The Phenomenal Self
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loginWhen pondering the question ‘What kind of thing am I?’ most of us findourselves pulled in different directions. In many respects we seem to be perfectlyordinary material things. We can see ourselves in mirrors; we have a certain shape,size and weight, and our bodies are composed of the same kind of elementaryingredients as tables and chairs. But in other respects it seems that we are notordinary material things — or that we do not think of ourselves as such. Wehave minds, and most material things (or so most of us believe) do not. Noless importantly, most of us have little or no difficulty in imagining ourselvessurviving transformations and displacements that no ordinary material objectcould possibly survive. I may not believe it likely to happen, but I have nodifficulty in making sense of the possibility that I could be given the form of adolphin, or changed into a sentient tree (or even a sentient lump of silicon) andso discover what it is like to be physically very different from how I actually am.It is equally easy to imagine myself enjoying an afterlife in a non-physical realm,or waking up to find that I already exist in a non-physical realm and have beenmerely dreaming that I am a human being. How could such fates be conceivablepossibilitiesfor meif I am an ordinary material being?
