Self-made People

Abstract

The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun 'I', so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made. 1. Overpopulation puzzles and the metaphysics of persons I am a person: a conscious, rational, thinking being. I also have various parts: feet, hands, a nose, ears, and so on. Moreover, I have parts that are or involve my 'thinking parts': a brain, a head, and things without a conventional name in English, for example my 'nose-complement' (a part that includes all of me except for my nose). For the sake of vividness, focus on my nose-complement. My nose-complement has everything intrinsically required for personhood: it has a working brain with the capacity to sustain a complex mental life. Worse yet, it has my brain, which makes it an excellent candidate for thinking just what I think. But if my nose-complement thinks of itself what I think of myself, it is badly mistaken. It is plausibly not a person, and it certainly does not have a nose. Unfortunately, things seem to my nose-complement exactly the way they seem to me. What makes it the case, then, that in referring to myself I refer to a person and not to a nose-complement? And how can I know that I am a person and not a nose-complement? This is one of the many overpopulation puzzles widely discussed in the personal identity literature. However, my cursory presentation

On Becoming a Rooster: Zhuangzian Conventionalism and the Survival of Death

“…The fact that there seems to be no real way to settle the debate has led many to the "Conventionalist" conclusion that the issue in part depends on one's person-directed attitudes 7see for instance, White (1989), Johnston (1989Johnston ( : 2010, Braddon-Mitchell and West (2001), Miller (2004), Miller (2013), and Kovacs (2016;. To illustrate, consider two communities.…”

“…7 Conventionalists differ on which particular attitudes are relevant for determining one's survival conditions. For instance, Johnston emphasizes attitudes such as anticipation (Johnston 2010), Kovacs takes it to be one's beliefs (Kovacs 2016;, and Braddon-Mitchell and Miller include attitudes concerning responsibility and property ownership (Braddon-Mitchell and Miller 2004). teletransportation, and have the corresponding person-directed attitudes: they fear teletransportation as death, they don't anticipate the experiences of the duplicate as being their very own experiences, etc.…”

“…Here I should make one important clarification: Conventionalism does not claim that our attitudes can determine the physical facts, rather it's just a claim that our attitudes can determine the identity facts. For example, in the above teletransportation situation, the physical facts include the fact that you are disintegrated by the initial teletransportation machine on earth, then the receiving machine on the moon makes a physical and psychological duplicate of you out of atoms 8 Some, such as Johnston (2010), Zimmerman (2012) and Kovacs (2016;, base this intuition on a precommitment to a permissive ontology (such as a rich form of Four-Dimensionalism) on which, coinciding each person, there is both an object that survives teletransportation and an object that does not. If the plausibility of Conventionalism rested on such an ontology, it makes it less likely that Zhuangzi is a Conventionalist.…”

Temporal Fictionalism for a Timeless World

“…Eklund (2004) calls views of this kind self-concern relativism. Kovacs (2016 and develops a related view that appeals to first-person 'I' thoughts rather than conative states. because those person-stages bear some particular relation to the person-stage in question, instead, it is the attitudes that are primitive, and some relation, such as psychological continuity, is one that a person-stage cares about because the primitive attitudes are ones that track that relation.…”

Are My Temporal Parts Agents?

“…See Olson . Some of these solutions, including the externalist solution defended in Brueckner and Buford , and the linguistic solution defended in Kovacs , may also be helpful in the present context. In addition, we may find the problem less worrisome if we think that persons and subpersons would have corresponding reasons for action, an issue that I will discuss in Section 4.…”