I have identified a possible flaw in a thought-experiment-based argument I posted here ('Kirk dies') some time ago. I wrote:
"We willingly go to sleep at night. We willingly get anesthetized for an operation. We might also be happy to go into 'cold storage' for a long space journey or to survive a devastating catastrophe on earth (a 'nuclear winter', for example).
But, what if, though we could be certain the hibernation device would not fail to keep our body alive and in a resuscitatable state, we just did not know whether or not it would ever get around to waking us up?
Going into such a device becomes exactly equivalent to a game of Russian roulette. Death (as in the death of the body) is functionally equivalent to not waking up, ever. All the death of the body does is make it impossible ever to wake up. It takes away hope.
But, from the point of view of the unconscious person, hope – or any kind of expectation – is irrelevant. So the experience of death is equivalent to the experience of going into a state of unconsciousness – nothing more."
The problem (as I now see it) is that I was overlooking the fact that a body which is revivable must, like any living thing, be in some sense sentient.*
A person requires consciousness as well as a social context, etc., and so is much more than a sentient body or body components. But the latter is the basis and sine qua non of the former and – crucially – is what makes me me and not you.**
The higher functions of my brain (or my 'mind') fade in and out, and may go permanently before my body fails. Once they are gone, I (as a functioning person) am gone. But in another sense I live on in my separateness until the death of the body.
In a fundamental sense, basic sentience is a far more interesting phenomenon than consciousness or self-consciousness, as it is the root of the latter. If there is a deep mystery in the universe, sentience is it. The primitive organism in a rock pool attracted to the warmth of the sun: this is what is most remarkable.
A human body, then, in some imagined technology-induced kind of super-hibernation would be unconscious but sentient (probably in many ways). And such a 'sleep' – even if extended indefinitely – is not at all equivalent to death.
I thought I had demonstrated (assuming that a functioning human body is entirely physical, i.e. soulless) that there can be no afterlife, no waking up (as it were) after death.*** But my little thought experiment was, I think, fatally flawed.
All sorts of possibilities – especially in an infinite universe (or multiverse) with multiple copies and so on – remain in place (faint though these possibilities may be).
* I am assuming here that any process which completely shuts down the functioning of organs, cells etc. would not be reversible: it would in effect kill the body.
** I know there are difficult questions about what it is exactly that confers identity on an individual or what identity consists of or in which I'm skirting here, but (if one rejects a Cartesian view) the living body is clearly basic.
*** Looking at things from a first-person perspective helps to keep these sorts of discussions grounded. Look, for example, at the sort of question that a dying person might ask him/herself. Something like: "Is this the end, the end of all experience (for me)?" I put the 'for me' in brackets because the burden of the question lies elsewhere. The dying person is not interested in me-ness but in whether or not there are going to be any more experiences. One can imagine – looking forward – waking up as oneself at another (say, earlier) stage of life, as someone else entirely or even as a giant cockroach – and I think these imaginings are at least coherent. (Kafka's giant bug had psychological continuity with the man who suffered the transformation. My cockroach doesn't (necessarily), and nor does my someone else. Thus the inserted clause, 'looking forward'.)
Showing posts with label self. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Death and the sense of self
This is a postscript to some previous discussions on death, human identity and 'the phantom self'.
These issues are quite maddening because one feels they should be simple. But (certainly as philosophers like Derek Parfit present them) they don't seem so.
I have given my (provisional) views on all this, and one of my conclusions is that Parfit's suggestion that day-to-day survival is not what it seems, being virtually equivalent to dying and having an exact copy live on, is just wrong.
Sure, the notions of the self and identity are problematic, but our struggle for (bodily) survival is at the heart of things, surely. We know what it is to go into an unconscious state and subsequently wake up. And we can imagine – not waking up! (Foresee our own actual death, in other words.)
However, having had various private discussions on this matter, I recognize that some people see it differently from me and would be happy enough to have their bodies destroyed so long as an exact copy survived.
"But look at it from your point of view," I would say. "You go into the (transporter) machine, get scanned, lose consciousness, and that would be that. You wouldn't 'wake up' as the copy (or one of the copies if there were several). You wouldn't wake up at all. Ever. Whereas, of course, for other people 'you' would still be there. Your wife would not have lost her husband, etc.. But you would have lost your wife – and everything else."
"But this you you talk about, what is it? You speak as if it's a soul or an essence..."
Which I of course deny. But I see that my interlocutor just doesn't get what I am saying, and I begin to wonder if I am making sense.
People see these matters very differently, and I suspect that one of my interlocutors may have given an explanation of sorts when he said, "Some people just have a stronger sense of self than others."
Those with a stronger sense of self, then, would be less likely to identify that self with any copy, however exact.
You could also plausibly see a strong sense of self as being associated with a strong survival instinct (and/or egoism), and a weaker sense of self with a less-strong survival instinct. But the crucial question is: how does this translate into truth claims?
It could be that a weaker sense of self tends to obscure – or blur – the simple (and tragic) truth about death. Then again, perhaps a strong sense of self and survival instinct leads one to underestimate the equivocal and tenuous nature of the self.
The human self is a complex – and indeed tenuous – phenomenon, based as it is on cultural and social as well as biological factors. But tying its fate to the fate of the body does not entail identifying it exclusively with the body in any simple way. For the self depends on the body, even if it also depends on other things. And when the body fails, it fails.
A couple of final comments of a more general nature.
It seems clear that a straightforward scientific approach doesn't seem to work on these problems of death and identity just as it fails to work on other typical philosophical problems – like free will. Could this have something to do with self-reference?
The major paradoxes of logic are self-referential, and the problems being discussed here (and the free will problem also) have a self-referential element.
And though self-reference in logic doesn't relate to a human self but just to concepts turning back on themselves (like a set being a member of itself), there does seem to be a parallel that may help to explain the intractability of these sorts of questions.
The problems (or limitations) may, in other words, be logical as well as psychological (and so deeper).
Science aspires to an objective, third-person point of view or 'view from nowhere'. It is not undermined (though perhaps dogged at a fundamental level) by those self-referential logical paradoxes. And it can readily explain (albeit from a general, objective point of view) how first-person perspectives arise in nature – and much about them.
The first-person point of view is fine, in fact – until it starts to reflect on its own nature and make (science-like) claims about itself.
These issues are quite maddening because one feels they should be simple. But (certainly as philosophers like Derek Parfit present them) they don't seem so.
I have given my (provisional) views on all this, and one of my conclusions is that Parfit's suggestion that day-to-day survival is not what it seems, being virtually equivalent to dying and having an exact copy live on, is just wrong.
Sure, the notions of the self and identity are problematic, but our struggle for (bodily) survival is at the heart of things, surely. We know what it is to go into an unconscious state and subsequently wake up. And we can imagine – not waking up! (Foresee our own actual death, in other words.)
However, having had various private discussions on this matter, I recognize that some people see it differently from me and would be happy enough to have their bodies destroyed so long as an exact copy survived.
"But look at it from your point of view," I would say. "You go into the (transporter) machine, get scanned, lose consciousness, and that would be that. You wouldn't 'wake up' as the copy (or one of the copies if there were several). You wouldn't wake up at all. Ever. Whereas, of course, for other people 'you' would still be there. Your wife would not have lost her husband, etc.. But you would have lost your wife – and everything else."
"But this you you talk about, what is it? You speak as if it's a soul or an essence..."
Which I of course deny. But I see that my interlocutor just doesn't get what I am saying, and I begin to wonder if I am making sense.
People see these matters very differently, and I suspect that one of my interlocutors may have given an explanation of sorts when he said, "Some people just have a stronger sense of self than others."
Those with a stronger sense of self, then, would be less likely to identify that self with any copy, however exact.
You could also plausibly see a strong sense of self as being associated with a strong survival instinct (and/or egoism), and a weaker sense of self with a less-strong survival instinct. But the crucial question is: how does this translate into truth claims?
It could be that a weaker sense of self tends to obscure – or blur – the simple (and tragic) truth about death. Then again, perhaps a strong sense of self and survival instinct leads one to underestimate the equivocal and tenuous nature of the self.
The human self is a complex – and indeed tenuous – phenomenon, based as it is on cultural and social as well as biological factors. But tying its fate to the fate of the body does not entail identifying it exclusively with the body in any simple way. For the self depends on the body, even if it also depends on other things. And when the body fails, it fails.
A couple of final comments of a more general nature.
It seems clear that a straightforward scientific approach doesn't seem to work on these problems of death and identity just as it fails to work on other typical philosophical problems – like free will. Could this have something to do with self-reference?
The major paradoxes of logic are self-referential, and the problems being discussed here (and the free will problem also) have a self-referential element.
And though self-reference in logic doesn't relate to a human self but just to concepts turning back on themselves (like a set being a member of itself), there does seem to be a parallel that may help to explain the intractability of these sorts of questions.
The problems (or limitations) may, in other words, be logical as well as psychological (and so deeper).
Science aspires to an objective, third-person point of view or 'view from nowhere'. It is not undermined (though perhaps dogged at a fundamental level) by those self-referential logical paradoxes. And it can readily explain (albeit from a general, objective point of view) how first-person perspectives arise in nature – and much about them.
The first-person point of view is fine, in fact – until it starts to reflect on its own nature and make (science-like) claims about itself.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Wittgenstein's anti-metaphysical stance
One thing I share with Ludwig Wittgenstein is a hostility towards metaphysics.
Henry Le Roy Finch argues* that the origin of metaphysics lies in the idea of identity, which he traces to Plato's conception of original or self-existing things, and to Aristotle's (and the Aristotelian tradition's) more systematically logical approach to the notion of self-identity.
That a thing is identical with itself (traditionally referred to as Aristotle's first law of thought) is often seen as the foundation for all logic.
Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thought that there was no more meaningless statement than a statement of self-identity. "To say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all." (Tractatus 5.5303)
Quite.
But Finch goes further and suggests that this skepticism about self-identity is linked to Wittgenstein's rejection of the popular notion of personal identity, the Cartesian thinking self. This is a central theme of Wittgenstein's (subsequently taken up by Gilbert Ryle). As Wittgenstein put it: "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (Tractatus 5.631)
Certainly, both this claim and the previously-cited one are anti-metaphysical. And, significantly, Wittgenstein saw metaphysics and religion (or at least the sort of religion he embraced) as being in opposition to one another rather than as allies.
Finch rightly points out that "identitylessness" is at the heart of some important religious traditions, notably Buddhism, certain forms of Christianity** and Islam in its Sufi aspect.
Wittgenstein said that his goal was to "show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle", which can be interpreted as referring to the freeing of the human being from his or her false self-perception as a thinking self in its own private world. And this view of freedom is quite consistent with the religious traditions listed above.
On the other hand, as Finch points out, it is not consistent with other religious and philosophical approaches:
"The Stoic (and some would say also Judaic) idea of freedom is essentially that of Kant, which is that of the ethical self or free will, in which the self still retains its identity through its capacity to decide."
I remain uncomfortable with religious language and concepts, but I don't think someone like Wittgenstein can be understood (and I think he is worth trying to understand) if one ignores the implicit religious dimensions of his thought.
Also, having grown up (and so having invested a lot) in a religious tradition which I subsequently rejected, it's satisfying to see elements of that tradition coming into play here in a positive way.
* See his Wittgenstein, published by Element Books as part of the series Masters of Philosophy.
** I would single out the tradition known as fideism, and also the various mystical traditions. Pauline themes are important here; and it is worth noting in this connection that Wittgenstein liked the writings of the twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth.
Henry Le Roy Finch argues* that the origin of metaphysics lies in the idea of identity, which he traces to Plato's conception of original or self-existing things, and to Aristotle's (and the Aristotelian tradition's) more systematically logical approach to the notion of self-identity.
That a thing is identical with itself (traditionally referred to as Aristotle's first law of thought) is often seen as the foundation for all logic.
Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thought that there was no more meaningless statement than a statement of self-identity. "To say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all." (Tractatus 5.5303)
Quite.
But Finch goes further and suggests that this skepticism about self-identity is linked to Wittgenstein's rejection of the popular notion of personal identity, the Cartesian thinking self. This is a central theme of Wittgenstein's (subsequently taken up by Gilbert Ryle). As Wittgenstein put it: "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (Tractatus 5.631)
Certainly, both this claim and the previously-cited one are anti-metaphysical. And, significantly, Wittgenstein saw metaphysics and religion (or at least the sort of religion he embraced) as being in opposition to one another rather than as allies.
Finch rightly points out that "identitylessness" is at the heart of some important religious traditions, notably Buddhism, certain forms of Christianity** and Islam in its Sufi aspect.
Wittgenstein said that his goal was to "show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle", which can be interpreted as referring to the freeing of the human being from his or her false self-perception as a thinking self in its own private world. And this view of freedom is quite consistent with the religious traditions listed above.
On the other hand, as Finch points out, it is not consistent with other religious and philosophical approaches:
"The Stoic (and some would say also Judaic) idea of freedom is essentially that of Kant, which is that of the ethical self or free will, in which the self still retains its identity through its capacity to decide."
I remain uncomfortable with religious language and concepts, but I don't think someone like Wittgenstein can be understood (and I think he is worth trying to understand) if one ignores the implicit religious dimensions of his thought.
Also, having grown up (and so having invested a lot) in a religious tradition which I subsequently rejected, it's satisfying to see elements of that tradition coming into play here in a positive way.
* See his Wittgenstein, published by Element Books as part of the series Masters of Philosophy.
** I would single out the tradition known as fideism, and also the various mystical traditions. Pauline themes are important here; and it is worth noting in this connection that Wittgenstein liked the writings of the twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth.
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