Which experiences are mine?
This is chapter 4 of my work Subject of experience and personal identity.
All experiences possess the quality of mineness. Some experiences are mine relative to me. The mineness of experience peculiar to me is its immediate givenness to me. If there are many mineness-properties, each one of them peculiar to some subject, what is the cause of an experience having a particular mineness-property, as opposed to some other? What causes an experience with this property to come into being? What conditions have to be met for an experience with the property of a particular mineness, as opposed to some other mineness, to come into being? What is it that keeps me in existence – that keeps the property of mineness peculiar to me actualizing itself?
We seem to believe that every experience is dependent for its existence on some brain state; i.e. not only that every experience corresponds to a brain state, but also that there is a causal relation between them, with the arrow of causation pointing from the brain state (a non-phenomenal, objective entity, not instantiating some property of mineness) to the experience (a phenomenal entity, instantiating some property of mineness).
The content of experience is determined by the brain state that generates it (arguably) – to cause an experience with a certain content, all we need to do is put some brain into a certain brain state, i.e. cause it to have a certain structure. For example, in order to create a content-copy of this experience, it is sufficient that we recreate the pattern of the brain state of Edralis’s brain (i.e. the brain that generates this experience, of Edralis writing this sentence) in another substrate. The generated experience (the copy) would be contentually identical (i.e. instantiating the same content) if the pattern of the substrate that is its generator (i.e. the brain state that is the copy) were identical to the original pattern (i.e. the original brain state).
What do we need to do to create an experience that is mine (i.e. that has this particular mineness, this particular immediate givenness)? We seem to believe that if the pattern of some brain state of another person were copied into one’s own brain (i.e. the brain of the human animal generating the experience „one finds oneself in“; e.g. in my case the brain that generates this experience, of Edralis writing this sentence), the resulting experience would be one’s own (i.e. would have the same mineness), in spite of its content being that of another person (in the sense of having a different PC). And if the structure of our brain were copied into a different brain, or a copy of our brain were created from scratch, the resulting experiences would not be our own (i.e. they would have a different mineness). So it is not the particular pattern of matter that we seem to believe determines whether an experience is mine or not – pattern determines content, but not mineness.
For example: imagine that your current brain state (BS1), i.e. the brain state that generates this experience (E1) that is immediately given to you now, of the person that you are, reading this sentence, and my current brain state (BS2), of this experience (E2) that is given to me now, of Edralis writing this, are scanned. Then, the pattern of my brain state (BS2) is copied into your brain (the brain that generated E1), and the pattern of your brain state (BS1) is copied into mine, so that the brain that generated E1 now generates an experience contentually identical to E2 – i.e. E2b, and the brain that generated E2 now generates an experience contentually identical to E1 – i.e. E1b. The intuition of the majority of people probably would be that E1 and E2b would be identical in their quality of mineness, as would be E2 and E1b – i.e. that the second experience of Edralis writing that sentence (i.e. E2b) would be yours; and the second experience of the person that you are, reading that sentence (i.e. E1b), would be mine. We seem to believe this because E1 and E2b would be generated by the same brain (by your brain, i.e. what we believe is the brain generating experiences with mineness peculiar to you), as would E2 and E1b (bymy brain, i.e. what we believe is the brain generating experiences with mineness peculiar to me).
And so it would seem that our basic assumption about which experiences have the quality of mineness peculiar to us is this: that every one of us (i.e. every property of mineness) is bound to a particular brain, i.e. that only the brain states of that brain, and all the brain states of that brain (that do generate experience), generate experiences with the same mineness. We also believe that our experiences are generally veridical – our experiences are reflections of the world from the POV of the creature (a human animal) with that brain, which (the creature) is represented in our experiences as their PC.
So e.g. I am bound to Edralis’s brain – her consciousness (the consciousness generated by the brain in her body) is my consciousness; it is her experiences (experiences generated by her brain) that possess the quality of mineness peculiar to me. When that brain ceases functioning, ceases being a generator, there will be no more experiences for me (i.e. with the quality of mineness peculiar to me)[1]. That is, when Edralis dies, that’s it also for me, i.e. there will be no more experiences with the mineness that this experience now of Edralis writing this sentence has. Also, before Edralis was born (before she became conscious, i.e. before there were any experiences generated by her brain), there was no me (i.e. no experience had ever been an actualization of the quality of mineness peculiar to me).
We usually believe that there exists a body, with a brain inside its head, which generates our experiences, which veridically represent the world of which that body is a part. Our experiences are partial (selective) reflections of the world in/for a mineness, i.e. they are the world phenomenally reflected as mine[2]. The microcosm (the phenomenal, the subjective) reflects the macrocosm (the objective), if you like.
And so people believe that our experiences (generally) reflect what really happens „out there in the world“. When there is an experience for us that we identify as a representation, say, of our hand (i.e. some complex visual or tactile percept), we assume there is an actual objective thing “out there” in the world[3] which corresponds to the experience, causes it, and is represented in it.
The reason why we have these beliefs about our experiences arguably has to do with memory: we have no memory of ever not being somebody, i.e. ever not being connected to a particular brain; and we have no memory of ever being a different person than the person that is the center of the experience that exists for us now. We anticipate experiencing the future experiences of the person that we are now because we remember their past experiences. We see that our experiences are centered on a particular person, and we assume that those experiences are veridical, and we do not have a memory of ever experiencing another person, or having experiences presumably not generated by this particular brain – thus, we believe that we (our experiences) are bound to (our existence is dependent on) a particular brain.
If we did not believe our experiences were veridical, we would have less reason to assume that because we remember being this person (which probably means so far we have only been this person), we can anticipate only ever experiencing the world from their POV. This is because in that case (if I were dreaming, a brain in a vat, etc.), our experiences would not depend on the existence of an external, predictable “lawful world”, but their content might be determined by rules we don’t understand.
So if the veridicality assumption is correct, that makes my mostly having experiences where Edralis=PC seem more likely than if I were a brain in a vat (BIV). If I were a BIV, the content of my experiences would be determined by the whims of those who put me (my brain) in the vat, and they could decide to make me experience a totally different person in my next experience, and to feed me false memories; but if there is actually a lawful world, with a body and a brain, generating consciousness which reflects that world, to which I (my mineness) happen to be bound, then, my experiences being generated by that particular brain and being a reflection of that (assumedly lawful) world, I can expect them to be (mostly) Edralis-centered. That is: if my experiences are veridical, then I have a better reason to believe that (almost) all my experiences will be Edralis-centered.[4]
We believe that it will most likely be the case that all our experiences will be those of a particular PC because we believe our existence is bound to a particular brain which generates, most of the time, experiences that are „veridically centered“, i.e. in which the Edralis-PC is a veridical reflection of the human animal Edralis. Of course, not all of the experiences that this brain generates are veridically centered, and we seem to expect to experience those, too: for example, dreams, hallucinations, non-centered experiences. We also expect to survive total amnesia or total reprogramming of the brain. However the brain is tinkered with, any experience it generates we expect to be our own (i.e. to possess the same quality of mineness; to be immediately given in the same way this experience now is given).
If the memory and personality of the person that we are were to be totally erased from our brain, and that person were to undergo torture, we would still anticipate their pains in a way we would not anticipate the pains of some other person – i.e. „our brain“ would remain ours, generating experiences for us, regardless of whom they were centered on (regardless of content, including the PC), and regardless of their veridicality. As Fasching puts it: “(...) an impending total amnesia and character change could not convince me that I would not have to fear a coming torture supposed to happen afterwards, just because the alleged personal-identity constituting psychological unity relations would not hold then.“[5]
So, to sum up, the assumptions we hold about ourselves: The existence of my experiences, and therefore of me, is predicated on the existence of some physical object (some brain) that has the function of (instantiates the property of being) the generator of experiences with the mineness peculiar to me. We exist only as long as there exists something that is capable of playing this role, i.e. some generator that brings us about. And we are uniquely bound only to a single object (a continuous spatio-temporally extended entity): of all objects that are generators that ever were, are, or will be, there is only one that is specifically the generator of our own experiences, i.e. that possesses the property of being our generator(1) ‒ this means that all the generator(2) physical states that generate experiences with our particular mineness are continuous[6].
For example: the current experience of Edralis writing this sentence is generated by a brain state– I expect any brain state continuous with that brain state that is a generator to also generate an experience that has the same property of mineness, i.e. is mine. That is why I anticipate tomorrow’s Edralis’s experiences – i.e. the experiences generated by her brain tomorrow: because tomorrow’s brain states of Edralis’s brain will be continuous with her current brain state, and I know this brain state (that is a brain state of Edralis’s brain) generates an experience with the property of mineness peculiar to me (i.e. this very experience).
I anticipate experiencing Edralis’s future experiences because I am Edralis. But just because this particular experience that is mine happens to be Edralis’s, and I have memories of her past experiences, it does not necessarily follow that all her future experiences will be mine too, or that I actually experienced her past experiences, or that all experiences that possess the property of mineness (peculiar to me) are also Edralis’s.
For example, if reincarnation is true, then some experiences that are mine are not Edralis’s[7]. But a mechanism which would allow for a transfer of the property of being a generator of a particular mineness from one brain to another seems physically impossible, i.e. there seems to be nothing that could allow the property of being a generator of a particular mineness to jump through space and time from one object to another, for example in reincarnation. Yet one could also wonder about the exact mechanism by which the property (i.e. being a generator of mineness, and also of a particular mineness) is inherited within a single brain, i.e. from one brain state to another, even when they are spatio-temporally adjacent (i.e. parts of the same process).
Also, the property of mineness is already mysteriously attached to some physical objects (i.e. generators) –to some brain states– and not others. Even if we assume that they are connected by continuity, and that is sufficient for explaining how a brain state comes to acquire the property of being the generator of experience for some particular mineness (i.e. that it somehow inherits that property from the previous brain state), that still leaves unanswered the question of why the property of being a generator of some particular mineness first became actualized in some particular brain state, and not another.[8]
In other words, we come back to the question: why am I this person, this brain, rather than somebody else? Why is it their experiences that are mine, their brain that generates experiences that are mine? Again – even if we accept there is some inheritance mechanism that preserves my mineness in experiences generated by some brain (once there already is a brain state that generates an experience for me), that does not answer the question of why a particular mineness is first actualized in an experience generated by a particular brain state, and not some other. Why did not some other brain state first acquire the property of being the generator of experience with this mineness? Why did the experience generated by that brain, with that content, also come into existence as mine and not e.g. yours?
[1] But experiences where Edralis=PC could be generated by some other brain (e.g. a brain in a vat), or simulated on a computer etc., even though they would not be veridical (unless e.g. Edralis was cloned and so another Edralis-type animal was created; the experiences where Edralis=PC generated by the brain of that animal could then be veridical [even though that which they would represent would not be the original Edralis, but a different Edralis-type animal]).
[2] Or, they are the reflections of the world in/for me.
[3] The the object “out in the world” is not phenomenal, is not constituted by some mineness – unlike the experience.
[4] The assumption is “the world” has a less capricious nature than those who would put my generator in a vat.
[5] Fasching 2016
[6] Because continuity is how we tend to determine/track identity of objects (is how we draw the boundaries of objects) – so if I believe I am bound to a single brain, and if brains are temporally extended objects consisting of individual brain states, then the brain (or brain state) that is continuous with some brain (state) that generates an experience for me should also generate an experience for me, because –as they are continuous– they are parts of “the same brain”. Presumably, the continuity must hold across states of matter with a certain structural integrity throughout: for example, if we took my brain, destroyed its structure entirely by blending it into mush, and then (using some as of yet magical technology) turned the mush, i.e. the very same matter, back into a brain with the same structure as the one that was destroyed, the brain state before the destruction event and another brain state after the reconstruction would be spatio-temporally continuous, but not all the stages of matter in between the former and the latter brain states would be brain states (some of them would be blended mush). Would I experience the second brain state, after the reconstruction? This does not seem intuitively clear. Continuity is kept, but normally the stages of matter between two brain states are also brain states. (Although not necessarily generators, because conceivably brains undergo stages of “zombiehood”, when they do not generate experiences [i.e. there are some brain states which are not generators(2)], yet we do not believe this is a discontinuity that makes us go out of existence, never to return – once a generator-brain state comes about again, there we are again. Or, rather, “again” – because from our perspective, we are never not there. There is no experiential gap for us. If there were a gap for me, it would have to be experienced by me – which it could not, since it is a gap. So there is never an experiential gap for me.)
[7] We assume reincarnation is not true because we believe we are bound to a particular brain, and we believe this because we do not remember being another person. But that we do not remember ever being another person is in itself not a proof of our never being another person, or a proof that we are bound to a particular brain. I do not remember many things I assume I actually experienced, as Edralis: I already believe there were experiences that were mine that I do not remember.
[8] Another place where things get complicated: We believe that all the brain states that generate an experience with a particular property of mineness are continuous with each other. But this would mean that sometimes two brain states that are parts of two different brains can generate experiences with the same property of mineness – after fission; and that a single brain state can generate two (or more) experiences, each with a different quality of mineness, i.e. be a multi-generator – after fusion. This clashes with another one of our assumptions that we have about ourselves: we seem to believe that there can only ever be, at any given time, a single experience for us, i.e. a single generator that generates an experience with the property of particular mineness (clashes with fission, on the continuity assumption); and that every brain state can only generate a single experience (clashes with fusion, on the continuity assumption). It would seem all of these assumptions cannot be true. Either the continuity assumption is false, or there can be more than one experience for us at the same time and multi-generators are possible.