Persons, Minds & Selves

Eight steps into the self: what a mind is, whether you are the same over time, and whether there is a 'you' at all.

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

What you will learn

  • Follow methodic doubt to the cogito: 'I think, therefore I am' as the one indubitable truth.
  • Understand res cogitans — the self as essentially a thinking thing, known better than any body.
  • State the argument for substance dualism (the real distinction of mind and body) and feel its initial force.
  • Understand the 'category mistake' via Ryle's university example.
  • See how reframing mental talk as dispositional dissolves (not solves) the mind-body problem.
  • Recognize this as clearing the ground for physicalist accounts of mind.
  • Distinguish identity of substance, of man (organism), and of person (consciousness).
  • State Locke's memory/consciousness criterion of personal identity.

Course outline

  1. I Think, Therefore I Am — The self's self-discovery. Descartes' methodic doubt strips away everything dubitable and reaches one certainty — the thinking self (the cogito) — then argues that this thinking thing is really…
  2. The Ghost in the Machine? — Ryle's dissolution of dualism. The Cartesian picture rests on a category mistake — treating 'the mind' as a ghostly thing of the same logical type as the body. Mind-talk is talk about dispositions…
  3. You Are Your Memories — Locke shifts the question from what the self IS to what makes a person the same over time. His answer: not the same soul or the same body, but the same consciousness — psychological continuity. The…
  4. There Is No Self — The self dissolves. Hume looks within and finds only perceptions, never a self that has them — the self is a bundle. Nagarjuna, centuries earlier and by a different method, teaches anatman: the self…
  5. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — With the self dissolved into a stream of experience, what IS experience? Nagel argues that consciousness has an irreducibly subjective character — there is something it is like to be a bat — that no…
  6. The Hard Problem — Chalmers names the deepest issue: the easy problems (explaining cognitive functions) yield to science, but the HARD problem — why function is accompanied by subjective experience at all — does not.…
  7. Does Identity Even Matter? — Parfit's reductionism and its great upshot. Through the teletransporter and branching cases, he argues that personal identity is not the deep further fact we assume, and — astonishingly — that…
  8. The Self, Assembled and Set Aside — Synthesis. The two strands (mind/body and identity-over-time) and the arc from Descartes' certain self to Parfit's reductive dissolution; the striking convergence of Hume, Nagarjuna, and Parfit on…

Works read in this course

  • Descartes, Meditations — methodic doubt, the cogito, the real distinction of mind and body
  • Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949) — the ghost in the machine; category mistake
  • Locke, Essay II.27 'Of Identity and Diversity' — person, consciousness, the prince and the cobbler
  • Hume, Treatise I.iv.6 'Of Personal Identity' — the bundle; no impression of a self
  • Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika ch.18 — examination of self (atman); emptiness of the self
  • Nagel, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' (1974) — the subjective character of experience
  • Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996) — the hard problem; zombies; the explanatory gap
  • Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984) — reductionism; the teletransporter; identity is not what matters

Terms introduced

the cogito, substance dualism, the interaction problem, category mistake, physicalism, psychological continuity, the bundle theory of self, anatman, the hard problem, qualia, philosophical zombie, reductionism (Parfit), Relation R

Part of the Simposeum course library.