Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

My commentary on a comic continues. The imagination of the folks in Existential Comics brought together Hume and Buddha, sitting them at a booth in what looks like a 20th century (not so much the 21st) diner. In its first half, they discuss what they have in common. In its second, how greatly their views diverge. For if the self is not real ... what follows? For Buddha, what follows is that one must turn away from earthly passions into contemplation. A man once came to the Buddha saying "I want happiness." The Buddha said he should take away the I from that sentence. Then he should take away the "want," for it is the now-disappeared I that has desires and wants. Happiness will be what is left. [The comic doesn't tell the story of that exchange, but the sentiments it puts into Buddha's mouth are consistent with that.] Hume doesn't see it that way. In the comic he says that the non-existence of the self means we should pursue ONLY sensual pleasu...

What is it like to be a human? It is about having experiences, and having those experiences be like something for me. Dan Zahavi, of the University of Copenhagen, has written this: Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood. It has been posted on the web, and will soon see hardcover existence in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Zahavi revisits a by now familiar thought experiment in philosophy, asking himself what it is like to be a bat? He stipulates that to be a bat is for phenomena to have a "what is it like FOR ME" aspect to the bat as a "me." The bat never experiences a blue sky. Does the bat experience the dampness of the cave? It he aware of the relative dryness of certain corners of his cave versus the extra dampness of others? And is that a for-me experience for a bat to have? What about anguish? My guess: a bat probably does have a subjective sense of relative dryness. Probably not an experience of anguish. The former wo...

Most of us have a sense that there is something about us that is peculiarly private, known only to us, and that the contents of what we call our "mind" are almost (?) definitionally this peculiarly private stuff. This is why "mind reading" is such a popular magic trick. To have someone pull a rabbit out of a hat is one thing, and all good fun. But to pull out my thoughts from my head? "Think of any number between one and ten ... you are thinking of four!" -- THAT sort of trick is slightly threatening, though in the context of a stage show the threat is of course contained so the audience doesn't flee in horror. In history-of-philosophy terms Descartes certainly helped codify our sense of ourselves as a tight fortress with a private theatre inside, it is the "I" which "thinks" and which holds itself as its first certitude. As a consequence and one might say as a mitigation of this sense of privacy, we talk of putting ourselv...

Dan Zahavi resumes an old debate about whether the human self discloses itself in thought -- whether I know myself (and so can be sure of my own existence) because of cogito. In its origin, this argument is Descartes vs Hume. In more recent decades, Jesse Prinz (portrayed above) has argued that there is no "experiential quality" that discloses self to self, BUT that consciousness is thoroughly permeated by selfhood. If I understand Prinz, he means that we know our self by a sort of inference, not as directly as Descartes'  concise language suggests but more genuinely that Hume's bundle theory can accommodate. Zahavi says that Prinz has rediscovered an element in Kantianism. As Kant put it, "I cannot cognize as an object itself that which I must presuppose in order to cognize an object at all." Zahavi's own view is that self-consciousness, the sort of conscious event that reveals a self, is a particular sort of event, not any-old event and not t...