Because of immunology’s eclectic contributions to pathology, clinical medicine, and basic biology, it cannot unite under a single experimental banner. Rather, it is (and from its inception has been) characterized by multiple, even competing research agendas, each requiring a different methodological apparatus to order its experimental program. Yet the discipline is organized by an underlying concept of an identified and protected self. In whichever domain immunity is studied—from basic science to clinical syndromes—“the immune self” is either implicitly or explicitly invoked and thus serves as a powerful idiom to organize diverse research findings in different research traditions. Because the “self” possesses operational value by attending to various functions (i.e., different communities of scientists use different understandings of agency, the topography of the self’s employment then becomes a map of a field divided by different scientific traditions, methodologies, and goals directed by different experimental and conceptual models. Clearly the self’s appearance in immunology served as a readily understood shorthand reference to personal identity and the efforts to substantiate that extrapolation on its own terms guided the discipline for the latter half of the twentieth century (for historical case studies see Löwy 1991). Indeed, the autonomous construction of immune selfhood resonates with Western cultural ideals and in turn supports them by melding laboratory findings with various extrapolated or borrowed philosophical, political and psychological meanings of human agency (Tauber 1994, 2016). So while firm definition of the immune self has remained elusive, this epistemological ambiguity and flexible polysemy has proven effective in sustaining the term’s powerful heuristic value as an idiom with many uses and meanings (Crist and Tauber 1999). Its versatility and pragmatic utility has effectively integrated clinical immune phenomena by highlighting the essential similarity or interconnectedness of diverse immune-mediated processes in response to various clinical challenges. Thus nutrition, allergy, infection, autoimmune disease, various phenomena of tolerance, natural (pregnancy) or experimentally created chimeras (transplantation), and autoimmunity all become conceived as a network of interlinked or interrelated functions. As these topics mirror and play off one another under the rubric of selfhood, immunologists have a ready means by which to represent states or processes, which arise in the various interactions between body and environment, at different stages of evolution and development. However, despite the wide range of meanings and uses, immune selfhood carries an implicit understanding connoting individuality and insularity, whose philosophical significance will be considered in turn below.

Maha-cattarisaka Sutta: The Great Forty MN 117

Saccavibhanga Sutta: An Analysis of the Truths

1. science of self/nonself discrimination

1.1. iIntroduction

1.2. Immune Selfhood

1.3. Whither Individulity?

1.4. Eco-immunology

1.5. The Cognitive Paradigm

1.6. Modeling the immune system

1.7. Conclusion

2. Free Will

2.1. Major Historical Contributions

2.1.1 Ancient and Medieval Period

2.1.2 Modern Period and Twentieth Century

2.2. The Nature of Free Will

2.2.1 Free Will and Moral Responsibility

2.2.2 The Freedom to Do Otherwise

2.2.3 Freedom to Do Otherwise vs. Sourcehood Accounts

2.2.4 Compatibilist Accounts of Sourcehood

2.2.5 Libertarian Accounts of Sourcehood

2.3. Do We Have Free Will?

2.3.1 Arguments against the Reality of Free Will

2.3.2 Arguments for the Reality of Free Will

2.4. Theological Wrinkles

3. Weakness of Will

3.1. Hare on the Impossibility of Weakness of Will

3.2. Davidson on the Possibility of Weakness of Will

3.3. The Debate After Davidson

3.3.1 Internalist and Externalist Strands

3.3.2 Weakness of Will as Potentially Rational

3.3.3 Changing the Subject

3.3.4 Recent Developments

4. Moral Responsibility 

4.1. Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism

4.2. Some Approaches to Moral Responsibility

4.2.1 Forward-Looking Accounts

4.2.2 The Reactive Attitudes Approach

4.2.2.1 “Freedom and Resentment”

4.2.2.2 Criticisms of Strawson’s Approach

4.2.3 Reasons-Responsiveness Views

4.3. Contemporary Debates

4.3.1 The “Faces” of Responsibility

4.3.1.1 Attributability versus Accountability

4.3.1.2 Attributionism

4.3.1.3 Answerability

4.3.2 Moral Competence

4.3.2.1 The Moral Competence Condition on Responsibility

4.3.2.2 Conversational Approaches to Responsibility

4.3.2.3 Psychopathy

4.3.3 Skepticism and Related Topics

4.3.3.1 Moral Luck

4.3.3.2 Ultimate Responsibility

4.3.3.3 Personal History and Manipulation

4.3.3.4 The Epistemic Condition on Responsibility

5.  Biological Individuals

5.1. The Focal Question: What are Biological Individuals?

5.2. Some Complexities: A Humungous Fungus and Coral Reefs

5.3. Conceptual Space, Distinctions, and Beyond Organisms

5.3.1 Beyond Organisms: Microbialism, Eliminativism, and Holobionts

5.3.2 Distinctions: The Evolutionary and the Physiological

5.3.3 Conceptual Space and Pluralism

5.4. Structuring Conceptual Space Beyond Pluralism

5.5. Groups as Evolutionary Individuals: Superorganisms, Trait Groups, Species, Clades

5.6. From Physiological to Evolutionary Individuals: Life, Reproduction, and Agency

5.6.1 Physiological Individuals as Living Agents

5.6.2 Reproduction, Life Cycles, and Lineages

5.6.3 Autonomous Agency

5.7. Locating Biological Individuals in Conceptual Space

5.8. Regulating Evolutionary Individuals

5.9. The Evolution of Biological Individuality

6. Recent theoretical, neural, and clinical advances in sustained attention research

6.1. Models of Sustained Attention Recent Developments in Paradigms to Investigate 

6.2. Sustained Attention

6.3. Neural Networks Involved in Sustaining Attention

6.4. Evoked Activations and the Vigilance Network

6.5. Functional Connectivity Analyses

6.6 Lifespan Changes in Sustained Attention Ability

6.7 Deficits in Sustained Attention Ability: Clinical Populations

6.8 Modulating Sustained Attention Ability

6.9 Summary

Box 1

7. Right Concentration (samma samadhi)

7.1 The definition

7.1.1 Samadhi

7.1.1.1 Practice

7.1.2 Mindfulness

7.1.2.1 Order of practice

7.2 Purification depends on concentration

7.3 The four developments of concentration

7.3.1 the stilling of directed thoughts & evaluation

7.3.2 the attainment of knowledge & vision

7.3.3 mindfulness & alertness

7.3.4 the ending of the effluents

7.4 Noble right concentration

7.5 What are you waiting for?

Reference

The development of the interdisciplinary areas of cognitive, affective and action neurosciences contributes to the identification of neurobiological bases of conscious experience. The structure of consciousness was philosophically conceived a century ago (HUSSERL, 1913) as consisting of a subjective pole, the bearer of experiences, and an objective pole composed of experienced contents. In more recent formulations, Nagel (1974) refers to a “point of view”, in which qualitative experiences are anchored, while Velmans (1990, 1993, 2009, 2017) understands that phenomenal content is composed of mental representations “projected” to the space external to the brains that construct them. In Freudian psychology, the conscious mind contains a tension between the Id and the Ego (FREUD, 1913). How to relate this bipolar structure with the results of neuroscience? I propose the notion of projection [also used by Williford et al. (2012)] as a bridge principle connecting the neurobiological systems of knowing, feeling and acting with the bipolar structure. The projective process is considered responsible for the generation of the sense of self and the sense of the world, composing an informational phenomenal field generated by the nervous system and experienced in the first-person perspective. After presenting the projective hypothesis, I discuss its philosophical status, relating it to the phenomenal (BLOCK, 1995, 2008, 2011) and high-order thought (ROSENTHAL, 2006; BROWN, 2014) approaches, and a mathematical model of projection (RUDRAUF et al., 2017). Eight ways of testing the status of the projective hypothesis are briefly mentioned.