Self

The self is the subject of one's own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts. In phenomenology, it is conceived as what experiences, and there isn't any experiencing without an experiencer, the self. The self is therefore an "immediate given", an intrinsic dimension of the fact of experiencing phenomena. In some other trends of philosophy, the self is instead seen as requiring a reflexive perception of oneself, the individual person, meaning the self in such a view is an object of consciousness.

The self has been studied extensively by philosophers and psychologists and is central to many world religions. With the recent rise in technology, the self has been discussed under various new emerging fields, such as Technoself Studies.

Philosophy

The philosophy of self seeks to describe essential qualities that constitute a person's uniqueness or essential being. There have been various approaches to defining these qualities. The self can be considered that being which is the source of consciousness, the agent responsible for an individual's thoughts and actions, or the substantial nature of a person which endures and unifies consciousness over time.

Philosophy of self

The philosophy of self defines, among other things, the conditions of identity that make one subject of experience distinct from all others. Contemporary discussions on the nature of the self are not thereby discussions on the nature of personhood, or personal identity. The self is sometimes understood as a unified being essentially connected to consciousness, awareness, and agency (or, at least, with the faculty of rational choice). Various theories on the metaphysical nature of the self have been proposed. Among them, the metaphysical nature of the self has been proposed to be that of an immaterial substance.

Definitions of the self

Most philosophical definitions of self—per Descartes, Locke, Hume, and William James—are expressed in the first person. A third person definition does not refer to specific mental qualia but instead strives for objectivity and operationalism.

To another person, the self of one individual is exhibited in the conduct and discourse of that individual. Therefore, the intentions of another individual can only be inferred from something that emanates from that individual. The particular characteristics of the self determine its identity.

Self (programming language)

Self is an object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes. Self was a dialect of Smalltalk, being dynamically typed and using just-in-time compilation (JIT) as well as the prototype-based approach to objects: it was first used as an experimental test system for language design in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2006, Self was still being developed as part of the Klein project, which was a Self virtual machine written fully in Self. The latest version is 4.5.0 released in January 2014.

Several just-in-time compilation techniques were pioneered and improved in Self research as they were required to allow a very high level object oriented language to perform at up to half the speed of optimized C. Much of the development of Self took place at Sun Microsystems, and the techniques they developed were later deployed for Java's HotSpot virtual machine.

At one point a version of Smalltalk was implemented in Self. Because it was able to use the JIT this also gave extremely good performance.