Is the idea of personal identity exhausted by the views of physicalism and dualism?

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Personal identity has been proposed as a concept to account for the nature of the identity of a person over time, but apart from math, terms like identity lack clear definition, and a term like person has no place in an advanced science. It is not, nor can it be, a natural kind.

Nonetheless, let's tentatively regard the term personal identity as an idea, a philosopher's idea, one that is best to eschew, but which meanwhile philosophers have used as an umbrella term to be able to talk about a loose set of related ideas that actually do have a bearing on practical matters. Follow me down this rabbit hole.

We ask if there is more to our existence than this, our three score years and ten, and of course we do not know, but erring on the conservative side, many of us conclude that since there is no evidence of life after death that there is no life after death. Still others, for various reasons (no doubt optimism being one driver), wish to believe that there is life after death. In order to conclude as much, such people often posit souls, something immaterial which we are said to be really or essentially.

Does one have to posit the existence of a soul in order to believe in life after death? I don't think so. Not enough someone believes in reincarnation, that is. What do I mean? How would reincarnation work without souls? Well, it could be the case that the specific physical constitution that gives me this first-personal feeling of what of what's like to be could be or could have been constituted or reconstituted functionally so that this exact same first-personal feeling is replicated in another being. There would be, then, something of what it feels like to be me now and also at a former or later time.

Now you may ask how could an entirely different human body generate the same first-personal feeling? The answer to that question would be just as mysterious, I assume, as it is to account for something as immaterial as a soul. And of course there's no evidence for it.

Also, you know, it would be a very funny cosmic irony for the universe to replicate beings that have identical first-person feelings and yet these beings would have no idea that they have been here before or might be here again. You could easily see how the entertaining of such an idea might seem like a kind of hell, and it would help make sense of the Buddhist idea about trying to break this cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

But as I said, there's no evidence for these extravagant claims. In the interests of rationality, therefore, it's best to err on the side that all there is is this three score years and ten. However, I wouldn't want to rule out irrational and yet pragmatic reasons for why one would want to believe in life after death. For some who have lost loved ones, the idea can be a comfort. And for those who are about to die, the idea can be a comfort. It's not always best to disabuse people of their irrational beliefs, ourselves included.

Thales

There's an urban legend that says that Thales was such the absentminded philosopher that one night while he was staring at the stars, he tripped and fell into a well, sending a nearby slave girl into hysterical laughter. And yet this was the same man who predicted not only a solar eclipse but a boom year for the olive harvest. With respect to that harvest, he was so enterprising that he bought up all the olive presses in the area so that he would have a monopoly on olive oil. And he did it.

Thales was born in 626 BCE and died in 548 at age 78. He spent most of his professional life as a statesman in a town in Asia Minor called Miletus, famous for its trade in wool, and rich. Fortunately for history, this world gave Thales enough time to philosophize. Unfortunately for us, we know very little of his actual philosophy, and this for the first known philosopher.

Here are two pieces of Thales' philosophy we know about. One is that he believed water was fundamental for life. This view anticipates our contemporary view of water's necessity for life. We don't know how Thales arrived at his conclusion. Perhaps he observed his very own civilization's proximity to water or people's reliance on potable water, or perhaps he watched the growth of plants and crops and thought that their growth generalized to the rest of life. We just don't know.

But we do know about this other piece of philosophy, and this through Aristotle. Thales noticed the effects of magnetism and concluded that there must be some particles within the objects that created these effects of attraction and repulsion. He called these souls. He posited that all things were full of souls. This isn't exactly modern particle theory or our understanding of force fields but this careful observation, using the vocabulary of his day, surely presages modern scientific conceptions of how subatomic particles operate in force fields.

The origin of Western philosophy

Let us go back to the beginning of philosophy.

To Thales? No!

Thales who said that all was water left little behind, and besides a claim as fatuous as his is nowhere to begin. There's nothing to grasp on.

Let us return to Anaximander who in 7th-century BCE sought the source of all things in the Infinite.

Was this a mistake, to seek the nature of all entities in an Infinite Source? Is it premature to ask the question? Or does the question now come too late? Would any answer to the question posed now be irrelevant?

And what is this Infinite Source? Is it a being itself, the Being par excellence? We with Anaximander cannot say. What it is, we know not what.

Anaximander conceived the Infinite Source as endless, limitless, primordial, free of age and decay and yet infinitely and perpetually yielding the Elements, from which everything in the known world is derived.

The Elements make matter through interaction, combinations, reconstitution. When the Elements dissolve, they return to the Source.

Whence things have their origin,

Thence also their destruction,

According to necessity:

What they give to each other in desert and recompense

In indifference they return

In conformity with the ordinance of time.

And that is all we know of Anaximander's metaphysics.

ADDENDUM. In addition to his metaphysics, we know of Anaximander's philosophical method. He proposed a method to improve the collective body of knowledge, which amounts to the following: acknowledge past teachings, yes, but question them rigorously and improve upon them. No wonder Hellenes gave birth to Athens. Such thinking not only smacks of an incipient scientific method but the very nature of democracy.

Excursus on psychotherapy (take two)

Lacan again.

It has been alleged that in an effort to make more money, Lacan qua charlatan analyst introduced the short session, which is, as it sounds, the conducting of short sessions with patients. Instead of the usual hour—really 45 or 50 minutes—Lacan might do 15 minutes, say.

Some would judge this a serious breach of therapeutic ethics. After all, if the patient pays for the hour, isn't he entitled to the hour? Not always, replies Lacan, and here's the rationale: there may be some sessions in which the analyst or patient has landed on a crucial insight, therefore any further communication may only muddy waters, occluding the insight. In such cases, it's perfectly fine to have a short session, argues Lacan.

As legend has it, Lacan and his patients arrived at early crucial insights often—too often—so often that it would appear to any outsider that the man was making a money-grab.

Lacan's personal ethics aside, there is still the question of whether in some instances it might be better to shorten a session if in fact the patient and the therapist have arrived at the point where they needed to be. It would seem if this is to be done, it ought to be done rarely, but there does appear to be sound justification for it, sometimes.

Excursus on psychotherapy (take one)

Behold the man, Jacques Lacan himself, certainly not Freud and possibly a fraud. And yet even charlatans have insights. What were his?

The patient does not want to change. From the time he enters therapy, he's invested in return to his status quo.

Before he'd come, his symptoms had been a substitute satisfaction for what might really one day benefit him. At least initially, symptoms provide satisfaction of one kind or another, even though they fact may not be obvious at first blush to outsiders or even to the patient himself.

Therefore, the therapist can never rely on the patient's own desire to change. Such a desire doesn't exist. As such, much of his therapy is, for the patient, to get back to the symptom.

The patient is only there because his substitute satisfaction has failed him and he would like to return to it. Without outwardly disabusing the patient of his delusions, the therapist must represent a pure desire for the patient's presence and return, a desire for the patient to keep talking, without obviously prejudicing the patient toward one life decision or another. This is the beginning.

The beginning of therapy is with the jouissance crisis, the patient's failure to get a kick out of his own dissatisfying satisfaction, his own suffering, the cage he had come to love, and loves no more.

Problems with semantic externalism

There is no definite agreement about what semantics is, but the view semantic externalism supposes an answer. According to semantic externalism, the field of semantics is the study of words and their relationship to the world. If this conception is correct, the goal of semantics ought to be to discover what this relationship may be.

Semantic externalism is opposed to semantic internalism. Semantic internalists accept no such relationship as that between words and aspects of the world. As Steven Gross writes in "(Descriptive) Externalism in semantics,"

Internalist opponents maintain that semantics rather concerns, or ought to concern, only non-intentional relations among linguistic items and (other) mental structures... On their view, semantics lays out what concepts or thoughts expressions directly activate or express, without recourse to intentional relations to things external to the mind/brain.

The grand question that externalists seek to provide an answer to, Gross writes, is: "Should semantics include a characterization of intentional relations between linguistic items and aspects of the world?"

The internalist answer is no, and here it might be useful checking why. On many different grounds, internalists can be opposed to this word-world relation. Here are some examples that provide reasons to be skeptical of this conception of semantics.

If semantic externalism is true, it is unclear how we can say a river, which is supposed to have some real-world properties apart from the human mind, can dry up, be diverted, frozen over and become a road, and so on. This gives some credence to the fact that the meaning of river has more to do with what goes on in the head than with some external property that all rivers might have. River might be more a concept like Texas, which, if it has any properties at all, are the properties constructed by the human mind/brain and which have nothing to do with any necessary relationship between the words themselves and something in the world.

There are more examples. Take this sentence: "The book John wrote weighs two pounds." Somehow the book in this sentence is both an abstract and a concrete object. The concrete object weighs two pounds. The abstract object is what John wrote and may not be any particular book.

Another kind of word or concept for which it is difficult to find what the real-world correlate would be is something like the average American. What object in the world corresponds to the average American?

Or take fictional creatures. It is very unclear to see how Superman is supposed to be any particular object in the world, and yet it is perfectly intelligible what we mean when we talk about Superman. Yet it does not seem as though there is any way to make sense of the expression, "Superman is Clark Kent," if in the world there is no Superman and no Clark Kent.

How might semantic externalists reply? We'll take that up next time.

Postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism

Anthropologist David Harvey, invoking the thesis of another scholar, calls postmodernism "the cultural logic of late capitalism." This thesis will require some analysis and justification, starting with what postmodernism means. Although there is no definite agreement on the term, the term is generally used to suggest that there is a real fragmentation and ephemerality to our personhood, our society, our economic and political systems, and our era and that this ephemerality and fragmentation is therefore basic to the human condition.

To understand more clearly what this means, contrast this way of thinking with a naive view. On the naive view, there are definite answers involved in understanding what a person is, how our society operates and its institutions operate, and what our place in the world is. It might not always be easy to uncover the facts of the matter but there are definite answers, according to the naive view. The Enlightenment project from the 18th century onward was an attempt to talk about these subjects and, to the extent possible, make these subjects amenable to scientific study.

The modernism of the late 19th and early 20th century did not necessarily contradict the attempts to conduct rational or scientific inquiry, nor to challenge the possibility of creation and representation in the sciences and arts, but it did try to show the limits of rational and creative intelligibility. Still, even on the modernist view, any inconsistencies, ironies, or downright contradictions were taken to be problems of knowledge, not really to the way the world fundamentally works. The modernist project did not rule out the possibility for deep inconsistencies in the nature of reality but the burden of proof would have to be on anyone who wanted to demonstrate them.

Postmodernism, however, a movement from the 1970s onward, proposed that the ironies, inconsistencies, and contradictions of everyday life were rooted in the way the world works. According to the postmodernist project, we have a difficult time inquiring and creating because there is no fact of the matter. There is instead superficial relations that we spot. The world just is one big ball of contradiction, no matter how you slice it. So is the human being. And so is language.

Comparing modernism and postmodernism, Harvey expresses the language issue this way:

Whereas modernists had presupposed that there was a tight and identifiable relation between what was being said (the signified or 'message') and how it was being said (the signifier or 'medium'), poststructuralist thinking sees these as continually breaking apart and re-attaching in new combinations.

Certain contradictions appear within the postmodernist project (ironically accepted because postmodernism can admit of all contradictions!), especially involving the actions and behaviors of postmodernist thinkers and artists themselves. On the postmodernist view, if it is true that all there is in the world is this sense of loose connection and superficiality among fragments of understanding and thinking and creating, no political project is entailed. Yet several of the thinkers and artists are left-wing and call for resistance to and suspicion of what they think of as oppressive regimes and institutions. Perhaps the only consistency to the thinking among the postmodernists is that there is no end-goal any of the social or political resistance is trying to achieve.

Harvey writes:

The simple postmodernist answer is that coherent representation and action are either repressive or illusionary (and therefore doomed to be self-dissolving and self-defeating), we should not even try to engage in some global project.

But if this much is true, why advocate resistance at all, especially if there is no fact of the matter?

Postmodernists' theory of personality is in general the view that there is no deep self, only a success of thoughts and sensations in time. Personality traits are not real nor is there any deep sense as to what a human being is as a possessor of rights and responsibilities. Also, since there is no deep self or sense of what a person is, there can be no real oppression, on the postmodernist account, of anyone.

Continuing with Harvey:

A number of consequences follow from the domination of this motif in postmodernist thought. We can no longer conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense, because to be alienated presupposes a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of self from which to be alienated. It is only in terms of such a centred sense of personal identity that individuals can pursue projects over time, or think cogently about the product of a future significantly better than time present and time past.

Quoting another source, Harvey writes that postmodernists have transferred the acceptance of the possibility of the "alienation of the subject" to the acceptance of the "fragmentation of the subject." In other words, in past times, a person was seen as someone who has rights and freedoms, which can be given and taken away. He or she can also have meaningful work and a meaningful life, or fail to. Alienation was a possibility because a grander conception of who the person is was possible. Not so anymore, the postmodernists say. Now, all we are supposed to accept is that people are at best one lived moment after another: "The immediacy of events, the sensationalism of the spectacle (political, scientific, military, as well as those of entertainment), become the stuff of which consciousness if forged," as Harvey writes.

With the triumph and celebration of surface appearances in the world and with the self, it becomes unclear in what sense the scientific enterprise is meaningful anymore, a good life or good work is meaningful, what the importance of art is, and so on. Harvey frames the problem in the following way:

[H]ow can we build, represent, and attend to these surfaces with the requisite sympathy and seriousness in order to get behind them and identify essential meanings? Postmodernism, with its resignation to bottomless fragmentation and ephemerality, generally refuses to contemplate that question.

And as postmodernism as a movement has progressed, it has been very much inclined, at least more and more, to accept the status quo and to profit from it. Harvey writes that "much of postmodernism is consciously anti-auratic and anti-avant-garde and seeks to explore media and cultural arenas open to all." The artistic representations of postmodernism have been re-appropriated for corporate interests and have become part of common culture. This fragmented conception of self and society has become so generally accepted that, as Harvey writes, quoting another source, "the vaunted fragmentation of art is no longer an aesthetic choice: it is simply a cultural aspect of the economic and social fabric," citing advertising as the new popular domain of postmodernism and "the official art of capitalism."

What to make, then, of Harvey's claim that postmodernism is "the cultural logic of late capitalism"? Here he is quoting political theorist Fredric Jameson, who has written extensively on the topic of postmodernism. Late capitalism is the period of capitalism human beings are supposed to have entered some time since the mid-20th century onward. (It is debatable if this part of the characterization is correct.) Cultural logic is here meant the way in which our culture thinks of our everyday practices. To call postmodernism "the cultural logic of late capitalism" is to say that it is the way we cannot help but think about the world or create new forms.

Scant evidence has been given so far as to how this thesis can be true. More to come from Harvey's book The Condition of Postmodernity.