Why You Don't Exist

(Or at least, not how you thought you did!)

Introduction

Hello, you. Yes, you, reading this right now. Do you exist? This might seem like a very silly question, too silly to warrant asking. Of course you exist! You’re a person, a subject, and individual. You do things and say things and think things. When you introduce yourself, you say “Hi, I’m so-and-so.” When asking for directions, you say, “Could you help me find such and such.” When you go to the doctor, you say “There’s pain in my wrist or in my neck.” What could these terms—I, me, mine—refer to if not you?

It might surprise you to hear that a number of philosophers have, in fact, denied that you exist. Well, not you specifically—most of them haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you—but they’ve denied that selves, egos, or persons exist. Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, famously taught that our sense of self was an illusion. A couple of thousand years later, the Scottish philosopher David Hume said something similar. He claimed what we call the self is nothing more than a loosely defined bundle of perceptions.

Since Hume’s day, a number of philosophers have endorsed similar views, including the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the British philosopher Derek Parfit. Are these philosophers just being provocative? Are they talking nonsense? After all, talking provocative nonsense might be a pretty good way to get tenure! And what could be more provocative, what could be further from common sense, than denying that people exist? It seems like you can’t even say that people don’t exist without presupposing that at least one person—you—exists!

However, I regret to inform you that these philosophers are neither being provocative nor talking nonsense. On the contrary, they defend what is to my mind the most plausible thesis we have about the nature of personal identity. That thesis is that there is no such thing as you, no such thing as selves, egos, or persons, independently of human linguistic conventions. What I’ll try to do in what follows is to sketch what I think is the strongest argument for that thesis.

What Are Persons, Anyway?

Before I start trying to convince you that you don’t exist, I should probably explain what I mean when I say that. I’m obviously not denying that a conscious experience is currently being had of reading this paragraph. Nor am I denying that that experience is occurring in conjunction with various others: an itch in your foot or an ache in your lower back, an anxious sense of foreboding, the sound of people around you, whatever. Nor, finally, am I denying that those various experiences are connected to a physical body, the one we call yours.

At this point, you might be tempted to claim victory. It sure sounds like I’m admitting there’s a self! I was talking nonsense after all! Well, not quite. So far, I’ve granted that there is, as per Hume, a bundle of interconnected mental states: a bundle of changing thoughts, feelings, perceptions, intentions, and so on. And I’ve also granted that those mental states have various causal connections to a bunch of interconnected physical states. What I’m denying is that there’s anything more to persons than this.

Maybe this sounds like it isn’t such a radical thesis after all. But it really is. Let’s illustrate with the help of science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Dick was born to Joseph and Dorothy Dick on December 16^th, 1928. He published his novel The Man in the High Castle in 1962 and won a Hugo Award for it the following year in 1963. He then went on to publish several more novels, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968. Now the question is: What makes it true that the man who wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is the same person as the one who published The Man in the High Castle? And what makes it true that that man is the same person as the one who was born to Joseph and Dorothy Dick on December 16^th?

That’s the question that philosophers who write about personal identity are asking. What makes someone one and the same person over time? And the answer that I want to defend is: Linguistic convention. What makes it true that the same person wrote both The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is simply that that’s how we use language to classify the causally interconnected physical and mental states we encounter. Our concept of a person, our term “person,” picks out certain patterns of interconnected mental and physical states. But absent our way of classifying things linguistically, there are no facts about persons. There are only facts about physical states, mental states, and their causal relations.

The Argument from Indeterminacy

So that’s the thesis. But what could possibly convince anyone of such an obviously insane view? The argument I’d like to suggest is simple. It’s not really mine, of course. I’m just adapting and summarizing what other philosophers have said.¹ Here it is broken down into two premises and a conclusion:

• Premise 1: If there were language-independent facts about persons, then there would always be a determinate answer to the question, “Is X the same person as Y?”

• Premise 2: But there is not always a determinate answer to the question, “Is X the same person as Y?”

• Conclusion: Therefore, there are no language-independent facts about persons.

Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound so simple after all. But I promise it is! The first thing to note is that someone can change and still remain one and the same person. And of course, people do change enormously both physically and mentally over the course of their lives. You currently contain very few of the cells you were born with. And I don’t know about you, but I certainly have no memory of my first three or four years of existence. What makes you one and the same person across all this change?

Now you probably think there’s some language-independent fact about this. That is, you probably think there’s some fact about whether you are currently the same person as the baby in your parents’ photo album and that this fact is out there in the world in some way. It isn’t just a function of how human beings happen to use language to classify patterns of interconnected physical and mental states. But what is the relevant fact? What does it consist in?

Modern philosophers have tended to offer two kinds of answer to this question. The first kind amounts to a physical criterion of personal identity: What makes you the same person across change is that enough of your body survives from moment to moment. The second kind amounts to a psychological criterion of personal identity: What makes you the same person is that enough of your mental states—your memories, intentions, preferences, and so on—remain the same from one moment to the next. To these, we can maybe add a hybrid view: What makes you the same person across change is that some combination of your body and your mind remain the same.

Although I’m admittedly cutting some corners here, we can say, broadly speaking, that these three options represent the range of possible answers. But here’s where things get interesting. Imagine that you were kidnapped by a mad scientist and placed into an ingenious contraption of his own design.² The contraption allows him to replace any proportion of your cells, including your brain cells, with another person’s. He can replace just one of your cells, or half of your cells, or all of them, or anything in between, with the turn of a dial. And in so doing, we would, of course, be transforming your mental states too. The question that arises now is: How much of you could he replace instantaneously without making you into a different person?

Now if there is some language-independent fact about this, then presumably, there’s got to be a determinate threshold in here somewhere. That is, there must be some determinate number of cells that the scientist could replace without changing the identity of the person in the contraption. On one side of the threshold, the person inside would still be you. On the other side, they would no longer be you. Hence my first premise. If there are facts about who the person in the contraption is, facts that are just out there in the world waiting to be discovered, then there will always be a determinate answer to our question.

The problem, though, is that there doesn’t appear to be any such a threshold! There are no determinate facts about identity that we can, as it were, read off from the physical and mental states of the person in the contraption. We can know everything there is to know about their physical states right down to the cellular, molecular, or even atomic level, and everything there is to know about their mental states down to the deepest recesses of their unconscious minds and still not have a determinate answer to the question as to whether they’re still you. And from this it seems to follow that there just are no facts about identity to be discovered at all!

Simples Arranged You-Wise

The argument above has surprising implications. Here’s one way to think about it. If there are no language-independent facts about persons, then it would in theory be possible to provide a complete description of reality without ever mentioning persons. As long as we inventoried every physical state in existence, every mental state in existence, and all of the causal relations between them, we wouldn’t exclude anything at all because that’s all there is to persons anyway. Any further facts are just facts about how we use language to classify the causally interrelated physical states and mental states we encounter.

But how can facts about persons just be facts about how we use language? You might be tempted to object here that people existed long before we came up with words to talk about them. And you’d be right! The things we designate by pronouns like “I,” “he,” and “she”; common nouns like “people,” and “human beings,” and proper names like “Donald Trump” and “Bill Gates” existed before we developed the English words “I,” “he,” “she,” “people,” “human beings” or their Indo-European predecessors. But those things are—you guessed it—causally interrelated physical and mental states. Vaguely defined bundles of them, at that!

Let’s see if we can make this less sound less implausible. If you’ve done any philosophy, you might already be familiar with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Another very similar thought experiment is the Sorites Paradox.³ It goes like this. Imagine a heap of sand. For simplicity’s sake, let’s suppose it contains exactly ten thousand grains of sand. Now imagine that we were to remove the grains of sand one at a time. It’s clear that by the time we reached five or ten grains of sand, it would no longer be a heap. But at what point would it stop being a heap? When there were a thousand grains of sand left? Five hundred? One hundred? Fifty?

This question can really make you lose sleep if you assume there must be some secret fact about heaps out there in the world just waiting to be discovered: “Where is it be hiding? If only I thought about it long and hard enough, I’d find it!” But that’s a mistake. There’s nothing to discover because there are no facts about heaps independently of how we happen to use language. Any language-independent facts there are to discover are facts about grains of sand.⁴ Talk about heaps is really just a useful shorthand for talk about certain simpler entities—in this case, grains of sand—standing in certain causal relations. But that concept isn’t very precise; it’s fuzzy around the edges. As a result, there are some cases where there’s just no answer to the question whether some grains of sand make up a heap.

What I’m claiming is that persons are just like that. Our concept of a person is a very useful shorthand for thinking and talking about more or less vaguely defined bundles of causally interrelated physical and mental states. Just as a heap is simply grains of sand arranged heap-wise, so we can say that you are simply physical and mental states arranged you-wise! There are language-independent facts about these physical states, these mental states, and their causal relations. But any facts about whether they amount to you—any facts about whether you are the same person over time—are facts about how we classify those causally interrelated physical and mental states.

Conclusion

Okay, so my title is a bit misleading. I’m not actually claiming you don’t exist. What you designate by words like “I,” “me,” “mine” does exist. It’s just that you might not exist in quite the way you thought you did. You might have thought that whether you’re the same person from day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year is a fact about the world out there independent of human language. As it turns out, though, that might not be quite right.

Maybe you think this is very rude of me. A lot of people don’t like being told that their existence is just a matter of linguistic convention. They respond to these kinds of claims with incredulity, revulsion, anger, and dismay. One nice fellow on Twitter went as far as to call them “homo babble from a pseud.” Clearly the Buddha was onto something when he said we were really attached to the self! I can’t say I’ve ever quite understood these kinds of reactions myself, though. If anything, I think there’s a kind of beauty in the idea.

Think about it. Although we like to think there are rigid distinctions between people and between things, that rigidity is ultimately linguistic. The reality beneath is significantly more fluid, more alive, than that. If I may allow myself a rare poetic moment, it’s as though we were, you and I, more or less arbitrarily defined segments of a living, changing flux, one that goes well beyond the boundaries of our bodies and that will continue long after our deaths. And to quote the great Kurt Vonnegut, who was surely a more poetic man than I, “Isn’t that nice?”

1. For the most detailed treatment of this kind of argument in Anglo-American philosophy, see Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). A shorter version closer to my own can be found in Charles Goodman’s Consequences of Compassion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

2. This scenario is adapted from Parfit’s Psychological Spectrum thought experiment (Reasons and Persons, p. 236-243), which is itself based on Bernard Williams’ thought experiments in “The Self and the Future” in Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Personal Identity (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 75-91.

3. My treatment of the Sorites Paradox here closely follow’s Parfit’s. See Reasons and Persons, p. 231-233.

4. I’m here simplifying for the sake of exposition. As a matter of fact, we could run a similar thought experiment on each individual grain of sand too, breaking it down further into its molecules, those molecules into atoms, and the atoms into subatomic particles, down to whatever the most fundamental level of reality happens to be. The claim is that whatever entities or entities exist or exists at that fundamental level—call them “simples,” though there’s no real need to assume they’re plural—is all that exists independently of human language.