Updating our Selves: Synthesizing Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Incorporating New Information into o
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Updating our Selves: Synthesizing Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Incorporating New Information into our Worldview Fay Niker & Peter B. Reiner & Gidon Felsen
Received: 30 September 2015 / Accepted: 9 December 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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 sociohistorical, 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.
F. Niker Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Keywords Autonomy . Pro-attitudes . Neuroscience . Decision making . Experience-responsiveness
P. B. Reiner : G. Felsen National Core for Neuroethics, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia, 2255 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 2B5, Canada G. Felsen (*) Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, 12800 E. 19th Ave., Mail Stop 8307, Aurora, CO 80045, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Felsen Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado School of Medicine, 13080 E. 19th Ave., Mail Stop B137, Aurora, CO 80045, USA
Introduction A key feature of autonomy—the capacity for selfgovernance—is that our decisions and actions are governed by a set of higher-order desires, values, and beliefs [e.g., 1, 2], which constitute our “pro-attitudes” [3]. The primary focus of this paper is to explore the question of how we incorporate new pro-attitudes into our worldview. This question is of fundamental importance to theories of autono
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