I find the following argument persuasive:<\/p>\n
Premise (1) seems to me undeniably obvious. I am aware are myself as a self<\/span>. I am not merely sentient, i.e., aware of my surroundings. I am aware that I<\/span> am aware of my surroundings. I am not merely conscious, I am self-conscious<\/span>. And I am not only self-conscious, but I am self-consciously self-conscious<\/span>. This is the point of Descartes’ famous cogito<\/span> argument – “I think, therefore, I am.” He invites us to simply notice ourselves qua selves<\/span>. When we do so, we find that the objectivity of our own existence as selves (“I am”) is given in our own self-reflexive subjectivity (“I think”).<\/p>\n Interestingly, not everyone accepts (1). David Hume famously denied that he was aware of himself as a self<\/span>. He claimed that when he introspected all he observed was a fleeting “bundle of impressions”. Essentially the same position is taken by Buddhists who affirm the anatta<\/span> or “no-self” doctrine. According to this doctrine, if you are able to realize that you<\/span>, as an abiding center of self-consciousness, do not exist, you will have achieved enlightenment and freedom from suffering. (After all, there’s no one there <\/span>to suffer.)<\/p>\n Frankly, what Hume and many Buddhists might wish to call “enlightenment”, I call blindness to the obvious. The reason why Hume finds only a “bundle of impressions” is because he’s a shallow phenomenologist. When he introspects he focuses on the intentional object<\/span> of introspection and forgets the intending subject<\/span>, the “I think” (to use Kant’s phrase) that makes introspection possible in the first place. In other words, when he looks for the self he wants to get it completely “out in front” so that he can view it as an object, from a third-person perspective, as it were. But this can’t be done. To try to view the self as an object<\/span> is to hide from view its very character as a self<\/span>.<\/p>\n Premise (2) seems right as well. Setting panpsychism aside as incompatible with physicalism (‘panpsychism’ is the idea that all things, from humans to quarks, have intrinsic, irreducible “mental” properties), it seems that all fundamental physical concepts – e.g., mass, charge, momentum, force, velocity, field, space-time, quarks, bosons, etc. – are also entirely third-person concepts. Take any purely physical object, say, a rock. Give as complete a description of the rock’s intrinsic properties as you care to. There is no reason to think that we will ever have to drag in any irreducibly first-person concepts in characterizing the rock. The reason is simple: The rock isn’t a ‘self’; it doesn’t have an ‘ego’ or ‘I’. It seems that the same goes, mutatis mutandis<\/span>, for any other purely physical system, including the human brain.<\/p>\n By now the rationale for (3) should also be clear. Notions like ‘person’ and ‘self’ are intrinsically first-person concepts. The only reason why I can understand what it is to be a ‘self’ is because I am one and because I am aware of myself as a self<\/span>. It’s a concept that can only be understood from the inside<\/span> and not, as physicalism implies, in third-person terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I find the following argument persuasive: I have an intrinsically first-person awareness of myself as a self, i.e., as a center of first-person awareness. All purely physical phenomena can be wholly understood in strictly third-person terms. The self qua self (first-person qua first-person) cannot be wholly understood in non-self (third-person) terms. Therefore, I am not\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}