Abstract
In this chapter, I reject the need for a subject of experience understood as a bearer of the experience. I defend a variant of the no-self view and I provide an account of diachronic unity, given this view.
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Notes
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“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”, 2012, Peter Jackson (dir.). In the case of “The Hobbit”, the frame rate used was 48fps, instead of the standard 24fps mostly used today. But, in principle, movies shot and shown in HFR can use other frame rates up to 60fps or even 300fps (which is used for situations where very fast movement is involved, such as sports broadcasts).
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Locke (1975, Book II, especially Chap. 14).
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See his notebook K, in Hollingdale (2000).
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He adds: “If I wrote a book called ‘The world as I found it’, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book”.
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Perhaps some philosophers will claim to find it just self-evident that universals are had by something. We don't have much to say to such philosophers. We do note, however, that the polemic against the bundle theory has rarely taken the form ‘It is simply self-evident that anything quality-like is directly or indirectly predicated of something that isn't like a quality […]’. If opponents of […] the Bundle Theory wish to retreat to this form of an incredulous stare, so be it (Hawthorne and Cover 1998, §2).
‘But if there is a process, there must be something—an object or substance—in which it goes on. If something happens, there must be something to which it happens, something which is not just the happening itself.’ This expresses our ordinary understanding of things, but physicists are increasingly content with the view that physical reality is itself a kind of pure process—even if it remains hard to know exactly what this idea amounts to. The view that there is some ultimate stuff to which things happen has increasingly ceded to the idea that the existence of anything worthy of the name ‘ultimate stuff’ consists in the existence of fields of energy—consists, in other words, in the existence of a kind of pure process which is not usefully thought of as something which is happening to a thing distinct from it (Strawson 1997, p. 427).
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Benovsky, J. (2018). The Subject of Experience. In: Mind and Matter. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05633-9_6
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