Personal identity-"The Self"

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Aragwen
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Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Aragwen »

Just about to start my next module and my first assignment is all about what is personal identity or is there a continuing self?

I have read some works on the subject by Locke, Hume and Parfitt and I don't know whether I am misunderstanding but there seems to be something missing from all their theories.

Certainly Locke appears to be stating that our sense of self is based on our consciousness and memories as do Parfitt to a lesser extent when he talks about his thought experiments of your body- Parfit asks the reader to imagine entering a "teletransporter", a machine that puts you to sleep, then destroys you, breaking you down into atoms, copying the information and relaying it to Mars at the speed of light. On Mars, another machine re-creates you (from local stores of carbon, hydrogen, and so on), each atom in exactly the same relative position. Parfit poses the question of whether or not the teletransporter is a method of travel—is the person on Mars the same person as the person who entered the teletransporter on Earth? Certainly, when waking up on Mars, you would feel like being you, you would remember entering the teletransporter in order to travel to Mars, you would even feel the cut on your upper lip from shaving this morning. Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons (1987).

My question would be even if you had the same body, a consciousness and the same memories what if there is a unique self/soul/essence that can't be transported so one had no emotional responses to those memories. Couldn't the same argument be used to Locke's belief that it is our memories that make us what we are whereas maybe it is our response to those memories that make us what we are.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Hereandnow »

As to responses to experience making us what we are, this would require an analysis of our responses. There are two kinds I would bring in: reflexive and interrogative. In the former, you simply continue on in the same vein as you did prior to the "transportation" and in the latter, you would inquire as to how well things went, and, given that you likely know the process, am I still me? When we think in established and continuous patterns, and do not stop to inquire, we are those memories you speak of, an unchallenged stream of consciousness anticipating the future and thinking and acting accordingly. But when inquiry rises, there is a reflection, and this, I would argue, interferes with the process of being "you" much like when your computer software fails, it stops some program from being what it is (as well as the continuity within you that is at the basis for your acknowledging it as software of a particular kind).
It is, this argument has it, the continuity that makes you, you. Inquiry always steals this away makes a self a problematic entity, and, if you will, rewrites your programming, redefines you. As to possible continuities that underlie, or rather, are apart form this view of "you", that is another far more interesting argument.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Hereandnow »

Another way to look at this is as a paradox of sorites. Is the self just a mass of experiences, and with no one essential, such that to remove it does deny what the self is? But the mass, this is you, but where does the self begin in the amassing, since there is no one memory in experience is decisive?

Incidentally, this kind thing is behind all "thick" theories of what it is to be a person, and is found in bioethics, discussions about euthanasia, abortion, and the like.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Fooloso4 »

Another famous example is the ship of Theseus in which over time every piece of the original ship must be replaced for repair. At what point is it no longer the same ship?

Parfit’s example is similar although every “piece” or atom is replaced at the same time.

I think such examples point to problems with the notion of the self and the relationship between the body and self, but in the end perhaps succeed only in pointing to the conceptual difficulties of the ‘self’ and the idea that it names an entity.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Consul »

Aragwen wrote: August 23rd, 2018, 3:53 pmI have read some works on the subject by Locke, Hume and Parfitt…
The name is "Parfit"—one "t" only.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Aragwen »

Consul wrote: August 25th, 2018, 9:47 am
Aragwen wrote: August 23rd, 2018, 3:53 pmI have read some works on the subject by Locke, Hume and Parfitt…
The name is "Parfit"—one "t" only.
Yes of course, it's having a son-in-law with a name ending in double t, habits and so forth.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Hereandnow »

Then there is the entirely other way to look at the self: it's invisible. It is a kind of nothing to the observer, for it is the self that "observes'.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by popeye1945 »

There is a more obvious choice I think. The self is the body, that which experiences the world as object and its own being in the world. Put simply, that which experiences, as pure being it has no initial identity but acquires an identity from its experiences of being in the world, being is the self.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Hereandnow »

popeye1945 wrote

There is a more obvious choice I think. The self is the body, that which experiences the world as object and its own being in the world. Put simply, that which experiences, as pure being it has no initial identity but acquires an identity from its experiences of being in the world, being is the self.
Interesting response popeye. The issue then goes to having no initial identity. Coming into the world of "blooming and buzzing" infancy and acquiring a self makes the self entirely a construction of experience. I actually think something like this is true. I would add that experience is problem solving, even language is reducible to this. But this kind of thing doesn't even begin to explain the self. At best it states the obvious, but without the detail. An exhaustive account of the self has to focus on meaning, and I don't mean by this what some text has to say. I mean the fact that at the center of human reality is care, interest, value, ethics, aesthetics, and the like. Whether a self is a composite or has prior to this composite some abiding, antecedent being not effect this. Value is the dimension of our being a self that really begs for analysis.

What is it for a self to care? Love, hate, adore, get puzzled by, irritated, suffer, affliction: What are these? Are they merely empirical, like any other pieces in the constructive constitution of a self? Or is there more to this? I think there is more.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Jack D Ripper »

Aragwen wrote: August 23rd, 2018, 3:53 pm Just about to start my next module and my first assignment is all about what is personal identity or is there a continuing self?

I have read some works on the subject by Locke, Hume and Parfitt and I don't know whether I am misunderstanding but there seems to be something missing from all their theories.

Certainly Locke appears to be stating that our sense of self is based on our consciousness and memories as do Parfitt to a lesser extent when he talks about his thought experiments of your body- Parfit asks the reader to imagine entering a "teletransporter", a machine that puts you to sleep, then destroys you, breaking you down into atoms, copying the information and relaying it to Mars at the speed of light. On Mars, another machine re-creates you (from local stores of carbon, hydrogen, and so on), each atom in exactly the same relative position. Parfit poses the question of whether or not the teletransporter is a method of travel—is the person on Mars the same person as the person who entered the teletransporter on Earth? Certainly, when waking up on Mars, you would feel like being you, you would remember entering the teletransporter in order to travel to Mars, you would even feel the cut on your upper lip from shaving this morning. Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons (1987).

My question would be even if you had the same body, a consciousness and the same memories what if there is a unique self/soul/essence that can't be transported so one had no emotional responses to those memories. Couldn't the same argument be used to Locke's belief that it is our memories that make us what we are whereas maybe it is our response to those memories that make us what we are.

I think Hume has the self accurately described:

https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/4/6

But that is not why I am replying.


If we look at the story of the teletransporter, we can change it slightly to show that the person on Mars is not the original person. Imagine a Mark II version of the teletransporter machine, in which the person is not destroyed at the original site, but still someone is made on Mars, with each atom in exactly the same relative position as you on earth (so that the person on Mars is EXACTLY like in the original story you have told by Parfit). What we would say is, you are still on earth and the one on Mars is a perfect copy of you at the moment of "teletransportation". So, too, it must be a copy with the original teletransporter that destroyed you on earth, because it is using the exact same process to create a person on Mars as the Mark II version of the machine; the one on Mars is obviously just a copy. The fact that it is a perfect copy does not make it not a copy. Nor does the fact that the first version of the machine killed the original person make the one on Mars not a copy.

We can observe the same idea in an old copy machine, that copies pieces of paper; if the machine malfunctions and destroys the original paper, that does not make the copy that was made not a copy. Of course, a real copy machine does not make perfect copies, but the point would be the same regardless.


Now, with the Mark II version of the teletransporter, there is another person who, at first, is exactly like you, but, over time, he or she will diverge from you, as he or she will have different experiences, eating different things (he or she is dining on Mars, and you are dining on Earth, at least at first, unless one of you immediately leaves the planet), etc. The copy on Mars would be exactly like you would be if you were on Mars and had the experiences the copy has there. He or she will, unless convinced otherwise, believe that all of your property is his or her property, that your spouse is his or her spouse, that your children are his or her children, etc. He or she might want to come and eliminate you, as obviously he or she will feel "real" and feel like he or she rightfully possesses all of your possessions (again, unless convinced otherwise, but, what would it take to convince you that you are a copy and do not own what you are sure you own, that your spouse is not really your spouse, etc.?).


I don't think there is any immaterial soul or any thing like that, so your concluding question I think is irrelevant. But even if there were an immaterial soul, we can just modify the claims about the teletransporter, and say that it recreates the immaterial parts of you, too, just as perfectly as it does the material. So it just makes the story of the machine a little different, and otherwise does not alter anything.

(Of course, I am aware that this is a revived old thread, and the person who started this thread is likely to never see this response.)
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence." - David Hume
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Gertie »

Hereandnow wrote: November 16th, 2020, 11:18 am
popeye1945 wrote

There is a more obvious choice I think. The self is the body, that which experiences the world as object and its own being in the world. Put simply, that which experiences, as pure being it has no initial identity but acquires an identity from its experiences of being in the world, being is the self.
Interesting response popeye. The issue then goes to having no initial identity. Coming into the world of "blooming and buzzing" infancy and acquiring a self makes the self entirely a construction of experience. I actually think something like this is true. I would add that experience is problem solving, even language is reducible to this. But this kind of thing doesn't even begin to explain the self. At best it states the obvious, but without the detail. An exhaustive account of the self has to focus on meaning, and I don't mean by this what some text has to say. I mean the fact that at the center of human reality is care, interest, value, ethics, aesthetics, and the like. Whether a self is a composite or has prior to this composite some abiding, antecedent being not effect this. Value is the dimension of our being a self that really begs for analysis.

What is it for a self to care? Love, hate, adore, get puzzled by, irritated, suffer, affliction: What are these? Are they merely empirical, like any other pieces in the constructive constitution of a self? Or is there more to this? I think there is more.
If I put your post in what I'd call more neutral terms, it's pointing to the fact that conscious experience is what is meaningful about being a Self, a Me.


As we know physical brain processes correlate with specific experiential states, so we have a handle on tackling some questions about why we are the way we are - empirical analysis. Those types of answers boiling down to how evolution molded brains in terms of utility, including social predispositions like caring for others, as well as for ourselves. We can look at brain plasticity and see that our genetic tendencies are shaped by experience, so we are a mix of nature and nurture. Not a blank slate, but identity isn't fixed at birth either, perhaps it is never completely fixed, perhaps it is just in sync with what our brain is doing at any particular moment.

With this type of analysis, there is nothing more special about ''care, interest, value, ethics, aesthetics, and the like'', than hate, disinterest, selfishness, liking chocolate ice cream and so on.

Such an analysis feels trivial though, because conscious experience does bring everything that matters into the universe. And for an individual, everything that matters about her life. So the question ''Is there more?'' feels valid. But what could that more be? That's difficult to answer, to even have a way of answering, because never-the-less we are bound by the limitations and flaws evolution has bequeathed us.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by thrasymachus »

Gertie wrote
If I put your post in what I'd call more neutral terms, it's pointing to the fact that conscious experience is what is meaningful about being a Self, a Me.

As we know physical brain processes correlate with specific experiential states, so we have a handle on tackling some questions about why we are the way we are - empirical analysis.


Not sure how physical brain/experiential states analysis is going to give you a "handle" on why we are the way we are. The idea that a "brain" correlates to anything seems analytically arbitrary since it in no way that connection reveals what a self is. In other words, if there were no brain to experience correlation available, the self would still be the self, what it is. Such correlation may be true, that is, a defensible idea, but simply not helpful.


Those types of answers boiling down to how evolution molded brains in terms of utility, including social predispositions like caring for others, as well as for ourselves. We can look at brain plasticity and see that our genetic tendencies are shaped by experience,


If I take your meaning, brain plasticity is all about how how brain structure and chemistry produce experience, and if we could understand better what these physical conditions are, we would better understand what a self is, this latter being some kind of contingent emerging "physical" effect or epiphenomenal manifestation. This kind of thinking subordinates self to physical analyses, as if what you experience in all its meaning and affectivity is exhaustively accounted for physical descriptions.
If you go in this direction of thinking, you will have to explain several absurdities: One is that experience is all you have ever witnessed of the physical; indeed, this makes the very idea of the physical, metaphysical: posited, but never been even witnessed empirically. But if this is not daunting enough, you have deal with a very simple matter. Obviously, there is a correlation, but correlation does not at all suggest a reduction of one to the other. My cat's running to her bowl correlates with the shaking of the snack box, but the former is not in any way about cat hunger, excitement, the residual effects of her prior states and so on.
so we are a mix of nature and nurture. Not a blank slate, but identity isn't fixed at birth either, perhaps it is never completely fixed, perhaps it is just in sync with what our brain is doing at any particular moment.
But again, a genetic tendency is talk about the way genes produce behavior and manifest actualities like ears and eyes. The self is what is there, in the experiences produced by ear or eye and all the rest. Even if you use the most common physical model, programming on a hard disk, you will still never get that software production out of an analysis of the physical features of the modified plastic.
With this type of analysis, there is nothing more special about ''care, interest, value, ethics, aesthetics, and the like'', than hate, disinterest, selfishness, liking chocolate ice cream and so on.
Which is why I resist this sort of analysis. Your analysis of the self
Such an analysis feels trivial though, because conscious experience does bring everything that matters into the universe. And for an individual, everything that matters about her life. So the question ''Is there more?'' feels valid. But what could that more be? That's difficult to answer, to even have a way of answering, because never-the-less we are bound by the limitations and flaws evolution has bequeathed us.
There are no limitations and flaws according to the standards of evolution. It is only in the self that such a thing arises at all, and if you reduce the self to evolutionary processes then these limitations and flaws lose their foundation, for their explanatory power does not pass over into the "experientially neutral" descriptions of genes, neuronal firings, axonal connections, and so forth.
The trivializing effect of taking an interpretation of a self as a evolutionary, biological entity is exactly why one should not do this. Obviously, e.g., being tortured on the rack is NOT a trivial event. To say so is so galactically insane that I cannot even fathom.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Gertie »

thrasymachus wrote: November 17th, 2020, 11:52 am
Gertie wrote
If I put your post in what I'd call more neutral terms, it's pointing to the fact that conscious experience is what is meaningful about being a Self, a Me.

As we know physical brain processes correlate with specific experiential states, so we have a handle on tackling some questions about why we are the way we are - empirical analysis.


Not sure how physical brain/experiential states analysis is going to give you a "handle" on why we are the way we are. The idea that a "brain" correlates to anything seems analytically arbitrary since it in no way that connection reveals what a self is. In other words, if there were no brain to experience correlation available, the self would still be the self, what it is. Such correlation may be true, that is, a defensible idea, but simply not helpful.


Those types of answers boiling down to how evolution molded brains in terms of utility, including social predispositions like caring for others, as well as for ourselves. We can look at brain plasticity and see that our genetic tendencies are shaped by experience,


If I take your meaning, brain plasticity is all about how how brain structure and chemistry produce experience, and if we could understand better what these physical conditions are, we would better understand what a self is, this latter being some kind of contingent emerging "physical" effect or epiphenomenal manifestation. This kind of thinking subordinates self to physical analyses, as if what you experience in all its meaning and affectivity is exhaustively accounted for physical descriptions.
If you go in this direction of thinking, you will have to explain several absurdities: One is that experience is all you have ever witnessed of the physical; indeed, this makes the very idea of the physical, metaphysical: posited, but never been even witnessed empirically. But if this is not daunting enough, you have deal with a very simple matter. Obviously, there is a correlation, but correlation does not at all suggest a reduction of one to the other. My cat's running to her bowl correlates with the shaking of the snack box, but the former is not in any way about cat hunger, excitement, the residual effects of her prior states and so on.
so we are a mix of nature and nurture. Not a blank slate, but identity isn't fixed at birth either, perhaps it is never completely fixed, perhaps it is just in sync with what our brain is doing at any particular moment.
But again, a genetic tendency is talk about the way genes produce behavior and manifest actualities like ears and eyes. The self is what is there, in the experiences produced by ear or eye and all the rest. Even if you use the most common physical model, programming on a hard disk, you will still never get that software production out of an analysis of the physical features of the modified plastic.
With this type of analysis, there is nothing more special about ''care, interest, value, ethics, aesthetics, and the like'', than hate, disinterest, selfishness, liking chocolate ice cream and so on.
Which is why I resist this sort of analysis. Your analysis of the self
Such an analysis feels trivial though, because conscious experience does bring everything that matters into the universe. And for an individual, everything that matters about her life. So the question ''Is there more?'' feels valid. But what could that more be? That's difficult to answer, to even have a way of answering, because never-the-less we are bound by the limitations and flaws evolution has bequeathed us.
There are no limitations and flaws according to the standards of evolution. It is only in the self that such a thing arises at all, and if you reduce the self to evolutionary processes then these limitations and flaws lose their foundation, for their explanatory power does not pass over into the "experientially neutral" descriptions of genes, neuronal firings, axonal connections, and so forth.
The trivializing effect of taking an interpretation of a self as a evolutionary, biological entity is exactly why one should not do this. Obviously, e.g., being tortured on the rack is NOT a trivial event. To say so is so galactically insane that I cannot even fathom.
It seems like it would take forever to go through your reply and explain/defend my position, and we might be too far apart to get each other even then. That you ended up with your final sentence shows that.

But if you want to summarise your main points of disagreement, I'll have a go at answering.
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by thrasymachus »

Gertie wrote
But if you want to summarise your main points of disagreement, I'll have a go at answering.
Sure Gertie. Sorry about that:

1. Brain to experience correlation superfluous to explaining what a self is.
2. a)Experience is exhaustively what is there too observe. This makes the physical, metaphysical: never observed. b) Correlations are not supposed to be an explanatory stand in for what is being correlated. See cat.
3. Strong models like hardware to software analogous to brain to experience are absurd.
4. Horrible pain is not a trivial event, and to reduce experience to physical descriptions does, as you say, trivialize the former. Objection: Pain is therefore trivial because the model you use to account for it trivial?
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Re: Personal identity-"The Self"

Post by Gertie »

Thanks Thras

1. Brain to experience correlation superfluous to explaining what a self is.

Yes I agree - depending on your definition of Self. To me the definition involves some experiential sense of being Me. We can't observe that in a brain, but we can note correlations between what my experience of being me is like to what is going on in my brain. There is some sort of relationship between my brain processes, and my experiential states - the 'mind-body' relationship.


This can help us get a handle on why we are the way we are. Why our experiencing of being a Self is the way it is. Because evolution 'works on' physical brains to help us adapt and survive in ways we can understand. A very simple example, it is evolutionarily useful to feel hungry when we need calories, to motivate us to eat; or to feel pain when we stick a hand in a fire, to avoid injury. Evolution gives us that type of explanation for what it's like to be a human Self, why we experience hunger, pain and presumably everything else if neural correlation always holds.


If I think what the experience of specifically being a Self, a Me, is like, it's the experiential sense of being a discrete being with a unified field of consciousness, located in space and time with a first person point of view correlated with this body. Who experiences interacting with the 'outside world', in ways which make sense in evolutionary terms.
2. a)Experience is exhaustively what is there too observe. This makes the physical, metaphysical: never observed. b) Correlations are not supposed to be an explanatory stand in for what is being correlated. See cat.
Sorry I don't understand this, can you re-phrase it?
3. Strong models like hardware to software analogous to brain to experience are absurd.
I didn't mention that. Maybe, I'm not sure. Nobody knows the nature of the mind-body relationship, including me. We can note correlations, but we don't know the reason for them. It might be the case that conscious experience is a novel emergent property of certain material processes - namely brains. That's sort of analagous in terms of the processes of a material substrate giving rise to something of a very different nature which can process information in ways which are representative/meaningful to us. But Searle convincingly makes the point in his Chinese Room thought experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ) that conscious experience isn't a necessary property of the computer itself. So the analogy is not apparently explanatory or nail the mind-body relationship.
4. Horrible pain is not a trivial event, and to reduce experience to physical descriptions does, as you say, trivialize the former. Objection: Pain is therefore trivial because the model you use to account for it trivial?
Hmmm I don't think that follows. I was meaning trivial there to point out that physicalist descriptions of brain processes don't feel like they do justice to what the meaningfulness of conscious experience entails. Not only that describing the neural activity of C Fibres is nothing like describing pain. But that conscious experience is what gives everything meaning. It's not only radically different, it's what makes existence important, meaningful, makes it matter. The two things are of an essentially different nature in that most significant respect.


But that doesn't mean conscious experience didn't emerge from physical processes as a function of evolutionary utility. That this is the complete explanation for the existence of conscious experience itself. And evolution provides a complete explanation for the way humans experience being selves. It feels to us so essentially incongruous, but it still might be true. Looking elsewhere might be a fools errand, based on this feeling it can't be all there is to it. We don't know.

Regardless, I'm suggesting evolution can apparently fully explain the specific nature of human consciousness (and cat consciousness and parrot and haddock consciousness, etc). And we can understand this by looking at how evolution molded brains, which conscious states correlate with. That's the handle it gives us on this, but we don't know if that's the full explanation, or even the most significant part. However, it is an explanation we can reliably work with, and study.

And I don't think any other approach gives us that. Without understanding the mind-body relationship, what other more reliable or informative option do we have?
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Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream
by Dr Frank L Douglas
August 2021

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts
by Mark L. Wdowiak
September 2021

The Preppers Medical Handbook

The Preppers Medical Handbook
by Dr. William W Forgey M.D.
October 2021

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress: A Practical Guide

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress
by Dr. Gustavo Kinrys, MD
November 2021

Dream For Peace: An Ambassador Memoir

Dream For Peace
by Dr. Ghoulem Berrah
December 2021