Sorry, I was only being ironic.
He said in jest.
Sorry, I was only being ironic.
He said in jest.
What’s So Simple About Personal Identity?
Joshua Farris asks what you find when you find yourself.
The Brain View
Another popular physicalist/materialist view is called the brain view of personal identity. This is the view that the person is identical to the brain; either to the brain as a whole, or to some part of it, such as the cerebral cortex, which produces the experiences and other higher order mental activity human minds enjoy.
It seems very natural for materialists to identify the self with the brain, given that the brain is responsible for much of the goings on in the body as well as in the mind.
The brain view is of course necessarily embedded in the body view. In fact, unless the mind part can somehow be explained as “transcending” the argument that the brain is but more matter inherently in sync with the laws of nature there’s no real distinction at all.
Do brains think? Such a question seems very odd. The immediate response seems to be, ‘No, I think’. Usually, when speaking of thinking, we implicitly speak of the person doing the thinking, not of a collection of neurons firing. Something like the following may seem more promising for the brain view: ‘I use my brain to think’ or ‘I depend upon neural functioning for thinking’.
And here we are: hopelessly stuck!
Or, rather, so it still seems to me. But this part will always exasperate some more than others. In that some are able to convince themselves that how they think about this relationship here and now need be as far as they go to make it true. Then the part where how what we think and feel precipitates behaviors that precipitate very real consequences whether what we think and feel is in sync with what is actually true or not. Let alone in being able to determine if all of that is moot given the assumption that the brain and the mind and “I” are all entirely at one with nature itself entirely at one with the possible existence of God.
However, this is not a reason to think that selves are brains. To say you are your brain because you use your brain to think is similar to someone saying that my hand picks up a stick, so I am my hand. A hand may pick up a stick, but it is a person’s hand picking up the stick: I use my hand to pick up the stick. Equally, it is my brain doing the activity facilitating my thinking; but me using my brain to think with is not equivalent to me being my brain. Thus, the brain view will not work as a satisfactory view of personal identity either.
Got that? Next up: the hand picking up the stick and using it to thrash someone soundly. That even more problematic matter able to reconfigure into a point of view. An actual vantage point out in a particular context out in a particular world in which the brain qua mind qua “I” precipitates [existentially] moral judgments from others.
The “I” is the part that speaks. Some parts of us are unknown to the “I”.
Enter: Metaphysics.
And here we are: hopelessly stuck!
Or, rather, so it still seems to me. But this part will always exasperate some more than others. In that some are able to convince themselves that how they think about this relationship here and now need be as far as they go to make it true. Then the part where how what we think and feel precipitates behaviors that precipitate very real consequences whether what we think and feel is in sync with what is actually true or not. Let alone in being able to determine if all of that is moot given the assumption that the brain and the mind and “I” are all entirely at one with nature itself entirely at one with the possible existence of God.
yes, stuck, and yet so many philosophers insist on scratching their heads over it. know why? it’s this whole problem about ‘what to do’ in life if there is some truth to substance dualism… and substance dualism is the underlying metaphysics to all theories of spiritualism whether religious or not. so as long as these folks aren’t absolutely certain that when they die, it’s curtains, they’ll live their entire lives in a nervous stupor over ‘omg omg what should i do?! am i doing the right thing!?’ that’s what it comes down to. no philosopher was ever interested with the question of mortality just because it’s an interesting question. it’s an invested question, and that’s why it’s so important to these guys. it’s not about ‘loving god’ or ‘doing the right thing’, either. it’s about covering one’s ass for the afterlife. niggas don’t wanna burn in hell or be reincarnated as a mushroom. that’s the real reason.
me, well, i run a two part pragmatic approach to this matter. first, i dismiss any system of existence/reality in which i am expected to guess at anything that is incredibly important. such a system is fundamentally flawed, and i will not drive myself crazy wondering if what i do now will have negative consequences for the afterlife. i do what the fuck i’m gonna do and if that pays out, good for me. if it doesn’t, good for you. this brings us to the second part. i will NOT ever regret anything i’ve done, and i will certainly feel no remorse. whatever i do, whenever i do it, is for a reason which at the time was obviously the ‘best’ thing i believed i could have done. duddint matter if the consequences of that decision turned out to be a disaster for reasons beyond my control. i don’t blame anyone or anything, i resent nothing, and i adapt to the shit storm if i find myself in one. this is because i don’t expect anything to work out when i have to deal with other people. this is my splendid quasi-misanthropy and it’s never been wrong. i say ‘quasi’ because it’s not genuine hate. there is no place for hatred where ‘they know not what they do’, as it were. if i could find a human being who was not only an asshat, but meant to be, i could move beyond mere contempt and perhaps feel some kind of hatred. but alas, human beings are so fucked up they can’t even be evil right.
and this is only a pickle if you drive yourself nuts hoping for some redemption from it all in some afterlife. you have to stop allowing yourself to be played with like a toy by [insert favorite god], and you have to understand that there will be no qualitative difference in the experiences you have now and the experiences you will have ‘in the next life’. you would simply exist in another ‘now’, phenomenologically structured by the same causal forces, affairs and events working to form your current experiences in this life.
what i’m implying here is that monistic spinozist stirnerite historical materialists do it better. fuck all that platonic/cartesian ‘guessing’ and piss on the afterlife. we make shit work here and now… because that’s all there is; the eternal here and now.
we are the ministers in the marriage of heaven and hell here on earf. morrison was wrong. you cannot break on through to the other side. there is no other side. and if there was, you’d only ask ‘what’s next’ when you got there. same shit, different dimension.
“first, i dismiss any system of existence/reality in which i am expected to guess at anything that is incredibly important.”
OK, that was pretty awesome…
“Morrison was wrong …”
You arrived at the same place as Fear And Loathing guy, wassisname. And all leftist hippies. The wiser position is “there might well be, but I got a sandwich.”
“same shit, different dimension.”
You belie the true promise and terribleness of transcendentalism: it is not only things arround you that radically are not the same.
The healthiest is Nietzsche’s: neither transcendentalism nor atheism: overcoming and self-overcoming. And transcendentalism a little bit.
leftism proper is only a pathological and eidetic expression of the paternal/maternal instinct in human beings. wanting to ‘take care’ of someone. remember heidegger’s whole thing about dasein’s possession of the world as grounded in ‘care’? that was one of his better moments. so, naturally, when you see a nigga being what you consider ‘mistreated’, you wanna jump in there and straighten shit out. pretty simple really. that’s all leftism is. the marxist is the linderman (vanguard) protecting and teaching the clifford (working class) how to beat the mikes and moodys (capitalists) of the world. this is, ad hominus simpliciter, an expression of fatherly/motherly love.
Yes, we all know that’s how leftists like to think of themselves.
indeed, and some of them are even liars. oh shit wait. i just had a eureka moment. what’s the difference between an opportunistic leftist liar who seeks office only to fatten his own pockets and doesn’t give a shit about the workin man, and a capitalist who seeks to maintain conservatism to fatten his own pockets and doesn’t give a shit about the workin man? (while also being entirely dependent on him. interesting, that. almost like biting the hand that feeds you, but that would be like comparing a capitalist to a dog… which is a very generous analogy)
yeah so did you see that? it’s like ‘hey capitalist, what are you bitchin about? these fucksticks are doing the same thing you are, right?’ ohhhh i see. suddenly it’s ‘unethical’ to get rich… especially if you’re lying while trying to do it. in that case, an honest leftist who admitted he didn’t give a shit about the workin man would garner the respect of the capitalist.
and this would work, actually, because we can’t indict the capitalist on lying here. he’d have to know what he thinks is ethical is actually not (for several epistemological reasons… and even more pragmatic reasons) in order to be ‘lying’. so far, the capitalist is only an imbecile, not a bad guy.
now we’ve reached a beautiful dilemma. the capitalist isn’t a liar (because he’s too dumb) but he does not empower the workin man… while the fake-ass leftist is a liar, but empowers the working man.
fuck. now what do we do?
The “I” is the part that speaks. Some parts of us are unknown to the “I”.
Enter: Metaphysics.
Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality
And, if this be the case, then everything — everything that encompasses the body, everything that encompasses the mind, and everything the encompasses the world around it/“I”, can only be entirely explained when we have an understanding – ontological? teleological? – of existence itself.
This thread however takes that gap for granted. Just as it makes the presumption that we all have some measure of free-will to actually opt for particular points of view.
Dasein then revolves around “I” in our day to day interactions and the extent to which what we believe to be true about them is able to be demonstrated as in fact true. Call it true objectively. Call it true universally. Call it true empirically. Call it true phenomenologically. Call it true historically, anthropologically, ethnically, culturally, sociologically, politically, economically, psychologically.
It is either a thing or a relationship in sync with what science calls the “laws of nature” out in the either/or world able or not able to be verified or falsified by way of the “scientific method”.
Of course science is considerably less concerned with “I” in the is/ought world. With human behaviors said to be virtuous or moral. Here instead any number of philosophers down through the ages have grappled with what in the discipline is called “ethics”.
And that’s the part I zoom in on in regard to my own understanding of dasein in this thread. That’s the part where I focus the beam at the existential juncture of identity, value judgments and political power.
Out in any particular world, in any particular context, understood from any particular point of view. And here I speculate not so much on what philosophers can tell us, but on what [perhaps] they cannot.
But it is only when we take these “intellectual contraptions” down off the scholastic scaffolding and situate the words out in a particular context, out a particular world, can the human condition be explored more substantively.
Or, rather, so it seems to me.
Liars to who?
You have yet to realize the realization of lying to one’s self.
Go, meditate on this. “Nihilism” won’t do.
What’s So Simple About Personal Identity?
Joshua Farris asks what you find when you find yourself.
[Lynne Rudder Baker, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts] identifies persons with what she calls ‘the first-person perspective’. This is the perspective I have of myself, or the perspective you have of yourself. Thus, persons are here not identical to a body or a brain; neither are persons identifiable with a set of memory or character states; instead, persons are identified with a particular perspective.
In other words, as I interpret it, “I” is not reducible down to the body or to the brain, or to a particular set of memories, or to a personality, or to a character. Instead it is embodied in the manner in which they all somehow come together from day to day to produce a “perspective”. I think this, I feel that, I choose this, I do that.
Basically, the manner in which most of us think about “I” in the world around us for all practical purposes. Given some measure of autonomy.
And we can think of it this way until someday, someone actually is able to demonstrate why the whole package is reducible down to a specific factor above.
And, in the interim, it still comes down to that which we are in fact able to demonstrate to others is [existentially] the most rational way in which to think, feel, say or do…anything.
In a recent work, Baker puts it like this: “A person is a being with a first-person perspective essentially, who persists as long as her first-person perspective is exemplified” (Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective, 2013, p.149), even though defining personal identity in this way is rather circular, and not very informative for the reader, as Baker acknowledges (p.150). As Baker says in her conclusion, “the first-personal view is a Simple View because it provides no informative criteria of personal identity”
There’s no getting around circularity here because however you explain human identity, you come back to certain assumptions you make which are not able to be either verified or falsified definitively. And this must be the case or there would already be an explanation out there that accomplishes precisely that.
Though, sure, if you think there is one, link it to us.
Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.
Scientists and futurists are spreading before a dazzled public all kinds of astonishing prospects of humans in the near future being deliberately transformed through the use of technology. Through advanced medicine and by integrating technology into our lives and our very bodies, we may soon be stronger, healthier, longer-lived, happier, with more acute senses, and capabilities undreamed of by our ancestors. Such technological enhancements of ourselves will be our own conscious choices. What will that mean for our sense of self?
The technological self?
Assuming of course that, using the technology currently available to them, neuroscientists are not able to rule out entirely at least some capacity on our part to freely choose among the options made available.
Given some measure of autonomy here, “I” is about to enter that brave new world in which the human biological self itself is reconfigured into a kind of memetic self predicated on those qualities that any particular historical or cultural community value the most.
Of course this part…
…we may soon be stronger, healthier, longer-lived, happier, with more acute senses, and capabilities undreamed of by our ancestors…
…is one thing. But it might well become another thing altogether if science is able to reconfigure the mind’s “I” so as to instill characteristics and behaviors more in sync with one political narrative rather than another.
What sort of behaviors should be encouraged if all it takes is tweaking the brain at or around birth?
Then this part:
Old questions such as ‘What are we?’ or ‘What makes us be who we are?’ still resonate through contemporary philosophy. The conviction of being oneself obstinately remains despite all theoretical attempts to dilute it. Phenomenologists take the experiencing self as a given, as a starting point. Others feel intellectual discomfort with substantive notions of self, and explain my feeling of being me either as an illusion or as a social construction. The conclusion that ‘the self within’ is an illusion caused by some grammatical, psychological or epistemological mistake is not exclusive to philosophers; neuroscientists and artificial intelligence theorists explain it away as being the result of complex systems, carbon based or otherwise.
What might science be able to pin down here more definitively? Whole new ways to grasp the phenomenological “I”? Will a “self within” be discovered? Will there be ways to determine what the optimal self might be? And ways to bring that about in the really and truly brave new world of childhood indoctrination? The “mass me”?
Or, instead, will it be discovered that the mass me is just the wholly determined me spread out among all of Earth’s inhabitants?
Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.
An I on the Self
We should start by clarifying our problematic notion. Even as we all seem to know what we mean by ‘self’, it is not easy to characterize.
Why? Because grappling with “I” in one context can be quite different from another context.
Consider:
There’s the “I” that goes about the business of living from day to day in the either/or world. Hundreds of things that we do [alone or with others] that are entirely in sync with that which is as close as we have been able to come to “objective reality”. In fact, the main obstacles to pinning this self down revolve around sheer speculation — sim worlds, solipsism, dream worlds, matrix perspectives.
There’s the “I” that goes about the business of living from day to day in the is/ought world. Still hundreds of things that we can agree are “true objectively” for all of us. But these things trigger relationships that trigger behaviors that are judged far, far more subjectively. The “I” that I root in dasein.
*There’s the “I” all the way out at the end of the metaphysical limb — going back to the understanding of existence itself. Or in resolving the debate about “free will”.
But that, it turns out, just gets us started…
Galen Strawson once listed twenty-one different concepts of ‘self’ (Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, 1999), and Peter van Inwagen analyzed nine possible referents of the pronoun ‘I’ (The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, 2002).
The biological “I”, The neourological and chemical “I”, the historical “I”, the cultural “I”, the sociological “I”, the psychological and emotional “I”. And on and on.
Other authors, such as Anthony Kenny, deny that the first person pronoun refers to anything at all, and say that this grammatical error is the source of many a philosophical muddle (The Metaphysics of Mind, 1989).
On the other hand, don’t get them started, right?
The ambiguity of the word ‘I’ seems apparent in claims such as ‘I have not been myself lately’ – which could be paraphrased as ‘There is something wrong with me’, or more confusingly, ‘I am aware that my self has not been itself lately’ – meaning, ‘I (supposedly the person talking) am aware that whoever I have been lately (self) is not the one who really I am (myself)’! This conceptual separation between myself and the self is characteristic of the ‘philosophical muddle’ pointed out by Kenny. Other instances show this problematic gap too. Consider, for example, ‘I was mad at myself’ or ‘I do not know who I am any more’, which both seem to suggest there is an essential self that a perhaps less essential ‘I’ can observe or get mad at.
And what does this ultimately revolve around? The fact that we relate to our “self” differently in different sets of circumstances. Somehow the “I” in my head is intertwined with all that exist out in any particular world. But there are so many different [and at times entirely unique] possible permutations “out there” given interactions awash in contingency, chance and change, that trying to pin down an understanding of all the variables that combine to create an “I” at any particular time, in any particular place can only be at best a more or less sophisticated guess. While, for many of us, it is more like a WAG.
And yet how could one speak of an “essential self” or the “real me” without the capacity to reduce all of these factors down to the one true reality?
Iambiguous,
I’ve told you a “million times” already that objective proofs are like open mathematical questions… sometimes they take hundreds of years to solve: either the conjecture is true or false.
People have NO PROBLEM, given these “multiple selves” of abstracting a continuity of consciousness. Obviously, given this, there is something wrong with stating that we all should agree that we don’t have a continuity of consciousness.
Elastic Selves in the Age of Enhancement
Susana Badiola wonders how technology will help us understand our selves.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein has made us aware, language can be misleading, presenting a common structure for very different uses. For example, ‘I have a computer’, ‘I have a dog’, ‘I have a dream’, and ‘I have a headache’ share a common structure, but my ‘ownership’ of my headache does not have the same sense as in the case of my computer.
Language can get particularly misleading when “I” is intent on pondering all the stuff that goes on in the mind that generates the “I” in the first place. Dogs and computers are things that are out in the world. You either have one or you don’t. And, if you do, you are easily able to demonstrate this to others. The communication back and forth is rather clear and objective.
In a similar manner, the claim that ‘I have not been myself lately’ suggests there is a real way to be myself, and a false way, even when the only possible self seems to be the one of which we are aware.
Here again however a distinction can be made between being or not being yourself with regard to things which are able to be demonstrated. If one day you find out from the doctor that you have an inoperable brain tumor, or have contracted AIDS, “I” can well come to embody a very different perspective on life. Or if your beloved spouse or child was murdered, “I” too can then come to reflect on life emotionally and psychologically such that you are never quite the same again.
But what is the true or the false way for one to embody a self with respect to conflicting goods? Interactions that garner particular reactions [good or bad] from others depending on the moral and political values that you embrace.
Philosophers such as Peter Hacker attempt to dissolve this muddle by clarifying conceptual confusions when discussing consciousness. For example, ‘I do not know what to think’ expresses not introspective deficiency, but the fact that I cannot make up my mind. And when I add ‘I think’, I’m not identifying a mental operation, but only specifying epistemic weight.
Yes, any particular “I” may not know what to think, but, depending on the context, there either is or is not a rational way in which to think about someone or something. You can’t make up your mind but there are ways in which to show you what a rational mind is obligated to believe or know.
There are epistemological boundaries separating that which we can know for certain and that which we cannot.
And it is always the latter that is of most interest to me. Things that “I” can draw more or less informed and educated conclusions regarding…and things that appear to more in the nature of personal opinions.
And, in regard to our day to day interactions, what could possibly be a more crucial task for philosophers to take on?
A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.
Who am I? That’s a difficult question to tackle, and each of us must do so for him- or herself, if it is to be tackled at all. But importantly related to this question is another: Am I the same person now as I used to be? For part of the issue of personal identity is how growth, change and life experiences transform one’s self. Perhaps they alter me totally, I may think. The identity problem is compounded by asking further: Might I be a very different person in the future?
Think about it: Suppose we lived in a world where there was no contingency, chance and change. None at all. Nothing to tackle then in regard to your identity, right?
But we live in a word that is exactly the opposite don’t we? Of course the question “who am I?” is a difficult question to answer. In fact, it’s far more likely an impossible question to answer. After all, does anyone here actually imagine they have a handle on all of the thousands upon thousands of variables that, over the years, come at you from all directions? The mind-boggling social and psychological permutations that go into creating and then sustaining your own particular “I” . Try to even imagine all the factors that you had no control or understanding of at all. If only as a child.
Yet many of us still approach our identity in the same manner as we might approach, say, a cinder block. It’s there, weighted down by it’s “thingness”.
So, the most important question of all [by far in my view] is how, given the fluid complexity necessarily embedded in “I” evolving over the years, what parts [and changes] can we come closest to nailing down objectively?
You know where I go here.
A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.
Historically, there has been a vigorous debate between those who argue that personal identity is established by physical continuity and those who opt instead for psychological continuity. According to the first of these views, I am the same person today that I was as a child or teenager because I have the same body, or at any rate a body that has merely changed incrementally over time. The second camp contends that it is personality traits and dispositions that carry my identity forward through time.
You may as well attempt to pin down if “I” is more the function of genes or memes. We know of course that without the biological self there would be no psychological continuity. But where does one stop and the other begin?
Think about it like this…
You get out of bed this morning. And, you tell yourself, you’re the same person you were when you got out of bed the day before.
Or maybe not. Maybe there is something happening in your body – a cancer cell, the onset of a disease – that, sooner or later, will dramatically reconfigure how you think about yourself in the world around you.
Or maybe yesterday you made a new friend. You are meeting her today. You will embark on a relationship that has the potential to introduce any number of new factors into your life. Factors that, as well, can dramatically reconfigure how you think about yourself in the world around you.
That’s simply how it works. There is “I” in your set of circumstances here and now. And then biological and environmental changes – in increments or in a tidal wave – result in a reconstructed “I” from day to day.
Some of these factors you will be able to grasp and/or control better than others.
With incremental change we encounter the ancient puzzle known as ‘The Ship of Theseus’. Theseus was a legendary king, revered as one of the founders of Athenian society. Plutarch reports that the ship in which Theseus and those under his command sailed the Aegean sea had its planks replaced one by one. Over time the entire ship was replaced, raising the question whether it remained the same ship or not, and if so, in what sense. The label ‘replacement paradox’ has been affixed to this sort of case.
Or, as Lena points out to Ray in Dream Lover
“They say you replace every molecule in your body every seven years. I changed my name eight years ago. No more Thelma Sneeder. Aren’t you going to give me credit for it? Doesn’t it seem brave that I became this completely different person.”
And we know how Ray’s “I” was reconfigured after marrying Lena.
But: In what sense do we become a “different person” when all the molecules are replaced? Or, circumstantially, when we have an experience so traumatic, the way we look at the world around us seems to turn upside down?
A New Look At Personal Identity
Michael Allen Fox argues that old approaches to the problem don’t work.
It has been known for quite a while that incremental replacement occurs within the human body, but recent discoveries indicate more precisely the scope of this reconstruction. A technique based on carbon-14 dating devised by Swedish neurologist Jonas Frisén has led to the first accurate estimates of the amount of time it takes for various human body parts to regenerate. For example, our gut lining is replaced every five days; the skin’s outer layer every two weeks; red blood cells every 120 days; bones every ten years; and muscles between the ribs every 15.1 years. If the regeneration paradox is considered a serious worry, the bad news is that human bodily regeneration goes on relentlessly and at variable rates for different parts.
So, these are facts that can be ascertained regarding the various parts of us that regenerate over the years. But it’s not like the fact of this has much of an impact on how we see ourselves. The fact that our bones and blood and organs etc., are reconstructed autonomically over time has little or no impact on how we react to, among other things, the behaviors of others given our moral and political prejudices.
No, instead, that part is reflected in the physiology of the brain. And here…
The good news is that the cerebral cortex and visual cortex of the brain have been confirmed to be as old as we are, that is, not to regenerate. This indicates that perhaps the most important parts of us from the perspective of self-identity do not change over time – except owing to injury, disease or the effects of ageing.
Except that we know full well how injuries and diseases and the effects of ageing can have a truly profound impact on how we see both ourselves and the world around us. All of those chemical and neurological interactions that we have little or no control over at all.
It might be argued that while novel and interesting, the above biological information does not really present any kind of challenge that hasn’t been faced before in the course of the personal identity debate, so the physical continuity view can remain intact. Making sense of continuity through change is still the issue we have to deal with, and humans are only a special instance (special to us) of objects that undergo alteration yet are said to remain the same.
Of course sooner or later genes give way to memes here. To our ever evolving and changing “sense of reality” given new experiences and access to new information and ideas. And here the social, political and economic permutations that any one particular individual might come to embody are truly vast and varied. Is it any wonder then that the objectivists are driven to invent Gods and philosophical contraptions and political dogmas and assessments of nature able to wade though all of this profoundly problematic variability and pin down the one true set of rational and virtuous behaviors.
Their own.