Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

But returning to fatalism, the truth, then, is that there is no general philosophical or rational justification for it. It corresponds to a mood, a state of mind in which we feel out of control, and feel that we are indeed just spectators of our own lives. This is not always unjustified.

It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube, which is simply inflated by a mind

Theorists and gurus like to make a pattern: people are all selfish; people are only influenced by class interests; people hate their parents; people can be conditioned; men are aggressive; women are gentle; people cannot help themselves, and so on. But this is not so much a matter of following the evidence, as of imposing an interpretation on it. Like all stereotypes, such interpretations can be dangerous, for people can be caused to conform to them,

Hume is pointing out that the self is elusive. It is unobservable. If you ‘look inside your own mind’ to try to catch it, you miss because all you stumble upon are what he calls particular perceptions, or experiences and emotions. You don’t also get a glimpse of the ‘I’ that is the subject of these experiences.

The soul is not composite. So, the soul cannot change or decay.

What is required is ‘partaking of the same life’, or in other words what we might think of as an organizational or functional unity. It does not matter whether the bits remain the same, so long as this unity of function is maintained. And so long as it is, we talk properly of the same oak tree.

Since we reckon as belonging to our identical self only that of which we are conscious, we must necessarily judge that we are one and the same throughout the whole time of which we are conscious. We cannot, however, claim that this judgment would be valid from the standpoint of an outside observer. For since the only permanent appearance which we encounter in the soul is the representation ‘I’ that accompanies and connects them all, we are unable to prove that this ‘I’, a mere thought, may not be in the same state of flux as the other thoughts which, by means of it, are linked up with one another

‘the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself

The memory wipeout destroys personal identity. Similarly, I can be sure that I will not live another life as a dog. For no dog could remember doing things I did; if it did remember them (but think of the neural complexity required!) it would not be a dog, but at best a doggiform human being. But dogs are not doggiform human beings.

Either ‘same person’ just goes along with

‘same human being’ or it does not. If it does, we all agree that we have the one human being from infancy to death, regardless of mental capacities. And none of the thoughts on list 2 make any sense. The reason for saying that ‘same person does not go with ‘same human being’, for Locke, is that we allow that if one man has ‘distinct incommunicable consciousness’ then we have different persons, successively inhabiting the one body (we

Hume himself thought that if you did not (and could not) encounter something in experience, then you had no right to talk of it. Your mind could not embrace it, or even ‘touch’ it. Hence, consistently, he held that the self was nothing but an aggregate of its ‘perceptions’ or experiences, together with whatever connections there are between them. There was content, but no container. This is sometimes called a ‘no ownership’ theory of the self,

So the objection to Hume is that ‘experiences’ are in the same way parasitic on persons. You cannot imagine a pain, for instance, as a ‘thing’ floating around waiting to be caught up in a bundle of other experiences, so that it might be accidental whether it, that very same pain, attaches itself to one bundle or another. In the beginning there is the person, and the onset of a pain is just the event of a bit of the person beginning to hurt, just as the onset of a dent is a bit of a surface becoming dented.

I do not first become acquainted with the experience, then look round for the owner, and then (provided, against Hume, that this last search is successful) announce that the experience is one of mine. Rather, for me to feel a pain is in and of itself to be aware that I am in pain.

You cannot misidentify the subject as yourself.

It is a requirement of the solution that it has an ‘egocentric’ point of view, or in other words presents the space as centred upon ‘itself’. Given that it can now interpret a scene as containing a table three feet away, it can also say ‘the table is three feet from me’—yet it need have no acquaintance with its bodily shape, or long-term history. And it most certainly needs no acquaintance with an internal ego or immortal soul.

So thinking in terms of an ‘I’ now looks like a formal or structural requirement on interpreting experience in the way we do—as experience of a three-dimensional world of continuing objects, amongst which we move. The ‘I’ is the point of view from which interpretation starts. It is not something else given in experience, because nothing given in experience could solve the formal problem for which an ‘I’ is needed. But a point of view is always needed: to represent a scene to yourself is to represent yourself as experiencing it one way or another.

All I am doing is representing to myself what it would be like to see the world from a different point of view, at a different time, or whatever.

Kant’s line of thought suggests that there is an equivalence between ‘I can imagine seeing X’ and ‘I can imagine myself seeing X’. But because this is a purely formal equivalence there is no substantive self, no soul of Me, involved in either imagining. Hence, it is wrong to take such imaginings as supporting any ‘real distinction’ between you as subject, as self or soul, and the animal that in fact you are. So the imaginings of X do not support the possibility that your biography might outrun the biography of that animal, just because X is something that the animal will not see.

It is like replacing thinking of the oak tree with thinking of a daffodil, which is certainly not thinking that the oak tree might have been a daffodil.

guarantees continuity of consciousness: the brain might be ‘reprogrammed’, or reconfigured so that memory and personality all change entirely.

Once the facts about which current living human animal is going to be present go vague and indeterminate, then facts about who now is going to be present then go vague and indeterminate as well. Our propensity to think otherwise is an illusion.

His rather feeble reason is that we need to suppose that goodness brings happiness, and since it does not do so always or even reliably in this life, there had better be another life in which it does. Then people get their just deserts.