Self in the context of Individual person

Imagination is the production of sensations, feelings and thoughts informing oneself. These experiences can be re-creations of past experiences, such as vivid memories with imagined changes, or completely invented and possibly fantastic scenes. Imagination helps apply knowledge to solve problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process.

Imagination is the process of developing theories and ideas based on the functioning of the mind through a creative division. Drawing from actual perceptions, imagination employs intricate conditional processes that engage both semantic and episodic memory to generate new or refined ideas. This part of the mind helps develop better and easier ways to accomplish tasks, whether old or new.

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of states or objects either internal to one's self or in one's external environment. However, its nature has led to millennia of explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied, or can even be considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with mind, and at other times, an aspect of it.

In the past, consciousness meant one's "inner life": the world of introspection, private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. There is also a medical definition that helps, for example, to discern "coma" from other states. The disparate range of research, notions, and speculations raises some curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

A duty (from "due" meaning "that which is owing"; Old French: deu, did, past participle of devoir; Latin: debere, debitum, whence "debt") is a commitment or expectation to perform some action in general or if certain circumstances arise. A duty may arise from a system of ethics or morality, especially in an honor culture. Many duties are created by law, sometimes including a codified punishment or liability for non-performance. Performing one's duty may require some sacrifice of self-interest.

A sense-of-duty is also a virtue or personality trait that characterizes someone who is diligent about fulfilling individual duties or who confidently knows their calling. A sense-of-duty can also come from a need to fulfill familial pressures and desires. This is typically seen in a militaristic or patriotic way. A distinction is commonly made between "positive duties", which a person must undertake, and "negative duties", which relate to actions from which a person must refrain. Michael Freeman notes that negative duties may be easier to fulfill as they do not require any action.

The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am", is the "first principle" of René Descartes' philosophy. He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed. It later appeared in Latin in his Principles of Philosophy, and a similar phrase (Ego sum, ego existo, 'I am, I exist') also featured prominently in his Meditations on First Philosophy. The dictum is also sometimes referred to as the cogito. As Descartes explained in a margin note, "we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt." In the posthumously published The Search for Truth by Natural Light, he expressed this insight as dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum ("I doubt, therefore I am—or what is the same—I think, therefore I am."). Antoine Léonard Thomas, in a 1765 essay in honor of Descartes, presented it as dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum ("I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.").

Descartes's statement became a fundamental element of Western philosophy, as it purported to provide a certain foundation for knowledge in the face of radical doubt. While other knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting one's own existence served—at minimum—as proof of the reality of one's own mind; there must be a thinking entity—in this case the self—for there to be a thought.

In philosophy, the Other is a fundamental concept referring to anyone or anything perceived as distinct or different from oneself. This distinction is crucial for understanding how individuals construct their own identities, as the encounter with "otherness" helps define the boundaries of the self. In phenomenology, the Other plays an important role in this self-formation, acting as a kind of mirror against which the self is reflected and understood.

The Other is not simply a neutral observer but an active participant in shaping the individual's self-image. This includes the idea of the "constitutive Other," which refers to the internal relationship between a person's essential nature (personality) and their physical embodiment (body), reflecting the interplay of internal differences within the self.

A person (pl.: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. The defining features of personhood and, consequently, what makes a person count as a person, differ widely among cultures and contexts.

In addition to the question of personhood, of what makes a being count as a person to begin with, there are further questions about personal identity and self: both about what makes any particular person that particular person instead of another, and about what makes a person at one time the same person as they were or will be at another time despite any intervening changes.

Self-interest generally refers to a focus on the needs or desires (interests) of one's self. Most times, actions that display self-interest are often performed without conscious knowing. A number of philosophical, psychological, and economic theories examine the role of self-interest in motivating human action. Individuals may have a self-serving bias towards their self-interest.

The soul is the purported immaterial aspect or essence of a living being. It is typically believed to be immortal and to exist apart from the material world. The three main theories that describe the relationship between the soul and the body are interactionism, parallelism, and epiphenomenalism. Anthropologists and psychologists have found that most humans are naturally inclined to believe in the existence of the soul and that they have interculturally distinguished between souls and bodies.

The soul has been the central area of interest in philosophy since ancient times. Socrates envisioned the soul to possess a rational faculty, its practice being man's most godlike activity. Plato believed the soul to be the person's real self, an immaterial and immortal dweller of our lives that continues and thinks even after death. Aristotle sketched out the soul as the "first actuality" of a naturally organized body—form and matter arrangement allowing natural beings to aspire to full actualization.

Philosophy of self examines the idea of the self at a conceptual level. Many different ideas on what constitutes self have been proposed, including the self being an activity, the self being independent of the senses, the bundle theory of the self, the self as a narrative center of gravity, and the self as a linguistic or social construct rather than a physical entity. The self (or its non-existence) is also an important concept in Eastern philosophy, including Buddhist philosophy.

Philosophical realism—usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters—is the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding. This can apply to items such as the physical world, the past and future, other minds, and the self, though may also apply less directly to things such as universals, mathematical truths, moral truths, and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality altogether.

Realism can also be a view about the properties of reality in general, holding that reality exists independent of the mind, as opposed to non-realist views (like some forms of skepticism and solipsism) which question the certainty of anything beyond one's own mind. Philosophers who profess realism often claim that truth consists in a correspondence between cognitive representations and reality.

Ātman (/ˈɑːtmən/; Sanskrit: आत्मन्) in Hinduism is the true, innermost essence or self of a living being, conceived as eternal and unchanging. Atman is conceptually closely related to the individual self, Jīvātman, which persists across multiple bodies and lifetimes, but different from the self-image or ego (Ahamkara), the emotional aspect of the mind (Citta), and the bodily or natural aspects (prakṛti). The term is often translated as soul, but is better translated as "Self" or essence. To attain moksha (liberation), a human being must acquire self-knowledge (Atma Gyaan or Brahmajnana).

The six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy have different views on what this self is. In Samkhya and Yoga, which call the essence purusha, and in Advaita Vedanta, the essence is pure consciousness or witness-consciousness (sakshi), beyond identification with phenomena. In Samkhya and Yoga there are innumerable selves, while in Advaita Vedanta there is only one Self. Prominent views in Vedanta on the relation between (Jīv)Atman and the supreme Self (Paramātmā) or Ultimate Reality (Vishnu, Shiva, Brahman) are that atman and Brahman are simultaneously different and non-different (Bhedabheda), non-different (Advaita, 'not-two'), different with dependence (Dvaita, 'dualist'), or non-different but with dependence (Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism).

In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight/episodic future thinking). The term was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, building on Endel Tulving's work on episodic memory. (Tulving proposed the alternative term chronesthesia.)

Mental time travel has been studied by psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, philosophers and in a variety of other academic disciplines. Major areas of interest include the nature of the relationship between memory and foresight, the evolution of the ability (including whether it is uniquely human or shared with other animals), its development in young children, its underlying brain mechanisms, as well as its potential links to consciousness, the self, and free will.

Self-sustainability and self-sufficiency are overlapping states of being in which a person, being, or system needs little or no help from, or interaction with others. Self-sufficiency entails the self being enough (to fulfill needs), and a self-sustaining entity can maintain self-sufficiency indefinitely. These states represent types of personal or collective autonomy. A self-sufficient economy is one that requires little or no trade with the outside world and is called an autarky.

Egoism is a philosophy concerned with the role of the self, or ego, as the motivation and goal of one's own action. Different theories of egoism encompass a range of disparate ideas and can generally be categorized into descriptive or normative forms. That is, they may be interested in either describing that people do act in self-interest or prescribing that they should. Other definitions of egoism may instead emphasise action according to one's will rather than one's self-interest, and furthermore posit that this is a truer sense of egoism.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia states of egoism that it "incorporates in itself certain basic truths: it is natural for man to love himself; he should moreover do so, since each one is ultimately responsible for himself; pleasure, the development of one's potentialities, and the acquisition of power are normally desirable." The moral censure of self-interest is a common subject of critique in egoist philosophy, with such judgments being examined as means of control and the result of power relations. Egoism may also reject the idea that insight into one's internal motivation can arrive extrinsically, such as from psychology or sociology, though, for example, this is not present in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself (for example, "I am loved", "I am worthy") as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it (see self)."

The construct of self-esteem has been shown to be a desirable one in psychology, as it is associated with a variety of positive outcomes, such as academic achievement, relationship satisfaction, happiness, and lower rates of criminal behavior. The benefits of high self-esteem are thought to include improved mental and physical health, and less anti-social behavior while drawbacks of low self-esteem have been found to be anxiety, loneliness, and increased vulnerability to substance abuse.