from ‘The Self’ – Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies (1997) <https://www.academia.edu/18112359/_The_Self_> *In the 1990s many analytic philosophers were inclined to deny that the expression ‘the self’ referred to anything at all. Others said that its meaning was too unclear for it to be used in worthwhile philosophical discussion. A third group thought that the only legitimate use of ‘I’ and ‘the self’ was its use to refer to the human being considered as a whole. This paper rejects these views. It makes a proposal about how to endow ‘the self’ with sufficiently clear meaning without taking it to refer to the whole human being. One needs to begin with phenomenology, with self-experience, with the experience of there being such a thing as the self. One can then approach the questions about metaphysics of the self—questions about the existence and nature of the self—in the light of the discussion of the phenomenology of the self.*
… Genuine, realistic materialism requires acknowledgement that the phenomena of conscious experience are, considered specifically as such, wholly physical, as physical as the phenomena of extension and electricity as studied by physics. This in turn requires the acknowledgement that current physics, considered as a general account of the nature of the physical, is like Hamlet without the prince, or at least like Othello without Desdemona. No one who doubts this is a serious materialist, as far as I can see. Anyone who has had a standard modern (Western) education is likely to experience a feeling of deep bewilderment—category-blasting amazement—when entering into serious materialism, and considering the question ‘What is the nature of the physical?’ in the context of the thought that the mental (and in particular the experiential) is physical; followed, perhaps, by a deep, pragmatic agnosticism. Even if we grant that there is a phenomenon that is reasonably picked out by the phrase ‘mental self’, why should we accept that the right thing to say about some two-second-long mental-self phenomenon is (a) that it is a thing or object like a rock or a tiger? Why can’t we insist that the right thing to say is simply (b) that an enduring (‘physical’) object—Louis—has a certain property, or (c) that a two-second mental-self phenomenon is just a matter of a certain process occurring in an object—so that it is not itself a distinct object existing for two seconds? I think that a proper understanding of materialism strips (b) and (c) of any appearance of superiority to (a). As for (c): any claim to the effect that a mental self is best thought of as a process rather than an object can be countered by saying that there is no sense in which a mental self is a process in which a rock is not also and equally a process. So if a rock is a paradigm case of a thing in spite of being a process, we have no good reason not to say the same of a mental self. But if there is a process, there must be something—an object or substance—in which it goes on. If something happens, there must be something to which it happens, something which is not just the happening itself. This expresses our ordinary understanding of things, but physicists are increasingly content with the view that physical reality is itself a kind of pure process—even if it remains hard to know exactly what this idea amounts to. The view that there is some ultimate stuff to which things happen has increasingly ceded to the idea that the existence of anything worthy of the name ‘ultimate stuff’ consists in the existence of fields of energy — consists, in other words, in the existence of a kind of pure process which is not usefully thought of as something which is happening to a thing distinct from it. As for (b): the object/property distinction is, as Russell says of the standard distinction between mental and physical, ‘superficial and unreal’ (1927: 402). Chronic philosophical difficulties with the question of how to express the relation between substance and property provide strong negative support for this view. However ineluctable it is for us, it seems that the distinction must be as superficial as we must take the distinction between the wavelike nature and particlelike nature of fundamental particles to be. Obviously more needs to be said, but Kant seems to have got it exactly right in a single clause: ‘in their relation to substance, [accidents] are not in fact subordinated to it, but are the manner of existence of the substance itself’. ---------- @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/180e6570-5dd2-482e-b3c8-c8cc9d8d95ca%40googlegroups.com.
