The term self-control is foxing me... who is controlling whom... which self is controlled by which other self?

Question

Do we have more than one self so that one is controlling the other?

Answer 1

Hmmm…

I think the answer may be simpler than suggested. Self-control simply means that the inhibition was internal.


Yes, we have many “masks”, but there is only one “self”. Can we all agree that one person or self has multiple thoughts? It's not conflicting selves, just conflicting thoughts. In philosophy, it implies the use of conscious “will” over “impulse”.

I’ll stick with Phoenix’s example: *Why* did the man decide not to make love to his sexy cereal picking-up wife in the grocery store? Was he afraid he would get in trouble with the store and/or the law? Was he afraid he would offend his 70 year old neighbor, while she bought her control-top panty hose? These are all external motivations. Philosophically speaking, that’s not self-control, it’s societal control.

If, on the other hand, his *independent* internal moral code prevented him from acting, he would be exercising self-control. His hesitation must stem from HIS beliefs, not those of another group (law, culture, religion). Hence, SELF-control.

In short, self-control is thought over emotion, will over impulse, reflecting *personal* attitudes.

Answer 2

Yes, we do seemingly have more than one self, one always controlling the other, whether we are aware of it or not. It's not that hard to see, we are always under control of Society and/or Nature....Then we grow up and, if we're lucky, we get to choose what kind of society we'll be integrated with, after that, all you can do is go along with it, it will definitely control you...family, school, work, clubs, etc...they all have RULES, meaning, they will rule over you, lest you become a sociopath. This is THE most important decision an adult can make, the very fine line....


GOOD LUCK!

Answer 3

lol

Quite a cogent observation. One is of course always controlled by self.

What we mean by self control is the ability to rationally override an emotional decision we have logically concluded is bad or inappropriate.

So your 'guess' is fairly accurate. One aspect of your self is controlling the other.

Should a man make love to his wife. Absolutely.

Should he do it in the grocery store because she looked so sexy when she bent over to pick up a box of cereal?

No. He should have a little self control.

Answer 4

Many parts that make up one self is how I would see it. Though psychologists, and sometimes philosophers, see self as a complex intermingling of many different selves.
The part that establishes self control...self control being the ability to moderate wishes, desires, wants and needs and keep them all in balance...would be the moral/ethical part of ourselves. You can call it conscience, if you wish...but I thinks its too small and puritanical a concept for a very complex part of our cerebral lives.

Answer 5

Adam Smith felt that we separate off a part of the self, an "impartial spectator" from whose view point we observe our behavior and chose those behaviors which we feel the most sympathy with. Since we are viewing ourselves from the point of view of another this tends to make our behaviors more moral or pro-social since we choose the behaviors in ourselves that we would like in others. The Freudian super-ego, and Mead's Generalized Other from which vantage points we view ourselves are rather the same.

So self-control tends to be close to societal control, or the application of the "Golden Rule," do as you would be done by. Another way of putting it is that self control is the application of objective self awareness in the control of actions, like a mirror to our own actions. In Western contexts this "mirror" is usually however a linguistic one in that we think about what we are going to do and hear our thoughts as if spoken by another so "I am going to rob that guy" sounds as scary when we think it ourselves as when someone else says it. Mead says we are different to lions who do not get scared when they roar, whereas we find threats, even our own, to be a bit scary.

Further neuroscience (Libet) research suggests will does not instigate actions but it can veto them ("Free won't).

Haidt claims that we think about what we are going to do and rationalize it, and go through with actions that we think we will be able to justify to avoid social exclusion.

Few psychologists explain how this self distancing is achieved. Freud is about the only one who does and then in hints. He seems to be saying that we can have another spectator inside us since we have a part of ourselves which we are to an extent guilty about, so it is repressed. This repression creates the divide necessary for a degree of self-objectivity.

Answer 6

The concept of "self" is an error... essentially.

That which we think of as consciousness is effectively just reason reliant upon consistancy of experience and directed by subconscious filtering toward biologically viable actions.


But this can be simplified somewhat....
The human mind has essentially three influences on it.
The stronger influences are individual instinct and group instinct..... i.e. the parts to play of a single animal.... and of one cell in a larger organism... respectively.
The weaker influence in most people is that of the reasoned will... which also is linked directly to the driving force.

Now as it happens... most people are controlled almost exclusively by the often conflicting drives of the individual and group instincts. They're not really aware of the motivations behind their actions... but one side wants them to steal food to benefit themselves while the other wants to give of themselves to benefit society..... and in the end it is essentially the crude balance between these two that keep them going... and keep them occupied.

In this context... "self-control" is generally a tool of the group instinct to control the individual instinct. Generally, a person's will is more accepting of the ways of the group instinct even of the individual instinct is in many ways stronger.


I am not.
As I consider it.... self-control means applying the force of one's own will to circumvent the manipulations of both the individual instinct AND the group instinct. It means not only refraining from rampant sexuality, aggression and debauchery.... but also refraining from social dependancy and unjustified selfless activity.

Afterall... both of these are just aspects of the influence of nature and our own evolution. In their own way... they are just tools for survival and procreation.... and these things mean nothing to the free will under reason.

Answer 7

The root of your question can be traced to the vast realm of puzzles surrounding self-reference. The most infamous instances of self-reference are paradoxes (e.g., the sentence "This sentence is false", or the classic example of the Cretan who says "All Cretans are liars."). But, of course, not all instances of self-reference are paradoxical. When you say "I like chocolate ice cream," you are engaging in self-reference, but you are not stating a paradox.

So turning now to your question about self-control, we should start by determining whether the notion of self-control is truly paradoxical, or just simply puzzling. The first thing to notice is that selves are always complex processes. So, like "aidan402" says in her answer, it could be that one part of a self controls another part. But then we wonder what the heck is a "part" of a self? My hand is part of my body, but is it a part of my self? I would say yes, my hand is a part of my self. My mental states, however, are a bit more tricky. Is my desire to eat ice cream a part of my self? I would say yes. Is my desire to be lean and healthy a part of my self? Again I would say yes. So now we have a single self with two conflicting desires. This is not a genuine paradox so long as we agree that the self is complex.

But there is still a puzzle. How are my desire to eat ice cream and my desire to be physically fit related to my "self" such that it is really "I" who have both of these conflicting desires? In your question you suggested we might have more than one self, thus leading to the problem of understanding which self is "really me". I prefer a different approach. I say there is only one self, but that this self is vastly more complex than our ordinary conscious understanding can ever grasp. The key here is the idea of perspective.

One implication of saying that the self is complex, is the possibility that the self can incorporate more than one possible perspective. A perspective is a patterned response to stimuli. A system has a perspective when it responds in some characteristic fashion to its environment. Now if the system has a goal, then its response will typically involve an attempt to achieve its goal. In mechanistic terms, this "goal" can usually be characterized in terms of reaching a point of greater stability. A pendulum "strives" for a state of rest at the bottom of its swing. Brain processes presumably slide down a thermodynamic slope as they "flow toward" some chaotic attractor. Different brain regions can have different attractors. Thus the brain as a whole can find itself vacillating between two or more options without any clear factor to determine which attractor is ultimately more attractive.

In the case of ice cream, the context of social messages plays a key role. It happens to be the case that society clearly favors "good health" over "gustatory indulgence". Society imposes "right and wrong" upon the picture, which means that in your brain's vacillation between two equally attractive attractors, an important asymmetry is introduced. The idea of "self-control" is a social phenomenon based upon social concepts like "prudence" verse "gluttony", for example, where one is clearly positive and the other is negative. The "self" that wants to "be good" goes to battle with the "self" that wants to be indulgent. But these are not actually "selves" at war; they are brain processes caught at an unstable point. Each sub-process has its own "perspective" because each has its own chaotic attractor, and these multiple perspectives can then be interpreted as "conflicting selves", but I'm suggesting it is better to interpret the situation as conflicting sub-processes within a single self. The single self "identifies itself" more or less equally with each perspective, but since the two perspectives are in conflict, the self has a tendency to disassociate – which is to say, it confuses different aspects of a single self with "different selves". Thus we end up with what FEELS like a self-reference paradox when, in reality, it is just a puzzle springing from the seemingly unitary nature of what is, in actuality, something very complex.

Answer 8

I believe we only have one self that we need to train the mind and soul to get a grip on our true and highest natures :)) This can be done by meiditation and allowing the Divine light of God to come in............we must intend it to happen and than we can gain control of the self :))))

Answer 9

Once we stabilize our position as the OBSERVER of the learned patterns of the defensive ego, these embedded beliefs can be looked at in the light of reason, reframed and discarded. As long as they remain at the subconscious level they wreak havoc with our experience of reality, i.e. CONTROL us.

Answer 10

Now you are getting into the "complicated" more complex triology of man and their parts,each with a property and purpose of their own within themselves. ignorance is not bliss...even psychology is beginning to recognize these..cognitive psy..but they haven't instituted them as of yet..i have more work, and to teach them more......