September, 2025 - Colin McGinn

Material Selves

The self and the mind: what are they? Are they material or immaterial? These questions are usually discussed separately: one under the heading “personal identity”, the other under the heading “the mind-body problem”. Thus, we discuss whether the self is the body and whether mental states are physical states. But these questions are surely connected—the nature of the self and the nature of the mind. The reference of “I” and the reference of “pain” must be connected questions. I will contend that they are connected to the point of identity, but this is not as obvious as you might think; it is a substantive philosophical thesis.

If the self is the body (the physical organism), are mental states necessarily physical states? And if mental states are physical states, must the self be identical to the body? Is there room for the idea that the physical self might have non-physical states? And if mental states are physical, could the self be non-physical, perhaps immaterial? To be concrete, if the human person is identical to the human physical organism, could his pains be other than C-fibers firing? And if his pains are his C-fibers firing, could he be something other than his physical body? Does materialism about the self entail materialism about the mind, and does materialism about the mind entail materialism about the self? Let’s take the second question first. Could an immaterial self have material attributes in the shape of mental states? It could clearly have immaterial non-physical attributes, but could it have material attributes? Wouldn’t this make it material? For such attributes would constitute it as material, would they not? You might think there is some wiggle room here, because the self has a body and itcould instantiate its mental physical attributes: wouldn’t the self then be immaterial but the mind be material? However, the reply to this is not hard to find: the self doesn’t have those physical attributes, the body does, these being distinct entities. The self is merely associated with a body that has physical attributes; it doesn’t have them (directly, intrinsically). If it had them, it would itself be material. So, the situation envisaged is not metaphysically possible: granted that the self has physical attributes, it must be physical—the body or brain. Materialism about the mind entails materialism about the self (the person, the subject, the “I”). You can’t be a Cartesian dualist about the self and a materialist about the self’s mind. The materiality of pain logically implies the materiality of the subject of pain: if my pains are material, so am I. I have to be my body or brain if my mental states are physical states. So, if I am not my body or brain, then my mental states cannot be physical states. The logical (metaphysical) connection between self and mind generates a possible refutation of materialism about the mind. If you don’t like materialism about the self, you can’t like materialism about the mind. You can’t have an identity theory of the mind and a non-identity theory of the self. You can’t be a physical reductionist about mental events and a non-reductionist about selves (given that such events occur inselves). This is a non-trivial result.

What about the other way round—can you be a reductive identity theorist about selves but a non-reductive duality theorist about minds? Could the self be a physical thing (the body or brain or the whole physical organism) and yet its mental states be irreducibly mental? Isn’t that combination of views actually held by some people? They don’t like immaterial egos lurking inside the body (as they would put it) but they are not freaked out by property dualism or some other non-materialist position. But again, this position is dubiously coherent: for how could immaterial properties inhere in a purely physical substance? Wouldn’t they stop it from being completely material? Of course they would, since they would constitute part of its nature and hence make it partly immaterial. You can’t be completely material and yet instantiate non-material properties. Here someone might invoke double aspect theories: the self has two aspects, one material, the other immaterial. Okay, fine, if you think this makes sense, but it doesn’t solve the problem, because the self is not then completely material—it has an immaterial aspect or nature or essence. And there is nothing yet to suggest that this is not basic to the ontology of selves—in which case they are not fundamentally physical. You can’t be a reductionist about selves and a dualist about minds, because selves have minds. Indeed, their minds are integral to their identity, at a time and through time. That’s how they are individuated. Thus, the choice is stark: either materialism about selves and minds or immaterialism about both. Persons and mental events must share their ontology. One can therefore argue against materialism about the mind by urging anti-materialism about the self and vice versa. It comes in a single package. (I am anti-materialist about both.) The two questions should not be debated separately.

What about identity through time? We are excessively familiar with all the thought experiments and empirical findings that adorn the study of personal identity, yet we don’t apply this apparatus to the mind: but are the questions really so distinct? Granted, mental events don’t persist through time (they occur over time), so we can’t ask what constitutes their identity through time; but can’t we ask the question about mental states? Do I have the same pain now that I had a minute ago? What constitutes this identity? States do persist through time, and presumably in virtue of something. A materialist will say that it consists in the persistence of an underlying physical state—the state of the nervous system has not changed (the C-fibers are still firing away). The pain, we might say, has survived, by dint of the continued existence of the brain state. But what if we consider a fission case? The C-fibers split apart, thus producing two nerve centers each realizing a pain. Has the original pain survived? There is some inclination to say yes: one pain has become two (just as in a split-brain personal identity case). But then, the survival of pains doesn’t require that the future pain be identical with the earlier pain—there can be pain survival without pain identity.[1] And we could mount the same argument about thoughts, emotions, etc. The personal identity literature could be redeployed in the area of the mind-body problem; and the diehard dualist will resist inferences drawn from brain physiology. He may even deny that pains can be divided, though C-fibers can be. The two subjects should not in any case be pursued separately (can minds survive without identity?). The subject of personal identity is just one subject in a class of similar subjects: we have the persistence of persons over time, the persistence of mental states over time, and the persistence of whole minds over time.[2]

Returning to the topic of materialism, I should say a few words about the eliminative view of selves or minds. Can we be eliminativists about one but not the other? It is not as easy as it sounds. Would it be possible to eliminate the mind but keep the self (“pain” doesn’t refer but “I” does)? Evidently not: what is a self without a mind to keep it company? There are no zombie selves. There can be organisms without minds but none of these qualifies as a self (still less a person). The I cannot exist as a psychologically bare physical particular; at a minimum it requires a primitive consciousness. But many people seem to think that they can get rid of the self and retain the mind in all its glory, as a kind of selfless heap of mentality. It is quite true that there is no need to go full Cartesian about the self, still less immortal-soulish, but how can mental states be thought to inhere in nothing, or in mere bodily tissue? Instead of saying “I believe in ghosts” should we say “There is nothing that believes in ghosts, but there are beliefs in ghosts in this vicinity” or “This bodily tissue believes in ghosts”? Really? Beliefs need believers, and believers are not (non-self) bits of tissue. Nor are they replaceable by brains: I don’t allude indirectly to my brain when I say “I”, even though my brain is necessary for saying anything. What the “I” is is a difficult question, but it isn’t dispensable in favor of my brain or some segment of it. The self emerges from the brain in some mysterious fashion, but it isn’t reducible to a chunk of brain, or nothing at all. No, if you want to hang onto the mind, you have to accept the self along with it; and if you want to preserve the self, you have to accept the mind. You can’t eliminate one but hold fast to the other. The mind and the self are too closely intertwined to be forced apart; nor is there any good reason to do so. There are no thinkers without thoughts or thoughts without thinkers—even if this is hard to understand.[3]

[1] There can be a pain Parfit as well as a person Parfit.

[2] We also have questions about the persistence of raindrops, plants, and statues over time: can there be survival without identity in these cases too? I leave these aside here, having discussed them elsewhere.

[3] Of course, this is the purest common sense, but it is amazing how ready people are to abandon it on the flimsiest of grounds. It is really quite obvious that materialism about the self and materialism about the mind are logically connected doctrines. Once again mysteries lead to ontological panic or mayhem. There is a mind-body problem about the self, as there is a mind-body problem about the mind (and about its contents). Is there something it’s like to be a self?

Paleolithic Philosophy

I wish to introduce a new academic discipline to be named “paleolithic philosophy” (aka “caveman philosophy”). This subject investigates the original causes of philosophically interesting concepts. The central tenet of paleolithic philosophy is what I will call “evolutionary empiricism”, the doctrine that our basic concepts derive from the primitive environment of our distant ancestors in (roughly) paleolithic times (when people got stoned a lot). So, cave men (also cave women—though this was contested at the time) hit upon certain concepts as a result of their interactions with their environment, before much real thinking had begun; and these interactions shaped the concepts acquired. There is no commitment here to classical empiricism with respect to innateness; no doubt the concepts in question partly arose by means of genetic selection in some way. What matters is which features of the environment did the prompting. We are to think of the minds of these people as barely above the animal level of their ape ancestors, but sophisticated enough to get real thinking off the ground (how we don’t know). They were no doubt naïve to a fault, but aspiring, curious, open-minded. I venture to suggest that there were four main things that would have impressed themselves on the childlike minds of these individuals: the sun, the sky, the earth, and the (other) animals. They noticed these things and distinguished them in their minds. The sun would have seemed mightily impressive, as it still does: its movement across the sky, its appearance and disappearance, its warmth or lack thereof, its ability to produce light thus creating day and night. As we know, it was man’s first god—the prototype of all gods. The idea of God grew from the sun—a supernatural agent of some sort. Religion sprang from the sun. No sun, no god, no religion. Simply put: the sun caused religion (along with other factors). The sky caused the idea of heaven—for the sun dwells in the sky. It may also have caused the idea of hell, what with lightning and thunderstorms. The sky ruled over the earth and the sun was its right-hand man (probably the boss, like the toughest cave man). The earth they took for granted—it was what you stand on, what you must not fall from a great height on. Caves were holes in it, so it couldn’t be that bad (pity about the damp). Other animals were everywhere and not always friendly, though occasionally helpful. That was it. That was life. It was all you had to think about, the basis of your theories and dreams.

The thesis, then, is that it all comes from this, fundamentally. From the sun we get the ideas of knowledge, the good, and the beautiful: what we know is what the sun throws light on; the good is the warmth of the sun; the beautiful is the sun in the morning and evening (you couldn’t look at it the rest of the time). Thus, the sun is ultimately responsible for science and human knowledge in general, for morality, and for aesthetics. The sun is bright, warm, and beautiful (not dark, cold, and non-descript). It brings knowledge, life, and delight. It instigates a huge swath of our early conceptual scheme. This is the solar theory of almost everything. The sky is the source of wonder, the unknown, the infinite. At night it turns black and twinkles with inscrutable points (and that pale-fire moon). It hardly bears thinking about. It eventually causes astronomy and man’s knowledge of his insignificance. What about the earth? Well, it gave our ancestors the idea of the earthy: the mundane, the daily toil, the coefficient of resistance. Eventually it would produce physics, but in those far-off days it mainly produced depression (the mud, the rocks, the sharp edges, the rigid laws). You had to live with the earth, like it or not. Ultimately it would lead to existentialism (the in-itself). It wasn’t very moral, but not all that immoral either, just indifferent. Facticity, as the existentialists would say. As to other animals: thereby hangs a tail. The animals were vexatious, enthralling, delicious to eat, dangerous. They caused so much conceptualization in our ancestors, as they patrolled the earth, tracked the sun, and monitored the sky. So many animals, of so many kinds, so much to digest. The cave men found animals too extensive and unpredictable to take in; they had only the vaguest idea what they were about. Nothing like the sun or the sky. They gave rise to ideas of generations, birth and death, fighting and surviving (our ancestors recognized their kinship with the animals). Ideas of taxonomy took hold, domestication, hunting methods—all leading to the science of biology and eventually Charles Darwin. The sight of an elephant in the daytime, a lion at night prowling. Then the flies, the rats, the snakes, the ants. All so overwhelming. They formed the scary part of our conceptual scheme, and so morally confusing (you loved them and you hated them). But, let me emphasize, the sun was preeminent in those simple-minded days: it was the focus of their attention, their constant preoccupation. The sun was the main cause of caveman philosophizing. When you left your cave in the morning the question was what the sun would be doing that day. Above all, the sun was the source of all knowledge: the knowable was the visible and the visible was what the sun cast its light on. The concept of knowledge was indissolubly linked to the sun’s powers. Epistemology centered on the sun (as the later empiricists implicitly recognized[1]). If there were no sun, there would be no epistemology worthy of the name: all would be ignorance, skepticism, the dark and gloomy cave (shades of Plato). Paleolithic philosophy is heliocentric, sun-obsessed. The sky is the sun’s home, the earth is what the sun sheds its light and warmth on, animals are the objects the sun enables you to track. The sun is everything. As we now know, this world-view is largely correct (the origin of the planets, the seasons, photosynthesis, etc.), at least so far as human beings are concerned. It got human thought off to a brisk start (according to evolutionary empiricism): it was the big bang of the human conceptual scheme. The earth orbits the sun, but human thought orbits it too. Astronomy begets psychology.[2]

[1] To say that all knowledge derives from the senses is to say that vision is the primary method of knowledge acquisition, but vision only provides knowledge with the aid of light, mainly sunlight. So, really, it is the sun that is the enabling condition of knowledge. The sun plays no role in implanting innate knowledge. Empiricism is, in effect, the doctrine that the sun is the source of (nearly) all knowledge. This is to physicalize the origins of human knowledge.

[2] Paleolithic philosophy is very interdisciplinary: it includes psychology, biology, geology, and astronomy. The human conceptual scheme is affected by all these things. Its origins reflect the basic facts of the universe, particularly our planet. And origins never really go away; they linger and permeate. This is cognitive science writ large. It takes in astronomical-psychological laws.