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Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2010

Galen Strawson
Galen Strawson
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Abstract

[1] Experience (i.e. conscious experience) is a real concrete phenomenon. The existence of experience entails the existence of a subject of experience. Therefore subjects of experience are concretely real (or at least one is). [2] The existence of a subject of experience in the lived present or living moment of experience, e.g. the period of time in which the grasping of a thought occurs, provably involves the existence of singleness or unity of an unsurpassably strong kind. The singleness or unity in question is a metaphysically real, concrete entity. So if thoughts, or any experiences at all, really do occur or exist – and they do – then there exist entities that are genuine, concrete, metaphysical unities of an unsurpassable sort. [3] There is a metaphysically irreproachable sense in which we may – must – take these unsurpassable metaphysical unities to be themselves (a) subjects of experience, although we may also take them to be (b) thoughts or experiences. If so, there is a sound argument (using Kantian materials) to the conclusion of the 2nd Paralogism. [4] Perhaps (a) and (b) are not in the final analysis distinct. Perhaps Kant is right, in his 1772 letter to Herz, that ‘the thinking or the existence of the thought and the existence of my own self are one and the same’.

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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 67 , October 2010 , pp. 61 - 92
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2010

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References

1 More strictly, I take the living moment of experience to be a very short period of time, as short as the shortest period of time in which experience can be said to be going on at all, and therefore much shorter than the so-called ‘specious present’, which probably has a maximum extent of around a third of a second. (I follow Dainton in this estimate – see his Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience (London: Routledge, 2000), 171 – although he may now be reducing it.)

2 I take ‘what-it's-likeness’ to cover the total character of our experience, everything that the Phenomenologists take as their object of study, and to be as much cognitive as sensory.

3 One doesn't need to attribute a general conception of experience to five-year olds to make the point, but one shouldn't underestimate five-year-olds – or think that they can't make a distinction between the character of their experience = what-it's-likeness and what it is experience of.

4 See e.g. Pessoa, L. and De Weerd, P., Filling-In: From Perceptual Completion to Cortical Reorganization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simons, D. J. and Levin, D. T., ‘Change blindness’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1 (1997), 261–7CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Chun, M. and Marois, R., ‘The dark side of visual attention’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 12 (2002), 184–9CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

5 I put aside the point that different people may have different taste-experiences in tasting pineapple.

6 To looking-glass a term is to define it in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means.

7 Frege, G., ‘The Thought, A Logical Inquiry’ in Philosophical Logic, edited by Strawson, P. F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918/1967), 27Google Scholar.

8 Shoemaker, S., ‘Introspection and the Self’ in The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986/1996), 10Google Scholar.

9 Descartes makes it in his ‘Second Meditation’ in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume 2, translated by J. Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1641/1985), 18.

10 ‘Of course there'd be a point: the universe would be a better place, other things being equal, if there were fewer pain sensations. Pains are intrinsically bad, even without owners.’ Reply: Pains without owners, pains without someone-or-something pained – call them ‘pains*’ – are pains without pain! Pains* are impossible (apart from not being intrinsically bad).

11 Again I follow Descartes in his ‘Second Meditation’. All he claims to know at this stage of his argument is that he is something – not nothing – a really existing phenomenon, whatever its ontological category.

12 I take ‘temporal’ and ‘spatiotemporal’ to be referring terms that pick out an objectively real ‘dimensionality’ (the dimensionality of the concrete real) however wrong we are about the nature of this dimensionality in so far as we take ourselves to know anything more about this nature than what is given in a mathematical characterization of it (sc of the set of homomorphic dimensionalities of which it's a member).

13 [8] on its own amounts to materialism as the term ‘materialism’ is used in the philosophy of mind (to rule out things like immaterial souls); but materialism can also be understood in a stronger sense which incorporates [7], the assumption that all real phenomena are concrete phenomena.

14 Some reject [8]. They say that there are ‘abstract objects’, numbers for example, that are part of reality in every sense in which concrete physical objects are (‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ are defined as mutually exclusive and exhaustive opposites).

15 See e.g. Strawson, G., ‘Real materialism’ in Real Materialism and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003/2008)Google Scholar.

16 On this ‘structural realist’ point see e.g. G. Strawson, ‘Real Materialism’ op. cit. and, for a sustained treatment, Ladyman, J. and Ross, D. (with Spurrett, D. and Collier, J.), Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Note that Cartesian souls are unbeatable examples of concrete strong unities, even if they're ruled out by materialism.

18 As a materialist I understand ‘inner’ literally, in a straightforwardly spatial sense.

19 This claim isn't ‘reductive’ or experience-denying in any way, given real um-ism – one might call it ‘adductive’. It doesn't claim that experience is anything less than what we ordinarily conceive it to be, but rather that the brain is more than what many people ordinarily conceive it to be.

20 Elsewhere I consider the suggestion that the subject synergy is not just part of the experience synergy, but identical with it (G. Strawson, ‘What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the content of the experience?’ in Real Materialism and Other Essays, op. cit).

21 I. Kant, Letter to Herz, Marcus, February 21, 1772, in Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759–99, edited and translated by Zweig, Arnulf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1772/1967), 75Google Scholar.

22 A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by D. F. Norton and M. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1739–40/2000), 165. Contrary to widespread belief, Hume never claims that there's no subject or self at all when there's experience. The point is sufficiently established by the quotation, but it would be no less certain without it. It is after all a necessary truth that there can't be experience without a subject of experience, an experiencer, simply in so far as experience is essentially experience-for-someone-or-something, and Hume doesn't go in for denying necessary truths. What he denies is something much more specific: the idea that we have any good evidence for the existence of a persisting self or subject, let alone an invariable, unchanging self or subject of the sort whose existence is taken for granted by almost all philosophers in his time (‘Some philosophers … imagine we are … intimately conscious of what we call our self: that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain both of its perfect identity and simplicity’, but we do not ‘have … any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain'd’ (Treatise, 164; my emphasis).

23 Sprigge, T. L. S., The God of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 474CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See also Schaffer, J., ‘Monism, The Priority of the Whole’, Philosophical Review 119 (2010), 31–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I take ‘substance’ to be a general term for a fundamental existent that has no connection to its etymological meaning of ‘standing under’.

25 The universe, or, in his terms, ‘God or nature’. Parmenides agrees. Descartes agrees that there is strictly speaking only one physical object or substance (but takes it that there is a true plurality of non-physical concrete objects or substances – souls; there is also considerable support for this view in physics and cosmology). One recent version of thing-monism has it that spacetime itself is best thought of as a concrete object, a substance (not a mere dimensionality, as it were), and indeed as the only object there is. The fundamental entities currently recognized – leptons and quarks – are not strictly speaking fundamental and are to be ‘explained as various modes of vibration of tiny one-dimensional rips in spacetime known as strings’ (Weinberg, S., ‘Before the Big Bang’ in The New York Review of Books 44/10 (1997)Google Scholar). On this view all the things we ordinarily think of as physical objects are made of rips in spacetime, the only concrete object there is. See also Strawson, G., Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schaffer, J., ‘Spacetime, the one substance’, Philosophical Studies 145 (2009), 131–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Wilson, R., Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coleman, S., ‘Being Realistic, Why Physicalism May Entail Panexperientialism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006), 40–52Google Scholar.

27 [20] depends on [18] and [19], for which some sort of case still has to be made. Note that [28] can be argued for quite independently of any theory about ultimates.

28 I take it that ‘virtual’ ultimates (virtual particles) and ‘anti-matter’ ultimates (anti-matter particles) are also objects, given that there are objects.

29 This is van Inwagen's, Peter ‘Special Composition’ question in his book Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

30 P. van Inwagen does not, in Material Beings, and his reasons are of considerable interest. The same goes for Nāgārjuna, in The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, translated with a commentary by Jay Garfield (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, c150/1995).

31 For van Inwagen, as for Aristotle (see e.g. Metaphysics Z 7.1032a19, 8.1034a4), animals are the paradigm substances. I am not sure what they would make of the fact that ninety per cent of the cells in one's body are microbial cells.

32 For further discussion see e.g. P. van Inwagen, Material Beings, op. cit.

33 Assuming that there are any non-experiential phenomena (it's a fundamental feature of real materialism that ‘physical’ doesn't entail ‘non-experiential’).

34 There's no implication here that the subject of experience is or must be thought of as an agent that brings about the binding or seizing, and this isn't I think a helpful or necessary idea.

35 I like the arguments of the physicist Richard Feynman and the philosopher Peter van Inwagen that things like chairs are really pretty inferior candidates for being objects, when one gets metaphysically serious; but I'm not appealing to them here. Note that to claim that there are no better candidates for the title ‘physical object’ than the unities we come upon when we consider subjects of experience in the living moment of experience isn't to claim that we come upon living-moment-of-experience-sized objects. If time is dense and periods of experience are continuous, then living moments of experience are theoretical abstractions from a continuum, not genuinely discrete entities. In this case the qualifying phrase ‘considered in the living moment of experience’ doesn't chop the subject at the boundaries of the living moment of experience (which don't exist) to deliver a distinct living-moment-of-experience-sized object. (The objects in question must be theoretical abstractions if time is dense because although they're countable in the mathematical sense – countably infinite – and although countable suggests discrete, no concrete infinity of things can exist in any finite period of time. To think that there could be a concrete infinity in a finite period of time is, in effect, to think that infinity is or could be finite.) It's an empirical question how long thin subjects last, and there's no good reason to suppose that the analytical cut that thought makes in considering the subject in the living moment of experience corresponds to a real division in nature. Questions about the temporal extent of objects must in other words be a matter of natural fact, and can't depend on what we can intelligibly isolate as objects of thought. If time is real but is not a continuum, consisting of discrete ‘chronons’, as some suspect, then living moments of experience may be chronon-sized, which is nice and simple; and there are other ways in which things could turn out to be simple – if, for example, experience-constituting activity in the brain comes in discrete pulses, 40 a second, say, or perhaps 1,000. The ‘temporal parts’ that analytic metaphysicians play with are (as usual) of no ontological interest whatever.

36 See G. Strawson, Selves, op. cit., 403.

37 Content is internalistically understood as before.

38 There's no need to rule out the possibility that there can be more than one total experiential field in a human being at a given time. If there can, the present point about necessary singleness will apply to each one individually (see G. Strawson Selves, op. cit., 2.19–2.20).

39 The former is also arguably essentially constitutive of the latter – in which case the asymmetry of the ‘X constitutes Y’ relation lapses, and simple identity is indicated – but I won't press the point. Elsewhere I consider the idea that the experiential content c of the experience of the subject s is related to s ‘in such a way that its being is at least partly constitutive of the being of s. On this view c is, as it were, the body or flesh of s, without which s … cannot exist and is nothing. s, we feel, cannot simply be the same as c, but s is nothing without c – not just utterly empty, but non-existent’ (cf. G. Strawson, Selves, op. cit., 410).

40 Anything that is experientially there in any sense at all is automatically part of the unity – just as any paint intentionally added to a painting by the painter is automatically part of the picture.

41 Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1781–7/1933), A355. If one moves to a notion of apperception (i.e. an entity's awareness of its own mental being) that allows apperception to entities that lack anything like full or express self-consciousness, then the two claims may – perhaps – come together again; but even then there is a natural way of taking the notion of apperception given which the present point holds completely independently of any questions about apperception.

42 ‘… the necessary unity of consciousness, and therefore also of the synthesis of the manifold’ (Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., A109; this is the only occurrence in the Critique of the phrase ‘necessary unity of consciousness’).

43 Note that I take it as given that things just are a certain way for one, experientially, at any given moment of experience, and that it is entirely determinate how they are, even if – even though – we cannot specify in exhaustive detail how they are. See G. Strawson, ‘Can we Know the Nature of Reality as It is in Itself?’ in Real Materialism and Other Essays, op. cit., 77–8.

44 In Selves I also recruit William James; see especially The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (New York: Dover, 1890/1950), 276–8; and 371, where he argues for the ‘indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought’.

45 In his ‘Sixth Meditation’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, op. cit., Volume 2, 59.

46 The main argument occurs in Kant's Transcendental Analytic, but can be easily integrated with his discussion of the ‘I’ or self in the Paralogisms section of the Transcendental Dialectic, and I move freely between the two.

47 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., A355.

48 As Darragh Byrne pointed out in discussion.

49 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., A398.

50 Ibid., A356.

51 Ibid., B407.

52 Kant's intellectualism may suffice to explain any privileging of thoughts over sensory experiences, but it's also important that he explicitly allows for the possibility that there could be thought without sensory experience, i.e. ‘intellectual intuition’.

53 We might allow a sense in which a pure note is simple although it involves pitch, timbre and loudness, and there seems no reason in principle why a sensory state-space could not be strictly one-dimensional. ‘Pure awareness’, of the sort that Buddhists claim to attain, is another possible example of absolute simplicity of content.

54 There are cases in which it's natural to say that someone has had or has entertained a thought, but in which what we mean by ‘a thought’ is such that having or entertaining it involves more than one unity of the sort I have in mind at present.

55 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., B413.

56 Compare, also, the use of ‘qualitative’ in the Transcendental Deduction on B114.

57 ‘Everyone must admit that the assertion of the simple nature of the soul is of value only in so far as I can thereby distinguish this subject from all matter, and so can exempt it from the dissolution to which matter is always liable. This is indeed, strictly speaking, the only use for which the above proposition is intended’ (Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., A356; my emphasis). There is a respect in which we may ‘allow full objective validity’ to the ‘proposition … everything which thinks is a simple substance’ (A357), but ‘we still cannot make the least use of this proposition in regard to the question of [the mind or soul's] dissimilarity from or relation to matter’ in such a way as to hope to establish immateriality and thence incorruptibility and immortality.

58 It is known that it exists, and that it is a unity, whatever the sense in which its nature remains unknown.

59 I argue for this in Strawson, Selves, op. cit., 299–320.

60 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., A353.

61 Kant does, however, take his arguments in the Paralogisms to show that materialists can't give an adequate explanation of the existence of the subject, given its ‘logical’ simplicity property. See ibid., B419–20.

62 Ibid., A357; my emphasis.

63 Ibid., A360.

64 However unreflective the subject, however little ‘thetic’ apprehension it has of the fact that the unity in question is a unity.

65 The qualification one then needs to enter is that there need be no distinctive experience of unity on the part of the subject of the IE unity, inasmuch as the necessary unity in question is simply the fact already mentioned: the trivial fact that any subject necessarily experiences all the material it experiences at any given time in a single experiential perspective. Some Phenomenologists may hold that there must in every case, however lowly, be some sort of experience of unity experienced as such. I think I can agree to this, in any sense in which it is true, without disturbing the point of this qualification.