Our Posthuman Selves: How Will Discoveries in Neuroscience Alter Our Self Conception?

This paper will examine how recent discoveries within the field of neuroscience have altered our view of the self. Special attention is paid to Catherine Malabou's work, What Should We Do with Our Brain, which explores how the current model of the brain based on plasticity has subtly influenced our notion of self-conception. Instead of recapitulating the idea of a fixed and stable self, plasticity could potentially cause a dramatic reevaluation of who we are, and how we think. The argument then expands to include many ideas that emerged within the field of posthumanism and attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the self, as conceptualized within the informational pattern posited by N. Katherine Hayles in her book, How We Became Posthuman, can be compared to the notion that we are our synapses as stated by the neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux. The humanist idea of a unified self is challenged throughout this paper, and ultimately, discarded altogether. What emerges in its absence though is a multivalent and fluid concept suggesting that many selves exist as opposed to just one.