Metaphysical interlude III: first-person realism is the name of the game

I am a proud pedophile (as the word has recently come to be used of bog-standard male sexuality and the now rare honesty about such), a MAP, an MRA, a male sexualist and also a first-person realist. Yes, our language evolves and while the first four labels are largely synonymous and starkly political, the last one only concerns metaphysics which I have also written about here and here.

So here comes the third installment in this series of merely philosophical reflection, in which I may not make any philosophical progress but sure do update the terminology, much like we have done in our evolution from MRA to MAP. I have previously referred to the question of whether the first-person perspective is metaphysically privileged as the "idiotic conundrum" (a term Geoffrey Klempner came up with), but now, thanks to this podcast by Robinson Erhardt and an excellent paper by his guest David Builes, I now know to refer to my position that the first-person perspective is indeed metaphysically privileged as first-person realism. Also new to me today is referring to the idiotic conundrum as the vertiginous question.

Although David Builes ultimately rejects first-person realism (he says in the podcast), his paper presents eight arguments in favor. The paper is thankfully open access, so you can all read it in full. In addition to the arguments it provides great clarity on how to think about this issue, including the terminology which I have now updated to be in line with contemporary academic philosophy. Some of his arguments are actually new to me. For example, I am not very conversant in anti-haecceitism and frankly I don't understand it much better after reading the paper either. But the decisive argument for me, which is similar to what I have said before, is the one he lists as number five:

5 PERSONAL IDENTITY: DISSOCIATION

There are puzzles of personal identity over time where I seem to have judgements about how I can persist through time that differ from my judgements about how David can persist through time. First-Person Realism can explain this, but other views can't.

For example, consider a classic fission case. Suppose I am about to go to sleep, and while I am asleep, half of my brain will be put into a body that is in a red room, and the other half of my brain will be put into a body that is in a blue room. From an external third-person perspective, it seems to me that David cannot survive this operation. After all, David can't be in both rooms, and it would be arbitrary if David went to either room, and the persistence of biological organisms like David is not a “further fact” beyond various relations of physical and biological continuity. However, when I adopt a first-person perspective and imagine myself going to sleep before the operation, it seems that I can clearly conceive of three possibilities: I can wake up the next day in a red room, I can wake up the next day in a blue room, or I can never wake up again.

However, if I judge that David can't wake up in either room tomorrow even though I can wake up in either room tomorrow, then it seems that I can't also consistently judge that I am identical to David. However, according to certain versions of First-Person Realism, it is clear how to make sense of these intuitions. For example, according to Hare's (2009) view, it is possible that tomorrow the red room is present, it is possible that tomorrow the blue room is present, and it is possible that no room will be present tomorrow. Furthermore, all three of these possibilities are consistent with David not surviving the operation.

Moreover, conceiving of David as a biological organism is not essential to the point. Even if David is a Cartesian immaterial soul, it still seems that what can happen to me can dissociate from what happens to an immaterial soul, just as what happens to me can dissociate from what happens to a biological organism.

Once you realize that there are thought experiments which show that personal identity can dissociate not only from your physical body and thus disprove physicalism but also dissociate from an immaterial soul, it becomes very hard to deny that personal identity is metaphysically privileged, beyond even what God (if he exists like any theist would have it) could create or govern! Which is why I tend to agree with Klempner that this is the deepest philosophical question.

There is the hard problem of consciousness, but then there is also the super-hard question of perspective. Even if we could solve the mind-body problem, we wouldn't know from the facts of consciousness how to explain which perspective or person goes with which mental state as opposed to any other. Why am I me and not you? We don't know! 

Also new to me in this paper is how first-person realism sheds light on time and modality. I had basically accepted eternalism after reading "The Unreality of Time" by John Ellis McTaggart, but now I am not so sure that presentism might not be true after all. Perhaps the present is privileged in an analogous way to the first-person perspective, and there is no block universe? All this and more is best explained by Builes, so once again I highly recommend reading his paper. And among his citations I recommend reading Christian List's (2023) "The many-worlds theory of consciousness" for a sort of plausible theory of how exactly the first person might be metaphysically privileged without degrading into solipsism.

I welcome comments on first-person realism as well as our usual discussion on (anti-)sexual legislation and prosecution. Which is so grim that it behooves is to take a break now and again and ponder some philosophy for our sanity.