Conclusion
This is the conclusion of my work Subject of experience and personal identity.
It is conceivable that I could have been another person. It isconceivable that the experiences immediately given in the same way this experience now, of Edralis writing this, is immediately given, would not be Edralis’s experiences, but rather those of a different person. That an experience is mine does not consist in it having a particular content, including what person it belongs to (i.e. its PC), or in it being generated by some particular brain (i.e. its generator) – but rather in it being immediately given.
We seem to believe that we are bound to a particular brain; that our experiences are generated by brain states that are physically continuous with each other. Even if this is the case, we are still left with the mystery of why it was a brain state of that particular brain that first brought an experience with the particular mineness into existence, i.e. why the particular phenomenal content was realized as mine. If different content corresponds to a different structure, and the same content can be replicated by replicating the structure, what does different mineness correspond to? What would we have to replicate to instantiate a particular property of mineness?
It is the quality of mineness of experience that existentially matters to us – yet it is not what we are looking at (or are even capable of looking at), when considering the identity or survival of people in the usual sense, i.e. people with certain psychology and a certain body. People interact with each other all the time, but mineness only exists for itself. What constitutes our survival to ourselves –the continued existence of our mineness– is not what constitutes the survival of the people that we are. The solutions to the problem of personal identity that analyze “us” as objects (i.e. as intersubjective, observable entities in the world) and do not take people’s internality into account fail to address the deeper mystery of ourselves as subjects, in which the world is.