the brain in cognitive, emotional, and social ways. But when this is shown as evidently the case, there is still more room to invent a larger scale idea, rather than focusing on yourself take everything into account something so large that you become engulfed by it, eventually leading to it influencing who you are. There is the microscopic level and the macroscopic level, we operate on both, and this contrast gives life to the self. This seems to shed light on the subject, but the brain itself is not entirely predictable from only its underlying activities--from an organ we still don’t completely understand. We are a unified singular being, and so we branch out into our environment and all that it has to offer.
As we live, we grow, when we spend our time focused in on something these two phenomena come together. Depending on the individual person the self may manifest in an incredibly large amount of strange and different ways. According to social psychology, a couple of ways in which we can model the behavior we accept is with ideas such as self-concept, self-awareness, self-esteem, and positive self-image. These are all invaluable to our ability to maneuver through the environment. People interact with each other and
identify by these psychological topics.
To say that the idea of a self is fantasy drawn up by something too large to control doesn’t fit with realistic impressions from experiences in life, as confusing as it may seem, it is always fluid enough to show your individuality. Behavior is almost the foundation for any clue we have to finding the self. And although our general behavior is influenced by reinforcement that doesn’t mean that we have to leave it at that. There are many reasons behind why we choose the reinforcers that we do, and this helps provide us with an image of a self, and one that is more adaptable.
We are ever changing even when we are defined in ultimately finite roles. The ability to think is what can keep us in a category separate from other more objective roles that we fill. We are products of the environment, that think about ourselves subjectively to
control how we grow. This is a necessary survival skill that both moderates our behavior, as well as, the behavior of what we grow from. And to continue to grow we must maintain our perception of what we are.
This plays into the social aspect of life, and that is where we come from. An aspect of life that is there for our every attentive need. The self needs to be seen as a factor when it is reflecting from our every experience. Find out why we have myelin sheaths on our nerve cells. We create these so we can keep our skill level at certain repetitious tasks.

Lit Review
After reviewing all of the sources I have found them to be helpful in discovering more about the phenomenon known as the self. These different sources provide substitutes for what could be seen as the self because there are still some things we don’t know or haven’t discovered--exactly how the brain works along with the extent of consciousness is still one of the world’s mysteries. Although cognitive science describes us as a vast number of networks connected to a larger consciousness, we are still one enigma of day-to-day stimuli. Over eighty phenomena related to what we know as the self is described in my source from Psychology Today on the medically accurate and more scientific side of things, and on the philosophical standpoint I have both Stanford.edu displaying Kant’s take on the mind along with consciousness and Hume’s take on the matter, as well. We are a brain interacting with its environment, whatever that means, but what becomes of it is clear for us to experience as we see what there is in store.
From the website Livescience.com, I have looked over many different conceptual ideas that encapsulate what one would call themselves. A self Landscape is described as containing a continuum of what could be, categorizing an array of complicated concepts to articulate the possibility of the self-compartmentalized. Then more supernatural answers are included, for unsolved mysteries, and a look at unexplainable connections. There are illusions that could yet still be undiscovered. Artificial competition may be inherent, but tricks of the brain provide us with more information.
Individual chemical balance is pointed to on Livescience.com as the reason for our being acting in the uniquely colorful ways that it does. This theory is due to the rate at which neuro and brain science is currently moving. According to a theory on Livescience, put forth by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, as a way of idealizing the notion of the self in a weak emergence theory, he says, ”The self is the product of interacting brain mechanisms, both at the microscopic neuronal level and at the macroscopic brain systems level. Given future neuroscience, eventually the self will be predictable from the brain alone; in other words, brain activity alone could still explain the self entirely.” (Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. “What Is a ‘Self’? Here Are All the Possibilities.” Livescience, December 7, 2016,https://www.livescience.com/57126-what-is-a-self-all-possibilities.html)
The author of the article then gives an interesting counter theory, stating that the self is a product of the before mentioned brain mechanisms, only we will never be able to fully recognize its true maxims or their further widespread acts.
When we are curious about the noise at the end of the hall, or why we keep hearing a faint voice whispering sweet nothings in our ear, people will sometimes turn to the supernatural. How society effects us is as great as how anything would, my source about the psychology of society and its effects on us in covers a range of personal systems that run what we see as reality. Cognitive self along with how we self-conceptualize is bulleted into objectives for searching different regions that would contain most any answer you would hope to discover about yourself in the context of psychology. The Psychological mapping is helpful, in that it mixes what we know as the sensations of who we are, and the actual medical phenomena that would be the source of our actions as we live them out. This edition covers everything from indications about self-esteem to cognition, to social media and online lives.