Gertie wrote: ↑May 30th, 2020, 11:35 amMy summary position position is -
What makes me worth calling a Me, is all about my experiential states. The underlying explanation for how that ties in with our materialist model of the world is an open question.
TLDR version -
I'm suggesting we start by examining what we mean by terms like Subject and Self. What constitutes such a thing.
And I'm suggesting it is essentially experiential. The properties which constitute being a Me, rather than just another object 'out there', lie in the way experience manifests.
In humans experiential content and the ways it manifests results in a Sense of being a discrete, unified, first person pov moving through space and time correlated to a specific body acting in an 'external' world. These properties enable us to have a mental model of our Self which we are aware of, can introspect, and give traits and agency to in the context of our overall model of the world, how it works and how we fit in.
This is what being a Self, a Subject, a Me, means (for humans). And I'm suggesting treating that as our foundational starting point for thinking about Selves and Subjects. (Rather than trying to use as foundational our current materialist model of the how the world works, and materialist based ways of thinking and associated causality ingrained in the grammatical structures we think in. Subject --> verb --> Object. Then seeing how that sense of self might fit in).
Then once we agree what we're talking about, we can explore the explanation for how that Sense of Self arises. From idealism to reductive materialism, and all the isms in between. That's an open question.
So whether it makes sense to talk of Experiencers as something different from the experiencing, will depend on the (as yet unknown) mind-body relationship. There is a fact of the matter explanation for the correlation we observe between some substrates/physical processes and associated experiential states, but we don't know what it is. If/when we do, we can know whether the questions and answers you give here are getting to the heart of that relationship, or a mis-framing of what's really going on.
So it might or might not be appropriate to use a dualistic framing of Substrate/Experiencer and Experiencing. You believe the evidence points to that being a reality based appropriate type of framing, and you could be right. I happen to think we're probably missing some more fundamental understanding of how the world works, which might make that type of framing inappropriate.
Never-the-less, this experiential Sense of Self is real, and has properties which are inherently experiential, and those are what I've tried to encapsulate in my sorta definition.
* Okay, let's say, narrowly defined, the sense of (the) self is one's awareness of being an individual mental/experiential subject, a subject of mental/experiential properties or states. Broadly defined, it is also one's awareness of being an individual corporeal, material object, or of having such an object as one's body. (Of course, a pure soul isn't aware of being or having a body, since it isn't and doesn't have a body.)
QUOTE>
"I take
persons or
selves (terms I use interchangeably) to be subjects of experience….
…By a
self…I mean a possible object of first-person reference and subject of first-person thoughts: a being which can think that
it itself is thus and so and can identify itself as the unique subject of certain thoughts and experiences and as the unique agent of certain actions. Such a being may well also be able to recognize itself as the unique possessor of a certain body, but it cannot plausibly be insisted that a capacity for such recognition is a logically necessary condition of selfhood, even if it can be argued –which I do not say it can – that embodiment itself is a logically necessary condition of selfhood. (…)
When I characterize the self as a being which can identify itself as the unique subject of certain thoughts and experiences, I mean that it is a logically necessary condition of selfhood that a self should know, of any concurrent conscious thought or experience which is its own, that it
is its own thought or experience and no one else's. For instance, if a certain presently occurring pain is mine, then I must now know of that pain that it is mine and mine alone – a thought which I might express in words by means of the sentence 'This pain is my pain' (although I do not insist that a self be capable of articulating such thoughts)."
(Lowe, E. J.
Subjects of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. p. 5)
<QUOTE
Remark: If selfhood is the same as personhood, then not all subjects are selves, because not all subjects are persons.
* When you write that "What constitutes such a thing…is essentially experiential", it's not clear to me whether this is an expression of
reductive realism or
nonreductive realism about subjects or selves.
QUOTE>
"…the Self, in the sense of the whole complex of contemporary and successive interrelated mental events which together constitute our mental history. If we reject the Pure Ego theory this complex will
be the Total Self. If we accept the Pure Ego theory the Total Self will be this complex together with the Pure Ego in its relation of ownership to all the events in the complex. Let us call the complex of interrelated mental events the 'Empirical Self'. No one seriously doubts the existence of Empirical Selves, whether he accepts or rejects the Pure Ego theory. If a man rejects the Pure Ego theory, the Total Self and the Empirical Self are, on his view, identical. If he accepts the Pure Ego theory, the Empirical Self must still be admitted to exist; but the Total Self will not be identical with it. The Total Self will then be the larger complex which consists of the Empirical Self and of the Pure Ego standing in the relation of ownership to the mental events which are constituents of the Empirical Self."
(Broad, C. D.
The Mind and its Place in Nature. London: Kegan Paul, 1925. pp. 282-3)
<QUOTE
According to reductive realism, the "empirical self" is the "total self", because there is no "pure ego" underlying and owning it, i.e. a distinct subject/object functioning as a substantial substratum of "the whole complex of contemporary and successive interrelated mental events which together constitute our mental history."
Here's a process-ontological expression of reductive realism, according to which selves aren't "substance-selves" but "process-selves" lacking a substantial substratum.
QUOTE>
"[O]nce we conceptualize the core 'self' of a person as a unified manifold of actual and potential process of action and capacities, tendencies, and dispositions to action (both physical and psychical) then we obtain a concept of personhood that renders the self or ego experientially accessible, seeing that experiencing itself simply
consists of such processes. As process philosophy sees it, the unity of a person resides neither in the physical body as such nor in the psychic unity of custom and memory but in a synoptic unity of process. On a process-oriented approach, the self or ego, the particular individual that one is, is simply a megaprocess, a structured system of processes, a cohesive and (relatively) stable center of activity agency. For processists, our sense of self is the glimmering insight of part into the whole to which it sees itself as belonging. The unity of person is a unity of experience, the coalescence of all of one's diverse microexperience as part of one unified macroprocess. (It is the same sort of unity of process that links each minute's level into a single overall journey.) The crux of this approach is the shift in orientation from substance to process, from a substantive unity of hardware, of physical machinery, to a processual unity of software, of programming or mode of functioning. A body or a brain is, after all, something we
have, while a life is something we live and a personality is something we
exhibit. Here process, comes to the fore.
People are constituted as the individuals they are through their doings, their history: one is the individual that one is by nature of the macroprocess that integrates the microprocesses constituting ones life and career. The unity of process is a narrative unity that deals not In fixed things but rather in materials that, like the artifacts in a collection of memorabilia or in a museum, cry out to be 'brought to life' by accounts that portray a coherent story.
…
Such an approach wholly rejects the thing-ontologists' view of a person as an
entity existing separately from its actions, activities, and experiences.
The salient advantage of such a processual view of the self as an internally complex process of 'leading a life (of a certain sort)' with its natural division into a varied manifold of constituent subprocesses is that it does away with the need for a mysterious and experientially inaccessible unifying substantial
object (on the lines of Kant's 'transcendental ego') to constitute a self out of the variety of its experiences. The unity of self comes to be seen as a unity of process of one large megaprocess that encompasses many smaller ones in its make-up. We arrive at a view of mind that dispenses with the Cartesian 'ghost in the machine' and looks to the unity of mind as a unity of functioning of operations rather than operators. People are defined as the individuals they are through their active careers.
And this processual approach carries over naturally from persons to their minds. 'The mind' is now not construed as being a substance of some (rather peculiar) sort. Instead, it is seen as a processual unifier of the manifold of mental processes that constitute a particular mental life, a macro-process that comprises and integrates a varied host of mental microprocesses. Process metaphysics accordingly sees the human mind also as a matrix of process of all those mental activities of ours. Thinking and feeling in all their manifold dimensions is the mind's stock in trade. And a person's particular mind is constituted as such by its forming a complex within which all of those smaller-scale mental processes are embraced and integrated. These psychic processes need not always be conscious, our conscious thought-life is, after all, interrupted by periods of sleep and unconsciousness. But, as Leibniz already insisted, the ongoing self-identity of mind consists in a continuity of psychic process even if it lies beneath the threshold of awareness."
(Rescher, Nicholas.
Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press, 1996. pp. 107-10)
<QUOTE
*
The Experience/Experiencer Thesis—according to which experience is impossible without an experiencer, because it's part of the essence of an experience to be experienced by an experiencer—is neutral between
reductive realism and
nonreductive realism about experiencers, and also between
materialism and
immaterialism/spiritualism about them. What it is
not neutral about is
antirealism/nihilism about experiencers (subjects/selves/egos/persons), since according to it there are
both experiences/experiencings
and experiencers/subjects of experience. (Whether experiences and experiences are different from or identical with one another is another question.)
Note that my view, nonreductive realism, is compatible both with materialism and with immaterialism about experiencers (subjects/selves/egos/persons)! For example, Berkeley is a nonreductive realist too, because he denies that "you are only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them." (Berkeley)
My basic objection to antirealism and reductive realism is simply that mental/experiential phenomena lacking subjects or being their own subjects are ontologically unintelligible.
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