Comments on the video of Sal Kripke’s 2006 talk on “The First Person“.
(I only understood about 25%, because of the poor sound quality of the recording and because SK had bronchitis, so I may have have filled the gaps wrong.)
SK was raising problems about pinpointing the referent for “I”. SK (rightly) pointed out that his own case was different from that of those people who claimed to be insentient robots, but that with testimony like that from others, and no way to determine whether it was true or false, all SK could conclude was that that confirmed the (familiar) uncertainty about the minds of others, and it raised anew the question of what exactly was different about one’s own case (for those of us who know we are not insensient robots).
Then SK brought up a Kripke/Wittgenstein-like point about uncertainty or even indeterminacy in trying to pinpoint the referent of “I”: The objective referent (roughly speaking, what is going on inside the body of SK) is not a problem, and anyone, SK or anyone else, can pick out that referent.
But the specific private Cartesian goings-on inside the body of SK — or SH: let me switch to my own “I”, because I’m not a robot either, and the points are clearer in I-language — are not as easy to pin down in the usual way. I think SK’s point was that I can have the usual Cartesian certainty that the private mental goings on are indeed going on (hence I am not a robot), but from that I still cannot fix the referent of “I.”.
So, along the same lines that SK has previously used to suggest that there is no way I can determine the fact of the matter between adding and “quadding,” I also cannot determine the fact of the matter about “I” — apart from the fact that private mental goings on are indeed going on. In both cases, it’s the Wittgensteinian problem of private error and its incorrigibility that makes this sort of private-language issue indeterminate even in the special (seemingly opposite) case of the incorrigibility and cartesian certainty of the Cogito.
There were also two other points, one Fregean one I couldn’t fully follow, concerning the sense vs. the reference of “I”. Perhaps that was just the “I”/”SCHMI ” version of the add/quadd problem of pinpointing the referent of I, which, in both cases, and unlike Hesperus/Phosphorus, fails, because of the private-language incorrigibility I summarized above.
The second point was about mirrors: that the mirror needs to be big enough for the entire body to fit (maybe that was about uncertainty concerning the spatial boundaries of the locus of the objective entity that we try to use to localize the subjective one); and that the naive non-philosopher who thought mirrors were the solution to the problem may not have been altogether wrong. (But I still don’t quit see how it could be done with mirrors!)
Now let me try an alternative view.
(1) Cogitatur. I’ve always felt that the Cogito, though one of the most important philosophical insights, had over-reached. Descartes had rightly pointed out that one cannot deny that cogitation is going on, when it is going on, hence that it exists. But to go on to conclude that an “I” exists, and that I am that I, might be a little more weight than the Cogito itself can bear, because what, after all, is that “I” — apart from the (undeniable) cogitation that exists and is ongoing? The “I” seems to be a more fallible, theory-laden matter. People can disagree about it; some (like the “robots” you point out some people claim they are) can even deny some aspects of it. Perhaps, like add/quadd, there is not even a fact of the matter about the “I”.
(2) Feeling. To get rid of unnecessary extra terminology that just makes it seem as if there is more going on, and more to account for, in contemplating the mind/body problem, I’ve tried to set aside all the synonyms and paranyms and variants (mind, mental, mentation, cogitation, consciousness, subjectivity, qualia, sentience, sapience, 1-st personhood, even intentionality) and to focus exclusively on that “mark of the mental” that we all (those of us who are not robots, at least) recognize as the necessary and sufficient mark and sine qua non of the mental, namely feeling.
(3) Senitur. So the slight over-reaching in Descartes’ gloss of his Cogito intuition is, I think, remedied if we reduce it to: I feel, therefore there is feeling (“Sentio ergo sentitur” — both said without needing a detached pronoun “I”, though “Sentitur ergo sentitur” would say much the same thing, at the cost of sounding like an empty tautology, which it isnt: it is perhaps more like what [I think you said] Shoemaker said it might be: an “analytic a-posteriori”, concluding from the experience of a mental event that there are indeed mental events). (That’s the non-robot intuition that you share with the others who deny they are robots.)
(4) Ego. But that still does not pin down the “I”.
(5) Feeling Feelings. It is true (though I don’t think it solves the problem) that “feeling” is intrinsically a 2-part relation: There is not only what is felt, but the feeler, feeling it. It is undeniable that that’s part of the content (the quality, the nature) of feeling itself, that it feels like “I” am feeling it. But that is only undeniable in the more general sense that it is undeniable that whatever one is feeling (when one is indeed feeling it) in fact feels-like whatever it feels like (and not like something else, or nothing). (This is the same point as the point that “is” is corrigible, but “seems” is not.)
(6) Feeling Like the Feeling Feeler. From the certainty that we feel, and the fact that feelings feel as if they are being felt by a feeler, it does not follow that an additional “I” exists, over and above the existence of the fact of the felt feelings. (It is undeniable that I feel cold when I feel cold, but that does not mean that I am cold, or that it is cold — or even that there is cold! There may be just feeling-like-cold — and by the same token there may be just feeling-like-I.)
(7) Free-Floating Feelings. Hence when we are trying to pinpoint the referent for “I”, we are right to detect a certain indeterminacy: We do have a (reasonably reliable) spatiotemporal locus for feeling itself. That’s probably not much more open to doubt than any ordinary here/now/this deixis. But the spatiotemporal locus (and indeed the existence) of the “I” — as anything over and above the brute fact that feeling is going on now (sentitur) — is another matter.
(8) Doing. To wrap up with the question of robots and causality: A robot is merely a certain kind of (“autonomous”) causal mechanism, with certain input/output performance (“doing”) capacities. Let us call the mechanism underlying the robot’s spatiotemporal performance capacities its “function.” (The goal of cognitive science is one day to reverse-engineer that function at the scale of human performance capacity, so as to be able to fully explain the causal mechanism. That’s what the goal of passing the Turing Test is all about.)
(9) I Robot. When people say “I’m just a robot,” they probably mean that they have a theory that all there is is their performance capacity, and once the underlying functional mechanism of that is known, there’s nothing else.
(10) Feeling Robots. But of course there is something else. We don’t just function, we also feel: Feeling is going on (if/when we are indeed feeling) and to deny that would be absurd. (And usually when people deny it, they are denying something else, not the fact tat they are feeling when they are feeling.)
(11) The Feeling/Function Problem. So we are indeed robots, but feeling robots. Hence the mind/body problem is really the feeling/function problem. It is a problem of causal explanation: How and why are some functions felt, rather than just “functed”?
(12) Causality. It is not that the fact that some functions are felt rather than just functed that is in doubt. The problem is explaining the causal status of feelings.
(13) Telekinetic Dualism. And a causal explanation of feeling looks impossible. For — except if we are ready to believe (without physical evidence, and contrary to all evidence except our feelings) in a “telekinetic dualism” in which feelings have independent causal (telekinetic) power, alongside the four other forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak subatomic force) — feelings must be acausal and hence superfluous in any complete causal explanation of our robotic function.
(14) Patience and Agency. So if cognitive science has no hope (short of resorting to telekinesis) of causally explaining the (undeniable) fact of feeling, it follows, a fortiori, that there will be no objective way to pinpoint the referent of the even more elusive “I” that feels like both the agent and the patient of those feelings, whilst the robotic mechanism is functing their doings.