Our understanding of who we are, our place in the world, and the very nature of our being is an intricate tapestry woven from the threads of knowledge, culture, and personal experience. Yet, throughout history, perhaps the most transformative influence on this ever-evolving perception has been the relentless march of scientific discovery. From ancient musings on the soul to modern contemplations on the implications of artificial intelligence, science has consistently challenged, refined, and sometimes entirely overturned our most deeply held beliefs about ourselves.
Pre-Science: Early Conceptions of Self
The annals of human thought contain a rich array of perspectives on the nature of selfhood. Ancient Greek philosophers, for example, grappled with questions of identity, consciousness, and the relationship between mind and body.
For example, Plato’s theory of an immaterial, immortal soul resonated with many religious traditions, while Aristotle’s view of the soul as the form or essence of a living being offered a more naturalistic interpretation of what we are.
Medieval thinkers, often influenced by religious doctrine, continued to explore these themes. Theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas debated the nature of the soul, its relationship to God, and its implications for human morality.
These early conceptions of self, though diverse, were mainly just rooted in metaphysical speculation, yet they laid the foundation for later inquiries into the nature of human existence.
The shift towards modern science—while slow and steady—marked a turning point in humanity’s understanding of itself.
The Rise of Scientific Inquiry: A Paradigm Shift
The Enlightenment marked a significant shift in our understanding of ourselves, primarily through the greater spread of new knowledge, and its basis was increasingly empirical, as opposed to metaphysical. Western self-perception was long based on Aristotle, and even when new insights were made, it typically fell back to the ideas of Aristotle as it was the most ubiquitous knowledge in the Latin and Arabic world. With these tools, dismissed or forgotten ideas and theories could be confirmed through the rise of mathematics and the improvement in scientific methods and disseminated outside more independently of religion and state.
With increased anatomical knowledge and its revelation of the intricate workings of the human body, many misconceptions and superstitions that had long clouded our self-perception finally became dispelled. An example is the view that the heart was the seat of thought, which the brain-centered view has completely replaced.
Nicolaus Copernicus could prove that the heliocentric view of the cosmos corresponded to reality better than the anthropocentric view, based on astronomical observations. This was a large step in our acceptance of not being the center of the world.
While many findings weren’t actually novel, their general acceptance and spread were. These insights in science started the shift of our self-perception from metaphysical ideas of immaterialness, essence, and souls towards more naturalistic ones.
Modern Science: Physics and Biology
More profound insights into ourselves came with the increasing refinement of science and its methods. The earliest modern breakthroughs into the nature of us and our place in the world were found in biology and physics.
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection fundamentally altered our understanding of the origins of life and the place of humans in the natural world. The recognition that we share a common ancestry with other animals and that our physical and mental traits have been shaped by millions of years of evolutionary adaptation challenged the notion of human exceptionalism and special character that had long permeated Western thought.
Science’s Expansion Into the 20th Century
In the same vein, in the 20th century, our cosmological understanding expanded to start to confirm the incredible vastness of the world, with our planet just being a part of a solar system that is just a minuscule part of a galaxy, a vastly greater system.
These insights into the physical universe and our part in it made anthropocentric views like immaterialism/epistemological idealism, which took reality to be based on our mind, take a backseat to views like materialism. Self-conceptions based on theology and metaphysics also slowly began to take a backseat after having had a solid footing during the Middle Ages.
This can show a shift in thinking away from purpose or teleology. There isn’t the same sort of higher purpose in biological and physical systems that we saw in theological systems. Yet, it may also have expanded our empathy to include non-humans, as we saw other organisms, such as apes, come closer to the level of sentience we believe ourselves to be.
The Fallibility of Man: Insights From Psychology
Since the 20th century, psychological research has allowed us direct insights into our regularities rather than extrapolating them from the world in general. It has shed light on the many ways in which unconscious biases, heuristics, and social pressures influence our perceptions, judgments, and decisions.
Classic experiments such as the Milgram obedience study, the Stanford prison experiment, and the bystander effect revealed the disturbing ease with which ordinary people can be led to act in harmful or cruel ways.
Studies also tried to illuminate our failures in terms of capacities, like cognitive biases unconsciously influencing our decision-making, decisions being rationalized after the fact, delayed gratification being inordinately difficult, the fallibility of our memories, and limits to self-control. As well as affirming our capacity to be unconsciously manipulated or impacted, like that of priming.
Considering these results, it should perhaps be expected that all of the classic studies mentioned have been shown to be unreplicable, highly controversial, or plainly fabricated. Yet, as with the old metaphysical views, even if their results are largely disproven, the subsequent interpretation may linger until something replaces it.
Despite these issues, psychology has shown us consistently that our cognitive capacities are less rational than we expect and that we are less in control than we would wish.
Our Place in Nature and the Universe
Early insights in biology and physics continued to be corroborated and expanded over time. The reality of the universe was continually shown to be much grander and vaster than expected and perhaps even beyond comprehension. The universe was given an origin point in space and time from which one could derive the current constellations.
DNA was discovered to corroborate evolution, to show us how we can be physically proven to have animal ancestors and be a product of adaptation. Genetics showed us that we are a product of our genes and their interaction with the environment, showing that while we have inherent dispositions, they are primed or invoked by the environment.
Genetic, environmental, and neurobiological factors can predict disorders and harmful personality traits, which limits the strength of attribution to moral factors, the supernatural, and other factors that can be ascribed back to metaphysical belief.
Evolutionary psychology further explores the implications of our evolutionary heritage for understanding human behavior and cognition. Many of our psychological traits, from our social instincts to cognitive biases, are rooted in adaptations that served our ancestors well in their ancestral environments. This has led to a growing appreciation of the biological constraints on our behavior and how our evolutionary past shapes our present.
Materialism and Determinism: Challenging Free Will
Centuries of findings in physics and biology have led to the growing acceptance of physicalism, the view that all the world is fundamentally physical. With physical systems, you have natural laws which follow preordained patterns. This leads us to question free will, as our thoughts, feelings, and actions appear to be determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.
This deterministic worldview has also tended to be supported by results in brain science through the behavioral impact of disease, lesions, the effects of the environment, and drugs. We have already accepted a certain extent of lack of free will with lesser culpability to children, the drunk, and the disorderly.
However, it is worth mentioning that it is not like our future is set on the train toward determinism, realism, and physicalism through science. For example, any strong evidence for the Copenhagen interpretation compared to the other quantum interpretations would shift the debate. We cannot know what direction science takes us and how it will impact our perception of ourselves.
Future of Our Self-Perception
As science advances, our understanding of ourselves will likely undergo further transformations. Emerging fields such as epigenetics, which studies how environmental factors can influence gene expression, shed new light on the complex interplay between nature and nurture in shaping our traits and behaviors.
Brain science is still in a very rudimentary stage of understanding and will surely influence our future understanding. Disorders have begun to be accepted and understood as more continuous than dichotomous. Furthermore, accepting that personality disorders are often evolutionary adaptations may shift our interpretation.
We are also just starting to understand how plastic our brain actually is, how much we are influenced by events occurring during certain critical periods of development, and how it continues to be plastic throughout our lives to varying degrees.
The Rise of AI
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is also raising profound questions about the nature of consciousness and the possibility of creating machines that can think and feel like humans. With the advent of complex AI, we have realized that we may not always be the top dog in terms of intelligence, so much so that a fear of this scenario has taken root.
The quest to understand ourselves is a timeless endeavor, one that has been pursued by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and artists throughout history. Science has provided us insights into ourselves by first illuminating how the world works and now starting to tap into the workings of us. While the answers to many fundamental questions about human nature remain elusive, true insights have been gained through scientific inquiry about ourselves and our place in the universe.
