IB Philosophy 6.2.2 Explanations of the Self Key Definitions

Biochemical reductionism holds that all biological phenomena, including consciousness, emotion, and selfhood, can be fully explained as chemical interactions between molecules. On this account, the self is nothing more than the product of neurotransmitter activity, hormonal regulation, and genetic expression.

Biosemiotics is an interdisciplinary framework proposing that the defining feature of life is sign activity, the capacity of organisms to interpret, produce, and respond to signs in their environment. On this view, the self is a semiotic process of ongoing meaning-making rather than a substance or a bundle of biochemical reactions.

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

Emergence is the position that higher-level properties such as consciousness and selfhood arise from the complex organisation of simpler parts but cannot be predicted or explained solely from knowledge of those parts. Emergentists accept a physical basis for the self while denying that it reduces to lower-level chemistry.

Moral responsibility is the status of being worthy of praise or blame for one's actions, typically requiring that the agent acted freely, with knowledge of what they were doing, and with the capacity to have done otherwise.

Reductive explanations attempt to account for complex phenomena by breaking them down into simpler, more fundamental components, as when mental states are explained in terms of neural processes or biological traits in terms of chemical reactions. While reductionism has been enormously productive in the natural sciences, critics argue that some properties, particularly consciousness and meaning, resist reduction and require explanations at their own level of description.

an explanation that accounts for phenomena in terms of their purpose, goal, or function rather than their physical components. Rooted in Aristotle's doctrine of final causes (telos), teleological explanations understand a thing by grasping what it is for, not merely what it is made of.

a concept introduced by Jakob von Uexkull describing each organism's subjective, species-specific life-world constituted by the signs it can perceive and act upon. Different species occupy radically different Umwelten even when sharing the same physical space.