Some Perspectives on the Problem of Self
A self is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as “the essential being of a person that distinguishes them from others”. This paper seeks to show the deficiency of this classification by looking at different perspectives on the notion within Philosophy. Following an investigation into these philosophical outlooks, it is hoped that the reader will realise, that what they are themselves, is far more complicated than standard accounts like those espoused by dictionaries and the like suggest.
The Psychological Continuity View
“X’s body is fatally injured, as are the brains of x’s two brothers. X’s brain is divided, and each half is successfully transplanted into the body of one of x’s brothers. Each of the resulting people believes he is x, seems to remember living x’s life, has x’s character, and is in every other way psychologically continuous with x”
In this thought experiment, a person’s psychological continuance is integral to their selfhood. The body is of little importance as each of x’s brothers believe they are x after the operation. Derek Parfit argues that the accepted notion of identity as “a one-one relation” (that is x is x and nothing else) makes little sense in light of the results of the above procedure. It can be the case that x=x at a certain point of time but that it can also be y, and z at a later stage (x=x at t1, x=y at t2, and x=z at t3). Parfit contends, on the basis of this logic, that the language of identity must be given up in place of the idea of psychological continuity. Essentially, x is a moment in the continuum it itself actually is, but it is an impossibility to establish an identity as the continuum is fluid while the label ‘x’ is static. John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding can be seen to agree with such a view: “whatever any substance has thought or done which I cannot recollect and by my consciousness make my own thought and action, it will no longer belong to me”. Locke here suggests continuity (primarily memory) is essentially what a self is. If a person is not able to recount a memory then it is not part of that person’s self. Effectively, for philosophers like Parfit and Locke, what matters for a person to be a self is the idea of continuity and not a static identity. Persons are more like rivers than puddles for both philosophers.
Some readers may interject here and say that such a medical procedure like the one Parfit is utilising is impossible and therefore Parfit’s argument is flawed. However, philosophically sophisticated neurologists have provided detailed accounts of how they could occur. The results of split brain commissurotomy and callosotomy also lend weight to the plausibility of a scenario like that detailed by Parfit. As for Locke, an obvious objection is that our self is more than our memories. This writer would agree with this sort of hostility towards the Lockean account of self but would contest that the idea you have of yourself necessarily contains memory and like Locke I see memory as a continuum, not something static. Thus, trying to construct a static identity account of self runs into the same difficulties with Locke, as it does with Parfit, owing to the fact it has to explain how a continuum could possibly be consistent within a static identity claim.
The Extended Self Opinion
The extended self thesis (EST) says that mental states can extend beyond a person’s skin. A story is put forward by Clark and Chalmers about Otto who is a pathologically forgetful man. In order to account for his memory deficiency, Otto makes use of a notebook that contains information for what he must do in any scenario where he finds his memory failing him. The notebook is literally “a repository of his beliefs”. Clark and Chalmers argue that “the information in Otto’s notebook “is a central part of his identity as a cognitive agent” and that Otto is “best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources”. Instead of thinking of a self just as a psychological continuity, something contained within an organism (be it x=x, x=y, or x=z at a point in time t), this theory allows x to be a whole host of other environmental objects at any time t as well. If we let Otto be x and Otto’s notebook be q then x=x and also x=q at the same time. This can be written (x = x & q). The EST theory is compatible with the Psychological Continuity View. For instance, if we let x = Otto and q his notebook, then following an operation like the one documented by Parfit above, (x = x & q, x = y & q, and x = z & q at a point in time t). Again, some readers may contest that this is all a bit farfetched and such a notebook like Otto’s is a fantastical idea. My response to this is to doubt that such people have ever kept a record of their day to day life. In a personal diary, memories can be stored that will more than likely be forgotten by the brain otherwise. Are these memories in the diary a part of you or are they just a diary? Think Tom Riddle and horcruxes or Ryan Gosling reading Rachel McAdams memoirs to her in a nursing home.
Quick Recap and Further Clarification
Thus far, the two perspectives looked at should pose a concern to any theory of self that wants a static identity referent. How is the Oxford English dictionary definition holding up so far? To remind you, a self is defined by the dictionary as “the essential being of a person that distinguishes them from others”. Well, is ‘the essential being of a person’ static (x=x and nothing else) or fluid like those suggested by the Psychological Continuity perspective and the EST. It should be apparent that the dictionary definition supplies no answer. We are still in the dark. If I am x, am I always x or can I be y, z, y & q, and z & q at another time like the fluid orientated views above imply. In respect to where we are now, the phrase ‘the essential being of a person’ is semantically defunct.
The View from Nowhere Standpoint
René Descartes famously concluded in his Meditations on First Philosophy:
“I convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, (and) no bodies. Did I therefore not also convince myself that I did not exist either? No: certainly I did exist, if I convinced myself of something. - But there is some deceiver or other, supremely powerful and cunning, who is deliberately deceiving me all the time. – Beyond doubt then, I also exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me all he likes, but he will never bring it about that I should be nothing as long as I think I am something. So that, having weighed all these considerations sufficiently and more than sufficiently, I can finally decide that this proposition, ‘I am, I exist’, whenever it is uttered by me, or conceived in the mind, is necessarily true”.
The ‘I’ Descartes talks about here, is something he feels, something he is willing to ground his epistemological inquiries on. Where is this ‘I’ located? Is it in the brain? If so, where exactly in the brain is it situated? Is it every part of our body bar our left foot per chance? Alfred Duhrssen in his 1956 paper The Self and the Body elucidates the enormous difficulty in locating a self in a body when he states, “there is something which is always there, which I can never see, not because it is behind my back but because it can never become an object of consciousness. Nevertheless it is something, it is there, in the world, (and) it is my self... a hole that I can never fill”. This sounds a lot like Kierkegaard’s suggested location for a transcendental self as “a mathematical point which does not exist”. All of the above, since this paper introduced Descartes, seems wholly paradoxical! Descartes concludes he is an ‘I’ but fails to adequately address where this ‘I’ is located. His suggestion of the pineal gland may sound absurd to most, but why should we be confident about any other particular part of our body? As for Duhrssen and Kierkegaard, they are openly suggesting a paradox – we are a thing outside time and space that allows us to view and influence time and space (the world). Well, how do the two interact properly then? Why do they ever come together? That is, how does this disembodied, non-spatial, non-temporal ‘I’ affect and come to feel situated in a body (us), which is spatial and temporal? There is a major interaction problem afoot. Philosophers that hold this View from Nowhere position have to make a cube fit into a like-sized circular hole – something whose possible success, this writer is very dubious about.
Quick Recap and Further Clarification II
Think back a minute to where we were before we examined The View from Nowhere standpoint. We have established that the notion of static identity is very tricky. It is very hard to know x=x owing to the sheer difficulty posed by change over time. It may be that x=y at some time, or z, or y & q, or z & q, and so on. The two fluid-like perspectives above showed the enormous difficulties time places on any accounts of self that want to provide a static identity explanation. The fluid-like views had an answer though: the ‘I’ is a continuum. Sure, there may be a mild philosophical squabble between Psychological Continuity adherents and proponents of the EST but they are compatible with one another. The View from Nowhere Standpoint should hopefully elicit in the reader some doubt about the explanatory power of these perspectives. By all means, we can be a continuum in time but where exactly are we in space? I suppose, people will vehemently say we are our brain (the thinking part). However, are we not our heart too since there are blood vessels in the brain or our lungs since they provide oxygen that allows the brain to function? I would like to propose an answer to this difficult location question by suggesting each one of us is our own vital organs. We may lose a limb (like a foot or a leg) but we don’t lose who we are since we don’t die. If you lose a vital organ you are no longer alive. The self is dead. As a result of this, we are now at a point where we can say: a self is all that is vital for a given organism to live and function (who refers to itself by a name, considers itself an ‘I’) extended in time (and if we allow for the EST) sometimes in other objects bar its own body in space.
The No-Self Outlook
“The no-self theory is not a theory about the self at all. It is rather a rejection of all such theories as inherently untenable”.
The most famous no-self philosopher is David Hume. In a section entitled Of Personal Identity, in his great, A Treatise of Human Nature, he concludes that we are “never aware of any constant invariable impression that could answer to the name of self”. He also notes that when he enters “most intimately into what (he) calls (him)self, (he) always stumble(s) on some particular perception or other , of heat or cold, light or shade , love or hatred, pain or pleasure. (He) never can attach (him) self at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception”. Hume is not alone in denying the existence of a self. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche denies the notion of a self pretty emphatically: “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming. ‘The doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything... Our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the ‘subject’”. Seneca in his Letters provides this powerful statement wholly compatible with the pessimistic outlooks of both Hume and Nietzsche on the ontological status of the self:
“None of us is the same in old age as he was in youth. None of us is the same tomorrow morning as he was the day before. Our bodies are carried away like rivers. Whatever you see races along with time: nothing that we see stays still. I too, while saying things change, am changed myself. That is what Heraclitus says: ‘we do, and we do not, step down into the same river twice’. The name of the river stays the same; the water has passed. This is more obvious in a river than in a person, but we too are carried past in a race no less swift...I am amazed at our madness: we love the most fleeting thing so much, the body, and we fear we are going to die some time, when every moment is the death of our previous state. Will you stop fearing that that will some time happen which happens every day”.
The crux of the No-Self Outlooks position is essentially an extension of the great pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno’s logic – every point in time is infinitely divisible, therefore when you try to isolate a self (a static identity), you can’t because you are always a new identity (x=x, at t1 but t1 is infinitely divisible, therefore x=x at infinitely divisible t (x=x at t ∞ (where ∞ = infinity))). Owing to this conclusion, philosophers like Hume, Nietzsche, and Seneca have concluded x ≠ x, as x is necessarily a part of infinitely divisible time t, therefore x must also be infinitely divisible (x = x ∞ if t = t ∞). The essential idea, in other words, is you cannot find a static identity point in time as both the point and time can be divided ad infinitum.
Quick Recap and Further Clarification III
At the last recapitulation part of this paper, it was suggested that a self is all that is vital for a given organism to live and function (who refers to itself by a name, considers itself an ‘I’) extended in time (and if we allow for the EST) sometimes in other objects bar its own body in space. The No-Self outlook poses difficulty to this conclusion. The self that is defined just above can be (at least theoretically) divisible in time and space. How do we accurately locate ‘all that is vital for an organism to live and function’ and where exactly is it ‘extended in time (and if we allow for the EST) sometimes in space’ when any attempt to locate a point of reference is impossible as the point is always divisible? Set theory helps answer the problems posed here. We can conceptualise an infinite amount of points in a set. Mathematicians are a great help for allowing a person to conceive of this. For instance, Cantor’s theorem shows that given a set A, its power set P(A) is strictly larger in terms of infinite size. What is philosophically interesting about this theorem is that you can contain an infinite magnitude via a power set. If this can be achieved, I feel safe to say a self is all that is vital for a given organism to live and function (who refers to itself by a name, considers itself an ‘I’) extended in time (and if we allow for the EST) sometimes in other objects bar its own body in space.
This paper set out to show the reader that what they are themselves is far more complicated than standard accounts like those espoused by dictionaries and the like suggest. The Oxford English dictionary definition was shown to be semantically defunct with only a little philosophical inquiry. The self is not “the essential being of a person that distinguishes them from others”. That statement is vacuous and tells you nothing. On the evidence of this paper, it would seem more apt to call a self, all that is vital for a given organism to live and function (who refers to itself by a name, considers itself an ‘I’) extended in time (and if we allow for the EST) sometimes in other objects bar its own body in space.