Episode 180: More James’s Psychology: Self and Will (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 180 is something like what is our moral psychology? Or what is the self? Or what is freedom? And we read some more chapters of William James the Principles of Psychology from 1890 and its abridgment, Psychology the Briefer Course from 1892. For more information and links to the readings, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Mark Linsenmayer, morally consisting solely of effort in medicine. Wisconsin.

0:27 Seth: This is Seth Paskin dropping all of his supernumerary consciousness in Austin, Texas.

0:33 Wes: Very sexy. This is Wes Alwan entering the lonesome memorial wilderness. That is my decision to do this podcast while sick with the flu in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey suffering from neural inertia in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:50 Mark: So, yeah, we are excited about reading more of this book. We didn't get to the self chapter last time, so we're going to do that. We're going to talk about. There's a separate chapter on the will and one of the things William James is most famous for in this book, his ideas of emotions. So those are the main topics. And also there were separate chapters on instinct and attention that are perhaps less important for us. But good to get the full picture of the psyche here. How y' all doing?

1:16 Seth: Fantastic.

1:17 Dylan: Doing good.

1:18 Mark: Besides the sick, Wes?

1:20 Wes: Lousy.

1:22 Mark: Yeah, we already pushed this off one day. We were supposed to do this several days ago.

1:26 Wes: And I know I might be worse tonight, actually than I was the other night.

1:32 Mark: I was feeling none too good that day. So this is an exciting way to end the year, feeling vaguely sick. But yeah, it'll be holidays for people when this gets posted. So happy days.

1:45 Wes: Merry James.

1:47 Dylan: Merry James.

1:49 Seth: I like that.

1:50 Wes: Start a religion.

1:52 Mark: That would be very fitting since I've been sort of reading William James more in answer to the Nietzsche that we had read before that he's Nietzsche. His book was a psychologist's Idleness. Right. Was his original title for Twilight of the Idols, which is a much less exciting title. Why he changed that at someone else's urging. And here we get some of the same things, not putting in quite the same way. James doesn't say straight out, free will is an illusion, for instance. That's not the kind of thing that he would say. But he does say, as scientists, we are committed to the idea that the will is caused.

And even though he considers the metaphysical problem of free will to be outside of the scope of this very scientific document. He's writing, you know, he's very much writing about moral phenomenology, about what freedom really amounts to in terms of. That's why I said effort in my intro. So he has a lot of things to say about effort. And that's why it was good that we read the little chapter Attention.

2:48 Wes: James really does want to preserve a place for the possibility of free will. Oh, yeah. So even though as scientists, as psychologists, we have to treat everything as deterministic, he leaves an area. He sort of indicates that it's not contradictory to say that there's such a thing as free will. And that fits in with a lot of his other philosophy as well. You know, what we read on religion,

3:10 Mark: that the distinction that he makes is, I've heard echoed in. I've never actually read Dennett's book on free will. But, you know, it's kind of what I've heard about as his short version of that. Something to the effect of. Well, even if our actions are ultimately part of a causal network, there's obvious ways in which some things are, say, the result of reasoned deliberation, and some things are not. And we've talked about in the chapter on habit in our discussion last time, how he's got the very physiological picture of mental activity in the first place, where all mental activity is at one point, he says, is fundamentally motor, so that it's a matter of some kind of incoming impression triggering something, and then there's an outgoing signal.

And what is the character of that if it just happens just like that? Well, then that's instinct. That's not freedom. Rather, it's a reflex action. Right. He has a special definition of instinct is. Well, it's reflex action that seems like it intends to achieve some goal, even though you're not necessarily thinking about a goal. Right. A spider spinning its web. It seems like he's trying to make a web. But there's no reason to think that the spider is deliberating about that, that it's still something like a reflex action, but it's more, you know, he starts building the web and that sensation of starting triggers the next little step and triggers the next little step.

And that follows very closely what we were saying about habit last time. And so instinct sort of flows in a habit.

4:38 Wes: So this is. I think you're talking about idea, motor action of which instinct might be one variety. Or are you just talking about instinct here?

4:45 Mark: I was just trying to sort of give the big picture from reflex to instinct, which is A more elaborate sort of complex of different reflex actions.

4:55 Wes: Yeah.

4:55 Mark: To habit, which we talked about last time. You know, something that becomes a reflex action. And it's not necessarily that it was initiated by conscious effort. It might have been just something that you fell into, but it might start as reflex action.

5:06 Wes: Yeah, this. In the chapter on free will, this is what he calls idea motor action. So, for instance, brushing dust away or something like that, you're not doing it fully consciously. And there's no. What he calls fiat. It is more like a habit. And really that stuff happens when there's no conflict in the mind. The question of deliberation, the question of will, really arises when there are conflicting impulses and we have to deliberate between them.

5:30 Mark: Yeah, there you go. So that's the big picture. That's how you get from a simple reflex to what really sure as heck feels like freedom. And that you could. He doesn't get into. Can we blame issues of moral responsibility and that part of what Nietzsche was concerned with. But he certainly sees this idea of. It seems like we can shift our attention this way and that way, and we have these conflicting impulses, as you say. And it seems like we can exert effort in one direction or another to make one impulse overwhelm another one. And that's really what moral life ends up being about.

6:03 Wes: Yeah. The effort is in paying attention to one idea or another idea, because impulsivity is sort of written into the nature of consciousness and ideas. In the end, the ability to will just depends on our ability to pay attention to a certain idea rather than let it simply fall out of the mind. And then the question of free will he raises in this very unique way, because he's set it up with this idea of attention. And the question of free will becomes. For James, it's about the amount of effort we can put into attention and whether that effort is all just a deterministic function of our character, of our habits, of our motives, things like that.

Whether it's reducible to essence, as the existentialists would put it, or if there's what he calls an independent variable, which is to say whether we can actually change our amount of effort in a way that is not a deterministic function of any quality of ourself.

7:02 Mark: Seth or Dylan, you want to give us sort of an overview, a lead in, something you wanted to focus on and hear.

7:08 Dylan: I don't have any introduction. I was figuring that we were just continuing on with what we had before.

7:14 Mark: Seth, give us a check in having spent two more weeks with this what was super important to you in here?

7:19 Seth: I still hung up on some of the stuff related to the self that I'm not sure that we gave full attention to last time.

7:27 Mark: We most certainly did not.

7:29 Seth: That's really what I was hoping, at least in part, we would get into this time. He has a lot of really interesting things to say about the constitution of the self, this material, social and spiritual, and the discussion of the self as knower and known. Through his discussion he comes to the point where he says essentially the concept of a substantial and persistent soul is superfluous to what we need for the concept of identity.

7:57 Wes: What order do we want to talk about things?

8:00 Mark: Let's spend as long as we need on this self chapter. There's definitely some ethical import that eventually comes up here. It's kind of laden throughout in terms of what's really important to us. What is self interest? What is it when we have self love? What is it when we're valuing the self? So that's all very relevant to the eventual moral discussion. But this is a full blown phenomenology of self, more or less, and gets into those tricky semi Kantian issues that we were pointing at quite a lot last. That's the only part of this chapter that we did get into last time and we didn't cover it in any sort of systematic way.

So yeah, you started, Seth, with just the idea that when we're talking about the self, we could mean the body, the material self, it could mean the social self, or we could mean what he calls a spiritual self. And so he categorized those all as the me, Right? All as the objective self. And then he asked the question, and it's more of a question really than clear doctrine, unlike. He goes on quite at length about the material, social and spiritual self. Is there something like the pure ego, the thing that actually does all the rest of the stuff?

And that's an interesting distinction between the spiritual self, in other words, my point of consciousness, the stream of consciousness that we talked about last time. And yet the pure ego, the thing that does those. Actually that's not a distinction. Say that Descartes necessarily. I mean, yeah, there's maybe a substance.

9:22 Wes: This is Kant's distinction, right, between the. So when he talks about the me versus the I, and the chapter is basically divided into those two sections, we're talking about the empirical self or the empirical ego versus what Kant called a transcendental ego, the self is knower. And yeah, he gives a nice summary of all the different aspects of the empirical self. So for instance, the material me includes not just the body, but it could include my property, the social me, the way that other people see me, the spiritual me, the sort of idealized other.

Which I think is one of the best parts of that whole constituence of the self part. And then he goes through the feelings aroused by self appreciation. And then the actions prompted by the self. Self seeking self preservation. Which in turn can be bodily, social, or spiritual. And then the more difficult part of the chapter is the self is knower. And really that gets us back to our whole stream of consciousness thing. The second part is really about the grounds for identity through a stream of consciousness. And so he has a really interesting take on that.

10:25 Seth: So I'd like to at least explore this concept of the self is known and the self as knower. So at the beginning of the chapter, he says, you know, you're always more or less aware of yourself as a personal existence. I'm partly object, partly subject, partly knower, partly known. This concept of the self as known is that sense of intentionality. The sense of there's I and me. But the me is draws a line between the me and mine. The knower and the known have a relationship of objectification and ownership. That he talks about how it's hard to draw the line in the widest sense about what is me and what is mine.

11:08 Wes: So the mine, in a way, is one of the constituents of the me. So he's trying to say when I talk about me, it's this very broad thing. It's not just the body, but it's everything that we possess that's related to ourselves.

11:19 Seth: Yes, the concept of me. When I talk about me as something that's known traditionally, I think, in philosophy, we think of it as being pretty circumscribed. And I don't think people explore it enough. But there's something about either my consciousness or my consciousness plus my body. And he expands that and pushes the boundaries on it, saying, the me and the mind can go well beyond just your body or just your self awareness. Right. It starts with the body. Then it's the clothes on the body. Then it's your immediate family and in your home and your property. And the labor that you put into things to create things.

11:56 Wes: And don't forget your yacht.

11:57 Seth: Your yacht.

11:58 Wes: The yacht is one of the examples that he uses.

12:01 Seth: But in essence, the boundary of what constitutes me as known or mine is limited only by the material sphere. And the distinction between the material sphere and the social and spiritual have to do with you. Know, spiritual is essentially the externality pointing in, whereas the material is somehow what's internal pointing out or creating a circumference out. And then spiritual is. I don't know what at this point, but I think the fact that he starts to erase the boundaries of what we traditionally conceive as self, when we conceive of ourselves not as consciousness, but as an object of consciousness, is interesting.

12:46 Mark: Yeah, it certainly spoke to the kind of stuff that we're addressing in the Buddhism episode. For instance, sense of the multiple selfs competing. And he certainly doesn't take the Buddhist argument that we gave where because almost any given thing, phenomena within the self you could point to and say, it's more mine than me. So it's not me. If it's mine, it's not me. Therefore there is no me at all. There is no self. Like, he's not going to follow that. He takes almost the opposite that if it is so fluid in that way, then then. Well, that's just the phenomenology of self is that at different situations we kind of contract the self or expand the self. And talking about it normatively like which is your real self? Sort of denies the phenomenology. I don't know that there's a normativity built into it.

13:35 Wes: He does actually say the spiritual me is what feels most real in the end. So just to kind of recapitulate, Seth set it up. As you know, he says, we're going to talk about the me in its widest possible sense, to include me and mine. And then he breaks that down into we're going to talk about the constituents of the self, the feelings and emotions those constituents arouse, and then the acts which they prompt. And then he divides those constituents down into the material me, the social me, and the spiritual me. The material me would be the things you expect, like the body, possessions.

The social me has to do with the recognition you get from others, which is very important. But most important of all the spiritual me, which he says is the quote, unquote, entire collection of my states of consciousness, my psychic faculties and dispositions. Taken concretely, when we think of ourselves as thinkers, all the other ingredients of our me seem relatively external possessions. Even within the spiritual me, some ingredients seem more external than others. Our capacities from sensation, for example, are less intimate possessions, so to speak, than our emotions and desires.

Our intellectual processes are less intimate than our volitional decisions. The more active feeling states of consciousness are thus the more central portions of the spiritual me. In a way, I think he does or at least he's suggesting that it's understandable that we will tend to give priority to some of these constituents of the me and treat some of them as more essential than others. And the spiritual part, in a way, seems to be more central, which is one of the reasons why you get someone like Descartes saying, I think, therefore I am, obviously.

15:10 Mark: So, yes, there is normativity that's kind of shot through here in terms of the spiritual is ultimately more important to us and that there's kind of something wrong with you. If you really consider, say, the body to be the most important thing and forget about my spiritual self development, I don't know that he has a strong argument for that. It's just sort of. That's kind of how we feel when we reflect on it.

15:31 Wes: Well, it's just that we can imagine losing, you know, all the externalities. We can imagine losing all of our possessions, all of our. In imagination, we can imagine losing our body. That's the point of Descartes thought experiment. Right. We retain a self even when we disembody it in the thought experiment, which is why it seems more central, why the idea of the thinker seems more central.

15:51 Mark: So where's the passage that he actually goes into in the hierarchy, the spiritual

15:56 Wes: ultimately being the one I just read from. You mean page 181 was where I was reading from.

16:02 Mark: All right.

16:02 Wes: He recapitulates, by this way, this distinction between the material, the social and the spiritual comes up in a number of times. It comes up first, and when he breaks down the constituents, it's like a grid, really. He also.

16:14 Dylan: He has that grid.

16:14 Wes: Other areas of this. He will. Yeah, and then he has a chart eventually, but he will break down other areas according to this trichotomy.

16:22 Mark: All right, so there is normativity in each kind of self, material, social and spiritual. Men distinguish between the immediate and the actual and the remote and the potential, between the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former and the advantage of the latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for the sake of one's general health. One must abandon the dollar in the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to come. One must make an enemy of his present interlocutor. If thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle. One must go without learning and grace and wit, the better to compass one's soul's salvation.

16:51 Wes: What page are you reading on?

16:52 Mark: I'm actually reading from the principles.

16:55 Wes: Okay. I just found that it's on page 191 of the Briefer course. But yeah.

16:59 Dylan: Do you have a different set of pages? So can you give me the headline of the section?

17:03 Mark: It's under rivalry and conflict of the

17:05 Wes: different selves in ours. It's under the hierarchy of the mes.

17:09 Mark: Okay, so we've got some normativity that way. And then we also have normativity between. Okay, so here's two paragraphs down. So it comes to pass that as aforesaid men have arranged the various selves in which they may seek a hierarchical scale according to their worth, a certain amount of bodily selfishness is required as a basis for all other selves. But too much sensuality is despised or at best, condoned on account of the other qualities of the individual. The wider material selves are regarded as higher than the immediate body. He is esteemed a poor creature who is unable to forego a little meat and drink and warmth and sleep for the sake of getting on in the world.

The social self as a whole again ranks higher than the material self as a whole. We must care more for honor, our friends, our human ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And the spiritual self is so supremely precious that rather than to lose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends and good fame and property and life itself. So right before the paragraph I just read, it talks about the hierarchy of the different spheres.

18:03 Dylan: So I wondered there whether that amounts to a cultural hierarchy. Or maybe that's all is meant by it being normative, that there's some kind of normativity to it. But whether or not that is expected to vary. You know, when I was going through this section, this list, particularly the last part before the claim about the spiritual self being supremely precious in general, we must care more for honor, our friends, our humanities, than our son's skin or wealth. It just felt like that was likely a cultural thing. The earlier hierarchies seem to be more plausibly physiological in a way that his brain physiology and body physiology is educated into. But these seem to have a stronger cultural influence.

18:50 Wes: Yeah, I think the more social we are. Right. The more the spiritual and the social are going to be higher in the scale. Right. So, for instance, if we're children, I'm going to eat the jam sandwich and let it drip all over my shirt and not care until my mom cleans it off me and says no. To do that, you got to be clean and you got to eat with manners and all that other stuff. And eventually I internalize it and it becomes more important in that Sense. Right. The hierarchy that's expressed is just one of the things in our day to day behavior. We have a check on all that other bodily stuff that might just run unchecked if it weren't for all the socialization, if it weren't for this internalization of what other people think is right and good and their approval and all that stuff. Go ahead.

19:36 Seth: Well, I think part of the issue is that the boundary between the material and the social is not so much a boundary in terms of kind, it's that if all you focus on is the material, then you have no frame of reference of which to make a judgment about how well or how poorly you're doing. If you aren't looking at what other people are doing, you don't measure yourself against them. And so my reading of it in the section I'm in the Principles of Psychology, not in the short course, he has a fairly extended discussion about kind of a Stoic response wants.

He puts forth this idea that self esteem is equal to your success divided by your pretensions. And he essentially says in regard to the social, well, you have a choice. You can either amp up the material, so gain more things, be more successful, accomplish more. In other words, expand the realm of what you can call yours or what I can call mine, or you can lower your aspirations and pretensions relative to how you want to compare the mine to the mine of others. And then he argues against the concept of Stoicism. And Dylan, this is where I think it complicates a little bit this idea.

I think he wants to acknowledge the reality of the social self and not simply try to abnegate it and take a Stoic complete retreat. Because the Stoic retreat, it's a retreat from the social and the material simply into some kind of a spiritual existence. And I don't think James is advocating for that.

21:17 Wes: Well, I don't think he doesn't see the spiritual as a Stoic retreat, though.

21:21 Mark: Well, it seems there are two ways that you could contract, right? If we're saying that there's a grid, so you've got the hierarchy from material to social to spiritual. And then within each of those spheres. So the second dimension is, is maybe between the me and the mine, right? How much you extend yourself out. So maybe in the social realm it might be sort of, how many friends do you care about their opinion? How many people do you call part of your extended family unit your circle of concern? Things like that. The example that Seth just gave was in terms of material possessions. If you don't claim that you care about possessions at all, then that's shrinking that material thing just to your body and nothing else. But it does feel like if you're shrinking, that you're also.

22:09 Seth: Even beyond the body.

22:10 Mark: Yeah. That you're shrinking both directions in the hierarchy. You're shrinking not just horizontally, but also vertically, back to spiritual. And so that's what you feel like. Yeah. You can whip my body, you can tie me up, screw my honor, you can destroy my family, can die. Like, the Stoic retreat really is a complete retreat to a point. It's a retreat to the spiritual. It's a. And within the spiritual to say, not even, you know, I don't know, if you're a Buddhist stoic, then you'd be saying, even parts of my spiritual self, my desires and things, I'm not even going to care about those.

Like, I'm really going to retreat to just this point of consciousness. And he thinks that that is. He says, if I'm a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to be my goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny their goods at all. We find this more of protecting the self by exclusion and denial. Very common among people who are, in other respects, not stoics. All narrow people entrench their me. They retract it from the region of what they cannot securely possess. People who don't resemble them or treat them with indifference, people over whom they gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however meritorious it may intrinsically be.

They look with chill negation, if not positive hate, who will not be mine, I will exclude from existence altogether. That is as far as I can make it so such people shall be as if they were not.

23:25 Wes: Yeah. So I just wanted to make the point that even if we see the Stoicism as a sort of a embrace of the. And by the way, he starts out this whole section talking about the rivalry of the different me. So all these things do stand in conflict to each other. It's just that embracing the spiritual doesn't necessarily mean becoming a stoic or getting rid of the other two. That's sort of one solution he rejects. But I did just want to say more precisely what he means by the spiritual, because I think it's actually really fascinating. And there are sort of echoes of Nietzsche's genealogy of Morals in this.

So this is again, when he's talking about the remote and the potential me, and he's saying the potential social me is the most interesting. And then he sort of derives the spiritual from a sort of ideal Social self. So he says. Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be. This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent me which I seek. This judge is God, the absolute mind, the great companion.

And then going down a little bit, the impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of the man is a self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate socius in an ideal world. Now, I may be inventing the connection to the spiritual myself. I'm not sure if he explicitly connects this to the spiritual, but I see, you know, when he's talking about these spiritual goods, I think it's this sort of generalized social spectator. So we start out, we're worried about conforming to the norms of society, to what people expect of us.

And that's one of the ways in which the social self bears down on us. But ultimately we could reject all those norms, right? We could be moral revolutionaries or whatever you want to call it. Or be willing. Willing even to completely sacrifice ourselves for the sake of this ideal social spectator.

25:24 Seth: This is a little further on in that same section. In each kind of self, material, social and spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and actual and the remote and potential, between the narrower and the wider view. To the detriment of the former and the advantage of the latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for the sake of one's general health. One must abandon the dollar in the hand for the sake of $100 to come. One must make an enemy of his present interlocutor. If thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle.

25:55 Mark: Blah, blah, blah.

25:57 Seth: And what I found interesting about this was. He makes it sound like you forego the immediate material for the future material. You forego the immediate social for the future social. What he means there is you might, you know, ignore your family and friends in order to go and. And pursue a life that would get you broader fame.

26:17 Wes: Or say, I brave the condemnation of my own family club and set when,

26:22 Seth: as a Protestant, I turned Catholic. Right? But what I find interesting is that when you talk about the spiritual, it almost seems like in order to gain the spiritual future, which, if you're Christian, is the world to come, what you are called upon to forego is not a spiritual present or immediate. It's a material or social. And that's what I think is interesting is that I feel like the hierarchy breaks down because to gain a spiritual future, you're not asked to sacrifice a spiritual immediate or a spiritual present. You're asked to sacrifice one of the other selves.

27:02 Wes: I think I've kind of led us astray a little bit by talking about the spiritual the way I have, because, I don't know, earlier on, right. We pointed to the passage in which he's thinking of the spiritual me as, quote, unquote, entire collection of my states of consciousness. It's the self we think of when we think of ourselves as thinkers, all that stuff. You know, my more active feeling states of consciousness are my central portions of the spiritual me. And I made this association between that and his talk of religion later on and this talk of the ideal socius as a sort of limiting case of the social self. And I think that was kind of a bad move. And we're using spiritual in two different senses now.

27:43 Seth: He says here he's talking about the ideal self. Says this self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent me which I seek, this judge is God, the absolute mind, the great companion. Right. So in a certain sense, the spiritual self is a form of the social self, but where the judgment or the recognition comes from the highest authority. And this is my point, is that because this authority is transcendent. And he makes the point of talking about prayer versus science in that same section, he is talking about something that's qualitatively different and spiritual in the sense that we think about it in a modern sense of being transcendent or religiously spiritual or something like that.

28:34 Wes: Yeah, well, he uses this phrase. It's connected to our moral and religious life, and it. It's connected to honor and conscience. Except, you know, as you said, not just to what other people think of me, but in that so far as they're related to this ideal Socius would think of what I'm doing technically. Right. This is what he calls the potential social me. This is the sort of endpoint, you know, that we are now connecting to the spiritual self. And I guess there is some sort of connection. Right. If we think that there's a connection between the Cartesian thinker, spiritual self, there may be a way to relate these two things, but right now, I think, at least in the text, it's distinct. This idea of a potential social me is not exactly the same as what he called the spiritual me.

29:17 Seth: Was that a big sidetrack?

29:19 Mark: No, I think there's a lot of ethical implications and ethical comments that are Scattered through here. But this is not a text in ethics. And so he does not straightforwardly say, here's my moral psychology. It's just when morally relevant insights come up, he'll say them. But I think what we're getting at is that what he thinks our moral phenomenology is involves a hierarchy that is. You know, it's interesting. I think he might want to say that just as our notions of self involve different distinct meanings, right, these different levels that are not always in harmony, our concepts of ethical duties could also correspond to these different levels.

I mean, the obvious one in terms of the social, right? A lot of what we consider our social self, our honor that captures. You might even think that there are whole societies that really just. They don't have morality in the sense that Nietzsche would point at and sneer. But they do have honor. They have social games that have been worked up. And so you can fail or you can succeed at those. You can lose honor, you can lose face. And so that would all be in the realm of the social. Now, what makes that distinctly moral? Well, this spiritualization that again, Nietzsche would say was a result of the slave morality overcoming the master morality.

The master morality is more or less the social morality I was just talking about. But when you start just navel gazing and thinking like Kant does, that the only thing that can really be moral or immoral is your will. And this is actually what James's view is like that he eventually gets to in the chapter on will explicitly, you know, we can't control what the results of our actions are going to be. We can't control even within ourselves. Maybe our will will not be able to overcome some other physiological triggering that's going on. But what we can gauge is this internal dynamic.

And that is all at the realm of the spiritual self. The realm of the spiritual self is the entirety of the stream of consciousness. And he says, yeah, within that, there might be some things that you point at, like, oh, there's a desire that just popped up. I don't want that desire. I don't really consider that me. And so there's an ambiguity even within the spiritual realm of what is me versus mine. And you know, maybe when we get to the, again, the transcendental ego, that maybe we even want to say, that's not a fundamentally different thing from all the different me's.

It's sort of a pole, an ideal. Just in the way you were just saying that this idea of God is an ideal limiting case. The objective ideal spectator is the limiting case in the social self, I would think maybe the doer of the deeds is the ideal limiting case in the spiritual self. And they're both relevant for ethics, obviously,

32:11 Dylan: but there's still this distinction between. I guess I'm getting to the knower question, but there's the distinction of those things that one would do or one would think social actions that one would engage in, and the claiming of them as mine.

32:26 Wes: Right.

32:27 Dylan: Just because you do something doesn't seem to require that that be you.

32:31 Wes: Right.

32:32 Mark: Claiming it's mine in the sense of responsibility or claiming it's mine in the sense of a source of value. I guess those are two different ways you could interpret that. Right. If you have a desire like you really are lusting after somebody you're not supposed to lust after, you could say, that's not really me. That's kind of just this thing like the Buddhists would say, that is imposing itself on me and I want to focus on what's really me. Or you could accept that that's you. I'm really responsible for that, but yet still not approve of it. And so it's not something you would fight for in the way that when we say you can extend or contract the self in terms of your circle of concern. So which one of those were you talking about?

33:12 Dylan: I guess I'm mainly talking about the latter. And maybe again, that's why it probably goes into the question of the second half of this section. As you said earlier, this account is a phenomenology of the me. And what I found myself kind of struggling with is the way in which it's phenomenological, but admits of these rivalries and these tensions where you don't seem to have. I'm wondering where the me that has an integrity is coming out of it. So there's this kind of soup there. But that experience of talking about this is part of me or this is not part of me. And as you pointed out, the question of responsibility or the question of sort of acknowledgement, those are going to be messy in this respect. Right. I guess we end up with the table, right, which is describing phenomenologically these facts. But you're still left with this question of what the unity of the self is.

34:05 Mark: I think there's a couple different ways to take that. And that's ultimately why he gets to talking about the I is because he thinks, very much like Kant, that we need to posit some sort of unity. We don't know how metaphysically seriously to take that. And he's going to say I'm going to set that question aside. Whether there is a soul or something that has all these different states of consciousness and that manifests itself as material and manifests itself in the social realm, or whether it's just a part of the language game, a pole of our experience. Is it real or not?

34:38 Dylan: I guess what I'm thinking about is in these levels of me, the material, the social and the spiritual, particularly the social and the spiritual have reflections from the outside world. And I feel like the spiritual me has more reflections from one's interior world on, as Seth put it, what's mine, what's part of me, what belongs to me? And that activity is an activity of identity. And it just seems to me, routine that we would say that that's me and that's not me, and we would have participated in both. So, you know, I do math, but I'm not a mathematician. Right. This claim example.

35:20 Mark: No, that's exactly the kind of thing like, you know, Sartre is pointing at. We're talking about the waiter. You know, I'm doing waitering activity, but I'm not a waiter. I'm not essentially a waiter. Come on.

35:30 Wes: So in other words, we might think of conditions of identity as all being within the sphere of the me as a Wes. It's because I have these specific qualities and character traits and friends. And that brain, the brain of a particular structure. And ultimately, that's not going to be the criterion of identity in the psychological sense, interestingly enough. And we can begin to see why, if we do thought experiments where we have people cloned. And actually, those thought experiments are troubling even for the criterion of identity that James proposes.

36:05 Dylan: This really comes out in this. In that next section, right?

36:07 Wes: Yeah. So when we move to the self as knower, we're moving to pure subjectivity. We're moving from something that can be known to only the knower, the knower itself. So it's worth reading just the first paragraph of this section. The I, or pure ego, is a very much more difficult subject of inquiry than the me. It is that which at any given moment is conscious, whereas the me is only one of the things which it is conscious of. In other words, it is the thinker. And the question immediately comes up, what is the thinker? Is it the passing state of consciousness itself?

Or is it something deeper and less mutable? And then the rest of this section, first he rejects the idea that we need a spiritualist account, that is, that we need some sort of metaphysical substance as a criterion of identity. This thing that Sort of underlies all the thoughts, as if the thoughts were its attributes. And then he's going to reject the British empiricist account of identity as a compound of ideas, a sort of a bundling of ideas. For James, there's. We can discuss this in more detail, but he's going to reject the idea that there could be compounds of ideas.

And that sort of comes out of his whole stream of consciousness assumption, which is to say that each pulse of consciousness, each idea that we have is this moment in time. And, you know, our ideas aren't these timeless things floating around in a cage that could be compounded or not compounded. And then he goes into his account of the idea of a deck of cards isn't just a compound of a different ideas of a bunch of different cards. So the whole idea of grounding personal identity on this compounding of ideas doesn't, for him, make sense. And then he's going to get to his solution, which I think actually does make a lot more sense.

37:48 Mark: So it can't be compounded at a time. He's not going to say, as you say, that my current experience is a bunch of different ideas stuck together. No, there's just.

37:57 Wes: I mean, actually one idea at a time.

38:01 Mark: Yeah, I mean, that's an ambiguous way of saying it. I was, in our last discussion of this, I was stressing that point heavily to the exclusion of the ability to then abstract and get an idea of blue, say, from experience of blue at time one and experience of blue at time two. That he's going to say that, yeah, there is an idea of blue. A conception of blue is what he's going to call it, that you can say, oh, there it is again. That's what coming up with a concept is, the ability to point to some aspect of a past experience and see it again in a future experience.

But the fact that you can do that does not mean that the current experience can be broken down into the blue part of it. The blue idea, interacting with the sky idea and the grass idea and all the other stuff that I'm perceiving at the same time. That's just nonsense. Can't you say that even though the ideas can't be at the same time, can't the unity come in, the consecutive ideas? Isn't that what his solution is? Or how is that different?

38:58 Wes: Yeah, the unity for him comes from. So it's the section. The sense of personal identity is the section we're looking at right now. And it begins by him rejecting that. The idea that the Self is known can be the grounds of personal identity. Because it's the grounds of so many differences as well. And so many internal conflicts. It's really his. This idea of warmth and intimacy. Which is the key for him to personal identity. It's this idea of an aura, you know, around any given state of consciousness right now. Right. He does that thought experiment later on with Peter doesn't wake up with Paul's thoughts.

He's not. He doesn't wake up thinking Paul's body is his body. And likewise, he doesn't wake up thinking that Paul's thoughts are eased. His thoughts, even if Paul told him all his thoughts the day, the night before. They have a different sense of intimacy and warmth for him. And that, by the way, is just a analogy in the whole picture. Because he wants to take that. He wants to think of each different pulse of our consciousness. As us waking up from the previous pulse. And when we wake up from that previous pulse. When I'm at time T2. I don't inherit Mark's time T1.

I inherit my own time T1 pulse of consciousness. I do that because of this sort of snowball effect. It's almost like there's a sense in which each present moment of consciousness carries all the ones before it. But not as this kind of cognitive content. But just because it treats its predecessor as warm, which is confusing. So we might have to read a little bit more about that.

40:26 Seth: Yeah.

40:26 Mark: Let me respond to my own attempt at that. I just ask, couldn't you, Instead of pointing to identity as something with different ideas stacking on top of each other at time T. But instead of looking at idea time T1, idea time T2. Idea time T3. And say those are all what makes itself. That's almost the story. How do we know? How can we. We label them in advance. Idea time T1. If I set up the question that way, I'm actually already assuming personal identity. Because how could you tell that idea Blue at time T1 and Idea Blue at time T2. How could you even try to put those together? Maybe one of them is in my head and one of them is in Wes's head. So I'm already assuming no, they're all in one stream of consciousness.

41:08 Dylan: Well, he said that's an empirical fact, right? Yeah, that's an empirical fact from his stipulation.

41:14 Mark: Yes. So it's just basic saying that there's a warmth and intimacy. This seems to be a good phenomenological characteristic. Of what typically makes up continuation of self. But it seems like you might want to just say that actually classifying them as oneself is simply basic. There's no further analysis. Adding the warmth and intimacy, again, characterizes it but doesn't define it. We already know what it is.

41:39 Seth: He spends a fair amount of time talking about trying to determine, like, how thoughts have ownership. Right. The whole experience of self is an experience of individuation, the thoughts that are happening. Peter doesn't wake up with Paul's eyes. The one thing he talks about, we talked about this on the last podcast, that one of the characteristics of consciousness is that thought is owned by ownership of thought is. So he says in this chapter, we're taking that as a given that there's a continuity of ownership of my thoughts. And what he points out here is avoiding or ignoring warmth and intimacy for a second. He says, listen, this consciousness of personal sameness, this idea of ownership, that there is this fundamental experience. Remember, he's saying he's a psychologist, right?

42:29 Unknown speaker: Right.

42:29 Seth: So there's this fundamental experience of personal sameness in the continuity of thought. He says, okay, we can treat this as a subjective phenomenon or an objective deliverance, as a feeling or as truth. We may explain how one bit of thought can come to judge other bits to belong to the same ego with itself, or we may criticize its judgment and decide how far it may tally with the nature of things. And so the points that Wes and Dylan were making, Mark, were around taking that as a given and then saying, he's going to basically say, if you think that this is a subjective phenomenon, you're constantly going to be tasked with trying to find further and further levels of explanation.

And so he's basically saying that there is a fundamental unity to thought, that this ownership points not towards a subjective feeling, but towards an objective reality. That's this continuity of thought. But he's going to back away from claiming that it's transcendental, or he's going to back away from any claims about what that might be in terms of, like, soul or ego or anything like that.

43:36 Wes: So he comes to the conclusion, after his argument against the compounding of ideas, he says, the simplest thing, therefore, if we are to assume the existence of a stream of consciousness at all, would be to suppose that the things that are known together are known in single pulses of that stream. And ultimately the unifying element is not going to be this substantial thinker that's sort of superfluous. So, for instance, if we may posit a simple and permanent spiritual being on which many ideas combine their effects, and its chief function would Be to be a combining medium.

But then we would have to ask the question, what's the real knower, this permanent being or our passing state? It doesn't really solve our problem. So he thinks we have to stick to the passing state itself as the exclusive agent of knowledge. And in that sense it must be the passing state must be the agent of identity. Or it must be the grounds of identity. So when we get to that sense of personal identity section, he posits what he calls functional identity. So this is in the sameness in the self as knower.

44:40 Dylan: It's in the second paragraph.

44:41 Wes: Yeah, but if the states of consciousness be accorded as realities, no such substantial identity in the thinker need be supposed. Yesterday's and today's states of consciousness have no substantial identity. For when one is here, the other is irrevocably dead and gone. But they have a functional identity. For both know the same objects. And so far as the bygone me is one of those objects, they react upon it in an identical way, greeting it and calling it mine and opposing it to all the other things they know. This functional identity seems really the only sort of identity in the thinker which the facts require us to suppose. Successive thinkers, numerically distinct but all aware of the same past in the same way, form an adequate vehicle for all the experience of personal unity and sameness which we actually have. That's the core argument.

45:28 Dylan: There's a lot tied up in here. Right. First of all, there's this picture of a stream of consciousness that goes from being a stream to being pulses. That already seems problematic in a way. Right. You're just discretizing something that's supposed to be continuous. And then this functional identity and substantial identity would seem to be a similar kind of thing. But the functional identity, everything about memory

45:49 Wes: is in there, right?

45:50 Dylan: So I have a pulse from one pulse to the other of my consciousness. And that pulsiness is the lack of substantial identity. The pulses are not causally related to one another in this respect. And so therefore no substantial identity. But they have a functional identity that they're tied to one another in that the way he says it is they call the same things mind. But that seems to really just mean memory.

46:15 Mark: Can I just clarify that? He's not saying there's no substantial identity. He's saying no such substantial identity in the thinker need be supposed. So the idea of substantial identity is there is a single substance that has experience one and experience two.

46:28 Wes: The soul, or the Cartesian substance or whatever you want to call it.

46:32 Mark: Yeah, so he's not saying my experience at time one and my experience two don't have substantial identity. In fact, that sentence sort of doesn't even make any sense because experiences wouldn't have substantial identity. It would be that the substance that has the experience has identity with itself.

46:47 Wes: Well, yeah, but he's just speaking loosely there to say he. He's saying that the sameness, my sameness, is not grounded in a substance, as in a metaphysical substance, a soul or something like that. That's what he means when he rejects substantial identity.

47:02 Dylan: Yeah. I'm making a kind of rookie mistake here about not remembering that substantial is a technical term that means stuff in this respect. So my apologies on that part.

47:12 Seth: Okay.

47:13 Wes: I didn't even know you were making that mistake.

47:16 Mark: So you were thinking substantial meaning like important.

47:18 Dylan: Yeah, like I said, it was a stupid rookie mistake. You should just exclude me from all further conversation.

47:24 Mark: It seemed like you were still making an interesting point of possible. Objection.

47:28 Dylan: I do think it's an objection. I just. I take him to be tying everything about the functional identity to being memory. And that successive activity, even if it doesn't causally sit in a material entity that accounts for its continuity. Its continuity is accounted for by memory. Because in his words, the functional activity is to successfully claim the same things as mine. That's the ground by which you chart the identity.

47:59 Wes: Yeah.

48:00 Dylan: At any given moment, you look back and you say the same things, especially for moments that are close together, you would go back and say the same thing as mine. Now that might actually diverge, I imagine, in his account. Right. If you got far enough away from two pulses, you went to pulses that were very far apart from one another. They may not exactly have the same things. Even the overlapping things is claiming that as mine.

48:25 Wes: Exactly right.

48:25 Mark: Just because I read the first two pages. The memory chapter. Yes. That is when you're talking short term memory, then it really does have this continuation of warmth and intimacy. When you're talking long term memory, you're really conceptualizing something that happened before. You're not actually reliving it.

48:41 Dylan: You're not preserving the memory. You have ideafied. I don't want to say idealized. Ideafied. The memory exceptionalized. You're remembering a memory.

48:49 Wes: Yeah. And I guess that's when he says, so the functional identity. It's a functional identity in the sense of. It's a knowledge relationship. It's the same knowledge relationship to a variety of objects, including the bygone me. What he calls the bygone me, which must be a remembered Me, of course. And as a known me must be an empirical me and not the I. You guys understand what I'm saying?

49:11 Seth: No.

49:12 Wes: So the functional identity between that creates a continuous I. It's a functional identity, meaning that it has a consistent set of relations to a certain set of objects. And that relation is knowledge. So both know the same objects. It's a knowledge relation. And if it is a knowledge relation, it's not a relationship to the I as knower, It's a relationship to the me, to the empirical self, which is an object of memory. That's the bygone me, he calls it. This is the only way I can make sense of this. And I'm just trying to fit it in with what Dylan and Mark were saying about this being critically about memory.

So that's the sense in which the I here would be transcendental. It's. It doesn't come into the stream as itself being an object of knowledge. In other words, I don't take my previous act of knowing as an object that I now know. That's not the grounds for this identity. You know, again, I think Dylan's point is spot on. It's about the unity of memory.

50:06 Mark: You could have this sort of unity of memory and so call yourself a single self. And even though on a physiological level there are actually separate agents, there are separate substances that are sort of sitting together in the mind. So, you know, you get this idea when you talk about, like, split brain patients that then are conscious of different things. So this is supposed to give you evidence that there really are kind of like, again, that's the theory that came up of the multiple selves in our Buddhism episode. Sort of as a side thing is like, oh, this is a thing that's at least debated, if not accepted among psychologists nowadays, that there really are multiple agents, we might want to say, at work in a single brain that correspond to different parts of the brain.

We're not exactly, you know, sure how this all works, that this deserves its own episode. But I just want to point out that this is compatible with James's account. Even if you have all these sort of separate beings that are sitting in your head, that are seeing out of your eyes and having the same experiences, those are still all functionally you. They're all functionally the same person.

51:08 Wes: Yeah. So now you're thinking. James is sort of thinking across time. Now you're thinking even within the same temporal moment. I mean, ultimately, he says, right. Successive thinkers, numerically distinct, but all aware of the same past in the same way. That's an adequate vehicle for personal unity. And you're saying those successive thinkers actually could be themselves in a way. Different thinkers, right? Different functional components of the brain or something like that. Dependent on. On those different functional components.

51:36 Dylan: Yeah.

51:37 Mark: Certainly the brain changes over time. And we don't want to say that you become a different person because one of your neurons has died and you've gained a new. You know, this. This kind of stuff. So there has to be some other way of. Of establishing continuity. And he thinks he's established it.

51:51 Seth: Can I read like a quote from the end of the chapter? So he says, to sum up now this long chapter, the consciousness of self involves a stream of thought, each part of which, as I can remember, those which went before and know the things they knew. And two, emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as me, and appropriate to these the rest. The nucleus of the me is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered past feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same me with it.

Whatever other things are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed to form part of that me's experience. And of them, certain ones are reckoned to be themselves constituents of the me in a larger sense, etc. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate, nor for psychological purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the soul or a principle like the pure ego. Views as out of time. It is a thought at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter together with all that the latter called its own.

53:08 Wes: So in a way, think of it as a kind of snowball effect. With every each moment in time the snowball gets bigger and includes everything preceding it, which seems counterintuitive if we think that the snowball has to consist only of what we're paying attention to and what's in our consciousness right now. But if we think of it in terms of potentiality, I think it makes more sense. The I is just each state at time T. And its connection is that there's a sense in which it includes all previous states. It doesn't mean that I have to think about every previous state consciously or something like that to establish that continuity. So it's something more complex.

53:46 Dylan: And this is where I think his notion of fringe is really, I don't like the snowball analogy because while it preserves that notion of memory and that notion of self as being a kind of folded up experience, it really takes the Stream of consciousness to me and pours it in a bucket and says that the self is really just taking that whole stream of consciousness and pouring it into a thing. And that's the self. But I think it's more. There's a locus of identity that has to do with. I still like that sense of warmth. Right. The things that feel most mine.

Then there are memories, things that are closest in or powerful or whatever that affect a kind of. I'll use a different analogy. That a cloud of self that at any given time has a more cogent center, but has a lot of fringe to it. And memory contributes to that. And in a way, that cloud is moving through time and you have memories that are sticking with it and memories that are fading away from it.

54:54 Mark: I was going to say a snowball with a tiny black hole in it.

54:56 Dylan: A tiny black hole.

54:57 Wes: Yeah. Well, actually, you got the snowball thing. I sort of thought of that while reading James's own metaphor. So here's what he says. Each later thought, knowing and including thus the thoughts that went before it is the final receptacle and appropriating them as the final owner of all that they contain and own. So I just think of the snowball rolling down the hill at this point. As Kant says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of it. And a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took both up into its consciousness and pass them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other balls had held and realized it as its own.

It is this trick which the nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and adopting it, which leads to the appropriation of most of the remoter constituents of the self. Who owns the last self, owns the self before the last. For that what possessed the possessor possessed the possessed. Or you could think of nesting dolls as another way of thinking about this. It's still. I don't fully understand it because I think Dylan and you were trying to elaborate on the sense of the importance of warmth and the. And the fringe and.

Or even of potentiality. Because obviously, again, to reiterate this whole adopting or the balls that take on everything from the previous balls, it can't be right that each state of consciousness holds all the previous ones in the sense that we. Again, that we have to consciously have everything that ever went before in our minds. And that's how we're unifying.

56:25 Dylan: It's way more deterministic than even the rest of his account is, and that's why I was brought back to the fringe aspect of it is that it doesn't have any dissipation in that analogy.

56:35 Wes: Right.

56:35 Dylan: There isn't any attenuation or wearing out or changing force in what comes in. It's all. The analogy is the most rudimentary form of perfect collisions and perfect accumulation, which even in physical reality doesn't work. And so there's just all these things that are being conserved in that picture, which in the fringe picture that he has or when he talks about that, the beautiful thing to me is that things aren't conserved in that way. Things come and go and are sort of in the haze and they appear in the consciousness.

57:07 Wes: Well, I think they're the same thing though, in a certain sense, the whole fringe thing. It's just that we have to be careful not to think that what's being conserved is all this cognitive content.

57:17 Dylan: Okay?

57:18 Wes: It's more. What's conserved is, I don't know, each act of appropriation or maybe one way to think of this is from the previous moment to this moment. There isn't some schism where I, you know, I'm shocked by some sort of break or something like that. And wait, that was someone else and now it's me. What's going on, I don't have on the periphery of my consciousness. There's no sense that I could move around in my memories and ever find such a schism. That's the sense of potentiality I'm thinking of.

57:46 Mark: It might be even more easier to think about this in physiological terms, like in his way of talking about physiology. You know, when we talked about habit, we talked about each mental reaction is kind of a. Again, it's a signal coming in, signal going out, and it leaves a track. It has to travel along a track. And by traveling on the track, it sort of strengthens that track. And so that's what stays in memory. So you've got a really complex network of tracks. And of course then they might interfere with each other and some might be obscured, but you might have the leavings of some very old stuff, some very old habits.

Even if you haven't, you know, pursued these actions in a long time, you might still have that track in there somewhere, sort of waiting for that stimulus to come up and pop on it. So I try to relate that which is a picture of long term identity over time to this shorter term moment to moment memory thing. And those are a little harder for me to put together. And I think to give it more Exactitude in his sense. We would probably would have had to read the memory chapter. So maybe we should stop torturing ourselves. Well, let's move on to the will.

Can we point at emotions before we get there? Just say what the theory is. So we read a whole chapter on emotions, and it is relevant only insofar as they're not the will they're part of. You know, we read a whole chapter on instinct, and we read a whole chapter on the emotions, which are both kind of part of this reflex action. Just his theory of emotion. Is that really what emotion is, is you feeling some physiological stuff? So what fear is, is you see the scary thing and your body reacts, your heart starts pounding, your breath gets fast, your mouth dries up, and then you having that experience of your body doing this is what fear is.