Illusion of Self

"We are all individuals with free will and independent selves." It's an idea so pervasive and deeply committed to us that it's hard to imagine the opposite. But in this book, Bruce Hood reveals the opposite with striking scientific findings distilled from many disciplines, especially neuroscience and behavioral science: Our self and our free will are illusions. What we call self is a useful and inevitable illusion as a "bundle" of mental outputs such as thoughts, emotions and memories, a story that takes a lifetime to write, a symphony of many melodies, a model of the external world that we build to live in, a mental Matrix.

Instead of making a simple reductionism by just saying "We are our brains", the author; It examines in detail how the illusion of self is produced in the brain, its relationship with important stages in the development of the individual, the idea expressed by the "Mirror Self" theory that the individual is a reflection of the conditions and people surrounding him, and what a dominant role society has in our self-production.

Thus, Hood adds a social dimension to the "Bundle Theory" of the self, the first seeds of which were laid by Buddha, by revealing the great impact of social interactions on our self-construction with extremely shocking examples: We are the fake authors of a play written by "others" on our "social brain".

Hood also emphasizes that we are at an important juncture in humanity's history of self-production by examining how the Internet and social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter, have changed our forms of social interaction and our sense of self.
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 336

Year of Printing: 2014


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Details Publications

First Printing Year: 2014

Number of Pages: 336

Language Turkish