The Essence of the Self

In Defense of the Simple View of Personal Identity

Geoffrey Madell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138823945
• eBook ISBN: 9781317584131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

In this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the "simple" or "anti-criterial" view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves, and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes (a) that there is always a gap between 'A is f and g' and 'I am f and g'; (b), that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described; and (c), that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine. Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell's view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind.

1
Personal Identity and the First Person

The Mind–body Problem and the Self

Everything about the problem of personal identity stems from the nature of the first person and the clash between the first-person perspective and an objective, third-personal perspective. Most contemporary treatments of the issue have proceeded on the assumption that there is no such clash. One need not question the motivation behind this approach, any more than one needs to question the desire for a monistic view of the relation between mind and body. But, just as it has proved impossible, in my view, to bridge the ‘explanatory gap’ between our understanding of consciousness on the one hand and that of the physical world on the other, so the gap between the first- and the third-person perspectives remains to be bridged. However, while everyone is aware of an apparent explanatory gap between the experiential and the physical, even if the extent of this gap is not appreciated by some, the clash between the first- and the third-person perspectives remains relatively unregarded. There are, of course, huge pressures moving us towards a monistic view of the nature of the person. Yet materialism, or physicalism, in all its variants seems quite clearly to have failed, and I shall spend no time on trying to establish this in general, except where what emerges in the ensuing consideration of the problem of personal identity offers further reason to emphasise this failure.

In spite of this failure, however, it has seemed intolerable to many to have to accept that persons are a conjunction of a physical body and an immaterial mind, if only because there appears to be no escape from the conclusion that these two utterly different types of substance are just found together in a miraculous coexistence. And even if one were tempted to pursue a Humean conception of causality and suggest that all causal connections are in a sense ‘miraculous’ because fundamentally inexplicable and that the posited causal connection between mind and body is no more inexplicable than any other causal connection, huge problems would still remain. Is it just a brute inexplicable fact that mind appeared in the course of evolution at the time that it did? And the same question must arise with regard to the development of each and every embryo. Up to a certain stage, its development can be explained by the laws of the physical sciences, but at a certain stage something happens which is utterly inexplicable in terms of what has gone before: the appearance of consciousness. When the brain reaches a certain level of complexity in its development, this allows the appearance of something non-physical to appear magically on the scene. And why is it that it is in the brain and in the brain only that we find this mysterious connection between the physical and the immaterial?

These problems with dualism remain, no matter how hard one presses a Humean conception of causality. They force one to the view that an ontological distinction between mind and body is acceptable only if the connection between them can be shown to be a necessary one. But to explain how it is that the mental and the physical belong together as a matter of necessity is something that, it can be argued, has defeated our best efforts, and it may well be that we have here a problem the solution to which is ‘cognitively closed’ to us, as Colin McGinn has suggested.

I ought to make it clear, however, that the fact that there has been, to my mind, no plausible account of how the mental and the physical necessarily belong together does not persuade me in the least to adopt any form of materialism, nor does any other monistic view of this relation that I know of seem acceptable. Let me say that, whatever its problems, dualism, and, indeed, interactionist substance dualism, seems to me far more plausible than any other view of the mind–body relation. The topic lies outside the scope of this book, but I shall say quite a lot in later chapters about the notion of substance and about how a misunderstanding of this concept has stood in the way of a proper understanding of the self.

However, the aim of setting out a convincing monistic account of persons is made vastly more difficult by the fact of the tension between the first- and third-person perspectives. It ought to be clear that the nature of the first-person perspective must have a great bearing on the mind–body problem itself. We cannot begin to make sense of the nature of conscious states unless we acknowledge that every state of consciousness is either mine or not mine and that a monistic or materialist account of consciousness must somehow account for this. This problem is additional to the problem of explaining how a materialist account of reality can allow for the phenomenal character of experience, which is the problem which has led some thinkers to talk of an ‘explanatory gap’ between the physical and the phenomenal. In any case, this account of the problem for materialism seems to me to be seriously inadequate for reasons other than the one about the place of the first person in a materialist conception of reality.

In particular, the admission that there is an explanatory gap between any description of the physical reality and the phenomenal quality of our sensations is often coupled with what seems to me an extraordinarily blithe assumption that intentionality itself presents no serious problem for the materialist. Intentional states, it is claimed, can be given a functionalist account.¹ I find this suggestion wildly optimistic, to put it as mildly as possible. I do not know what a functional account of such states of thought and emotion as indignation, gratitude, remorse, compassion, acting from a conception of duty, and so on could possibly look like. It is, of course, not enough for the physicalist to claim that a notion such as that of indignation is indeed functional, just insofar as it is defined in terms of some typical input (the perception of what one takes to be an injustice) and a typical output (some form of protest against the perceived injustice). This will clearly not do, because the inputs and outputs look to be themselves irreducibly mentalistic, and I see no possibility of a physical reduction of these terms, which the materialist surely requires. Kim, by contrast, while acknowledging that no one has yet produced full functional definitions of believing, desiring and intending, and that it is ‘perhaps unlikely that we shall have such definitions any time soon’, sees no problem in the idea that such definitions will eventually be produced. This seems to me a pipe dream. The idea that we might eventually be able to describe some highly complex pattern of pathways through the physical world and be satisfied that some such pattern conveys what it is to feel sympathy for someone, or to be indignant about a perceived wrong, is, in my view, simply incredible.

Furthermore, many intentional states have a phenomenal aspect which is essential to them. It is impossible to imagine that one could hive off the phenomenal aspect of a state such as rage, or elation, or remorse and could be left with anything like the same state of consciousness. It is therefore quite mistaken to suppose that the problem presented to physicalism by the phenomenal relates only to the physicalist’s difficulties in providing a materialist account of sensation. What looks to be much the same problem arises in relation to intentional states as well.

These problems for materialism are profound enough, but the problem of how to account for the first person is another daunting problem for the physicalist. Thomas Nagel has highlighted this issue in a number of places. As Nagel has pointed out, it is the case that even the most complete objective description of the world, a description presented without recourse to indexicals or token-reflexives, will miss something out: which of the billions of persons featuring in this description is me? What small segment of the total reality thus described am I? David Chalmers has suggested that, while an explanation of consciousness might yield an explanation of ‘points of view’ in general, it is hard to see how it could explain why one of what are objectively similar points of view should differ from the others in being mine, unless solipsism is true. In the light of this question we may need to posit a ‘primitive indexical fact’, that some particular point of view on the world is mine.² He is inclined nevertheless to think that this may be a rather ‘thin’ feature of consciousness, compared with the richness of the phenomenal aspect of consciousness.

This suggestion of thinness must surely be questioned. If, as I have said, every experience is either mine or not mine, any materialist attempt to make sense of the phenomenal aspect of conscious states must begin by showing how Nagel’s challenge can be met. If, as Chalmers suggests, the challenge leads us to posit a primitive indexical fact, it becomes very difficult indeed to see how such an indexical fact can be accommodated within a materialist view of the world. It becomes difficult, in fact, to see how the self can be regarded as simply an object in the public world, whose identity through time is in principle not radically different from the identity of other things in the world. Far from being a thin feature of consciousness, the basic indexical ‘I’, if we are compelled to admit it, carries with it a series of implications for our understanding of personal identity which are dramatic—or so it can be argued. In what follows I shall attempt to set out briefly what these appear to be. I have to acknowledge that my claims will appear to be highly contentious and that they will be rejected by many or even most people who have thought about this issue. In the following chapters, I shall look at possible responses to the claim that we are compelled to posit the primitive indexical fact expressed by the use of the first person, and that the implications of this fundamentally affect our understanding of the self, and I shall examine a range of alternative approaches to the issue of the nature of the self and of personal identity which have been current in the literature and attempt to show that they fail.

The First Person

Here is one way in which the thought that we may have to posit a primitive indexical fact conveyed by the indexical ‘I’ can be approached. There is, as some have openly acknowledged, always a gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’. No amount of information conveyed without recourse to indexicals can give the information that, for example, I am the person described in such-and-such a way. The basic thought has been expressed by a number of philosophers. McTaggart argued that the self cannot be known ‘by description’, for unless we are directly aware of ourselves, unless we know ourselves ‘by acquaintance’, we could not know that any particular description applies to us: I could not know of any particular description that it is a description of myself.³ The same thought is expressed by Shoemaker in his paper ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’:

If the awareness that I am in pain had an explanation analogous to this [i.e., to my perceiving that John has a beard] it would have to be that I ‘perceive’ by ‘inner sense’ something whose ‘observed properties’ identify it as myself … But of course in order to identify this self as myself by the possession of this property, I would have to know that I observed it by inner sense, and this self-knowledge, being the ground of my identification of the self, could not itself be grounded on that identification.⁴

But if ‘I’ picks out an object in the public world, then, it might be argued, it ought to be the case that one can indeed know oneself ‘by description’. To know that there is an object in the world which satisfies some specified description would be to know that the object in the world is oneself. After all, as McDowell points out, surely correctly, if we are merely ‘elements of the objective order of things’, then ‘[o]ne must conceive the states of affairs one represents in one’s “egocentric” thoughts … as states of affairs which could be described impersonally, from no particular standpoint’.⁵ But if this is true, then there cannot be the gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’, for the absence of such a gap seems a precondition of our being able to understand ourselves as ‘elements of the objective order of things’.

But there is such a gap. We have to allow the primitive indexical ‘I’. That means, or so I shall argue, that we have to introduce into our ontology specifically first-person facts, perspectives, and properties. In what follows, I shall draw out what seem to me to be the implications of this. Once we recognise this, we must bid farewell to the idea that our understanding of persons is governed by a conception of human beings as merely a certain sort of object in the world. We also have to face this crucial question about the nature of personal identity: if knowing oneself to have certain properties cannot be a matter of perceiving certain properties whose character identifies them as mine, what is the relation between the self and the properties the self possesses? If there is always a gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’, then the relation between myself and the properties I happen to possess looks to be no more than contingent. If we must posit the primitive indexical ‘I’, the same conclusion is indicated: the relation between what is denoted by that indexical and the properties it possesses looks again to be merely contingent. I am aware of myself as having certain properties, but I do not and cannot identify myself through observing certain properties whose character indicates that they are mine. Of course, I cannot be aware of myself without being aware of myself as conscious and as having some state of consciousness or other, but I do not and cannot infer from the nature of these states of consciousness that they are mine. And I seem able to understand without much difficulty the possibility that I might have had properties radically different from those which I in fact have.

The problem which looms here concerns not only the connection between the self and the properties it possesses at any one time. This looks, I have suggested, to be contingent. The same point, however, also seems to undermine any attempt to establish that there are criteria of personal identity through time. For to suppose that there are criteria of personal identity through time is to suppose that there are certain conditions which constitute what is logically constitutive of being the same person through time. But, again, it is difficult to see how there could be any such condition or criterion if it is the case that there is a gap between ‘there is a person of such and such a description’, on one hand, and ‘the person thus described is me’, on the other. If there are no such criteria, no conditions the satisfaction of which establishes that the person who meets those conditions is me, then equally there can be no conditions the satisfaction of which establishes that the person who meets those conditions at any point over time is me. That is, it seems to follow that there can be no criteria of personal identity over time. We seem incapable of avoiding the conclusion that being the same person over time is compatible with any amount of discontinuity in terms of bodily or psychological continuity, to name the two standard, suggested criteria of personal identity over time. And we shall see that attempts to establish such criteria in fact reveal themselves to be incoherent in a variety of different ways.

To talk of criteria in the strict sense is to talk of wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Personal Identity and the First Person
• 2 The First Person
• 3 Body
• 4 Psychology
• 5 Persons and Possible Worlds
• 6 Retrospect
• Index