Autonoetic consciousness

Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to thus be able to examine our own thoughts.

Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future. It relates to how we reflect on our own past behavior, how we feel about it, and this in turn determines if we do it again (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson 2009, p. ).

It is episodic memory that deals with self-awareness, memories of the self (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson 2009, p. ) and inward thoughts that may be projected onto future actions of an individual (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson 2009, p. ). It was “proposed by [Endel] Tulving for self-awareness, allowing the rememberer to reflect on the contents of episodic memory” (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson 2009, p. ). Moreover, autonoetic consciousness involves behaviors such as mental time travel (Schacter, et al., 2007; Suddendorf and Corballis, 2007), self-projection (Buckner and Carroll, 2007) and episodic future thinking (Atance and O'Neill, 2001), all of which have often been proposed as exclusively human capacities.

Autonoetic consciousness is important in our formation of our “self” identity. What we have done in the past becomes a part of our “self” and the ability to reflect on this influences our behavior in the now.

In psychology, the self is often used for that set of attributes that a person attaches to himself or herself most firmly, the attributes that the person finds it difficult or impossible to imagine himself or herself without (Perry 1995). Identity is also used to describe this (Perry 1995). A person’s gender is part of their identity but their profession, for example, may not be (Perry 1995).

In philosophy, the self is the agent, the knower and the ultimate locus of personal identity (Perry 1995). This self, the identity of which is at the bottom of every action, and involved in every bit of knowledge, is the self philosophers worry about (Perry 1995). Nevertheless, care of the self is of utmost importance in the bios-logos relationship (Foucault, Parrhesia, 2007).

A straightforward view of the self would be that the self is just the person, and that a person is a physical system (Perry 1995). There are two problems with this view. First, the nature of freedom and consciousness has convinced many philosophers that there is a fundamentally non-physical aspect of persons (Perry 1995). The second challenge stems from puzzling aspects of self-knowledge, as the knowledge we have of ourselves seems very unlike the knowledge we have of other objects in several ways (Perry 1995).

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