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Updating our Selves: Synthesizing Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Incorporating New Information into our Worldview

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Abstract

Given the ubiquity and centrality of social and relational influences to the human experience, our conception of self-governance must adequately account for these external influences. The inclusion of socio-historical, externalist (i.e., “relational”) considerations into more traditional internalist (i.e., “individualist”) accounts of autonomy has been an important feature of the debate over personal autonomy in recent years. But the relevant socio-temporal dynamics of autonomy are not only historical in nature. There are also important, and under-examined, future-oriented questions about how we retain autonomy while incorporating new values into the existing set that guides our interaction with the world. In this paper, we examine these questions from two complementary perspectives: philosophy and neuroscience. After contextualizing the philosophical debate, we show the importance to theories of autonomous agency of the capacity to appropriately adapt our values and beliefs, in light of relevant experiences and evidence, to changing circumstances. We present a plausible philosophical account of this process, which we claim is generally applicable to theories about the nature of autonomy, both internalist and externalist alike. We then evaluate this account by providing a model for how the incorporation of values might occur in the brain; one that is inspired by recent theoretical and empirical advances in our understanding of the neural processes by which our beliefs are updated by new information. Finally, we synthesize these two perspectives and discuss how the neurobiology might inform the philosophical discussion.

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Notes

  1. There is some discussion in the literature about whether experience or evidence more generally is the correct object of our responsive attentions. For our purposes, we use the term “experience-responsiveness” to capture both “the acquisition of information through direct perception”, i.e., experiential information [18] and the more expansive idea of any evidence—experiential or not—that offers a reason to review the relevant part of one’s worldview [7].

  2. In other words, our oughts should be compatible with what can be achieved in the real world.

  3. While reflection may be sufficient for updating one’s beliefs, the likelihood of this occurring may depend on how one’s pro-attitudes initially developed, which our analysis does not attempt to address.

  4. To be clear, it is the capacity to critically reflect that is important, not whether new pro-attitudes are or are not ultimately incorporated.

  5. This account does not attempt to explain resistance to incorporating new pro-attitudes (exemplified by the case of older Pat). It is indeed possible that representations of pro-attitudes do not undergo the same cycle of deconsolidation and reconsolidation described here.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics (G. F.) and by a Warwick Transatlantic Fellowship from the University of Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre (F. N.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

    Fay Niker

  2. National Core for Neuroethics, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia, 2255 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 2B5, Canada

    Peter B. Reiner & Gidon Felsen

  3. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, 12800 E. 19th Ave., Mail Stop 8307, Aurora, CO, 80045, USA

    Gidon Felsen

  4. Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado School of Medicine, 13080 E. 19th Ave., Mail Stop B137, Aurora, CO, 80045, USA

    Gidon Felsen

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  1. Fay Niker
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Correspondence to Gidon Felsen.

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Niker, F., Reiner, P.B. & Felsen, G. Updating our Selves: Synthesizing Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Incorporating New Information into our Worldview. Neuroethics 11, 273–282 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-015-9246-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-015-9246-3

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