First Chapter
FROM THE IDENTITY POINT OF VIEW
General identity
Upon prima facie reflection we tend to believe that the physical world with its objects, facts, events and their relations exist apart from us, independently of our perceiving them in the external world. Identity comes along with them. We believe that everything is identical to itself and different from other things. These two concepts are formalized by the two axioms of Godel’s theory of identity:
1) (x) (x=x) and
2) (x) (y) (x=y. Fx:>Fy)
In English they read: For all x, x is identical with x and for all x and y, if x=y and F is true of x then F is true of y, where F is any predicate that stands for a property or a quality. For suppose that there were an object that violates the above assertion; everything would be true of such an object, since if it has both the property F and not F, its existence entails the existence of everything and everything entails its existence. Identity is the other side of the coin of the Principle of non contradiction.
The two axioms are of a slightly different nature. While the first seems to clearly refer to the objects of our world, whether abstract or concrete, and is therefore an ontological assertion, the second is a mixture of linguistic and ontological elements. We believe furthermore that identity must be some kind of attribute or property, inherent to the object, fixed and immutable, independent of any change that the thing may undergo in time. We tend to reason this way because we see no alternative to such a course of thought at a first glance. But reality itself challenges, in a variety of ways, our belief.
The tendency to reason in such a way has its remote roots in ancient philosophy. An immutable identity, resisting change has been the cornerstone of philosophical thinking during the Greek period, and even today with respect to this problem, a philosopher may be labeled ‘Platonist’ or ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘atomistic’ or ‘Heraclitean’ according to the notion of identity that she supports.
But the notion of identity is fraught with difficulties and may mean different things.
The first difference to appreciate is that of numerical as opposed to qualitative identity. For instance two drops of water may appear identical. But they are still two different objects, distinguished by different spatio-temporal coordinates, so they may be said to be identical qualitatively but numerically distinct.[1] I think that the principle of the indiscernibility of the identicals enunciated by Leibniz is a numerical identity principle which says that if x and y have the same properties then they are identical, i.e., they are one and the same object, the converse of the second axiom of the theory of identity mentioned above.
Numerical identity is an ontological claim,[2] but its paths may be linguistic in nature like when we say that ‘Scott’ and ‘the author of Waverly’ are the same person. In any language we have terms or expressions that refer to the same thing: ‘Tullio’ and ‘Cicero’, ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’, ‘2’ and ‘5-3’. Each pair of expressions refer to the same object. But given the richness of language in some cases, we have more than one way to refer to the same thing. It is only through discoveries of the structure of the world and its facts or the knowledge of the language that this notion of identity may surface. ‘Each unmarried man is a bachelor’ is something that we know from the meaning of these terms, and ‘Bertrand Russell is the author of the Principia Mathematica’ is true because we, or some of us, know the facts of this world true of the British philosopher.
The richness of language is also balanced by some poverty of language. In fact if identity is an ontological property, it may be argued by some that, after all, there is no identity between ‘Bertrand Russell’ and ‘the author of the Principia Mathematica’, as they are two different expressions. It is only their capability to refer to one single object that confusingly calls for the use of the word ‘identity’ given the lack of a better expression. If language is part of this world, it is only the intentionality[3] of those two linguistic expressions that has to do with identity. This is the hybrid of linguistic and ontological elements contained in the second axiom, where X may stand for ‘Bertrand Russell’ and Y may stand for ‘the author of Principia Mathematica’. The second axiom adds an additional condition to the first, via language: the first says that everything is identical with itself; it is reflexive. The second adds a condition of exclusiveness to reflexivity: if you refer to two things with different linguistic expressions and, if everything that is true of the thing referred to by the first is also true of the thing referred to by the second expression, then they are referring to one thing only, there are no two identical things. The conclusion is that everything is identical to itself and nothing else. So much for qualitative identity. Do spatial properties, like spatio-temporal coordinates, suffice to ensure the diversity between two identical drops of water? This is an open question.
Class versus individual identity
An additional use of the notion of identity takes place when philosophers may intend the notion of identity as referring to class identity as opposed to individual identity. If I want to know if this copy of the Principia Mathematica is my copy or yours I am dealing with the problem of individual identity. If I want to know if my copy is of the last edition published or the one before that, I am dealing with a problem of class identity. This nomenclature can be connected with the distinction between qualitative and numerical identity: my copy resembles your copy and if I want to know if this particular object is exactly the one I paid for, forty years ago, and not yours, I am wondering about a numerical identity problem. If I want to know something about the edition of this copy, I am wondering, after all, about the qualitative notion of identity; there are thousands of members of the class of Principia Mathematica published in the last edition, all sharing the same pages.
The class identity problem is an issue covered by feminist philosophy, bioethics, and other philosophical areas. Feminists may wonder about the problem of what it means to be a woman, and this is a class identity problem as opposed to numerical identity. In bioethics, they wonder about whether a fetus is a human being, or better, a person in some form, or what to do with a terminally ill person, all of which are class identity problems.
Of course a general account of class identity may work to partially cover personal identity, from a particular point of view: from certain perspectives class identity is just a step towards individual identity. Certain general suggestions of identity may in fact cover both individual and class identity, like in the case of John Locke's doctrine[4].
Diachronic versus Synchronic identity
A distinction that has gone quite unnoticed in the history of philosophy, and yet it is fundamental, is one I believe was known by philosophers like Parmenides and Heraclitus. Scholars have devoted much of their effort on identity by wondering what is fixed in a world of change, but little attention has been given to a problem prior to that of identity over time: we may call this other problem ‘identity over space’ or better the problem of synchronic identity as opposed to the problem of diachronic identity.
Synchronic identity is naively taken for granted by many authors overlooking the fact that it is the foundation of the diachronic: thinkers often take for granted that trees, stars, fish, and human beings exist separately from one another, a conviction that belongs to the conceptual framework of our adult life as members of our culture, but not proven to be rooted in reality. Synchronic identity may be captured by the following rule: take a picture of the universe at any instant T and count how many things there are.
For suppose that you want an exhaustive definition of an object like a human being from a physical point of view. What criterion is to be used to separate a human being from the rest of the universe? The best criterion we can think of is a criterion of necessity which fails on the basis of the fact that we are necessarily connected with the universe outside of us: our existence depends on nourishment, on air, on light and much more.[5] In turn, any attempt to define those things will inevitably extend definitions up to the last smallest detail of the universe. This is also Parmenides’ point of view: in the very moment you try to explain multiplicity you are forced to explain the entire universe, which is one. Therefore multiplicity is an illusion and the One is the only reality. Parmenides reasoning may be guessed to go on this way: how do we get to the discovery that there is only the One? By pondering, thinking reflecting on the apparent reality. So the truth may be reached only by thought, hence the identity between the real being and thought! The problem was clear to Heraclitus as well: some of his fragments depend on his awareness of the problem of synchronic identity. One in particular reads: ‘…of everything one and by the one everything.’
One may argue that synchronic identity dissolves into diachronic identity because in order to detect certain properties, you need an interval of time. So a thought, a new cell in a living organism, a growth in size, are detected only if one takes a time segment sufficient for each change to emerge, unless these properties can be accounted for in terms of dispositions[6]. The answer to this objection is, I think, that even if time may be relevant to the attribution of properties to individuals, none the less there is a problem of synchronic identity: we want to know at any time how many objects there are and what criterion was used to separate them. So far I have spoken about general identity problems. But our problem is even more complex as the issue at stake is personal, individual identity. This adds an additional complication; as objects of the universe we are subjected to individuation (to be known for who we are by others). Many have thought that individuation and identity are the same thing, and I think this is wrong: for suppose that I undergo a drastic plastic surgery to the extent that nobody is able to recognize me; presumably my identity is not affected from a subjective point of view (I know I am the same person I was before the operation) but my individuation is!
A modern school, forged within the field of psychology, supports a construction of personal identity that is a combination of individuation and an internal notion of the self: identity consists of a feedback between our presence in the world and the image of ourselves reflected to us from the society we live in. It is a kind of sociological self that echoes William James’ psychology (see also Mead 1939). But if we distinguish between what we believe and what it is, this notion of identity belongs to the first category and it is a form of nihilism towards an objective existing notion of identity. If we construct identity, it is mental in nature, and its ontological status must be doubted and finally denied.
Ante-litteram & post- litteram distinction
Let me introduce a general distinction that will be essential to my notion of identity, but which also covers a variety of other notions. I call everything that is constructed by the mind after learning the language ‘post-litteram’, and ‘ante-litteram’ everything that can be detected by the mind impacting reality and existing prior to language learning. It will turn out that a large class of post-litteram notions has no correspondence to reality; they are exclusively constructions of the mind that tackles reality. By reality I do not mean something out there, but rather the outcome of our perception of what there is, that is probably a translation of reality (noumena) into terms accessible to the mind (phenomena).[7] Although this distinction will largely cover other notions, it will be relevant, to begin with, to the problem of the Self. Is the self an existing property or entity that we discover along our life, or is it a construction of the mind with no counterpart in reality?
The problem of identity according to the conceptual framework set so far, and the introduction of the notion of self from an intuitive point of view.
We could analytically schematize the problem of identity in the following terms:
Ontological question: Does the self exist? [8]
Epistemological question: Suppose it does exist, can we ever come to know it? Logical question: Suppose it does exist and we can know it, why should we care?
Philosophers may be distinguished according to their answers to these three questions. For people like Descartes, Plato, and Locke, the self does exist, and we can know it. For Hume, we get a negative answer to the first, and since the other two questions obviously depend on the first, the answer to them is negative as well.
Locke supplied an interesting answer to the third, logical question. He offered a doctrine of identity that covered three different subjects: the identity of a substance (in his sense of substance, which is of an empirical nature rather than of an Aristotelian nature), the identity of a human being and the identity of a person[9]. The identity of a person is placed by Locke within the stream of consciousness and in particular within the person's memory. So by his suggestion we do get not only a class identity but also a personal, numerical identity: memories are present in every mind (class identity), but each of us has a different set of memories (personal identity). I am a person because I have memories of my past and they are in turn unique; no one can share them in the way they exist in my consciousness. His answer to the third question, why we should care about identity, consists in the fact that the notion of identity of a person in Locke is forensic, a legal notion and it contains the reasons why a person is a responsible agent. Unfortunately, his notion is defective as Bishop Butler objected to him during his life time. The notion of ‘my memories’ presupposes the self rather than explains it. My memories are such in virtue of the preexistence of a self, some kind of unifying device. A mentally ill person could have a sporadic sense of what her memories are, not because she does not remember them but because she is unable to perceive them as hers most of the time[10]. The attribution of memories to oneself is an independent, additional labeling of them. That the idea of our unity needs spelling out was partially clear to Plotinus, who maintained that the soul is immaterial or else there would be a soul in the finger, one in the foot and so on, because matter is divisible. I do not share with Plotinus his argument as Leibniz did later on, if I remember it correctly, but I do believe that the problem of unity (what I have called the ‘synchronic identity’) is primarily an ontological investigation. Plotinus, like many others, takes the notion of substance for granted and his Mereology, the branch of philosophy that deals with the relation of the parts to the whole, is defective for this reason. I will come back to this problem later.
In the meanwhile another problem endangers Locke's doctrine. As it is called in the recent literature, the problem of the intrinsic relational doctrine involves a case of fission, in which there is an inflation in connection with identity problems in the literature.
A fission is a thought experiment that, although variable, consists primarily in taking the brain of one person, dividing it in two parts both allegedly containing the exact redundant amount of information and placing it in two copies of the original body. Call the donor A and the beneficiaries B and C. Now B and C are descendents of A and as such they are identical to A.
According to the law of transitivity widely accepted by philosophers of identity, B and C should be identical with each other as well. But they are not. Although they share the same memory and same content of consciousness with respect to their inherited past, they are two persons occupying different spatiotemporal coordinates. From their point of view each of them is A, but B is not identical to C and vice versa. This is a problem for Lockean accounts of identity and variations of it; the intrinsic relational account of identity violates the transitivity law. For the intrinsic relational view, as long as B remembers everything A does, she is A; but B would reject the notion that she is also C.
According to the extrinsic relational view, which was largely assumed by some authors more than half a century ago, the establishment of your identity not only depends upon internal relations, but also upon external relations like how you relate to other people who would take in account more objective factors in light of which B and C are not identical to A ipso facto. The extrinsic relational view is the foundation of a sociological view of the self and is a form of individuation that must be combined with the subjective, what I call the genuine problem of identity and it was supported by James as we have seen.
Kant had his own ideas about the problem of identity and some of his remarks are indisputable, although his solutions may be rejected along with his epistemology on which his identity notion depends. Like Plato, Kant seeks to draw metaphysical conclusions regarding the nature of the soul from his theory of knowledge. He calls the soul the "self" in order to distinguish his conception of it from the Cartesian conception of it as a substance. While the self exists, it is not a substance. He calls his argument the ‘transcendental deduction’. He writes: ‘We cannot have any kind of knowledge, nor would we be able to connect and form a unity of one kind of knowledge with another[11], without that unity of consciousness which comes before all the content of our intuitions, and without which the representation of objects would not be possible. I shall call this pure original unchanging consciousness the transcendental apperception.’ The abiding and unchanging 'I' (pure apperception) is the correlative of everything that is presented to us, and it would not be possible that we should become conscious of any representation without it. In simple words, it is a non-substantial entity, call it ‘the self’, that glues certain memories together and labels them ‘my memories.’[12] According to our three analytical questions however, it seems that Kant's answer to the second is negative: while the self quasi-logically follows from his premises, we can never know it; it is inaccessible. One may tend to believe, as I have said at the outset, that after all, being a man is one aspect of my identity that must be summed up with other aspects to complete the specification of my identity. But this is what I found unsatisfactory in the literature. All those qualities, properties, characteristics mental and/or physical that identify me as unique among the objects of the universe are not any aspect of what we really mean by identity; Kant was right up to this point at least.
From what said so far there is a leitmotiv in the literature; misled by the fact that inanimate objects do not possess a self but only properties, many writers include persons among the objects of the world. And even if they recognize the existence of a subjectivity, the ultimate suggestion seems to be a combination of two things that are at odds with each other: personal identity is a subjective issue independent of objective properties even if the subject may wrongly see in those properties her own identity, forced to do so by psychological and cultural constraints. How, as objects of this world, we may be identified and re-identified by others according to certain properties and characteristics that must persist to permit identification, is important for cultural interchange but irrelevant to identity.
Identity in my view is a subjective stream, that feeling of being me no matter what. On the one hand, I can wake up one morning bewildered by my body that has completely changed, just as I may wake up one morning in a Chinese room in Peking and not know how I ended up there. On the other hand, I can wake up one morning with nothing changed in my physical characteristics and nothing changed in my memories, and yet feel a completely different person. Perhaps I had during the night a revealing dream in which I discovered that I am just the reincarnation of an Indian Guru who used to live in the 18th century in India or, because I have been baptized at the age of fourteen and I believe this baptism has actually occurred, have become a new person with a new secret name (as it happens in some cultures). Identity is among the prime objects of belief.
Let me stress this difference between identity and identification[13] by appealing to more examples. The scenario and the characters: a scientist, you, and your beloved boyfriend or girlfriend to whom several doctors have predicted few remaining months of life. You are offered by the scientist the following deal: we put her/him in a machine that copies up to the last insignificant little element of this person, and outputs a perfect replica on the other side,[14] while the original is destroyed. Furthermore, the scientist will inject you with a substance that will completely erase any memory of the deal. Unless you are a very egotistical person, you may not accept the deal. Apply the same story to yourself and you will tend to value six more months of life due to the common intuition that you would end up dead, no matter how similar to you would be the person that comes out of the machine. Some modern philosophers, arguing similarly to some ancient philosophers, would recommend you accept the deal whether it concerns your beloved mate or yourself.
Another revealing case is a psychiatric case. We—and most importantly, psychiatrists—usually consider people who have lost their memory as having lost identity. But who is trying to remember her past if the identity is completely gone? The self, it seems to me, is in that thing that is struggling to remember and not something in the content of the memories or the non-person (by definition) who has lost her memories, wouldn’t care less about them. I think Bishop Butler would have approved this case as supportive of his point against Locke.
The history of the notion of identity dates at least twenty five hundred years in western philosophy. Some kind of soul or self of material nature can be attributed to Greek Atomists. But my story starts with Heraclitus: known for the problem of identity over time, the becoming and his alleged violation of the principle of non contradiction; he was a constructivist in knowledge as we could call him today. True, he maintained that there is nothing beyond sense perception, but he also believed in some form of deep structure of our understanding of nature and that we can know nature thanks to the fact that our soul, a material soul, is permeated by the universal logos (his doctrine is the matrix of logical atomism). Knowledge of reality demands interpretation. Everything so far has been said or denied about Heraclitus' epistemology, but I believe that he was aware of the problem I have called ‘synchronic identity’.
It is not clear to me why this problem has been so largely neglected in the history of philosophy. It must have escaped attention as the extension of the body and therefore of the individual is taken for granted in our seemingly intuitive conception of it. The body, my body, is the container which includes everything that is mine. Of course built in, somehow, in our perception apparatus or simply acquired at an early stage, we posit an object wherever there is continuity of matter; continuity highlighted by motion gives evidence for the compactness of that portion of matter. Although we are certainly wrong to do so in light of what we know about the physical world now, even before our scientific discoveries there were arguments against this approach[15]. How do we know that everything that moves with it, is part of it, and nothing outside of it is a physical part of it? The idea that the physical extension of my body is characterized by the surfaces of my body is taken for granted but is not philosophically justified. Whatever is inside my body is mine, outside is not. This seems to be directly suggested by perception. Think of toys with remote controls. The remote control that moves the little car must be understood as a part of the toy. Analogously, we can imagine that our body is controlled by some external mechanism, or it may depend on something outside that cannot be distinguished from what we generally place inside. For some ancient cosmologies, the stars control our life.
Mereology, the science of the relation between the whole and its parts, which could have included my problem, was completely silent about it. This is thanks to the fact that most thinkers take for granted the Aristotelian notion of substance,like Plotinus discussed some pages ealier, a notion which is immersed in a dogmatic logical atomism, where the soul (the mind) mirrors reality as it is[16]. After the Pre-Socratics, the story of the soul, the locus where the self is thought to reside, continues with an innovation: Plato's dualistic account with a material body inhabited or piloted by an immaterial soul. With Aristotle, we witness a sort of synthesis between the pre-Socratic’s materialism and Plato's immaterial soul. For him, there are three souls, the rational or nous at the top, the vegetative at the bottom, and the sensitive in between those two extremes. The self most likely resides in the sensitive, and therefore dies with the body; only the rational, being immaterial, survives to join with the universal nous. This idea opens the gate to a form of panpsychism[17]. Although this is all I will say about Aristotle for now, there is a passage to which I will return later, because I read it in a very personal way. In Lucretius, a Roman Epicurean philosopher who lived during the first century, we find perhaps anticipations of some aspects of the doctrines of later thinkers like Thomas Aquinas: he seems to believe that if anything immaterial survives, it cannot contain any fragment of our identity, as our identity needs the body's support to exist (one other example of the confusion between identity and individuation). Later on, Thomas, on the same tack, will emphasize the importance of the body.
From this time on, the interest on identity is religious in nature, as it depends upon the Christian problem of survival after death. During the patristic period, some pagan philosophers who had converted to Christianity were entrusted with the task of rationalizing certain dogmas of the religion, among which is the problem of resurrection. According to some scholars, we can divide their contribution into three different lines of thought (following the excellent Personal Identity, edited by Martin and Barresi): 1) Identity depends upon the continuation of the immaterial soul, 2) Identity depends both on the immaterial soul and the resurrection of the material body, 3) Identity depends only on the continuation of the material body.
Two supporters of the third doctrine are Origen, a Christian Platonist, and Tertullian, who was a materialist. In each we find grotesque, long disquisitions about the difficulty of reassembling pieces of the body, sometimes rescued from the stomach of lions, in order to reconstruct the body as it was at the moment of death to preserve identity. In Thomas Aquinas, we deduce some interesting facts about class identity: since he follows Aristotle in dividing the soul into three parts, and holds that only the vegetative and sensitive soul are present in the early stage of the development of a new born, it follows that abortion does not amount to killing a person. The rational self is a later development in the growth of the individual.
Leibniz’s doctrine is bizarre and impressive at the same time. His idea that we are mental entities is an epistemologization of ontology, which is in line with some of what we have said so far. But Leibniz’s perplexity about considering the problem of individuation and the problem of identity as one problem instead of two is to be praised as a superior philosophical intuition; the notion of the monad solves ipso facto the gap between subjective and objective: the objective is a reconstruction operated by the subject.
With Hume we witness the first attempt to dismantle the self and his philosophy of the self started a doctrine that goes through the centuries. From Thomas Reid, Hazlitt, up to today, or the last century, we have attempts to formulate ethical principles on the premises of the annihilation of the self (see Derrick Parfit among others).
The path followed by philosophers of identity that characterized the last century was well rendered by John Barresi and Raymond Martin in their already cited anthology “Personal Identity” (2003).
Let me remind you once again of the development from the intrinsic to the extrinsic relational account. The intrinsic relational account of identity, exemplified by Locke's theory, is the doctrine according to which a person’s identity depends upon internal relations, the relation of a person at a time t1 with the alleged same person at time t2. On the extrinsic relational account this is not sufficient: not only does identity depend on a continuity judged by the subject, but the subject is an object whose identity depends upon its relations with the environment, including of course other people.[18] A successive development consists in a separation from whatever identity may be and survival, and the idea that in order to survive, identity is not of any importance. This is a prescriptive doctrine, a reflection I believe, of the first primitive awareness that the individuation issue and the genuine problem of identity are distinct issues, even if the right intuition is distorted by an obscure notion of survival that is quite questionable. This doctrine, rather than uncovering new facts, tells you that you ought to value a replica of yourself as much as you value yourself if the replica is sufficiently similar to you as to deceive individuation. Or, better, to carry on whatever you are doing in your life. So, this is a doctrine that places the self in our actions.
A further development consists in the idea that through time a series of person stages are connected with one another just like in a relay: different couriers, the person stages, pass on to one another the baton. Call this the four dimensional account of identity. Therefore identity is never in discussion in fission cases from a four dimensional point of view: two different people share the same person stage and neither ceases, a very bizarre conclusion.
On the one hand, these eccentric attempts show how flexible the notion of identity is and how obscure it may become as we get closer and closer to it. On the other hand, as opposed to the existence of objects and others, what I believe is my ‘self’ is the subjective sense of being. This light that I perceive inside, this private thing that I call the ‘I’, this sense that there is a space inhabited by me, the only agent I can be sure of his existence. Can we ever find more appropriate words to describe the self?
The meaning that we attach to this word ‘I’ seems to evaporate in the light of philosophical analysis. Does a logical ‘I’ correspond to the grammatical ‘I’? Should we trust the language to the extent that the word ‘I’ commits us ipso facto to an ontological entity? Or, in the spirit and in the steps of the reformist philosophers of language, are we better off distrusting natural language?[19] If we had to trust natural language as the later Wittgenstein and his followers have suggested, then we should find an explanation of some of the opacity in it. Consider for instance the striking similarity of structure between these two phrases: “My Mind”, “My bank account”. Were you in charge of inventing a language for living beings, wouldn't have you chosen a different possessive adjective for something so intrinsically mine as the mind to distinguish it from more accidental goods and properties? In a context of better knowledge of oneself from a physical point of view, shouldn’t our ability to distinguish between senses that inform us about the external world and the internal one be built in? We have receptors that inform us about our posture, muscles and lung stretch, level of oxygen in the arterial blood, but only through natural science do we know the existence and nature of the mechanisms that inform us about those internal states; there is no direct knowledge of them. So one could construe a culture that posits that everything one is external to the physical world and compare it to the view that one’s own body is part of the physical world and there is no way to say which version is correct; the distinction is not given but construed and inscrutable[20]. Usually, in particular if you are a reductionist, when it comes to problems of explaining the subject, the agent nature, your solution ought to consist in finding a hole in the external world that will lead you to the self, the ‘I’, the subjective entity. But even if identity were nothing but individuation and even if you believed in Quine’s indeterminacy, as I do, with its dramatic consequences for problems of reference, you would be prone to recognize that the world is a creation of the mind, no matter how tenaciously Quine struggled to minimize the problems that his own empiricism had created; this is what Davidson called the third dogma of empiricism, the dichotomy between scheme and content.
It means that what you see and touch is not what it is, but what is constructed by your mind as Kant had said some centuries ago, and Heraclitus had fancied some millennia earlier. Or even as you can read in the writing of Johannes Muller, a pioneer of modern physiology, “Therefore sensation is not the conduction of a quality or a state of external bodies to consciousness, but a conduction of a quality or a state of our nerves to consciousness, excited by an external cause.” According to Patricia Smith Churchland, a modern scholar who in her Neurophilosophy comments on the new physiology booming in the 19th century, “...it became evident that the brain in some sense must reconstruct the world from effects on the nerves and hence the nature of the world is not sheer given to us. It is in some measure a product of our brain.”
But Quine is not the only relevant factor towards a form of subjectivism or solipsism in my case and others. Even more important than Quineism for those who are familiar with the theories of physics that have dominated the scenario in the last century was the paradoxical conclusion that reductionism led to a form of mentalism in this sense: special relativity had deranged the objective Newtonian world of the 19th century by splitting the universe, according to my understanding of physics, in a multiplicity of universes all depending on the observer. Different observers experience different worlds in the face of a common single event. Even more dramatic messages were sent to us by quantum mechanics that induced Heisenberg to conclude that the laws of nature were not to be found in the properties of atomic particles but rather in the knowledge that we have of them. Almost a century later, after the development of relativity theory, we are finally coming to terms with its implications. Our basic intuitive assumption that the events of the world unfold before us in a container-like substance we call ‘space’ whilst an absolute ‘time’ flows in it is incorrect. Whatever space and time are, they are not fixed absolute quantities out there, independent of the observers that view events of the world.
The old reductionist dream of explaining the mind in terms of chemistry and physics has been baffled by a re-dignified mind: thrown out of the window by materialism, the old irreducible mind reappears authoritatively from the main entrance, with not even a scarf on it.
This casts doubt on the assumption that the subjective must be gotten or explained via the objective. Isn't it perhaps the other way around? Isn't it perhaps that we must rather explain the objective starting from the subjective as Hume and others had somehow suggested in the past? And perhaps we are monads in the sense of being universes that, contrary to Leibniz’s view, communicate with one another?
These are some of my justifications for even accepting an inclusion of an introspective analysis of the self and its roots. To summarize my points so far: 1) The problem of establishing the physical limits of a person is not well accounted for in the literature. 2) Even if it were, regardless of whether indeterminacy can be solved, and setting the problem of interpretation aside, the attempt to see as one issue the problem of individuation and the problem of identity is a mistake.
But it could be argued that I am the victim of an illusion. An elitist conception of my self, immune to any characterization that could be shared by others, would be a superb act of arrogant presumption on my part. Let me pursue the attempt to humbly accept that my self is nothing more than what other people could, in principle, establish.
En passant notice once again something consistently perplexing: we say “my mind, my thoughts and my checking account”. Are we to attribute this analogy of structure to some defect in the language, as the reformist philosophers of language, like Frege, Russell, and Quine would have considered it, or are we to align with the everyday philosophers of language, like Wittgenstein and Austin, who would probably pay attention to whether the analogy of structure does not hide something more profound? I will indirectly favor the second hypothesis with my final remarks on the self, up to a point.
Now I want to pursue the validity of the assumption that the limits of my physical existence are marked by my skin in the spirit of my humble acceptance of identity and individuation as two faces of the same coin. If the surface of my body is also the external wall of my physical existence, there must be some criterion to distinguish philosophically what is mine from what is not, what constitutes my physical identity from what is foreign to it.
One idea is the idea of the continuity of the extension, the physical compactness, preserved throughout time and motion, which to a closer look sounded arbitrary and inadequate on the basis of the difference between the physical world as we perceive it and the scientific nature of some descriptions of it. Another could be the subjective criterion: any action directly exerted onto any part of the surfaces of my body and inside is felt by me.
I will consider only one argument only against the subjective criterion: things that occur outside of me can affect me in a way that they produce a change in mental state, similar to pain or other physical events, that cannot be distinguished on the basis of an arbitrary distinction between physiological and psychological causes (they both produce a change in brain state). Furthermore, not everything physically affecting my body is perceived, there are areas of the body not physiologically connected with the nervous system.
A better candidate could be a criterion of necessity, already mentioned above: whatever is necessary to one’s identity or to one’s survival or both, if they coincide, is a constitutive part of your physical identity and nothing else. Especially in the light of modern medicine we know that many internal parts can be substituted by synthetic or animal organs that once transplanted can function in place of the original parts. The brain is the least accessible organ to this kind of manipulation, but this is just a technical problem that one day could be solved.[21] On the other hand, a certain feedback with the external world, a mutual material exchange, is necessary. I need food, water, air, and God knows what else. Of course I do not need that particular food or that particular air; any good air, water, or food will do. But this differentiation evaporates in the light of what I have just said in reference to transplants: any organ, except perhaps the whole brain at the present moment, can be substituted without affecting identity as it is understood in the literature I am trying to criticize.
These considerations, apart from the modern cases of transplants, could have been pondered by a smart philosopher twenty five hundred years ago. Heraclitus may have tried to define the identity of things on these lines: he may have dreamt of a perfect science that could account for up to the last detail of what a human body is, for instance.
Briefly, he could have noticed that he could imagine an accurate description of any part of the human body and now his perfect science needed in addition to that, a definition of whatever else is needed by this organism to survive, in the light of what I have said about a criterion of necessity. He could have been very aware of the arbitrariness of putting the limits of our physical being on the skin of the body due to two philosophical achievements of his thinking: 1) reality is not given but interpreted, 2) the soul is of a physical nature. He may have noticed that a complete, perfect description of a human being, would amount to a description of the entire cosmos.
Heraclitus might have not had the philosophical sophistication to express the whole problem in clear terms, but that does not mean that he was not aware of this problem; when he says, “everything is one and one is in everything,” he means exactly what I have attributed to him, I believe. And so it was for Parmenides perhaps, and any philosopher that tends to skepticism about multiplicity, like Marcus Aurelius or Spinoza.
When I wonder at the problem of what constitutes my physical reality I am impressed by the fact that we never wonder why we are so familiar with the environment of our everyday life, the objects of our room, the people, etc., while we see so little about ourselves. If there were no mirrors I would have never known how the back of my head looks. There is no logico-epistemological relation between my body and the way I perceive it; there may have been people who have lived their entire lives as great experts of tomatoes and artichokes, but died without knowing they had a liver.
The direct objects of our knowledge are our everyday objects rather than our body, although we learn how to adjust to it. Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description runs into trouble because it is not clear what is directly known to us without the mediation of culture.
It makes little sense to me that I know so much about the external world and so little about my internal being from a physical point of view. Were you a God in charge of creating human beings or persons, wouldn't you make them more knowledgeable about what goes on inside them? After all, it is more appropriate that an intelligent design should allow me to be more knowledgeable of the mechanisms inside me than those outside me (like the alarm clock, or the oven, or the defective lock of my front door).
Psychology, understood as a very comprehensive discipline, exerts a strong pull on our need to understand the human mind and what comes with it. To turn to psychology does not mean to get away from philosophy and logic. I have in mind the kind of psychological introspection that characterized Wittgenstein's departure from the Tractatus.
Take knowledge: if our progressive knowledge can be approximately defined in terms of an ever richer universe of objects and their relations, it is very plausible that an infant lives in a very impoverished stage of knowledge. If we assume furthermore that this sense of unity provided by what we call the ‘I’ or the ‘self’ is present at birth as a biological, innate component of our mental structure, then we reach the conclusion that at birth we perceive, in a foggy, blurred way perhaps one single object and not more than one; this single object is you. Such a result would be welcomed by an empiricist, I think. With so little that is innate, the consequence is that the individual as she conceives herself at a more mature stage is a cultural achievement.
What happens between the stage when one is a single universe and the time the world is fragmented, in parts that fall under two categories, the external and in the internal world? We can speculate from a subjective perspective on the stages of the development of intelligence, in terms of successful achievements and failures. The child lifts her arm and the arm goes up, the child closes her eyes and they close, the child tries to lift a book and the book does not move. These differences are recorded and formalized by language at a later stage, when the linguistic apparatus of reification becomes available.
Little by little, the world divides into two great categories: “the me” and the “not me”. Thus, growing up amounts, paradoxically, to shrinking. The more objects are expelled into the external world, the smaller the individual becomes.
The fragmentation of the world starts here. Later on, the linguistic apparatus of reification will refine the process, by solidifying objects, fixing identity and similarity; identity and individuation are linguistic in nature. A principle of economy may step in, to fix individuation. It would be much more expensive for a brain or a mind to conceive mother-stages or person-stages in general, instead of whole mothers, whole people. It is much more difficult to deal with stages than whole persons, as long as they show some kind of continuity, sameness of functions and properties. The principle of economy stems out of the primordial unique universe: ‘fragment the world only when it is necessary to do so’ is the inner guiding principle to knowledge. (Pavlov's dogs were trained to recognize differences between four hundred and ninety eight bits in a minute from five hundred, when needed). Just as we are trained to fragment reality in ever smaller particles: objects are not innate, the mechanism designed to do this work is.
Once the individual is mature she has also shrunken and is, at least in our culture, to the point when she is a body with maybe a mind that is not spatially located. What is left after expelling the world outside constitutes the subject.
We may therefore imagine that the process of maturation is not a pleasant one, it is highly costly and painful; we do not give up easily an entire universe in exchange for knowledge, which is needed to survive. But shrinking is a necessary sacrifice if we want to be part of society. (We can imagine also that not everybody will trade in the initial monoblock for a place in the culture, and here we have a first hint to cases of interest for psychiatry, perhaps.)
At this point it is plausible to attribute a latent nostalgia for the monoblock, a principle of will to regression, a latent desire to go back to the unique universe, the paradise lost which becomes the masked motivation for the entire life and is present in the psyche of everybody in this form: our life is characterized by an unconscious attempt to reconstruct the primordial monoblock. Any attempt in this sense will be a surrogate, since it must coexist with the multiplicity just constructed; growing up is generally a one way route.
If we add to this, a human typology maybe developed along the process of maturation we can postulate that whatever one wants to pursue in her life has to do with this attempt of a reconstruction of the unique universe according to the psychological type one belongs to.
Aristotle wrote in De Anima: “Therefore it is necessary that in the soul there be an intellect capable of becoming all things, and an intellect capable of making itself understand all things.” (To be and to understand are synonymous in this passage, and I would add a third one: to possess). And David Wiggins writes about Heraclitus: “When we ask how the logos of the world comes to be grasped by the soul, we must remember that the soul itself is not for Heraclitus something that is alien to reality; it is all of a piece with what it seeks to interpret.”[22] Edward Hussey says of Heraclitus: “...so to interpret the cosmos it is necessary to study one's own self, and apply what one finds there to explain the world.” For him and other scholars, Heraclitus seeks to discover the world soul from the human soul, and metaphysics from physics, and he mentions Kahn's claim [Mr. Garofolo: should there be quotation marks here? There are some at the end of the sentence.] that in Heraclitus the inner personal world of the psyche and the larger natural world share identity of structure.” This containment of the entire universe in the soul makes sense to me in the modality I have tried to explain, where the ‘mine’ of the mind and the ‘mine’ of external things are learned during a time of initial tentative fragmentation, so they are only vaguely distinguishable during the initial stage.[23] A philosophical intuition, a belief, or even a scientific hypothesis, according to this idea, emerges from our inner, latent knowledge of our primordial mental states, like an obscure guiding force that transforms the ineffable content of a non-linguistic mind into a doctrine, a rationalization, a theory. The One, The Unum, foreseen behind the senses—from Parmenides to Marcus Aurelius, or Plotinus to Spinoza—and the reunification with it, is a transformation of the primordial monoblock. Thus, cosmology is the extrapolation of psychology.
If I apply my three original questions to this idea, what do I get? A negative answer to all three, if I intend the self as a cultural entity separated from the outside. Or I get a positive answer to all of them if I understand the self as a dynamic entity expanding towards the inexistent limits of the universe in which I live and am a responsible agent with respect to a notion of logical consistency that concerns my moral system, whether it is compatible or not with the cultural and legal system of the so-called external world. But this is another chapter of the story.
I started my considerations on the psychology of the self with a paradox, “As our knowledge of the world progresses, we shrink.” Let me conclude with another paradox: the impossibility of knowing what we are is what makes us what we are. The self is still beyond our epistemological reach.
Summary and complementary notes
In this first chapter, I have insinuated that personal identity may be a post-litteram notion concerning a dynamic entity involved in a process that starts at birth. The individual's personal experience of the world accrued in the first months of life is blind to the distinction between the inner and outer world. Every experience is going to add to what is a monoblock, every experience melts in this un-sundered potpourri, the primitive personal universe in evolution. The One is born at this stage, but goes unnoticed as it cannot be contrasted with multiplicity! Only later, slowly and painstakingly, will the accrued experience be divided into internal and external states of affairs, facts, whose constituents are objects, concrete and abstract, internal and external, natural kinds, processes, and finally feelings, beliefs, desires, all of which are entities shaped by the acquisition of language.[24] It is only with the advent of language that the mind is able to fragment reality, perhaps operating on some inner structure that, if not activated, would shape only a primitive fragmentation, one different from the fragmentation that we know as members of our culture, or none at all. The blue print, so to speak, of the original One, the undivided, will be projected on each portion of reality that does not need to collapse in further fragments. It is a principle of scientific thought that we are never to assume more than is necessary to explain the facts, and this hypothesis is of a minimal nature, i.e., it adheres to the principle and it is also of a quasi-logical nature;[25] the one and the multiplicity are the outcome of mental operations designed to put the world under control. When multiplicity is born, it grows according to some convenience or economy principle: separate and divide only as needed. I also believe that the hypothesis of the primordial monoblock can be tested, with some ingenuity, together with some additional conjectures about its effects on our adult life: separating us from the external world is a paradoxical way of growing up while shrinking. We must pay a price for our ability to put the world under control, and this price is the loss of a status of omnipotence, which in the form of a will to restoration or conservatism, if I can borrow terms from political parlance, will never abandon us for the rest of our life. Our language harnesses the power to broadcast states of our universe; each of us is a universe, and we can inform others about it. Language works as a messenger of a force, call it the mental force field, yet to be discovered.[26] Whatever we think is an object of our network of beliefs, and whatever is captured in the net must be attributed to our universe at the epistemological level, even if we project it outside and attribute it to an objective existing world.[27] But what makes it external and objective is not an independent existence out there, it is rather its similarities with other mind's beliefs. Intentionality in the sense of Brentano is an arbitrary superimposition (or a post-litteram notion, in my vocabulary). It is an interesting fact that a category of the mental, the qualia, enjoy a double life: they are obviously events taking place in our body, and the overall body is internal to my mental representation; and yet the body belongs to the external world, a vague, ambiguous and blurry boundary, a sign that this distinction too is an arbitrary, post-litteram notion with no correspondence to reality. But, given the plasticity of the ontology, we are epistemologically free to expel our body into the external world or put it under the control of the phantasmagoric self, according to different perspectives.
It is one thing to be able to speak a language, and another to know what language is all about. Similarly, it is one thing to attribute certain experiences to the external world, and another to establish that they are triggered by the external world. Philosophical reflection on this trait of human beings, language, has added a normative dimension to the mental content of it: meaning and reference, truth, together with the notion that there are languages out there—independent of speakers, the patrimony of the culture we live in—are superimposed cultural additions with perhaps no corresponding reality; as Chomsky has argued, they are arbitrary, useful (this adjective is mine not Chomsky’s) conventions.[28] Each of us is a universe, a live, continually changing universe where facts internal and external are trends of a fabric intertwined with what we call the self. Although this self must be dynamic as it grows with the expansion of knowledge, it must also be artificially postulated, a linguistic trick, a make believe, a device necessary to talk about our universe; it is an entity of our reconstruction of the internal facts: it is not more than all the facts of our mental life, but it is also the locus of the awareness of what goes on in our universe, the ‘I’, the subjective evidence that we are present in the world: it is what makes the objective real, casts light on those facts that would otherwise lay forever in darkness; its total transparence makes it impossible to distinguish it from other mental facts; the ability of a sophisticated organism to perceive itself as one thing, through a process of change and accumulation of experiences that never ends as long as life is there, may be called the self. It is this gizmo that generates attributes like ‘mine’ and ‘my’, ‘my mind,’ ‘my thoughts’, and so on, maybe on the basis of acquisition of grammatical particle like the indexical ‘I’.
The process of fragmentation at the outset projects a large portion of our experience outside, that portion that we believe other people see and perceive as we do, the objective world, what we call the physical. The internal and the external world, as each of us can know them, fall under the relative control of the self, pending a better explanation of what the self is, if there is any.
In investigating this thing, the self, Artificial Intelligence Scientists speak about ‘the first’ or ‘the third person approach’. The third person approach considers the self as another objective scientific problem, to be studied within the field of human behavior, neuroscience, and AI, the study of cognitive modeling. The dubiousness of this approach resides in the fact that it identifies the self with a sort of program self scanning its own processes. The first person approach seeks to underscore the fact that the subjective experience is the only experience we have access to.
A combination of the two approaches is not only auspicious, but it is also what advocates of the third person approach inadvertently do, pretending absolute objectivity which is impossible. You cannot investigate and understand experience if you are not an experiencing, sentient being. The best way to explain what experiencing the color ‘black’ is to another is to show a black thing to that person (provided that this person is endowed with sight).
It is another interesting fact of philosophy that our intuition of the self has no alternatives in the vocabulary except perhaps for some equally obscure terms like ‘self-consciousness’, the indexical ‘I’ embedded in quotes, or ‘first person experience’. Kant thought the self is not analyzable. Good writers about the subject like Hofstadter resort to negative metaphors like, “...when that light went off inside...” and the beautiful negative metaphor by Dennett, “...all that hustle and bustle...and there is nobody home”.
This problem opens the path to reflections on a trend of thought in history. Philosophers, guided by logico-linguistic approaches to ontological problems, have been led to skeptical conclusions about different topics, or have corrected their view, just because natural language is not rich enough to provide us with general conceptual aggregates to investigate a conceptually poor issue. Or, because we are not smart enough to read into it the answers we are seeking.
The situation was theorized by philosophers of language like Frege and Russell[29] and later on by Linguistic philosophers, like Wittgenstein and Strawson. All of them shared the conviction that it is language we need to study to find out the truth about the structure of the world, whether we need to improve language or better understand it. Some of their work is very useful to the understanding of philosophical problems but, beyond this idea, there are often several arbitrary assumptions. One of them is that there is an isomorphism between the structure of reality and the mind, and language is the messenger, so to speak, of this symmetry. Do we have no alternatives? If reality is there, perhaps this is one of the available options. But if ontology is fixed solely by language we have no alternatives: reality is deeply rooted in the linguistic structure, the mind, whether it was shaped according to the structure of reality or set to capture essential aspects of it and not all of them.[30] We must turn to Sapir and Whorf to appreciate the importance of the role of language in the growth of our mental life. But philosophers of language, from Frege to Russell and Quine—with the exception of perhaps Wittgenstein in the Tractatus—to different degrees, have all believed that philosophy must distinguish between epistemology and ontology, and reality exists as we see it, in spite of the overwhelming evidence offered by their own doctrines that supporting a drastic separation between ontology and epistemology is a forlorn enterprise.
Consider Aristotle’s notion of categories docet. He was the first thinker to try to bridge language and reality, looking for a correspondence between grammatical and ontological categories. The linguistic philosophers were only reformulating an old philosophical intuition: if the final destination is reality, one must travel on the language airbus to get there; reality is an island.
But there is no guarantee that language bridges the mind and a hard reality out there. Against this claim there is the claim that by considering reality real we have survived extinction and we live in a world where technology is a confirmation of our scientific knowledge each and every day. Are we sure this argument is sound? This is no more an argument than that of Doctor Samuel Johnson kicking a stone when he learned about Berkley’s criticism of Newton and his conclusion that reality is an illusion. Perception of pain after kicking a stone is evidence of perception, not of stones.
On the path of this trend of linguistic considerations, other facts are illuminating and puzzling at the same time: when biology had to deal with new discoveries, its solution consisted in using a humanized, intentional and therefore mental language in order to explain events at the level of genetics. Organisms read instructions and execute their replicating job, viruses invade cells and impose their genetic mark to the host cell, ‘transcription’ and ‘translation’ are common terms in the language of genetics. It is hard to imagine a new language stripped of its purposive and intentional terminology to account for these genetics facts. Ribosomes (the locus of protein manufacturing) do not read genes, and viruses do not impose their genetic marks, so we were told. At that level there are no agents, it is just analogical language borrowed from our intentional mind, up to a point though. Recent studies suggest that a symbolic interpretation rather than a chemical or mechanical process characterizes DNA helices’ work.[31] The concept of ‘information’ is used in molecular biology, not as a metaphorical concept, but with a literary meaning taken at its face value. Whether we are forced to borrow from other fields the terminology to explain new facts or we are exploring an intrinsically conceptual reality, aren’t we misled in the search for a separation between the physical and the mental? Is not this borrowing or discovery of symbolic interpretation another sign of the inevitable conceptualization of reality, without which it would flow indistinctively unnoticed, like a river in the dark? We borrow from our everyday experience a structure of facts and their corresponding terminology to create hypothetical facts or explain potential new facts, what in the connectionist A.I. approach is called 'conceptual blending'. Our reality is much more vast than what we see.[32] Our first mental entity considered, the self, is transparent, slippery, and ethereal. Does the subjective nature of the self eschew any attempt to objectify it? Couldn't it be that the mental language is richer than the so called physical language, and the self is forever behind all this, resisting objectification? Couldn’t it be that any sentence can be understood only as the object of a propositional attitude? “I believe”, “you think”, “he says,” followed by the proposition and our objective world is just a useful shortcut? Let’s put the ‘self’ aside for a while and ask probably more answerable questions.
Could we understand concepts like identity, property, or causation, if our mind were just a mirror reflecting the real and we were not agents with the ability to abstract properties, to attribute causal power to events, once events are fixed by our conceptual apparatus? We do not see identities, causation, and properties, we construe them.
Could it also be that we cannot find an acceptable account of the mental/physical dichotomy because we look at the wrong data or wrongly interpret them, forced from our inner mental constitution to conceive an inexistent mental and physical distinction?
Going back to the self, which is presumably a mental issue, whatever it is, it must be found somewhere in the mind or the body or both of them, hence the mind/body problem is a chapter of personal identity, at least as I have chronologically experienced it in my life. But let me add what I believe is an important aspect of this approach if it is also feasible: if each of us is a universe and truth, reference, and meaning are to be investigated within each universe, one may wonder what these notions are within the system. A word as it exists in a mind is an intrinsic characteristic of the mental object, the idea (be it a thing, a relation, or a property). Reference is the additional property of certain words of picking up public objects, i.e., objects postulated as existing in other universes. Given a sentence S, for an agent A in the universe U, S is true if there exists an object in that Universe, a state of affairs, a fact, or event that can be picked up by that sentence. Furthermore, problems posed by propositional attitudes do not arise in this system: in my universe I may be speaking about Aristotle, Jacqueline Kennedy's second husband, and may not know anything about the Greek philosopher. I may not know that Scott was the author of Waverly, and therefore the substitution salva veritate is prevented in my mind as long as I do not know that he was the author of Waverly. The personal identity problem does not arise in a system like this: for each universe is the totality and whatever there is, is included in the totality. Finally in the Universe U reasons governed by free will may be deliberately transformed into causes and generate behavior. But these considerations are developed in an additional chapter (see chapter III, ‘Language’).
[1] Some subatomic particles are indistinguishable from one another. I will come back to this peculiar problem of the identity of subatomic particles. [2] By ontology throughout the book I mean the range of things existing independently of the mind. [3] Intentionality in the sense of Brentano. [4] A hint at Locke’s doctrine of identity will be introduced later in these pages. [5] There are other criteria we can envisage, and they will be dealt with later in this chapter. [6] But dispositions generate instead of solve problems. [7] The distinction between noumena and phenomena is due to Kant with whom I share some ideas. [8] The distinction between epistemology and ontology will be largely blurred along the way. [9] I take it to be a recurrent mistake that individuation and identity are mixed in his approach. [10] From an ethical point of view there is something else that make this idea difficult to accept. Suppose there was a drug that could cancel my memories. I rob a bank and then I take the drug in order to cancel the memory of that event. I may be legally responsible for two violations of the law, robbing a bank and injecting in my system a prohibited substance, but by the time I have injected the drug and forgotten everything I have done before, I would not be legally responsible anymore. [11] This is what I have called the problem of synchronic identity. [12] My suggestion will be that unity in reality is a projection of the primeval unity of the individual, which I call the ‘monoblock’. [13] Physical identification shouldn’t be a problem nowadays. If fingerprints could be erased by removing the skin of the fingers, DNA is present in every human and animal cell. But the problem of identity is different from the problem of identification. Ask yourself if you would let a clone of yourself (DNA as a criteria of sameness) replace you in this world. Only the acceptance of the annihilation of your Self or ‘I‘, as in some doctrines is embraced, could prompt you to accept the replacement. Generally speaking we place our identity in a more complex set of obscure intuitions, but by forcing examples on us, we see what is not acceptable of our notion of identity scrutinized so far. [14] The literature on personal identity is filled with thought experiments of fission, fusion, and replications and substitutions of material parts of the human body. Not only does modern technology provide us with real cases of partial substitutions that do not affect identity, but in different cultures the belief that partial or thorough substitution of whole bodies does not affect identity are numerous. For instance, in Eskimo shamanism the ceremony of initiation consists in the removal of all his internal organs that are substituted with new organs, iron bones. This imagined replacement, which is total, up to the most minute particles of the body, does not affect the identity of the initiate. Of course we do not need to believe that this replacement necessarily takes place to evaluate its effect on the notion of identity within their culture. So, we can play with material part substitutions and end up believing what our culture dictates. [15] See my previous short interpretation of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ philosophy. [16] Opposite to this view stands Mereological nihilism. Classical Mereology depends on the idea that there are metaphysical relations that connect parts to wholes. Mereological nihilists maintain that such relations between parts and wholes do not exist, since wholes themselves do not exist. My point of view is that reality is contaminated by mind, and therefore it exists in a post-litteram setting. To deny reality amounts to denying the mind, since reality is the most successful mental operation. [17] It is obvious that if one takes Aristotle seriously on this universal mind, some kind of Unum is present in his doctrine, as a preexisting transcending universal mind or nous. [18] Still, this mixture of subjective and objective elements is once again confuses identity and individuation. [19] The problem of linguistic forms and terms that allegedly refer to something has been troublesome. In its general nature it was known as the problem of Plato’s beard, and it was often used by religious thinkers to defend the existence of God. Because if terms (of a categorematic as opposed to syncategorematic type that do not refer) always refer, and you say “God does not exist,” the Theologicians of those days would say, “What are you denying here? “God” is the natural answer, and he would reply, “Therefore God is something that you are denying, which is a contradiction!” Philosophers have invented all sorts of inadequate answers to this problem for centuries, making improbable distinctions up to the one between existence and subsistence, until finally Russell gave a satisfactory answer to the problem of Plato’s beard. He could do that thanks to the great works of a German mathematician, Gottlob Frege, who had laid the ground for the Russellian answer by providing the theory of quantification (the theory that introduced quantifiers in the analysis of sentences). In short, Russell’s analysis of any sentence containing a noun, a name, or an expression that seems to refer to something, provided the elimination of that referring linguistic item or items, we could call ‘rigid designators’ (using a term introduced by Saul Kripke for different purposes), in favor of a neutral variable, call it X; X stands for the neutral word ‘something’ in English and everything you want to say about that something is said by a predicate and the predicate refers to universals corresponding to properties. ‘A man’ becomes something like “there exists something and it is human.”
Russell also believed that he had provided a reading of the real hidden structure of the human mind, one which does not commit itself to the existence of anything when it says things like, “The round square does not exist” or “God exists.” The former is a true sentence and the latter may be true or false, and the mere use of a term like ‘round square’ is not a commitment ipso facto to any reality. I do praise Russell’s analysis as it served an important historical role, that of putting an end to ontological speculations based on mental reality, but I do not share Russell’s conviction that he grasped the inner psychological reality unless we modify his claim in a sense that will become clearer as we go on and which distinguishes between a private and a public psychological reality.
At any rate in his analysis there are no referring names anymore, only variables and predicates that stand for properties. Now in my view properties are abstractions, because we do not see sizes, dimensions, shapes and other things that you can predicate of objects. And what or who is capable of making those abstractions? The human mind! Hence the epistemologization of ontology! I will insist on this issue over and over again in this essay.
[20] This dualism is basic to Cartesian interactionism. [21] See Theseus's paradox and others along the same lines. [22] In “Language and Logos,” by Malcolm Shofield and Martha Nussbaum, Cambridge University Press, 1982. [23] The indistinguishability of the possessive adjective applied to external and internal realities may well be a relics of the stage where everything is “MINE.” [24] A good term to name this stage would be “Schizophrenia” from the Greek roots skhizein (σχίζειν, "to split") and phrēn, phren- (φρήν, φρεν-, "mind") were it not for the fact that it is already used to refer to a serious mental illness and therefore has a negative connotation. [25] In fact if we assume that knowledge progresses in an ideal direction where more and more entities and their relations are added, the inverse direction seems to clearly point towards a stage in which there is only one entity and therefore no relations. I knew nothing about children, so mine was not an attempt at naturalized epistemology; it was an intuition of a logical nature. Only later did I learn that a Swiss psychologist had reached the same conclusions via experimental psychology. See Jean Piaget on “The Intellectual development of the child.” [26] I will come back on this issue later. [27] You can certainly label my proposal so far a form of methodological solipsism (though with some reservations). [28] There may be people who have never even heard of the word meaning, let alone reference, and the word ‘truth’ has a role in their language of emphasizing or rejecting an assertion. [29] The Theory of descriptions by Russell can be seen as an important contribution to understanding the difference between the structure of the language and of reality, since it castrated language of any direct form of reference. By so doing it eliminated any ontological commitment and reduced the corresponding reality to a class of classes of properties. Objects are not designated by names of any sort anymore; they are individuated by a class of properties. But properties are abstractions of the mind and therefore our reality is mental; this is a direct consequence of Russell’s theory of description if you take it seriously. Carnap’s Aufbau was an attempt to materialize properties, once objects are eliminated. [30] It is a fact that, while at the level of macroscopic world, perception seems to work quite in accordance with reality, at the level of the subatomic world we encounter bewildering ontological problems. [31] See Trautteur’s “Computational virtuality in biological systems.”
[32] We speak and fancy past and future dimensions that are absent from our instantaneous perception. Whether we manifest our intentions or not, we have projects designed to manipulate, change, and alter the universe; by marrying a human being or by discovering a medication capable of curing HIV, or by suggesting a new theory of subatomic particles, we are capable of altering reality in an indefinite number of ways. By lying we trick other minds into believing in non-existent states of affairs. As agents of the universe in which we live we have a creative role in it. (By creativity I mean our ability to deliberately change some aspects or other of it.)
