Think - Simon Blackburn
Chapter 4 - the self
- Descartes salvaged the self out of universal doubt
- lichtenberg queried this…
An immortal soul?
- there are actual things we think about ourselves (once small, will age) and possible things we think about (might have been born with different mind and body, might live again)
- the first list is compatible with a straightforward view of who I am… The second list implies I am something mysterious, that my soul could endure through a lot of changes.
- Hume observes the self is elusive and unobservable, inside your own mind all you will discover is perceptions, experiences and emotions.
[ o ] room (contents of mind), can never see the house (mind) and can never really see other peoples houses if all the windows are closed…
- Thomas Reid states the ‘I’ is simple, the self is not composite. Things that cannot change and decay are not composite, therefore neither can the soul.
oak trees and ships
- Locke’s observation on Vegetables + plants:
- plants can change all of their cells/atoms, but this doesn’t matter, just as long as this ‘unity of function' is maintained.
- This explains how a human being is said to be the same throughout all stages of ones life.
- ship of Theseus, planks changed, still the same ship? What if someone had been picking up the planks all the while… Would there be two ships? Identical? How is that possible, a clone?
Souls and Elastic Balls- invoke an ‘immaterial substance’
- Locke points out that if we’re worried about personal survival through time, ‘immaterial soul substances’ won’t help, we don’t make reference to it.
- Kant, ‘representations’ are things like experiences or thoughts contents of the mind. Simply, we don’t know anything about immaterial substances. It could be continually replaced. (elastic ball example)
- Nothing of our notion of ‘self’ gives us a permanent inner substance which can survive (to be immortal)
The Brave Officer
- Locke, person A + person B are the same if A remembers what B thought, felt and acted…- rules out that I am Cleopatra, reincarnated
- similarly I can be sure I will not live another life as a dog, a dog couldn’t have that kind of mental capacity.
- “Memory wipeout destroys personal identity”
HOWEVER, consequences…
- I cannot survive complete Amnesia
- Also, problems with partial amnesia… following on from Locke’s theory, what if I committed a crime, then retained no memory of the event? I am the same human being, but a different person.
- “it seems that the one human being is inhabited by multiple successive personalities, as memories come and go.”
- Thomas Reids version of the problem: brave officer objection, in the end the officer, now general, is and is not at the same time the boy who was flogged as a boy…
- Locke’s simple reply: same person goes along with same human being… or it does not. He needs notions of the same person in order to justify claims of responsibility.
- Courts don’t work that way… Amnesia is far too easy to claim. But in God’s eyes, real amnesia does.
- Reids argument that A = B, B= C then A = C only if each A B C are simple, and not composite… Locke didn’t think this.
The Self as a Bundle
- bundle theory of the self, Hume, mind containing an aggregate of perceptions/experiences together with whatever connects them.
- hume: we are never aware of a self
- Perhaps the way forward is to deny that the ‘self’ is something we can be aware of…. this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, however.
- Wittgenstein, talks of cases where we are subjects of experience “i hear the rain” “i have a toothache”. Cannot mistake the subject for someone else, I can’t call out in pain for someone else.
- I only refers to the body…’mind’ HAS meaning…
- “Try thinking of self-consciousness some other way…”
The Self as an organising principle
- problem of Artificial Intelligence…
- self-interpretation is necessary for any kind of interpretation of experience
- “The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts”
- A point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.
Delusions of Imagination
- This line of thinking is due to Kant.
- I can abstract out of myself, i have transported the mysterious soul
- Suppose I am not transporting anything, but I am representing to myself what it would be like to see the world from a different point of view, at a different time.
- Kants line of thought: there is an equivalence between ‘I can imagine seeing X’ and ‘I can imagine myself seeing X’ … illustrated by me thinking of something such as Genghis Khan, my soul does not transport to him.
- Does this prove that such imaginings such as life after death are illusions?
Scrambling the Soul
- ‘curious’ difference between the past and the future when we think of ourselves.
- suppose we lived in a world where we can assemble bodies and brains like computers… suppose tomorrow you would go to get an upgrade and you had a choice between person A, artic and person B, tropics… you COULD be either person… reminiscent to David Lewis, there is a fork in the road. It is never half and half, I am either on one place, or the other… or neither.- religion affects the people on this subject…
Chapter 4 - the self
- Descartes salvaged the self out of universal doubt
- lichtenberg queried this…
An immortal soul?
- there are actual things we think about ourselves (once small, will age) and possible things we think about (might have been born with different mind and body, might live again)
- the first list is compatible with a straightforward view of who I am… The second list implies I am something mysterious, that my soul could endure through a lot of changes.
- Hume observes the self is elusive and unobservable, inside your own mind all you will discover is perceptions, experiences and emotions.
[ o ] room (contents of mind), can never see the house (mind) and can never really see other peoples houses if all the windows are closed…
- Thomas Reid states the ‘I’ is simple, the self is not composite. Things that cannot change and decay are not composite, therefore neither can the soul.
oak trees and ships
- Locke’s observation on Vegetables + plants:
- plants can change all of their cells/atoms, but this doesn’t matter, just as long as this ‘unity of function' is maintained.
- This explains how a human being is said to be the same throughout all stages of ones life.
- ship of Theseus, planks changed, still the same ship? What if someone had been picking up the planks all the while… Would there be two ships? Identical? How is that possible, a clone?
Souls and Elastic Balls- invoke an ‘immaterial substance’
- Locke points out that if we’re worried about personal survival through time, ‘immaterial soul substances’ won’t help, we don’t make reference to it.
- Kant, ‘representations’ are things like experiences or thoughts contents of the mind. Simply, we don’t know anything about immaterial substances. It could be continually replaced. (elastic ball example)
- Nothing of our notion of ‘self’ gives us a permanent inner substance which can survive (to be immortal)
The Brave Officer
- Locke, person A + person B are the same if A remembers what B thought, felt and acted…- rules out that I am Cleopatra, reincarnated
- similarly I can be sure I will not live another life as a dog, a dog couldn’t have that kind of mental capacity.
- “Memory wipeout destroys personal identity”
HOWEVER, consequences…
- I cannot survive complete Amnesia
- Also, problems with partial amnesia… following on from Locke’s theory, what if I committed a crime, then retained no memory of the event? I am the same human being, but a different person.
- “it seems that the one human being is inhabited by multiple successive personalities, as memories come and go.”
- Thomas Reids version of the problem: brave officer objection, in the end the officer, now general, is and is not at the same time the boy who was flogged as a boy…
- Locke’s simple reply: same person goes along with same human being… or it does not. He needs notions of the same person in order to justify claims of responsibility.
- Courts don’t work that way… Amnesia is far too easy to claim. But in God’s eyes, real amnesia does.
- Reids argument that A = B, B= C then A = C only if each A B C are simple, and not composite… Locke didn’t think this.
The Self as a Bundle
- bundle theory of the self, Hume, mind containing an aggregate of perceptions/experiences together with whatever connects them.
- hume: we are never aware of a self
- Perhaps the way forward is to deny that the ‘self’ is something we can be aware of…. this doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, however.
- Wittgenstein, talks of cases where we are subjects of experience “i hear the rain” “i have a toothache”. Cannot mistake the subject for someone else, I can’t call out in pain for someone else.
- I only refers to the body…’mind’ HAS meaning…
- “Try thinking of self-consciousness some other way…”
The Self as an organising principle
- problem of Artificial Intelligence…
- self-interpretation is necessary for any kind of interpretation of experience
- “The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts”
- A point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.
Delusions of Imagination
- This line of thinking is due to Kant.
- I can abstract out of myself, i have transported the mysterious soul
- Suppose I am not transporting anything, but I am representing to myself what it would be like to see the world from a different point of view, at a different time.
- Kants line of thought: there is an equivalence between ‘I can imagine seeing X’ and ‘I can imagine myself seeing X’ … illustrated by me thinking of something such as Genghis Khan, my soul does not transport to him.
- Does this prove that such imaginings such as life after death are illusions?
Scrambling the Soul
- ‘curious’ difference between the past and the future when we think of ourselves.
- suppose we lived in a world where we can assemble bodies and brains like computers… suppose tomorrow you would go to get an upgrade and you had a choice between person A, artic and person B, tropics… you COULD be either person… reminiscent to David Lewis, there is a fork in the road. It is never half and half, I am either on one place, or the other… or neither.- religion affects the people on this subject…
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