Inseparable subjectivity – Part 1: Bundle theory of personhood

A cool objection to my free will skepticism.

Part 1: Bundle theory of personhood

* The self is real, self-evident, and certain – just as first-person properties are real, self-evident, and certain. So there is a self – the self is not an illusion. We are not eliminating the self but reducing it to first-person properties. Always, anywhere, and only where there are first-person properties, there is personhood. To say "I am" is just to say "Here are some first-person properties" – it is not to say "Here is a mental substance."

 

* Definition of personhood:

 

Take Alice and Bob. 

 

* Person(1) = Public person = Alice's public person is that thing that generates within Bob certain experiences, such as visual experiences of a certain shape or auditory experiences of a certain sound (like the sound of Alice's voice).

 

* Person(2) = Private person = A subjective / experiential / first-person / phenomenological property.

 

That is, a singular subjective property or a single bundle of subjective properties closely related by time, event, cause, or something else.

 

E.g. Alice burns herself on accident when pulling cookies out of the oven by pulling at too steep an angle, causing the top of her forearm to touch the inner ceiling of her oven. You have a bundle of first-person properties here: The pain of the burn, the right-forearm-i-ness of the pain, the smell of the cookies, the weight of the oven door, the soothing feeling of aloe vera gel on the burn. When we speak of these experiences of Alice, we speak of Alice qua Person(2).

 

* Person(3) = Total private person = The collective phenomenological properties of Alice, i.e., all the experiences Alice has over her lifetime, or has had over her lifetime thus far.

 

* Person(4) = Total public person = The collective phenomenological properties of people other than Alice who've had experiences of Alice's public person.

 

* Person(5) = Total person = The combined sets of Person(3) and Person(4). 

 

* Your accidental properties are things you have or are associated with, but are not identical to you. Your essential properties are you.

 

* Because your accidental properties (like the sound of your voice) are responsible for the experiences generated within me (like the experience of hearing your voice), these properties are essential with respect to you qua person(1) but accidental with respect to you qua person(2). So what counts as accidental / essential depends on which definition of 'person' we are working with. It's contextual.

 

* This explains why it often feels like our accidental properties are identical to us. When folks talk about us, they are talking about that thing that generates within me xyz experiences. That is you qua public person, and in that context properties that would be accidental to you qua private person are essential.

 

To give a concrete example, let's say group G gossips about person P. Group G says that P can sing well. What they mean is that when P sings, certain good feelings are produced within them. But linguistically this comes out as (if they were to speak to P): "You are a good singer." If we were to take 'are' as one of identity, then: You = good singer. Personhood solved! Who is P as a person? Why, P is good singer! And so we can see how people in general can and often do attach their sense of self-worth to their public self rather than to their private self—the public self is the self that is, unsurprisingly, accessible to the public and thus the cause of one's praise, fame, hirability, employment, good reputation, money, career, and survival. If it's my public self upon which my survival hangs, and if xyz properties are essential to that public self, then xyz properties are essential to me in a highly relevant sense, i.e. the sense of survival.

 

* (This also explains a deep-seated loneliness that we all feel. When I'm talking about you, I'm really talking about me!—about my experiences of what I take to be you. And vice versa: When you talk about me, you're really talking about your experiences of this thing that you have labeled under my name, but from my point of view that thing isn't me at all but something accidental to me. We never get to access each other's true selves, only our public selves.) 

 

But it's obvious that these xyz properties are not at all essential to the sense of Person(2). It's also obvious that from my perspective, who I am essentially is not what other people see but what I see directly and within me. But again, it's contextual. Someone who thinks personhood is more context- / social- / narrative-based would be more inclined to think of Person(4) as what it really means to be a person at the end of the day – you are the experiences you cause others.

 

But because our own experiences of ourselves are so certain and undeniable, surely we'd want to include those, arriving at Person(5) as a more full sense of what it means to be a person. You are the experiences you have and the experiences you cause others. Because public properties = essential with respect to the public person and private properties = essential with respect to the private person, whether certain properties of yours are essential to you is a matter of context.

 

* However, clearly, if no one else existed but me, I would not only still exist, but exist with certainty! Because my own subjective properties are still certainly there. So it makes sense to favor Person(2) as the true self. Person(3) includes experiences of my past and future—experiences I am not currently having—and so is not relevant to the me in the present. Perhaps therefore we ought to build into Person(2) this sense of the present person, while Person(3) covers the whole person, past, present and future.