Persons, Minds & Selves

Eight steps into the self: what a mind is, whether you are the same over time, and whether there is a 'you' at all.

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

Course outline

I Think, Therefore I Am — The self's self-discovery. Descartes' methodic doubt strips away everything dubitable and reaches one certainty — the thinking self (the cogito) — then argues that this thinking thing is really…
The Ghost in the Machine? — Ryle's dissolution of dualism. The Cartesian picture rests on a category mistake — treating 'the mind' as a ghostly thing of the same logical type as the body. Mind-talk is talk about dispositions…
You Are Your Memories — Locke shifts the question from what the self IS to what makes a person the same over time. His answer: not the same soul or the same body, but the same consciousness — psychological continuity. The…
There Is No Self — The self dissolves. Hume looks within and finds only perceptions, never a self that has them — the self is a bundle. Nagarjuna, centuries earlier and by a different method, teaches anatman: the self…
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — With the self dissolved into a stream of experience, what IS experience? Nagel argues that consciousness has an irreducibly subjective character — there is something it is like to be a bat — that no…
The Hard Problem — Chalmers names the deepest issue: the easy problems (explaining cognitive functions) yield to science, but the HARD problem — why function is accompanied by subjective experience at all — does not.…
Does Identity Even Matter? — Parfit's reductionism and its great upshot. Through the teletransporter and branching cases, he argues that personal identity is not the deep further fact we assume, and — astonishingly — that…
The Self, Assembled and Set Aside — Synthesis. The two strands (mind/body and identity-over-time) and the arc from Descartes' certain self to Parfit's reductive dissolution; the striking convergence of Hume, Nagarjuna, and Parfit on…

Part of the Symposium course library.