Benj Hellie's vertiginous question is as follows: of all the subjects of experience out there, why is ''this'' one—the one corresponding to the human being referred to as Benj Hellie—the one whose experiences are ''live''? (The reader is supposed to substitute their own case for Hellie's.)
A simple response to this question is that it reduces to "Why are Hellie's experiences live from Hellie's perspective," which is trivial to answer. However, Hellie argues, through a parable, that this response leaves something out. The parable describes two situations, one reflecting a broad global ''constellation'' view of the world and everyone's phenomenal features, and one describing an ''embedded'' view from the perspective of a single subject. The former seems to align better with the simple response above, but the latter seems a better description of consciousness.
David Chalmers
David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York Universi ...
has written a response to Hellie, but he did not address the question itself.
Hellie's argument is also closely related to
Caspar Hare's theories of
egocentric presentism Egocentric presentism is a form of solipsism introduced by Caspar Hare in which other persons can be conscious, but their experiences are simply not .
Similarly, in related work, Hare argues for a theory of perspectival realism in which other pers ...
and
perspectival realism In Caspar Hare's theory of perspectival realism, there is a defining ''intrinsic'' property that the things that are in perceptual awareness have. Consider seeing object A but not object B. Of course, we can say that the visual experience of A i ...
, of which several other philosophers have written reviews.
Similar questions are also asked repeatedly by
J.J. Valberg in justifying his
horizonal view of the self.
See also
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Further facts
In philosophy, further facts are facts that do not follow logically from the physical facts of the world. Reductionists who argue that at bottom there is nothing more than the physical facts thus argue against the existence of further facts. The ...
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Indexicality
In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a ''sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, ...
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Metaphysical subjectivism
Subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth.
The success of this position is historically attribute ...
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Personal identity
Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can ...
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Open individualism Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future. It is a theoretical solution to the question of persona ...
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Subjective idealism
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Solipsism
Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known an ...
References
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External links
Hellie, Benj. Against egalitarianism. Preprint of article in Analysis (2013).Benj Hellie's page at the University of Toronto.
Metaphysics of mind
Subjective experience