The Problem of Myself

Three of the most basic problems in modern philosophy are different approaches to the same problematic: how can the human individual be part of the physical world around her and separate from that world at the same time.  This is most explicit in the mind/body problem (what is the relationship between consciousness and unconscious matter?).  It is just as fundamental to the problem of free will.  Is my consciousness of choosing and acting the cause of my actions (given the fact that it seems to depend on physical processes) and, if so, how is it the cause?  These two broad topics, difficult as they are, seem easy compared to the third.  What does it mean to say that I am the same person over time when both my physical and mental self are constantly changing? 

There are three general approaches to this question: illusion theory, substance theory, and continuity theory.  The spread is typical of modern philosophy.  You get a null answer (there is no persistent identity or self), a grounding in common sense (self is substantiated in the body or the soul), and an attempt to redefine the question (the self is a continuous series of memories). 

The most prominent defense of the illusion theory comes from two basic principles of Buddhist doctrine.  According to the principle of impermanence, all compounded things will eventually decompose.  This is true of mountains as it is true of human bodies and human minds.  It is true not only “eventually” but persistently.  Everything that exists now has emerged as something else fell the Hell apart.  This is true moment to moment; so my self then is constantly fallout apart into my self now. 

The second principle is interdependence.  There are in fact no individual objects or beings.  When we recognize a tree or some other person as an individual thing, we are abstracting from (which is to say, forgetting) a vast number of other things on which it depends.  The tree is only a tree because it is rooted in a ground that provides moisture and reaches up, through obliging space, to take in the sunlight and air.  Birch trees and Terry Bertrams are like waves on the ocean: temporary ripples riding on an ocean of causation. 

So there is really no persistent me to take responsibility for my actions or to be important enough to worry about.  There is a lot of truth to this view and I think that it is liberating in the way that my Zen teachers have said.  It is not, however, the whole picture.  I am saving for retirement.  At the present rate, I expect to stop working sometime in the next century (assuming that Social Security is intact).  I also expect that it will, in some important sense, be me who retires.  I think that I will be disappointed if I have not saved enough.  Illusion theory offers nothing to comfort me. 

Substance theory is based on Aristotle’s account of change.  For something to change it must become other that it is (or else here has been no change) and remain what it is (or else it has not changed but been replaced).  To account for this you need one substratum and two opposite qualities.  An iron bar becomes hot and red from being cold and black when it is heated.  It remains what it is (iron before and after) but becomes what it is not (hot when it was cold).  So I am the same person because there is something that is me that has not changed (my body or my soul) despite the fact that I changed in many ways. 

The two candidates for individual substance (body and soul) both seem to be lacking.  My body is not the same from moment to moment, let alone through my life.  It seems likely that all my material constituents are replaces once or twice during my lifetime.  Matter and energy flow in and out.  As for the soul, if it’s the same as my consciousness and memories, then it changes along with my body.  If it is something else, what is it?  See this previous post for the difficulties. 

The last approach, continuity of memory theory, is compelling enough that it seems to grab some of my students before I get to it in Introduction to Philosophy.  It was pioneered by John Locke.  I am the same person I was when I was 5 years old because I can remember things that happened to me when I was five.  In the live size photo of me on my mother’s wall I am wearing a sweater.  The photo is black and white but I remember that the sweater was red.  You can't remember what happens to someone else. 

That’s a pretty good answer, but there is a problem.  Suppose that my memories could be downloaded and uploaded by someone else.  Now that guy remembers wearing the red sweater.  Does that mean that he is me?  No.  Tomorrow, when he eats breakfast, he will enjoy it.  I will not. 

Biology offers something useful here.  I began life as a single, fertilized cell, half mommy, half daddy.  All of the specifically human cells in my body (a minority interest among a lot of bacteria, as I understand) trace back their lineage to that Ur cell.  When the cell multiplication formed a blastocyst, there was then established an existentially robust distinction between inside and outside, self and other.  That distinct remains as long as I live. 

Biological continuity is probably the best foundation for a theory of self.  Any philosophically coherent account of soul will have to be grounded in that, as Aristotle argued in his De Anima.  But I am not sure that it answers the most important question.  Tomorrow when I swing my legs out of bed, will that be me that contemplates the event tonight, or a newly regenerated me that only remembers typing this blog.  That is a haunting question.  

Nagel on Mind & Cosmos

More notes on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Nagel uses the terms “materialism” and “materialist” where I would use “physicalism” and “physicalist”.  So far I think my usage is vindicated. 

The word materialism is more reductionist in implication that those who use it ordinarily intend.  It focuses the mind on the concept of material at the expense of all the non-material aspects of physical nature such as form and energy.  Nagel uses the term to encompass all physical explanations. 

To take an example, consider a beaker of water sitting over a gas flame.  The beaker is material and the water is material.  But the water is being heated without any change in the molecular constituents of the water and the molecules of glass hold the water in place only because they are in a certain shape.  Shatter the glass and the same material will produce a distinct set of phenomena. 

Again, I prefer physicalism because I think that the physical can be defined (as Nagel neglects to define it) as the measurable.  I am only on Chapter 3, making notes as I go, but it already seems clear that the title of the book is both misleadingly provocative and understated.  Nagel is not arguing that “the materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is false.”  So far, he doesn’t seem to quarrel with any part of the Darwinian synthesis. 

He is claiming that physicalist science is necessarily incomplete and (a more radical claim) that a complete account of nature is possible.  He has made it pretty clear so far that he is not going offer any such account but intends to say what kind of account would meet the purpose. 

Nagel does not flirt with dualism, let alone theism.  He thinks that the brain does produce the conscious mind and that human brains and consciousness are products of evolution.  But he thinks that physical explanations alone cannot for consciousness.

I think that that is clearly correct, at least in the meantime.  He considers various physicalist approaches to the mind/body problem.  Behaviorists attempted to reduce terms for mental states to terms for behavioral states, so that “pain” meant nothing more nor less than saying “ouch!”  That is unsatisfactory, as anyone knows who has heard the one about the two behaviorists who have just finished making love.  “That was good for you,” says the one; “how was it for me?”  Obviously, first person experience is a better guide to one’s own mental states than any behavior one might display. 

Identify theorists argue that mental states are identical with brain states, so that any mental state Ψ is to some physical (brain) state Φ as water is to H2O.  This analogy fails because H2O is a sufficient explanation for water in all its forms whereas there is nothing in a measurable brain state that would lead you to infer the existence of consciousness if you did not already know that the latter was a fact. 

I would add, though Nagel skips past it, that the same is true of functionalist accounts of mind.  Minds are obviously functional.  They process information in ways that allow us to navigate around obstacles and find food and mates.  However, as the infamous zombie problem indicates, there is no obvious reason why a mind has to involve consciousness in order to function properly.  If one of those robot vacuum cleaners can navigate around table legs without being aware of them, what need have I for all my heartbreaks? 

Consciousness seems, at present, radically private.  My body temperature, brain states, and behavior are measureable and therefore physical.  No one can measure the passion that a photo of my infant daughter produces in me every time I look at it.  It seems logically possible that we will someday have a qualiameter that can measure inner experience more or less directly.  Until then, we cannot have a completely physical account of nature. 

Nagel insists rightly that the fact of consciousness has implications beyond biology.  If indeed physical processes produced conscious creatures over the course of evolutionary history, then the potential for consciousness was present in dumb matter from the beginning.  There is more to heaven and earth than could be guessed from all previous physics and chemistry.