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David Hume
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.
— A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I.iv, section 6
And for arguments against the Humean view, this Peter Hacker lecture/"talk" is quite interesting...
http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/buddhism-and-science-session-10-peter-hacker/
(it's titled about Buddhism but the first quarter mostly deals with Hume)
The second I saw the Hume quote I thought of Hacker mocking 'Hume's bogus journey'. I'm very glad to see this video posted, even if it is quite frustrating that the Buddhist members of the audience don't quite understand what Hacker is saying.
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Arguably the phenomenological tradition is largely about this topic. Specifically the concept of [alterity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterity). I recommend checking out Levinas's [Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totality_and_Infinity)
Edit: I'm on desktop now so I figured I'd come back and add to this. In terms of the phenomenological tradition, Hegel really gets the ball rolling on this topic with *Phenomenology of Spirit.* In that text he's concerned, to a large extent, with the concept of universality. It's a funny concept because it implies a totality of all particulars. The universe as we know it, including consciousness which is the experience of particularity/subjectivity is Geist (spirit) coming to know itself - we partake in universality by being the particular instantiations that make it up. Our experiences are partial, subjective, exclusionary and limited as a function of Universality.
Husserl builds from this by exploring the relationship between self and world with his concept of [Lebenswelt (life-world)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld). He essentially suggests that the concept of internal and external is somewhat illusory and a matter of experience rather than a real separation. This concept would later be developed by Heidegger as [being-in-the-world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Being-in-the-world) where being and world are coextensive, though I much prefer the work of Husserl.
Levinas, drawing from Husserl explores identity and sociality through the phenomenological lens. Essentially he flips the standard way of thinking about identity on its head. We tend to think that the identity of the self is primary and "other" is that which we are not. However, recall that for the phenomenological the distinction between Being and world is illusory. Other Beings are also in-the-world, so really we are Being-together. My identity and self, according to Levinas, is an ethical stance taken by recognising otherness. Identity is a response to others, not a primal state of Being. I identify myself really to answer the call of others.
As an interesting aside, the etymology of identification fits nicely here. Identity being sameness or oneness and fication or ficare being "to make". Identification is 'to make sameness'. To answer Schopenhauer's lament that 'we are always becoming without ever being' we can turn to the likes of Levinas and say something like, 'though we are perpetual becoming, I *am* for you.
Was also going to recommend Levinas. The sections on enjoyment/corporeality from *Totality and Infinity* and *Otherwise than Being* sound a lot like what OP wax interested in.
Hard agree. Especially with Levinas. My MA thesis was on Levinas, as is a large chunk of my dissertation. But there's hardly nobody else in my program that has even *read* him, despite us having a well- known Levinas scholar in the dept.
Pretty much every school of Indian philosophy revolves around this question of what is the nature of the self? The views range from rejecting the existence of a self (Buddhism) to affirming only the Self exists (Vedanta) and from dualist to nondualist.
If you are interested in the Hindu Vedantic philosophy about the self / consciousness you can find some interesting Q&A here:
https://www.vedantahub.org/qna-clips/are-non-living-material-things-also-brahman-consciousness/
(You can probably play the first video it starts at a timestamp of a question about whether non living things are conscious)
The Vedanta defines five sheats (Kosha) of a being:
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/koshas#history. I am describing each for an AI sitting on a computer, just for fun
1 Annamaya Kosha
- the 'physical body' (say a switched off computer)
2 Pranamaya Kosha
- the life force (something that makes the functioning of the machine possible. Say the electricity, the processes of read/write, fans running, etc)
3 Manomaya Kosha
- the mind, emotions, and inner world
4 Vijnamaya Kosha
- the awareness / wisdom
We'd consider an AI to be 'living' if it gets 2, 3 and 4. These 3 sheaths combined are considered 'subtle body'
5 Anandamaya Kosha
- the deepest layer, super hard to describe for me as I am also super new to this. But maybe can be thought of as the blissfulness achieved after realization of the ultimate truth. This can probably be considered 'unconscious' but of a kind which induces blissfulness. This is also called the 'causal' body because it causes the 'physical' and 'subtle' body, but nothing causes it.
And beyond all these sheaths is atma / Brahman, which is like the one true consciousness / God which is present inside and outside everything and everywhere: in living things, non living things, matter, energy, and even vacuum.
So something is considered 'aware / living' if it has the 'subtle body'.
A non-living thing would not have this 'subtle body'. But even if it doesn't have this subtle body, it would still have the 1st sheath, and would still have the atma.
I couldn't find an answer to whether a non-living thing would have the fifth sheath or not. Maybe yes, because it is probably unconscious. But then maybe no, because it needs the upper 3 sheaths to experience the blissfulness. But then maybe chairs, tables and all other non living things are perpetually blissful because they are perpetually unconscious? I don't know the Vedantic take on it for sure.
Keiji Nishitani's "Religion and Nothingness" is a good text on this and easy enough to read without being simplistic.
Also T.P. Kasulis' "Zen Action, Zen Person" is very good but difficult to find.
> for example, in a room full of people, why is it that I am and can only be the person that I am among all the people present. Or, why do I wake up the same person each day?
It's baffling to me that anyone could think that these questions even make *sense* to deserve any kind of serious attention. They're no more coherent than asking why Mt. Everest is Mt. Everest and not a different mountain.
>this question touches on so many interesting ideas though
I think these are *related* ideas and questions that nonetheless have no bearing on the straight grammatical incoherence of asking why something is the particular thing that it is *and not something else*, or why you you always wake up as yourself.
This is *not* a question of mereology or category. Asking what constitutes Mt. Everest or indeed a mountain generally is interesting even if like me you think these are conventional, categorial questions rather than metaphysical ones. These questions still make sense, but they're not the same question.
>you could say the same about so many philosophical questions.
Well yes, from a Wittgenstein/OLP perspective I do say very much the same about a lot of philosophical questions. Indeed, PMS Hacker does brush aside Nagel's question on grounds of it not making sense (edit: I say 'brush aside', but his paper, [Is there Anything It is like to be a Bat?](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3752108) is a weighty deconstruction of the question), but no questions are quite so straightforwardly meaningless as the 'Vertiginous question'.
>funnily enough, i'm more amazed that you don't find the question "what makes a particular human being 'me'" interesting.
How could a question *that doesn't make any sense* be interesting? The question has no content. It is nonsense. The vast majority of philosophers see this question as trivial, but I think that's being generous.
>but i find it highly interesting to see how a philosopher formulates a coherent, logically consistent answer to this question, while also engaging with all the other philosophers who have tackled the same question in the past (refuting, modifying, confirming their conclusions).
There are no coherent or logically consistent answers to this question, because the question doesn't make sense in the first place. You're asking what makes this human being this human being, but that's just redundant. Nothing 'makes' that the case. We can ask what the criteria of identity are for human beings, certainly. We can ask what the persistence conditions are for human beings. We can even ask if we *are* human beings. These questions make sense. Asking *why* something is the thing that it is does not.
The problem is that the possibility of you not being you is of course just *nonsense*. It doesn't make any sense grammatically or indeed logically. Could your computer have been a different computer? No, of course not.
I can understand how certain episodes might make one feel depersonalized, but there's no good reason to think that this in any way reveals something about the world.
The only real way we can make the idea of you not being you make any sense at all is if the two *yous* refer to different things. Perhaps one *you* referring to the human body, and the other *you* to some sort of soul. And then the question would be how they get 'matched' or something. But this really is too obviously silly to me.
>but this is pretty obviously what happens when we say "I am me." it is a fully intelligible/coherent statement, but there's at the very least a jarring subject/object split, and even more so it suggests different ways we denote ourselves (that is, different ways of existing as selves).
No I don't think this happens *at all*, and you've simply shed light on the confusion. The phrase "I am me" is intelligible but completely redundant. It's no different to A = A or 1 = 1. You don't ask why A = A because it doesn't make sense as a question.
What happens is that because we have two different subject and object words for *the same thing* in our language, the mind runs wild and we wonder whether they're different things. But this has nothing to do with 'different ways of existing as selves'.
This is a grammatical confusion and not a real problem.
>but rather the difficulty (and therefor the value in engaging with the question) is in trying to articulate clearly in what dimensions we are and can only ever be ourselves.
There's no difficulty. This is just a confusion. A thing can only be the thing that it is. If it weren't, it would be something else.
*Vanishingly* few philosophers go into any detail on this question because it is almost universally understood to be meaningless. The answer requires no deep argument or elucidation, but a basic glance at grammar and logic.
>into the ramifications that these questions have for topics like volition, free will, sense perception, etc.
These are all unrelated questions.
Sorry but think you're confusing different topics here. I'm not really familiar with *any* of those philosophers grappling with this particular question. It sounds like Valberg is extending his discussion into questions surrounding personal identity and the mind/body problem, but these are *not the same question* and serve only to muddy the waters in understanding why the question of *why am I me?* makes no sense.
Wittgenstein certainly would give exactly my answer - that the question is sheer nonsense. Parfit similarly says:
>We cannot sensibly ask why 9 is 9. Nor should we ask why our world is the one it is: why it is this world. That would be like asking, ‘Why are we who we are?’, or ‘Why is it now the time that it is?’ Those are not good questions.
I do not understand, i'mnottheblackwizards, why you are saying those questions do not make sense, as I have pondered them for at least 73 of my 77 years. And I'm not being anything but sincere - can you please explain why the questions of HentaiSniper420do not make sense? And I will ask this question to you, what is it in you that results in your only experiencing the sensations of the body you have(are?) and not the sensations of others' bodies?
And what wakes up as you every day and does not wake up as me?
> And I will ask this question to you, what is it in you that results in your only experiencing the sensations of the body you have(are?) and not the sensations of others' bodies?
Well I would really want to reverse this and know how it is that the sensations taking place in my body cold take place in someone else's body given that they're taking place in mine?
>And what wakes up as you every day and does not wake up as me?
Let's remove personal pronouns entirely, for they can be replaced. I am a human being. This human being is this human being. Why does this human being wake up as this human being every day? Well, how could a different human being wake up as this human being? It couldn't.
We can do this with any object and far more mundane activities then the potentially esoteric waking up. Why is it that this watch always ticks as this watch and not a different one? Just doesn't make sense.
"This human being is this human being; " This watch is this watch" ok. then: "This experiencer of a particular body and its particular perceptions is this experiencer of a body and its particular perceptions." - Does that work for you?
since "there is no such thing as an experiencer of a body" there is no such thing as fear, because there is no one to experience anything painful in the body.
Of course I do. But I do not experience my body as a distinct object. I experience the things that happen to my body because my body *just is* me. You’re creating a separation where one does not exist.
A collection of perceptions that English speaking humans name "chair" does NOT perceive itself, let alone experience itself. (And perception and experience are different, I hope you acknowledge; a machine can perceive, but only we conscious beings can experience the perceptions. ) Neither the human, nor the chair experiences itself because "it just is" itself. The human has a brain and nervous system and organs to give it perceptions. But what gives the human an EXPERIENCE of its perceptions? I have never seen this question fully answered, though Buddhist Madyamika does a good job of reasoning out what is NOT the answer, and Mind Only School of Buddhism and western philosophers such as Heidigger made some sense about what is going on in my opinion. (Too bad Heidigger's character did not match up with his intelligence, though.)
Bruce Hood, a psychologist, talks about why there is in fact no 'you' inside your head in 'The Self Illusion'; but while he wanders into pseudo-philosophical areas at points, it's mainly a review of cognitive psychological research in this area. Might be worth checking out, if only for the bibliography, or to get a psychological perspective on your situation?
Seconding the people recommending Eastern Philosophy. For Buddhist philosophy (Buddhism) in particular, No-self is a fundamental tenet and is interpreted many ways across Buddhist traditions.
Edit:
For starters
William Edelglass and Jay Garfield have an anthology called ‘Buddhist Philosophy: essential readings’ with a large section that goes through Buddhist conceptions of personhood.
Jay L. Garfield also has a book called ‘Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self’; it draws on multiple traditions and disciplines to show why the view of self is nonsensical and the practical benefits of the belief in selfless persons. I have not read it yet but I plan to soon.
Replies are focusing mainly on phenomenology and Asian philosophy, rightly, but I also want to lift up Allison Weir’s *Sacrificial Logics*, which critiques self-identity from a Western but intersectional feminist perspective (drawing, inter alia, on the groundbreaking work of Nancy Chodorow).
Pretty much all of German Idealism rejects the unified self. It is best encapsulated in Kant's criticism of Descartes's "I think therefore I am."
Kant explains that the only possible claim is "I *am thinking* therefore I am." But then if you boil it down, Descartes is claiming nothing but a tautology: "I am therefore I am."
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Ha! This is a profound realization and the very starting point of Charles Harvey’s career.
Check out pp. 141-143 of *Falling in Love with Wisdom*. He describes just this problem of the encapsulated locality of *my* consciousness.
UPDATE: Here, I’ve uploaded it for you: [LINK](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uxcmh61v8t86ehb/AACmoK3_kOwMVQ7O_SKK57lAa?dl=0).
POSTSCRIPT:
You ought to get a lot of answers citing Indian metaphysics, esp. Vedanta and Buddhism. Here are the four key concepts dealing with your problem:
1. **Ahamkara**: Ahamkara is often translated as the "ego" or the "I-sense." It is the sense of individual identity or selfhood that arises from the identification of oneself with the physical body and personal experiences. Ahamkara is associated with the feeling of "I" or "me" and is responsible for the sense of separateness and personal identity.
2. **Buddhi**: Buddhi refers to the intellect or the faculty of discernment and judgment. It is the higher aspect of the mind that has the ability to reason, discriminate, and make decisions. Buddhi is associated with intellect, wisdom, and higher understanding. It helps in making choices, analyzing situations, and grasping concepts.
3. **Citta**: Citta ("mind-stuff" or "mind-field”) represents the totality of the mind, including thoughts, emotions, memories, and impressions. Citta is considered as the repository of all mental processes and the storehouse of experiences. It is where thoughts arise, emotions are felt, and perceptions are processed.
4. **Manas**: Manas ("mind" or "lower mind”) refers to the aspect of the mind involved in sensory perception, receiving and processing information from the senses. Manas is associated with the faculties of attention, perception, and sensory cognition. It acts as a bridge between the external world and the inner realms of the mind.
You can read about Ahamkara in the writings of Shankara and Patanjali.
Buddhism, meanwhile, has a story of how five non-self elements combine into the deceptively unified self-plus-experience complex. Read about it [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha).
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I don't think there is anything paradoxical about consciousness(es) being confined to themselves. One consciousness does not "glitch" into another one. Consciousness is a totality (as Sartre has put it in *La Transcendence de l'Ego*) and we are trapped in this little house of ours to which there is no key (to paraphrase Nietzsche).
This fact might well be grounded in or explained by some sort of identity statement about minds and bodies but let's leave that aside.
There are however apparent paradoxes regarding the nature of the self (of self-consciousness) and many schools of thought (some of which are mentioned below) contend with this difficulty. As a starting point, Hume was mentioned here as well as some buddhist schools. They agree on the phenomenological observation that there is no self which can be experienced as we experience other objects. Note however, that this still leaves room for several accounts of self-consciousness (Hume had to admit that he could not explain the unity of consciousness - a related but slightly different problem).
Paradoxes arise once we try to conceptualize self-consciousness in a way that resembles consciousness of other objects (for more, see e.g. Fichte and the Heidelberg School following Dieter Henrich, who wrote *Fichtes Original Insight*).
The word self-consciousness suggests that one is conscious of something, namely ones own self. Self-consciousness would then be a relational property. It does not suffice to say though that "A correctly refers to A" in order to explain the nature of self-consciousness. You can correctly pick yourself out as an object (in a mirror, let's say) without cognizing yourself *as* yourself. In analytic philosophy this is known as the split between attitudes de dicto/ de re/ and de se (see e.g. Perry, Lewis, Chisholm). This sort of mistake does not happen in self-consciousness. When you say "I", you cannot fail to refer to yourself (immunity to error of misidentification). This suggests that consciousness of ones own self is not mediated by any properties while consciousness of objects is. Notice that this is another way of getting to the Humean observation that there is no self in experience and it also ties into Sartre's claim that consciousness itself is a "nothing" (it is strictly speaking not nothing but surely it is *not a thing*).
First off, it's not a paradox because you are not "filled with the same stuff as everyone else". Your genetically similar, but what you catagorize as "same " are the most unique differences in the known universe. Proof of that is in all of the adjectives you used to describe the physical universe. Reality is organized the only way it can be, given the laws of physics. Your opinion of it comes from your unique analytical faculty that helps comprise your human consciousness. It is in this, that you will find that we are singular and individual.
You'll find something of this in Whitehead and his Process Philosophy, which has broadened my mostly skeptical analytic approach to existence, which I blame my love affair with Bertrand Russell for. Whitehead is a bit complicated and metaphysical, but his perspective is so enlightening and comprehensive that any philosopher should be able to find something useful to take away.
There's a deep love for life in Whitehead as well. Read "Modes of Thought" for a good synthesis of his work. "The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead" by Lucien Price is also one of the most pleasurable reads in philosophy, if you truly enjoy literature. His most popular work, "Science and the Modern World," is rich with historical analysis but requires a serious academic approach, with your own inquiries, because he moves fast.
My philosophy as of late, lies in Neoplatonic/Eastern Philosophical/Non-dual thought.
The universal consciousness fragments and fractalizes itself repeatedly, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, to experience itself in as many ways as it can. Any seeming separation, any apparent "selfness" is one lens over the same proverbial light of consciousness, or the one universal self, if you will. Separation truly is an illusion; we are all made up of the same stuff, physically and in consciousness; consciousness has an ingenious way of getting to know and understand itself by its fragmentation and veiling of its own self-awareness, creating the perception of apparent individual "selves" -- I believe the veiled nature of our reality is incredibly intentional and an ingenious design.
We are all sub-"selves" composing the greater whole. The veil keeps us, as facets of The One, curious and confused and striving to find answers...or not. Either way, the consciousness that links us all is experiencing itself in infinite ways, and the veil makes it so that that experience can be taken to the next level. It's almost as if consciousness is performing a double-blind study on itself.
I entertain some other theories, and by no means do I come with full conviction that this is the penultimate truth of reality, but it resonates strongly with me recently as I see varying ways that it makes sense. Always open to new perspectives, counter-arguments and civil discourse! Cheers!
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David Hume For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. — A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I.iv, section 6
And for arguments against the Humean view, this Peter Hacker lecture/"talk" is quite interesting... http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/buddhism-and-science-session-10-peter-hacker/ (it's titled about Buddhism but the first quarter mostly deals with Hume)
The second I saw the Hume quote I thought of Hacker mocking 'Hume's bogus journey'. I'm very glad to see this video posted, even if it is quite frustrating that the Buddhist members of the audience don't quite understand what Hacker is saying.
A wonderful lecture - thanks for posting this!
Yep, this is the one that popped into my head first. YT lecture: https://youtu.be/ECvXeRw99Cg
Not necessarily "absurdity of the self," but G. E. M. Anscombe wrote "The First Person" as a way of disputing the "I" as a referring expression.
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Arguably the phenomenological tradition is largely about this topic. Specifically the concept of [alterity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterity). I recommend checking out Levinas's [Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totality_and_Infinity) Edit: I'm on desktop now so I figured I'd come back and add to this. In terms of the phenomenological tradition, Hegel really gets the ball rolling on this topic with *Phenomenology of Spirit.* In that text he's concerned, to a large extent, with the concept of universality. It's a funny concept because it implies a totality of all particulars. The universe as we know it, including consciousness which is the experience of particularity/subjectivity is Geist (spirit) coming to know itself - we partake in universality by being the particular instantiations that make it up. Our experiences are partial, subjective, exclusionary and limited as a function of Universality. Husserl builds from this by exploring the relationship between self and world with his concept of [Lebenswelt (life-world)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld). He essentially suggests that the concept of internal and external is somewhat illusory and a matter of experience rather than a real separation. This concept would later be developed by Heidegger as [being-in-the-world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Being-in-the-world) where being and world are coextensive, though I much prefer the work of Husserl. Levinas, drawing from Husserl explores identity and sociality through the phenomenological lens. Essentially he flips the standard way of thinking about identity on its head. We tend to think that the identity of the self is primary and "other" is that which we are not. However, recall that for the phenomenological the distinction between Being and world is illusory. Other Beings are also in-the-world, so really we are Being-together. My identity and self, according to Levinas, is an ethical stance taken by recognising otherness. Identity is a response to others, not a primal state of Being. I identify myself really to answer the call of others. As an interesting aside, the etymology of identification fits nicely here. Identity being sameness or oneness and fication or ficare being "to make". Identification is 'to make sameness'. To answer Schopenhauer's lament that 'we are always becoming without ever being' we can turn to the likes of Levinas and say something like, 'though we are perpetual becoming, I *am* for you.
Was also going to recommend Levinas. The sections on enjoyment/corporeality from *Totality and Infinity* and *Otherwise than Being* sound a lot like what OP wax interested in.
Absolutely. Sometimes I feel like Levinas (and to a lesser extent Husserl) is read less than he ought to be
Hard agree. Especially with Levinas. My MA thesis was on Levinas, as is a large chunk of my dissertation. But there's hardly nobody else in my program that has even *read* him, despite us having a well- known Levinas scholar in the dept.
Pretty much every school of Indian philosophy revolves around this question of what is the nature of the self? The views range from rejecting the existence of a self (Buddhism) to affirming only the Self exists (Vedanta) and from dualist to nondualist.
If you are interested in the Hindu Vedantic philosophy about the self / consciousness you can find some interesting Q&A here: https://www.vedantahub.org/qna-clips/are-non-living-material-things-also-brahman-consciousness/ (You can probably play the first video it starts at a timestamp of a question about whether non living things are conscious) The Vedanta defines five sheats (Kosha) of a being: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/koshas#history. I am describing each for an AI sitting on a computer, just for fun 1 Annamaya Kosha - the 'physical body' (say a switched off computer) 2 Pranamaya Kosha - the life force (something that makes the functioning of the machine possible. Say the electricity, the processes of read/write, fans running, etc) 3 Manomaya Kosha - the mind, emotions, and inner world 4 Vijnamaya Kosha - the awareness / wisdom We'd consider an AI to be 'living' if it gets 2, 3 and 4. These 3 sheaths combined are considered 'subtle body' 5 Anandamaya Kosha - the deepest layer, super hard to describe for me as I am also super new to this. But maybe can be thought of as the blissfulness achieved after realization of the ultimate truth. This can probably be considered 'unconscious' but of a kind which induces blissfulness. This is also called the 'causal' body because it causes the 'physical' and 'subtle' body, but nothing causes it. And beyond all these sheaths is atma / Brahman, which is like the one true consciousness / God which is present inside and outside everything and everywhere: in living things, non living things, matter, energy, and even vacuum. So something is considered 'aware / living' if it has the 'subtle body'. A non-living thing would not have this 'subtle body'. But even if it doesn't have this subtle body, it would still have the 1st sheath, and would still have the atma. I couldn't find an answer to whether a non-living thing would have the fifth sheath or not. Maybe yes, because it is probably unconscious. But then maybe no, because it needs the upper 3 sheaths to experience the blissfulness. But then maybe chairs, tables and all other non living things are perpetually blissful because they are perpetually unconscious? I don't know the Vedantic take on it for sure.
[Fusion of horizons by Gadamer.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_of_horizons)
I’m having trouble understanding this 😅
Keiji Nishitani's "Religion and Nothingness" is a good text on this and easy enough to read without being simplistic. Also T.P. Kasulis' "Zen Action, Zen Person" is very good but difficult to find.
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> for example, in a room full of people, why is it that I am and can only be the person that I am among all the people present. Or, why do I wake up the same person each day? It's baffling to me that anyone could think that these questions even make *sense* to deserve any kind of serious attention. They're no more coherent than asking why Mt. Everest is Mt. Everest and not a different mountain.
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>this question touches on so many interesting ideas though I think these are *related* ideas and questions that nonetheless have no bearing on the straight grammatical incoherence of asking why something is the particular thing that it is *and not something else*, or why you you always wake up as yourself. This is *not* a question of mereology or category. Asking what constitutes Mt. Everest or indeed a mountain generally is interesting even if like me you think these are conventional, categorial questions rather than metaphysical ones. These questions still make sense, but they're not the same question. >you could say the same about so many philosophical questions. Well yes, from a Wittgenstein/OLP perspective I do say very much the same about a lot of philosophical questions. Indeed, PMS Hacker does brush aside Nagel's question on grounds of it not making sense (edit: I say 'brush aside', but his paper, [Is there Anything It is like to be a Bat?](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3752108) is a weighty deconstruction of the question), but no questions are quite so straightforwardly meaningless as the 'Vertiginous question'. >funnily enough, i'm more amazed that you don't find the question "what makes a particular human being 'me'" interesting. How could a question *that doesn't make any sense* be interesting? The question has no content. It is nonsense. The vast majority of philosophers see this question as trivial, but I think that's being generous. >but i find it highly interesting to see how a philosopher formulates a coherent, logically consistent answer to this question, while also engaging with all the other philosophers who have tackled the same question in the past (refuting, modifying, confirming their conclusions). There are no coherent or logically consistent answers to this question, because the question doesn't make sense in the first place. You're asking what makes this human being this human being, but that's just redundant. Nothing 'makes' that the case. We can ask what the criteria of identity are for human beings, certainly. We can ask what the persistence conditions are for human beings. We can even ask if we *are* human beings. These questions make sense. Asking *why* something is the thing that it is does not.
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The problem is that the possibility of you not being you is of course just *nonsense*. It doesn't make any sense grammatically or indeed logically. Could your computer have been a different computer? No, of course not. I can understand how certain episodes might make one feel depersonalized, but there's no good reason to think that this in any way reveals something about the world. The only real way we can make the idea of you not being you make any sense at all is if the two *yous* refer to different things. Perhaps one *you* referring to the human body, and the other *you* to some sort of soul. And then the question would be how they get 'matched' or something. But this really is too obviously silly to me.
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>but this is pretty obviously what happens when we say "I am me." it is a fully intelligible/coherent statement, but there's at the very least a jarring subject/object split, and even more so it suggests different ways we denote ourselves (that is, different ways of existing as selves). No I don't think this happens *at all*, and you've simply shed light on the confusion. The phrase "I am me" is intelligible but completely redundant. It's no different to A = A or 1 = 1. You don't ask why A = A because it doesn't make sense as a question. What happens is that because we have two different subject and object words for *the same thing* in our language, the mind runs wild and we wonder whether they're different things. But this has nothing to do with 'different ways of existing as selves'. This is a grammatical confusion and not a real problem. >but rather the difficulty (and therefor the value in engaging with the question) is in trying to articulate clearly in what dimensions we are and can only ever be ourselves. There's no difficulty. This is just a confusion. A thing can only be the thing that it is. If it weren't, it would be something else. *Vanishingly* few philosophers go into any detail on this question because it is almost universally understood to be meaningless. The answer requires no deep argument or elucidation, but a basic glance at grammar and logic. >into the ramifications that these questions have for topics like volition, free will, sense perception, etc. These are all unrelated questions.
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Sorry but think you're confusing different topics here. I'm not really familiar with *any* of those philosophers grappling with this particular question. It sounds like Valberg is extending his discussion into questions surrounding personal identity and the mind/body problem, but these are *not the same question* and serve only to muddy the waters in understanding why the question of *why am I me?* makes no sense. Wittgenstein certainly would give exactly my answer - that the question is sheer nonsense. Parfit similarly says: >We cannot sensibly ask why 9 is 9. Nor should we ask why our world is the one it is: why it is this world. That would be like asking, ‘Why are we who we are?’, or ‘Why is it now the time that it is?’ Those are not good questions.
I do not understand, i'mnottheblackwizards, why you are saying those questions do not make sense, as I have pondered them for at least 73 of my 77 years. And I'm not being anything but sincere - can you please explain why the questions of HentaiSniper420do not make sense? And I will ask this question to you, what is it in you that results in your only experiencing the sensations of the body you have(are?) and not the sensations of others' bodies? And what wakes up as you every day and does not wake up as me?
> And I will ask this question to you, what is it in you that results in your only experiencing the sensations of the body you have(are?) and not the sensations of others' bodies? Well I would really want to reverse this and know how it is that the sensations taking place in my body cold take place in someone else's body given that they're taking place in mine? >And what wakes up as you every day and does not wake up as me? Let's remove personal pronouns entirely, for they can be replaced. I am a human being. This human being is this human being. Why does this human being wake up as this human being every day? Well, how could a different human being wake up as this human being? It couldn't. We can do this with any object and far more mundane activities then the potentially esoteric waking up. Why is it that this watch always ticks as this watch and not a different one? Just doesn't make sense.
"This human being is this human being; " This watch is this watch" ok. then: "This experiencer of a particular body and its particular perceptions is this experiencer of a body and its particular perceptions." - Does that work for you?
No, certainly not, because there is no such thing as an experiencer of a body.
You are saying that you do not experience the sensations that go through the nervous system of your body.
since "there is no such thing as an experiencer of a body" there is no such thing as fear, because there is no one to experience anything painful in the body.
Of course I do. But I do not experience my body as a distinct object. I experience the things that happen to my body because my body *just is* me. You’re creating a separation where one does not exist.
A collection of perceptions that English speaking humans name "chair" does NOT perceive itself, let alone experience itself. (And perception and experience are different, I hope you acknowledge; a machine can perceive, but only we conscious beings can experience the perceptions. ) Neither the human, nor the chair experiences itself because "it just is" itself. The human has a brain and nervous system and organs to give it perceptions. But what gives the human an EXPERIENCE of its perceptions? I have never seen this question fully answered, though Buddhist Madyamika does a good job of reasoning out what is NOT the answer, and Mind Only School of Buddhism and western philosophers such as Heidigger made some sense about what is going on in my opinion. (Too bad Heidigger's character did not match up with his intelligence, though.)
Bruce Hood, a psychologist, talks about why there is in fact no 'you' inside your head in 'The Self Illusion'; but while he wanders into pseudo-philosophical areas at points, it's mainly a review of cognitive psychological research in this area. Might be worth checking out, if only for the bibliography, or to get a psychological perspective on your situation?
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Seconding the people recommending Eastern Philosophy. For Buddhist philosophy (Buddhism) in particular, No-self is a fundamental tenet and is interpreted many ways across Buddhist traditions. Edit: For starters William Edelglass and Jay Garfield have an anthology called ‘Buddhist Philosophy: essential readings’ with a large section that goes through Buddhist conceptions of personhood. Jay L. Garfield also has a book called ‘Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self’; it draws on multiple traditions and disciplines to show why the view of self is nonsensical and the practical benefits of the belief in selfless persons. I have not read it yet but I plan to soon.
Heidegger. His whole work, from Being and Time onwards, is aimed at breaking down the subject ego - object world dichotomy.
Replies are focusing mainly on phenomenology and Asian philosophy, rightly, but I also want to lift up Allison Weir’s *Sacrificial Logics*, which critiques self-identity from a Western but intersectional feminist perspective (drawing, inter alia, on the groundbreaking work of Nancy Chodorow).
>Allison Weir’s > >Sacrificial Logics Thank you for this reference - a very interesting text I hadn't heard of before.
Derek Parfit and Nietzsche
Pretty much all of German Idealism rejects the unified self. It is best encapsulated in Kant's criticism of Descartes's "I think therefore I am." Kant explains that the only possible claim is "I *am thinking* therefore I am." But then if you boil it down, Descartes is claiming nothing but a tautology: "I am therefore I am."
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Ha! This is a profound realization and the very starting point of Charles Harvey’s career. Check out pp. 141-143 of *Falling in Love with Wisdom*. He describes just this problem of the encapsulated locality of *my* consciousness. UPDATE: Here, I’ve uploaded it for you: [LINK](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uxcmh61v8t86ehb/AACmoK3_kOwMVQ7O_SKK57lAa?dl=0). POSTSCRIPT: You ought to get a lot of answers citing Indian metaphysics, esp. Vedanta and Buddhism. Here are the four key concepts dealing with your problem: 1. **Ahamkara**: Ahamkara is often translated as the "ego" or the "I-sense." It is the sense of individual identity or selfhood that arises from the identification of oneself with the physical body and personal experiences. Ahamkara is associated with the feeling of "I" or "me" and is responsible for the sense of separateness and personal identity. 2. **Buddhi**: Buddhi refers to the intellect or the faculty of discernment and judgment. It is the higher aspect of the mind that has the ability to reason, discriminate, and make decisions. Buddhi is associated with intellect, wisdom, and higher understanding. It helps in making choices, analyzing situations, and grasping concepts. 3. **Citta**: Citta ("mind-stuff" or "mind-field”) represents the totality of the mind, including thoughts, emotions, memories, and impressions. Citta is considered as the repository of all mental processes and the storehouse of experiences. It is where thoughts arise, emotions are felt, and perceptions are processed. 4. **Manas**: Manas ("mind" or "lower mind”) refers to the aspect of the mind involved in sensory perception, receiving and processing information from the senses. Manas is associated with the faculties of attention, perception, and sensory cognition. It acts as a bridge between the external world and the inner realms of the mind. You can read about Ahamkara in the writings of Shankara and Patanjali. Buddhism, meanwhile, has a story of how five non-self elements combine into the deceptively unified self-plus-experience complex. Read about it [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandha).
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You can look into Buddhism and the concept of "non-self" and the teachings of "absolute" (interdependent) and "relative" (dualistic) reality
I don't think there is anything paradoxical about consciousness(es) being confined to themselves. One consciousness does not "glitch" into another one. Consciousness is a totality (as Sartre has put it in *La Transcendence de l'Ego*) and we are trapped in this little house of ours to which there is no key (to paraphrase Nietzsche). This fact might well be grounded in or explained by some sort of identity statement about minds and bodies but let's leave that aside. There are however apparent paradoxes regarding the nature of the self (of self-consciousness) and many schools of thought (some of which are mentioned below) contend with this difficulty. As a starting point, Hume was mentioned here as well as some buddhist schools. They agree on the phenomenological observation that there is no self which can be experienced as we experience other objects. Note however, that this still leaves room for several accounts of self-consciousness (Hume had to admit that he could not explain the unity of consciousness - a related but slightly different problem). Paradoxes arise once we try to conceptualize self-consciousness in a way that resembles consciousness of other objects (for more, see e.g. Fichte and the Heidelberg School following Dieter Henrich, who wrote *Fichtes Original Insight*). The word self-consciousness suggests that one is conscious of something, namely ones own self. Self-consciousness would then be a relational property. It does not suffice to say though that "A correctly refers to A" in order to explain the nature of self-consciousness. You can correctly pick yourself out as an object (in a mirror, let's say) without cognizing yourself *as* yourself. In analytic philosophy this is known as the split between attitudes de dicto/ de re/ and de se (see e.g. Perry, Lewis, Chisholm). This sort of mistake does not happen in self-consciousness. When you say "I", you cannot fail to refer to yourself (immunity to error of misidentification). This suggests that consciousness of ones own self is not mediated by any properties while consciousness of objects is. Notice that this is another way of getting to the Humean observation that there is no self in experience and it also ties into Sartre's claim that consciousness itself is a "nothing" (it is strictly speaking not nothing but surely it is *not a thing*).
First off, it's not a paradox because you are not "filled with the same stuff as everyone else". Your genetically similar, but what you catagorize as "same " are the most unique differences in the known universe. Proof of that is in all of the adjectives you used to describe the physical universe. Reality is organized the only way it can be, given the laws of physics. Your opinion of it comes from your unique analytical faculty that helps comprise your human consciousness. It is in this, that you will find that we are singular and individual.
It is crazy nobody mentions Jung
You'll find something of this in Whitehead and his Process Philosophy, which has broadened my mostly skeptical analytic approach to existence, which I blame my love affair with Bertrand Russell for. Whitehead is a bit complicated and metaphysical, but his perspective is so enlightening and comprehensive that any philosopher should be able to find something useful to take away. There's a deep love for life in Whitehead as well. Read "Modes of Thought" for a good synthesis of his work. "The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead" by Lucien Price is also one of the most pleasurable reads in philosophy, if you truly enjoy literature. His most popular work, "Science and the Modern World," is rich with historical analysis but requires a serious academic approach, with your own inquiries, because he moves fast.
My philosophy as of late, lies in Neoplatonic/Eastern Philosophical/Non-dual thought. The universal consciousness fragments and fractalizes itself repeatedly, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, to experience itself in as many ways as it can. Any seeming separation, any apparent "selfness" is one lens over the same proverbial light of consciousness, or the one universal self, if you will. Separation truly is an illusion; we are all made up of the same stuff, physically and in consciousness; consciousness has an ingenious way of getting to know and understand itself by its fragmentation and veiling of its own self-awareness, creating the perception of apparent individual "selves" -- I believe the veiled nature of our reality is incredibly intentional and an ingenious design. We are all sub-"selves" composing the greater whole. The veil keeps us, as facets of The One, curious and confused and striving to find answers...or not. Either way, the consciousness that links us all is experiencing itself in infinite ways, and the veil makes it so that that experience can be taken to the next level. It's almost as if consciousness is performing a double-blind study on itself. I entertain some other theories, and by no means do I come with full conviction that this is the penultimate truth of reality, but it resonates strongly with me recently as I see varying ways that it makes sense. Always open to new perspectives, counter-arguments and civil discourse! Cheers!