Why am I this person?
This is chapter 5 of my work Subject of experience and personal identity.
Why, of all people in the world, is this one the center of my experience? Why does this particular brain generate me? By what mechanism is it determined which brain is to be the generator of experiences with this particular mineness? Why am I this person?
Some might dismiss the question, finding it trivial and uninteresting: „To ask ‘why am I this person’ is just like asking ‘why is this apple this apple’. There is nothing else for you to be but yourself.“ But I am not asking why some thing is identical to the thing it is. I am asking why this mineness –the givenness of experience that is identical to that of this experience, of Edralis writing this– realizes only this particular content. Why is Edralis live?
I could be some other person. What makes a person me is the fact of their experiences having the quality of a particular mineness (the mineness peculiar to me). The experiences that are that person’s could conceivably be not mine. As they actually are, the particular experiences that are Edralis’s could not exist in a different mineness, because they already are in a particular mineness, and you couldn’t swap it for a different one while keeping the same experiences. In other words, the actual experiences themselves could not be experiences with a different mineness, for then they would be different particular experiences. But it could have been the case that the experiences with Edralis-content had a different mineness from my own, i.e. were for some other subject. The particular experiences that are mine could not be not mine, of course – but instead, there might have been different experiences, with the same content and generated by the same brain, which would not be mine. Edralis would be experienced by some other subject; her experiences would be realized in some other mineness.
And we can meaningfully ask: why is the experience that is mine also an experience from this particular perspective, when there are other perspectives which are also, presumably, experienced, and thus must be someone’s, i.e. have some mineness? Of all the existing perspectives of the world, why is the one centered on this particular body, this particular person, the one special to me in its immediacy? Why does this brain generate my experiences?
Hellie calls this the „vertiginous question“: “One of the many subjects of experience—soul pellets—is me. It is easy to pick it out uniquely by description: it ‘drives around’ the human being whose visage matches a photo on a driver’s license bearing the name ‘Benjamin Hellie’; it has the experience of writing these words on the 29th of January 2012. We will call this the ‘Hellie-subject’. (The reader is asked to substitute examples concerning her or himself for examples I have phrased as concerning myself.) Having settled this, a vertiginous question is right around the corner. The Hellie-subject: why is it me? Why is it the one whose pains are ‘live’, whose volitions are mine, about whom self-interested concern makes sense? That thing there in the objective world: what is so special about it? Why doesn’t some other subject of experience there in the objective world ‘go live’ in this way: for instance, the ‘Chalmers-subject’ out there driving around in the human being whose visage matches a photo on a certain driver’s license bearing the name ‘David Chalmers’—why not instead it?”[1]
A terminological clarification: on my analysis (and in my terminology), „we“ just are subjects (I just am a subject, i.e. some mineness), and so the mystery consists not in why one „is“ the particular subject experiencing one person and not some other subject experiencing another person, but rather in why one (as a subject) experiences one person rather than another, i.e. why one experiences the world from the POV of a certain person rather than another. Why does that person’s experience have the mineness peculiar to me? Why is the Hellie-subject (the subject to whom the experience of Hellie happens actually to be given) the subject of Hellie? The subject that happens to be the Hellie-subject (the subject experiencing Hellie) could be the Chalmers-subject, but it is not – i.e. the Hellie experiences could be e.g. mine, but they are not (presumably). Why?
We are asking how it came about that two things which need not be related in a certain way to each other (for it is conceivable that they are not) are so related. How did some entity become attached to a certain other entity, or how did it acquire certain properties? How did a certain particular come to realize a certain property? Why did certain properties get „expressed“ in the same particular? We observe a certain thing with certain properties, and we observe that it could have different properties instead – so we observe that it is as it is (in those relations, with those properties) contingently. The entities that are contingently found together are Edralis and me (i.e. the mineness peculiar to me), Hellie and the subject-that-happens-to-be-Hellie (i.e. the mineness peculiar to that subject), the-person-that-you-are and you (i.e. the mineness peculiar to you), etc. One entity is of the kind „PC“ (or „person“, or „brain“), the other of the kind „subject“ (i.e. mineness). The properties of „being the experience of a certain person“ (or „being generated by a certain brain“) and „being mine“ are found together in a particular experience. Why? How?
An answer to questions of this kind consists in some kind of observation of causality: „why am I wearing a sweater?“ ‒ „because I put it on because I was cold“; „why is X the president?“ ‒ „because they were voted into office in the last election“, etc.
But it’s hard to come up with a satisfying answer to the question of why the world appears to me from the perspective of this particular person: why is my perspective bound to this particular body? If P (e.g. „I am the Pope.“) is conceivable and P is not the case (and indeed it would seem it is not – although it cannot be entirely ruled out that I am, for Edralis and the Pope might actually share the same mineness), then there must exist an explanation for why P is not the case (or an explanation for why ~P is the case). Yet it seems utterly mysterious what the explanation of this particular contingent fact and other facts of this kind could be.
Perhaps this is simply a brute fact – similarly, we can hardly expect a meaningful causal answer to the question „why is light with a frequency between 405–480 THz perceived as red and not green?“.
But there is another alternative: that, in actuality, there is no distinction between experiences in their mineness – that is, that all experiences are equally mine. In that case, it is no mystery that I find myself in this experience, and not someplace else – for wherever there is experience, it is mine. There exists only a single property of mineness. And so there is no need for any mechanism that causes some particular property of mineness to be actualized in one experience rather than another.[2]
[1] Hellie 2013
[2] This is the position of Kolak (2004), which he calls ‘open individualism’; Zuboff (1990), under the name of ‘universalism’; and also, apparently, that of Advaita Vedānta – among others.