Mineness
This is chapter 3 of my work Subject of experience and personal identity.
This experience, currently unique among all experiences in that it is mine (so people believe – i.e. they believe that now there are also other experiences which are not mine), is immediately replaced by a new one, which is then the one immediately given and present to me. What changes is the content of what is now, what is to me immediately given and present; what remains is the basic fact of there being something (some content) that is now for me, immediately given and present to me, i.e. some experience having the property of mineness.[1]
This moment, which is centered around Edralis, and this moment (for the first moment is already gone), which is centered around the same person, are both immediately given in the same way, as opposed to your experiences, centered around the person that you are, which are not given like this (presumably). There is something that all Edralis’s experiences have in common besides their contentual continuity, something that your experiences lack (so people believe): that they are mine.
Mineness is the unchanging substrate underlying our (ever-changing) experience. Whenever there is a change, there must be some grounding identity, something persisting through change, where the change “takes place” – something that undergoes the change. For experience, this substrate of change is mineness – it is the where-when of my experience taking place. From moment to moment, my experience changes; yet, from moment to moment, my experience remains. What changes is the content that is experienced, and what remains is the way that content is realized, i.e. the basic fact of there being something existent as experienced, something existent for me, as long as I exist: “(…) whereas the act can become past and absent, the dimension of experiencing that allows for presence and absence cannot itself become past and absent (for me). Whereas we live through a number of different experiences, the first-personal experiencing itself remains as an unchanging dimension.”[2]
What remains constant in my experience, and what makes it mine, is its immediate givenness (i.e. that it exists in the same way this experience now exists), whatever its content. In one experience – I am; in another experience – I am again, equally present.
In other words, the frame, the “screen” –the mineness of experience– remains, but the content –that which is shown or given as mine, in that mineness, for me, in the now-here– changes: “the element of content changes, whereas the element of givenness/consciousness remains constant, so that different experiences may be characterised by the same primary givenness”[3].
Or, as Priest puts it: “The unconditioned content of the present is Heraclitean. The unconditioned present itself is Parmenidean. What happens in the present constantly replaces itself. The present when this happens is utterly unchanging.”[4] The present, the now, is the immediate givenness of experience itself –the way it exists, its for-me-ness, its phenomenal character, its subjectivity. That is what exists equally in all my experiences. I exist equally in all my experiences – so in an important sense, I am mineness.
I care in a special way about future Edralis’s pain, because I believe it will be as present and as immediate as this particular moment is present, is “live” now. I believe it will have the same property of mineness that this experience now, of Edralis writing this sentence, has – this is what it means for me to anticipate Edralis’s experiences. I don’t care about other people’s pains in this way, because other people’s pains (so people believe) simply do not have the same painful immediacy – yes, they have a painful immediacy, but not for me, not the same immediacy that Edralis’s pains have. They have mineness (for all experiences have mineness, have subjectivity ‒ otherwise they would not be experiences), but that mineness is not mine.
Because of our implicit belief that only those experiences which belong to the person that we are now experiencing as ourselves have this sort of immediacy (i.e. our own mineness), we lack this special kind of care for other people’s pains, even though we might sympathize with the people and feel bad for them. We believe that the experience of their pain is not our experience: not only that it is not the experience of the person that we are, but that it does not exist in the same way, does not have the acute immediacy of an experience that is our own – not for us anyway. The only pain that will be real for me is that of Edralis (presumably). And it is the default view that after she is gone, there will be nothing for me, no experience, ever again.
This immediate givenness of experience to me, its mineness, is not a feature of the content of experience. The Edralis-ness of experience does not constitute its mineness, even if I believe that Edralis-experiences (i.e. experiences generated by Edralis’s brain, or experiences where Edralis=PC) and my experiences are the same experiences. Edralis-ness is either an extrinsic property of experience (i.e. that the experience was generated by Edralis the human animal’s brain) or a feature of its content (i.e. that Edralis=PC); but mineness is the way that content is actualized. Mineness is the substrate, content its shape.
Any content could conceivably be realized as mine, could be immediately given to me ‒ Klawonn calls this “incarnational tolerance”: “any kind of experiential content could be present in the I-dimension”.[5]
How to describe what this mineness is? Notice your current experience – this one now. Notice another one – this one now. What do they have in common? They are there, for you – they are now and this. They are immediately given to you; they exist as present to you, and could not exist without you (even though their content might be instantiated in another experience with a different mineness). They are both yours. And again, this has nothing in itself to do with what is in them, i.e. with their content, with what person they belong to (what PC they have, what brain they were generated by): “my experiences are not mine (in the sense relevant here) because they are associated with this particular objectively existing person; rather, vice versa, this person is (apprehended as) ‘me’ in so far as it is given to me (in my experiencing) in a very special way (‘from the inside’, so to speak)”[6].
Mineness is the phenomenality or subjectivity of experience, which is just the way experience exists. Fasching identifies the immediate givenness of experience as something that “constitutes its very being” and is its “mode of existence” [7]. It is its thisness, nowness, givenness, immediacy. Zahavi and Kriegel call it “for-me-ness” and “subjective givenness” [8] and identify it with pre-reflective self-consciousness, which is “a constant structural feature of conscious experience”[9].
Klawonn calls it “ontological subjectivity”, “self-givenness”, “self-presence”, “primary presence”, “being this” of an experience, “phenomenal dimension”, “I-dimension”, and “first-person mode of presentation of experience”[10].
A key feature of this mineness or givenness is its actual (as opposed to conceptual) inextricability from experience. If there is an experience, there must be a property of mineness that it instantiates. An experience does not first exist and then acquire mineness, thereby becoming “given” to me; it exists as/in being immediately given to me: “ … experiential for-me-ness is not a detachable self quale that one could introspect in isolation from any other content of consciousness, but rather an experiential feature of all phenomenal episodes that remains constant across them and constitutes the subjectivity of experience. To deny that such a feature is present in our experiential life, to deny the for-me-ness or mineness of experience, is to fail to recognize an essential constituent of experience. It is to ignore the subjectivity of experience.”[11]
So the immediate givenness of experience that is its mineness –the way it exists, its phenomenal character– is also its subjectivity: experiences exist subjectively. They are not available for “public viewing” – my experiences belong to me only. They are private, have their being “in me”, and could not exist without me. You can undergo “the same” experience as me only in the sense that the content that is instantiated for me, in an experience that possesses the mineness peculiar to me, can be instantiated for you in another experience, in the mineness peculiar to you.[12]
All experiences that are mine possess the property of mineness equally (they are all equally mine), even though the content of experiences might be more or less intense: “[…] a tepid pink is just as present as a bright red, it does not amount to a less of consciousness; and even the experience of complete darkness does not mean being unconscious! Actually, consciousness as such is not a matter of degrees at all: either experiential presence takes place or it does not, with no possible in-between … .”[13]
Klawonn makes the same point, using his own term “primary presence” to refer to the mineness of experience: “In an ontological sense there are no degrees of consciousness. Either an experiential content is primarily present – or else it is not.”[14] My drifting asleep, when I am half-awake, is just as mine as the state of the most intense, self-aware joy or pain; it is not half mine and half not-mine. Inasmuch as something is my experience, it is always entirely for me, i.e. it has the immediate givenness peculiar to me[15].
Even though in this sense I exist fully in every experience that is mine (i.e. every experience that is mine has the quality of mineness peculiar to me), at any point in time, only a single experience is revealed as mine. I existed yesterday, I exist now, and I will again exist tomorrow – I exist in many experiences (many experiences existed/exist/will exist in/for me). Does that mean that right now I exist only partially? No – I am fully myself here-now, in this experience. But I am also fully myself there-then, in all the past/future experiences that are mine.[16]
There exist many experiences which have the property of mineness in common, i.e. which have (instantiate) the same immediate givenness. Only one of them is ever now, even though all of them, when they are, are now. Klawonn calls the set of such experiences the “system of changing experiences with a common feature of primary givenness”, “I”, “ego”, “self”[17], or “Cartesian I-substance”, and says it “[consists] of states of mineness (i.e. phenomenal states ‘exposed’ in the I-dimension)”[18]. There are as many of these systems, or sets, of experiences as there are subjects, i.e. as there are mineness-properties. If our common assumptions about ourselves are correct, then the set of all experiences with the property of mineness peculiar to me is the same as the set of experiences generated by a particular (Edralis’s) brain; but if, say, reincarnation is true, then Edralis’s experiences constitute only a subset of the experiences that are mine.
[1] “The contents become actual successively, whereas the actuality of experiencing is an abiding manifestation-dimension, and not something that comes and goes, with one actuality succeeding the previous one (one actuality after another becoming actual). And this abiding actuality of experiencing is the essence of the I in a fundamental sense (the sense that is relevant with regard to the question of what my continued existence consists in).” Fasching 2012
[2] Zahavi 2000
[3] Klawonn 2009, p. 46
[4] Priest 2012
[5] Klawonn 2009, p. 80
[6] Fasching 2012
[7] ibid. Also cf. Sartre 1943, p. 20: “This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something.”
[8] Zahavi & Kriegel 2015
[9] Gallagher & Zahavi 2016
[10] Klawonn 2009
[11] Zahavi & Kriegel 2015
[12] Of course even I myself cannot experience the same experience twice. There might be experiences identical in their mineness (i.e. both mine) and in their content, yet they must be two different phenomenal events, two different experiences.
[13] Fasching 2012
[14] Klawonn 1998
[15] And so it cannot be an empty question whether some person at some time is me or not! It can be an empty question whether a person is the same person as some other person; but never whether that person is me, i.e. whether their experience is mine.
[16] Cf. Fasching 2012: “I qua the standing present is not a temporally extended object with corresponding object-stages. This is why it is so counter-intuitive to conceive of oneself as a perdurer. Each moment I experience something, I, qua experiencer, fully exist, and not just a part of me. Of course, only a part of my experiential life takes place right now: my experiential life is the succession of the experiences that are present to me one after another, and therefore a process. But this ‘I’ to whom they are present is not itself a process. When one experience succeeds the other – when a new ‘temporal part’ of my experiential life becomes present – it is not the case that another part of me comes into existence: for these new experiences are – vice versa – part of ‘my experiential life’ only because they are present to me. And this ‘me’ that makes my experiences mine is absolutely singular and does not itself consist of parts.”
[17] Klawonn 1998
[18] Klawonn 2009, p. 95