Following Lacan and others, we may understand personal identity not as some direct and immediate sense of self, but rather as a "constitution" of the self, a sort of synthetic self-conception. When I think of an object—my car, for example—I think not of some particular isolated detail, but of a complex of elements and relations: its color, its shape, how it runs, when it was last serviced, etc. As some cognitive scientists would put it, I "access" a "schema" of my car. When I think about another person, a friend perhaps, I do much the same thing; I access a schema which includes not only his/her appearance, but also typical and particular behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, preferences, etc. When I think about myself, I do the same thing. I access a schema of myself. This too includes.....
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