In the London Review of Books, philosopher Thomas Nagel reviews Galen Strawson’s Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics:
Galen Strawson’s book Selves, a work of shameless metaphysics, argues that selves exist and that they are not human beings. However, Strawson is a materialist and does not think that your self could exist apart from your central nervous system. He holds that your experiences are events in your brain, and that if there is a self which is their subject it too must be in the brain. But he is a materialist of an unusual kind: a realist about experience and an anti-reductionist. Strawson believes that although experiences are events in the brain, experience cannot be analysed in terms of the physical properties of the material world, so the material world is much more than the world described by physics—at least in the case of brains, and perhaps quite generally.* This means that the conscious brain has a mental character that is not revealed by the physical sciences, including neurophysiology.
Strawson contends that there are two uses of the word ‘I’, or the grammatical first person, and that they are familiar to us all. One refers to the public human being, as when you say: ‘I’ll meet you in front of Carnegie Hall at a quarter to eight.’ The other refers to the subject of consciousness, as when you think, ‘I hear an oboe,’ or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The argument of the book proceeds from phenomenology—an introspective examination of the subjective character of experience—to metaphysics, a conclusion about the existence and objective nature of selves. The results are radical and unexpected.
Continue reading “The I in Me” here.