Chapter 10 My non-narrative, non-forensic Dasein: the first and second self
1. FORENSIC, NARRATIVE PERSONS AND REAL EVERYDAY PERSONS
In (a widely under-discussed paper) “Sexual identities and narratives of self” (2003), Jill Einstein and I proposed that John Locke’s conception of persons, PersonLocke, despite its merit as an account of forensic persons, is woefully inadequate as an account of the normal everyday sense of who one is, how one feels, the weather within,
personality, and so on, which we argued is better captured by a conception articulated by William James, PersonJames. Our unremarkable conclusion was that the forensic conception, “Locke’s resolute cognitive-linguistic view,” needed to be
supplemented by “James’s feeling-of-and-for-the body view.” Here I develop our argument further, and in a more provocative
direction, arguing that PersonJames is basic and PersonLocke is, at best, a special case. PersonJames is the first self. PersonLocke is the – possibly only “a” – second self. Once this much is established, I further argue that in privileging PersonLocke we open ourselves, even make more likely, a class of projective mistakes in self-understanding. These include first, overrating
the constitutive role of autobiographical memories of happenings and doings, and underestimating the constitutive roles of
the much larger class of that-which-is-experienced but not remembered; second, projecting normative expectations of self-sameness
backwards and forwards over our lives, sometimes in the face of evidence that we do not have (or in the case of the future,
evidence we cannot have) that we are, in fact, the same self or person.
Start by granting for the sake of argument that one of the concepts expressed by the polysemous words PERSON or SELF, or,
what is different, by one of the homonyms pronounced as PERSON or SELF, can be analyzed usefully in terms of relations of a certain kind of psychological connectedness and continuity, specifically, diachronic
memory for things I did or that happened to me. This would be the familiar concept of a forensic person championed by Locke
as best suited to account for the identity of humans who are legal and moral agents and accountable as such. The key words
in the schema are “a certain kind” of psychological connectedness and continuity. The schema gives permission to analyze personhood in terms of a subset of
the experiences that persons have and a subset of the connections among them, specifically, autobiographical memories. A forensic
person is a person who consciously remembers and can report what he or she has done, who distinguishes between things he or
she did and things that happened to him or her, and who can do so for others. Call such persons, PersonLocke. Forensic persons are called upon to be narrative persons, to self-represent narratively, and to be represented by others
as doers of deeds with certain characteristic behavioral dispositions. The two go together like horse and carriage, so I will
speak sometimes of one or the other, the forensic or the narrative, but assume the linkage throughout – forensic-narrative
persons.
Why anyone ever thought that a forensic person, PersonLocke, was a good analysis of personhood as such is puzzling since this conception of person is so obviously exactly what you would
get if you asked: What features of persons and their conscious selves do we depend upon to make intelligible our moral and
legal practices in the post-Enlightenment North Atlantic? Without that particular interest, a forensic one, at a particular
time, it is not remotely plausible that one could have come up with the idea that forensic persons are basic, what we mean
really by PERSON or SELF and possibly what in addition grounds personal identity.
Here I propose that we think anew about what makes a PERSON or SELF from the perspective of a principle that is both plausible
and widely accepted, which I call the Experience Principle:
Experience Principle: Whatever it is (the items and the connections) that makes a person who he or she is first personally, whatever it is that makes for personal identity, subjectively speaking, it involves necessarily the individual’s experiences.
The Experience Principle is warranted on semantic grounds: Most every, but possibly not all, usages of words such as PERSON or SELF assume a first-personal,
subjective, experiential component. It is also warranted on the basis of the empirical evidence from Geisteswissenschaften: The proximate cause and constitution of persons but not, for example, plants and minerals, come from experience; and further
on general scientific and metaphysical principles such as causal closure and no action at too far a distance, which naturalists about mind accept. The Experience Principle is not analytic or vacuous since there are both reductionist – a person is just a collection of bosons and fermions – and
inflationist views – a person is whatever God says he is, his experience of himself be damned, that do not take experience as necessary. The Experience Principle allows an account of personhood that goes beyond what a person experiences, expresses, or represents himself as like, but
it requires that any account of a person include her experience and self-understanding.
The core idea is that experiences make for a person if anything does; non-experiences, for example, trees and apples might
cause tree and apple experiences, but the trees and apples do not constitute the person, whereas the tree and apple experiences
might. The Experience Principle suggests that experience is necessary for identity; it is silent on whether experience is sufficient (as I will go on to
say, semantics, science, and metaphysics seem to agree that it is not). Locke actually suggests that experience might be sufficient,
when he writes: “For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on
that only” (Locke [1689] 1975, 286). But he eventually sees that this is too strong (unless he is just taken here to be telling us what “makes a
man be himself to himself,” not what makes a man himself). And in any case, the kinds of experience Locke thinks constitute
a person are very limited; they are pretty much only the kinds of experience a Puritan (Anglican) God would be interested in on Judgment Day. Narrative-forensic self-representation is guided by a normative-metaphysical picture in which God decides and evaluates lives in accordance with
his view of what matters in a human life. But his view of what matters does not, purely in virtue of his being God, match
up with how my personhood is experienced by me or seems to me. Or to put the point another way: If we imagine, as many modern
people can, a world without the Lockean normative-metaphysical structure, and if, in addition, we permit ourselves to take
a non-prejudiced phenomenological pose toward how it seems to be the person or self that we are, we will find that the conviction
that we are all essentially or primarily PersonsLocke will yield its pride of place. Or, so I say.
2. THE EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLE
There are two points that require clarification so that the Experience Principle is properly understood. First, the core idea that motivates every naturalistic theory of personhood, although not every soul-based
theory, is that first-personal experience is (a major and necessary part of) what makes a person himself or herself. There are two senses of “make,” make in the sense of causally contributes, as in the way “you are what you eat,” and constitutive, as in the way “I am shy.” Second, the schema that is typically used as the motto for the forensic view, and which says that
what grounds or constitutes personhood is psychological connectedness and continuity actually says nothing, exactly zero,
about: (1) what the psychological items are that are experienced, or what is different, expressed or represented that make a person who he or she is.1 It is commonly assumed that the items are autobiographical memories, but this is taken-for-granted rather than argued. Furthermore,
even if we concede that personhood or, more likely, one variety of personhood, can be analyzed in terms of one very specific
kind of psychological connectedness and continuity, namely, autobiographical memories for what I did (possibly supplemented
by accounts of why I did those things), nothing follows about: (2) the nature of the connectedness and continuity relations
among the items of experience, whatever they are, that (also) constitute me as who I am, and that are not, as it were, memorial,
or not memorial in the familiar autobiographical way. Call the first question, the ITEMS question; the second the CONNECTIONS
question.
To get the concept of forensic person out of the schema that mentions only psychological items and connectedness and continuity
relations between these items, one needs to be looking for the items and the connection kinds that are suited primarily for
our legal and moral practices.
What are those items? They include episodic memories and intentional action descriptions, but not usually phenomenal experiences
or the characteristic weather within each of us. What are those connection kinds? Conscious declarative memory, propositional
logic, and a theory of intentional action, but not, for example, the sorts of connections that characterize drinking, eating,
walking, exercising, cooking breakfast, having sex, daydreams, REM dreams, sexual fantasizing, fantasies of homicide and suicide,
poetic musings, artistic imagination, and so on. Regarding (1) and considered most generally: Are the items that make for
a person – sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, thoughts, memories, values, beliefs, desires, plans, temperamental traits, personal skills,
personal style – a psychological penumbra, a sense of self, a sense of my own phenomenal presence, a sense of myself as agent/author of my life, a sense of myself as owner of my
experiences, or something(s) else? If all these things are among the items of experience that constitute the self, is there
some ratio among them that is typical or, what is different, expected for being designated a bona fide person? Regarding (2): Are the items that constitute a self, experienced, expressed or represented in language, or primarily
in gesture, bodily posture and facial expression, conceptually or non-conceptually, first-personally, subjectively, and auto-phenomenologically,
or is who and what a person is an objective matter, a matter determined by public heterophenomenology, social consensus, and/or
completed neuroscience? Are the items that make a person who he or she is, normally – or, what is different, normatively –
connected and continuous experientially, expressively, and representationally in narrative form, or are there myriad ways
selves emerge, and that selves are experienced, expressed, and revealed?
The Lockean view, which regiments the polysemous ordinary language terms, SELF and PERSON for forensic purposes, gives insufficient
attention to both (1) and (2) even as it endorses the insight, expressed by the motto, that what makes a person that person,
who she is, has to do with the items of her experience and how they are connected with each other. If we think that the Lockean
picture of forensic persons and forensic selves captures some deep metaphysical features of all persons, or that it captures ordinary
self-experience, ordinary self-expression, and ordinary self-representation, we will be mistaken. The view picks out a conception
of a certain kind of modern, reflective, public person, but not what a self or person really, deep-throat, is.
3. SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE IDENTITY(IES)
Because Locke’s theory is said to be a memory or consciousness criterion it would seem to belong to the consensus which abides
the Experience Principle, and which analyzes what makes a person who she is in terms of how she experiences herself, and thus how her experiences
constitute her experienced being. But this is not quite so.
In Book II, Chapter 27, section 10 of the second edition of his Essay, entitled “Consciousness Makes Personal Identity,” Locke writes: “For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be
himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only” (Locke [1689] 1975, 286). Call identity, so conceived, “self-experienced identity,” SEI, or “self-represented identity,” SRI, where for the present referring to SEI or SRI is neutral about how, for example, conceptually or non-conceptually, linguistically or non-linguistically, episodically or
narratively, or how meta- or non-meta SEI or SRI are. When speaking about first-order subjective consciousness, it is most natural to speak of self-experienced identity,
SEI, rather than self-represented identity, SRI, which is more naturally suited as a name for some sort of second-order consciousness. But I will not fuss here to distinguish
SEI from SRI. The key is that both SEI and SRI are entirely subjective. Infants and toddlers, who are pre-linguistic or early in language acquisition and who have not been
trained up to know or conform to the normative demands of forensic personhood, are self-experiencers and have an SEI, perhaps even an SRI, but they do not have it in a meta- or in a linguistic way. No matter what the format of representation is, personal identity
conceived as either SEI or SRI is entirely a first personal matter.2
In Book. II, Chapter 27, section 26, “Person is a Forensic Term,” Locke states this seeming objection to his own purely subjective account
of identity.
Person, as I take it, is the name for this self . . . It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit . . . The personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason that it does the present . . . And therefore whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in it than if they had never been done. (Locke [1689] 1975, 467)
The objection is this: Who a person or self is, is commonly both more and less than what the individual experiences, or, what
is different, self-represents. Personhood involves more than what I experience or what self-representation represents because
there are things I did (I experienced, I am like), but forget or misremember or fail to see in the first place that I did
(I experienced, I am like). And personhood involves less than what l have experienced and less than self-representation represents
because familiar self-serving biases lead me to describe my experiences, my character traits, my motives and intentions, and
my actions in excessively charitable ways, to puff myself up, and to overestimate my good qualities, good actions, and so
on.
[F]or supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment, and being created miserable? And, therefore, conformable to this, the apostle tells us, that, at the great day, when every one shall “receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open.” The sentence shall be justified by the consciousness all persons shall have, that they themselves, in what bodies soever they appear, or what substances soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions, and deserve that punishment for them. (Locke [1689] 1975, 468)
Call God’s description of a person’s identity, “actual full identity,” AFI. AFI is the true account of a person’s identity, either over a segment or a whole lifetime. God knows and can provide the account
of what really happened. AFI depicts a person as he or she really is, possibly deep-down-inside, or more plausibly given what Locke says, depicts a person
as he really is only in the sense that there is a reunification of consciousness with what actions it, as it were, caused
or committed. God knows what you really did, who you really are, even if you misremember, forget, engage in hermeneutic puffery
or minimization, and he restores your memory before eternal reward or punishment is doled out in the “soever.” If God did
not do this he would be unjust, punishing you for something you did not, according to SEI or SRI, do.
The idea is to introduce a counterfactual test: If it were the case that a person’s SEI or SRI “could be made to have no consciousness at all” of what that person really did, then reward and punishment would make no
sense; punishment, in particular, would be absurdly cruel, karmically absurd. But punishment and reward make sense if (inter alia) the person could be made conscious of what she really did. The key term is “could.” If God is the standard for what could
happen, then pretty much everything can or could be done including restoring all true memories, motivation ascriptions, action
descriptions, and so on, to any individual. God aside, in the actual world we do hold people accountable and dole out rewards
and punishments, based on social assessments of the person’s AFI even if their SRI (or SEI) does not own the memory of the action ascribed or, what is different, owns the memory of what happened, but not the description
of the action that produced it, as in “I didn’t mean to hurt you (by running off with her).” Sometimes we hold folks accountable
for what they did, even in cases where, without divine intervention, the agent is incapable of seeing things our way, and
thus cannot be brought to be conscious of what he did, who he is, and so on.
This much raises a serious question for the concept of forensic personhood, since it is designed to mark accountable persons,
and SEI and SRI are perfectly compatible with an individual who experiences her life in a way that either because of her unusual memory, an unusual
theory of action, or no conscience, is not subjectively accountable. It looks as if the Lockean might need to say that actual
consciousness or memory of the individual is neither necessary nor sufficient for personhood. On the memory restoration picture,
who I am depends upon how my upgraded (by God) self-consciousness, were it to be restored, matches up (or would match up) with God’s comprehension of who I am. God has all
the objective facts right, so if he restores my memory on Judgment Day I will experience myself as I really am (was), see
what I really did.3
4. PERSONJAMES: STREAMS, HALOES, PENUMBRAS, PSYCHIC OVERTONES, FRINGES, AND THE FREE WATER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
How does William James provide an alternative or an amplification of PersonLocke? The answer is that he takes all of experience, both the items and the connection types, more seriously than Locke does. The basic insight relevant here is this: If we pay close attention to the phenomenology of experience from a neutral pose, we will see that there are both what James calls “substantive” and “transitive”
states of mind. The distinction is not hard and fast, but here are some examples: I experience thirst, I walk to the cabinet,
fetch a glass, go to the sink, turn the faucet on, fill the glass with water (all transitive), and drink it (substantive).
I leave work and drive home: The road ahead is focal throughout (a “stopping place,” “a perch” = substantive state of mind)
until I achieve my goal, namely, getting home. But even as the road ahead remains the focus of my attention all the way home,
there are numerous other experiences I have while driving that are not focal, namely, everything else that is experienced
– sights, sounds, daydreams, half-hatched musings, listening to the radio, etc. – that are not essential to getting home. All this other stuff
is transitive. Or, imagine a class of young students reading an elementary arithmetic problem and then setting to solving
it. The problem and its solution involve substantive states, the process of solving it (imagine this is done both in the head
and by way of any scribbling that seems useful) is transitive. Each student may fly from perch to perch in a different way.
The teacher grades only successful landings on the perch.
From the point of view of experience we are in no position to decide which, the substantive or the transitive parts, are more
causally significant or constitutive of who we are overall. Nonetheless, and here James is speaking directly to Locke, among others, “we” – in the traditional faculty psychology of the philosopher and the “brass instrument psychology”
of the second half of the nineteenth century – privilege the substantive parts:
We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. (James [1890] 2010, 162)
Focusing introspectively or phenomenologically on the underestimated stream, the flow and the transitive, reveals that these
parts have depth and texture that extend into a wide horizontal zone that James calls the “fringe.” “The object before the
mind always has a ‘fringe.’ There are other unnamed modifications of consciousness just as important as the transitive states, and just as cognitive as they” (James [1892] 1984, 149). He then writes about the type(s) of experience constituted by what he calls “the free water of consciousness”:
The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, – or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood . . . Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the image by the name of “psychic overtone” or “fringe.”4 (James [1892] 1984, 151, original italics)
The stream is in the first instance a stream of self-experienced identity, SEI. James’s insight is that it is underestimated in self-representation, in SRI, be it intended for first personal or public consumption, as well as in scientific theorizing, possibly for similar reasons.
Why are the substantive aspects of experience rated more highly than the transitive aspects? It might be because the substantive
parts are objectively more significant than the transitive parts, specifically, that the former are more causally influential
or, what is different, constitutive of who I am than the latter. But there is no a priori reason to think that all the sights I experienced inattentively biking to work or what I had for breakfast is less important
causally or constitutively than this morning’s argument with my best friend. Everyone thinks this is so. But one would need
a much more advanced science of the mind to actually show this. One possibility, I think it is likely, is that we, especially
in our kind of complex and crowded worlds, rate the causal and constitutive role of the latter as greater than the former,
because we are more interested in the upstream effects of the latter kind of events, and the reason is that they are probably
more consequential to an individual’s social behavior, but not necessarily to everything that is true overall about a person,
not necessarily more consequential to who the person is. A different and more provocative way to put the point is this: Both
the normative-metaphysical structure of the Lockean – really the modern North Atlantic – universe (there is a moral blueprint
for doing life the right way and God will judge whether your life was in normative conformity), as well as certain familiar practical features of complex social
life cause us to attend disproportionately to happenings and doings (substantive facts) as what makes for a person, when,
in fact, these facts (as known first or third personally) are just the main things we are interested in, not necessarily what
makes an individual who he or she is.
The Experience Principle simply says this: Whatever it is (the items and the connections) that makes a person who he or she is first personally, whatever
it is that makes for personal identity, subjectively speaking, it involves necessarily the individual’s experiences. The Experience Principle is non-committal on which experiences make a person, or on which experiences make the greater contribution to who a person
is. Some say dream experiences are both hugely influential to who I am and, what is different, hugely self-expressive. Others
say that dreams are largely inconsequential noise. Which is it? Presumably this is an empirical matter, which awaits lots more evidence from mind science
than we have at present.5 Or consider this sort of case: Like many people I read lots of novels and frequently attend concerts. I do both to change
myself, to become a more complex and interesting person, mostly in the first instance to myself. I almost always can tell
you what books I have read, or more likely you say, “have you read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen?” and I say “extremely overrated”; or you ask about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and I say “as good as Joyce and Proust.” If you ask “What are they about?” I often cannot say (actually in these two cases
I can because they are recent reads). It is an empirical question whether and how my novel reading and concert-going affects
who I am, but I am betting that they are self-forming and this despite my poor memory for what I have read or heard.
Here one might propose that we ought to distinguish between causal and constitutive claims. The idea would be that the taste
experience of even the most wonderful meal is not – cannot be – as significant to who I am as who I had the meal with. The
experience of losing a sock is not – cannot be – as significant as losing one’s mother. Both might have downstream causal
effects but only the latter could ever be thought to be identity constitutive.
This sounds generally right, although there are many exceptions (I once heard an acquaintance say that when he was in the
grip of an addiction, a mismatched sock and a family death seemed about equally (un-) important), and the distinction between
causes and constituents is an important one. But here it is asked to do too much work. Right now normative views about what
counts as constitutive, and what counts as merely causal, are largely determined by our normative views themselves. The sciences
of the mind’s answers to basic questions about what makes us tick are just emerging. So far, we have largely been dealing
with folk theories, pseudo-scientific theories, such as psychoanalysis, and normative views, such as Locke’s, about what makes us tick, all of which are designed for a certain kind of complex social commerce in certain types
of social worlds.
Experiences make persons. At least experiences are what make a person who he or she is subjectively. But there is also sense
to the idea that a person is more than she subjectively experiences herself as being now, certainly more than she expresses
or represents herself as being now. Right now there are ever so many experiences, including ones I am having now, that I do not know how to express or represent, and saying so
is not a way of expressing or representing those experiences. Part of this, the inability to express or represent what I experience,
is a memory problem, but most of it seems to me as due to the fact that most of my experience, conceived in a Jamesian, “free
water of consciousness” way, seems first, to have little to do with doings, and second, is not suitable to be narrated, storied,
perhaps not even to be spoken about at all.
In Nausea (1939), Sartre gestures at this first self, and indicates what attentiveness to it might yield:
[t]here is something new about my hands, a certain way of picking up my pipe or fork which now has a certain way of having itself picked up. I don’t know. A little while ago, just as I was coming into my room, I stopped short because I felt in my hand a cold object which held my attention through a sort of personality. I opened my hand, looked: I was simply holding the door-knob . . . So a change has taken place the last few weeks. But where? It is an abstract change without an object . . . I think I’m the one who has changed: that’s the simplest solution. Also the most unpleasant. But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. (Sartre 1939, 4–5)
It seems a perfectly credible hypothesis that who I am is not just some complex summation of all my deeds (plus all the things
that have happened to me), but also that who I am involves “a crowd of small metamorphoses [that] accumulate in me.” The accumulation
involves experiences, but many, possibly most of these are not stored, and do not involve the doings of deeds. They are nonetheless,
identity constitutive; at least, it is not remotely incredible to claim that this is so.
Is the “crowd of small metamorphoses [that] accumulate in me” also part of my experience, and thus according to the Experience Principle part of what makes me, me? Surely, metamorphoses are based on experiences, some of which may be as inchoate and hard to articulate
and remember, as those depicted by Sartre; and some of these metamorphoses are themselves noticed, experienced. Perhaps, there
are practices that could make us more attentive to these aspects of our selves.
What I have been calling AFI claims to capture the facts about who a person is. But if I am a person constituted not only by what happens to me and by
what I do, but in addition, by the transitive flow, the “free water of consciousness,” the accumulation of “the crowd of small
metamorphoses,” then these deserve a place in the story of my AFI. AFI, conceived as the God’s eye point of view, is clearly a fiction as far as the naturalist is concerned. But it is a useful regulative fiction,
and not just for forensic practices. Each of us insofar as we have aspirations for greater self-knowledge distinguishes between
how we experience ourselves and how we might experience ourselves if we saw things more clearly and deeply. It is normative
for us to wish to remember and to be able to tell our story truthfully. If, however, we conceive experience broadly as involving
affect, emotions, moods, the overall way(s) it feels to be me and to go about living, we will realize that there is much more
than just autobiographical memory, much more than narrative identity, to be in touch with to get myself for who and what I
am. But the AFI that derives from Locke’s discussion is an exclusively forensic, narrative conception. On Judgment Day, Locke’s Puritan God
does not restore my phenomenological stream or put me in some sort of deep touch with “the free water of consciousness” that
helps constitute me as the person I am. He provides me with a perfect transcript of my deeds and my actual intentions and
motives when I did those deeds. God could put me in touch with the “free water” that makes me, me. But the view on offer does
not make that “free water” or the “crowd of small metamorphoses [that] accumulate” important.6
Earlier I described two extreme views of persons that might deny the Experience Principle, a reductive deflationary view that offers a full description of the supervenience base – neurons or lower – that describe
this guy OJF, or an inflationary view that says that this guy OJF is whomever God says he is. That is, how OJF is, is however God experiences him as being, which could be nothing like this guy OJF experiences
himself. A credible objection to both views is that they are eliminativist. There are persons, so any conclusion that there
are no persons at all rests on a mistake, and enacts a reductio on itself. I will not develop this reply here, but it seems the right sort of response to give.
The Experience Principle favors a more expansive view of personhood than PersonLocke, one that does not privilege the aspects of a person and his or her life that might legitimately be considered most important
for forensic purposes and suitable for being depicted in a standard modern narrative. If, descriptively, I am the person constituted
by my experiences, and if my experiences have depth, texture, nuance, and display multifarious contents and connections that
are not on offer by either the “potsful” and “pailsful” picture and its close forensic and narrative relations, then there
are important normative consequences.
5. THREE THESES OF PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL NATURALISM
The next step to advance the argument for a broader view of personhood than PersonLocke involves fully embracing scientific naturalism about persons, the sort of view Locke claimed to be neutral about, and James, despite writing in the aftermath
of Darwin, was ambivalent about. Consider again the questions: (1) What are the multifarious psychological items that, as it
were, bind together to constitute, make, or reflect who a person or self is? – what I called the ITEMS question; and (2) What
are the various ways these multifarious items are, can be, and, what is different, should be connected and/or relate to each
other in conscious Homo sapiens to count as a human person or self ? – the CONNECTIONS question.
Start with these credible theses that are widely accepted by naturalists about mind and that form the core of constructive
psychobiological naturalism: Neurophysicalism; The Heterogeneity Thesis; and Subjective Realism (Flanagan 1992, 2000, 2002, 2007).
Neurophysicalism is the thesis that in this actual world, experiences supervene only on embodied beings with nervous systems topped off by
brains, or that experiences occur only in and to creatures with nervous systems of certain sorts, or some such.
The Heterogeneity Thesis says that any taxonomy of the kinds of states, events, and processes that we call “experiences” will show them to be of multifarious
kinds. There are moods, emotions, sensations, perceptions. There are the experiences of ‘if,’ ‘and,’ and ‘but.’ There is taste
consciousness, olfactory consciousness, tactile-kinesthetic consciousness, visual consciousness, auditory consciousness. There
is time consciousness, the feeling of duration and of the “specious present.” There is the experience of orgasm, a tickle,
an itch, and the experiences of riding a bike, swimming, doing long division, remembering French vocabulary words or the capitals
of the fifty states. There is the memory of the overall feel of our summer cottage on Cape Cod in 1961, and there is the memory
that JFK was the president at that time. There is the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. There is know-how and know-that.
There is consciousness while asleep, and there is awake consciousness. And there is probably most of all that “free water
of consciousness.”
C. S. Peirce expresses one version of The Heterogeneity Thesis this way: “The quale-consciousness is not confined to simple sensations. There is a particular quale to purple, though it be only a mixture of red and blue. There is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensations – There is a distinctive quale to every work of art – a distinctive quale to this moment as it is to me – a peculiar quale to every day and every week – a peculiar quale to my whole personal consciousness. I appeal to your introspection to bear me out” (Peirce 1898, vol. 6, 223).
The heterogeneous types of mental states are distinguished variously in terms of content, format, and phenomenal feel. Taken
together, they are the items of experience – although one might legitimately worry that “items” talk itself favors the forensic,
narrative view, by making us prone to commit what A. N. Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” – making
something that is an event or process into a thing or substance. In any case, if consciousness makes a person, then the answer
to the first question, the ITEMS question, now interpreting “items” to allow for events and processes (my own metaphysical
tendencies are Heraclitean): What are the items that constitute personhood? – is that they are – indeed, they must be – the
heterogeneous item types that make up some precise and expanded taxonomy such as this picture provides (Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1 The heterogeneity of conscious mental states.
Subjective realism says that for creatures that have experiences, that is, creatures with the right kinds of nervous systems, experiences are
had, experienced, or possessed only by the creature that has, is constituted by, or is attached to that particular nervous system.
Experiencers have their own and only their own experiences. Things or systems that lack nervous systems do not have experiences,
and thus there is nothing it is like to be them, nothing at all. For things or systems that are not experiencers, all facts
about them are, in principle, accessible from the objective point of view, ergo, objective realism for table and chairs, water, gold, bosons and fermions.
In a nutshell, these three theses taken together are the key to understanding the mind–body problem, or what has been lately
dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness,” as well as getting a feel for what “experience,” in the Experience Principle, encompasses. Experiences are (neuro-) physical events, and thus physicalism is safe and secure. But experiences are had
only by the creatures, systems, or sentient beings, which are capable of, or positioned to have, them – fish, reptiles, amphibians,
birds, and mammals, but not planets, stars, oceans, plants, and dirt. In the portions of the universe for which subjective realism obtains, there are opacities that are consequences of evolutionary design. Evolution had no reason to care about making experiences
first-personally accessible to all the curious creatures interested in having the experiences of other persons or creatures,
bats and the like. If consciousness serves a function, it comes from the fact that passing information phenomenally, rapidly,
and accurately, proved a good, satisfactory design solution to the feeding, foraging, dating, and mating problems faced by
the very organisms with most need to know what is happening in their own bodies and the immediate surround, namely, each embodied
individual. To paraphrase John Dewey: It is amazing that consciousness emerged, but given that it did emerge, there is no
mystery to its being connected to what it is connected to.
6. THREE CONSEQUENCES OF PSYCHOBIOLOGICAL NATURALISM
This resolutely naturalistic perspective yields immediate insight into several truths about selves, self-experience, self-expression,
and self-representation that are occluded by the forensic agenda.
First, regarding our first question, the ITEMS question: (1) What are the items that are connected in consciousness? The answer
is that a vast heterogeneity of experiences is normal and expectable, only some of which are propositional memory states,
which are privileged on the forensic analysis. Much of the texture of things I did and that happened to me, and that make
me who I am, that make my life what it is, seem to fade, sometimes even to evaporate, once the experience is over. Even if the memory remains that such and so happened, or that I
did it, or that it seemed a certain way, how it seems often, indeed almost always, passes quickly, as the vivid experience
it was. I had a hard-boiled egg and three kinds of berries for breakfast today. When I ate breakfast there was the taste equivalent
of a kaleidoscopic visual experience. I am sure of that, but I am not experiencing or re-experiencing it as such now, although
I have a fond connection to that experience. But the person I am now is the person who was doing that and having those experiences
several hours ago. That breakfast experience is undoubtedly causally relevant to certain things that are happening now, perhaps
to some things I am doing now, for example, writing about today’s breakfast. On what basis could it be concluded that my breakfast
experience is, even if I had not reflected upon it, not also constitutive of this guy OJF? Of course, the better example is
the earlier one about novels and concerts that we choose to read or go to in order to change ourselves, but the experience
and content of which we cannot conjure up. If the basis is a normative theory about what matters most to those outside me
– then it is true that my breakfasts, as well as the novels I have read and concerts I have attended, are largely inconsequential
to how the lives of others go and to what makes them, them. But the question of personhood is not about what matters to you
about me, but about what makes me, me.
The second consequence of the three theses of psychobiological naturalism involves (2), the CONNECTIONS question. The heterogeneous multiplicity of conscious mental state types that there
are, and which form the basis for an answer to the ITEMS question, should make one worry about privileging or highlighting
the propositional memory items as the key items that make a person who he or she is, and also about privileging the ways the
propositional items are connected in, for example, declarative memory and in a propositional logic that embeds a theory of
practical rationality. There is no a priori reason to think that the person I am is not both the result of, and constituted by, all the heterogeneous experiences that
are part of the stream or flow of experience – including “the free water of consciousness” – as much as they are the result
and constituted by the explicitly remembered events and actions that occur in the stream or flow.
It is a plausible general metaphysical thesis that the causal and constitutive relations among all a person’s experiences make him who he is, whether these experiences involve deeds or memories thereof, and whether memory
for these experiences is accurate or not. This plausible metaphysical thesis is the Experience Principle. Every cognitive scientific research program seeks to identify the items and connections that are most relevant to the explanation
of certain psychological phenomena, certain stable phenomena, domain by domain. But as far as I can tell, what psychological
phenomena are studied is driven by interest in a particular type of experience, vision, memory, learning, and no researchers
claim that this rather than that kind of experience is most constitutive of personhood, although they often claim that one
kind or another is most relevant for negotiating particular aspects of the world. Insofar as mind scientists operate with
a general theory of personhood, it is not the forensic conception7 but something like this:
Experience Principle: Whatever it is (the items and the connections) that makes a person who he or she is first personally, whatever it is that makes for personal identity, subjectively speaking, it involves necessarily the individual’s experiences.
The third consequence of the three theses of psychobiological naturalism is epistemic. Subjective realism provides the picture given in Figure 10.2.
Figure 10.2 The Subjective Realist picture of mind. Metaphysically one, epistemically tri-partite.
Subjective realism enables us to quickly gain a picture of the epistemic situations – the facts about, as well as the advantages and disadvantages
– of first, second, and third persons trying to understand their own and other minds, themselves and each other. There are
three epistemic positions in the actual world marked by the three kinds of pronouns – “I,” “you,” “he/she/it/they.” Picture
each person as represented by a cylinder, a tall 16 oz. drink can, say. What is experienced first personally, as SEI or SRI, is opaque from the point of view of the second person, from the point of view of those in various kinds of relations, which
at the limit are of an I–thou sort, the kind that lovers or true Aristotelian friends have. Think of the “you’s” and the “thou’s”
in one’s life as those who stand in various external relations to the long vertical orientation of the cylinder, which represents
the outside, the skin of a person – the skin, recall, is the largest bodily organ. Relations who are friends or acquaintances
of utility or pleasure see the cylinder as a flat rectangle if they are far away, but start to detect dimensionality and depth
as they move closer. True friends are very close and experience me, the cylinder, from all sides, but still only from the
outsides – over, under, sideways, down, perhaps; but always from the outside. But no you’s and thou’s, no second persons in my life, no one in the history of interpersonal life in the history of the universe, has ever
had one of my experiences, since they are not me.
The third personal perspective – imagine the perspective of the neuroscientist, who gazes into my brain as I eat my hard-boiled
egg and berries or as I watch my children running up the driveway to greet me – has yet another, different perspective from
me or my loved ones. Whereas friends, acquaintances, and the abundant anonymous souls with whom I interact, read me through
my actions, by applying a commonly known theory of intentional action, by reading my self-expressions and listening to my
self-representations, the neuroscientist is looking at the supervenience base, and working to link that level with my phenomenological
reports (SEI and SRI) and observations of my behavior.
Each and every perspective of every human individual is, according to the subjective realist, a perspective on, of, and by, a living human being who has an inner life comprised of the multifarious items that are the
answer to question (1), the ITEMS question, connected in all the different ways these items are connected as provided in the
answer to (2), the CONNECTIONS question. These items and the connections among them are better described, more validly depicted,
by PersonJames than by PersonLocke. If autobiographical memory is the dominant mode of connection for PersonLocke, for the second self, then accumulation of small but significant metamorphoses is the dominant mode of connection for PersonJames, for the first self.
One might ask, which perspective, first, second, third, yields the right epistemic position to see the person for who he or
she is? Only one perspective, first person, is the perspective of the person himself or herself. But it is not automatic trump.
The question of who a person or self is, is not for all purposes, straightforwardly equivalent to the question: How does this
individual person experience (SEI, SRI) himself or herself? Nonetheless, what makes any person, the person he or she is, does according to the view on offer, include
essentially experience of himself or herself.
If we think that the second or third person perspective, even as based, in some significant measure, on first personal self-expression
and self-representation for social planning purposes, generated in the back and forth of giving and taking instructions/orders,
and making commitments for which we hold each other responsible, describe the first person, we will be mistaken. The Experience Principle expresses the insight that what makes a person who he is consists first and foremost of experience, not of all this public
stuff, but of his experience.
The person or self that I am, is subjectively constituted by whatever things are like or, what might be different, seem like
from the inside. This follows from the Experience Principle. One question is whether the Experience Principle provides direction to capture the necessary and sufficient conditions for personhood. The answer is no. The person I am objectively,
according to AFI, might be something that the second and third persons in my life see or remember some aspects of more clearly than I do,
either because there are facts about me that are not experienced by me at all, or because there are facts about me that are
experienced by me, but that I do not see or remember for what they are, or there are certain facts about me that are not amenable
to experiencing at all, first, second, or third personally, but that involve surmises (based on mini-theories or big master
narratives, psychoanalysis, for example) about patterns that explain who and what I am, and am like.
7. SUBJECTIVE REALISM, ROBINSON CRUSOE, AND THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE
Even the most superficial phenomenology reveals my experiences, both the items and how they are connected, to involve much more than tracking my actions,
interpreting them, scoring them for moral quality. Normally I am having my experiences (SEI), both substantive and transitive experiences, not mostly evaluating them in terms of some blueprint I may, or may not, have
(but the culture almost certainly has) for judging how I am measuring up to some pre-existing and normatively approved game
plan for how lives should be and go. It seems obvious that a Robinson Crusoe raised on a tropical island by rabbits would be a person who does things, has experiences, and who self-expresses.
Self-expression, which does not always accurately reflect (sometimes on purpose) self-experience is worn often on the face
or seen by others who know how to read others’ actions in our social world (Darwin 1872; Flanagan 2003, 2007). If rabbits can read human expressions, then Robinson Crusoe is read, understood by rabbits to whatever point that rabbits can get us or him. If rabbits cannot read persons,
then Robinson Crusoe is not read even though he is a locus of self-experience (and possesses SEI) who is expressing (SRI) some of what is going on inside himself. That is, even if Robinson Crusoe is not read by any other sentient being, he is still the person who has and is constituted by his experiences
and, what is different, the life he lives. Even though my Crusoe does not have language, he has a memory – episodic, perhaps
– of what he has done, and where he has been. He has experiences and he is a person.
Not only is my Crusoe a person, but it is perfectly sensible to say on general naturalistic grounds that cavemen and hunter-gatherers
of 200,000 years ago were persons too. Such folk lived lives, had autobiographies, had, but not in the modern linguistic way,
their own lebenswelten. (If you have ever been on a silent retreat for more than a week, experience can start to be, at least seem, non-conceptual,
more holistic.) But cavepersons and hunter-gatherer persons were not forensic persons. They did not in any non-trivial sense
conceive their lives as essentially narrative ones. The relevant legal and moral practices that define forensic persons into
existence did not yet exist; and the linguistic practices, these involve far more than words, did not exist. There is no doubt
that language and other social institutions add complexity, new kinds of texture, and new varieties to all three underlying
capacities – for experience, self-expression and self-representation (to self and others) – and thereby allow new efficient vehicles that can do the work of forensic selfhood.8 The point, however, is that persons pre-exist these practices.9
So far, I have tried to make plausible this thesis: All persons are PersonsJames; modern people are also PersonsLocke. PersonJames is ontogenically and phylogenetically basic, the first self. PersonLocke is later, derivative, an abstraction, a second self. These two ways of being interpenetrate. In modern times we apply a discount
rate to our first selves. But there is as of now no evidence or argument that applying this discount rate is warranted if
what we are concerned with is who we are, what makes us tick, and how we are constituted as persons.
8. DIACHRONIC AND EPISODIC SELF-REPRESENTATION
For a long time (Flanagan 1990, 1991, 1996), I have been distinguishing between the descriptive and normative theses about forensic, narrative persons, and suggesting
that in its industrial strength forms, as one sees, for example, in the work of Locke, Charles Taylor, and Harry Frankfurt, we are seeing an endorsement of a certain way of being, doing, and representing the self, not
a description of normal, everyday self- or person-hood.
Forensic persons may be narrative persons, but that is not because persons are essentially either forensic, called by their
nature to be morally or legally accountable, nor called by their nature to think or speak of themselves in terms of narratives
that make them suitable objects for prediction and control. To be sure, gregarious social animals such as us were always held to account by whatever mechanisms were at the disposal of our non-human ancestors and the original people.
But no one credibly thinks that those mechanisms involved a theory of moral and legal agency, which PersonLocke does involve, nor that keeping score of cooperation or lack thereof in social relations is sufficient for being an essentially
narrative being. And if it is, then the concept of narrativity is trivially true and nothing interesting is at stake in discussing
the matter. It is incredible to think that we were narrative persons when we evolved say, 200,000 years ago. Forensic persons,
persons who are morally and legally accountable, seem to require something like narrative accountability. And clearly, providing
narrative accounts is something persons, especially modern persons, know how to do. But it is by no means obvious that this
co-occurrence of forensic persons and narrative persons has to do with the naturalness or inevitability of either, but rather
more likely with the fact that they are designed to co-occur. Again, I am not doubting that cavepersons and hunter-gatherers
held each other accountable for what they did (there is moralistic aggression among non-human primates and there are coalitions
of chimps that plot and carry out pay-back for wrongdoing). I am denying that such practices depended in any way on the cognitive-linguistic
capacities that underwrite PersonLocke.
One possibility that emerges is that the way we self-express and self-represent in modern social worlds, because it depicts
persons in forensic and narrative ways, produces the illusion that this is the way most persons always have and always will
experience themselves, and that furthermore the actual experiences that makes each of us who we are, are mostly of this form.
But if, as I have been arguing, there is a multiplicity, a heterogeneity of experience items types, it is also prima facie credible that there is a multiplicity of types of self-experience, and thus that there may be nothing normal and natural
about being a modern type of forensic-narrative person. An idea worth seriously entertaining is that SEI and SRI in the narrative-forensic mode is not the dominant mode of self-experiencing and self-representing because it is so natural,
as that it is expected, endorsed, and pulled for by modern social ecologies that are (also) structured by a picture of the
universe with the normative, metaphysical structure of the Abrahamic traditions.
Galen Strawson thinks something like this. In “Against narrativity,” he distinguishes between “one’s experience of oneself
when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as a whole, and one’s experience of oneself when one is
considering oneself principally as an inner mental entity or ‘self’ of some sort” (Strawson 2004, 429). The idea is to first draw attention to the fact that when speaking of one’s self, when using first-personal pronouns say, there is often a disconnect
between the sense that phi happened in my life, that this guy OJF did phi, and that the person that I am now, did phi. Strawson recommends using self* to mark my (sense of) self now, and self without asterisk to mark the historical being I
am.
For example, I, OJF, wrote a desperate, longing love poem to B in my teens. This is something that is part of my experience,
of my history, despite the fact that the person I am now, OJF*, is not the same person or self who wrote that desperate, longing
love poem. This latter, self as “inner mental entity,” is what Strawson calls “self-experience,” which is one variety of what
I call “experience” or “self-experience” (SEI), and which may or may not involve self-expression and/or self-representation
(SRI).10
The key point is that the story of my life, even as known and told and lived by me, and my experience of my self, can come
apart; it depends on how I am using words like I, MY, and MINE, with or without *. This might not seem surprising given the
polysemy of the words PERSON and SELF, but it is consequential for more than the meaning of our words. Indeed, it seems to
me that if I do not antecedently ask, expect, or require that my self* now (should) be or feel that I* now am the same self
as I was at every other point in my life, if I do require that the actors and owners of past events in my life must be me*,
then I can start to think about the multiplicity of ways that experience of myself presents itself to me. It is freeing to
not demand that I conform to norms, roughly Lockean, that require that everything that has happened to me and that I have
done, has happened to me* or was done by me*. It did not and it was not.
One answer to one of my security questions is “Reggie,” the name of my best childhood friend, Reginald J. Sutherland IV. Reggie died in Vietnam in 1969. He was my best friend then, actually not even then, really about ten years earlier, when
we were boys, barely in the double digits. But I* am not the same person I was then, not remotely. And thus Reggie is not
only not my best friend now, he was not in 1969 when he was killed, and he never ever was the best friend of this guy OJF*,
who I* am now. But it is true that Reggie was once the best friend of this guy OJF when I am considering myself “principally
as a human being taken as a whole,” but he was never even an acquaintance of OJF*, when I am considering myself “principally
as an inner mental entity or ‘self’ of some sort.”
Strawson uses this disconnect to emphasize this: “One of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves
. . . is as things whose persistence conditions are not obviously or automatically the same as the persistence conditions of a human being considered
as a whole” (Strawson 2004, 430). And he draws attention to one aspect or kind of experience that is underestimated, not properly noticed – perhaps
because of the high status of forensic-narrative selfhood:
The basic form of Diachronic self-experience is that[D] one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future.If one is Episodic, by contrast,[E] one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future. (Strawson 2004, 430)
Strawson describes D and E as “basic forms of self-experience,” as “styles of temporal being,” and as “basic dispositions,” and proposes that they are
based on deep innate individual differences. I will not fuss over these matters, since my main concern is to use the distinction
among his varieties of self-experience to create leverage to move forensic-narrative selfhood from the realm of the obvious
right way to conceive persons. But I will say this: We ought to consider the old-fashioned historical materialist possibility
that the dominant mode of self-experience, self-expression, and self-representation, is D-ish, i.e., forensic-narrative, and that this is not because it is the most common innately specified psychobiological configuration
of the human mind, but because this way of self-conceiving, expressing, and representing is culturally constructed, endorsed,
and pulled for, especially in modern social environments. If the ontogeny and phylogeny of the self is as I have imagined,
then cavepersons, hunter-gatherer-persons, like contemporary infants and toddlers were PersonsJames not PersonsLocke. The linguistic, moral, and legal practices required for PersonLocke did not exist when the ice melted at the end of the Pleistocene. It seems likely that the forensic, narrative self is normalized
by cultural forces, not by human nature as such. And if this is so, it is also possible that being episodic (E) is basic, and that being diachronic (D) is derivative, later, not necessarily better.
Strawson imagines this challenge from a Diachronic to an Episodic: “Episodics are inherently dysfunctional in the way they
relate to their own past. Episodics will reply that the past can be present and alive in the present without being present
and alive as the past. The past can be alive – arguably more genuinely alive – in the present simply insofar as it has helped to shape the way one is in the present” (Strawson 2004, 432). An emerging jazz composition has a history as it is performed, and what happens at each moment is crucial for what
comes next. But the whole thing is improvised, as we say, not composed in advance. The Experience Principle says that a person is constituted by his or her experiences. It does not say that a person to be a person must bring, know,
articulate, express, or represent her history at each moment to be that person. Strawson gives this gloss on wise remarks
from Rilke:
“For the sake of a single poem . . . you must have . . . many memories . . . And yet it is not enough to have memories . . . For the memories themselves are not important.” They give rise to a good poem “only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves.” (Strawson 2004, 432)
Normal people are all diachronic in the sense or to the point that they possess memory, a respectable amount of knowledge
about what they, considered as a historical being, have done, where they have been, and what has happened in their lives.
But diachronicity, in this minimalistic sense, is not sufficient to be a forensic-narrative self, since even my Crusoe, cavepersons,
and the other original persons, have such knowledge and such sense of themselves. They are self-experiencers who self-express.
What else is necessary to be a narrative-forensic self? Strawson suggests that to make for narrative selves such additional
things as form-finding, story-telling, the search for, or the projection of coherence, a fair amount of central planning about
how things are supposed to go, to turn out for this guy, and religious beliefs of the sort embedded in the analysis of PersonLocke, where the analysis is intended to have personhood conform to an account that takes as basic the reality of God and God’s interest in assessing and holding each of us fully accountable for our whole life.
One way of challenging Strawson’s nativist interpretation is by claiming that much of pressure to conflate me and me* comes
from a normative-cum-metaphysical picture that assigns unity and accountability to a person for his or her whole life, and
thus that pressures or directs one to accept that it makes sense to assume that one is the same self* over the course of a
life. Experience suggests otherwise, and thus the Experience Principle is weighted insufficiently in PersonLocke.
I can put the upshot in my terms. The forensic-narrative self that is PersonLocke is offered as a deep analysis of what a person is. But a better diagnosis is that PersonLocke is an analysis of a certain kind of construct from what a person really is that is not based on experience or self-experience,
but is based on an abstraction from experience or self-experience, in particular one that can be offered in the public space where
self-representation can traffic so that we can be held mutually accountable for our actions and coordinate our actions. Nothing
much follows from how I self-express and self-represent publicly about how I experience myself overall, who I am, and what
I seem like to myself, not even with how I self-express and self-represent for first-personal consumption. Thinking carefully
about the ways we are all PersonsJames and, more than a few of us also PersonsStrawson, might make us skeptical that PersonLocke is the right analysis of personhood. It will realign philosophical analysis of persons with what the Experience Principle teaches, and make us more sensitive to the remarkable variety of kinds of persons.
I am grateful to JeeLoo Liu, as well as audiences in Cincinnati, NYC, Nashville, and Carbondale, IL. who made helpful comments.
1 It is a complicated task to distinguish clearly between self-experience, self-expression, and self-representation. Here I
have this in mind: An itch is just an itch, a self-experience or just an experience. My itching the itch or grimacing because
of the itch is a self-expression of the itch or of the way the itch feels. If I think to myself that I have an itch or say
aloud that this is so, then I am self-representing. Experience is inherently private, inside the skin. Expressing is observable.
Representation can be for one’s eyes only or for public consumption. Self-expression and self-representation involve experience.
But self-expression and self-representation need not, often do not, express or represent the experience they seem to express
or represent. Self-expression can be misread, whereas self-representation can be manipulated intentionally to disguise or
misrepresent.
2 What makes SEI the identity of a person as opposed to a pig or a frog, who also has its own kind of SEI, but not SRI, is that the relevant kinds of experience are typed to the species nature of each.
3 There is something to this idea of AFI: For us naturalists, something like our best scientific theory of persons and what makes them tick will play the role of
God in fixing facts about personal identity that require more than what the Experience Principle provides. Also, suppose that God was interested in more than rewarding and punishing persons in the “soever.” Suppose he
wanted to let you know who you really are in a deep non-forensic way, akin to the way Socrates and Nietzsche recommend (Freud said of Nietzsche “he had greater self-knowledge than any man who ever lived or ever shall live”). Since God can do
anything, he could instead of restoring your memory for everything you did, do that plus make you more sensitively aware of
everything you experienced, and better than you are now at seeing the depth and texture of your experiences, and more attuned
to the actual causal roles, and constitutive status, of all your experiences. If God did this I could be said to know myself
as the person I, OJF, am. In such a case, as perhaps occurs with excellent therapy, I would internalize certain objective
truths about persons generally, and about the person I am specifically, and experience myself anew, more clearly, and, as
we say, subjectively. Under this scenario, my SEI/SRI would approximate my AFI.
5 It might be claimed that physicalists must accept that it is more than experiences that play a constitutive role. Say my vitamin
D levels are low, this will have an effect on mood. Or if calcium levels are low this will make my bones weak. True. But the
idea here is that these differences in the body only make a difference to me, qua person, if they produce experiential effects.
I feel low, or ache, say. Are there unconscious experiences? No.
7 One exception is personality psychology, where psychologists look for characteristic dispositional types – almost always as
one would expect in a tradition that privileges forensic-narrative persons – as traits that predict behavior, which is not
the only role that such traits play first-personally, where they are also enlisted in the project of self-knowledge, a project
that need not reduce to self-prediction and self-control.
8 Dreaming is a good example of (self-) experience, which is self-expressive. But dreams are not self-represented until put
into words in thought or told to others, in which latter case “dreams” are shared. Now whether the experiences that we call
“dreams” are self-expressive in the sense that they express deep and significant aspects of one’s self is an empirical question.
My view is that dreams are the spandrels of sleep (1995, 2000), which means that although dreams are experiences and thus
both cause and constitute my self, they are not the best information source about what makes me tick or specifically what
I most care about.
9 Thinking of my Crusoe, as well as cavepersons and hunter-gatherer persons, helps fix attention on three different functions
that experience seems to serve, so long as epiphenomenalism is false. First, there is consciousness that works by the familiar
five senses, and which at least by the light of day helps me negotiate the immediate environment. Second, there is social
consciousness that works to read other animals, including non-human ones, and to help me to negotiate the immediate social
environment, to know when opportunities to date and mate are available and when I need to flee or fight. But third, and subserving
and subfusing both the latter kinds of focal consciousness, is the “free water of consciousness,” the overall experienced
state of both my being (my Dasein) and the surround. This field, the horizon of consciousness, not only makes my experiences what they are, but also allows
quick shifting between figure and ground as necessary. Normally and everywhere, it is experiences which serve these three
functions that make a person who he or she is. A forensic person is only possible, when both these functions, but especially
the second, are elaborated inside complex modern social practices.
10 It would be better, given the way I am using words, to mark the distinction this way: PERSON = SELF and names the historical
being I am. PERSON* = SELF* and names the sense I have of my phenomenal occurrent being. But I will not fuss over the matter
here.