Thomas Nagel, in his famous paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974, 436) argued that for an organism to have “conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” More generally, the question of ‘what it is like to be me’ exemplifies a fundamental property of self-consciousness, and it cannot be meaningfully answered just in terms of ‘me’, as ‘I am me’ or ‘I am like me’, without falling prey to circular reasoning or triviality. “[Self-identity] is certainly a relation formally or logically speaking, but it also holds trivially, it’s trivially true of everything…” (Strawson 2013); it tells us only that something is identical to itself but nothing about ‘what’ that something is like, or what makes it distinct from everything else: the content of identity. What is it that I am like? What is it that I am the most like? Am I more like a tree, a gust of wind, or a human? I argue that faithfulness of my likeness can be meaningfully judged only via reflexive relating with other beings of the same ontological kind.

Unless I can compare myself to something else there is literally nothing like ‘being me’, or at least no sense to the belief that I am a definite something. Another way, ‘being me’ entails awareness that in some crucial respect I am like someone else. Why should I believe, for example, that I am human? Nagel (1997, 5) explains that if I have reasons to believe or do something, “they cannot be reasons just for me” but would have to be reasons for anyone else if they were in my place. “Any claim that what is a reason for me is not a reason for someone else to draw the same conclusion must be backed up by further reasons, to show that this apparent deviation from generality can be accounted for in terms that are themselves general.” On this account, reasons need not apply to everyone else but only to a range of beings who are sufficiently like me. In any case, justified beliefs entail consideration of what it would be like “for someone else [like me] to be in my place.” For this to work, according to the premise of generality of justification, I must be able to quantify both the scope and the degree of likeness over a range of beings by employing a principle grounded not only in my own perspective but also in the perspectives of others. “The individual self will only emerge through the course of social externalization, and can only be stabilized within the network of undamaged relations of mutual recognition.” (Habermas 2003, 34) I can be myself only by identifying with what I identify others as, insofar as others act reciprocally. Since reciprocity and generality are also conditions of language and meaning, the same principle must extend to awareness of any conceivable object or property.

In order to occupy the first-person perspective and conceive of something, we must also recognise the second-person perspective of something alike as equally ‘real’. This is precisely the sense of ‘being in a world’: relating to another Self who, despite occupying a unique point of view, is relating to something that I can also relate to in terms of properties common to both observers. If my experience, impression or description of something is, in turn, generally ‘true’ according to a common standard, it signifies something ‘real’, a thing; otherwise the notion of reality would be meaningless. Conversely, my seeing something that is not like anything meaningful to other beings of the same kind, not definable in terms of properties common to us all, this would amount to not seeing anything at all. The state of not seeing what is ‘there’ for a being of a different ontological kind is competently portrayed in the HBO series Westworld, with Dolores and Bernard exclaiming, when confronted with a contextually incompatible object from the ‘real’ world: “it does not look like anything to me”. In other words, they do not possess the general terms of reference, the context of ‘likeness’ with which to identify the purported something. The same condition must apply to self-awareness; presenting a being with a mirror is insufficient to make it self-aware if that being has no conception of what it is like.

A prominent alternative solution to the problem of self-awareness was proposed by Uriah Kriegel (2009, 224-8), according to whom the necessary reflexivity of self-awareness could be accomplished within an individual by means of its parts (indirect self-representationalism): “For any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious iff there are M∗ and M♦, such that (i) M∗ is a proper part of M, (ii) M♦ is a proper part of M, (iii) M is a complex of M∗ and M♦,and (iv) M∗ represents M by representing M♦.” I take that by ‘representation’ Kriegel means the relation of likeness (‘x is of the same kind as y’) rather than the stricter relation of sameness (‘x is the same as y’). Nevertheless, the main objection to Kriegel’s thesis is that reflexivity is, by definition, reciprocal, so that if an individual becomes self-aware by reflexively relating to one of its parts, that part would have to be simultaneously constituted as another self-aware individual, hence not the same individual (the law of identity: everything is identical only to itself), therefore contradiction. Kriegel’s thesis can also be challenged along the lines of the Russel’s Paradox, since the ‘whole’ mental state M is defined as a function of the same M and at least one of its proper parts (M∗ or M♦). According to Whitehead and Russell (1927, 39) “…no function can have among its values anything which presupposes the function, for if it had, we could not regard the objects ambiguously denoted by the function as definite until the function was definite, while conversely, (…) the function cannot be definite until its values are definite.” For these reasons I regard Krigel’s theory of indirect self-representationalism as either false or incomplete, despite his elaborate strategy to defend the charge or infinite regress. The most promising theory of self-awareness is that of external reflexive relations between beings of the same ontological kind (see my formal analysis of subjectivity here).

See also On What it Means to ‘Be’: A Schema for Reconciling Relational and Absolute Conceptions of Being.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature . Polity Press, 2003.

. Polity Press, 2003. Kriegel, Uriah. Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory . Oxford University Press, 2009.

. Oxford University Press, 2009. Nagel, Thomas. What is it Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 1974.

The Philosophical Review, 1974. Nagel, Thomas. The Last Word . Oxford University Press, 1997.

. Oxford University Press, 1997. Strawson, Galen. ‘Self-intimation’ . Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2013.

. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2013. Whitehead, Alfred-North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica (Volume I). Cambridge University Press, 1927.

435 views