 Okay, hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to this, a Howison lecture. I'm John Campbell. I'm a professor in the philosophy department here at Berkeley. And I'd just like to welcome you here. So this series of lectures commemorates George Holmes Howison. When he was 50 in 1884, Howison took the first endowed chair in philosophy at Berkeley, and he built the philosophy department here. He was clearly a charismatic and much-loved individual, and on his death, his friends and colleague put together a fund that is paying for today's lecture even now to continue Howison's work to bring the most distinguished and influential thinkers of the day from the great metropolitan centres out here to the rural wilderness of California. I like to think that as one of the leaders of that colourful group, the St. Louis Hegelians, Howison would have greatly approved of the choice of Beatrice Longines as our speaker today. Beatrice was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, at the Sorbonne also in Paris, and Princeton. Her first book, Can't in the Capacity to Judge, published in 1998, was instantly acclaimed as a remarkable contribution. It was an extended meditation on, among other things, Can't's remark that the categories originate in the logical functions of judgement. Somewhat dizzying, if I may say so, but a really deep and important subject, and her book really changed how people were thinking about it. Her second book, Can't in the Human Standpoint, further developed her view, responded to criticisms and deepened and extended it. In Hegel's critique of metaphysics, she went back to her dissertation work and took on the task of explaining the relations between Can't and Hegel. So this is a background in the very deepest metaphysics, and our 2017 book, I, Me, Mine, Back to Can't and Back Again, really expanded the canvas. It looked at self-consciousness and eye-thinking, how we think of ourselves as people, and looked at contemporary debates about self-consciousness in the light of these background ideas. On Beatrice's view, the Kantian, I think, relates to the awareness of our own activity in binding together representations into thoughts. That a thought is the product of some activity involving the binding of various representations into a single object, and then saying something about that object, binding the whole lot together into a single thought. The I in the I think is thought of as a reflection of one's own capacity for that kind of intellectual activity. She tried to avoid the idea of Kantian transcendental subjects and compared the I to Freud's ego and the moral I to Freud's superego. Harvard's Matt Boyle said in mind, one is not likely to find a more illuminating guide to modern theories of the self and self-consciousness and Kant's special place among them on this important book. Our Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam, The First Person in Cognition and Morality, were published in 2019. I'm full of expectation, but I really can't wait to hear what is coming for us today, so please join me in welcoming Professor Longnes. Thank you very much for this wonderful introduction. Thank you also for the invitation to give this year's Harrison Lecture. I'm deeply honoured, deeply honoured by the invitation, and thank you all for being here. So I want to check the time as I don't have my phone. Shortly before coming to Berkeley to give this lecture, I was asked to sign a consent and release form which read like this. I'm not going to read the whole form, just the beginning of each sentence on the form. I am a presenter speaker for the above event, the above event being the Harrison Lecture in Philosophy with Beatrice Longnes. I understand the event will be videotaped and recorded. There follows the list of uses that could be made of the recording. I give my permission and authorize the university to videotape, audio tape, and follows the whole list of uses it could make of it. I declare I have read the above and I fully understand the meaning and effect. I agree to be bound by it and then there's a space to print my name. There's a space to give the date and then the space for signing in person so that it is quite clear that the person who says I agree etc etc is the person named Beatrice Longnes who has been tested to this by signing her own name. We all have many, many instances where we thus have to attest. I agree to this, this and that and then to sign our name. Here's the best of them in my case. As a French citizen picking up French retirement benefits for the time I taught in France, where I now live in the US, I have to sign every year, I kid you not, a certificate of existence, a certificate that I exist. Signed in front of a notary public, it's true, I'm not inventing it. I Beatrice Longnes, a test that I exist. It is important that the person who says I exist is the person whose name is Beatrice Longnes as a tested by the government issued ID I have to bring to the notary public. And I have to sign in front of the notary public so that he can attest that the person who signed is the person named Beatrice Longnes and the person who says I exist etc etc. I won't give you any more examples. But we do all have to make at some point those kinds of statements in the first person. Why? After all, if I wrote Beatrice Longnes pledges and then signed, we would know that one person pledged and signed. It would give enough information. Why do we have this device which everyone uses in that sense it's universal, but uses only to refer to the person she herself is in that sense it's singular. The name is only singular. Maybe there are other Beatrice Longnes in which case I would have to give some definite description that specifies which I'm talking about. But basically I could use just the name. There are countless attempts both in the history of philosophy and in contemporary philosophy to address these questions. And this puzzlement, why on earth do we have this extra device, the first person pronoun? I don't think any of them fully exhausts the question. I don't think mine will either. Obviously there are many different angles under which one might address the question. What I intend to do in this talk is to consider two ways of addressing it, which I will argue are quite different but mutually illuminating. I call the first way, Anscombe's way, because in presenting it I'm inspired by a famous paper by Elizabeth Anscombe, the first person published in 1975. And I call the second way, Sartre's way, because it is inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre. The text I will be appealing to in his case are the transcendence of the ego 1937 and being in nothingness 1943. In both cases I'm going to be selective in the particular arguments I borrow from them and I will use those arguments to my own ends. The first way, Anscombe's, addresses the question from the standpoint of language analysis. What do we do with I in language or more generally, what do we do with the first person in language and in thought? The second way, Sartre's way, addresses the question from the standpoint of what we call and he calls phenomenology. And I don't mean by the school of phenomenology, but just a method which consists in the description of our experience of the world and of ourselves. Insofar as the first person I come into his investigation, the question is what are its place and its role in the expression of our experience of the world and of ourselves. The two types of questions are clearly not foreign to one another. Indeed, I think there is quite a bit of phenomenology in the sense I just explained, especially in the solution Anscombe offers, and surprisingly enough there is quite a bit of language analysis, although not as rigorous as we might like, but it does play a role in Sartre's phenomenological descriptions. So my first part, the plot for the paper is quite simple. My first part will be Anscombe's way, my second part will be Sartre's way, and I will end with a few conclusions about what lessons we can draw from their cross pollination in some way. So I start with Anscombe's way, that's point one on your handout. I am skipping the little story about Oedipus, on which I had a nice land of my own, but for lack of time I go directly to a thought experiment Anscombe coins, which essentially is clarifying the kind of point I was trying to make with Oedipus. The thought experiment is the following, so I go directly to one-one a thought experiment. A users and I users. And the experiment is this, imagine a population in which each individual has two names. One consists in a letter of the alphabet, printed on the top of their chest and their back so that they can see it, but other people can see it. Which others can see and which others use to designate them to convey information about them. The person who has those names on her chest and on her back. So that they learn to respond to that name just by the fact that others call them by that name and call upon them by that name. But the other name is the letter A, the same name for everyone, just like our eye, the same name for everyone, printed on each person's wrist, so that each person alone, at least in the normal case, there can be slips where you catch a glimpse of someone else's wrist, but in the normal case you see your own wrist and no other. And so when other people, for instance, would call me B, I would call the person I am A. And I would learn that the person I call A is the person other people call B. There's clearly a similarity between the duality of names, a name A which everyone used only for themselves, and the names B, C, D, and you can go to the end of the alphabet and then to another alphabet as many as you need, which are public names which are used by others. There's a similarity between that case and our duality of terms, one which is I, which each of us uses only to talk about themselves, and the public name which we have learnt is our name because other people call us that way, and perhaps first our parents call us that way. And so it is tempting to say just like A in our imaginary population is a name everyone uses to talk about themselves, I in our own population is a name each of us talks about ourselves. And this is how Anscom wraps up her story. That's the one on your handout. In my story we have a specification of a sign, we are talking about the A population here, not the I population which we are. In my story we have a specification of a sign as a name, the same for everyone, but used by each to speak only of himself. How does it compare with I? And as she says, the first thing to say, to note is that our description of the A users does not include self-consciousness on the part of the people who use the name A as I have described it. But then she goes on to say, but it's a weird thing to say that they don't have self-consciousness. After all, B who uses A is conscious, that is to say he observes some of B's activities, that is to say his own. He uses the term A as does everyone else to refer to himself. So he's conscious of himself. So he has self-consciousness. And again she replies, but when we speak of self-consciousness we don't mean that. We mean something manifested by the use of I as opposed to A. Now this last sentence like the previous one has a suspicious air of circularity. We want to know the difference between our fictitious population of A users and the population of I users, the population we are, and we're given the reply, well, I users, not A users, only I users have self-consciousness. But now we want to know what self-consciousness is and the reply as well is what I users have and A users don't. How is this an explanation? Well it's not. It's just a statement of an intuition we have about the case at hand. The I users report about their own whereabouts on the basis of observation, testimony and inference, the very same sources of information they have about the whereabouts of other people. They observe that the body that carries the letter A is written only on their own, moves, they can infer from what other people say that something happened to that body, and so on and so forth, just like they would do for other people. The only difference is that the name A happens to apply in each case to the person who reports the whereabouts of A. Being conscious of themselves in enscomes wrapping up assessment is just observing themselves, making inferences about the person who is signaled by the letter on their wrist which they alone can see and hearing testimony about the person they happen to be called by others, let's say in my case, B in which they call A. But on the other hand, there is this particular source of information specific to I or the I user self-consciousness. If we want to get out of the circle, the circle is explaining the difference between I users and A users by saying that the first, not the second have self-consciousness, and then explaining self-consciousness as what the I users have, if we want to get out of that circle, we need to know what self-consciousness is. And then we will know what we do when we report beliefs about the person we are based on that particular source of information, self-consciousness. And this is indeed what Anscomb goes on to do, offering a first explanation of what self-consciousness might be and correspondingly, what kind of word which what function in our language and thought I is. But that first explanation collapses both as an explanation of self-consciousness and as an explanation of the role of I. And so she offers a second explanation which this time does not start from self-consciousness but starts from what an I thought is and by I thought she means a thought in which I, the word I but then in thought the concept I occupies the position apparently of subject and then you can apply a predicus to that subject. She starts from that and from there it seems emerges a new notion of self-consciousness which taken things in the reverse order. So I will get to her solution of course but before getting to her solution it is worth lingering on the first explanation the one that collapses for two reasons. It does have a long history in the history of philosophy and whether we realize it or not it is a very tempting way in which we sort of apply everyday life to think about I. So I start with the first explanation which starts with self-consciousness and the question is what is self-consciousness? Well, one tempting response which seems very natural is is the consciousness of a self but what is a self? Well, is what one is to oneself. So there is the person called be whom everyone can see and make judgments about and draw inferences about and then there is this much more secret aspect of me what people see is the outside me but there is an inside me which I alone have access to and the discrepancy would exist between the outside me and the inside me I am so intimately aware of at every aspect of life for instance even some common situation like this be do you want to go to the movie and I say yeah I would like to go to the movie with this reply I alone know the flow of associations that go with my replying I would like to go to the movie the flow of associations feelings, expectations, hopes, fears what happened the last time I went to the movies and so on so other people do see me as the person who wants to go to the movie we'll go together to the movie but there's something much deeper in me about what it means to so much want at this time to go to the movie of course I can tell it to other I can start telling about my associations it's never going to be sufficient to get to the deep me that is the one who wants to go to the movie I know it from the inside and this goes for everything with something even more commonsensical as this is a tree out there and we all agree and I will reinforce my statement by saying I know this is a tree because I see it now the experience of seeing the tree is just mine and other people will also say yeah I know this is a tree because I see it and their experience is there so there's the common world on which we can agree but then there's for each of us the internal experience in virtue of which we see that world so we could say being a self and then we will explain self-consciousness being a self is being the kind of entity that does not only report about the world or act on the world or react to the world in ways everybody else can see but is aware of her own reaction to the world and of the fact that that awareness is absolutely singular that's what makes us a self so there's me as the very public persona whom everybody including that persona herself knows by her public name like the air users know themselves in the way other people know them for the others their public name for the air user in the same way but by that name that she alone sees and then for us our users there is myself what I'm most inwardly and we do often protest that's why I say it's a very common experience but that's not me the way I'm depicted the way others see me but also perhaps the way I have acted out what I get at the people to see of me that's not me I know that's not me that's the basis on which I make such statement is I alone know what the true me is namely myself and so I want to add and maybe I want to spend too much time on this because I think I'm already going a bit over but I do want to mention that the philosopher who most forcefully introduced that notion of a self is John Locke in the 17th century here's what he said when we see, hear, smell, taste sensory and sort of affective experiences but also when we meditate like Descartes the pure form of thinking or when we will our thinking is directed to agency anything we know that we do so thus it is always as to our present sensations and present experiences that we have always as to our present sensations and perceptions and by this everyone is to himself what he calls self it not being considered in this case whether the same self is continued in the same or in diverse substances so there's the self which one is to oneself in virtue of all of those mental activities he's just listed and then there's the substance whatever the substance is and the identity condition of the two are not going to be the same and he goes on to say that's what I'm skipping a bit he says as far as his consciousness can be extended backwards in any past action or thought so far reaches the identity of that person it is the same self now as it was then for him person and self are the same thing and they are different from the human being which has its own conditions of identity at different times so for law there is what I am as an entity located in space and time a human being moving through the world performing actions expressing feelings talking but then there is what I am to myself a self conscious of our own motion actions feelings willing and so on the two in most normal circumstances overlap enough sort of consider them as the same when the living body moves the person who is a self to a self is aware of its motion when the body is heard the self experiences hurt in this inward way and so on the motions and actions of the body that the body has performed in the past the self remembers having experienced in the past a present self experiences its own identity with the past self in virtue of experiencing being now the self that remembers the very experiences of the past self experience and so on so in normal cases they overlap that's okay but in many cases the identity at different times of the self and the human being or the living entity don't overlap I may remember as mine as experiences I myself had experienced which no event we all know about false memories it's a phenomenon that now is very widely studied so no event in the past in the objective biography of the human being suppose you have lived through the corresponding lapse of time confirms what I seem to remember as something I have done to me says something about what and who I am luck actually bit that bullet happily and he says that well the identity of self is just not the same as the identity of the human being if the individual who in the past world is a prince now has all and only the memories of the cobbler who was mending shoes by the side of his palace and continues to have all and only the experiences of the cobbler then as a self he is the cobbler well as a human being which includes his biological and social identity he is still the prince so you will have a very befuddled cobbler who finds himself bowed to by courtyirs and thinking what is he doing there is a complete so of course this is a case imagine by luck himself saying biting yeah right no the difference there is a self and then there is the human being this raises all sorts of paradoxes about responsibility moral accountability and so on which luck delighted in discussing but without going into those issues one can ask even granting his notion of the identity of self as distinct from the identity of man where do we have a criterion for the identity of self itself how do we know that our present recollection of a past experience is indeed a recollection rather than a fantasy and the identity of self is supposed to be the identity of the current recollecting self with the self which actually experience the recollected experience but how do we know that in fact whether our current being self to one self is identical to any past being self to one self nothing guarantees it which is different from the human being of course because there there's space and time there's a public discourse are this can confirm or disconfirm we know what footing we're on but with the self we don't and so we're stuck with the idea well maybe the self is limited to an instantaneous being self to one self and actually some people you know philosophers are capable of defending any view and there are some people who defend that view the self is just instantaneous but even if you say that where's the limit where do you get to the actual instant where the self how is there not a composition of selves in what we think is an instant and so on there's no criterion now to this notion of self and self consciousness as consciousness of a self corresponds a way of characterising the word I and it's different from A that's why it's so tempting because you can say that's one three on the handout I as the name of a self you can say just as A in our fictitious population is a name the same for everyone by which each a user refers to the person she in fact is while other people refer to her by using other names different for each individually similarly I is a name the same for everyone but this time by which each user refers to her self her self namely her self as we have just characterised it in saying self consciousness is consciousness of a self the difference with A is that the self is accessible only to the user whereas the entity the A user refers to using the name A is the very same entity referred to by another name the public name used by everyone else we were wondering what makes I different from A, well that's what it is A is a name the name for everyone the same for everyone which refers to the person who sees A on the wrist A is a name the same for everyone that refers to the self which each person has access to in virtue of being aware and being alone aware of her own but all the difficulties we encounter identifying what that self might be beyond an instantaneous subjective object those difficulties also hold for the idea of a self as what I refers to or is a name for and we'll have the same difficulties occurring if we try to define I as a demonstrative referring to what the self because it can be to this body then it would be just A but the same difficulties and others and more occur again and so ens comes in a way perfectly reasonable conclusion is well it's just a mistake to think that I refers to anything at all we cannot say it refers to the body we've lost the difference between I and A we cannot say it refers to a self because there's no way of identifying a self as an object we have to figure out something else to be the role of I and so that's why that one of the most striking statements in the paper which I find great but really mind boggling is well this means that I am Elizabeth Enscom is not an identity proposition it is not a proposition that asserts that when said by Elizabeth Enscom A oh sorry I I refers to the very same entity which the name Elizabeth Enscom refers to which would be but an identity proposition is you have two terms they refer in different way to the same entity and it seems to stand to good sense that when Elizabeth Enscom says I'm Elizabeth Enscom I refer to Elizabeth Enscom and Elizabeth Enscom I refer to Elizabeth Enscom when I say I'm Beatrice Longaness I refer to Beatrice Longaness and Beatrice Longaness refers to Beatrice Longaness that's the point of those forms I signed so even though the reasoning is really very powerful we really cannot get your mind around the conclusion but still now we want her positive proposal to see why well she does have a solution to offer so she starts by giving examples which you have on the handout just under I think one four but I'm not going to look at the examples just now I'm going to look at them a bit later I'm going to go directly to okay so what is the alternative account of I she has to offer and she has several which amount to the same and I'm giving only two which I find the most salient the most striking that's T3 and T4 on your handout I thought so I thought again I thought in which I functions as logical subject and something I am F I'm standing I'm running I'm sad I'm thinking a predicate of that logical subject I and correspondingly in language I is the grammatical subject and then there's an attribute to the subject okay so I thought so defined I thought are unmediated conceptions unmediated conceptions knowledge or belief true or false of states, motions etc and then she continues of the subject here and that's how we are supposed to understand it of the subject here of which I can find out so she would say if I don't know it that is Elizabeth Anscombe people have called her so many times Elizabeth Anscombe she has to know Elizabeth Anscombe and about which I did learn that's what we learn in biology classes or in reading Aristotle that it is a human being that's her first of course I will comment on it but that's the first characterization the second characterization is at the very end of the paper and unfortunately I cannot comment on the circumstances in which it appears maybe it will come up in the discussion the second characterization is I thought are unmediated again the unmediated agent or patient conceptions of actions happenings and states and there's not anymore in this object here in this body it's just agent or patient conceptions of actions, happenings and states so here's what we're supposed to understand at least as I understand it I thought, thought expressed in the first person with I as the logical subject of the thought or in language the grammatical subject of the corresponding sentence I thought about an object that's what T3 says but where the information about the object is not obtained by observation inference or testimony as in ordinary thoughts about objects and as in the I thought considered in the thought experiment I started with the information is obtained in virtue of being the object in question and perhaps experiencing being the object in question this is what she calls unmediated conception of states, motions etc of this object here or in T4 even more tellingly agent or patient conceptions of actions happenings and states unmediated because not mediated by observation inference or testimony and agent or patient conceptions because they had in virtue of being in the state asserted in the proposition now in all the examples we go back to the beginning of the examples I gave just under 1.4 in all the examples you note that the statement she cites except for the last one I will go somewhere or other this statement about a body assertions of bodily states I jump I have an itch I run whatever but the assertions and that's why there is this object here but the assertion is made not from the point of view of an observer but from being in the state asserted by proprioception I'm sitting by intention I will go at the same time the statement is about the body this body here that the statement is made from the point of view of being in the state described is what is expressed by I but at the same time the statement can be verified or falsified only by observing this body here so here on the handout you have a series of objections and I'm going to skip the second but I think I'm going to go through the first because I think it at least trying to go through these objections and responding to them clarified for me what she had in mind but I'm going to skip the second which introduces more complex issues so objection so she says we don't need to ask what I refers to it doesn't refer it's just the fact that the information is acquired not by observation but by being and perhaps being namely experiencing but even not necessarily just being in the state that's what's expressed by I and so one objection is why then not say that I refers to this body here it's this body here that is itching sitting disposed to go when I say I'm sitting I'm itching I intend to go and so on Enskan might reply that's what I'm trying to invent in her place maybe she would have a better reply this would take us back to the question how does I differ from A which clearly refers to the body rebuttal of that reply well I does differ from A in that it refers to this body yes but not from observing this body but from being this body Enskan's rebuttal of the rebuttal but we also think I thoughts while having no information whatsoever about the body and which assert states that are not states of the body if we say that I refers to the body we have no way of accounting for those cases of I thoughts for instance we can imagine that's a very famous thought experiment she offers at very stages in the paper we can imagine someone in sensory deprivation tank absolutely no sense of her body not by external sense, not by inter-reception no thing, nothing whatever, no information whatever coming from the body that's a thought experiment so the sensory deprivation tank goes all the way down as it were but she could still think I'm in a dreadful situation what shall I do and that does not involve the body she's capable of accounting of something going on some mental state some mental attitude going on of which there is being in that state information also going on and that's what's expressed by I similarly more common cases the so-called what she calls the Cartesianly preferred cases where we just ascribe to ourselves mental states we don't need to be aware of our body to ascribe to ourselves those states there's a famous story in Plato Thales who was thinking so hard about geometry that he fell into the well and the servant had a good laugh at Thales and now he has to become aware of his body of course but while thinking about geometrical proof didn't need to think about his body but he was using I saying oh I think that's right or I better think about that proof again I is the expression of being oneself engaged in putting together a proof testing a proof and so on so it's better to say agent or patient conception of states conception of states from the standpoint of being in those states rather than observing those states and sometimes we just have no answer to the question in what thing are those states verified or falsified which is something she said I think that is a problem for her view actually but that's yeah in the case of the sensory deprivation or in the pure cases of Cartesianly preferred cases as I think about thinking there has to be something that's in those states but the I is not expressing in a way of that something but just an awareness of being in those states okay my second objection I'm skipping and I go directly to my introduction of why it's interesting to think about Sartsway first of all taking stock my suggestion is that she's on the right track by rejecting the idea that I refer to a special object the self defined as a special internal object she's on the right track by insisting that what is characteristic of my thoughts is the standpoint expressed not an observer standpoint but what she calls an agent or patient standpoint which I'll call a standpoint of just being in the state which may be a state in which I'm implementing the state or a state in which I'm acted upon that's what she calls a patient information but it is unnecessarily complicated is what I'm suggesting to claim that when I say I'm Elizabeth Anscombe I'm not saying that an entity referred to supposing I'm Elizabeth Anscombe so I'm identifying momentarily with Elizabeth Anscombe supposing I'm Elizabeth Anscombe when I say I'm Elizabeth Anscombe it's unnecessarily complicated to say that it's not true that an entity referred to by I is the very same entity referred to by Elizabeth Anscombe just as in the form I had to sign I the undersigned refers to the person who signs and who is as it happens the person referred to by the name Beatrice Longanes as the notary public can attest now both points I thought are not thoughts about an object a self they express an agent or patient standpoint on something that remains to be identified are close to a position between Sartre developed some 30 years before Anscombe wrote a celebrated paper I'm not saying this to play the game of precedence or to gloat about the fact that a Frenchman had those thoughts I'm saying this just because if I'm right that there is a closeness between Sartre's and Anscombe's view they are developed from very different standpoints language analysis with some phenomenology tossed in Anscombe after all her examples are very very phenomenologically telling and phenomenology with some language analysis tossed in in Sartre most importantly Sartre starting point is not a puzzle about language Sartre starting point is a fact about us that we are conscious the uses of I in its complexities is to be understood against the background of the different types of consciousness they are anchored in and so I moved to point to Sartre's way what time did I start do you have an idea when I started because I'm about halfway through but it means I'm okay so Sartre's way takes its starting point from a more primitive phenomenon than language consciousness and so I want to start apologizing for the sort of detour through Sartre's own thought I start with at least a few indications about Sartre's conceptual toolkit to talk when he talks about consciousness and the toolkit is consciousness, self-consciousness and reflective consciousness that will be the first point in this second part of the paper then I will reflect on when does the use of I fit in the description of those phenomena and third since the point also did come up in Enskam's reflection but with a kind of unresolved point about the relation to the body what is the relation between I and the body or if you like between using I and the I users consciousness of her own body so first consciousness, self-consciousness, reflective consciousness consciousness is a property we human beings have other beings may have it what interests Sartre's human beings consciousness is a property we human beings have in fact we are most fundamentally conscious beings now consciousness as the fundamental property of the kinds of entities we are has two aspects the first is intentionality which Sartre also calls positional consciousness or static consciousness that's the kind of sort of jargon he inherits from the history of philosophy and I'm going to go into that when he says static or positional he means intentionality what we would call the directedness of the mental state or the directedness of the attitude of the individual that is in those states the second is what we would call I think although they may be debate about that I think it's what we would call phenomenal consciousness what it's like for the conscious creature to be conscious he calls this second aspect which for him is inseparable from the first non-thetic or non-positional self-consciousness I now consider each in turn intentionality or positional consciousness or static consciousness intentionality is the directedness of the mental state or mental attitude the fact that it is of something directed at something perceiving is perceiving a tree a car the person in this room and so on hating is hating someone or hating a situation thinking is thinking about something all of these are conscious state in the sense of intentional states now the entity which is in those states is conscious in the same sense she's conscious of whatever object her attention is directed at in virtue of being in those states the tree as the tree she's now perceiving the person as the person she can't stand the situation as the situation she would like to get out of and so on that's for static consciousness non-thetic self in parenthesis to indicate it's not the consciousness of a self according to Sartre this second aspect is inseparable from the first being conscious that we are conscious being aware of our own consciousness as intentionality is inseparable from that intentionality if we were not aware of our mental states being directed at something then those states would not deserve to be called conscious states so I'm reserving the question whether there could be intentional states that are not conscious in this second sense Sartre's term consciousness involves those two aspects intentionality and the non-positional consciousness of being in the intentional state itself and again in the second sense consciousness is both an aspect or property of the state and of the creature who is in the state to say that she's a conscious being and to say that she has mental states directed at the world she has positional consciousness of objects in the world she has intentionality and it is to say that she's aware of her own intentionality the directedness of her own mental state and of being in those states that's the phenomenal aspect however again this second aspect of consciousness is not a second order intentionality directed at the first there is a second order intentionality directed at the first that's what Sartre calls reflective consciousness I had something on the hand out I'm skipping that because I want to go we will get back to reflective intentionality directed at the first I'm going directly to the second point which is I think I'm going directly to that which is where does I appear where does the use of I appear that's 2-2 on your hand out and here I'm going to take a risk I'm going to borrow two examples from Sartre I don't think that excellent examples are excellently presented but I still think it's important to consider them in the terms in which he offers them and to see how we can make sense of them and move on from them the first example I'm considering them in chronological first order the first example I'm considering is a very famous example from being in nothingness 1943 the second will be from the transcendence of the ego 1937 so previous text which maybe explains partly why it's kind of more wishy-washy in what it's saying but I think there's another reason so first I consider the example from being in nothingness so you have the text I'm not going to read the text the example is counting cigarettes not surprising for Sartre Saint-Germain-des-Paris was a place where people smoked a lot so the example is counting I count the cigarettes left in my packet wondering do I have enough for the rest of the day but I'm just engaging the act of counting my cigarettes I count and I will eventually arrive at the number 12 the act itself counting is comes to be a definable unified act when I get to its goal I have figured out the number 12 as the property of this collection of cigarettes so the aesthetic consciousness is directed at the cigarettes and at the number which in fact there's another text where Sartre just talks about the number it's an abstract object I can speak about number it's an abstract object the intentionality is directed at that but at the same time in order to get at that object to have an intentional awareness a directedness of my mental attitude at the object 12 as the property of the collection of cigarettes I have to be counting them and I have to not lose track of my act of counting them so I have to be nonthetically conscious my attention is not directed at the act of counting if it was I would stop counting and maybe at some point I would stop oh I've lost track let me start again oh yeah where was I then I'm reflecting but if my act is successful I'm not reflecting on it I'm going on with it and if someone comes into the room and asks me what are you doing I'll say shh I'm counting I'm going on with my counting so his point is here the phrase I'm counting is expressed not as the expression of a aesthetic consciousness of myself as counting it's the expression of a non-thetic consciousness very much like Anscombe said the use of I is really the way to understand it is the expression of agent or patient conception of states in this case it's an action the act of counting the expression of an agent conception of counting without me myself being the object of consciousness as intentionality and so I have identified four points in the text I have not read the text but I go quickly through the points since now I have summarized the situation point one I have aesthetic or positional consciousness of the cigarettes and of their property there are 12 cigarettes this is an objective property in the world of objects I have aesthetic or positional consciousness of it two, meanwhile I have a non-positional consciousness of in parenthesis to indicate it's not intentionality my act of counting in fact my positional consciousness of there being 12 cigarettes is inseparable from my non-thetic consciousness of counting if I turn my attention back I would lose track and if I lost track of any of the steps in my act of counting I could lose track of the number in fact I may be annoyed at the person who asks me the question she's potentially distracting me distracting my attention from the cigarettes and their number to my act which is not what I want to do but in the case described happily this is not what happens I'm just keeping counting three you will see the identification of the points in the text if you want to go back to it I reply I'm counting immediately without reflecting and my reply tracks all the previous instances of non-thetic self-consciousness that accompanied each step of the act of counting I had to be non-theticly conscious that I was at one and then at two and then at three and then at four otherwise I would not get to the whole series so there was all along a non-thetic consciousness which grows on itself as it were and starts conclusion there is a pre-reflective cogito agential consciousness of some mental act which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito now the Cartesian cogito that's where we get to reflective consciousness Descartes in the second throughout the first meditation Descartes has reflected on each and every one of his mental acts and realized that he couldn't trust any of them and in the beginning of the second meditation he gets to oh wait a minute but if I doubt each and every one of them as I should I have no reason to trust them at least there's this one thing I doubt and if I doubt I think I'm still thinking so I have this thing this is a reflective consciousness he's reflecting on acts that have been going on including his current act of doubting and it's this reflection that lands him and of course Sartre's view is that it's because it's a reflective consciousness that as a reflective consciousness namely now we're directing our attention to acts instead of doing them then we can construct this object which is a fictitious object and there's a thing that has to be the thing that does the thinking and that's Descartes idea of a thing that thinks namely a soul which he will then go on reasoning is distinct from the body but if we're just doing the thing the eye just expresses the essential concept in this case of being engaged in an act without any object being represented so much less a self okay, skipping again so the important point here is that I said there's something very similar in Sartre's conception of eye as expressing a non-sathetic conception and and Scum saying agent or patient conception of states attitudes or even just events going on somewhere and there's also a similar suspicion with respect to the idea of an eye or a self or an ego as the object of self-consciousness now I want to look at the other example I announced which is the example from the transcendence of the ego which involves this time the consciousness of a bodily agency and actually it does complicate matters so here the case is again I'm doing something someone comes into the room that's T6 on the hand out but you don't have to read it I will go through the points but first I summarize the example and what are you doing and I say he gives two examples I'm repairing the tire or I'm hanging the picture, I'm trying to hang this picture and he expands on the second example I'm trying to hang the picture and here's what he says first where is static consciousness directed at? static consciousness is directed at the picture to be hung as an object in the world that's where my attention is directed at and it's that goal that the picture be hung that unifies the act that's going on but he also says and this where I think he's a bit wishy washy he also says my attention is also directed at the act which is not what he said in the case of counting and I think what he means is that what in the case of hanging the picture you know I do have to pay attention for instance to perhaps my hand that's holding the nail I better be aware where it is because I don't want to bang my hammer against the hand similarly I have to be aware of how I'm holding that hammer so that I go in the right direction that of the nail not that of my finger and so on but at the same time of course what is it that is doing the act it's the very same body that also is being watched as part of the causal chain which starts with its goal the picture is to be hung and then you have a chain you know nail hold with my finger hammer hold with my other hand bang the nail not hit my finger and then maybe I'm standing on the ladder and I have to be in the right position and the picture in the right place close enough that I can now take it there's all sorts of going on in my body that I have to observe but at the same time who is doing this the body from a different standpoint but does I refer to that body bizarrely he says and that's the point 2 which you have on the handout when I reply I'm hanging the picture I'm not directing my attention to some entity I call I and there he puts it in italics if I envisage the actions I envisage the actions just not in so far as they are done or to be done not in so far as I am doing them in so far as I am doing them I have no static consciousness of them and that's the third point which is even stranger in that sentence I is an empty concept he doesn't say just that he says it's not just a mere syntactic form it is an empty concept destined to be empty that's what you have at the end of the text and which I identified as point 3 in the text nevertheless I is not a mere syntactic form it's an empty concept destined to remain empty now a mere syntactic form is what I is for enscom it is just a trick of our language that agent or patient conception is formulated using a first person pronoun the first person just indicates a switch in stand point from an observational stand point to an agent or patient stand point on a state action or motion but I should not be treated like an ordinary subject in a subject predicate proposition which would be a concept referring to a particular object now clearly Sartre does not know enscom's view this book and even more is written 30 years earlier but clearly he was tempted by a similar view when he says I is not a mere syntactic device is because it could be given the explanation I've given it's just a syntactic device to express non-tytic consciousness of being engaged in the action but that's not what it is he says it's an empty concept so I think what this shows is that Sartre does not share enscom's suspicion with respect to the subject predicate model but he does see the problem enscom is after and he's trying to solve by saying well I just express agent or patient conception of states events, actions, motions and so on and so because of that enscom concludes it's not a singular referring expression at all in Sartre's term I is an empty concept there is something that is designated by I when I say I'm hanging this picture there is an object in the world in which the motions that together amount to hanging the picture can be observed but that is not an object for the concept I so closer to say there's one and the same thing which you will refer to in very very different way one by a concept that remains empty but never there's plays an important role if only to then become aware of the various identifications it could come to define for itself in the world so there is still some entity whose existence is indicated by the mere fact that I is in use that's why Sartre is still willing to call I a concept namely something that does function as a component in a proposition in which it functions as a logical subject of logical predicates and where the subject refers to some individual entity and the predicate asserts properties, acts, states to be true of that individual that's where the key difference is I think between Sartre's view and Anskin's view why is it important after all why should we care because there's a similar intuition in both cases that if it is a referring expression it's really of a very unique kind and that leads me to my third point in the second part the body passed over in silence in the concluding section of an important chapter of being a nothingness the body Sartre has this striking formulation in non-thetic self-consciousness the body is passed over in silence the body is passed under silence that's not really a satisfactory equivalent it's passed over it's left in silence we're silent about it non-thetic self-consciousness is silent about it now we can see what he may mean in the case of the non-thetic self-consciousness of counting expressed in the pre-reflective statement I count this is the expression of a mental act which one knows to be occurring in virtue of performing it nobody's self-consciousness is involved unless perhaps I'm physically pointing to each cigarette as I pronounce but even there I would be pointing to the cigarette not to my finger that points for the same reason in the case of hanging the picture one can say in non-thetic self-consciousness of hanging the object in the non-thetic consciousness of a hanging the object of consciousness is the picture and also the parts of the body directly connected to the picture in the cause of the chain that ends in the goal being achieved but then there are objects of thetic consciousness parts of the chain in the form hand hammer finger nail picture in the non-thetic self-consciousness involved in the whole action the body is passed over in silence in non-thetic self-consciousness every object including the body that acts in so far as it acts is passed over in silence that's the insight Sartre expresses when he says even in the case of I'm hanging the picture that I there is an empty concept and yet if I turn around and make consciousness itself namely non-thetic consciousness and its intentionality if I make it itself the object of a second order intentionality what I find at least that's the claim is that that conscious entity is a body in both cases namely the counting and the hanging the picture a conscious body namely a body having intentionality and non-thetic self-consciousness this is true both for the entity that has non-thetic self-consciousness in counting and the entity that has non-thetic self-consciousness in hanging the picture if the self as a mental entity was a mental construct for Sartre namely a fictitious entity that may have its use and in that sense the view is not exactly the same as Enscombe but it's something we should be suspicious of on the other hand the self-conscious body as the entity that thinks is not a construct it's just an object in the world which has this peculiarity that on it one can have an external observational standpoint or an immediate agent of a patient standpoint a standpoint one has in virtue of being that body in which case the body can be passed over in silence now you might think I'm pulling a strange and unexpected I hear by the silence I think that you do think I'm pulling a strange and unexpected rabbit out of my hat by suddenly saying that in reflecting on the act of counting and on the non-thetic self-consciousness involved in counting or for that matter even in thinking the second order reflective-thetic-consciousness directs its intentional attitude at a body now defending the point we necessitate going into more details of Sartre's mammoth book than I can do here and maybe we can discuss some aspects of it in the Q&A I will simply note that if the notion of an internal self is a fictitious construct what Sartre calls a body in this case reflecting back on the consciousness and what the consciousness is and why it is what it is what he calls body here is a body in situation and that is not a mental construct it's a self-conscious body that has learned various practices including language reasoning and yes counting the reflection on the act of counting is a reflection on those various practices that always involve a body in situation if only in the small size learning to count which then proliferates into very abstract for the theorists of number reflections on number a body in situation that can and should be passed over in silence when intentionality is directed at an object which is not itself and which now the object about which I'm trying to think establishes its own norms for the correct type of reasoning that needs to be involved but at some point in reflecting on what that act exactly is I will go back to learning a practice and in your practice will involve the practice of a body in situation that's the view at least that's what I can sort of endorse of the view and I'm willing to discuss so taking stock I have outlined significant points of convergence between the Anscomway and the Sartreway those points of convergence include first the contrast between observational and non-observational standpoint on states, actions and motions second the claim that I thought are expressions of non-observational standpoint but can be connected to thoughts about the very same entity from the observational standpoint three the criticism of the notion of an intimate internal self the lock in self or Cartesian ego for Anscomway the constructed eye of reflection for Sartreway and fourth the connection between I thoughts and knowledge of or consciousness of the body although that connection is very different for Sartreway and for Anscomway and for Anscomway at some point it ends on no answer and in Sartreway it does end on some kind of answer although we may find it pretty complex to swallow now one might think that there is not much of a difference between thinking like Anscomway that I thought are agent or patient conception of states, motions, actions occurring in this object here or in no object if none is available and no observable object if none is available and Sartreway view that I thought are the expression of non-positional self-consciousness propositions in which I is an empty concept according to the formulation of the transcendence of the ego but there is a difference which I think is meaningful adopting Sartreway's view of I as an empty concept allows us at least to say that I in I thought does have a referential role but in no other way than according to the rule I refer to the eye user a rule that does not need to be reflected on in order to be used it's just used to use the word in language and in thought according to that rule and being capable of learning such a rule is actually quite an achievement I submit that Sartreway's approach building up from more primitive to more sophisticated experiences of being a conscious entity solves problems that were acknowledged but not really resolved when addressed in Anscomway in particular had to have a unified account of the agent conception of mental states counting and bodily states sitting, jumping, hanging a picture had to understand how one and the same entity can have can be non-phatically conscious of in parenthesis itself and conscious of itself as an object in the world namely have observational and non-observational standpoint on itself and its own actions but on the other hand revisiting Sartre's view of self-consciousness and eye thoughts through the lens of Anscomway's semantic analysis helps us be on our guard with respect to the grandiose metaphysical statements Sartre derives from his description of the emptiness of the concept I as the expression of non-phatic self-consciousness in that sense Anscomway's lesson to Sartre is at least as welcome as Sartre's lesson Anscomway, thank you very much What about a third way and that's the way of neuroscience? Could we ask that people tell us their names? What about a third way and that's the way of neuroscience? Because in the last 30 years there's been an amazing amount of work that's been done about consciousness and language has zero to do with consciousness we have babies who are conscious we have hydroencephalic people who have no cortex they're conscious we have animals that are conscious we have people like Einstein who claim they think visually not linguistically so all these arguments have little to do with consciousness Well sorry I don't want to talk too soon that's your question Did you want to say more? So what would be your answer to all this? Well that's exactly why I say it's interesting that Sartre does not start from language but start from consciousness and note that I introduced the use of I very late in the game I completely agree with you and that's something I did not discuss how the two aspects of consciousness can dissociate I do think we can have phenomenal consciousness and you can have creatures who have phenomenal consciousness without intentionality you can have also creatures sorry? Creatures have intention Well you can have so there I am not I'm not going to claim the expertise of a specialist but the only thing I want to stress is that that's exactly why I started with consciousness and for instance the experiences that I often cited of the little girl who had no cortex but still expressed affective states Of course people debate about that some people deny that she has consciousness I'm on the side of the people who say she did have consciousness she had phenomenal consciousness but she didn't have intentionality it looks like I would say states of affective consciousness that have no intentionality extreme pain just is its own thing net block defends the idea that orgasm has phenomenal consciousness and no intentionality so that they can be dissociated is at least a possibility and my answer to you is yes exactly I think there's consciousness before there is language and therefore what we need to understand is where language comes to fit into the experience of consciousness which is exactly one of the ways in which I thought Sartre's way does have something to teach to teach to the kind of extremely precise language analysis that's offered by Anscombe so I agree with you and so as to neuroscience yes it also has a lot to teach us what I would say also and I think that's one today extremely interesting aspect of neuroscience is that to understand and both consciousness and where propositional attitudes fit in and first person propositions we need not only cognitive neuroscience we need affective neuroscience and that might be part of the answer to Anscombe's problem which he says at the end I don't know on which object it could be verified I think what she has in mind and who we need to know much more about what a brain is to understand what object is verified and that we are beginning to know things about where it's verified although I suspect we still think and I think that's what we should think that the phenomena of consciousness and self-consciousness are still to this day much more complex and much more phenomenally rich than anything neuroscience tells us even though of course it's very important but neuroscience we have a number of questions I'll be passing around including the heart problem but I'll stop here I didn't talk about it you forced me to say something I won't say anything more oh hi can you hear me? I'm Sandra Durante anthropology UCLA first of all fantastic talk you cover a huge amount and there's a lot obviously you didn't say because you know it but you didn't say so just two things one is that I mean you didn't talk about intersubjectivity so can you hear me? oh yeah I didn't see where you were sorry so you didn't talk about intersubjectivity so the question of the constitution of the eye from the point of view of the other which is also for a start for a big question so I'm not going to say anything about that but that's one point the second point is that actually it relates to what was just but a previous comment which is it's not to defend the fact that I want to make the point that full disclosure I'm by training a linguist so now I'm going to say the next thing so which is that it's not necessary to say that you need language for consciousness but it's curious to me and interesting to me anthropologically that the languages of the philosophy that you talked about a language is where you need the eye the jus it's obligatory in finding it's sentences you cannot I mean a regular sentence with that the subject pronoun so subject pronoun that you need it and if you have a first person that you need to say so I mean I find it interesting so historically anthropologically that there is what I would call even an obsession with this problem of the eye as opposed to with other kinds of problems and by the way it's also interesting I'm curious what you think about that there might be a different lecture but the fact that the French like German doesn't have a word for mind so anyway there are things that go into this direction doesn't have a word for mind? you don't have a word for mind mind yeah no you don't have it okay so there were several I'll say something about intersubjectivity even though you're right it was not my topic and it's not a question Anscombe touches on at least not in that paper but I think your question is actually very important including for what I did not say but does sort of touch on what I said namely of course if you say all you need to use eye is the eye rule namely I refers in any instance of its use to whoever says there's already intersubjectivity there because it means that if you use eye you understand that anybody else who says eye referred not to me but to themselves and that's something children have there's some very funny funny things that happen with small children they still haven't figured that out so that itself is something to figure out and it shows that learning eye is learning not just me but intersubjectivity I completely agree with you and that's not only a matter of language it's a matter of theory of mind recognizing other minds and so on so absolutely agreed and then you said what striking is that in the examples given both by Anscombe and by Sartre so that's what Anscombe denies the whole point and that is what I find perhaps the most interesting in what she does namely in saying don't suppose I refer it's just an expression of what's really going on is something is going on and in that sense she completely agrees with the point of Lichtenberg for instance who says we shouldn't say I think which say it thinks thinking is going on that's what is really going on something is going on nevertheless she adds there's a sense to using eye because what it indicates is for instance a suggestion is not that thinking is going on just like thundering is going on because thundering is a process that does not involve subjectivity whereas thinking is a process that involves the what is likeness not always but very often so why was I saying that because you were wondering why eye comes in and again that's why I was careful to say ok wait a minute keep in mind the consciousness Sartre is talking about is human consciousness that's what interests him I don't think Sartre had very much interest for animals I'm not saying it's a good thing I think we do learn a lot from trying to think where the continuity relies I suspect that if we accept that animals non-human animals have at least for them a theory of mind there's some primitive eye-ness of the their own state compared to the states of others and watching what's going on with this other guide so but it's true that in the authors I'm talking about today and especially in Sartre yeah we're in the Cartesian tradition we're in the Cartesian tradition and Sartre whatever his denials are and indeed as I tried to show he thinks about eye in eye think in very different ways he's in the Cartesian tradition he's talking about consciousness in the terms of eye and a lot of what he says is also inherited from Kant and so on but I didn't talk about that either and there was another oh yeah I was surprised why did you say ok so anyway so these are my answers thank you thank you department of philosophy thank you that was a fantastic talk I wanted to ask you to say more about why you find it as I think you do you find it implausible that I am Elizabeth Anscombe isn't an identity statement so I was kind of just I was thinking a lot I mean it's fascinating that she denies that it's an identity statement and I was thinking about why like what it could be if it wasn't an identity statement and there may be a very straight forward answer to this but is there why couldn't it be the statement something like Elizabeth Anscombe is having this thought or when you sign this wonderful attestation of existence and you say I certify I am Beatrice Longnes why couldn't that be equivalent to saying Beatrice Longnes is signing this I mean I'm actually share with you I'm sympathetic to the idea that I is a referring expression but as I was thinking about Anscombe's view that it isn't I started to think well why couldn't you kind of get rid of the referring expression maybe you're kind of doing something sneaky by using the demonstrative and saying this maybe somehow you can't make sense of this without first making sense of the eye but still I just wanted to hear what your thoughts were about right so about so that's where maybe the question of language shouldn't be pushed too far because there's an answer I would give but would not be hers I'm going to give mine and then say why she's more on your side I would say if you say Elizabeth Anscombe is having this thought well suppose she says Elizabeth Anscombe is having this thought we need to know that she means I am having this thought now of course she does think she means I am having this thought and what she thinks she means by that is Elizabeth Anscombe is the entity the states of home these ideas of states I have are ideas of so you have to switch from the first person standpoint to the third person standpoint to understand that yeah it makes sense to say Elizabeth Anscombe is having this thought and Elizabeth Anscombe is me and I think it's simpler to say so then I'll try to say so she does recognize that of course we can imagine a population that does not have I and she recognizes that in that case even in that case there would have to be a different way we use that one term the proper name Elizabeth Anscombe one in which in saying Elizabeth Anscombe is doing this I'm saying it from the standpoint in which we say it using I and there's another way I'm using it in which I say it from the standpoint in which we talk about other people and I think it's so much simpler to then say well in both cases so why does she think ultimately what is her fundamental reason to say no it's not an identity proposition because she thinks that and then I'm going into aspects of the paper I haven't talked about and I didn't mean to talk about so I'll be quick and then we'll can leave it at that and we can discuss later she thinks that a term can refer if there's a mode of presentation under which it refers and obviously for I there is no mode of presentation because if it were the body then we're back to our problems about A that very intimate kind of access after myself then there's not really an entity that I can re-identify so there's no mode of presentation for I so it cannot refer because the classic cases of course if you have two terms that refer to the same entity you have to have one that refers under one mode of presentation the morning star and then other that refers under another mode of presentation the evening star and lo and behold they refer to the same thing but in the case of I there's no mode of presentation that's why she thinks it's trwyr to say well it doesn't refer at all it expresses a certain standpoint and I think you really lose a lot there because the partly for the reasons that have been alluded to or stated by the discussants namely and especially the linguists namely it's important that we have a term which is by itself empty never that refers to an entity we know in virtue of what I said there's something that exists that it refers to and that entity is essentially a conscious entity but does not need to be ethically aware of it it's essentially a conscious entity and it is capable of acknowledging a potentially infinite number of modes of presentations under which that's what she is and that's partly what Sartre says with his idea of a body in situation I can identify myself as Jean-Paul Sartre that's the name I've learned I can identify myself as the philosopher just after the second world war that just took the philosophical world by storm I'm all of those entities and how do I sort of relate to something that is this very person who says I act projects her own understanding of the world and being aware of that plurality of possible identification I think is very very important it's really a part and at the same time acknowledging that all those other beings that have around me have exactly the same capacity and that's what I need to sort of adjudicate navigate make peace with Sartre thinks we can make peace with nobody but he's wrong and so on I don't know whether it really answers your question but I think her fundamental reason is there's reference only if there's some identifiable mode of presentation which surprisingly enough by I itself we don't have and that's Sartre thinks too but he thinks it's precisely what now Sartre when I said we need and some sobriety to avoid all those crazy metaphysical conclusions conclusions or statements which are not really conclusions that have no argument leading to them except phenomenology when I is empty it means everything is possible for the person who says I and of course that's crazy but if you understand it all comes from this very weird term that has a very weird role it's very important it's the core from which we have any kind of standpoint and can recognize the diversity of our standpoints and relate them to other people's standpoint at the core of anything we think or say and at the same time there's no mode of presentation that's why I think Thanks for the talk it's really interesting so this might pretty much be related to what you were just saying and I hope it's not a completely redundant kind of question so I was just thinking about the A users and it's not just a thought experiment because you already mentioned children they kind of sometimes are A users or they start off sometimes anyway and then I was thinking another example would be people who go through some sort of dissociation maybe because of trauma so they don't talk about themselves as I did these or feel this but they maybe refer to their name in talking about their experience as a way of coping I guess so it makes me so that relates to the question of what are we doing when we use the I and when we don't use the I what are we doing instead and then that makes me wonder so connecting to what you just said does the I refer and then if so what does it refer to so I wonder so I wonder does the I by thinking about the dissociation cases does the I rather for example establish a relation sort of a relation between some kind of self and some kind of self as opposed to say in the second personal relation when I say you it's not just when I say you I'm referring to you that the conscious body whatever it's not just that I'm either establishing or sort of recognizing a relationship between this consciousness and that consciousness and it seems like I might be doing something in a similar kind of structure so when you say we establish a relation between self and another self you mean someone else who can say I that's what you mean or just in the third person like Tommy is Tommy fell Tommy is in pain mm-hmm yeah yeah so these terms are suspicious and I want to go too far with it but I think there's a certain kind of passivity in the fact of not using I so for instance so there's an example that Anscombe does give of someone who's lost the use of I and I think she interprets it in the wrong way and maybe that will also be part of the answer to the question that Hannah asked and that you're asking now so she tells the story which actually is in William James that she didn't invent herself she read it in the principle of psychology a character named Baldy who was in a car with other people and he fell out of the car and clearly he was conscious because he says oh somebody fell, who fell and the interlocutors say Baldy fell probably indeed realising and that's how she describes the case that he had lost the use of I and she says indeed he replies Baldy fell poor Baldy not realise I am Baldy and she says that's what was wrong with him he was looking for a subject and I is the source of the illusion of the subject in philosophy but he had lost I he had lost the use of I that's why he was looking for a subject he was looking for who fell he was aware of falling that he was aware of falling having occurred he was not aware of himself being the patient of the falling which gets us to to Hannah's so what's so wrong with the with with Anskin's interpretation he's lost the patient conception of that thing of which he is aware that it occurred and then she says and therefore he was looking for a subject well what's wrong is that if he had not lost the patient conception he would not have what you call this dissociation and that's right he would not be looking for a subject he would have it having lost the use of I made him look for who fell and the use of I is the way of recognising my standpoint the situation that occurred in this case the patient standpoint so the dissociation is the loss of a standpoint from which you can adjudicate situations that occur understand what kind of situations they are does that answer your question I can't resist crying if I may slip in something about the first half of the last question I was very struck by what you said about Locke and the memory as framing the idea of the inner self the hidden self so I know about my past self my past life as a couple of even though no one else knows about that kind of thing and I was thinking that it's sometimes said that that idea of the hidden self is correlative with ideas like authenticity or being true to yourself and that if you don't have that conception of the hidden self then the only notion you have of an honest or a sincere person is one who does their job they sell you the bread they fix your knee when you're not well that kind of thing they do what it says in the tin they fulfil their social functions but once you have an inner self to which you have to be true then you can raise questions like okay here I am smoking but is this me is this really me is this what I really want to do and it seems to me there's it would be possible to think that that thought that Lanscom and Sartre agree on of the skepticism with regard to the idea of an internal or an intimate self I mean it seems possible that what's wrong with that idea of an internal or intimate self is the idea that it's something there available to your introspection a thing that just presents itself to you and it's already carved out whereas I think we often think of eye thinking as involved with negotiation and evaluation and is this what I want to do or am I doing it because somebody else thought I ought to do it is it really me that wants to do this I mean we do torment over these things and it seems possible well I just like to know what you think I think that's exactly right so I think and I said I was too quick about this I think Lanscom and Sartre skepticism about the idea of the inner self are not exactly of the same kind Lanscom's skepticism is against the idea of an observed inner self and in fact she does say at some point in the paper the only entity of which whose identity at different times you can really assess is the human being of course we have and self-knowledge is the knowledge of the human being we are and that we can assess by observing but on the other hand we have another access to what happens in that human being and that's important that's important morally that's important for agency but we will always have to go back to the observed human being to find the truth about that but she does say oh well introspection he does then grant at that very point well introspection can be one of the sources so it's not completely absurd to wonder is this really what I want as you say and for that we will interrogate our current state and maybe also ask about well look I felt differently the other day but there are limits to what we can how far we can go with that whereas so it's always in a way the way she is skeptical about the self is always from the observational standpoint Sartre is skeptical about the self as a construct that also has a practical role essentially of self-deception going to tell you oh I'm that kind of person whereas the kind of person you are you will know but looking at what you do but again you can always ask yourself so in that sense they have the same point you can always ask and that's always useful but go back to reality to what you do and the skepticism for there are limits to what can introspectively observe about oneself and for Sartre's well there's a lot of ethical suspicion to have about precisely the ideal authenticity what my authentic self is well look at what you do I don't know whether that no that's great you've been very patient we are Andy Graham I was just one binary question here do you believe in the possibility of a nonthetic consciousness happening outside of biology so that's the question whether consciousness can be realised in non-biological systems that's the question I was going to say carbon and silicon exactly, carbon and silicon I myself am skeptical that's not how I think I heard recently a very good talk by Peter Godfresmith who knows much more than I do about those questions and who was deeply skeptical and it made me feel good just because he has more thought through reasons to be skeptical but that's all I can say I don't know it I think consciousness is deeply related to being a biological entity that has an immune system in which the emergence to affectivity is part of the functioning of the immune system defending oneself about the environment against it could a silicon system you generate as a silicon system achieve maybe, maybe not I'm skeptical but really I'm not an expert on this question yes please oh I'm sorry I'm sorry Isabella de Mellunar architect I wanted to ask you the post Sartre and Merlot-Ponty the structuralist stated that one is never completely fully aware and conscious of what he says writes or even is so I think they summarized it saying that human is never even at home in his own house and I wanted to know your point of view about that so I didn't quite understand what he said one is never completely aware in one is never fully aware and conscious of what he says or writes there are contradictions in the language in the speech and even in the situation of being aware people are not fully conscious so I wanted to have your point of view about that, the structuralist point of view I completely agree with that in fact and that's what I'm going to talk about tomorrow in the colloquium talk part of my sort of thinking about what is the role of I as an expression of self-consciousness is to adjudicate also what is the to what extent and in what ways it's completely obvious especially today someone was talking about neuroscience of course we're not subjectively aware of everything we think without even going to Freud's statement the I is not master in its own house the cognitive unconscious is a different type of unconscious but it's a thinking that goes on below the level of our awareness but so I guess your question is so you start with I think Sartre would say and there I disagree with that's one of the points that deeply annoy me Sartre would say that that is to say that is to not recognize so he's talking about Freud's unconscious in this case Freud does not recognize that ultimately when we go deep into what the nature is of someone who says I and who's self-conscious because non-thetic self-consciousness is empty or the way it is empty is that it can generate whichever type of entity out there in the world it chooses to be even the Freudian unconscious is chosen and I don't think that's true of course I don't think that's true although nor is the cognitive unconscious chosen nor is actually even our conscious thinking chosen it's there I agree with it's something that goes on it's something that goes on in our mind and that goes on according to what I call in the paper of different logics of the mind some of which are and I take logic here in a very broad sense ways of concatenating mental contents some of which are rational some of which are irrational the ones that are rational we will tend to sort of unify them and in unifying them express them in an eye thoughts some are irrational and in that case we may say oh my god something is going on in my mind I have no idea where it comes from but even saying that would be still a way of having the ability to adjudicate what's going on that I control what's going on that so yeah I agree with you the point is there's a lot that's neither conscious nor controlled yes that's true I tend to think I appears with at least the ability to control but also can be the expression of the acknowledgement of the inability to control the acknowledgement of a lack hi I'm back here Madeleine philosophy thanks for your talk it was so interesting so you registered some dissatisfaction with the way that Anscombe makes the connection to the body and the role of verification so I just wanted to invite you to say a bit more about that so it looks like and that I think goes with the idea of this reference only if there's a mode of presentation and I have no mode of presentation or there's no reference it looks like in her formulation unmediated conception knowledge I believe true or false true or false of actions, emotions, states, events I think these are the four types of goings on she cites in this body here in this body here occurs only as what would be sort of I don't mean salient I mean relevant from an observational standpoint whereas all her examples are really examples where the access to the body is from a non-observational standpoint and if the very same body can be accessed from a non-observational standpoint and from an observational standpoint I don't see why you cannot say that what you say of this body I'm jumping I'm running I will go to the movie whatever have a non-observational standpoint is not said about that very same body that you can also access from the observational point so my impression is and in that sense okay no I'll stop here that's why I'm not satisfied with the way she treats the body I think she has available given what she says another way to think about the body not just because her examples are exactly that but maybe I'm missing something and in that case I'm very willing to be corrected the other thing I would think about is she has this nice line where she says what was hard for Descartes is easy for me and it seems like part of what she's interested in about these sort of self predications of physical attributes or physical actions is precisely that they're both observable third personally and the sort of thing about which one can have an unmediated conception and it seems to me like that's a crucial pivot in her account but maybe that's compatible with what you were saying no I agree that that's what's crucial in her account and that's what I like in her account that's what I like in her account but clearly there's something that I resist that neither you nor Hannah find reason to resist so then why wouldn't we say and I know why she said because she's quite explicit because then but again I would be touching on parts of the paper that I haven't talked about no she says well an objection who will insist that I refers will say well yes true of course I refers but in a particular way because it's immune to reference failure and then she lists three kinds of immunity to reference failure now there's the immunity just in virtue of saying I and there's the the second immunity which is that of so there's names then there's demonstrative there's that of names like A which cannot fail to refer to the intended reference and then there's that of the no there's that of demonstrative which cannot fail to no so there's the one that cannot fail to refer to the intended reference Adv oherfrind y nifer ond rwyf dim. differs wnaeth gyda gweld cofmergiad am d gearsborydтаethaw â gweithio. Felly mae'r dod o'r logithawer yn mas careidu cyn gweithio erwyd ein lle ordod arelyn inni. Mae'r angylcheddau pa h 연� glor yn dod o'r sariad, o wnaeth o bobl yn oed. A byddwch yn diweddio y holl i'r angen ac mae'n gweithio dd Idi Mffg 로ham o wneud yn hyn feddwl. Rwyf fod bait rwyf yn y car iddynt gyda le'n hyffordd umflog ff Beth I say, look, the first degree of immunity in I's case is enough. The very fact that I is in use makes it immune to reference failure even though there's no mode of presentation, just the rule. In I's case all we need is the rule. But of course she doesn't want that because she says it makes no sense to talk of reference without the mode of presentation. I think that's the crux of the issue. Why not? It precisely is important that there be no mode of presentation that you can go on to ask. And so then which kind of entity and which particular entity in the world do I identify with? I who per se dress in virtue of the ability to say I could be anything. But then Sartre and that's where I stop in my we say, oh, yeah, I could indeed be anything. But it's just that cognitively in virtue of saying I I'm not learning anything about what I am. So that that's where I this the first degree of immunity is reference failure is enough in I's case. But yeah. OK, I think maybe we have time for one last. Is that kind of a result? All right, please one last question. I'm just curious if you have any examples in Buddhist philosophy. So I've done some studying and also practice of Buddhist philosophy. And a lot of this relates to Nagarjuna's teachings of the Prachna Paramita. Yeah. And essentially what it's saying is that the self is instantaneous at any given moment. It's an aggregate of five scundas you form feeling cognition consciousness. And I I think I struggle a lot with finding ways to really connect that framework and that structure to that I was proposing. But yes, the framework that you're discussing. And I think it's because on a very fundamental level, whatever we're talking about in terms of perception or interrogation, are all part of these aggregates which in Nagarjuna's framing are sitting sort of beneath this idea of self. And so when we talk about it or in your kind of framing, there's I would the way I think of it is it's sort of sitting on the same hierarchy. Whereas in Nagarjuna's framing. They're all just perceptions and they're all empty or anathema. And so I'm just wondering if you've done any work or any reading on Buddhist philosophy and how you find a parallel or how you even start to compare these two things. Because to me, they're just very, very different. That's very interesting. It's a really good question. I'm not sure. And this is just because I'm a bit hard of hearing everything you said. So if I miss it, just come in again and tell me. But so you were saying in the Buddhist tradition, the self is instantaneous and then it aggregates. So what I was describing were aggregates and the phenomena I was describing were the phenomena that occur when we have an aggregate of instantaneous selves. That's basically the idea. Well, this is my interpretation. So the way I interpret it is that the self is temporary. It's an aggregate and it's instantaneous. And it is instantaneous. So at any given moment, it's a concoction of all of these five things. And those five things are constantly changing. And because there's constant change, there's nothing deterministic that exists within the self. And so that's why we say the self is empty or anathema. So I think maybe the difference is that so I'm not a specialist of Buddhist philosophy. I have done quite a bit of work on Miri Al-Bahari's book, The Self in Buddhist Philosophy, which I found extremely illuminating because she started with and she could read the text in the Sanskrit in the original. And she was starting with text. She was citing and analysing from within the Buddhist tradition. And then in the second part of the book, comparing with mostly contemporary analytic philosophy, the idea I got was that the idea of self I'm talking about and in comparing Sartre and Enscom and that's not the only two authors I'm interested in, but that's one way of getting into the question is precisely characterised not just as an aggregate, but as an aggregate characterised by intentionality, namely a goal. And what I remember of Miri's book, but you can correct me here, is that there is at least one trend in Buddhist philosophy which says to to become aware of your integration in the great self. So lose the small self and become aware of integration in the great self. Lose all goal, either cognitive or agential. And then you become aware of what really is, namely indeed those aggregates that fluctuate and change and are fundamentally and the more you lose any kind of intentionality, the more you become aware of what really is, namely not your individual self, but the whole self in which you have those aggregates that shift. And yeah, it's true that in that sense, what I'm thinking about belongs to a very different tradition where intentionality, goal directedness, rightly or wrongly is the essential aspect at least of human consciousness. That's true. Yeah. So that's a very different tradition. At the same time, even in that tradition, there are attempts to try to figure out, for instance, what the therapeutic aspects are of, OK, lose track of everything you think is so important. And then that's the practice of meditation that even in the West has become much and more developed. That exactly that. OK, and if you find your thoughts focusing too much, let that go and just become aware of the fact that you're just part of something that is much greater than you. So these are very different traditions. And what I would say is one of the bit there, I have to be very cautious, but I would say is from talking to people who know more about than I do about the Buddhist tradition. And from the way I think about these issues, I think the two ways of thinking again, but that's sort of my my goody to choose way of being. They really have a lot to learn from each other. There is no such thing as being in the world without intending something in the world and at the same time there is such a thing and it's desirable as forget about your intention, just become aware. And one would be more the Western tradition and the other would be more the Buddhist tradition. Would you agree with that? I don't know. OK, anyway, that's my lame proposal. I don't know, means you probably don't. I'm still young, still figuring it out. Thank you, though. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I think the questions have made clear that that was a model of how you can take something very tightly focused or ramified through the whole of human life. And we've always got enough questions left over to do another hour, but perhaps if you could give our speaker a break at this time. Well, thank you.