Topics Identity

Question Is there anything existing within or beyond the human body or mind that can be called I? If so, exactly where is I located?

Accepted:
October 1, 2006

Comments

Who is going to be calling this thing "I"? Are you asking whether you could be something other than a human body or mind? Let's suppose so, and let's suppose you are a person now embodied in a human body.

It is tempting, I think, to say that when you use the term 'I' you are simply referring to the living human body who is you. Your ID gives your height, weight, eye color, etc. because that human body is who you are. However, some thought experiments (and films, tv, and novels) suggest that you could exist in a non-human body, e.g., Kavka suggests in Metamorphosis that Gregory could become a cockroach. It is common in popular culture these days to find persons taking on the bodies of dogs. So it seems that our concept of person allows that you aren't just that human body. (Though this isn't the end of the discussion about human bodies, because our fictional narratives of humans taking on other forms may be based on false beliefs about the relationship between minds and bodies.)

Perhaps when you use 'I' you are referring to your mind. But what do you mean by "mind"? Do you mean 'conscious mind'? (If you are using "I" then probably you are conscious...but of course we can use "I" to refer to ourselves when we were unconscious, e.g., I had a dreamless sleep last night.) If you were in a car accident and went into a permanent coma, perhaps even with no evidence of brain activity, would the body in the hospital bed have a mind? Would it be you? If you have amnesia and cannot remember anything about the past, does the self now have the same 'mind' as the self before the amnesia?

Perhaps you are thinking that there is a non-physical mind distinct from a human body that we refer to with the term 'I'. If so, it might be possible for non-physical things to exist in time but not in space; so you can say it is located now, but not here. One problem with this, however, is that the mind seems to have effects on the body, and it isn't clear how it could do so without being located in space as well as time. But that just pushes the question back to whether it makes sense to say that the mind is non-physical in the first place.

(Also, you might enjoy the paper "Where Am I?" by Daniel Dennett.)

Finally, there may be beings other than human bodies or minds that are capable of self-reference. If there is a God, for example, God could call him/her/itself 'I' without being a human body or mind. (Also aliens or other intelligent creatures such as chimps, perhaps.) Where is God located? People disagree about this, but I'd guess not in time or space.

Paul Bloom, a developmental psychologist at Yale, has evidence that human beings are "natural dualists," who believe that minds are distinct from, and can exist separately from, their bodies. He's just published a book about his findings, called Descartes' Baby. In addition to the scientific data he adduces, he points out that human beings universally tell stories about life after physical death, reincarnation, possession, and transmogrification (like Kafka's "Metamorphosis").

I'm not convinced by his research that we are dualists -- I think it's consistent with his data to conclude that we are functionalists -- that is, that we believe that psychology is an abstract feature of bodies. For one thing, most of these folk tales are equivocal about the physicality of the person: so even if it's stipulated that someone survives the death of their body, stories usually go on to attribute physical attributes to the "soul" -- souls are said to be located in particular places, they are said to "see" and to "hear", and sometimes to act efficaciously in the physical world. How things feats are conceived to be accomplished without bodies is left unexplained. I suspect there's deep ambivalence about the possibility of persons existing without bodies.

Question Is there anything existing within or beyond the human body or mind that can be called I? If so, exactly where is I located? Accepted:October 1, 2006

Question Is there anything existing within or beyond the human body or mind that can be called I? If so, exactly where is I located?

Accepted:
October 1, 2006