Inseparable subjectivity - Part 4: Response to inseparable subjectivity

Part 1: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-1-bundle.html

 

Part 2: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-2.html

 

Part 3: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/11/inseparable-subjectivity-part-3.html

Part 4: Response to inseparable subjectivity

So there are two objections, one about the legitimacy of the distinction between Person(2a) and Person(2b) and one about the causal role of Person(2a). We can describe each objection like so:

Objection 1: Inseparable subjectivity

In Part 3 I said:

“Imagine the feeling of being judged. It's a sharp pain, which makes it vivid and easy to imagine. Is it possible to separate the feeling of being judged from the subjectivity? No. The experience is necessarily experiential. There is no pain floating around out there without a person to feel it. Pain is by its essence felt. Likewise, there is no subjectivity floating around out there without other properties characterizing that experience. Subjectivity is by its essence a particular kind of experience. So for a painful feeling, like being judged, you can't have the pain without the subjectivity, and you can't have the subjectivity without the pain. The subjectivity is replete and inseparable.

 

But if a person per se is identical to their subjective properties . . . then any criticism or praise directed to the ugly or admirable aspects of the subjective property are directed to the person per se . . . 

 

If this is right, and if our choices come with a subjective property (the quale of making a choice), then we are our choices, just as we are our pains and pleasures and any other subjective property. If by ‘person’ we mean a collection of subjective properties that all have the same subjectivity in common, then our experiences (including experiences of making choices) are straightforwardly part of us.

 

Far from eliminating free will, this might provide the very resources to build an account of how free will works! Namely, that . . . because a*) our choices are caused by our phenomenal choice, and because b) wherever there is phenomenology there is personhood, therefore c*) our choices are caused by our personhood (i.e., by us). So d) the goodness or badness of the consequences of our choices reflects the goodness or badness of the phenomenal choice that caused them, which just is to reflect the goodness or the badness of the personhood that caused them.”

Objection 2: Pure subjectivity plays a causal role in choices

We first must distinguish between the pure subject as an abstraction versus the subject as a concrete first-person property. Abstract properties are not causal. So it’s trivially true that the abstract self does not play a causal role. But when it comes to praising and blaming persons, we are praising and blaming real, concrete persons, not abstractions. We praise and blame you, not the concept of you. Because persons are concrete and causal, we must, as Objection 1 gets at, treat “pure subjectivity” as concrete and causal (more precisely, there is no such thing as personhood qua “pure subjectivity”; all personhood is concrete). As mentioned in the previous post:

 

“If I have stressful experiences, and those stressful first-person properties cause my body to produce stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, then the ‘pure subjectivity’ of being on the receiving end of experience actually does play a role in causal relationships. Plus, presumably pure experiences cause me to remember having those experiences. So pure subjectivity causes memory. Furthermore, memories reveal patterns that affect future actions. By remembering the pain of touching a hot stove, I avoid touching hot stoves in the future. So by causing memories, not only does pure subjectivity play a causal role, but a causal role with respect to our actions.”

 

“Pure subjectivity” here really refers to concrete first-person properties that are passive in the sense of not being those first-person properties that directly correspond to the making of choices. If the badness of Y reflects the badness of the cause of Y, and if these passive first-person properties play an indirect causal role in bad actions, then the badness of these bad actions caused in part by these passive first-person properties reflects to that degree the badness of these properties, and thus reflects to that degree the badness of the personhood corresponding to these properties. So even “passive” subjectivity is blameworthy and praiseworthy, and thus the personhood that corresponds to this subjectivity is not only praised or blamed, but praised or blamed in a direct, immediate way. That is, because you are your experiences, the goodness and badness of the consequences of your experiences—experiences that are directly or indirectly involved in your making choices with good or bad consequences—directly reflect the goodness or badness of you.

Reply: Insofar ‘you’ picks out something abstract

Can essential properties be abstract? Not only yes, but this must be the case, because identifying essential properties requires abstraction. What gives rise to essential and non-essential properties in the first place is the act of bundling – bundling properties under labels. There’s a bundle of properties referred to by the word ‘mountain’, a different bundle of properties referred to by the word ‘lake’, and so on, for every word. Essential properties are those properties that make or break your inclusion within a label. Where a mountain is located is non-essential; you can have mountains in Colorado, Mexico, Mars; your location won’t get you kicked out of the mountain club. But your size will: too small and you will be called a hill. When does a mountain become a hill? No one knows and it doesn’t really matter. Words are vague. What matters is how people react to what you say. If you point to an average-sized mountain and say, “That’s the biggest hill I’ve ever seen!”, you will be promptly corrected that it’s an average-sized mountain. Conversely, if you point at a hill and call it a tiny mountain, you will be corrected that it’s a hill. A similar conversation could take place about rivers versus creeks, and so on. Often, with a bit of thought, we can abstract out one or more of the make-or-break properties of an object. If something does not produce heat, then whatever it is, we will not consider it to be a lit bonfire, lit furnace, or any lit object. So producing heat is an essential property of lit objects.

So could my essential property be abstract? If everyday objects have abstract essential properties—and indeed if the very notion of an essential property depends on abstracting out the properties that explain why an object falls under a particular label—then I don’t see why not.

When I experience pain, the subjective property identical to me is present. When I experience happiness, the subjective property identical to me is also present. But my pain and my happiness are not the same thing, despite the shared subjectivity. So it cannot be that both properties are identical to me, as then they would be identical to each other, and what could be more certain than that pain and happiness are different? So ‘me’ must pick out a subjective property that my pain and happiness share. To understand the difference between pain and happiness, while acknowledging what they have in common – me – I have no choice but to abstract out the shared property and consider it in the same way I would consider the abstract property producing heat shared by bonfires and furnaces.

But do ‘I’ and ‘me’ in fact pick out such an abstract property? If I were strapped to a device and tortured, day and night, for years and years, my existence would be perfectly, and unfortunately, real to me. Even if no one knew I was there, I would know. Even if I lost the ability to form memories, the “first” moment of pain, repeated again and again, would still be undeniable. Even if I made no choices, even if my pain caused no effects, other than perhaps the morally irrelevant effects of releasing stress hormones in my body, I would still be there, there in the pain. So I cannot deny that there is a sense of the concept of me that does not depend on a) Anyone else’s existence or awareness of me, b) On me making choices, or c) On me having any memories. A person can inspect their own moments of pain and abstract out what unites them. A person can observe the stark contrast between the moments of pain and moments of happiness and see that the same thing unites both. I am not my happiness; I experience happiness. I am not my choices; I experience my choices. I am not my pain; I experience pain. Of course Ben’s pain is essentially felt by Ben, just as this bonfire is essentially producing heat. And just as this bonfire is not equivalent to producing heat, neither is Ben’s pain equivalent to felt by Ben. Just as producing heat is what unites lit objects, felt by Ben is what unites Ben’s experiences. ‘I’ picks out this felt by me property. It sounds like a circular definition: <Ben> is <felt by Ben>. This is exactly what I expect, because my essential self is a phenomenal thing, and phenomenal things can only be defined circularly, because words can only gesture to phenomenal objects. It’s more accurate to say <Ben> is <feeler> (or: <experiencer>) where <feeler> picks out a particular feeler that we label <Ben>. So <Ben> is <feeler> is really the tautology <This feeler> is <this feeler>, and <Ben’s pain> is <felt by Ben> means <Pain felt by this feeler> is <felt by this feeler>. So the essential self is the first-person felt property abstracted out from the entire phenomenal property.

If the essential self is an abstract, non-causal property, then it immediately follows that the self does not stand in causal relations, and so the essential self cannot be attributed to be the cause of anything, even if the non-essential self is the cause of many things. But a) Surely these phenomenal properties are caused to exist (they don’t exist necessarily) and b) Surely these phenomenal properties cause (if we grant mental causation) some things, like choices, or at least bodily processes (like crying, panic attacks, or inducing stress hormones).

Sure, just as there are things that cause bonfires and furnaces. That doesn’t change the fact that producing heat is one of the essential properties of lit bonfires and lit furnaces. This particular heat from this particular bonfire is causal – it causes the surrounding air to heat up. And this particular heat was caused by chemical properties giving rise to combustion, and so on. Likewise, this particular subjective property—a bundle of properties surrounding the state of being sad—causes the body to produce tears. And this particular subjectivity was caused by a  particular brain in such and such state, and so on. Just as this particular heat is inseparable from the other properties of the bonfire, this particular subjectivity is inseparable from other properties of the phenomenal property. To get one property, or bundle of properties, you need the other. To get the particular heat from the bonfire, you need the particular wood, and so on. To get the particular subjectivity, you need the particular feelings of sadness, and so on.

So the inseparability between particular essential and particular non-essential properties is nothing new, a feature of all objects. When identifying the property that is essential of an object, that requires abstracting out the property the lack of which precludes your inclusion under the label being considered. When the label being considered is <(lit) bonfire>, I see that lacking producing heat precludes your inclusion under the label. While producing heat considered in the abstract is an abstract property, that doesn’t mean the heat of this bonfire right here is abstract. Particular heat is concrete, being both caused by various other properties and causing changes in properties outside itself. This concrete, particular heat is inseparable from other concrete particular properties whose existence are co-dependent with the heat.

When the label being considered is a pronoun like ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, and so on, I find myself abstracting out the property of subjectivity – of having a particular, unique, first-person experience. If something possesses a particular subjectivity that we can only gesture toward with the word ‘me’, then that thing is me. If something lacks that particular subjectivity, then that thing is not me.

While this might sound like the contradiction of a “universal particular”, the word ‘particular’ here picks out specificity, just as other abstracted properties refer to something more or less specific. The issue is distinguishing between my subjectivity, which all my phenomenal properties share (and thus is multiply instantiated), and subjectivity in general, which all persons share.

While a specific subjectivity considered in the abstract (i.e. divorced from other phenomenal properties) is an abstract property, that doesn’t mean this particular subjectivity right here is abstract. Particular subjectivity is concrete, being both caused by various other properties and causing changes in properties outside itself (allowing for mental causation). This concrete, particular subjectivity is inseparable from other concrete particular properties whose existence are co-dependent with the subjectivity.

So bundling seems to work differently for ordinary objects versus persons. Different objects can share essential properties. But different persons cannot share essential properties. Only different phenomenal properties that share the same subjectivity can share essential properties.

Reply 2: Insofar ‘you’ picks out something concrete

You might reject the idea that essential properties for particular objects can be abstract. Sure, in general, an object cannot lack producing heat and still be a lit bonfire. But when it comes to this bonfire right here, it’s not enough for this bonfire to produce just any heat, and certainly it can’t be producing the heat of some other object. To be included under the reference this bonfire right here, you must produce this heat. In other words, we have universal, abstract essential properties for abstract objects, and particular, concrete essential properties for concrete objects.

So if I am convinced that my essential self cannot be something abstract, but must be concrete, then I cannot accept that my essential properties are abstract. If it’s true that wherever you find my phenomenal properties, you find me, then it’s true that wherever you find my phenomenal properties pertaining to emotions, pains, joys, sights, rememberings, making choices, and so on, you find me. Because subjectivity is inseparable from other phenomenal properties, and because I am my subjectivity, it follows that I am my phenomenal properties. So I am my happiness, my pain, and so on. This runs into the objection that happiness and pain cannot be the same, but set that aside for now. My essential self must not be abstract, as that would mean my essential self does not stand in causal relations. But surely I was caused to exist, and surely I cause other things to exist (unless we want to parse out meanings of ‘I’ and suggest that ‘I’ is being used to mean one thing in one context and another thing in another context).

Even still, I don’t see how this rescues moral responsibility. The collection of first-person properties that a person has is incidental to factors beyond their control. It’s painfully obvious to me that someone who wins the lottery at 18 years old and spends that money improving themselves and removing sources of stress in their lives will turn out much differently than that same person who doesn’t have access to those privileges and is forced into miserable conditions for years on end. The psychology of the two persons is radically different, and the activities they in fact spend their time on are radically different. So it’s not morally interesting that a person would have one set of phenomenal properties versus another, when we can so easily imagine that set radically changing by a few simple changes to the person’s circumstances that they could not have controlled for.

I will return to this topic of personhood at a later point. I think the bottom line for me for now is that:

 

1. Pronouns are ambiguous, and I see different bundles of properties picked out by words like ‘you’. The illustration of the sleepwalker shows this. ‘You’ can refer to: You(1a): The private experiences of others about you; You(1b): Your public properties that cause others to have experiences of you (and causes you to have experiences of your public properties); You(2a): Your subjectivity that unites all your phenomenal properties; You(2b): The properties that distinguish one of your phenomenal properties from another (assuming subjectivity is in fact separable).

2. There are other distinctions we could make: You as in your body; You as in the location of your visual field; You as in some combination of above meanings.

3. There’s an unmistakable sense of self that remains even when you remove 1a and 1b. Because the properties of 2b cannot be identical to each other (happiness cannot be the same thing as pain), and yet you are identical to yourself, you cannot be 2b either. So that leaves 2a as the essential self. When I engage in the abstraction process for identifying that property the lack of which precludes something’s being referenced by the word ‘me’ (the same abstraction process for identifying essential properties for any object), 2a comes out as the essential property of me. The torture device illustration shows this.

4. But I’m not sure about the exact relationship between concreteness and abstractness, between those and causality, between essential properties and concreteness, or what abstraction really is and how to tell when it is occurring. Countless other questions are left open, like the nature of mental causation, the nature of causation more broadly, the nature of properties, existence, and facts more broadly, the relationship between properties and time and thus the relationship between mental properties and time, how personhood survives through time, how personhood relates to eternalism versus presentism theories of time, and how this Bundle Theory of the Self and properties relates to substance dualism, neutral monism, or other monisms (versions of physicalism or versions of idealism), or to property dualism and arguments for and against property dualism (or arguments that property dualism entails this or that view about substances). Thus far I've basically assumed a substance nihilist position. There are objections to bundle theory / substance nihilism more broadly that have yet to be addressed as well. There are many alternative views of the self, that the essential self is a non-physical substance, that it is a physical substance, that it is a brain, that it is an animal or organism, that it is a partition of God's necessary mind, that it is a weakly emergent thing via a panpsychist interpretation, that there is no concrete self at all via an epiphenomenalist interpretation, and probably a dozen other views besides.

Inseparable subjectivity - Part 3: Inseparable subjectivity

Part 1: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-1-bundle.html

Part 2: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-2.html

Part 4: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/12/inseparable-subjectivity-part-4.html

Part 3: Inseparable subjectivity
 

In Part 2 I said the following:
 

“Person(2a) = The pure subjectivity (of a particular person) by which all first-person properties (of that particular person) are unified.

E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie all have something in common: the fact that these experiences are happening to you. There is a youness, a subjectivity, that these experiences have in common.

Person(2b) = The other properties of first-person properties that accompany the pure subjectivity by which all first-person properties are unified.
 
E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie have differences between them. That which distinguishes one experience from the other—the pain of venom in your veins versus the pain of the initial shock of cold water versus the happiness of the taste of melted chocolate—these differences show that these experiences cannot be the same, despite having a sameness to them, specifically the same subjectivity.

You(2a) is the ‘you’ referred to in the following sentence: You do not choose to be what you are. You do not choose to have the intelligence, rationality, or knowledge that you have. So you do not choose for your decision-making process to be what it is. So you do not choose for your choices to come out as they do. The badness (or goodness) of your choices reflects the badness (or goodness) of your inputs, but not the badness (or goodness) of you.
 
But you(2b) is the 'you' referred to in the following sentence: The choices you made were good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy. I.e. the causal properties accompanying the pure subjectivity of first-person properties had good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy effects.”

Two thoughts:

One, even if we allow a distinction between Person(2a) and Person(2b), it’s not clear that 2a is as non-causal as I claimed. If I have stressful experiences, and those stressful first-person properties cause my body to produce stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, then the “pure subjectivity” of being on the receiving end of experience actually does play a role in causal relationships. Plus, presumably pure experiences cause me to remember having those experiences. So pure subjectivity causes memory. Furthermore, memories reveal patterns that affect future actions. By remembering the pain of touching a hot stove, I avoid touching hot stoves in the future. So by causing memories, not only does pure subjectivity play a causal role, but a causal role with respect to our actions.

Two, it’s not clear that the distinction between 2a and 2b makes sense. If I treat subjectivity as a consistent property that survives through time (to explain how a person survives through time), then it sounds like I’m sneaking in the idea of a mental substance, of a subjectivity that exists independently from everything else and is subject to qualia. That’s a problem for bundle theory, which says that there are no substances, only properties. If instead I say that wherever there is a subjective property, there is personhood, and paint this picture that there is no stable, persistent, substantial, mysterious self – and that instead there is a succession of subjective properties and a directly observable, unmysterious self – then it seems like I must consider subjectivity not something separate from the subjective properties. If your subjective properties are you, then your subjective properties involved in your choices and feelings are you. So the pure subjectivity of 2a cannot be separated from the other properties, 2b, that accompany 2a. 

By abstracting out my subjectivity in common with all my subjective properties, I am beholding my subjective property not as something particular and concrete, but universal and abstract. But persons are concrete, not abstract! The self is as particular and concrete as it gets. So to avoid the mistake of talking about the concept of myself when I should be talking about myself, I must avoid abstracting out subjectivity.

It seems that I have been assuming that the subjectivity of a property can be separated from ugly (or admirable) aspects of that property. For example, if someone makes the conscious, unconstrained decision to kill someone out of spite, there’s a subjectivity to that choice. But this subjectivity is replete throughout the property such that the entire property is subjective. We cannot separate the subjectivity from the rest of the property. So the ugliness of the subjectivity just is the ugliness of the entire subjective property, and thus the person.

Imagine the feeling of being judged. It's a sharp pain, which makes it vivid and easy to imagine. Is it possible to separate the feeling of being judged from the subjectivity? No. The experience is necessarily experiential. There is no pain floating around out there without a person to feel it. Pain is by its essence felt. Likewise, there is no subjectivity floating around out there without other properties characterizing that experience. Subjectivity is by its essence a particular kind of experience. So for a painful feeling, like being judged, you can't have the pain without the subjectivity, and you can't have the subjectivity without the pain. The subjectivity is replete and inseparable.
 
But if a person per se is identical to their subjective properties (the person per se of the moment is identical to the subjective property of that moment), then any criticism or praise directed to the ugly or admirable aspects of the subjective property are directed to the person per se (at the moment of that property).
 
If this is right, and if our choices come with a subjective property (the quale of making a choice), then we are our choices, just as we are our pains and pleasures and any other subjective property. If by ‘person’ we mean a collection of subjective properties that all have the same subjectivity in common, then our experiences (including experiences of making choices) are straightforwardly part of us.
 
Far from eliminating free will, this might provide the very resources to build an account of how free will works! Namely, that because a) our choices accompany phenomenal choice, and because b) wherever there is phenomenology there is personhood, therefore c) to criticize or praise a choice just is to criticize or praise the phenomenology, which just is to criticize or praise the person with that personhood.

 

Or put another way, because a*) our choices are caused by our phenomenal choice, and because b) wherever there is phenomenology there is personhood, therefore c*) our choices are caused by our personhood (i.e., by us). So d) the goodness or badness of the consequences of our choices reflects the goodness or badness of the phenomenal choice that caused them, which just is to reflect the goodness or the badness of the personhood that caused them.

Inseparable subjectivity – Part 2: Critical vs moral blame

Part 1: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-1-bundle.html

 

Part 3: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/11/inseparable-subjectivity-part-3.html 

 

Part 4: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/12/inseparable-subjectivity-part-4.html

 

Part 2: Critical vs moral blame

Now that we have some idea of what ‘person’ refers to, we can make progress on what it means to blame a person. For a recap:

Person(1) = Public person = Your public person is that thing that generates within others certain experiences, such as visual experiences of a certain shape or auditory experiences of a certain sound (like the sound of your voice).
 
Person(2) = Private person = Your private self is any subjective / experiential / first-person / phenomenological property that carries a particular youness to it.

Because this is a phenomenal definition, it’s no surprise that it would be circular – i.e. you = those subjective properties that correspond to… you. The circularity is benign because phenomenal definitions must gesture toward a phenomenology. Compare: red = the red color, another phenomenal definition that is circular in a benign way, gesturing toward the phenomenology of seeing redness. Just as ‘red’ gestures toward the red experience you have, ‘you’ gestures toward the youness of any experience you have.

You can make further distinctions like where ‘you’ refers to the total experiences you caused others or the total experiences you’ve had. For now, these two key distinctions are enough.

I’ve made a distinction between moral versus critical blame, which basically means blaming Person(2) versus blaming Person(1), respectively. That is, to blame a person critically is to criticize the quality of their public properties. To blame a person morally is to criticize the quality of their phenomenal properties.

There’s two other distinctions of blame at work: Blame as cause and blame as blameworthy / blameless cause (or creditworthy / creditless), i.e., whether you are the cause in a way that reflects the quality of you. X can fail to be the cause of Y, explaining why the quality of Y says nothing about the quality of X. For example, I fail to be the cause of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal (so I claim), and so the badness of this disaster says nothing about the badness of me. Or, X can succeed in being the cause of Y, but in such a way that the quality of Y says nothing about the quality of X. For example, a baby succeeds in being the cause of accidentally knocking over a vase and breaking it. The badness of breaking the vase says nothing about the badness of the baby.

But that’s too quick. The badness of breaking the vase does say something about the badness of the baby: the baby can cause bad experiences in others by breaking their vases. So Baby(1) is extrinsically bad. But the badness of breaking the vase says nothing about the badness of the baby’s phenomenal properties, as the baby’s phenomenal properties had nothing to do with causing the vase to break. So Baby(2) is blameless with respect to breaking the vase.

But even if the baby’s phenomenal properties did have something to do with causing the vase to break, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Baby(2) is bad. If the baby grows up and is now a teenager, and the teenager chooses to break the vase, and thus the teenager has a phenomenal property of making a choice, and if we allow for mental causation, then the teenager’s phenomenal properties do cause the vase to break. So doesn’t that mean that the badness of breaking the vase says something about the badness of Teenager(2)? Yes and no.

If we allow for mental causation, then Person(2) is embedded within Person(1), because “that thing that generates within others certain experiences” includes those phenomenal properties, like those involved in making choices, that cause one’s actions which then generate experiences within others. So if the badness of Y reflects the badness of what causes Y, then the badness of bad experiences reflects the badness of that which caused those bad experiences. And so both public and private properties of personhood can be extrinsically bad.

But we can imagine Pereboom-style manipulation cases where a person is manipulated into having properties, public or private, which cause those bad experiences within others. But whose fault is it that these badness-causing properties obtain? The fault lies with the source of the manipulation. But our deterministic (or random) inputs, like our genetics, social influences, and so on, all together comprise such a manipulator. We do not choose to be what we are. We do not choose to have the intelligence, rationality, or knowledge that we have. So we do not choose for our decision-making process to be what it is. So we do not choose for our choices to come out as they do. The badness of our choices reflects the badness of our inputs, but not the badness of us. The badness of our choices does reflect the badness of us as choosers within such and such contexts (e.g., reflects our stupidity, irrationality, ignorance, etc.), but not the badness of us as experiencers, as pure subjects (i.e., as experiencers we did not choose to be stupid or irrational or ignorant, but we experience our stupidity, irrationality, ignorance, etc.).

Our first-person properties come from somewhere. They do not come, ultimately, from us, i.e., our first-person properties do not ultimately come from other first-person properties of ours. They come ultimately from sources outside of us.

What this comes to is that at bottom, the most fundamental self-property is the property of pure subjectivity, a property that is divorced from any choices made. This first-person property is not involved in the making of any choices, and so its quality cannot be fairly criticized.

To capture the distinction between those first-person properties that can be fairly criticized and those that cannot be fairly criticized, we must split Person(2) in two:

Person(2a) = The pure subjectivity (of a particular person) by which all first-person properties (of that particular person) are unified.

 

E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie all have something in common: the fact that these experiences are happening to you. There is a youness, a subjectivity, that these experiences have in common.

Person(2b) = The other properties of first-person properties that accompany the pure subjectivity by which all first-person properties are unified.

 

E.g. The experiences of being stung by a wasp, jumping into cold water, and biting into a chocolate chip cookie have differences between them. That which distinguishes one experience from the other—the pain of venom in your veins versus the pain of the initial shock of cold water versus the happiness of the taste of melted chocolate—these differences show that these experiences cannot be the same, despite having a sameness to them, specifically the same subjectivity.

 

You(2a) is the ‘you’ referred to in the following sentence: You do not choose to be what you are. You do not choose to have the intelligence, rationality, or knowledge that you have. So you do not choose for your decision-making process to be what it is. So you do not choose for your choices to come out as they do. The badness (or goodness) of your choices reflects the badness (or goodness) of your inputs, but not the badness (or goodness) of you.

 

But you(2b) is the 'you' referred to in the following sentence: The choices you made were good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy. I.e. the causal properties accompanying the pure subjectivity of first-person properties had good / bad / praiseworthy / critique-worthy effects.

 

On good vs praiseworthy choices: Good choices include those choices that are good by accident, good in a way that doesn't reflect good qualities of Person(1) and Person(2b). Actions are praiseworthy when they do reflect good qualities of Person(1) and Person(2b). The difference is that a Person(1,2b) with good qualities will regularly make good choices, while a person who makes good choices by accident will only rarely make good choices. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for bad and critique-worthy (aka blameworthy) choices. None of this speaks to the goodness or badness of Person(2a), who, as a pure subject, is merely along for the ride – only experiencing and never causing anything.

 

On Person(1): You can distinguish between those first-person properties other people have about you. We can label this Person(1a). These are strictly private properties. Then there are those public properties that cause others to have the properties referred to by Person(1a). We can label this Person(1b). These are strictly public properties. If we allow for mental causation, and if we allow a distinction between Person(2a) and Person(2b), then the first-person properties of (2b) can cause the third-person properties of (1b) which then cause the first-person properties of (1a). In other words, your choices (and other internal states that lead to choices, like beliefs and memories) cause your actions (like writing) which cause others to have the experiences of you that they do (like reading your writing).

Inseparable subjectivity – Part 1: Bundle theory of personhood

Part 2: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/10/inseparable-subjectivity-part-2.html
 

Part 3: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/11/inseparable-subjectivity-part-3.html

 

Part 4: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/12/inseparable-subjectivity-part-4.html

 

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 talks 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 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.

Two senses of "I"

Consider the sentence: "I sweat."

Who is this I that I refer to? Do I choose to sweat? No. I sweat involuntarily. And yet it's perfectly natural to say "I sweat" or "I digested my food" or "I was breathing hard after the run." But I did not do these things because of a choice I made, but because of bodily processes. So we use "I" to refer to something that does not choose. In fact, I can sweat, digest food, and breathe even while unconscious. So we can use "I" to refer to something that is unconscious.

 

Yet we also use "I" to refer to that which consciously experiences and chooses.

 

Our bodies are so strongly associated with us that we use "I" and "You" statements to refer to them. 

 

I don't sweat, my body does. I don't digest food, my body does. I don't breathe, my body does. 

 

Who is this "I" that doesn't do these things? It is the I of self, mind, soul, consciousness, subjectivity, choice, experience. So we have two senses of I, an embodied sense and an unembodied sense. There are three possible options:

 

The essential I is the embodied sense.

 

The essential I is the unembodied sense. 

 

The essential I is a whole made up of both the embodied and unembodied senses.

 

Another option is that there is no essential I, as the self is empty or an illusion or non-existent. But I take that kind of view to be self-evidently false.

 

I go for option 2: the essential I is the unembodied I that experiences and chooses. All embodied "I" statements can be paraphrased as "my body" statements.

 

One reason why I go for this option is because it seems to me that one of the most essential aspects of what it means to be me involves the pain and happiness I experience, especially the pain. Jordan Peterson once said that nothing is more real than pain.

 

My body might facilitate the experience of pain, but my body is never in pain. I am the one who has to be in pain. Whatever that thing is that is in pain, that first-person, subjective, self-aware, singular, unified, thinking, feeling, remembering, choosing, introspecting, metacognizing, experiencing thing, that is the soul, the self, the mind, the person, and that is what I am.

 

We can make distinctions between these terms. Perhaps person refers strictly to the essential property of being a particular subject, while mind refers to both the personhood as well as the non-essential mental properties associated with that particular person, including mental properties like memory and subconsciousness.

 

"Haecceity" refers to the suchness of something, or the particularity of it. My haecceity is that which differentiates me from things that are not me. So to make sense of my haecceity, we first need to make sense of my essence. What does it mean to be me? It means to be a very particular subject. And so the suchness of one subject (person) is what differentiates the suchness of another subject (person). And so when it comes to persons, the essence and the haecceity are the same, but both answer different questions, with the first answering the question of what it means to be that thing, and the second answering the question of what it is that differentiates this thing from other things.

 

Essence and haecceity usually do not overlap. For example, the essence of my vacuum cleaner probably involves its function (both actual and modal -- a broken vacuum is still a vacuum) and history. Maybe its appearance as well. But there are many other properties associated with my vacuum, like its age, size, location, and so forth. These properties help distinguish it from other objects. Together, these differentiating properties form the haecceity of the vacuum. So a haecceity is a property or bundle of properties that differentiates one object from another.

 

Question: negative space properties. Is differentness between two things a property? It can't be a universal because a particular differentness might lack multiple realizability. But it's not a property, as it's the negative space between two properties. It's a lack of two properties, but shaped by the two properties. So what is differentness exactly?

Alcibiades and Socrates on the soul

Plato Complete Works, Benjamin Jowett, Alcibiades I, 50/3045 - 52/3045

"Socrates: And does not a man use the whole body?

Alcibiades: Certainly.

Socrates: And that which uses is different from that which is used?

Alcibiades: True.

Socrates: Then a man is not the same as his own body?

Alcibiades: That is the inference.

Socrates: What is he, then?

Alcibiades: I cannot say.

Socrates: Nay, you can say that he is the user of the body.

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: And the user of the body is the soul?

Alcibiades: Yes, the soul.

Socrates: And the soul rules?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Let me make an assertion which will, I think, be universally admitted.

Alcibiades: What is it?

Socrates: That man is one of three things.

Alcibiades: What are they?

Socrates: Soul, body, or both together forming a whole.

Alcibiades: Certainly.

Socrates: But did we not say that the actual ruling principle of the body is man?

Alcibiades: Yes, we did.

Socrates: And does the body rule over itself?

Alcibiades: Certainly not.

Socrates: It is subject, as we were saying?

Alcibiades: Yes.

Socrates: Then that is not the principle which we are seeking?

Alcibiades: It would seem not.

Socrates: But may we say that the union of the two rules over the body, and consequently that this is man?

Alcibiades: Very likely.

Socrates: The most unlikely of all things; for if one of the members is subject, the two united cannot possibly rule.

[WRM Lamb translation (130c): "The unlikeliest thing in the world: for if one of the two does not share in the rule, it is quite inconceivable that the combination of the two can be ruling."]

Alcibiades: True.

Socrates: But since neither the body, nor the union of the two, is man, either man has no real existence, or the soul is man?

Alcibiades: Just so.

Socrates: Is anything more required to prove that the soul is man?

Alcibiades: Certainly not; the proof is, I think, quite sufficient.

Socrates: And if the proof, although not perfect, be sufficient, we shall be satisfied;—more precise proof will be supplied when we have discovered that which we were led to omit, from a fear that the enquiry would be too much protracted.

Alcibiades: What was that?

Socrates: What I meant, when I said absolute existence must first be considered; but now, instead of absolute existence, we have been considering the nature of individual existence, and this may, perhaps, be sufficient; for surely there is nothing which may be called more properly ourselves than the soul?

Alcibiades: There is nothing.

Socrates: Then we may truly conceive that you and I are conversing with one another, soul to soul?

Alcibiades: Very true."