Clas Weber is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and a DECRA Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the nature of first-person content in thought and language. More recently, he has explored the question how first-person imagination shapes our views of the self. He is currently working on a 3-year research project on the philosophical prospects of Mind-uploading. In addition to his work in philosophy, he has an ongoing interdisciplinary project on the socio-economic effects of linguistic structures.
A post by Clas Weber
Imagine that not just the words you are reading right now on your screen are generated by a computer, but that everything you see, hear, smell, and feel is part of a hyper-detailed simulation created by a giant supercomputer. More shockingly, imagine that the stream of consciousness you are experiencing right now is itself generated by that computer. You yourself are part of the simulation.
Next, imagine that you wake up one morning and find yourself lying on an armour-like back. When you lift your head, you can see your brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. Your many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of you, wave about helplessly, as you think: I have been transformed into a giant Kafkaesque beetle.
Finally, imagine that you are Napoleon riding a horse, looking out on the battlefield at Austerlitz, surveying your troops. You feel confident that you will win the imminent battle. In the next moment, you find yourself standing over Donald Trump, and next to Theresa May, Shinzo Abe, Emmanuel Macron, and other heads of states. You are no longer Napoleon. Now you are Angela Merkel, negotiating with other world leaders during a G7 meeting.
These prompts elicit a special form of imagination where we picture a scenario from the first-person perspective or from the inside. We simulate what it would feel like to be the subject at the centre of the scenario. They also show how flexible this form of imagination is: we can, it seems, imagine being avatars in a computer simulation, being members of a different species, or even being two different people successively.
Imagination plays a crucial role in debates about the self, when we ask what kind of thing we are and what facts ground our survival. These questions directly lead to further questions about possibility: What kind of thing could we be? What type of change could we survive? If, as Descartes (1641) argued, we could exist without a body, then we do not seem to be material things. If, as Sydney Shoemaker (1984) argued, we could switch from one body to another, then our survival does not seem to be grounded in the survival of our bodies.
Imagination is our main guide in answering such questions about possibility. When the possibilities in question concern our own nature and our own survival, we tend to imagine the relevant scenarios from the first-person perspective, as we did in the above cases. The fact that we can imagine being disembodied or switching bodies is seen as good evidence that we could indeed be disembodied or that we could switch from one body to another. But does imagination from the first-person perspective really give us access to which possibilities are open to us?
You may think that the answer is straightforward. There is no reliable link between imagination and possibility quite generally. Saul Kripke (1980) has severed this link. We can, it seems, imagine a scenario in which water is a substance other than H2O. But since being H2O is one of water’s essential features, this is not a genuine possibility. The link between imagination and possibility is broken.
Things are not that straightforward. When we imagine the above scenario, we are not imagining a blatantly contradictory situation, where one and the same substance both is and isn’t H2O. Rather, we are imagining a scenario that contains a liquid very much like water, except that it has a different chemical structure. But it would be a mistake, so the lesson from Kripke, to describe this scenario as one that literally contains water, i.e. H2O. Rather, it merely contains a watery liquid. Or, to put the point differently, when we explicitly take into consideration that water really is H2O, we can no longer imagine a scenario in which that very substance, H2O, is not H2O. So imagination does give us access to possibility, we just have to be careful in how to describe the possibilities we are presented with. The question therefore remains: is first-person imagination a good guide to possibility?
The imaginary cases at the beginning of this post should make us wary. Could I really have been an avatar simulated by a computer? Could I have been a beetle? Is there a possibility in which I am first Napoleon and then Angela Merkel? It seems pretty clear what the answer to these questions is: no, given that we are not in fact avatars, beetles, Napoleon, or Angela Merkel, we could not have been these things. So first-person imagination does not seem to provide access to what is possible for us. (We need to be careful about the sense of possibility at play. We are not asking the skeptic’s question of whether it might turn out that this is all a computer simulation, or whether we can really be sure that we aren’t beetles. Rather, the question is whether, assuming that we are, say, human organisms, we nevertheless could have been avatars or beetles, had things been differently, just like I could have chosen a career as a baker instead of becoming an academic.)
Can we explain the seeming breakdown between first-person imagination and possibility in the same way as in Kripke’s water case? It does not seem so; the first-person cases seem interestingly different. One way to see this is as follows. Even when I explicitly take into consideration the fact (if it is fact) that I am just a human organism, I can still easily imagine being a Cartesian soul, or waking up as a beetle. This is unlike in the case of water where the relevant scenario was no longer properly imaginable.
So what is going on? Are we then imagining impossible scenarios in which we literally are Cartesian souls, beetles, or Angela Merkel? I think there is a better analysis. One, moreover, which maintains the general spirit of the Kripkean strategy and preserves a connection between first-person imagination and possibility.
The key idea is the following: the scenarios we imagine from the first-person perspective are not scenarios that really involve ourselves. In a sense, we are not part of the imagined situation at all. We are not imagining an impossible situation in which we are literally identical to a Cartesian soul, or first to Napoleon and then to Angela Merkel. Instead, we are merely taking on the perspective of a Cartesian soul or of a beetle from the inside and simulating what it would be like to experience the world from this perspective. (One can make this idea more precise by applying the influential account of first-person attitudes from David Lewis (1979) to the case of first-person imagination, as Francois Recanati (2007) and Dilip Ninan (2009) have proposed.)
On this proposal, there is a parallel to the Kripkean analysis. When we really take seriously the idea that we are not part of the imaginary situation, then it is strictly speaking a mistake to describe that possibility, as we often do, using the first-person pronoun. For instance, when I picture being a Cartesian soul or being Napoleon, I’m not literally picturing a situation in which I, this human organism over here, am a Cartesian soul or one in which I, Clas Weber, am Napoleon. Rather, I am simply picturing a situation that contains a Cartesian soul or Napoleon and then imaginatively taking on the soul’s or Napoleon’s perspective from the inside.
If this is indeed an accurate analysis of what’s going on in first-person imagination, then we should not assume that this form of imagination really informs us about what possibilities are open to us. The fact that we can take on a Cartesian’s soul or Napoleon’s experiential perspective from the inside and simulate what it would be like to be them does not show that we really could be them. The overall lesson is that when we try to figure out what the right view of the self is, we have to be extremely careful not to be misled by what’s imaginable from the first-person perspective.
References
Descartes, R. (1998 [1641]). Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings. London: Penguin.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ninan, D. (2009). Persistence and the first-person perspective. The Philosophical Review 118(4), 425–464.
Recanati, F. (2007). Perspectival Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shoemaker, S. (1984). Personal identity: A materialist’s account. In R. Swinburne and S. Shoemaker (Eds.), Personal Identity, pp. 67–132. Oxford: Blackwell.