Egnor Drops the Ball on Personal Identity Reductionism
Has Egnor read at all anything written after Acquinas?
Michael Egnor likes to opine on topics about which he’s very ill informed. We’ve already seen this with his elementary confusion about a multiverse and fine tuning. Yet he has more articles expressing juvenile errors combined with immense snark.
In this article, Egnor explains how we know there’s an irreducible self. Off the top, Egnor makes a funny error, misspelling the name of the person whose view he is addressing.
Sir, I am confused after reading the view of materialist philosophers regarding the sense of self. One of them, Thomas Meitzinger, a German philosopher and expert in conciousness, said that “There is no self” in his book. He said that self is an illusion produced by modules of brain. Is it so? Please help me understand this view.
Thomas Meitzinger (pictured) is a prominent philosopher of mind who has a strong interest in artificial intelligence. I don’t know his work well, but what I do know of it, I find unintelligible. Perhaps it’s me, or perhaps he’s a sophist, or perhaps both.
No one knows the work of Thomas Meitzinger because he is not a real person. Egnor is thinking of Metzinger. The questioner asked Egnor what he thought about Meitzinger and Egnor didn’t bother to check the questioner had spelled his name right, though he did rather amusingly include an image of Thomas Metzinger.
However, this is the least of Egnor’s errors. Egnor continues
But this much is clear: My self cannot be an illusion, because having an illusion presupposes a self. A rock, which has no self, cannot have illusions.
The assertion that self is an illusion is not even wrong — it’s self-refuting, which means it’s nonsense. It is like saying “I don’t exist” or “Misery is green.”
One can say such things poetically, but taken literally they make no sense. To say “My self is an illusion” isn’t to offer a proposition. The words are a sentence only in a grammatical sense. Intellectually, it’s just making a noise with your mouth and vocal cords.
This shows Egnor doesn’t understand what people like Metzinger say when they deny a self. They don’t deny that the collection of experiences which you call yourself exist. What they deny is that there’s some deep fact of the matter about whether some being is really you. In what sense are you the same person as your four year old self? You plausibly have more in common with me than with your 4 year old self, so why are you the same as your four year old self.
Let’s consider an analogy with the word genius. There’s no irreducible genius, it’s obviously reduceable to facts about intelligence. Additionally, there’s no robust fact of the matter about whether one is a genius. Sure, we’d ordinarily say that Einstein is a genius, but there’s no robust fact of the matter about that. It’s just a term we give to a rough collection of very smart people. There’s no sharp threshold at which one goes from not a genius to being a genius. A self is the same way.
Much like with genius talk, self talk runs into similar questions of ill definition. Suppose the cells in your brain were slowly replaced with copies of the cells in my brain. At what point would you stop being yourself? Well, as time passes your cells are replaced by other cells and you become different, so if you would stop being yourself through the process described above, why don’t you just naturally shed your identity. Also, if the right half of your brain was transferred in the right half of my skull and the right half of my brain was transferred into your skull, which of us would be me and which would be you? Also, if you destroyed our bodies but recreated the mental states we’d be in a second from now in a different body, would we still exist? It’s not clear.
So to deny that there is an irreducible self is like denying that there’s irreducible genius. It doesn’t deny that Einstein is smart—very smart even, or that there’s a common notion of the self that works for most situations. The claim is just that there’s no robust fact of the matter about whether on is the same person as we are. Thus, there’s no absurdity in denying a self. We agree that the things you call a self exist, the claim is just that there’s no superimposed self on top of all that.
Egnor then confuses Metzinger’s claim with Wittgenstein’s, totally missing the point. (Honestly, these Egnor hit pieces just write themselves, he makes such elementary blunders).