Learning Evaluation

Teaching – Learning Activities

Words That Describe Me
Circle the words that describe you. Add additional words.

Adaptive Self-Aware Tolerant

Dependable Intelligent Fearless
Compassionate Hard Worker Capable with Hands
Respectful Calm Humble
Energetic Eccentric Clever
Creative Confidant Thoughtful
Complex Realistic Cautious
Balanced Cooperative Shy
Quiet Attentive Picky

Other Words that describe you: Independent

Honest
Easily distracted

Your Personal Identity

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 A Portrait of Yourself

• The best thing(s) I ever did was (were) I cherished all the moments I have with those people
whom I value the most.

• I wish I could lose my fear of public speaking.

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• I know I have the talent to innovating arts and singing.

• I enjoy people who are very open to welcome me.

• I admire those people who are very thoughtful.

• I feel most productive when I’m alone with music.

• I am motivated by my family especially my parents.

• I almost never fought for my place as an achiever after I almost never reached the average grade.

• My idea of fun is having to spend special time with my treasured loved ones.

• Work is exciting when I got to focus doing it without any distraction.

• The best advice I ever got was to follow what my heart speaks and to never doubt my own self.

• The thing I value most is my family. Without them, I don’t think I’d be able to live this life.

• If money were no object, I would live life in an alternative way with a resourceful nature.

• It is easy for me to focus on working for something by myself.

• My idea of a perfect life is having a happy family and putting God at the center of everything.

• My best days are every time that I got to laugh with my friends and family without worrying
about anything.

• My dream is to become successful one day, achieve all my goals, and give back to my parents.

• I always wanted to travel in different places together with my loved ones.

• I look forward to become a degree holder someday, share, and become an inspiration to other
people.

• I spent too much time trying to do everything that I think I can do rather than thinking that I can
never do it at all.

• The thing my friends like about me is I am very open to lend ears and give advices.

• When I try to change something I am very eager to try not to do it the way it was before.

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• In a group I like to always listen to others’ opinion and be open to any suggestions.

• If I ever win a prize it will be for my parents because all that I did/ all that I will be doing are for
them.

List down at least 5 of your traits under each of the categories provided below. Then, identify the
possible sources of these traits by ranking the influence of the different factors.

Traits Factors of Self or Identity

Social Environmental Hereditary Person-Volition
Physical
appearance (e.g
tall, has pointed
nose, stout)
1. Face Hereditary

2. Attitude Environmental Person-Volition

3. Intelligence Social Environmental Hereditary Person-Volition

4. Height Hereditary

5. Lips Hereditary

Emotional
expressions (e.g.
warm, cheerful,
irritable)
1. Open Social

2. Irritable Person-Volition

3. Calm Person-Volition

4. Quiet Person-Volition

5. Innovative Hereditary Person-Volition

Interpersonal
relationship (e.g
caring, friendly,

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 aloof)
1. Friendly Person-Volition

2. Understanding Person-Volition

3. Caring Person-Volition

4. Kind Person-Volition

5. Optimistic Person-Volition

Assessment

Read the articles and answer the items that follow.

Is there such a thing as the self?

Most of us, when we look in the mirror, have a sense that behind the eyes looking back at us is a
me-ish thing: a self. But this, we are increasingly told, is an illusion. Why? Well, according to
neuroscientists, there is no single place in the brain that generates a self. According to
psychologists, there is no little commander-in-chief in our heads directing our behaviour.
According to philosophers, there is no “Cartesian ego” unifying our consciousness, no unchanging
core of identity that makes us the same person from day to day; there is only an ever-shifting
bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories.

In the last few years, a number of popularising books, bearing titles like The Self Illusion and The Ego
Trick, have set out the neuroscientific/psychological/philosophical case against the self. Much has
been made of clinical cases where the self seems to malfunction spectacularly: like Cotard
syndrome, whose victims believe they do not exist, even though they admit to having a life history;
or “dissociative identity disorder,” where a single body seems to harbour multiple selves, each with
its own name, memory, and voice. Most of us are not afflicted by such exotic disorders. When we
are told that both science and philosophy have revealed the self to be more fragile and
fragmentary than we thought, we take the news in our stride and go on with our lives.

But perhaps we should be paying closer attention. For example, there is striking evidence (detailed

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by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow) that each of us has a
“remembering self,” which makes decisions, and an “experiencing self,” which actually does the
living. And when the remembering self looks back on an experience and decides how enjoyable it
was, it can arrive at an assessment that is quite out of whack from what the experiencing self
actually endured. It is your remembering self that tyrannically resolves to take another family
vacation this summer, even though your voiceless experiencing self was miserable for most of the
last one. Evidently, the subtleties of the self are of practical as well as scholarly interest.

Barry Dainton’s Self and Jennifer Ouellette’s Me, Myself and Why stand out, in different ways, from
the recent crop of books that seek to undermine our sense of self-identity. Dainton, a philosopher
who teaches at the University of Liverpool, is a dissenter from the no-self consensus. He can tell
you exactly what your self really is and how to keep track of it over time, even if it somehow
escapes your body (which he appears to think is possible). Dainton presents a theory of the “core
self,” in all its philosophical purity. In contrast, Ouellette is concerned with the “extended self,” the
sum total of all we turn out to be: genetically, socially, temperamentally, sexually. An American
science journalist, she wants us to understand how genes and environment conspire to make each
of us idiosyncratically singular—indeed, more singular than you might have imagined (as in the
case of a transgender person mentioned by Ouellette who refers to her genitalia as “Schrödinger’s
vagina”). Ouellette goes to heroic lengths to explore her own self, on one occasion even dropping
LSD in an attempt to dismantle it temporarily.

The basic question about the self is: what, in essence, am I? Is my identity rooted in something
physical (my body/brain) or something psychological (my memories/personality)? Normally,
physical and mental go together, so we are not compelled to think of ourselves as primarily one or
the other. But thought experiments can vex our intuitions about personal identity. In An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke imagined a prince and a cobbler miraculously
having their memories switched while they sleep: the prince is shocked to find himself waking up
in the body of the cobbler, and the cobbler in the body of the prince. To Locke, it seemed clear the
prince and the cobbler had in effect undergone a body swap, so psychological criteria must be
paramount in personal identity.

A more contemporary thought experiment along these lines involves “teleportation.” Suppose you
want to get to Mars in a hurry. Instead of going in a spaceship, you opt to be beamed there. You
enter a teleportation chamber on Earth, where a complete scan of your body is done, after which
your body is vaporised; then the information is sent at the speed of light to Mars, where a 3D
printer creates a perfect duplicate of your body, right down to the cut on your upper lip you got
from shaving that morning. You walk out of the receiving cubicle on Mars after just a few minutes
of unconsciousness.

Or do you? Is teleportation really a mode of travel? Might it not rather be a mode of death? It

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maintains perfect psychological continuity while destroying your original body and brain.

For Derek Parfit, who presented this thought experiment in his 1984 book, Reasons and Persons, this
type of teleportation is a survivable process. Psychological continuity, Parfit argued, preserves
what matters in personal identity. But not all philosophers agree with this neo-Lockean view.
Thomas Nagel, for one, thinks that the correct criterion for personal identity is physical, not
psychological. The key to your identity, Nagel has suggested, is the physical object that is causally
responsible for the continuing existence of your consciousness: your brain. On this “I am
essentially my brain” view, you cannot survive teleportation of the kind Parfit describes. Once your
brain is vaporised, the lights go out for good. Even an exact physical duplicate of your body and
brain would not be you—although it would certainly believe it was.

So which will it be, the psychological criterion or the physical? Those would seem to be the only
options on the table (unless you’re one of those benighted people who believe in immaterial
souls). But in Self, Dainton stakes out what he takes to be a novel position—and a “very radical”
one, by his own estimation. What is critical to your identity, Dainton claims, has nothing to do with
your psychological make-up. It is your stream of consciousness that matters, regardless of its
contents. That’s what makes you you. As long as “your consciousness flows on without
interruption, you will go on existing”—even if you have massive amnesia, or some evil scientist
replaces your psychology with a duplicate of Steve Coogan’s.

But what if you undergo anaesthesia, or get knocked out, or simply doze off? Dainton is aware that
such interruptions in the stream of consciousness pose a problem for his initial conception, so he
adjusts it a bit. Your self is not your stream of consciousness, which admittedly stops and starts;
rather, it is your “capacity” for consciousness, which is still there even when it is inactive during
dreamless sleep. “According to my account of the self,” Dainton writes, “there is a very real sense in
which we are nothing but potential.” The self, to use his term, is a “C-capacity”—the “C” standing
for “consciousness.”

This seems to be an awfully austere view of the self. Am I really just a naked potential for
consciousness, stripped of all psychological “quiddity,” inherent nature? If so, what makes me
different from yours? Well, our C-capacities are embodied in different brains. But if C-capacities get
their identities from the brains that realise them, then Dalton's theory is not so novel after all. It is
merely Nagel’s “I am my brain” position, disguised by some ungainly new terminology. But Dainton
suggests that, given the right circumstances, a single stream of consciousness might be able to
flow from one brain to another—or even from a brain into a computer. All that is required is the
right kind of “bridge” (or perhaps we should say “plumbing,” to avoid mixing our metaphors).

In fairness to Dainton, interesting philosophical propositions often sound like caricatures when
they are ripped out of the context of careful reasoning in which they naturally live. And Dainton’s

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reasoning is not just careful, but often clever. It is also fun to follow, thanks to his relaxed and
humorous prose. In a brief volume he ranges over a vast conceptual territory, lucidly presenting
current views of how consciousness fits into the physical world, and speculating with brio on the
fate of the self in a future age of brain-augmentation and virtual reality.

I only wish Dainton’s own conception of the self was not so minimal. As he himself acknowledges,
it leaves untouched the issues about the self raised by contemporary neuroscience and
psychology. It says nothing about the role of the conscious self as the (real or deluded) originator
of our choices and actions. And, unlike Derek Parfit’s view of the self, it seems to have no
implications for our attitude toward death. If I am in essence nothing but a capacity for
consciousness, how should I feel about the inevitable extinction of this bare capacity, as opposed
to what Philip Larkin called the “lading-list” of contingencies with which it becomes freighted over
the course of my life?

Philosophy alone cannot give us an idea of how weird and extensive that “lading-list” of the self is.
For that, we need science, in all its laboratory-bench messiness. And it is hard to imagine a more
delightful guide to the science of self than Ouellette. In Me, Myself, and Why, she uses all the
devices of contemporary genetics, brain scanning and personality testing to delve deep into the
formation of her own self.

The book opens with the author, who was adopted as a child and never knew her biological
mother, getting a first look as an adult at her faded onion-skin birth certificate, and marvelling at
the unfamiliar name that it bears: “fragments of a self that might have been.” She sends a bit of
her saliva in the mail to a genetic-testing company called 23andMe to get an idea of the DNA she
inherited. This becomes the pretext for an informative account of how genes can fine-tune our
personalities. (People with a long version of a gene that codes for dopamine-receptor molecules,
for example, “tend to score higher on extroversion and novelty-seeking. The longer the gene, the
greater the need for novelty.”) Ouellette explains why people are “surprisingly good” when it
comes to assessing their inner feelings and insecurities, but are much poorer at assessing their
outward traits, like intelligence and attractiveness. Discussing narcissism, she notes that celebrities
test higher than average for this trait, with female reality TV stars scoring off the chart.

The most entertaining chapter in this very entertaining book concerns the author’s acid trip—
undertaken in a spirit of pure enquiry and ending in psychedelic bathos. She describes the history
of LSD and psilocybin, what little is understood about their temporary fragmenting effect on the
brain, and their positive potential for curing cluster headaches, breaking the hold of alcoholism,
and generally “rebooting” a brain that is caught up in destructive loops. What LSD is no good for is
“mind control,” as the CIA, to its disappointment, discovered during the Cold War when it set up a
string of brothels in San Francisco where prostitutes would slip their johns a tab of acid so agents

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could observe its effects through two-way mirrors.

Ouellette treads lightly over philosophical ground, but she does take up the deep question of how
different parts of the brain might collude to generate self-consciousness. A robust sense of self
seems to arise in us by the age of two, when children learn to recognise themselves in the mirror.
Chimpanzees can also do this, and are thus believed to be endowed—afflicted?—with
selfconsciousness; but few if any other species pass the mirror test. Yet even the humble
roundworm C elegans, with its paltry 302 neurons and 2,462 synaptic connections (which scientists
have exhaustively mapped), has a single neuron devoted to distinguishing its body from the rest of
the world. “I think it’s fair to say that C elegans has a very primitive self-representation” comments
the philosopher-neuroscientist Patricia Churchland—indeed, she adds, “a self.”

If the spectrum of selfhood begins with the roundworm, surely it ends with Proust—whose own
oversubtle explorations of memory and the self are sadly neglected in these two otherwise
estimable books. Moving from Barry Dainton’s philosophical conception of the self—pure, pristine
potential—to the endlessly variegated empirical self traced by Jennifer Ouellette, I was reminded
of Proust’s description (near the beginning of The Guermantes Way) of what it’s like to wake up out of
a leaden slumber. At first, there’s just a glimmer of undefined consciousness; you’re not even a
person. Then gradually, in a sort of resurrection, you recover your thoughts, your memories, your
personality; you become you again. Proust’s narrator likens the awakening process to finding a lost
object. What baffles him is how, “among the millions of human beings one might be,” he unerringly
manages to lay his hands on the very self he was the day before. Puzzling as the self is, that might
be one puzzle too many.

List down three things that you significantly learned from the reading.

1. It is increasingly clear that a self is a mental entity which comprises, refers to, or represents us
and includes our experiences, memories, beliefs, character, interests, knowledge, and everything
else that goes into making up an identifiable “we”.

2. I have learned that there are different respective means about how we are supposed to identify
our own self, how we get to control it, and we are supposed to be aware enough about our own
consciousness.

3. I have realized that it is efficiently compulsory to get to know our selves better in order for us to

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be able to know how to control it if ever we get to encounter different cases of identity disorder, or
any type of self-confusion and personality-switch.

List down three things that are still unclear to you.

With regards to Barry Dainton’s book “Self”,

1. What is the status of mental entities in relation to “reality”?

2. How do mental entities interact with the physical particles that made up brains and the rest of
the body?

3. After I finished reading, it is still quite confusing for me to identify what really is “self”. Why are
we told that it is an illusion?

List down three questions that you want to ask about the reading.

1. When it comes to our individuality, what really constitutes our solitary self as human beings?
Who are we? What are we made of? Who are you? Who am I?

2. If a person get to have a Cotard syndrome, aside from having multiple selves, does it give a
negative effect on the mental entity of the person?

3. Does nature shape our personalities more than nurture?

Come up with one philosophical statement of your sense of self. Your Philosophical statement
should encompass the points of view of all the members.

What is your philosophy of the self?

What is self? They say that “self” is a me-ish thing that we see behind our eyes. On the
other hand, others believe that the self is clearly a mental entity. We gain a lot of philosophy on
our own. But for me, a persons’ philosophy will vary depending on one’s life experience. I believe
that no two people will have seen life in the same way. There would be many people that have
similar philosophy on life but none of them would be exactly the same.

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Identify from which parent you have inherited the following attributes.

Father Mother Both Neither

Height Father

Weight Mother

Shape of face Mother

Eyes Mother

Nose Mother

Ears Mother

Lips Mother

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 Color of the Hair Mother

Skin Complexion Both

Feet size Neither

Body and structure Father

After accomplishing the above table, answer the following questions:

In terms of you physical features, who do you resemble more – your father or mother? How do
you say so?

In terms of my physical features, I resemble more of my mother. I have garnered up all

the identifications and most of my attributes are from her. In person, most of the people says that
I am her carbon copy. I have also inherited some attributes from my father but not as many as
what I inherited from my mother.

In terms of temperament or disposition (quiet-loud, jolly), who do you take after - father or
mother? Explain your answer.

In terms of this, I guess that I get to take after my father because among the two of them,
my father is the one who is more expressive, approachable and jolly. My mother on the other
hand, is quite a shy person and a silent one. I guess I get to have that trait too but only less.

Based on your answers to the preceding questions, do you think that when you reach your
dominant parents’ age, you will also be like him or her? Why or why not?

For me, if I reach my dominant parents’ age, I think that I would take both of their traits
and attributes because as I can see, every time I see what my mother and father is doing, or what
he or she is thinking is that somehow we, their children get to adapt it in ourselves and get to do it
too. Parents are their children’s ideal model where they are being influenced to be liked them
someday. My mother and my father are my inspiration that I wanted to become an awesome and
good parent someday, whether physically, mentally or spiritually.

Metacognitive Reading Report

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 1. Difficult Concepts: What concepts did you find difficult to understand?
The concepts that I find difficult to understand was, the article about the “self”. There are
statements in the article that confused me. These are about the statements of the neuroscientists,
psychologists, and philosophers. When it comes to our individuality, if self really is an illusion, what
constitutes our solitary self as human beings? Who are we? What are we made of? Who are you? Who
am I?

2. Insights: What new insights or learning did you gain in the discussion/activity?
The new learning that I gained from the activity is that there are different respective means about
how we are supposed to identify our own self, how we get to control it, and that we are supposed to be
aware enough about our own consciousness. More so, it is increasingly clear that a self is a mental entity
which comprises, refers to, or represents us and includes our experiences, memories, beliefs, character,
interests, knowledge, and everything else that goes into making up an identifiable “we”.

3. Questions: What questions do you want answer for? Or vague areas you want more explanations?

The question that I want an answer and an explanation is the context that according to the
statement of the psychologists, “there is no little commander-in-chief in our heads directing our
behavior”. If there is really none, then how come we are able to do certain things and move in a
functional manner if we are not being controlled by our senses or even our nerves? Is it really possible?
What are the psychologists’ basis upon this statement? Is self really an illusion only?

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