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WMA Seminar
Carol Rovane (Columbia University): 'Some Perplexities about Consciousness'

Abstract:

Some decades ago, I offered novel interpretation and defense of Locke鈥檚 distinction between personal identity and human (animal) identity. Locke himself had equated personal identity with 鈥渟ameness of consciousness鈥�, and then argued that sameness of human (animal) life is neither necessary nor sufficient for sameness of consciousness. I granted for the sake of argument that Locke was wrong about this, but then argued for a version of his distinction anyway, on the ground that a person is a rational agent, and there can be single group agents that span many human lives as well as multiple agents within a single human life. Each such individual agent has its own first person point of view, which is the rational point of view from which it deliberates and acts and engages in interpersonal relations with others. Yet this is not the same as the phenomenological point of view from which a subject of experience has access to phenomena in consciousness, by virtue of what they are like. This distinction between two different kinds of point of view forces us to look harder at what role consciousness might play in mental life. We may no longer be sure whether consciousness is an essential and defining feature of mental phenomena, or if so, why; but secondly, even if we retain that conviction, we should find it curious that the unity of consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient for the sort of rational unity that defines what it is for an individual agent to be fully, or ideally, rational. I want to emphasize that my arguments do not proceed from standard sorts of functionalist considerations, but from purely normative considerations to do with agency.