Consciousness of Self Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution

Agent Consciousness of Self and Self-Constitution: how we got here ……. Critique of descriptivism and Humeanism led me to recognize a basic non-attributive consciousness of self in reflection on experience. Now I want a deeper understanding of this consciousness of self. Inquire into the notion that seeing how this is connected with agency, we discover a consciousness of self “as subject”—that promises to explain: – how we acquire the concept of self that figures in reflection (O’Brien), and – how a particular (morally significant) self is is generated (or “constituted”) (Korsgaard).

Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution (How) does the way one is conscious of oneself in exercising agency create a “self” and give it unity over time?

Korsgaard: her take on consciousness of self (?) My conception of myself as a unified agent, at time, over time, is practically based. I have pragmatic reason to regard myself as the same rational agent who will occupy my body in the future. This needs no “deep metaphysical sense” in which I am “identical to the subject of experiences who will occupy my body in the future.” Developed in connection with a Kantian response to Parifit’s Humean reflections on personal identity and its moral significance.

Review Parfit on person “fission” and “what matters” Suppose: “My body is fatally injured, as are the brains of my two brothers. My brain is divided, and each half is successfully transplanted into the body of one of my brothers. Each of the resulting people believes he is me, seems to remember living my life, has my character, and is in every other way psychologically continuous with me. And he has a body that is very like mine.” (p.130) Problem: they can’t both be me, neither one is a better candidate— and yet their existence is about as good as if I had survived in the ordinary way (and much better than ordinary death). “the main conclusion to be drawn is that personal identity is not what matters.” (130)

Parfit: salient points— the self and what matters; compensation Fission preserves everything that matters, though it doesn’t preserve identity. Thus there’s no reason to think it matters that some future person be you (a copy of you would be good enough to secure “what matters”). Your concern for your future self should be assimilated to your concern for other selves. The idea that it matters deeply whether you or I are benefitted for a burden I incur today (since only if I am benefitted have I been compensated) loses its rational grip.

Korsgaard’s Kantian reply to Parfit An “agent-centered conception of personal identity blocks the utilitarian implications which Parfit anticipates. Yet [this agent centered conception] shares [with Parfit] the idea that persons are not deeply or metaphysically separated.” (124)

An agent-centered conception of personal identity The need to conceive of yourself as a unified agent comes from your need, by deliberation, to “eliminate conflict among motives” in order to act with a single body. To do this you cannot just wait to see which motive is strongest and become effective, rather you regard some principle as “expressive of yourself” and as a reason that “regulates your choice among desires”—which is to say you “identify with” the principle. This is to view yourself not from the standpoint of explanation and prediction, but of justification and choice. (120) To see yourself as the “author” of your life, as the one who “leads your life”, making actions and choices “truly your own”

Tracking persons with bodies may become outmoded—but this doesn’t make “leveling” ok It’s true that changes in technology could make it no longer appropriate for moral attitudes to track particular human bodies (there could be “series-persons”). But a conception of personal identity justified by reference to what’s required for rational agency is sufficient to give us reason to accord agents a moral status that resists Parfit’s utilitarian “leveling” of concern —that is, resists his assimilation of your concern with your future to your concern for others, so as to justify indifference to compensation.

Identifying which your future to be what you are ( ) “Some of the things we do are intelligible only in the context of projects that extend over long periods…careers…friendships…family lives…we presuppose and construct a continuity of identity and agency… In order to carry out a rational plan of life, you need to be one continuing person…You are one continuing person because you have one life to lead.” The unity of our life is forced upon us, although not deeply, by our shared embodiment, together with our desire to carry on long-term plans and relationships.” …Indeed the choice of any action, no matter how trivial, takes you some way into the future…you need to identify with your future in order to be what you are even now.”

Practically we must see see ourselves as agents and choosers ( ) “[F]rom the practical point of view, actions and choices must be viewed as having agents and choosers. This is what makes them, in our eyes, our own actions and choices rather than events that befall us… This does not mean that our existence as agents…requires a separately existing entity that should be discernible from a theoretical point of view. It is rather that from a practical point of view our relationship to our actions and choices is essentially authorial: from it, we view them as our own.”

Blocking Parfit’s leveling “…it is misleading to ask whether my present self has a reason to be concerned with my future selves. This…presupposes that the present self is necessarily interested in the quality of present experiences, and needs a further reason to care for more than that. But insofar as I constitute myself as an agent living a particular life, I will not in this way oppose my present self to future ones. (126-27)

Blocking Parfit on compensation and leveling of concern (12) “Parfit…concludes that distributive policies should focus on the quality of experiences rather than on lives. But…[l]ives conceived as led by agents may be completely separate even if the unity of those agents is pragmatic rather than metaphysically deep. And if living a life in that sense is what matters, distribution should be over lives, and the agents who lead them. As things stand the basic leader of a life is a human being, and this is what makes the human being the unit of distribution. If technology changes this—for instances, if series-persons become possible—then the appropriate unit of distribution may change.” (129)

Agents: fundamental to practical reason, hence to morality “…the conception of ourselves as agents is fundamental to the standpoint of practical reason, the standpoint from which choices are made. And it is from this standpoint that we ask moral questions, and seek help from moral philosophy. This makes the conception of the agent, along with its unity, an appropriate one to employ in moral thinking.” (132)

Doubts about Korsgaard’s concession to Parfit First, I do not concede that what matters to me would be preserved without identity, just by copying (making a “replica” of me). I do not concede that I’d be just fine being destroyed and replaced by “series- persons” It may be that Parfit’s fission scenario is no worse that ordinary survival. But that is not because some relation that can be preserved in copying is what matters, so I’m fine with being destroyed and my Replica stepping in. No, fission would be just as good as ordinary survival, not for that reason, but because, by preserving enough of my (functional) brain, it preserves, in a bizarre way, what would have, in other circumstances (where the other half of the brain is destroyed, say), constituted real survival with personal identity (bodily + psychological continuity).

Are bodies so dispensable to living our lives? Maybe what I do and can do bodily provides not just contingent constraints on how I can live my life, any more than does what I can or do think. It belongs just as much to living my life. If bodily activities—experienced looking, feeling, touching, reaching, grasping—are integral to what makes me act as an agent with subject self-consciousness, together with conscious deliberative thought— why suppose only in rational deliberation and decision do I identify with a future and express who I am—and the rest merely provides dispensable limitations on how I can live my life?

Are bodies so dispensable to living our lives? Also, isn’t it by reliance on some sort of bodily continuity that I am able to commit acts with the sort of unity needed for me to carry myself into the future (and to “identify with my future”)? And, while I could continue to live my life while losing old and acquiring new body parts, even brain parts—without some bodily continuity in the process, and without the right sort of body to carry on, I cannot continue my life. If this much bodily continuity is required for the unity that could constitute a single life that is mine, why assume radical bodily discontinuities of the sort envisaged in “series-persons” would not break the thread of my life, and be nothing more than a series of person-copies, accompanied by destruction of the originals? And is it then clear that a pragmatically based conception of myself as a unified agent needs no “deep metaphysical sense” (?) in which I am “identical to the subject of experiences who will occupy my body in the future”?