I Could Be Somebody Else
This is the chapter 1 of my work Subject of experience and personal identity.
This is the starting point of my investigation: that it is conceivable that I were a different person than the one I actually am (i.e. Edralis). That is, that the person that I am could have existed without me, and I could have existed even if she had not. I can imagine being a different person than the one I happen to be now – for example, waking up tomorrow in a different body, with a different personality, and without any memory of ever having been the person that I am now. I can imagine having been born as a different person – or, after the person that I am dies, being born again as a different person, without having any memory of ever having been the person that I am now, i.e. reincarnated tabula rasa. It seems that it is a contingent fact about me that I am the person that I am: that the person that I happen to be exists and that I exist are two different facts – that neither is reducible to the other.[1]
So, what does it mean that “I could have been a different person”? What do I imagine when I imagine being a different person? What do I imagine would be the different person, when I imagine myself being a different person? What is the referent of ‘I’ here, and what is the relation between the ‘I’ and the person that I actually am and that I could have been? What about the world would have been different if it were the case that I were a different person?
Let’s say I were indeed a different person – for example, the person that you are – and you, instead of being the person that you are, were Edralis – that is, that our bodies, including the brains, were swapped. What does this translate to? In one sense, nothing would be different – Edralis and the person that you are would remain as they are, doing what they are doing now. Even their experiences would exist, unchanged in content – all their joys and sorrows, their thoughts and perceptions, would exist. The only difference would be this: that it would not be me who would be experiencing Edralis’s experiences, even though her experiences would exist[2] – instead of being here now, writing this, I would be there where you are now, doing what the person that you are is doing, i.e. your current experience would be, instead of being yours, mine[3]; and vice versa, it would be Edralis’s experiences that would be yours, instead of those of the person that you are. You would now be here, being Edralis writing this sentence.
When I imagine myself being a different person, what I imagine is that I perceive the world through their eyes, have their personality, their body, their memories; that their experiences are mine, in the same way that this experience, of the person that I happen to be now (i.e. Edralis), is mine. That is, this particular experience –these perceptions, feelings, thoughts– is special to me in that it has a sort of immediacy that experiences of all other people lack (or so people believe). I am this person, Edralis, because the experiences that have this special immediacy belong to her. And so when I imagine being a different person, what I imagine to be different compared to how things are now is that some other man’s or woman’s experiences, instead of Edralis’s experiences, have this sort of immediacy that only Edralis’s experiences actually possess (or so people believe).
There is only ever one experience, one situation going on for me – in any given now, there is a particular perspective that I have of the world – a world is given to me from a certain point of view. Every moment, the perspective changes and the world is seen differently – even though it is only ever seen, for me, through Edralis’s eyes (or so people believe). That is, the experience that is mine-now, and the experience that was mine-now five minutes ago, and the experience that will be mine-now five minutes in the future – are all believed to be centered on the same person, Edralis. However, even if that were not the case and in five minutes I were to be reincarnated as a different person, let’s say her name is Mary, what would remain identical in Mary’s experiences, since they would be mine, is that they would exist as immediately given in the same way this experience now is given.
That is what makes an experience mine: it is this immediacy in which the mineness of experiences (relative to me – for there exists also a mineness that is peculiar to you, or so people believe) consists, that I can imagine would be the property of experiences of those people that I am not, but that I can nonetheless imagine myself being: “I could have been born as another person” translates to “it could be experiences of another person that would be mine”, that is, “it could be the experiences of another person that would have the property of immediacy that makes an experience mine[4]”.
I am the person whose experiences are mine. The me-ness of some person consists in their experience being mine: I am Edralis because her experiences have this property of mineness, or immediacy. But it is conceivable that her experiences did not have this immediacy – it is conceivable that I were another person, or many people. I could be some other person, or not exist at all, while her experiences could be someone else’s, i.e. have some other mineness – in the same way that the experiences of other people are someone’s and immediately given, but not mine (so people believe). And so that I am this person that I am, i.e. that it is her experience that has the property of mineness, is a contingent fact about me – for it is conceivable that I were somebody else.
Klawonn calls this “incarnational contingency”: “my being the person that I am and nobody else, is not logically implied by any set of data about the person whose mental life happens to be present in the I-dimension”[5], where “I-dimension” is “what confers presence or appearing to everything that appears to me”[6], i.e. the mineness (peculiar to me) of experience itself.
That an experience belongs to me is not a function of its content – including whether it belongs to this or that person – but of whether it possesses the specific immediate givenness that is its mineness. Any experience could be mine, as long as it has the property of mineness ‒ an experience that is mine could have any content. That is, the quality of mineness could conceivably inhere in an experience of any content.
So what I imagine when I imagine being another person is that person’s experience being mine, i.e. possessing the immediate givenness of the same kind that this experience now, of Edralis writing this sentence, possesses, and not the givenness the experiences of other people are thought to possess.
[1] Because of it being conceivable that I could be somebody else instead of the person that I am, or not exist at all, without her changing in any way psychologically or physically, there would be something missing in our description of how things are even after we took account of every person in the world, objectively describing their bodies and psychologies. As Thomas Nagel (1965) points out, what would be missing from our description would be the specification of the fact that I am (you are) one of these people: “I can thus describe without token-reflexives the entire world and everything that is happening in it – and this will include a description of Thomas Nagel and what he is thinking and feeling. But there seems to remain one thing which I cannot say in this fashion – namely, which of the various persons in the world I am. Even when everything that can be said in the specified manner has been said, and the world has in a sense been completely described, there seems to remain one fact which has not been expressed, and that is the fact that I am Thomas Nagel. … the fact that I am the subject of these experiences; this body is my body; the subject or center of my world is this person, Thomas Nagel.” Also cf. Sluga on Wittgenstein: “Wittgenstein insists that a complete description of the world, “a book called The World as I found it”, would not mention the I, the subject.” (Sluga 1996)
[2] But note they would not be the same experiences that exist now: for the experiences that actually exist now are mine; and in our hypothetical scenario, they would be yours. That is, unless the ‘I’ and ‘you’ we are seeking for is actually the same thing, in which case there is nothing to swap and the whole scenario is misguided.
[3] More precisely: the content that is currently instantiated for you, would be instantiated for me. Again, the particular experiences that exist now would not exist; but there would exist some experiences instantiating the same content.
[4] i.e. the property of immediacy in which the mineness of an experience consists in
[5] Klawonn 2009, p. 80
[6] ibid., p. 86