First, there is the Kantian view, advanced by Christine Korsgaard, that conceiving ourselves as practical agents simply requires us to view our lives as unified, despite the weakness or strength of various psychological connections that may or may not obtain between our various temporal stages.
Quantum physics forced us to re-conceive ourselves as creatures who appear to be physical and bounded by time, even though our substance isn't material and has no boundaries in time.
As we understand ourselves not only through our ideas but through receiving all feelings, emotions, sensations, memories, images, possibilities open up; we are free to engage in different ways of conceiving ourselves, others, purpose.
The Protestant work ethic, our entire culture and society is really oriented around the prominence of work, the importance of work both in terms of social organization but also in terms of our own well-being, how we think about ourselves, how we conceive of ourselves.
And, as long as we do conceive of ourselves as governed by rules and train ourselves and our progeny to recognize and live in accordance with rules, it is true that we are rule-governed creatures.
Like Rebecca, we conceive of ourselves as strong, independent and far too cool to sacrifice ourselves for male attention, but, also like Rebecca, we weren't exactly raised in a world that fostered those qualities.
When he turns to ethics, Grice adds that commonsense psychology represents us as exercising rationality in freely adopting and pursuing ends; moreover, this view of ourselves is self-justifying in the sense that we cannot coherently conceive of ourselves in any other way.
