The Soul by J. P. Moreland

Author:J. P. Moreland [Moreland, J. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8024-8984-5
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2014-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

UNITY AND THE FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE

Consider the following argument:

(1) If I were a physical object (e.g., a brain or body), then a third-person physical description would capture all the facts that are true of me.

(2) But a third-person physical description does not capture all the facts that are true of me.

(3) Therefore, I am not a physical object.

(4) I am either a physical object or a soul.

(5) Therefore, I am a soul.

A complete physical description of the world would be one in which everything would be exhaustively described from a third-person point of view in terms of objects, properties, processes, and their spatiotemporal locations. For example, a description of an apple in a room would go something like this: “There exists an object three feet from the south wall and two feet from the east wall, and that object has the property of being red, round, of weighing 3.5 ounces,” and so on.

The *first-person point of view is the vantage point that I use to describe the world from my own perspective. Expressions of a first-person point of view utilize what are called indexicals—words like “I,” “here,” “now,” “there,” “then.” Here and now are where and when I am; there and then are where and when I am not. Indexicals refer to me. “I” is the most basic indexical, and it refers to my self that I know by acquaintance with my own acts of self-awareness. I am immediately aware of my own self and I know to whom “I” refers when I use it: it refers to me as the conscious owner of my body and mental states.

According to a widely accepted form of physicalism, there are no irreducible, privileged, first-person perspectives. Everything can be exhaustively described in an object language from a third-person perspective. A physicalist description of me would say, “There exists a body at a certain location that is five feet eight inches tall, weighs 160 pounds,” and so forth. The property dualist would add a description of the properties possessed by that body, such as “The body is feeling pain,” or “It is thinking about lunch.”

But no amount of third-person descriptions captures my own subjective, first-person acquaintance of my own self in acts of self-awareness. In fact, for any third-person description of me, it would always be an open question as to whether the person described in third-person terms was the same person as I am. I do not know myself because I know some third-person description of a set of mental and physical properties that apply to me (“So, the body is five-feet-eight-inches, 160 pounds, and is thinking about lunch? I think that’s me.”). Instead I know myself as a self immediately through being acquainted with my own self in an act of self-awareness. I can express that self-awareness by using the term I.

I refers to my own substantial soul. It does not refer to any mental property or bundle of mental properties I am having, nor does it refer to any body described from a third-person perspective.

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