[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 20/01/2024 05:48, Jason Resch wrote:
> ... one of the questions of personal identity is "which experiences 
> are had by which persons?"
> However we might define "person," I hope you agree that this question 
> is meaningful.
> Experiences are something we as persons have. So the question: which 
> experiences are mine? Which ones will I experience? Leads to the 
> three-way split in theories of personal identity. That is, how do we 
> assign which observer moments, are experiences that will be had by 
> which persons?

I don't think the question is very meaningful at all.

It's treating 'experiences' and 'people' as separable things. I don't 
think they are (I don't see how they could be).

You have to have a person before they can have an experience. It's like 
coloured blocks. You can have a blue Block and a yellow Block, but you 
can't have 'a Blue' or 'a Yellow'. And experiences are inherently 
personal. No-one else can possibly know what your experiences are, so 
"which experiences are had by which persons?" only has one answer: You 
have your experiences. I have mine. Each person has their own.

'The experiences' is just a label that we use in our heads so we can 
think about these things (remembering that the thoughts don't have to be 
true or accurate, or even make any kind of sense). It would be more 
accurate to say 'I experience', 'you experience'. Saying 'you /have/ 
experience X' tempts us to think of X as a thing that is possessed (and 
could therefore also be possessed by someone else). It's not. X is a 
label that we use to represent our experience, and we assume, for 
convenience, that other people experience something like it that they 
also call X (I strongly suspect that my X and your X could be completely 
different, but lead to the same behaviour. It's the old question about 
colours: "Is my blue the same as your yellow?" There is no way to know).

Apart from the label that we use to communicate (assuming we speak the 
same language), there is no other link between my X and your X. There is 
certainly no known mechanism that could implement such a link. Your X is 
yours alone. We might agree that putting our fingers into a fire causes 
us both to shout, withdraw the fingers, do a little dance and never do 
that again, but we each can't know what the other is actually 
experiencing. The likelihood is that our shouts and dances are different 
in some ways, which does kind of hint that there are going to be 
differences in our experiences. Even if, by some ridiculous freak 
chance, the experiences were exactly the same, there's no way to 
possibly know, and no actual link between them.

There is no such thing as 'the experience of being happy' as a thing in 
itself. John Smith being happy is not something that you can separate 
into the John Smith and the Being Happy, as if they were buckets and 
frogs. You can meaningfully ask which other buckets can hold these 
frogs, but you can't meaningfully ask which other people can experience 
this (John Smith's) happiness, because it's unique to him, and 
inherently unknowable to anyone else.

So the way I see it, this whole concept of 'theories of personal 
identity' is built on a misconception of the nature of 'experiences'.

Ben
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