A Model of Self

Abstract:

The “self” has been studied extensively by modern science and is central to many world religions. But still there are none theories clearly depict the self development and how the self work. In this field, philosophy and anthropology attach importance to knowledge system and innovations, but psychology and psychiatry set store by feelings and behavior. Actually the two aspects are constantly related together and they are basic characteristics of self. In the present paper, I come up with a self model which reveals relationships between knowledge, feeling, behavior and innovation.

 

Keywords: self; knowledge system; feeling history; innovation

 

 

 

Every individual entity has a “self”. To any study concerning human being as a whole, the concept of self is unavoidable. Current theories have mentioned the connections between knowledge and feeling and behavior. Like the social cognitive theory (Pajares, 2002) which had revealed some essential qualities of self. (Fig.1).

 

 

 

Fig.1. The social cognitive theory model.

 

This theory shows some fundamental factors about self formation and its activity. But it did not answer why human beings are so creative.

In present paper, I advance a self model (Fig.2) which combines the knowledge and feelings together and can explain how people make innovations.

 

 

 

 

Fig. 2.  The model of self .

 

This self model contains eight elements. The next I will explain each one’s connotation.

1. Environment: The environment not only includes nature, society, living condition, family etc, but also includes various inside environment like endocrine system and blood pressure (A Mehrabian et al., 1974). Most importantly, the environment gives self signals and information, which can be felt and perceived by knowledge or experiences from others. In return, the actions of self also become part of the environment.

2. Knowledge system: The knowledge system includes all the spoken and written information and experiences achieved by self. For human being, our knowledge can be divided into four categories: science and technology, art, philosophy, theology. Here I include language in science. And the experiences from others in the society can be shared and classified into knowledge system.

3. Feeling history: The individual can feel from the outside or inside and recall from memory. Feeling history is the concept to describe not only all the physical sensation the individual felt or perceived from others, but also all the emotion has experienced (Vanden Bos et al., 2006). These feelings, no matter they are positive or negative, build up self from one’s birth to death, even some feelings the individual could not remember (we can call that unconscious feelings).

4. Cognitive ability: The cognitive ability is a psychological concept, which describes how to perceive information or knowledge quickly and merged them into former knowledge structure of self. So self can evaluate the information and make some predictions about situation. Also this ability relates to the brain function of individual.

5. Self: The knowledge system is constantly reconstructing along with certain feelings. Thus, the feeling history combining with knowledge system together form the “self”, which constantly response to the society, nature and other information.

6. Executive ability: When facing various situations the self will recall its memory to evolve a solution. The executive ability is a process of carrying out the task effectively and flexibly to gain established goals (or needs) through a series of actions (behavior and innovation). This ability is mainly a brain process relates to physical health of individual.

7. Behavior: Behavior provides outputs from the self to the environment (Dusenbery et al., 2009). Behavior is the response of the self to various stimuli, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert.

8. Innovation: Innovation is not just one of behavior. In a sense, many biological phenomena is innovation, even the bacteria receives some drug resistance plasmids. Therefore innovation and natural selection working together form the evolution. For human being, our innovation does not just mean the gene mutation. More importantly, science and technology innovations helped us more to fit in this planet.

On basis of analysis, we can substantiate self model (Fig.3) as below:

 

 

 

 

Fig. 3. The substantiated model of self for human being.

 

Obviously, from this model we notice that by using knowledge and assisting with positive feelings, human being can acquire innovations and discoveries. Positive feelings motivate us to expand our ability and make innovations to gain better conditions and better health. But the robots which are without such feelings only can do something set in their programs beforehand.

Further more, this model gives some clues to depict self by mathematical ways.

 

References

 

A Mehrabian, J A Russell. (1974).environment psychology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Dusenbery, David B. (2009). Living at Micro Scale. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, P120-124.

Pajares. (2002). Overview of social cognitive theory and of self-efficacy. available at http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/eff.html

Vanden Bos, Gary. (2006).APA Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.

 

 

转载本文请联系原作者获取授权，同时请注明本文来自彭雷科学网博客。
链接地址：https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-28871-377998.html

上一篇：紫峰夜景
下一篇：嫦娥卫星 诗一首