On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects

Draft!! Please do not cite.

ON MYSELF, AND OTHER, LESS IMPORTANT SUBJECTS

Caspar John Hare

With an Introduction by Mark Johnston

November 2006

CONTENTS Introduction

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Chapter 1: Self Interest and Self Importance 1.2 Conflict and Misalignment 1.3 Arbitrating the Conflict

1 5 13

Chapter 2: Time-Bias and the Metaphysics of Time 2.2 The Peacemaker’s Response

17 24

Chapter 3: Egocentrism and Egocentric Metaphysics 3.2 Egocentric Presentism – An Introduction 3.3 Semantics for a Logic of Points of View 3.4 Egocentric Presentism 3.5 Egocentric Presentism and Egoistic Considerations 3.6 Grounding

31 33 34 38 39 42

Chapter 4: Defending Egocentric Presentism 4.2 Egocentric Presentism is Absurd 4.3 Egocentric Presentism is Incomprehensible 4.4 Egocentric Presentism is Incoherent 4.5 Objections to Egocentric and Temporal Presentism

47 47 53 56 62

Chapter 5: How Presence is Distributed Over Time 5.2 ‘Common Sense’ About Personal Identity Over Time 5.3 A Parfitian Interpretation of ‘Common Sense’ 5.4 Presence and Time 5.5 Generous Ontologies 5.6 What Matters in Anticipation and Survival 5.7 Fission 5.8 Wrapping Up

66 67 72 82 84 89 93 10

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INTRODUCTION The short work which you have before you is quite remarkable. Not just for the penetrating clarity of its philosophical prose, and not just for its uncompromising determination to follow the argument wherever it leads. The work announces that there is someone amongst us who is absolutely special, who has no peers, or “no neighbors” as Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, by way of describing solipsism. The character of this person’s mental life is graced by a feature--“presence”---found in the mental life of no other. As it turns out, we readers are particularly fortunate in that the author, Caspar Hare, is ideally well-placed to describe the special one whose experiences are the only experiences that are present. For, as it happens, Caspar Hare himself is the special one. He is not kidding, at least not in any simple way. On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects is a profoundly serious provocation. It works to deny us any coherent part of logical space in which to locate our commonsense conviction that we are all on a par when it comes to presence. Even if the tongue is sometimes in the cheek, this never interferes with the beautifully continuous line of argument from things we all believe to things all but one of us will find unbelievable. In setting out this line of argument, On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects offers the philosophically most sophisticated form of solipsism (from “solus ipse”--oneself alone) that I have encountered. This is not the crude, almost universally rejected, solipsism that denies the existence of other minds. Hare himself insists that distinct functional systems of mental events and states are located in other bodies; so much is the result of any reasonable inference to the best explanation of the behavior of others. This

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inference to the best explanation of the behavioral evidence is widely regarded as having refuted solipsism. Yet, as Hare’s monograph shows, accepting all that is entirely compatible with a deeper and more disturbing solipsism to the effect that the experiences of others are just not present. Hare offers an engagingly direct illustration of his point. Pour a little boiling water on the back of your hand: Pain is present. But now consider all the unfortunate Russians who within the last few hours accidentally did something similar. Their experiences of pain were real, but they were manifestly not present. Search as you might in your memory of what was present in the last hours, the pains associated with all those unfortunate Russian scaldings are not be found. You will say that this is a mighty confusion. “Those pains were not present to me, but take any one of the pains, surely it was present to the person whose scalding caused the pain in question.” A very natural thing to think, in fact it can seem the only thing to think. Here it is crucial to realize that Hare is in effect assuming a version of what philosophers have called the “no-self” or “no-ownership” theory, namely that the presentations of objects and experiences which make up our conscious life are not presentations of objects and experiences to a subject or self. David Hume sounded the rallying cry for this conviction when he wrote:

There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. To attempt a farther proof of this were to weaken its evidence; since no proof can be deriv'd from any fact, of which we are so

v intimately conscious; nor is there any thing, of which we can be certain, if we doubt of this. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.

As I would put it, when we attend to the structure of any conscious act, there is an object of consciousness, be it an external item or an experience, thought, emotion, belief, etc. And there is the manner of presentation of that object. But there is not a third term in the conscious act, the self or subject to whom objects are presenting in that manner. Conscious acts are owned by individual persons only in the sense that they are united in mentally coherent bundles of events and states, bundles contingent on the operation of individual brains and nervous systems. So much is the content of the no-self or noownership theory. Given the theory, then the most natural thing to say or think in response to Hare’s illustration turns out to be an illegitimate attempt to relativize presence on the subject end. If presence is never presence to someone or other, if objects and experiences are just present sans phrase, then the only thing to conclude from reflection on one’s own

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scalding and the scaldings of all those unfortunate Russians is that while one’s own pains are present, their pains are not present. We may usefully compare Hare’s point here with one of Wittgenstein’s deepest thoughts about other minds, the thought forcefully set out in the unjustly neglected second essay in Saul Kripke’s famous Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. In that essay, “Wittgenstein on Other Minds,” Kripke locates something like Hume’s noownership theory as the source of Wittgenstein’s claims that it is no easy thing to conceive of another’s pain on the model of one’s own, and that attempting to do so may be as conceptually incoherent as talking of time on the sun. How could I generalize an inner presentation like pain from my own case, if it is not a case or an example of something more general, namely pain presented to a self? This is one source of the so-called conceptual problem of other minds: How am I even so much as in a position to entertain the hypothesis of another’s pain, given that my experience of pain is not a presentation to a self that happens to be one self among other selves? Wittgenstein seems to have regarded the conceptual problem as an upshot of an artificial, Cartesian construal of pain as a purely inner sensation wholly individuated by its qualitative character. Instead, our concept of pain is a concept of an inner state that has characteristic behavioral expressions. To be able to see those behavioral expressions as expressions of pain is part of understanding of what pain is, an understanding which we rely upon even when we attribute pain to ourselves directly and without recourse to our own behavior. So for Wittgenstein, the absence of an owning self for my pains, in Hare’s terms the idea that the presence of pain is not presence to a self or subject, does not

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threaten the idea that another’s behavior might express his pain. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, that possibility is already provided for when I attribute pain to myself, and do this directly, i.e. not on the basis of my own behavior. For what I am attributing to myself is a state with such and such characteristic behavioral expressions. However, that perfectly correct Wittgensteinian point may not seem to cut deeply enough when it is presence itself that is at issue. To make sense of presence is to make sense of something that is conceptually independent of any behavioral manifestation. If we can make sense of presence then something like the argument envisaged by Kripke will remain: given the no-self theory, imagining experiences present to another on the model of experiences present to me will be “none too easy a thing to do.” If, as Hare puts it, presence is a monadic feature applying to certain experiences then there is no room for the idea of experiences being present to another. (Or to me for that matter.) So much the worse, you might say, for the idea of presence; as it were the most abstract distillation of the Cartesian idea of the “innerness” of sensations. Anticipating this sort of reaction, Hare argues that it is very natural to appeal to presence in explaining what is so disconcerting about one’s own death. In fearing death we fear the end of presence:

When I was a child I was gripped by all kinds of quasi-solipsistic fantasies – convinced that the people around me were all aliens or actors or robots or secret agents or whatever. So far so normal. As I grew up so I grew out of this phase, I stopped jumping around doors to catch the aliens off guard…etc., and generally became more mellow. But one quasi-solipsistic thought survived into my adolescence. It would arise most distinctively when I thought about death. What would my death be like? I would imagine a vicious internal cramp as my heart

viii gives out, panic and fear as my muscles become limp and then, as the blood stagnates in my head and my brain starves of oxygen... what? My school vicar said light. Homer, in a much more impressive way, said darkness: Achilles smote him with his sword and killed him. He struck him in the belly near the navel, so that all his bowels came gushing out on to the ground, and the darkness of death came over him as he lay gasping. The sword reeked with his blood, while dark death and the strong hand of fate gripped him and closed his eyes. Idomeneus speared Erymas in the mouth; the bronze point of the spear went clean through it beneath the brain, crashing in among the white bones and smashing them up. His teeth were all of them knocked out and the blood came gushing in a stream from both his eyes; it also came gurgling up from his mouth and nostrils, and the darkness of death enfolded him round about.1 But even then I understood that neither was right. After my death there would be a kind of nothingness, a kind of absence that was difficult to describe or imagine. The closest I could come to picking it out with words was by appeal to precedent – things would be the way they were before I was born. But now I was struck by a thought. Isn’t it amazing, weird, that for millions of years, generation after generation of sentient creatures came into being and died, came into being and died..., and all the while there was this absence, and then one creature, CJH, unexceptional in all physical and psychological respects, came into being, and... POW! suddenly there were present experiences! Was I thinking about presence and absence in a relational sense? Clearly not, for there is nothing at all amazing or weird about the fact that for millions of years sentient creatures existed without any experiences being present to CJH, and then 1

Homer, the Illiad, book XXI, line 161 , ibid., book XVI, line 283

ix CJH was born and suddenly experiences were present to CJH. To the extent that I found it amazing and weird that CJH’s birth brought an end to millions of years of absence, I must have been thinking about presence and absence in the monadic sense. So the notion of monadic presence is not, I think, a product of the philosophical laboratory, something that cannot be grasped outside of it.

Hare’s view is that his experiences are present. Period. The best that can be said for others is that from their respective points of view experiences are present (one of Hare’s main projects is to offer a way of making sense of this idea, the idea that from other people’s points of view other experiences are present, without thinking of presence as a relational property – see sections 3.2-3.4). Hare therefore thinks of himself as the one to whom experiences are present period, and whether those experiences are bad or good is important, important period. He expects us all to resonate with this; each of us extends to himself or herself a special metaphysical privilege; not the privilege of being the only mind; obviously others have minds, experiences and external items are present from their point of view. Each takes himself to be the one to whom experiences and external items are simply present. As mentioned earlier, Hare invites us to try the following little thought experiment:

Trial By Kettle Today, many hundreds, if not thousands, of Russians will spill boiling water on their hands. Pour boiling water on your own hand and compare your present discomfort with the absent discomfort of the northern-most Russian spiller. Which is worse?

x Your immediate reaction: ‘My pain is dreadful, far worse than anything that is going on in Russia.’ may be tempered by a sober, reflective thought: ‘My pain appears worse to me because I am more intimately acquainted with it. It is present to me in a way that the northern-most Russian spiller’s pain is not. But he is more intimately acquainted with his pain. It is present to him in a way that mine is not. Since our situations are really symmetrical, I find, on reflection, that I have no grounds for thinking that my pain is worse simpliciter than his pain.’ Well and good. But this humbling thought is not available… It’s not that my pain is present to me and his present to him. Mine is present and his is absent. That is part of the way things are. So there is no reason to qualify or reassess my initial judgment. Of course… Hare continues I will take it that our situations do have something important in common – the northern-most Russian spiller is not a zombie, so just as it is the case that from CJH’s point of view (there is excruciating pain), so from the northern-most Russian spiller’s point of view (there is excruciating pain)…. The way that from another person’s point of view (...things are) matters. That is why empathy is instructive…empathizing with an unfortunate involves imagining that I am the unfortunate, that the unfortunate has present experiences. This involves viscerally imagining what from the unfortunate’s point of view (…is the case). And I care about the results of this exercise because I care about what from another person’s point of view (...is the case)… I do not regard presence as an enabling condition for experiences to matter, but as a kind of factor, that makes certain pleasures better and certain sufferings worse.

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In this way, Hare is able to carry out his main theoretical ambition, which is to align the Consequentialist idea that the only things that matter are states of the world with the natural egocentric idea that one’s own experiences, say of pleasure and pain, matter more than the experiences of others. One aspect of a total state of the world is a specification of just whose experiences are present! Well then, let us begin to specify the total state of the world, and answer who it is that is the one whose experiences are present? Hare answers that it is a manifest fact that the one is, and always has been, Caspar Hare. This is, of course, an obvious mistake. If there is one to whom experiences (and external items) are present then that one, I can assure you, is Mark Johnston. As Hare’s advisor I alerted him to this manifest fact time and time again; but somehow, despite my very considerable persuasive powers, he would always fall back into thinking that he was the one, the one to whom experiences and external items are present, thereby denying a manifest fact. At Hare’s dissertation defense (this book is based on his dissertation) the question arose among the examiners as to whether a thesis, however brilliant, could be passed if it denied a manifest fact. We all agreed that this was a problem; but we had a worse problem: We could not agree on just which manifest fact it did deny. Depressingly, it emerged that each examiner thought he was the one whose experiences are present. Seeing these other examiners also deny the manifest fact, namely the fact that I am the one, it seemed to me unfair to hold the candidate to a higher standard. And, of course, each of the examiners had his own version of that thought. So we had to pass Hare, even though we all believed he had denied a manifest fact!

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Joking aside, there is something to the idea that the examiners’ predicament is the general predicament. There is something about the structure of self-consciousness that invites each one to grant himself a special metaphysical and practical privilege; namely to indulge in a refined sort of solipsism and in a corresponding practical egocentrism. The striking achievement of Hare’s work is to have made this general predicament so philosophically vivid.

Mark Johnston

ABSTRACT

In this book I spell out, and make a case for, egocentric presentism, a view about what it is for a thing to be me. I argue that there are benefits associated with adopting this view. The chief benefit comes in the sphere of ethics. Many of us, when we think about what to do, feel a particular kind of ambivalence. On the one hand we are moved by an impartial concern for the greater good. We feel the force of considerations of the form: ‘all things considered, doing __ will make things better overall’. On the other hand we are selfish. We feel the force of considerations of the form ‘doing __ will make things better for me.’ And it appears as if these sorts of considerations often conflict. Often by doing what makes things better for me I do not make things better overall, and vice-versa. But egocentric presentism is capable of resolving this conflict. As an egocentric presentist I can think both that considerations of the greater good always count in favor my doing what’s good for me, and that considerations of the greater good always count in favor of other people doing what’s good for them. Another benefit comes in the sphere of metaphysics. As an egocentric presentist I can make sense of some otherwise perplexing puzzles about personal identity over time, by combining a non-reductionist view about who I will be, with Parfitian reductionism about personal identity over time and a lean physicalist ontology.

CHAPTER 1: SELF INTEREST AND SELF IMPORTANCE It is common to have a mildly exaggerated sense of the significance of your own tribulations, but grand self-importance is rare. Louis XIV was grandly self-important. He believed that, when he consumed too much foie gras, France suffered gastric pain. When he took satisfaction from the construction of a new fountain in the grounds of Versailles, that feeling would settle over his natural kingdom – from the docks of Brest to the poxridden slums of Marseilles. For Louis, self-indulgence was a national mission.

When we have the state in mind, we are working for ourselves. The welfare of the one creates the glory of the other. When the former is happy, lofty and powerful, he who is the cause of it has glory too and consequently should enjoy more than his subjects with regard to himself and to them everything in life that is most pleasant.2

We, the undistinguished masses, are not as fortunate as Louis. As one of the masses I know that I have a set of unique qualities – a unique height, a unique weight, a unique time and place of origin…etc., but these give me scarce grounds for thinking that I occupy a special place in the larger scheme of things, that my pleasures and pains are in themselves more significant than anybody else’s. I am not the physical embodiment of a national spirit. No God has chosen me as his special representative on Earth. I am hardly stronger, faster, or more delicate than the next person. And there are seven billion next people. Yet I, like Louis, am chronically attentive to my own well-being. To a philosopher this may seem strange. Louis’ self-attention makes perfect sense. He takes himself to be 2

Louis XIV, Mémoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin, Paul Sonnino trans. and ed., New York, 1970

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attending to what is important, and of course one should attend to what is important. Mine is more mysterious. I do not take my well-being to be any more important than the next person’s. So why devote so much attention to it?

1.1 Two Kinds of Consideration Let’s try to put this thought in a much more precise way. Imagine that I am in the early stages of thinking about what to do, searching for considerations that count in favor of my doing one thing or another3. What sorts of considerations count? Well, here’s one sort of consideration that seems to count: things overall will be better if I do one thing rather than the other. So, if I am deciding whether to save a local museum from destruction at the hands of ruthless developers, one consideration that counts in favor of my doing so is that things overall will be better if the museum is saved. And if I am deciding whether to give money to a charity, one consideration that counts in favor of my doing so is that things overall will be better if the charity has that money. This suggests a principle, the Weak Authority of the Greater Good:

(WAGG)

Where a1 and a2 are actions open to an agent, and Sa1 and Sa2 are maximal states of affairs that will obtain if she does a1 and a2 respectively, one consideration that counts in favor of her doing a1 is: Sa1 is simply better than Sa2

3

Rather than talk of practical reasons, I will talk of supporting considerations. This is because I find reason-talk opaque, and am among those who think that the least misleading analysis of ‘P is a reason for A to ϕ’ is ‘P is a consideration that counts in favor of A’s ϕ-ing.’

3

Some quasi-technical terms are being used here, and they need to be glossed. What is it to for one thing to be ‘simply better’ than another? Let’s just say what it isn’t – not better in some qualified or three-way relational sense of the word, not better for me, or better for some purpose, or better in relation to a particular set of interests, but better period. What is a ‘state of affairs’? Think of a state of affairs as a way for things to be. So the way things in Yosemite National Park are is a state of affairs. The way things in the Russian economy are is a state of affairs. What is a ‘maximal state of affairs’? Well, some states of affairs can be parts of others – the way things in my laundry cupboard are is a part of the way smelly things in Cambridge are. A maximal state of affairs is one that is not a proper part of any state of affairs. The Weak Authority of the Greater Good is less controversial than it may, at first, appear. Many philosophers would accept that the question of whether things overall will be better or worse if I do this or that has some bearing upon appropriate practical reasoning4. The celebrated and highly controversial doctrine in this area, Act Consequentialism, is much stronger. It says that, as far as morality goes, at least, these are the only kinds of considerations that really count. As far as morality goes, at least, considerations like my mother asked me to do a1 a perfectly virtuous person would do a1 a2 would be a spiteful thing to do 4

A prominent exception is Judy Thomson, who has argued that betterness simpliciter does not exist. There are no A,B, such that A is simply better than B (see Thomson 2001). I will not defend the existence of the relation or coherence of the notion here. The principle may also worry dogged internalists, who will accept it only if they can take ‘simply better’ to mean ‘is or would be desired in … circumstances’. And it may worry dogged deontologists of the ‘consequences be-damned!’ ilk (though I hope that most deontologists would at least take themselves to have reason to pause when a billion years of innocent suffering is the cost of abiding by their principles.)

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I promised to do a1 the rule – ‘act in the manner of a1 in these types of circumstances’ – could not reasonably be rejected by people in a certain hypothetical bargaining scenario a2 involves my harming someone a2 involves my lying count only insofar as they provide me with evidence that Sa1 is a better state of affairs than Sa2. An even more extreme view would hold that, as far as all practical reasoning is concerned, these are the only kinds of considerations that really count. It’s not just that other kinds of considerations have no moral force, it’s that they have no force at all. So considerations like a2 is irrational a2 is a self-destructive act a2 will give me nothing I desire do not matter one little bit, except insofar as they provide me with evidence that Sa1 is the better overall state of affairs. No philosopher, to my knowledge, has ever endorsed such a view, and surely any philosopher who did would be incapable of living by it. Among other things he would need to perform an almost super-human feat of self-detachment – giving the satisfaction of his own desires and fulfillment of his own interests no special weight in his practical deliberation. The rest of us, more down-to-earth folk will take a consideration like I am better off in Sa2

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to have a special practical role. First, like the considerations Hilary Clinton is better off in Sa2 James Brown is better off in Sa2 it counts in favor of my doing a1 to the extent that it provides me with a tiny fragment of weak evidence that Sa1 is the better overall state of affairs. Second, unlike the latter considerations, it has independent, further force. Unlike the latter considerations it counts in favor of my doing a1 even when it is clear to me that Sa2 is the better overall state of affairs. We accept, in other words, Weak Egoism:

(WE)

Where a1 and a2 are actions open to an agent, and Sa1 and Sa2 are maximal states of affairs that will obtain if she does a1 and a2 respectively, one consideration that counts in favor of her doing a1 is: Sa1 is better for her than Sa2

1.2 Conflict and Misalignment So there are at least two kinds of considerations that may count in favor of my doing something – egoistic considerations and considerations of the greater good. And obviously there may be situations in which they conflict – situations in which I can make the world better at a cost to myself, and myself better off at a cost to the world. That does seem obvious. Can it be denied? To get a grip on this question, let’s consider the position of a peacemaker, a person whose desire for the kind of psychological harmony enjoyed by Louis XIV leads her to be resolutely committed to denying that egoistic considerations can conflict with considerations of the greater good. The peacemaker wants to claim that

6 (Harmony)

Whenever an agent makes herself better off, she makes the world better simpliciter.

Indeed (and this is stronger), she wants to claim that (Harmony*)

Whenever a person favors a scenario in which she is better off, she thereby favors a better maximal state of affairs.

I mean the notion of ‘favoring’ to be understood quite broadly here: one way to favor a scenario or state of affairs is to bring it about, another is just to desire that it obtain. So, according to (Harmony*), it is not just that all of our selfish actions bring about the good (whenever a person brings about a situation in which she is better off she brings about a better maximal state of affairs), it is also that all of our selfish desires align with the good (whenever she wants a situation in which she is better off to come about, she wants a better maximal state of affairs to come about.) To elicit the interesting content of (Harmony*), it will be helpful to fix on a concrete account of what it is for a person to be better or worse off. Any such account will, needless to say, be highly controversial, so let’s use one of the simplest: a person is better or worse off to the extent that she has higher or lower levels of well-being, where her level of well-being in a given scenario is determined by the quality of her experiences in that scenario. Then we can give the peacemaker’s claim more practical substance: (Harmony*)

Whenever a person favors a scenario in which she has higher levels of well-being, she thereby favors a better maximal state of affairs.

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Is this credible? Well, three, seemingly insurmountable, obstacles stand in the way of my believing it.

The Grounding Problem First, if I am to believe it, then it must be true of me that whenever I enhance my own well being at the expense of other people, I am making for a better overall state of affairs. So I must adopt a picture of the world in which my own well-being makes an overwhelming contribution to the value simpliciter of a state of affairs. Call this the Grounding Problem: my picture of who I am, and of how I fit into the world, must somehow give me grounds for thinking that my well-being has a uniquely important place in the larger scheme of things. But how could this be? I am not the Sun-King. I am mundane in all measurable respects. So perhaps my only hope is to believe that I am extraordinary in some immeasurable respect, that I am metaphysically unique in some way that bears upon the intrinsic value of my well-being – that I am a God, or that I am dreaming up the world, or that solipsism is true of me, or that I am a solitary utility monster, loose among the unsuspecting masses.

The Solitary Utility Monster My physiology is not unusual in any measurable way – I wince when punched, smile when pleased and frown when saddened, just like anyone else. But there is one important, hidden difference between me and other people: my experiences are qualitatively far, far more intense than theirs. If

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their experiences are like water-colors by Turner, mine are like oilpaintings by Francis Bacon. Drinking tea feels to me just the way that taking morphine feels to them. A touch of indigestion feels to me just the way that being disemboweled feels to them.

What if this were true of me? It’s a bleak thought. Beyond my immediate horizons things are dull. My feelings of love and compassion are only faintly reciprocated. My generosity causes little pleasure, my spite little pain. The world is, in some deep sense, irresponsive to me. Perhaps the only consolation would be my blissful ignorance. It is hard to imagine evidence that would count for or against this picture, so only a desperately self-interested person would suspect the awful truth. But if I were a solitary utility monster then perhaps I should be self-interested. Perhaps my well-being would be intrinsically more important than everybody else’s. For surely, one could argue, what is intrinsically good or bad about pleasure or pain is its phenomenal aspect. Hit your hand hard against your desk. What is bad about pain is that feeling. Run your fingers gently across your scalp. What is good about pleasure is that feeling. And there are more of those sorts of feelings associated with my experiences than with anybody else’s. So the Solitary Utility Monster picture would do a fine job of grounding selfinterest on my part. But it is, of course, ridiculous. Serious philosophers do not believe that they are metaphysically unique. At best they use the idea as a foil – the problem of the ‘problem of other minds’ is almost always taken to be the problem of how one can know that other people’s mental states are just like one’s own, very rarely taken to be the

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problem of whether other people’s mental states are just like one’s own. And to my knowledge, no serious philosopher has ever even considered the view that I, Caspar Hare, am metaphysically unique. It hasn’t even been in the ball-park! So this doesn’t seem like a very promising strategy. If I am to solve the Grounding Problem, I must do so without committing myself to a wildly implausible metaphysical picture. And that appears impossible.

The Generalization Problem Furthermore, if I am to argue, quite generally, that there is no conflict between egoistic considerations and considerations of the greater good, it is not enough just to show that there is no conflict in my own case. I must show that any given person, in favoring scenarios that are better for her, is favoring better maximal states of affairs. And it is very difficult to see how this can be so. Call this the Generalization Problem. The central difficulty is illustrated by Moore’s famous argument against egoism in the Principia Ethica. Moore (for reasons that do not concern us here) endorsed a strong consequentialist constraint on reasons and argued, from this assumption, that ethical egoism must be false.

The only reason I can have for aiming at ‘my own good’ is that it is good absolutely that what I so call should belong to me – good absolutely that I should have something, which, if I have it, others cannot have. But if it is good absolutely that I should have it, then everyone else has as much reason for aiming at my having it, as I have myself. If, therefore, it is true of any man’s ‘single interest’ or ‘happiness’ that it ought to be his sole, ultimate end, this can only mean that that man’s ‘interest’ or ‘happiness’

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is the sole good, the universal good, and the only thing that anybody ought to aim at. What Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man’s happiness is the sole good – that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is – an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of a theory could be desired.5

To see Moore’s thought, imagine a situation where my interests are at odds with someone else’s. For example:

Competing for a Scarce Resource Jane and I are competing for a scarce resource. It is better for Jane that she get it, and better for me that I get it.

In this situation there seem to be two ways for things to go:

Scenario (1)

CJH gets the resource and is content

Jane misses out and is miserable

Scenario (2)

CJH misses out and is miserable

Jane gets the resource and is content

Being an egoist, I favor Scenario (1) over Scenario (2). Being an egoist, Jane favors Scenario (2) over Scenario (1). But, if the notion of ‘better simpliciter’ is to remain coherent, it can’t both be better simpliciter that Scenario (1) obtain and better simpliciter 5

Moore (1903), section 59

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that Scenario (2) obtain. So surely in this case at least one of us, in favoring what is better for ourselves, is not favoring a simply better maximal state of affairs. So, for at least one of us, egoistic considerations do not align with considerations of the greater good. If I am to believe the peacemaker, I must somehow find grounds for denying this.

The Problem of Irreducibly Egocentric Preferences The third problem arises from the fact that, for me, caring about CJH and caring about me do not always amount to the same thing. Given that I am broadly egocentric, and that I believe myself to be CJH, I want to promote my well-being and the well-being of CJH. But, given that I am broadly egocentric, the moment I ceased to believe that I was CJH, I would cease to care about him and continue to care about me. Here’s the kind of situation in which this might happen:

After the Train-Crash I wake up in hospital, achy and bewildered, unable to remember who or where I am. I try to move, and find that my body is swathed in rigid plaster and my head is locked in a brace. I call for help and receive no reply. But, happily, some kind nurse has placed a television directly in front of me. From it I learn that there has been a terrible train accident, that only two survivors, CJH and Joe Bloggs, have been prised from the wreckage, and that both have been taken to hospital and placed in full-body plaster casts. “Interesting!” I think, “I must be either CJH or Joe Bloggs.” The television then tells me a great deal about the conditions of CJH and Joe Bloggs –

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CJH is physically like so…, while Joe Bloggs is physically like so…; CJH has such and such a biographical history…, while Joe Bloggs has such and such a biographical history…; they are in adjacent rooms, CJH to the north and Joe Bloggs to the south, but both rooms have a west-facing window; they are both watching television right now… etc. “Interesting!” I think, “I now have an extremely vivid picture of what’s going on in this hospital, and I know a tremendous amount about CJH and Joe Bloggs, although I still don’t know which of them I am.” Finally, the television tells me that one of the two is scheduled to have an extremely long and painful operation in a few hours time. “Interesting!” I think, “I hope that’s not me.”

My first concern in this situation, is for me, not CJH. If I were to discover that CJH was to be the unfortunate subject of this operation, I would be neither happy nor unhappy, because two importantly different possible scenarios would remain open, scenarios that we can represent like this (with arrows to represent who I am):

Scenario (1):

CJH suffers

Joe Bloggs is comfortable

Scenario (2):

CJH suffers

Joe Bloggs is comfortable

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I very much want the first scenario to obtain. I want to be Joe Bloggs, the person who will not be suffering. But surely this is a clear example of a person favoring a scenario in which he is better off without thereby favoring a better maximal state of affairs. For, on the standard account of the content of ‘self-involving’ propositional attitudes,6 when I hope, desire, believe or discover that scenario (1) obtains, I do not hope, desire, believe or discover that the world is a certain way. After the operation I already know everything relevant about the way the world is, about the nature of the maximal state of affairs – I know who will suffer, when they will suffer and how much they will suffer. My preference for (1) over (2) is not (to use some jargon) a preference for the actual world being in one class of possible worlds rather than another; it is an irreducibly de se preference, a preference with no de dicto content. If I am to believe the peacemaker, I must somehow find grounds for denying this.

1.3 Arbitrating the conflict In light of the Grounding, Generalization and Egocentric Preferences problems, it appears as if (Harmony*) must be rejected, and the peacemaker’s project abandoned. Sometimes we are faced with conflicting egoistic considerations and considerations of the greater good. Indeed, as Peter Singer and Peter Unger have been at pains to make clear7, this is the default situation of anyone who receives income significantly in excess of what is required to satisfy his bare needs. The money that he spends indulging fancies

6 7

See Lewis (1979) See Singer (1970) and Unger (1996)

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could be better spent elsewhere – saving some of the many children who die each day for want of basic medicine. Singer and Unger (for different reasons8) have a rather uncompromising take on this default situation – morality demands that (at the very least!) we give away all of our superfluous income to the most efficient and effective life-saving charities. And it is perhaps tempting to regard this as a reductio of their views about morality. But they have, nonetheless, made vivid a basic problem for the practical deliberator – faced with a massive, widespread conflict between egoistic considerations and considerations of the greater good, how do I arbitrate between them? I could take it that, when these kinds of consideration conflict, the one kind always trumps the other, or the other always trumps the one. But neither option is very attractive. As I said, to let all considerations of the greater good trump all egoistic considerations would be psychologically impossible and, in an important sense, contrary to life (if I earn $30,000 a year after tax, need $8,000 for bare sustenance, give $21,500 away to charity and use the remaining $500 to indulge my preference for freshly squeezed over frozen orange juice, then I am to a small degree allowing egoistic concerns to outweigh considerations of the greater good, for I surely must concede that things would be better overall if I drank the cheap orange juice and two more children were saved from foul deaths from easily preventable diseases). And to let all egoistic considerations trump all considerations of the greater good would be to ignore the basic fact that some things matter, that there is more to life than the fulfillment of my interests

8

Singer’s view derives (although this is not explicit in his original essay) from a commitment to actutilitarianism – a theory that he acknowledges to be at odds with common-sense morality. Unger takes himself to be uncovering the significant features of common-sense morality.

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and the satisfaction of my desires. And this would in the end be a way of isolating myself from the world. Clearly, I must in some way balance the conflicting considerations. But how? One source of difficulty here is that the considerations have such different form. If I see that Sa1 is in one respect better than Sa2, and Sa2 is in another respect better than Sa1, then I can move forward by asking ‘which outcome is better, all things considered?’ But this is not the situation I find myself in. It is rather that I see that Sa1 is better, all things considered, than Sa2, and Sa2 is better for me, all things considered, than Sa1. So I can move forward by asking… what? Now, some relatives of this question, understood broadly as the question of how to respond to the conflicting demands of self-interest and an impartial concern for a better world, have been around for a long time. A history of responses would need to cover Plato, Hobbes, Sidgwick, Gauthier, and Parfit at least. But I will not give such a history, nor add another response to the list, because I think, contrary to the argument from Section 1.2, that it is far from obvious that there is any conflict to respond to. That argument assumed a substantive, and questionable, metaphysical picture of what the world is like, and of how the self fits into it. If a different metaphysical picture is correct then the prospects for a dedicated peacemaker are not so bleak. My aim over the next four chapters is to develop and defend this different picture. Chapter Two is a warm-up. I show that, by adopting an appropriate metaphysical picture, a peacemaker can align time-biased considerations with considerations of the greater good. Chapter Three is the main event. By adopting an analogous picture, a picture I call egocentric presentism, a peacemaker can align egoistic considerations with

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considerations of the greater good. In Chapter Four I defend egocentric presentism against the charges that it is absurd, incomprehensible and incoherent. In Chapter Five I give some positive reasons to accept it. I argue that it offers a way of reconciling some appealing ideas about survival with reductionism about personal identity over time.

17 CHAPTER 2: TIME-BIAS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TIME Some people care not only about what things happen, but also about when things happen. One way to care about the when as well as the what is to care about how events are ordered over the course of history – a history across which good and bad things are evenly sprinkled, for example, might seem preferable to one with good things clumped at one end, bad things clumped at the other.9 Another way is to care more about what happens at some times than others – what happens on the first day of the year 2000, for example, might seem to matter more than what happens on the three hundred and twenty sixth day of the year 1994. Another way is to care about when things happen relative to the present moment. Call someone who cares about when things happen relative to the present moment time-biased. Of the many ways in which one might be time-biased, the two that have received most attention from philosophers10 are bias toward the future (all things considered, I prefer that bad things be past rather than future, and good things be future rather than past), and bias toward the near (all things considered, I prefer that bad things be in the distant future rather than the immediate future, and good things be in the immediate future rather than the distant future). Everybody seems to some extent vulnerable to these kinds of bias. Wouldn’t you prefer to be walking out of your dentist’s office, with the pain in your tooth subsiding, than to be walking in, with the bulk of the pain still to come? Wouldn’t you prefer the drill to be a week, rather than an hour away?

9

For life-histories, Slote (1982), and Bigelow, Campbell and Pargetter (1990), have argued that the value of a life-history is not given by the sum or average of momentary well-being over the course of that lifehistory. The order in which good things happen matters. 10 See the discussion in Parfit (1984) Chapter 8

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Let’s restrict our attention to pain. Someone who has these sorts of biases, and considers pain to be a bad thing, may give them a role in her practical reasoning by accepting appropriate principles. Call them Weak Future-Bias and Weak Near-Bias:

(WFB)

One consideration that supports favoring scenario S1 over scenario S2 is: There is less future pain in S1 than in S2

(WNB)

One consideration that supports favoring scenario S1 over scenario

S2 is: There is less near-future pain in S1 than in S2 But it would be unwise to take such considerations to provide the last word in practical deliberation, because sometimes they will, surely, misalign or conflict with considerations of the greater good. Sometimes, when you desire, or make it the case that there is less future or near future pain, you do not desire, or make it the case that a simply better world history obtain. And this gives rise to a problem closely analogous to the one we saw earlier. When time-biased considerations conflict or misalign with considerations of the greater good, how should you weigh them against each other? But the ‘surely…’ comes much too quickly here. Once again it will be useful to consider a peacemaker, one who denies that time-biased considerations and considerations of the greater good can be at odds. The dedicated peacemaker is committed to:

19 (Harmony II)

Whenever a person favors a scenario in which there is less future, or near-future pain, she thereby favors a simply better maximal state of affairs.

But can she really believe this? Three familiar obstacles stand in her way:

The Grounding Problem First, she would have to adopt a metaphysical picture that gave her some grounds for thinking that future pains are in themselves worse than past pains, near-future pains in themselves worse than far-future pains. Her picture would need somehow to support the idea that Joan of Arc’s suffering on the pyre matters less than Jennifer Lopez’s suffering at her next workout. Here’s a picture that would do the trick:

Divine Novocain At the dawn of creation God faced a problem: He would not allow Himself physically to intervene in the course of history, for fear of compromising our freedom, but He wished to protect us from the evil consequences of that freedom. So He created divine novocain, a drug that dulls the qualitative aspect of suffering without inducing any physical changes in the sufferer. In the past He has administered this drug liberally, to all sufferers, pure and fallen, but now (what with the evil rich causing or failing to prevent famine, war and disease on a scale that even He could not have anticipated) He finds His stocks to be running low. He will be forced to ration. So He decides that He will

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administer none for a short while, and then gradually build up the doses, though never to their pre-2006 level.

This would do the trick. But it is mad. On any sane view, Joan of Arc’s suffering is no less intense for being past.

The Generalization Problem Second, it is not enough for our peacemaker to show that considerations of the greater good align with time-biased considerations now, in 2006. She needs to show that they always do. So she needs to deal with cases where time bias leads us to have different preferences at different times about the same states of affairs. Here’s an example of such a case, where the preferences are generated by bias toward the future.11

Bad and Worse Operations On Monday, doctors run some tests on me and declare that, depending on the results of these tests, I will either have to endure an unpleasant operation on Thursday, or a nightmarish, exquisitely dreadful operation on Tuesday – an operation that involves poking optic fibers down my major blood vessels, slicing through my muscle tissue, and cauterizing the internal wounds with a red-hot scalpel, without so much as an aspirin to distract me from the pain.

11

Are there similar such cases where the preferences are generated by bias toward the near? This will depend upon the rate at which you discount for temporal distance. If you discount exponentially (for example, where i is the intensity of a future pain and t is the temporal distance, by taking its significance to you now to be given by i/2n.) then your preferences will not change over time. If you don’t then they will. See Parfit (1984) section 62 and elsewhere.

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Not to worry, though, both operations, if performed, will undoubtedly be successful. On Monday I hope to have the unpleasant operation on Thursday. But on Wednesday evening I wake up, bewildered, unable to remember if I have yet been operated upon, and, since I am biased towards the future, I hope very much to have had the nightmarish operation on Tuesday.

Here the possible world-histories seem to be: Fig 2.1: Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday time

Possibility (1): mild pain! I await the results

Monday

I wake up, bewildered

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday time

Possibility (2): TERRIBLE PAIN!!! I await the results

I wake up, bewildered

On Monday I prefer (1) to (2), while on Wednesday I prefer (2) to (1), consistent with the considerations provided by the Future-Bias Principle. But it can’t both be better simpliciter that the maximal state of affairs represented by possibility (1) obtain, and that

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the maximal state of affairs represented by possibility (2) obtain. So on at least one of the two days considerations of the greater good do not align with future-biased considerations. On at least one of the two days, in favoring a scenario in which there is less future-pain, I am not favoring a better maximal state of affairs.

The Problem of Irreducibly Egocentric Preferences Third, the peacemaker must face cases where time-bias leads us to have irreducibly egocentric preferences. Here is an example of such a case, where the preference is generated by bias toward the near12:

Waiting For My Painful Operation Early in my life, clever doctors find that I have a rare genetic condition that will most likely cause me to contract cancer of the x (substitute whatever organ you feel most anxious about for x) in late middle-age. Happily, they can eliminate the risk by removing organ x from my body. Unhappily, the necessary operation is agonizingly painful. Knowing all this, I schedule such an operation for soon after April 8, 2022, my fiftieth birthday. I am always perfectly sure that the operation will take place, that I will survive it, that it will be successful, and that it will hurt like anything. Then, one night, I wake up from a fretful dream and look at the date on my malfunctioning alarm clock. It says April 7 …2. Is it April 7, 2012 or April 7 2022? For the

12

Future-bias generates many similar preferences – e.g. when I wake up, knowing that I have a painful operation on a particular date, but not knowing whether it is in the past or future.

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moment I just don’t know. But I do know what I want. Being biased toward the near, I want it to be 2012.

In this case there seem to me to be two possible scenarios (with arrows to represent what the time is now):

Fig 2.2: April 7, 2012

April 7, 2022 time

Scenario (1): PAIN!!! I wake up I wake up

April 7, 2012

April 7, 2022 time

Scenario (2): PAIN!!! I wake up I wake up

But these two scenarios do not represent different ways for the world to be, different maximal states of affairs. My ignorance in this case is irreducibly de se – I know everything relevant about the history of the world, but don’t know which person-slice I am. So, in favoring (1) over (2), I am not favoring one maximal state of affairs over

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another. So, in favoring the scenario in which there is less near-future pain, I am not favoring a better maximal state of affairs. As before, these three problems seem to be insurmountable, so it seems that the peacemaker must give up. No plausible metaphysical picture grounds general time-bias. Time biased considerations do not always align with considerations of the greater good.

2.2 The Peacemaker’s Response The argument above is structurally just like the argument from Chapter One, the argument that egocentric considerations do not always align with considerations of the greater good. Is there anything wrong with it? Well, this time around we have at least some reason to suspect that there might be something wrong with it, because its conclusion is at least controversial. Certainly, many influential philosophers (including Sidgwick13 and Rawls14) have had a low view of time bias, arguing that it is petty, unenlightened, or, in the extreme, irrational, but many others (including Bentham15) have thought it to be perfectly rational, and furthermore a bias toward what is better full stop. It is better full stop that, for example, suffering be in the past rather than the future. One way to accommodate this intuition would be to take issue with my characterization of the sorts of states of affairs whose intrinsic value gives rise to considerations of the greater good. I took them to be maximal states of affairs, but one could perhaps take them to be proper parts of maximal states of affairs. In favoring better futures I may, then, be favoring intrinsically better ‘states of affairs’ of the relevant kind.

13

See Sidgwick (1907), pp. 381, 382 See Rawls (1971), Section 45 15 See Bentham (1789), Chapter IV 14

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(Lars Bergstrom once endorsed this view, arguing that, for consequentialists, ‘the future is more important than the total state of the world.’16) Or, for a quite general solution to problems of agent and time-bias, one could stipulate that the relevant ‘states of affairs’ are <World, Agent, Time> triples, the ‘centered worlds’ that figure prominently in recent decision theory. It may be the case that (e.g.), in always favoring better futures, I am always favoring better ‘states of affairs’ in this sense, because it may be that whenever <w1, a1, t1> and <w2, a2, t2> are such that there is less suffering in w1 after t1 than in w2 after t2, then <w1, a1, t1> is simply better than <w2, a2, t2>. But there is something fishy about this suggestion. For one thing, notice that there is neglible difference between saying that the triple <w, a1, t1> is simply better than the triple <w, a2, t2>, and saying that world w is better for, or in relation to, a1 at t1 than for, or in relation to a2 at t2. For another thing, it mis-characterizes the nature of the considerations in question. Considerations of the greater good gain their force from the thought that what matters is the way that everything is, not the way that everything is relative to a time, place or person. But the triples <w, a1, t1> and <w, a2, t2> do not represent different ways for everything to be. Another, much better way to accommodate the intuition is to question whether facts about which time is now do not somehow enter into the way that everything is. This involves making some substantive assumptions about the metaphysics of time.

Four-Dimensionalism

16

Bergstrom (1966), p. 125

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One vexed question in the metaphysics of time concerns the ontological status of past, present future moments, events, objects. Does Julius Caesar exist? Does the 90th President of the United States exist? Call someone who believes that past and future entities (moments, events, objects…etc.) exist an eternalist. Some eternalists are ersatz realists about the past and future, they believe that present things are concrete, past and future things abstract. Others believe that past, present and future things are equally real, equally concrete. ‘The world consists of a four-dimensionally extended space-time manifold,’ these people say, ‘the past, present and future are ontologically on a par. Just as a thing is no less real for being to my left or right, so a thing is no less real for coming before or after me’. Call such people block universe theorists. Another vexed question concerns the status of tensed properties. What is it for something to be past, present or future? Some block universe theorists think that there are no monadic tensed properties, only relational tensed properties – the death of King Harold is not monadically past, present or future, it is past relative to the death of Ann Boleyn, future relative to the death of Jesus, and present relative to William’s invasion of England. ‘All things are on a par with respect to tense’, these people say, ‘all things are future relative to things that come before them, present relative to things with which they coexist, and past relative to things that come after them. No moment has the privileged status of being the present one.’ Call such people four-dimensionalists.17

17

This term has been used by several different philosophers in several different ways – sometimes to mean the block universe picture, sometimes to mean the block universe picture conjoined with the view that tensed properties are relational, sometimes to mean the block universe picture conjoined with the view that tensed properties are relational conjoined with perdurantism about persistence over time. So, for maximum precision, perhaps I should use a different term, but the one that suggests itself – ‘the uncentered block theory’ – is unacceptably clunky.

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Four-dimensionalism has become something of an orthodoxy among philosophers of time, but it is overtly surprising. We do, after all, very frequently appear to attribute monadic tensed properties to events. We say ‘Christmas will be coming soon!’, ‘There there, the whole sordid and dreadful business is over!’ and such-like. What are we doing? Four-dimensionalists could say that we are spouting confused nonsense, but that would distance them, uncomfortably, from common sense. So they make sense of such token sentences by giving them truth conditions in which monadic tensed properties do not figure. The paradigmatic treatment borrows from Kaplan’s treatment of indexicals – words like ‘I’, and ‘here’. From the semantic content of ‘the whole sordid and dreadful business is over’, and its context of utterance, November 5th 2006, we determine its socalled ‘propositional content’ – that the business occurs before November 5th 2006 – and check to see if it is indeed a feature of the four-dimensionally extended space time manifold that the business occurs before that date; if so then the token sentence is true, if not then it is false18. Now, if we accept four-dimensionalism, then the Grounding, Generalization and Egocentric Preferences problems really are insoluble. With respect to grounding, past pains are just as real as future pains, so we have no real grounds for thinking them less important simpliciter. With respect to generalization, in the Bad and Worse Operations case, my preferences on Monday and Wednesday are indeed de dicto inconsistent. On Monday I favor the one space-time manifold over the other, while on Wednesday I favor the other over the one, so I cannot, on both days, be favoring better ways for everything to be. With respect to egocentric preferences, in the Waiting for my Painful Operation

18

See Kaplan (1989)

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case, my desire that pain be in the far future rather than the near-future does indeed have no de dicto content. I am not favoring one space time manifold over another, so I am not favoring a better over a worse way for everything to be. So if we accept four-dimensionalism then the argument goes through – consequentialist considerations do not always align with time-biased considerations. But what if we deny it? What if we insist that there are monadic tensed properties, that tense is built into the way the world is?

Alternatives to Four-Dimensionalism There are several ways to accommodate this basic thought. Advocates of hyperkenesis19 retain the block universe ontology, retain the idea that the world is a fourdimensionally extended space time manifold, but say that one moment has the interesting and unique property of being the present one. Which moment? Well, that changes as time goes by (think of a laser-pointer moving remorselessly along the block). Others imagine that the past exists but the future does not. The present is the outermost skin of a block that expands as time goes by.20 Others imagine that the future exists but the past does not. The present is the outermost skin of a block that contracts as time goes by21. Others imagine that the future branches off in many directions while the past remains fixed. The present is the first point at which multiple branches split off from the bare tree-trunk of the past.22 Presentists23, meanwhile, hold that only present objects, events, moments exist 19

See, for example, Schlesinger (1994) This view may have origins in Aristotle. A contemporary version has been proposed by Tooley (1997) 21 Though many people have imagined this, I don’t know of anyone who has endorsed it. Surprising, perhaps, because it seems uniquely well qualified to explain why the future matters and the past does not. 22 A view developed in McCall (1994) 23 The first and most famous presentist was Saint Augustine. For more up-to-date expositions of the view, see Bigelow (1996) and Zimmerman (1998). 20

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(and perhaps abstract things like gods and numbers). There are no past or future things. The best we can say is that it used to be the case that they existed, or it will be the case that they exist. I think that presentism is by far the most coherent and philosophically defensible of these theories, but for present purposes that is beside the point. The point is that each of them is a theory about the nature and extent of all that there is, where ‘all’ is understood in an unrestricted sense – a theory about what maximal states of affairs are like. And, according to each of them, it is part of the nature of maximal states of affairs that present things are different from past and future things. So, according to any of them, the Generalization and Egocentric Preferences problems do not arise. With respect to generalization: in the Bad and Worse Operations case the maximal states of affairs that I discriminate between on Monday (one in which mild pain is in the far future and one in which terrible pain is in the near future) are not the same as the maximal states of affairs that I discriminate between on Wednesday (one in which terrible pain is in the past and one in which mild pain is in the near future), so is quite possible that, on both days I am favoring a simply better maximal state of affairs. With respect to irreducibly egocentric preferences: in the Waiting for the Painful Operation case, the two scenarios that seem open to me really do represent two different maximal states of affairs (in the one case a maximal state of affairs in which pain is in the far future, in the other a maximal state of affairs in which pain is in the near future), so it is quite possible that, in favoring one scenario over another I am favoring a simply better maximal state of affairs. So, if a dedicated peacemaker rejects four-dimensionalism, and accepts that there are monadic tensed properties, she can solve the Generalization and Egocentric

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Preferences problems by stipulating that, all other things being equal, states of affairs in which pain will occur are worse than states of affairs in which pain has occurred, and states of affairs in which pain will happen soon are worse than states of affairs in which pain will happen a long time from now. Would this solve the Grounding Problem? Would the metaphysics somehow make it seem plausible that pain with the monadic property of being in the future is in itself more significant than pain with the monadic property of being in the past? Well, unless our peacemaker adopts the ‘shrinking block’ view, the metaphysics will not explain why past pains matter less than future pains. But maybe no explanation is needed. If the peacemaker has a strong (though perhaps defeasible) conviction that future pain is intrinsically worse than past pain, the metaphysics does nothing to undermine her conviction.

31 CHAPTER 3: EGOCENTRISM AND EGOCENTRIC METAPHYSICS We can make peace between considerations of the greater good and time-biased considerations by adopting an appropriate metaphysical picture. Can we perform an analogous trick for egocentric considerations? What sort of picture would allow us to say that, whenever we favor scenarios in which we are better off, we favor simply better maximal states of affairs? At a minimum the picture would have to imply that, in the After the Train Crash case, where I have an irreducibly egocentric preference, the two possibilities represent different ways for the world to be. But since these ‘possibilities’ differ only with respect to which of the injured parties is me, the picture would have to imply that this property, being me, somehow enters into states of affairs. The analogy to four-dimensionalism and its denial should be clear. According to the common sense metaphysics of persons, it is natural to suppose that if ‘being me’ and ‘being other’ are properties at all, then they are relational properties - Caspar Hare is me relative to CJH, other relative to Stalin. And everybody is, in the relevant sense, on a par with respect to these properties – we are all me relative to ourselves, and other relative to everybody else. But according to the strange-seeming view we would have to take, it would have to be the case that in any given maximal state of affairs, one and only one person has the non-relational property of being me. There is a unique I at the center (so to speak) of all that exists. After the Train Crash, I am comparing maximal states of affairs in which the thing with the monadic property of being me is in pain, with maximal states of affairs in which the thing with the monadic property of being me is free of pain. Won’t this turn out to be just another theory of the kind we considered in Chapter One, another theory that says I am metaphysically unique? Well, yes, but if it is to solve

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the Generalization Problem it needs to be considerably more subtle than those were. Let’s say that I am CJH, and Jane and I are each contemplating a state of affairs in which CJH suffers and Jane prospers. Our theory will need to explain why, although the state of affairs I am considering is one in which the thing with the intrinsic property of being me suffers, the state of affairs Jane is considering is not. And it will need to explain why, when Jane says ‘I am going to prosper’, the proposition expressed by her sentence is true. It may be helpful to see how a temporal presentist deals with the analogous ‘problem’. Let’s say that it is presently noon, and Joe at noon and Joe at 11am are both contemplating a situation in which Joe at noon suffers, and Joe at 11am prospers. The presentist must explain why, if temporal presence is a monadic property, the state of affairs that Joe at 11am contemplates is one in which Joe presently prospers, not one in which he prospered one hour ago. And he must explain why, when Joe at 11am says ‘Joe isn’t suffering’, the proposition expressed by his sentence is true. Obviously this poses no real difficulties for the presentist. If it is presently noon, and Joe is suffering, and Joe at 11am was thinking about this, then the situation that Joe at 11am was contemplating was one in which Joe wasn’t suffering. The point is that the presentist has operators – ‘It will be the case that...’ and ‘It was the case that...’24, that enable him to make sense of past and future tensed propositions, by evaluating them within the scope of the operators. If Saint Augustine said ‘Great! It’s time for dinner!’ the presentist need not label his sentence false. His sentence was true, says the presentist, because it was the case that (‘It’s time for dinner’

24

Presentists also avail themselves of so-called ‘metric’ operators – for any n, the presentist has operators ‘In n seconds it will be the case that…’ and ‘n seconds ago it was the case that…’. But we won’t need these for the moment.

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is true), because it was the case that (it’s time for dinner). And these operators also enable a presentist to moderate the claim that only present things exist. Though Anne Boleyn does not exist, she is not like Santa Claus – it was the case that (Ann Boleyn exists). Though my first grand-daughter does not exist, she is not like the bogeyman – it will be the case that (CJH’s first granddaughter exists).25 In general, for any thing that the fourdimensionalist believes to exist, the presentist believes either that it exists, or that it will exist, or that it has existed. The present is special, then, but not quite as special as it might at first have appeared. So the theory we are groping towards is going to need operators that, in a similar kind of way, allow us to make sense of self-referential sentences uttered by other people, and of the ‘possibilities’ that other people consider. Which operators we use will depend on the details of the theory we adopt. I’ll outline a theory, call it Egocentric Presentism, which seems to me attractive and simple.

3.2 Egocentric Presentism – An Introduction The best way to introduce this theory is with a story. Imagine that, in a fit of Cartesian pique, I throw away all of my cherished beliefs about how the world is, and about how I fit into it. I no longer accept that the earth is round, that there are material objects, that I am CJH, or, for that matter, that I am anything at all. In this epistemically emaciated state I retire to a secluded room and attempt to build up a world-view from the raw materials of what is unquestionably given. A series of insights strike me.

25

Of course, the presentist will need some story about how the description ‘CJH’s first granddaughter’ gets to refer, given that there is no CJH. But I take it that presentists have such stories.

34

Insight 1:

There are some things – a painting of Saint George and the Dragon, a telephone, a diary, a facial itch. Their nature remains obscure. Perhaps the painting is not really a painting. Perhaps the telephone is a toy. Perhaps the diary is a bundle of sense data. Perhaps the itch is imaginary. All that can be said for sure is that these things, whatever they are, reveal themselves at this, the first stage of the Cartesian exercise. They are present.26

Insight 2:

The present things are perceptual objects of a sentient being, CJH. CJH sees the telephone, painting and diary. CJH feels the itch.

Insight 3:

There are many, many sentient beings other than CJH, but their perceptual objects are not present. So as to talk about this interesting feature of CJH in an economical way, let’s introduce some terms. Let ‘present experiences’ be short-hand for ‘experiences whose objects are present.’ Let ‘I’ (in the nominative, ‘me’ in the accusative) be short-hand for the definite description ‘the one with present experiences’.

Insight 4:

Although I, CJH, am unique in having present experiences, I find that I can imagine other sentient creatures being unique in this respect. I can imagine, for example, that I am Michael Schumacher (that the one with

26

This is a term of art, and I introduce it guardedly. The advantages of using the word ‘present’ in this context are that it supports both monadic and relational readings, and that, by doing so, I emphasize the structural similarities between this view and the analogous views in the metaphysics of time.

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present experiences is Michael Schumacher). This involves imagining that Michael Schumacher’s perceptual objects – heat, a smell of foam and latex, the wail of a ten-cylinder engine – are present. It involves imagining hoardings buzzing past me, the one with present experiences, Michael Schumacher, at two hundred miles per hour.

Insight 5:

Such imaginings lead me to suspect that I am less unique than I may have thought. Michael Schumacher’s experiences are not present, so things are not as I imagined them to be, when I imagined being him. But he is conscious, he has a point of view, and from his point of view things are as I imagined them to be – the heat, the foamy smell, and the wail of the engine are manifest. From Michael Schumacher’s point of view, Michael Schumacher’s experiences are present.

But let’s be careful here. In saying that Michael Schumacher is conscious I am not taking presence to be a relational property – saying that his experiences are present relative to his point of view, while mine are present relative to my point of view. Presence is a monadic property that my experiences have and his do not. The construction ‘from his point of view’ is really an operator, the semantics for which might be given in the following way.

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3.3 Semantics for a Logic of Points of View Say that a subject world (henceforth an S-world) is a world in which there are functionally sentient creatures, the experiences of one and only one of which have the monadic property of being present. At any such world, a set of atomic propositions hold true. Think of these as propositions having to do with the way things are, physically speaking, and propositions having to do with where the property of being present is instantiated. So, for example, at SHenryKissinger, a world physically identical to our own, but in which the experiences of Henry Kissinger are present, the following atomic propositions hold true: ‘The sun orbits the moon’ ‘There are over ten billion functionally sentient animals’ ‘The person with present experiences was formerly Secretary of State’ ‘CJH’s experiences are absent’ ...etc. Now, let a system of S-worlds be a set of physically identical S-worlds such that for any functionally sentient creature in an S-world in the set, there is an S-world in the set in which that very creature has present experiences. And say that for any system of Sworlds there is a reflexive two-place access relation, the a-relation, defined over pairs of S-worlds in the system. Here, for the sake of having an example to work with, is one system of S-worlds:

37 Fig 3.1:

STom

Some atomic propositions true at STom: ‘There are 3 functionally sentient animals’ ‘Tom’s experiences are present’ ‘Harry feels queasy’

SDick

SHarry

Some atomic propositions true at SDick: ‘There are 3 functionally sentient animals’ ‘Dick’s Experiences are present’ ‘Harry feels queasy’

Some atomic propositions true at SHarry: ‘There are 3 functionally sentient animals’ ‘Harry’s experiences are present’ ‘Harry feels queasy’

(The ovals represent S-worlds. The arrows represent access relations between S-worlds: Si

Sj means Si is a-related to Sj.) So, in this system there are three S-worlds, STom,

SDick, and SHarry. They are all a-related to themselves, STom is a-related to SDick (though not vice-versa), and SDick is a-related to SHarry, (though not vice-versa). Now we give truth conditions for quantified Point of View operators in the following way:

Definition 1: From some point of view, from every point of view ‘From some point of view (p)’ is true at SK iff for some SJ a-related to SK , ‘p’ is true at SJ ‘From every point of view (p)’ is true at SK iff for every SJ a-related to SK , ‘p’ is true at SJ

38

So, for example, in the above system the proposition ‘From some point of view (there are present queasy experiences)’ is true at SDick, because SDick is a-related to SHarry and ‘there are present queasy experiences’ is true at SHarry. But it is false at STom, because STom is not a-related to SHarry, or to any other S-world at which ‘there are present queasy experiences’ is true. And we give truth conditions for operators of the form From Q’s point of view with the following definition schema:

Definition 2: From the point of view of H For any functionally sentient being H, ‘From the point of view of H (p)’is true at SK iff for some SJ a-related to SK, ‘H has present experiences, and p’ is true at SJ So ‘from Harry’s point of view (Harry’s experiences are present and Harry is queasy’) is true at SDick, in the system above. Finally we stipulate that: Definition 3: Consciousness ‘H is conscious’ is true at SK iff ‘From H’s point of view (H’s experiences are present)’ is true at SK

So in the above system, for example, ‘Harry is conscious’ is true at SDick but not at STom, because SDick is a-related to a world in which Harry’s experiences are present, but STom is not. But ‘from Dick’s point of view (Harry is conscious)’ is true at STom, because STom is a-related to SDick.

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Here’s a different system: Fig 3.2

STom

Some atomic propositions true at STom: ‘There are 3 functionally sentient animals’ ‘Tom’s experiences are present’ ‘Harry feels queasy’

SDick

SHarry

Some atomic propositions true at SDick: ‘There are 3 functionally sentient animals’ ‘Dick’s experiences are present’ ‘Harry feels queasy’

Some atomic propositions true at SHarry: ‘There are 3 functionally sentient animals’ ‘Harry’s experiences are present’ ‘Harry feels queasy’

In this system all pairs of S-worlds are a-related. Call this a maximally interrelated system. So in this system ‘Harry is conscious’ is true at SDick. Indeed, at every S-world it is true that every functionally sentient creature is conscious. There are no zombies in a maximally interrelated system.

3.4 Egocentric Presentism That’s the S-world semantics for a logic of points of view. It gives you, I hope, an intuitive sense of how the operators from some point of view, from every point of view... etc. work. As an egocentric presentist (pretend, for the moment, that I am one) I make use of these operators but believe the semantics to be misleading in one important respect. I

40

believe that all that exists is an S-world, SME, in which the experiences of one and only one person, the person I call me, are present. That’s it. What makes the S-world semantics useful, though misleading, is that propositions containing the point of view operators are true or false of this world as if it were part of a maximally-interrelated system of physically identical S-worlds, and truth conditions for such propositions were given by the rules above. So it is true, for example, that from Henry Kissinger’s point of view (Henry Kissinger’s experiences are present), and that from Henry Kissinger’s point of view (from Colin Powell’s point of view (Henry Kissinger’s experiences are not present)), and that every functionally sentient creature is conscious. An egocentric presentist’s attitude towards the S-world semantics, then, is very like a temporal presentist’s attitude toward the standard, four-dimensionalist semantics for tense logic. The temporal presentist says that only the present moment exists, that that is all there is. But for the purposes of understanding how tensed operators (operators like it was once the case that and it will always be the case that) work it may be useful to imagine that other moments exist, because propositions containing such operators are true or false of the present moment, as if it were part of a system of moments ordered by an earlier-later relation and truth conditions for these operators were given by the rules of the four-dimensionalist semantics for tense logic. It is also very like a modal fictionalist’s attitude to the possible worlds semantics for modal logic.27 The modal fictionalist believes that propositions containing modal operators (like it is possible that and it is necessary that) are true or false of the actual world as if it were part of a wider system of possible worlds ordered by an access

27

See Rosen (1990) and onwards.

41

relation, and truth conditions for the operators were given by the possible worlds semantics. But, says the fictionalist, we shouldn’t let this fool us into thinking that a wider system really exists. Only the actual world exists.

3.5 Egocentric Presentism and Egoistic Considerations That’s egocentric presentism. If it is right then all that there is is an S-world. S worlds are maximal states of affairs. So, as an egocentric presentist, I can make peace between egoistic considerations and considerations of the greater good by taking Sworlds in which I (short-hand for ‘the one with present experiences’, remember) suffer to be worse simpliciter than S-worlds in which I do not, and S-worlds in which I prosper to be better simpliciter than S-worlds in which I do not. The Problem of Irreducibly Egocentric Preferences now disappears. When I have such a preference, in the After the Train Crash case, for example, the two ‘possibilities’ that seem open to me really do represent different ways for everything to be. My desire that I not suffer amounts to a preference for the maximal state of affairs in which there is no present suffering, a simply better maximal state of affairs. What about the Generalization Problem? As an egocentric presentist I can make sense of the idea that other people have reason to be self-interested, even when their selfinterest conflicts with my own. Recall the Hoping for a Prize case, for example. In this case there seemed to be two ways for things to go:

Possibility (1):

CJH gets the resource and there is present happiness

Jane misses out and there is absent misery

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Possibility (2):

CJH misses out and there is present misery

Jane gets the resource and there is absent happiness

Since the state of affairs represented by Possibility (1) is intrinsically better than the state of affairs represented by Possibility (2), considerations of the greater good support my favoring it, but how do such considerations bear on Jane? I might think about this question in two different ways. On the one hand, I might think that considerations of the greater good support Jane favoring me getting the resource in just the way that they support me favoring me getting the resource. If Jane takes the resource for herself then she brings about an intrinsically worse state of affairs, and that counts against her doing so. But there’s another, better way to think about it. When I treat another person as a practical deliberator, and ask whether such-and-such considerations support her doing soand-so, I take her to be in a particular deliberative context, facing choices, options, and alternatives. This involves taking the deliberative context to be present. But since Jane’s experiences are not, have never been, and will never be present, she is not, has never been, and will never be a practical deliberator in this sense, so I cannot think directly about what considerations count. I must instead think indirectly, by, so-to-speak, thinking within the scope of the from Jane’s point of view operator – by thinking about what from Jane’s point of view (…is the case). When I do this I see that from Jane’s point of view (if Jane gets the resource there will be present happiness and absent misery, if Jane misses out there will be present misery and absent happiness), so from Jane’s point of view (it is

43

intrinsically better that Jane get the resource), so from Jane’s point of view (considerations of the greater good support Jane favoring the scenario in which she gets the resource). When I think about Jane as a practical deliberator, I see that considerations of the greater good support her looking out for herself. When a temporal presentist seeks to generalize time-bias he will feel a similar kind of ambivalence. Imagine that, in the Bad and Worse Operations case, I decide to act on Monday so as to ensure that I will have the nasty operation on Thursday, rather than the exquisitely agonizing one on Tuesday. It is now Wednesday evening, and, being biased-toward the future, I am already regretting my decision, wishing that I had brought my operation forward to Tuesday. What should I now think about whether considerations of the greater good supported Monday’s decision? On one hand I might think that they weighed against my decision. As things are there will be nasty suffering tomorrow. If I had acted differently all suffering would be in the past. So, in deferring the operation, I favored an intrinsically worse state of affairs over an intrinsically better one. But that is obviously the wrong way to think about it. Thinking in the right way about the practical considerations that bore upon Monday’s decision involves thinking about a deliberative context in which I face Monday’s options and alternatives, which involves thinking about that deliberative context as present. But Monday’s deliberative context is not present. For me to consider it so, I must think, so-to-speak, within the scope of the it was the case that operator. I must think about how it was the case that (…things are). But since it was the case that (if CJH chooses to defer the operation there will be less suffering in the future), it was the case that (considerations of the greater good

44

support CJH deferring the operation). When I think about the decision in the appropriate way, I see that it was supported by considerations of the greater good.

3.6 Grounding Lastly, what about the Grounding Problem? Does the metaphysics support the idea that it is worse that I suffer than that other people do? I think so. For surely present suffering is worse than absent suffering. If you don’t see this immediately, I urge you (really!) to perform this experiment:

Trial By Kettle Today, many hundreds, if not thousands, of Russians will spill boiling water on their hands. Pour boiling water on your own hand and compare your present discomfort with the absent discomfort of the northern-most Russian spiller. Which is worse?

Your immediate reaction: ‘My pain is dreadful, far worse than anything that is going on in Russia.’ may be tempered by a sober, reflective thought: ‘My pain appears worse to me because I am more intimately acquainted with it. It is present to me in a way that the northern-most Russian spiller’s pain is not. But he is more intimately acquainted with his pain. It is present to him in a way that mine is not. Since our situations are really symmetrical, I find, on reflection, that I have no grounds for thinking that my pain is worse simpliciter than his pain.’

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Well and good. But this humbling thought is not available to an egocentric presentist. For an egocentric presentist, the situations are not symmetrical. It’s not that my pain is present to me and his present to him. Mine is present and his is absent. That is part of the way things are. So there is no reason to qualify or reassess my initial judgment. Of course, as an egocentric presentist, I will take it that our situations do have something important in common – the northern-most Russian spiller is not a zombie, so just as it is the case that from CJH’s point of view (there is excruciating pain), so from the northern-most Russian spiller’s point of view (there is excruciating pain). But, just as a temporal presentist is free to take it as basic that it is worse, all other things being equal, that there be present suffering than past suffering, so an egocentric presentist is free to take it as basic that it is worse, all other things being equal, when there is present suffering than when from someone else’s point of view (there is present suffering). This thought experiment does not, of course, commit an egocentric presentist to extreme egoism – the view that only present suffering has any practical significance at all. It identifies one factor that makes pleasure better and suffering worse. This is quite compatible with thinking that, in evaluating the significance of suffering, there are many other relevant factors to consider – factors such as the intensity of the suffering, the duration of the suffering, and the number of sufferers. It may be very tricky to give these factors precise weight. 28 Is it better that there be one hour of hand-scalding or four hours

28

The trickiness runs deep. Indeed, it may be that there is no satisfactory way of answering all such questions without appealing to an intransitive ‘better than’ relation. See Temkin (1996) and Norcross (1997).

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of thumb-scalding? Is it better that there be one scalded hand or four scalded thumbs? 29 Is it better that there be absent suffering from hand-scalding or present suffering from thumb-scalding? But some cases are less tricky. It is better that there be four hangnails than one crushed leg. It is better that there be present suffering from a hangnail than absent suffering from leg-crushing. After all, when there is an absent suffering from legcrushing, and the victim is not a zombie, it is the case that from someone else’s point of view (there is present excruciating pain). And an egocentric presentist is free to take it that this matters, in just the way that a temporal presentist is free to take it that it matters that it will be the case that (there is present excruciating pain). This is why empathy is instructive. For an egocentric presentist, empathizing with an unfortunate involves imagining that I am the unfortunate, that the unfortunate has present experiences. This involves viscerally imagining what from the unfortunate’s point of view (…is the case). And I care about the results of this exercise because I care about what from another person’s point of view (...is the case). So, for a reasonable egocentric presentist, in some cases (e.g. choosing between my suffering a hangnail and someone else suffering a crushed leg) there will remain a conflict between egoistic considerations and considerations of the greater good. What progress do I make, then, by adopting egocentric presentism? First, while the best I could do before was to acknowledge that the other person being tortured was worse full stop, and that my suffering a hangnail was worse for me, now I can ask: ‘which is worse, twenty hours of absent suffering or one hour of present

29

The trickiness runs very deep. Indeed, it may be that there is no satisfactory way of answering all such questions without appealing to an intransitive ‘better than’ relation. See Temkin (1996) and Norcross (1997).

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suffering?’ It may be hard to find satisfactory answers to questions of this kind, but there is, at least, a question to answer. Second, the residual conflict will not trouble an egocentric presentist. For an egocentric presentist, egoistic considerations are not considerations of a special, distinctive kind, that count towards my favoring one state of affairs over another even when I recognize that the other is better simpliciter than the one. Once I have judged that it is better that there be a present hangnail than absent torture, it isn’t as if there is some further consideration – ‘but the hangnail will be present!’ – that has independent force. I have already accounted for the presence of the hangnail in my judgment about which state of affairs is better simpliciter. So when considerations of the greater good conflict with egoistic considerations the latter just fall away. Third, in all but extreme cases (e.g. choosing between the present hangnail and the absent torture), as an egocentric presentist I can selfishly attend to my own pleasures and pains while enjoying the psychological harmony of Louis XIV – the serene confidence that comes with believing that in doing what’s good for me I am doing what’s good full stop.

48 CHAPTER 4: DEFENDING EGOCENTRIC PRESENTISM So by adopting egocentric presentism you can harmonize your otherwise discordant impulses to make the world better and make the world better for yourself. Well and good. But you can always rid yourself of psychological conflict by adopting some contrived, patently false world-view. If you believe in a paradisiacal after-life, you will go peaceably to your death. If you believe that meat is a kind of root vegetable, you will not feel bad about eating it. Unless egocentric presentism is a plausible theory, the point of the last chapter is strictly academic. Is it a plausible theory? I find that most people to whom I present it say ‘no’, some because they see no positive reasons for adopting it, others because they think that it should immediately be dismissed as absurd, incomprehensible or internally incoherent. My next chapter, Chapter Five, will be addressed at the former kind of person. This chapter will be addressed at the latter. Its aims are rather restricted – I just want to show that the theory is not obviously untenable. Egocentric presentism is absurd, incomprehensible or internally incoherent. Let’s take these claims in turn.

4.2 Egocentric Presentism is Absurd The worry here is that egocentric presentism is just a kind of solipsism. And isn’t solipsism clearly absurd? This depends on what is you mean by ‘solipsism’. Different philosophers have different positions in mind. Perhaps you mean ontological solipsism: the view that other

49

people have diminished ontological status. An ontological solipsist may believe any one of the following: There are no other people Other people are spectral entities, like angels Other people are abstract objects, like numbers Other people are figments of my imagination Other people exist only while I exist And these are indeed absurd views, but not views that the egocentric presentist need associate himself with. He believes that there are other people, and they are exactly as real, fleshy and (to mix metaphors) concrete as he is. True, the egocentric presentist is ontologically discriminatory. It is a central tenet of this theory that certain kinds of entities – other subject worlds – do not exist. For the egocentric presentist there is only one subject-world, SME. But, given that no philosopher has ever believed that there are other subject-worlds, it seems unreasonable to fault the egocentric presentist for this denial. His ontology is beyond reproach. So perhaps you have something else in mind. Perhaps you mean mental solipsism, the view that other people are not conscious, or that other people do not have mental states. But again, this is not something that an egocentric presentist need accept. According to egocentric presentism, for a person to be conscious is not for his experiences to be present, but rather for there to be something it is like to be him, which is for it to be the case that from his point of view (his experiences are present). An egocentric presentist will, typically, think that this is true of every person – from

50

Madonna’s point of view (Madonna has present experiences), from Graham Priest’s point of view (Graham Priest has present experiences) ...etc. But, of course, no feature of the formal structure of egocentric presentism commits one to the view that other people are conscious. As an egocentric presentist I can readily imagine a world in which George Bush junior, and only George Bush Junior, is a zombie. This is the world like ours, but in which it is not the case that from GB’s point of view (GB’s experiences are present). Here’s a way of representing one such world, SME1 (I have scare-shaded the bottom half of the diagram to remind you that SME1 is all that exists, but propositions containing the point of view operators are true or false, as if it were part of the network below and truth conditions for such propositions were given by the S-world semantics):

Fig 4.1: George Bush is a Zombie SME1 CJH’s experiences are present SDickCheney DC’s experiences are present

SGeorgeBush GB’s experiences are present

And I can readily imagine a world in which mental solipsism is true, in which everybody but me is a zombie. For example SME2:

51 Fig 4.2: Everybody But Me is a Zombie SME2 CJH’s experiences are present SDickCheney

SGeorgeBush

DC’s experiences are present

GB’s experiences are present

I can also readily imagine a world in which CJH is a zombie. For example SME3, a world in which I am George Bush: Fig 4.3: CJH is a Zombie SME3 GB’s experiences are present SDickCheney DC’s experiences are present

SCJH CJH’s experiences are present

And, finally, I can even imagine a world in which everybody is a zombie. For example S--:

52 Fig 4.4: Zombie-World S-Nobody has present experiences SDickCheney DC’s experiences are present

SGeorgeBush GB’s experiences are present

So the question of whether egocentric presentism is correct is entirely perpendicular to the question of who exactly is conscious. An egocentric presentist can imagine all kinds of strange scenarios, formally consistent with his theory. Does this render egocentric presentism absurd? This will depend upon your attitude towards non-reductionism about the mental. Personally I think it doesn’t. I think it would, on the contrary, be a problem for the view if these kinds of scenarios were not imaginable. Perhaps, then, you have qualitative solipsism in mind, the view that the phenomenal quality of other people’s experiences is in some important way different from the phenomenal quality of one’s own. If you believe that you are a solitary utility monster, that other people’s pains and pleasures are less intense than your own, then you are a qualitative solipsist. If you believe that the qualitative aspect of your visual experience is ‘inverted’ relative to everybody else’s, that the sky looks to them the way lava looks to you, then you are a qualitative solipsist. Crazy views, but egocentric presentism does not commit you to any of them. As an egocentric presentist, when I want

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to consider the phenomenal aspect of George Bush’s experience, how things feel to George Bush, I consider how from George Bush’s point of view (...things are). But, just as, if I thrust my hand into a fire then there is intense present suffering, so if George Bush thrusts his hand into a fire then from George Bush’s point of view (there is intense present suffering). I have no reason to think that the way such things feel to George Bush is any different from the way such things feel to me. What’s left is super-weak solipsism, the view that my own experiences have some interesting intrinsic properties that other people’s lack. In this sense, at last, the egocentric presentist is a solipsist. But is this highly attenuated form of solipsism obviously absurd, obviously contrary to common sense? I don’t think so. I don’t think that common sense has much to say about which experiences are monadically present and which monadically absent. Consider, also, how the point-of-view operators moderate the extremity of the claim. In one sense an egocentric presentist takes himself to be unique – he alone has present experiences. But in another sense he takes himself to be just like everybody else – it is true of every person, including himself, that from his point of view (his experiences are present). An analogy may help here. The temporal presentist believes that only present events, objects, people, exist. Is he fetishizing the present? Well imagine that, when talk is about Ronaldo and Bush and Blair and Saddam Hussein, he is voluble and loquacious, but when talk turns to Princess Diana and Joan of Arc he just goes blank. Princess Diana? Joan of Arc? There are no such people. He would then appear to have a kind of fetish about the present moment. But real temporal presentists are not like this. They can move

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seamlessly from talk of Tony Blair to talk of Princess Diana – ‘ah yes, her wedding dress was pretty, but impractical’ – they can say, where they mean this to be understood: it was the case that (Diana’s wedding dress is pretty, but impractical). For any person the four dimensionalist takes there to be, the temporal presentist thinks that either that person exists, or it was the case that (that person exists), or it will be the case that (that person exists). Similarly, if the egocentric presentist had no operators at his disposal, it would seem that he had a kind of fetish about himself. But he does have operators at his disposal, and they enable him to move seamlessly from occupying his own point of view to occupying someone else’s. Although there is a sense in which he is unique, there is another sense in which he is just like everybody else.

4.3 Egocentric Presentism is Incomprehensible Skeptically minded people30 sometimes say the following: ‘I understand the formal structure of egocentric presentism, but the structure seems empty, because, although I understand what it is for an experience to be present-to-me and absent-to-you, I don’t understand what it is for an experience to be present in the monadic sense. And it doesn’t help to say, for example, that the notion of monadic presence plays a role in egocentric presentism analogous to that of the notion of monadic actuality in some views of the metaphysics of modality, because I have an independent, pre-formal sense of what it is for a world to be monadically actual, but no sense of what it is for an experience to be monadically present. Indeed, this just makes me suspect that the notion is a technical

30

Many thanks to Josh Greene for personifying this position.

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artifact. You are stipulating that a certain property will play a certain role in your technical scheme, but we have no independent idea of what it is for a thing to instantiate the property.’ In reply to this, my first instinct is just to repeat my original instructions: introspect and you will find that certain experiences are present. Take this presence not to be a feature of how things seem to you, but rather a feature of how things are...etc. But for these skeptics this exercise did not work first time around, so I suppose it will not work second time around. Instead I will tell a story, about my childhood. When I was a child I was gripped by all kinds of quasi-solipsistic fantasies – convinced that the people around me were all aliens or actors or robots or secret agents or whatever. So far so normal. As I grew up so I grew out of this phase, I stopped jumping around doors to catch the aliens off guard…etc., and generally became more mellow. But one quasisolipsistic thought survived into my adolescence. It would arise most distinctively when I thought about death. What would my death be like? I would imagine a vicious internal cramp as my heart gives out, panic and fear as my muscles become limp and, as the blood stagnates in my head and my brain starves of oxygen... what? My school vicar said light. Homer, in a much more impressive way, said darkness:

Achilles smote him with his sword and killed him. He struck him in the belly near the navel, so that all his bowels came gushing out on to the ground, and the darkness of death came over him as he lay gasping.31

The sword reeked with his blood, while dark death and the strong hand of fate gripped him and closed his eyes. Idomeneus speared Erymas in the

56 mouth; the bronze point of the spear went clean through it beneath the brain, crashing in among the white bones and smashing them up. His teeth were all of them knocked out and the blood came gushing in a stream from both his eyes; it also came gurgling up from his mouth and nostrils, and the darkness of death enfolded him round about.32

But even then I understood that neither was right. After my death there would be a kind of nothingness, a kind of absence that was difficult to describe or imagine. The closest I could come to picking it out with words was by appeal to precedent – things would be the way they were before I was born. But now I was struck by a thought. Isn’t it amazing, weird, that for millions of years, generation after generation of sentient creatures came into being and died, came into being and died..., and all the while there was this absence, and then one creature, CJH, unexceptional in all physical and psychological respects, came into being, and... POW! suddenly there were present experiences! Was I thinking about presence and absence in a relational sense? Clearly not, for there is nothing at all amazing or weird about the fact that for millions of years sentient creatures existed without any experiences being present to CJH, and then CJH was born and suddenly experiences were present to CJH. To the extent that I found it amazing and weird that CJH’s birth brought an end to millions of years of absence, I must have been thinking about presence and absence in the monadic sense. So the notion of monadic presence is not, I think, a product of the philosophical laboratory, something that cannot be grasped outside of it. Thirteen year-olds who have

31 32

Homer, the Illiad, book XXI, line 161 ibid., book XVI, line 283

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no exposure to philosophy can think of their experiences in this way (put aside, for the moment, the question of whether they should).

4.4. Egocentric Presentism is Incoherent There are several related worries here. Imagine that I attend a metaphysics conference, at which two philosophers, professors Fred and Kat, both passionately defend egocentric presentism. Fred and Kat take themselves to be allies. They applaud each other’s talks. They cite each other’s arguments approvingly. And, in a state of drunken bonhomie at the end of the conference, they decide to co-author a paper on the subject, in which egocentric presentism will be expounded in a more forceful and persuasive manner than ever before. Here’s one worry. Why do Fred and Kat take themselves to be in agreement? Fred thinks that Fred is the one with present experiences (henceforth the one). Kat thinks that Kat is the one. Given that they disagree about an issue that they both take to be of immense practical significance, shouldn’t they be attacking each other’s views? All they really agree about is someone being the one. But that isn’t much of a basis of agreement – after all, Red Sox and Yankee fans think that some team is the noblest in baseball; Muslim and Christian fundamentalists think that some religion is the true one. Call this the Agreement Problem. Here’s a second worry. George, an impressionable young student attending the conference, hears Fred and Kat’s talks and finds them both utterly convincing. But which of them should he believe? Should he believe that Professor Fred is the one, or that Professor Kat is the one? Clearly Fred and Kat intend for him to believe something else –

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that George is the one. But if he believes this then surely he has not been convinced by Fred’s arguments, for they are supposed to support the view that Fred is the one, and surely he has not been convinced by Kat’s arguments, for they are supposed to support the view that Kat is the one. Call this the ‘Which Conclusion?’ Problem. Here’s a third worry. George, Fred and Kat have a spirited conversation about egocentric presentism, but how do they manage this? After all, in order for two people to communicate, they must both be in some way acquainted with the property at issue (think of trying to talk with a person who has been color blind from birth about this or that shade of red). But if egocentric presentism is correct then in any conversation at least one of the interlocutors does not have, has never had, and will never have, present experiences. So how do they get to talk about presence? Call this the Communication Problem. Here’s a fourth worry. Converted, student George now believes something, a belief he proudly expresses with the sentence ‘I am George, and George is the one with present experiences’. Will Professor Fred take the proposition expressed by this sentence to be true? Apparently not. Fred must, it seems, say that George has a false belief. So why did Fred go to such trouble crafting an elegant talk so as to persuade George to believe something that he (Fred) believes to be false? Call this the Motivation Problem. I think the easiest way to see how an egocentric presentist should respond to these worries is by looking at how a temporal presentist should respond to analogous worries.

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The Agreement Problem Imagine that ten years ago a philosopher (call him Dr. Now) wrote a spirited defense of temporal presentism. One could ask him – ‘You have a particular view about what there is, and you give the impression that you have held this view for some time. You don’t try to qualify or disavow the paper you wrote on the topic ten years ago. You seem as proud of it now as you were on the day it was first published. But why? Hasn’t your view really changed? Ten years ago you believed that only those things that a fourdimensionalist would describe as ‘existing in 1996’ really exist. For example, you wrote the sentence: ‘The Twin Towers exist.’ But you no longer assent to this sentence. You think that it expresses a false proposition. And surely, being a presentist, you think that the proposition this sentence expresses now is just the same as the proposition it expressed then. There are no hidden indexicals in ‘exist’, no devices that change the propositional content of token utterances of the sentence. So surely you must say that you assented to a false proposition. You were wrong about the Twin Towers... and about most things else. All you and your past self really agree about is that there is some t such that only things that a four dimensionalist would describe as ‘existing at t’ really exist. But that isn’t much of a basis of agreement at all.’ Dr. Now could reasonably reply – ‘No. I wasn’t just right about there being less to the world than the four-dimensionalist thinks, I was right about the Twin Towers, because the Twin Towers did exist. To put this in a more cumbersome, but more accurate way, where p is the proposition that the Twin Towers exist, I concede that

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Dr. Now’s paper says p, and ¬p and that it was the case that (Dr. Now believes p), and ¬p So I concede that my paper says something false, and that I believed a proposition that is false. In this sense I take my former self to be wrong. But this doesn’t mean there is any real, substantive disagreement between me and my former self. I think my former self was right, because it was the case that (Dr. Now believes p, and p) In a similar way, Fred the egocentric presentist will think that there is one sense in which Kat the egocentric presentist is wrong, and another, more relevant sense in which she is right. Where q is the proposition that Kat’s experiences are present, Fred takes it that Kat says and believes that q, and ¬q and that from Kat’s point of view (Kat says and believes that q), and ¬q so in this sense Fred must concede that Kat is wrong. She says and believes things that are false and, even from her point of view, says and believes things that are false. But from Kat’s point of view (Kat believes that q, and q) so in another sense Kat is right.

The ‘Which Conclusion?’ Problem Second, one could ask Dr. Now: ‘The arguments in your 1996 paper led you to the conclusion that those entities talked of by historians and prophets do not exist, that

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only the entities of 1996 exist. If I read the paper and find these arguments utterly convincing then what am I to believe – that only the entities of 1996 exist or that only the entities of 2006 exist? The former seems ludicrous, and the latter cannot follow from your argument. After all, how can one good argument have two inconsistent conclusions?’ And Dr. Now should reply: ‘Presentism is not a view about 1996 or 2006. In life you are faced with certain manifest truths. You look for Oliver Cromwell, you fail to find him, you conclude that he does not exist. A four-dimensionalist wants you to spin that manifest truth – what you really saw was that Oliver Cromwell does not exist-in-2006. As a presentist I urge you to take the manifest truth at face value. But of course, the precise nature of the manifest truth that I urge you to take at face value will change over time.’ Along similar lines, the egocentric presentist should say that egocentric presentism is not a view about Fred or Kat. Fred and Kat have argued that, when one introspects in a certain way one is confronted with a manifest truth – that a certain person’s experiences are present. The standard picture would have one spin that manifest truth – what one really saw was that a certain person’s experiences are present to that person. The egocentric presentists argue that one should take the manifest truth at face value. But, of course, the precise nature of the manifest truth that one should take at face value will depend upon precisely who one is.

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The Communication Problem Third, one could ask Dr. Now: ‘I am on the phone with my wife, talking about the color Barbie-Pink. A suitable doll is in front of me, so I am acquainted with the color, but no Barbie-Pink thing is in front of her, or in front of any temporal part of her (after all, if presentism is true then we have no temporal parts that do not exist now), so how do we get to communicate?’ And Dr. Now should answer: ‘Of course it is not necessary, for your wife be acquainted with Barbie-Pink, that she sees Barbie-Pink. It is sufficient that it was the case that (she sees Barbie-Pink). And so the egocentric presentist should say that, for Bill to talk about monadic presence, it is not necessary that his experiences be present. It is sufficient that from Bill’s point of view (his experiences are present).

The Motivation Problem Finally, imagine that Dr. Now is working on a yet more persuasive version of his 1996 paper. Given the mechanics of publishing, and the fact that he is not the sort of fellow to post things in the web, he knows that nobody will read it for at least four years. His aim, then, is to persuade his first readers that only the entities of 2010 exist. If they believe that then he will take himself to have been successful. But, given that he thinks that it is not the case that only the entities of 2010 exist, one could reasonably ask ‘why are you trying so hard to persuade people of something you believe to be false?’ He should, of course, reply – ‘If I succeed then it will be the case that (my reader believes that only the entities of 2010 exist, and only the entities of 2010 exist). My

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reader will believe something true. And I care about its later being the case that people have true beliefs.’ And so Fred the egocentric presentist should say – ‘If I succeed in persuading student George to adopt my view then it will be the case that from George’s point of view (George believes that George’s experiences are present, and George’s experiences are present.) And I care about its being the case that from George’s point of view, George has true beliefs.’

4.5 Objections to Egocentric and Temporal Presentism I have been stressing that, for most of the obvious objections to egocentric presentism, there are analogous objections to analogous views in the metaphysics of time. But I do not mean to give the impression that the two kinds of theory stand or fall together, because the reverse is not true. Some of the most powerful objections against temporal presentism and related theories in the metaphysics of time do not carry over to egocentric presentism. One charge that is often leveled against the temporal presentist is that there are some expressions that seem, intuitively, to have truth value, for which the temporal presentist (armed only with his spare ontology and the operators ‘it will be the case that…’, ‘it was the case that…’, ‘in five minutes it will be the case that…’, ‘five minutes ago it was the case that...’ …etc.) cannot give truth conditions.33 For example, expressions that involve counting things that exist at different times, like: ‘There have been three Kings of England named George’ 33

Several of these examples are due to David Lewis. Variants of the objection have been addressed, in print, by Sider (2001) and Markosian (2004).

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and expressions that invoke relations between things that exist at different times, like: ‘I am an enormous fan of Jane Austen’ and ‘Lincoln and I have stood in the same place’ But I see no analogous problems for the egocentric presentist, no intuitively substantive sentences of which the egocentric presentist is unable to make sense. There’s a reason for this. The problems arise for the temporal presentist because his picture is significantly more economical than that of his opponent, but the egocentric presentist’s picture is richer than that of his opponent. You can get egocentric presentism by taking the standard picture and then adding facts about which experiences are monadically present, which monadically absent, and then adding facts about how, from the points of view of other people, things are. So all of the semantic resources available to an advocate of the standard picture are available to the egocentric presentist. In this respect, egocentric presentism is more closely analogous to hyperkenesis than to temporal presentism. You can get hyperkenesis by taking the block-universe view, and then adding the fact that one moment is monadically present, and then adding the facts that it has been and will be case that other moments are monadically present. So all of the semantic resources available to a four-dimensionalist are available to a hyperkenetisist, and more. But hyperkenesis has serious problems of its own. The most celebrated worry is that a hyperkenetisist needs to appeal to an infinity of ‘higher’ timedimensions to make sense of the idea that the fact about which moment is present changes as time goes by. ‘You imagine that the present moves along the time dimension of the four-dimensional block universe, like a laser-pointer,’ says the objector, ‘if it

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moves it must move at some rate. At what rate? n seconds of time per unit measure of what – hypertime? But if there is hypertime, then surely you think there must be a moment in hypertime that is monadically hyperpresent, and that this changes, that the hyperpresent moves along the hypertime dimension of the five-dimensional block universe (otherwise you would just be five-dimensional block universe theorist). If the hyperpresent moves it must move at some rate. At what rate? n units of hypertime per unit measure of what – hyper-hypertime? But if there is hyper-hypertime... etc.’ Happily, there is no analogous problem for the egocentric presentist. One person’s experiences are present, from the point of view of other people, their experiences are present. That’s all an egocentric presentist needs to say. Finally, the problem that many philosophers have considered fatal for presentism, hyperkenesis, and indeed all views that take temporal presence to be a monadic property is their apparent inconsistency with Special Relativity.34 Right now I am clapping my hands. Call this event c. Take some distant hand-clapping, e. Is e present? Well, that depends on whether e occurs simultaneously with c. But Special Relativity tells us that there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity. e may occur simultaneously with c relative to some rest frames, prior to c relative to some other rest frames, and after c relative to yet other rest frames. So the best we can say is that e is present relative to some rest frames, past relative to others, and future relative to yet others (indeed as temporal presentists we would be forced to say that relative to some rest frames e exists, relative to others it does not). But then we seem to have given up on the idea of monadic presence.

34

A lot has been written on this problem. A good starting point is Sider (2001), Chapter 2 section 4.

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Again, I see no analogous worries for egocentric presentism, because no scientifically contentious notions (like ‘simultaneity’) are built into the theory. Perhaps I should reemphasize the point of this section. The point is not that the above problems really are fatal for temporal presentism, hyperkenesis and their cousins. I have not time or inclination to discuss that here. The point is rather that, while there are structural affinities between these views and egocentric presentism, and while it is certainly true that the kinds of people who are sentimentally inclined to accept the one kind of view are more likely to be sentimentally inclined to accept the other, the issues are really orthogonal. If you think that temporal presentism does not survive sustained critical inspection then you can still be a four-dimensionalist egocentric presentist. Indeed, that is a very natural position to take.

67 CHAPTER 5: HOW PRESENCE IS DISTRIBUTED OVER TIME Egocentric presentism is not absurd, incomprehensible or incoherent, but the standard view is not absurd, incomprehensible or incoherent either. If you are to be persuaded to give up the latter for the former you will need some positive reason for doing so. Now I take it that I have already given you a positive reason. Egocentric presentism gives us resources to explain why we should be self-attentive, in a way that the standard view does not. An egocentric presentist can work for his own benefit by day and enjoy the gentle, untroubled sleep of the righteous by night. But you may have methodological qualms about settling on a view in metaphysics because it supports a position in ethics. Advocates of this kind of method (I count myself one) say that, when it comes to evaluating a theory in speculative metaphysics, once some minimal standards (of coherence, consistency with empirical evidence, economy, elegance, explanatory efficacy and such) have been achieved, other factors, including ethics, come into play.35 Opponents say that settling on a view about what is the case because it supports your view about what ought to be the case amounts to little more than wishful thinking. No matter. In this last chapter I will add another, quite different reason to favor egocentric presentism over the standard view – it casts light on otherwise murky questions about personal identity over time. The central thesis is that an egocentric

35

This is certainly implicit in, for example, the debate over whether modal realism supports moral indifference. All parties in the debate have assumed that, if modal realism has counter-intuitive implications for morality, this counts against modal realism, in favor of some alternative metaphysical picture that does not have these implications. See Adams (1974), Lewis (1986) section 2.6, and Heller (2003)

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presentist can retain some very appealing views about survival and persistence in unusual cases without committing himself to a patently indefensible theory of personal identity over time. I will develop it over three sections. The first section describes these very appealing, very common-sensical views. The second sets up an argument, due to Parfit, that purports to show that holding these views commits us to a false picture of identity over time. We hold these views because we are in the grip of an error about the sort of things we are, and about the conditions of our persistence. The third is the crux – I argue that, by adopting egocentric presentism, one can retain the appealing views without committing oneself to any theory whatsoever about identity over time. Finally, in a fourth section, I consider what an egocentric presentist should say about some of the tricky cases that have so pre-occupied philosophers writing about personal identity.

5.2 ‘Common Sense’ About Personal Identity Over Time To get the argument going we need to consider some fantastic vicissitude of the kind that form the staple diet of introductory undergraduate lectures on personal identity – fission or fusion or brain-swapping or ‘brain-cleaning’ or psychology-swapping or teletransportation or re-duplication or what have you. For these purposes I don’t think it matters very much which we choose. So here’s one:

A Fantastic Vicissitude In the center of an enormous warehouse are two rooms, the interior of one painted egg-yolk yellow, the interior of the other lined with blue velvet. A person is placed in the yellow room and then operated upon by

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a clever but intrusive machine. First the machine scans the person, a process which, sadly, involves subjecting him to fierce dose of radiation that destroys most of his brain. Then the machine creates a molecule-formolecule perfect duplicate of the person fifteen feet away, in the blue room. Then, so as not to allow the original body to go to waste, the machine implants a silicon ‘brain’ into it. Though not very sophisticated, this ‘brain’ can control the body’s vital functions and support a minimal substrate of perceptual experience.

Let’s call the original person Adam, the silicon-brained person who later lies in the yellow room Sili-Brain, and the person who walks out of the blue room Tele-Product.

Fig 5.1: Adam, Sili-Brain and Tele-Product Space

Adam

Sili-Brain

Yellow Room

Tele-Product Blue Room

Time

70 Now think yourself into the position of Adam, facing the vicissitude. How might you think and feel about the future? It is very natural to think that there are different ways in which things might go. When I imagine things going the first way, I imagine all events taking place, physically speaking, in the manner described above, and I imagine having the sensation of seeing yellow for a while... and then having the sensation of seeing blue Fig 5.2: One Scenario Space Yellow Room

Adam

Blue Room

Sili-Brain

Tele-Product Time

When I imagine things going the second way I imagine having the sensation of seeing yellow for a while... and then continuing to have the sensation of seeing yellow. Fig 5.3: A Second Scenario Space Yellow Room Blue Room

Adam

Sili-Brain

Tele-Product Time

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When I imagine things going the third way I imagine having the sensation of seeing yellow for a while... and then... not having any experiences. Fig 5.4: A Third Scenario Space Yellow Room

Adam

Blue Room

Sili-Brain

Tele-Product Time

And that just about exhausts the list of possibilities. I cannot, for example, imagine having the sensation of seeing yellow for a while... and then... both having the sensation of seeing yellow and having the sensation of seeing blue. Fig 5.5: A Fourth Scenario Space Yellow Room Blue Room

Adam

Sili-Brain

Tele-Product Time

72 Nor can I imagine having the sensation of seeing yellow for a while... and then... neither determinately having nor determinately not having the sensation of seeing blue. Fig 5.6: A Fifth Scenario Space Yellow Room

Adam

Blue Room

Sili-Brain

Tele-Product Time

So scenarios one to three cover the three ways in which things might go. And I take it that how I should feel about the upcoming fantastic vicissitude depends very much on the way things will actually go. If, for example, things will go in way two, then I shouldn’t feel too bad about the future, even though some nasty, violent things will be happening to my body. If things will go in way three then I should feel very bad indeed. That, I claim, is a very natural way to think. When I was first exposed to fantasticvicissitude style cases I thought about them in this way. When I talk to people not steeped in the literature on personal identity I find they are inclined to think about such cases in this way. As a philosopher one is told to be wary of calling anything ‘common sense’, so I’ll do the next best thing, and call this ‘‘common sense’’.

73 5.3 A Parfitian Interpretation of ‘Common Sense’ These ‘common sense’ intuitions have always been taken to be intuitions about personal identity over time. When I imagine the first scenario, I imagine that I have the sensation of seeing yellow for a while... and then I have the sensation of seeing blue. I am some person, P, such that P sees yellow for a while, and then P sees blue. So (given that I take myself to be Adam) Adam sees yellow and then Adam sees blue. Adam is the same person as the one who sees blue, Tele-Product – that is what I am imagining. So, with respect to my fantastic vicissitude, ‘common sense’ says that it is at least conceptually possible that Adam is the same person as Tele-Product (Scenario One), that Adam is the same person as Sili-Brain (Scenario Two), or that Adam is neither the same person as Tele-Product nor the same person as Sili-Brain (Scenario Three). But common sense rules out the possibility that Adam is the both same person as Sili-Brain and the same person as Tele-Product (Scenario Four), and the possibility that Adam is neither the same person nor not the same person as Tele-product (Scenario Five). What, then, is the conception of personal identity over time that underlies ‘common sense’? We can already see that it must have certain features. First:

(Determinacy)

Identity is always determinate, never a matter of degree

Scenario Five is impossible because Adam must be either determinately the same person or determinately not the same person as Tele-product. Second:

(1-1)

Identity is always 1-1. It is a relation that a thing at one time bears to at most one thing at a later time

74 Scenario Four is impossible because, since Sili-brain and Tele-Product are not the same person, Adam can be identical to at most one of them. Third:

(Non-Reductionism) Facts about identity do not reduce to physical facts This requires some explaining.

Reductionism about Personal Identity over Time Let’s call a theory of personal identity over time reductionist if it accepts the following:

(Reductionism)

What it is for A at t1 to be the same person as B at t2 is for certain physical or psychological relations of connectedness or continuity to hold between A’s body36 at t1 and B’s body at t2.

Most of the philosophers who have written about personal identity over time have been reductionists of one kind or other. The bulk of the traditional debate has been about precisely what these ‘certain physical or psychological relations’ are. Does ‘common sense’ support (Reductionism)? It might appear not. After all, ‘common sense’ says that, when you fix the physical facts in the Fantastic Vicissitude case, three distinct possibilities about personal identity remain open. And this tells against the idea that the facts about personal identity reduce to physical facts in the manner described above. 36

I am deliberately equivocating here. Some reductionists believe that people are bodies. Let them read ‘A’s body’ as ‘A’. Others believe that people are constituted by things that are not people – bodies – in the way that statues are constituted by things that are not statues – lumps of clay. Let them read ‘A’s body’ as ‘the body that constitutes A.’

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But this is much too quick. For there are several ways in which, given a reductionist concept of personal identity, physical facts could seem to fail to fix an answer to questions about identity. Perhaps, one might say, ‘common sense’ is armed with an Indeterminate Reductionist concept of personal identity over time.

Indeterminate Reductionism An analogy may be instructive here. Imagine a one-hole golf course, SimpleCourse, with a path running across its fairway:

Fig 5.7: SimpleCourse Tee

Path

Out-of-bounds

Green

In-bounds

And imagine that rules for SimpleCourse are: ‘Balls that lie ahead of the path are in-bounds’ ‘Balls that lie behind the path are out-of-bounds’ At SimpleCourse, what is for a ball to be in or out of bounds is for it to be in such and such a position on the course. Facts about boundedness reduce, in the relevant sense, to facts about position. But there are some positions such that for a ball to be in that position is for it neither to be determinately in, nor determinately out of bounds – a ball on the path, for example:

76 Fig 5.8: Indeterminacy Tee

Path

Green

?? Out-of-bounds

In-bounds

For such a ball, the physical facts about its position do not fix a yes or no answer to the question of whether it is in or out of bounds. Is the concept of personal identity over time that underlies ‘common sense’ like this? It doesn’t seem so. With respect to the Fantastic Vicissitude, ‘common sense’ does not say that there is no fact of the matter about which of scenarios 1, 2, or 3 will come about. It says that one will come about, we just don’t know which it is.37 So perhaps our concept of personal identity over time is a little more complex. Perhaps we have an indeterminate concept with aspirations to determinacy.

Determinacy-Aspiring, Indeterminate Reductionism Imagine that SimpleCourse has three rules about boundedness. ‘Balls that lie ahead of the path are in-bounds’ ‘Balls that lie behind the path are out-of-bounds’ ‘Every ball is either in or out-of-bounds’ 37

It may nonetheless be true that, when we do conceptual analysis, we find that under our best reconstruction of the concept, identity comes out as indeterminate in some cases. See Parfit (1970) and onwards. But, as Parfit would be happy to acknowledge, this best reconstruction is at odds with common sense.

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If my ball lands on the path I am now in something of a quandary. It must be either in or out of bounds, but which is it? On pain of conceptual coherence, I must extend my concept in some way, perhaps like this: Fig 5.9: A Mean Extension Tee

Path

Green

?? Out-of-bounds

In-bounds

or perhaps like this: Fig 5.10: A Generous Extension Tee

Path

Green

?? Out-of-bounds

In-bounds

Whichever precisfication I choose, I can then say with some authority that the ball is either in- or out-of-bounds. Some philosophers have suggested that our concept of personal identity over time is like this. It determines no matter of fact about who is who in fantastic vicissitude-style cases, but says, nonetheless, that identity is determinate in every case. Faced with a

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fantastic vicissitude case, we feel pressure, on pain of incoherence, to precisify our concept. Three appropriate precisifications might be: (i)

People are teletransporters. Their persistence is grounded in psychological continuity and connectedness, not spatio-temporal continuity or token identity of atomic parts. People survive accurate teletransportation.

(ii)

People are human organisms.

(iii)

People are human beings – organisms that survive iff their brains survive.

If we adopt the first precisification we will conclude that Adam is the same person as Tele-Product. If we adopt the second we will conclude that Adam is the same person as Sili-Brain. If we adopt the third we will conclude that Adam is the same person as neither; he ceases to exist when his brain is destroyed. So this explains, perhaps, why scenarios one to three all seem conceptually possible – they represent the results of extending our concept of personal identity over time in three equally appropriate ways. But is this what underlies ‘common sense’? I think not. For if it were then there would be no sense in which any of the three appropriate precisifications would be right or wrong. But ‘common sense’ says that one of scenarios one to three will come about, and it is not in any way up to us to decide which one does. If, for example, the second scenario will come about, and if we decide to view ourselves as tele-transporters, then we will be wrong.38

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Determinate Reductionism with an Epistemic Gap Finally, perhaps we have a reductionist concept of personal identity over time, which, we recognize, determines a matter of fact about personal identity in the fantastic vicissitude case, but we fail to see what the determinate matter of fact is. The ‘possibilities’ represented by scenarios one to three are, on this suggestion, epistemic, not metaphysical. Here’s one way for such a failure to arise: I recognize that the concept determines a matter of fact, but am not in a position to say what the concept is. So, if the rules for SimpleCourse are kept in a safe in the clubhouse, I may know that the local concept of boundedness determines a matter of fact about whether my ball is in or out of bounds, but nonetheless need to go back to the safe to find out what this matter of fact is. Here’s another way: I recognize that the concept determines a matter of fact, but am unable fully to grasp the concept myself. So, if SimpleCourse has the rule: ‘A ball that is behind the space in front of the space behind the space in front of the back edge of the path is not out of bounds.’ I may, for want of logic, just be unable to tell whether my ball is in or out of bounds. But neither of these capture the ‘common sense’ reaction to the fantastic vicissitude case. ‘Common sense’ does not say that rigorous conceptual analysis can settle which possibility will arise. Here’s one last way for the epistemic failure to arise: I recognize that the concept determines a matter of fact, and fully grasp the concept, but am unable to determine the 38

Again, it may turn out that, under our best reconstruction of the concept, there is internal pressure to resolve indeterminacy in some cases. My point is just that the result is to some extent at odds with common sense.

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matter of fact myself, because of the complexity of the relations involved. So, a macroeconomist may know that what it is for the US economy to be in a deflationary spiral is just for certain lower-level transactions, investments, plans...etc. to be taking place. But give her an exhaustive list of all such lower-level stuff, and she may be quite unable to tell you what is happening to the US economy. But, again, this doesn’t seem to be what’s going on in the fantastic vicissitude case. In this case there is nothing very complex about the relations between the lower and higher-level facts. The relations between Adam and Tele-Product, for example, are just like the relations between successive stages of any ordinary person, but with a break in spatio-temporal continuity.

The Real Commitments of ‘Common Sense’ These considerations suggest that ‘common sense’ is in the grip of a nonreductionist view of personal identity over time.

(Non-Reductionism) What it is for A at t1 to be the same person as B at t2 is not just for certain relations of physical or psychological connectedness or continuity to hold between A’s body at t1 and B’s body at t2.

Indeed, since ‘common sense’ represents scenarios one to three as genuinely distinct metaphysical possibilities, ‘common sense’ seems committed to something even stronger:

(Non-Supervenience) Facts about personal identity over time do not supervene on physical facts. Two possible worlds that are physically the same may differ with respect to facts about personal identity.

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And from this (given the plausible assumption that wholly physical things have wholly physical persistence conditions) it follows immediately that:

(Separateness)

We are not wholly physical things.

Consider the distinct possibilities represented by scenarios 2 and 3. The physical world is precisely the same in both cases. So, surely, any wholly physical thing that persists through the fantastic vicissitude in one case persists through the fantastic vicissitude in the other. But Adam persists through the fantastic vicissitude in one case and not the other, so Adam is not a wholly physical thing.

Once we have come this far then, says Parfit, we are forced towards the conclusion that ‘common sense’ is laboring under a misconception of the sorts of things we are, and of the nature of our persistence over time. First, when we think about some fantastic cases – ‘spectrum’ and ‘fission’ cases, in particular – we will be forced to concede that (determinacy) and (1-1) are false, that identity can be a matter of degree, and that the relations that constitute identity can hold between a person at one time and more than one person at a later time.39 For the ‘spectrum’ cases we imagine a series of vicissitudes, 1 to 100, that Adam may undergo. Vicissitude 1 is so mild as not to be a vicissitude at all: Adam steps into a room and then steps out again, physically and mentally just the way he was before. Vicissitude 100 is

39

See Parfit (1984), Chapter 11

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violent: Adam steps into the room and a thing that is physically and mentally just like Greta Garbo steps out. Vicissitudes 2-99 cover every gradation between these two extremes, each one fractionally more violent than its predecessor. Is there some n such that Adam survives vicissitude n but not vicissitude n+1? That seems implausible. So there must be some vicissitude such that it is indeterminate whether Adam survives it. For the ‘fission’ cases we imagine that Adam splits, symmetrically, into two people (traditionally called Lefty and Righty), whose psychologies are both continuous with his. The notion of identity over time, as commonly understood, may prohibit our saying that Adam is the same person as both Lefty and Righty, but we should immediately see that, in the sense relevant for shaping practical concerns, Adam survives as both people. After all, if Lefty didn’t exist Adam would survive, and if Righty didn’t exist Adam would survive, and how can a double-success amount to a failure? Second, the ontological commitment that underlies these non-reductionist intuitions is just absurd. Why does ‘common sense’ endorse (1-1), (Determinacy), (NonReductionism), (Non-Supervenience) and (Separateness)? Because ‘common-sense’ takes it that our existence involves the existence of Cartesian Egos, diamond-like things that cannot half-exist, cannot fuse or divide, can flit about while the physical facts remain fixed… But that idea is so outdated, so much a product of theological dogma, as hardly to merit serious discussion. So we who take ourselves to be sophisticated, enlightened, types are in the grip of a basic error. While we may claim to have rejected the Cartesian world-view, some part of our soul-less brains just will not let it go. It continues to shape our responses to fantastic cases, and, says Parfit, continues to shape our attitudes (the petty, undignified

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ones, mostly!) towards ourselves and others. Once we are finally, fully free of it we will become less selfish, feel less separate from other people, and care less about our own mortality. That is the broad argument from Reasons and Persons Part Three. Many hardheaded commentators, catching a whiff of mystical incense, have taken issue with its second part, arguing that our practical attitudes need not be responsive to grand discoveries in metaphysics.40 But its first part has largely been accepted. Yes, the intuitions of ‘common sense’ are wedded to a false view about personal identity over time. I wish to depart from both Parfit and the commentators here. Common sense need not be committed to a false view of personal identity over time. By adopting egocentric presentism you can retain the intuitions of common sense without committing yourself to any view of personal identity over time.

5.4 Presence and Time Let’s begin by considering what an egocentric presentist should say about how presence is distributed over time, and across worlds. So far I have stated the view in a manner that is consistent with taking any position about the metaphysics of time (presentism, four-dimensionalism, the branching universe theory… etc.), any position about the metaphysics of persistence over time (endurantism and perdurantism are the established alternatives) and any position about personal identity over time (the memory theory, the psychological continuity theory, the spatio-temporal continuity theory, the

40

See, e.g., Johnston (1997)

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‘closest continuer’ theory…etc.). I want to keep things that way, so I will try, as far as possible to use language that is neutral between these theories. As an egocentric presentist I believe that CJH alone has present experiences. This doesn’t just mark CJH out among his contemporaries. It marks him out among all the people who have ever been or will ever be. At no time in history before CJH’s birth was there a present experience. At no time after his death will there be a present experience. Is it necessary that no thing other than CJH has present experiences? The natural thing for an egocentric presentist to say is no. I can vividly imagine a scenario in which, for example, Ralph Nader is the one with present experiences. Indeed, that is precisely what I do when I empathize with Ralph Nader, when I imagine being him. It is actually the case that from Ralph Nader’s point of view (Ralph Nader’s experiences are present). I imagine that, contrary to fact, Ralph Nader’s experiences are present. On this view what I am imagining is a real metaphysical possibility, a way that things might have been. When I say ‘thank goodness I am not Ralph Nader’, I am thanking goodness for the fact that things are a particular way, rather than this other way they might have been. So ‘the one with present experiences’ (the term for which ‘I’ stands) is satisfied by different things in a different possible worlds. It is a non-rigid referring term. But (as is standard with such terms) it can be rigidified, explicitly (by inserting ‘the actual’ as a pre-fix) or by context. So as an egocentric presentist I can say: ‘If things had gone differently, I would not have been me’ and mean that, if things had gone differently, the actual one with present experiences (CJH) would not have been the one with present experiences.

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Is it necessary that, in any given world history, only one thing ever have present experiences? Again, the natural thing to say is no. The view gives me conceptual resources to imagine being one sentient creature and then, later, being another sentient creature. So I can imagine that, after a lifetime of oblivious egg consumption, I die a famous and respected philosopher, then find myself in a cage eighteen inches tall by twelve inches wide, my beak clipped to its base. This need not involve imagining that CJH dies a famous and respected philosopher and then CJH becomes a battery chicken. It need only involve imagining that after CJH’s death there are again present experiences, and they are the experiences of a battery chicken. And, once again, this is a real (real nasty) metaphysical possibility. So ‘the one with present experiences’ may be satisfied by different things at different times within a single world history. It is, so to speak, a temporally non-rigid referring term. But it can be temporally rigidified, either explicitly (by inserting ‘now’ as a suffix), or by context. So an egocentric presentist can make sense of the thought ‘since I will be a battery chicken, I will not be me’ by taking it to mean that, since the one with present experiences will be a battery chicken, the one with present experiences now (CJH) will not be the one with present experiences.

5.5 Generous Ontologies Before we consider what an egocentric presentist should say about ‘common sense’, there remains one subtlety that needs to be addressed. Right now I am looking at a bottle of carbonated water, on the shelf beside by computer. It may seem as if only one thing has this experience but, according to some ontologically generous theories of

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constitution and persistence, this turns out to be strictly false. Some such theories allow for the possibility of distinct subjects of experience sharing the bulk of their spatial parts. Other such theories allow for the possibility of distinct subjects of experience being spatio-temporally coincident for periods of time. If you accept a theory of the former kind, then you may think, for example, that there is one entity CJH (circa 160 pounds) and a distinct entity CJH minus his left foot (circa 158 pounds), and that both have the experience of looking at the water.41 If you accept a theory of the latter kind then you may think, for example, that there is one entity, CJH-organism, who will, in forty five years time, survive a process of slow decline into dementia, and a distinct entity, CJHperson, who will not survive this process, and that both have the experience of looking at the water.42 It may not be obvious how to square these theories (which strict neutrality about theories of persistence forbids my ruling out) with egocentric presentism. Which of the many entities looking at the glass is the one with present experiences? One option would be for the ontologically generous egocentric presentist to insist, as before, that only one of these entities has present experiences, that the one with present experiences carries with him many absent ghosts.43 But that would make the view unnecessarily exotic – when I look at the carbonated water, are there really two sets of experiences, the present ones, had by the one with present experiences, and the absent ones, had by his ghostly companions? Better to backtrack a little, and concede that, at any given moment, there

41

Actually it is not clear to me whether any philosophers have taken this view, because it is not clear to me whether those philosophers who think that there is an entity CJH minus his left foot (e.g. Lewis) think that it that entity is a subject of experiences. 42 See Lewis (1983) 43 Thanks to Bob Stalnaker for the observation, and the turn of phrase.

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may be many things with present experiences at that moment, but stipulate that, if two things have present experiences at one moment, those experiences are shared. If you take this view then, as an egocentric presentist you should not take ‘the one with present experiences’ to be, strictly speaking, a definite description. It is satisfied by more than one thing (CJH-organism, CJH-person, CJH-minus-his-left-toe... etc.) in just the way that ‘that bronze thing on the shelf’ may be satisfied by more than one thing – the lump of bronze and the statue with which the lump is for the moment spatially coincident (I presume that, if you wish to be ontologically generous about people you will also wish to be ontologically generous about statues and lumps). But, like ‘that bronze thing on the shelf’, for some token utterances of the term, the context may fix a referent. In the midst of a discussion of lumps of bronze, wondering how many one can rustle up for the purposes of boiling them down, one may use ‘that bronze thing on the shelf’ to pick out the lump, while, in the midst of a discussion of the beauty of statues, one may use it to pick out a statue. In the midst of a discussion about wills and plans and death one may use ‘the one with present experiences’ to pick out a person, while in the midst of a philosophy seminar one may use it to pick out something more restricted, a person-stage or what not.

5.5 An Alternative Interpretation of ‘Common Sense’ Subtleties aside, the basic idea is that, at any given moment, at most one person has present experiences, but it is possible that, over the course of history, different people have them. In light of this, look back at scenario one. What am I imagining, when I imagine it coming about?

88 Fig 5.11: Scenario One Revisited Space Yellow Room

Adam

Blue Room

Sili-Brain

Tele-Product Time

In imagining the case I imagine having the experience of seeing yellow and then having the experience of seeing blue. If egocentric presentism is correct, this simply amounts to imagining that first the experiences of seeing yellow are present, and then the experiences of seeing blue are present. It need not involve imagining anything at all about personal identity over time, merely about how presence is distributed over time. Similarly, imagining scenarios two or three coming about involves imagining different ways for presence to be distributed over time. But you can see why thoughts about which experiences are present might be confused with thoughts about who is who. In Scenario One First the one with present experiences is Adam, and later the one with present experiences is Tele-product. Since ‘I’ is just short-hand for ‘the one with present experiences’, it follows that First I am Adam, and later I am Tele-Product and one might think that this entails Adam is the same person as Tele-Product

89 but of course it really does not. ‘I’ is short-hand for a non-rigid referring term, and, in general, for a non-rigid referring term, T, and rigid terms Q, P, it does not follow from T is Q, and later T is P that Q is P It only appears to follow, because most of us are accustomed to thinking of ‘I’ as a term that refers rigidly. What does this mean? It means that an egocentric presentist can stick with the intuitions of ‘common sense’ without committing himself to the manifestly false claims about identity over time: (1-1), (Determinacy), (Non-Reductionism), (NonSupervenience) and (Separateness). Nor, as an egocentric presentist, do I need to believe that there are any immaterial soul-pellets, much less that I am one. I am CJH, and CJH is a wholly physical thing, with persistence conditions… well, the view is compatible with my having whatever persistence conditions you like. This is not to say that we are all secretly egocentric presentists, that if the personin-the-street has the ‘common sense’ intuitions, it is because he has, without knowing it, internalized the view. I don’t have any idea what the person-in-the-street thinks, nor, for these purposes, do I care about what he thinks. Doubtless Parfit is right, and many people-in-the-street believe that they are soul-pellets. They have all kinds of bizarre ideas. An astonishing number of them believe that a vengeful god will bring the world to an end in the next decade. For these purposes, that doesn’t matter. It is to say, rather, that egocentric presentism offers you a way to reconcile some compelling intuitions about anticipation and survival with theoretical commitments to a

90 physicalist ontology and reductionism about identity over time. If you don’t share these intuitions or these commitments, this may not interest you. But if, like me, you have them, then you should take this to be a strong mark in its favor.

5.6 What Matters in Anticipation and Survival Parfit has a revisionary slogan – ‘Identity is not what matters. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness’. He thinks it revisionary because he thinks that most of us have a black and white attitude to the future. We want there to be, in future, a person who bears the relation of personal identity to ourselves now. That’s what our concern for survival amounts to. And we want the experiences of this person to be good ones, not bad ones. That’s what our anticipatory concern amounts to. But, says Parfit, once you fully understand the truth about personal identity over time you see that you should think about the future in shades of grey. You should be more or less satisfied to the extent that there exist future people who are more or less strongly psychologically continuous with and connected to you now. You should be more or less concerned about future pleasures and pains to the extent that the people that have them are more or less strongly psychologically continuous with and connected to you now. If self-interested concern is a light, it should not be governed by a switch. It should be governed by a dimmer. As an egocentric presentist, I have a different slogan: ‘Identity is not what matters, what matters is who I will be.’ My concern for survival amounts to a concern that there be present experiences in future. Facing a dangerous vicissitude, I am wont to ask: ‘After this is over, will someone be me?’ And my anticipatory concern amounts to

91 special concern for those pleasures and pains that will be present – facing a future in which many people suffer, I am wont to ask: ‘Will I suffer?’ These are not quite the same questions as: ‘After this is over, will someone be CJH?’ and ‘Will CJH suffer?’, because it is at best a contingent truth that CJH always, alone, has present experiences. Why should an egocentric presentist exhibit this pattern of concern? Because it matters simpliciter that there be present experiences in future, and that they be good. Worlds in which there continue to be present experiences (above a certain threshold quality) are, all other things being equal, better than worlds in which presence is a thing of the past. The quality of present experiences makes a greater contribution to the value of a world than the quality of absent experiences. So, as an egocentric presentist, I take it that my pattern of concern is consistent with, and supported by, consequentialist considerations. I should favor scenarios in which I continue to exist (less ambiguously: scenarios in which there continues to be a me) and scenarios in which I will have good quality experiences. This is another respect in which egocentric presentism has an advantage over the standard view, for, according each of the various versions of the standard view, it comes out as something of a mystery as to why I should care more about what will happen to me. Let’s say that I am to suffer a dental operation tomorrow, and there will be no fantastic vicissitudes in the meantime. Why should I care more about my suffering tomorrow than about the suffering of the hundreds of those thousands of other people who will suffer dental operations tomorrow? Why should I take special measures to reduce my own suffering, rather than someone else’s?

92 Some philosophers think that I am strictly-speaking identical with the thing that suffers tomorrow. The challenge for these philosophers is to explain why a thing should have special concern for its own well-being. As I have argued in the first three chapters, an egocentric presentist is better able to meet this challenge than an advocate of the standard view. I won’t rehearse the argument here. Other philosophers think that I am not strictly-speaking identical with the thing that suffers tomorrow. I am a person-stage, a thing that exists for (at best) a very brief period of time. The thing that suffers is a distinct person stage. The relation that obtains between us is not strict identity (the relation that obtains between a thing and itself and nothing else) but some identity-surrogate (e.g. the relation that obtains between two parts of one four-dimensionally extended thing).44 Let’s call me PSme and the thing that suffers PSother. The challenge for these philosophers is to explain why PSme should have special concern for the suffering of PSother, given that they are distinct things. Some observations these philosophers have made are:

(Empathy)

Because PSother is psychologically similar to me, I can empathize more with his pain. I can imagine more clearly what it will be like.45

(Reliable Executor)

Because PSother is psychologically similar to me, he is more likely to satisfy my future-oriented desires, and to work towards the success of my long-term projects.46

44

This is the result of combining a perdurantist view of persistence over time with the view that, in some contexts, when I ask ‘what do I have reason to do’, ‘I’ refers to a person-stage, not a person. It is a popular view, explicit, for example, in Lewis (1983) and Sider (2002), and implicit in Parfit (1984) (for an argument that it is implicit in Parfit, see Brink (1997)). 45 See Perry (1976) 46 Again, Perry considers this explanation. But, to his credit, recognizes that it is less than satisfactory.

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(Dependence)

Because PSother’s psychology is counterfactually dependent on my own in various intimate ways, he will experience the pain in the wake of my thinking about it. His experience of the pain will be shaped by my anticipation of it.47

But none of these observations seem to justify special concern for PSother’s pain. In response to (Empathy): Pain is pain. While there may be a vast difference between your experiences when you sigh at the sight of a sunset and mine when I do the same thing, it seems plausible to imagine that having teeth drilled feels pretty much the same to everyone. In response to (Reliable Executor): whether PSother suffers mildly or severely on the dentist’s chair typically has no bearing on whether my future-oriented desires will be satisfied (except, perhaps, for the desire that things psychologically continuous with me not suffer – but the justification for that desire is precisely what is at issue.) In response to (Dependence): it may be that I have a special kind of control over the manner in which PSother will suffer, and that may give me a special kind of responsibility for PSother’s suffering, but it is very hard to see why that responsibility would justify special concern. I won’t make his pain any less severe by fretting about it. Indeed, experience suggests that my fretting will probably make it worse. An egocentric presentist’s explanation is far less contrived. PSme should have special concern for the suffering of PSother because PSother’s suffering will be present, and present suffering matters more than absent suffering. That’s all an egocentric presentist need to say.

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5.7 Fission Still, a worry might remain. Egocentric presentism is not wedded to any particular view of identity over time, reductionist or not, but it is wedded to a particular, nonreductionist account about what matters in anticipation and survival. One of the things that is important (important full stop, not important to me) is that there be present experiences in future. Another is that the present experiences be pleasant, not painful. But whether there are present experiences in future, and whether they are pleasant or painful does not supervene on the way the world is or will be, physically speaking. The worry is that some of the thought experiments that Parfit took to provide problems for any nonreductionist theory of personal identity over time might also provide problems, more generally, for any non-reductionist theory of what matters in anticipation and survival. Just as a non-reductionist about personal identity over time cannot give a plausible account of what happens (vis a vis personal identity) in fission and spectrum cases, so a non-reductionist about how presence is distributed over time cannot give a plausible account of what happens (vis a vis presence) in these cases. Fission is the cleaner case.

Fission Adam is in a blue room when he splits, like an amoeba. One of the resultant people (call him Lefty) is carried off to a yellow room. Another (call him Righty) is carried off to a red room. Both Lefty and Righty are psychologically and spatio-temporally continuous with Adam. Since the split was perfectly symmetrical, neither is, in either sense, his closer continuer.

47

See Velleman (1996)

95 Fig 5.12: Adam Splits time

Lefty

Righty

Yellow Room

Red Room

Adam Blue Room space What can an egocentric presentist say about how presence is distributed in this case? Well, an egocentric presentist will take it that, if Adam’s experiences are present, there are at least two ways in which things might go here. It could be that Adam’s experiences are present, and then Lefty’s experiences are present (that I am Adam, seeing blue, and then I am Lefty, seeing yellow). Or it could be that Adam’s experiences are present and then Righty’s experiences are present (that I am Adam, seeing blue, and then

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Righty, seeing red). What is worrying about this? Here are some worries that you might have:

A Worry About Counterfactuals If I were to undergo fission, something would happen, surely. Either Lefty’s experiences would be present or Righty’s experiences would be present. Well, which? The counterfactual ‘If I were to undergo fission, Lefty’s experiences would be present’ must be true or false, and, one might think, must be true or false in virtue of the actual world being one way or another. But it doesn’t seem as if any feature of the actual world can make it the case that, if I were to undergo fission, one or other of the fission products would have present experiences. In response, an egocentric presentist should say that we must be very careful about disambiguating ‘something would happen, surely’. The counterfactual ‘If I were to undergo fission, I would be exactly one of Lefty or Righty’ is true, but the counterfactuals ‘If I were to undergo fission, I would be Lefty’ and ‘If I were to undergo fission, I would be Righty’ are both false. Think about the latter counterfactuals in broadly Lewisian terms. Since I will not actually undergo fission, to evaluate them I must consider the nearest class of non-actual possible worlds in which I do undergo fission and see who, in those worlds, has present experiences after the big event. But, all other things being equal, worlds in

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which Lefty has present experiences are not in any contextually salient sense closer than worlds in which Righty has present experiences. For an egocentric presentist this pattern of counterfactual variance will not only arise in fission cases. I may ask who, if I were not CJH, I would be, and this question may be perfectly intelligible – after all, there are many distinct possible worlds in which CJH is not the one with present experiences. But although it is true that: ‘If I were not CJH, I would be somebody’ none of the following are true: ‘If I were not CJH, I would be Sophia Lauren’ ‘If I were not CJH, I would be John Kerry’ …etc. because, all other things being equal, worlds in which Sophia Lauren has present experiences are not in any contextually salient sense closer than worlds in which John Kerry has present experiences. And the pattern of counterfactual variation will also be familiar to a temporal presentist. I may ask the temporal presentist what year, if it were not now 2004, it would now be, and my question may be perfectly intelligible to him – after all, there are many other possible states of affairs in which 2004 is not the present year. But although it is true that: ‘If it were not now 2004, there is some year it would now be’ neither of the following is true: ‘If it were not now 2004, it would be 2003’ ‘If it were not now 2004, it would be 2005’

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because, all other things being equal, worlds in which it is now 2003 are not in any contextually sense closer than worlds in which it is now 2005.

2: An Epistemic Worry Imagine that I am Adam, about to undergo fission. There are two relevant possible ways in which things might go. Perhaps Lefty will be the one with present experiences, or perhaps Righty will be the one with present experiences. I have no evidential or theoretical grounds for favoring one hypothesis over the other – both are consistent with the evidence available to me, neither is simpler, more elegant or less ontologically profligate. So surely I cannot know who I will be, and, if something hangs on who I will be, if Righty will later be subjected to torture while Lefty wins the lottery, say, this means that I cannot know how to feel about the case. The best I can say is that I think it no more or less likely that I will be subjected to torture than win the lottery. Well and good, but why is this worrying? Perhaps if I were someone who will undergo fission (henceforth a splitter) this might trouble me. But a non-splitter like myself should only be troubled if the argument generalizes so as to show that I cannot know who I will be. And it doesn’t seem to. Consider a world in which two (and a half) people exist – one splitter and one non-splitter. Here are three ways for this world to be:

99 Fig 5.13: Some Possibilities time Possibility 1

Possibility 2

Lefty Righty CJH

Lefty Righty CJH

Possibility 3

Lefty Righty

CJH t2

t1 Adam

CJH

Adam

CJH

Adam

CJH

Present experiences Absent experiences

1-3 cover all the relevant possibilities. If I discover that, at t1, Adam has present experiences, this leaves possibilities 1 and 2 open, so I cannot say who I will be. But if I discover that CJH, the non-splitter, has present experiences at t1, I am perfectly entitled to infer that, at t2, I will be CJH.

3. A More General Epistemic Worry But why am I epistemically entitled to take 1-3 to cover all the relevant possibilities? The apparatus of egocentric presentism supports other, more exotic possibilities. For example:

100 Fig 5.14: More Possibilities time Possibility 4

Possibility 5

Possibility 6

Lefty Righty CJH

Lefty Righty CJH

Lefty Righty CJH t2

t1

Adam

CJH

Adam

CJH

Adam

CJH

Present experiences Absent experiences

In 5 and 6 it is also the case that CJH’s experiences are present at t1. So I can infer from CJH’s experiences being present at t1 that they will be present at t2 only if I have firm epistemic grounds for favoring possibility 1 over possibilities 5 and 6. But what gives me such grounds? Let’s divide this question into two. First one can ask, what grounds do I have for thinking that CJH’s experiences were present, yesterday, say? How do I know that CJH’s experiences have not become present just recently? Second, one can ask, given that I have good grounds for thinking that CJH’s experiences are and have been present, what grounds do I have for thinking that they will be?

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The first is analogous to questions that some people suppose to be troubling for the non-reductionist about qualia – It may be obvious to me now that my experiences have a certain qualitative aspect, but how do I know that my spectrum has not inverted over the past few days, that red things appear to me today just the way that blue things appeared to me yesterday? Or – It may be obvious to me now that I am conscious, but how do I know that I was not a zombie yesterday? One celebrated48 line of response is to say ‘I know these things haven’t happened because I would have noticed if they had. If my spectrum were to invert over a few days I would start running through traffic lights, mistaking the sky for the ground and the ground for the sky, confusing autumn with spring, and generally behaving in a destabilized manner. If I were suddenly to become conscious I would be overwhelmed by the vivid qualitative texture of my experiences. But I have been neither confused nor overwhelmed.’ The analogous response in this case – ‘I know my experiences haven’t suddenly become present because I would have noticed if they had’ is not satisfactory. I will accept the counterfactual only if I accept that there are bridging laws, laws that preclude presence flitting around like a butterfly, alighting, unnoticed, on one person one moment, another person another moment. But what grounds do I have for believing that there are such laws? I cannot appeal to induction, because the first step: ‘in the past, presence has never flitted around, unnoticed’ is precisely what is in question. A better response harkens back to the Cartesian-style thought experiment that motivated egocentric presentism in the first place. My foundational insight is

48

This is the line taken in Chalmers (1996) Chapter 7.

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that CJH’s experiences are present I may be tempted to revise or reassess this insight later, to say that it really amounted to something along these lines that it seems to CJH that CJH’s experiences are present that CJH believes that CJH’s experiences are present If I, as an egocentric presentist, succumbed to this temptation, then I could reasonably ask myself: ‘What grounds do I have for inferring that CJH’s experiences are present, from its seeming to CJH that CJH’s experiences are present? After all, it would seem to CJH that CJH’s experiences were present even if they were not.’ But I don’t succumb. I stick with the manifest truth. That’s what makes me an egocentric presentist. Now, is the manifest truth a truth about CJH’s experiences over time, or about CJH’s experiences at a moment in time? Is it that CJH has and has had present experiences or that CJH has present experiences, and has memories as of having had present experiences ? If it is the latter then I can reasonably ask myself: ‘What grounds do I have for inferring that CJH has had present experiences, from his having memories as of having had present experiences? After all, CJH would have memories as of having had present experiences even if he never had present experiences.’ But is it the latter? This is a delicate question. How one answers it will depend on whether one thinks that, if one is in the business of justifying beliefs by appeal to manifest truths, one’s beliefs at a time can be justified only by appeal to truths that are manifest at that time – that I now have such and such perceptions, that I now have such and such memories... etc. I am inclined to think not. If,

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during a period of introspection, someone asks me what grounds I have for believing that CJH’s experiences of ten minutes ago were present, I think I am entitled to appeal not merely to its being manifest that CJH has memories as of having present experiences ten minutes ago, but also to its having been manifest ten minutes ago that CJH had present experiences then. I am entitled to say ‘it has been manifest over a period of time that CJH has present experiences.’ And that suffices as a response to the question – What grounds do I have for believing that, in the past, CJH’s experiences were present? In response to the second question – What grounds do I have for believing that, in the future, CJH’s experiences will be present? – I say induction. In the past CJH’s experiences have been present, so it is reasonable to think that in the future they will remain so. What is the precise form of the general law that applies here? What mechanism secures presence as time goes by? I don’t know. Given that my history is less than exotic, CJH’s experiences having been present is consistent with presence tracking spatio-temporal continuity, psychological continuity, and many other things beside. Indeed, it may be that there is no general law to know about. Take a case where spatiotemporal continuity and psychological continuity come apart:

Psychology Swapping CJH and Ralph Nader swap psychologies. All of Ralph Nader’s beliefs, desires, affinities...etc. get implanted in CJH’s body. All of CJH’s beliefs, desires, affinities...etc. get implanted in Ralph Nader’s body.

104 Fig 5.15: Will I be Nader? Nader

Nader-Body “Must finish this book”

CJH

CJH-Body “Must break the two-party system”

Time Given that, in this world, presence tracks both spatio-temporal and psychological continuity, it may be in the familiar sense under-determined as to who I would be if I were to undergo a psychology swap. All other things being equal, possible worlds in which I am CJH, and then CJH-body, may be no more or less close than possible worlds in which I am CJH and then Nader-body.

5.8 Wrapping Up I am sure that, in the last section and in Chapter Four, I have not addressed every reasonable objection against, or worry about, egocentic presentism. But I hope to have given you a sense of the way in which the egocentric presentist might respond to various kinds of objections, of the resources available to him. If you have residual concerns they

105 must be balanced against the considerable advantages of the view. By way of wrapping up, let me repeat what these are: First, the center-piece of egocentric presentism is the most obvious thing in the world – that one person, alone, has experiences that are in one important respect radically unlike the experiences of anybody else. Second, egocentric presentism gives substance to the attractive thought that there is always a determinate fact of the matter as to whether a given future person will be me, without supposing that there is always a determinate fact of the matter as to whether a person at one time is the same person as a person at another time. Third, egocentric presentism is uniquely capable of making sense of why I, and indeed everybody, should be self-interested. Each person’s naked self interest tracks what is valuable simpliciter. Whether you accept the view will (and I think should) come down, not to intricate questions in epistemology, but to whether you can stomach the implications of this third ‘advantage’. When one’s life goes well it may be gratifying to discover that one is special. But when it goes badly perhaps there is solace in the thought that the troubles of one little person don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

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