Naturalism, Consciousness, & The First-Person Stance: Jonardon Ganeri

2
Naturalism,
Consciousness, & the
First-Person Stance
Self the
jonardon ganeri
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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 16/12/2011, SPi
The Self
Naturalism, Consciousness, and the
First-Person Stance
Jonardon Ganeri
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research

Council for the award of a Research Project Grant between 2008 and 2010,
to the École des haute études en sciences sociales for its invitation to be a
Visiting Professor in May 2009, to Wolfson College Oxford, and to
the University of Sussex. I would also like to thank Piotr Balcerowicz,
Thomas Baldwin, Christopher Bartley, Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, Amber
Carpenter, Christian Coseru, Georges Dreyfus, Eberhard Guhe, Julius
Lipner, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, François Recanati, Peter Sahota, Man-
idipa Sen, Mark Siderits, Shalini Sinha, Richard Sorabji, Tom Tillemans,
Jan Westerhoff, Dan Zahavi, and Francis Zimmermann. Chapters 3 and 4
are based on my article ‘Emergentisms, Ancient and Modern’, Mind (2011),
and Chapter 15 on ‘Cross-modality and the Self ’, Philosophy and Phenome-
nological Research 61 (2000), 639–58. An earlier version of Chapter 8 appears
under the title ‘Selfhood, Subjectivity, and the Use of the Word “I”’ in
Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi (eds.), Self, No Self?
(Oxford University Press, 2010). I am grateful to the respective publishers.
Finally, I am extremely grateful to Peter Momtchiloff, as well as to the other
members of the OUP team.

Contents
Note on Diacritics and Pronunciation x

Key Philosophers Discussed xi
Introduction 1
Part I. Naturalism and the Self

Historical Prelude: Varieties of Naturalism 19
Naturalism: Raw and Rich 19
Two Varieties of Hard Naturalism 24
Three Varieties of Liberal Naturalism 29
1 Conceptions of Self: An Analytical Taxonomy 35
Two Distinctions about ‘Having’ 35
Buddhist and Real Self Views 39
Tornado and Flame Views 43
2 Experiment, Imagination, and the Self 50
Methodological Naturalism 50
The Cogito: Augustine, Ibn Sina, Prabhācandra 57
Naturalism and the First-Person Stance 60
Part II. Mind and Body

3 Emergence 69
Emergentism: The Core Issues 69
Cārvāka Naturalism 71
Epiphenomenalism 73
Supervenience 77
4 Transformation 83
Causation and Mind 83
Downward Causation as Assistive Causation 88
The Emergence of Consciousness 91
viii CONTENTS
5 Persistence 98
Cārvāka Naturalism Redescribed 99
Is the Self Physical? 102
A Persistence Argument against Animalism 105
6 The Self as Bodily 112
The Strong First-Person Requirement 112
Is Bodily Transfer Possible? 113
The Embodied Self 117
Core Self as Bodily Presence 120
Part III. Immersion and Subjectivity

7 The Composition of Consciousness 127
A Trope Metaphysics of Mind 127
Macro and Micro 132
The Elements of Content 135
Pudgala: Flame or Stream? 138
8 Self-Consciousness 146
Two Concepts of Self-Consciousness 146
Phenomenal Mineness and Mental Files 150
The Immersed Self 153
The Use of ‘I’ as a Metaphor 157
A Descriptive Metaphysics of the Self 162
9 Reflexivism 166
Aspects of Content 169
First-Person Access to the Subjectivity of One’s Past Experience 171
The Reflexivity of the First-Person Stance 174
Provisional Objections 176
10 Sentience 182
Sensation and Thought 182
Quality Space: The Structure of Phenomenal Appearance 184
Location and Binding 188
Quasi-Objects 192
Does Object Perception Involve an Error? 195
I-Thoughts and Quasi-Subjects 199
11 Other Minds 202
An Overview of the Argument 203
CONTENTS IX
The Refutation of Other Streams of Consciousness 206

Reflexivism Entails Conceptual Solipsism 212
The Composition of Self-consciousness 218
Part IV. Participation and the First-Person Stance

12 The Mind-Body Problem 225
Minimal Physicalism: An Ownership View 226
Supervenience Again 229
Why Mental Properties are not Properties of the Body 233
Ownership and Exemplification 244
13 Attention, Monitoring and the Unconscious Mind 249
Free Will 249
Autonomy 252
Three Sorts of ‘Cause’: Efficient, Individual, Feature 255
The Underself 262
14 The Emotions 268
What Is an Emotion? 268
A Theory of Pleasure 272
Emotions and Agency 276
Emotion and the Participant Self 278
15 Unity 283
The Self as Genuine Subject 283
Cross-Temporal Identities 287
Binding 288
Tracking 290
The Conception of Oneself as Oneself 292
Oneself and One’s Conception of Oneself 299
16 The Distinctness of Selves 304
Many Selves 304
Rootedness: Against Bare Particularism and Mere Difference 306
First-Person Realism 312
Conclusion: A Theory of Self 318
Bibliography 333
Index 365
Note on Diacritics and Pronunciation
I follow the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) for the

transliteration of Devanāgarı̄. Vowels are pronounced as in ‘but’ for a, ‘father’
for ā, ‘fee’ for ı̄, ‘put’ for u, ‘boo’ for ū, ‘made’ for e, ‘bite’ for ai, ‘rope’ for o,
‘found’ for au. The vowel r. is pronounced ri, as in ‘pretty’. Consonants are
pronounced as in ‘chill’ for c, ‘try’ for t., the first t in the French tout for t,
with aspiration indicated by an h as in ‘t.h’, ‘ch’; ‘ship’ for ś and s., ‘hiss’ for s;
jña is sometimes pronounced ‘gya’. See Coulson (1976: 4–19) for details.
Key Philosophers Discussed
Dichaearchus (350-285 BCE). Pupil of Aristotle

Aristoxenus (fl. 335 BCE). Pupil of Aristotle
Kan.āda (1st/2nd cent. CE). Author-compiler of the Vaiśes.ika-sūtra
Gautama Aks.apāda (2nd cent.). Author-compiler of the Nyāya-sūtra
Br.haspati (date unknown). Author-compiler of the Cārvāka-sūtra
Galen of Pergamon (129–216). Physician/Philosopher
Alexander of Aphrodisias (c.200). Aristotelian commentator
Plotinus (205–70). Founder of Neoplatonism
Porphyry (234–c.305). Pupil of Plotinus
Iamblichus (c.245–325). Syrian Neoplatonist
Asaṅga (4th cent.). Buddhist, Abhidharma /Yogācāra
Vasubandhu (c.316–96). Buddhist, Abhidharma/Yogācāra; Asaṅga’s half-brother
Sam. ghabhadra (4th cent.). Buddhist, Abhidharma; Vasubandhu’s rival
Vātsyāyana (c.450). Nyāya commentator
Proclus (412–81). Neoplatonist
Dignāga (480–540). Buddhist, Yogācāra
Priscian (fl. 530). Neoplatonist who lives in Persia
Praśastapāda (c.530). Vaiśes.ika, reforms Kan.āda’s physics and metaphysics
Philoponus (490–c.570). Christian, critic of Arisotelian physics
Sthiramati (c.510–70). Buddhist, commentator on Vasubandhu
Uddyotakara (c.550). Nyāya
Dharmakı̄rti (600–60). Buddhist, Yogācāra/Sautrāntika. Dignāga’s reinterpreter
Śaṅkara (c.710). Vedāntin
Kamalaśı̄la (c.740–95). Buddhist, Yogācāra/Sautrāntika/Mādhyamika
Bhat.t.a Udbhat.a (c.800). Independent, drawing on both Cārvāka and Nyāya
Jayanta (c.870). Nyāya
Vācaspati (c.960). Independent polymath, writing on Nyāya, Vedānta, etc.
Vyomaśiva (10th cent.). Vaiśes.ika
Śrı̄dhara (10th cent.). Vaiśes.ika
Bhat.t.a Rāmakan.t.ha (c.950–1000). Śaiva
Udayana (10 cent.). Vaiśes.ika/Nyāya
xii KEY PHILOSOPHERS DISCUSSED
Ibn Sina (980–1038). Islamic

Prabhācandra (980–1065). Jaina
Ratnakı̄rti (11th cent.). Buddhist, Yogācāra
Raghunātha Śiroman.i (c.1460–1540). First modern philosopher and inventor of the
‘new reason’, a radically reformed Nyāya-Vaiśes.ika
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Introduction
Perhaps the greatest mystery in philosophy is what it is to be a human being.

Clearly we are animal creatures, with animal bodies and animal desires and
appetites. Equally clearly we are beings with interiority, able to think of
ourselves as ourselves, to occupy a first-person stance. Three influential
depictions of our humanity have increasingly come to seem unworkable:
the picture that we are immaterial souls associated with but separable from
our animal bodies; the picture that we are nothing but especially complex
networks of neural circuits; and the picture that we are simply causal flows
of consciousness. Do the Indians, who thought long and hard about the
question of what it is to be a human being, have any alternative advice?
I believe so. I think that it is possible to derive from their discussion
a powerful alternative answer to the question about our nature. The answer
I will offer arises out of my reflection upon that discussion but is not the
view of any single participant within it.
What is it to occupy a first-person stance? Is the first-personal idea one
has of oneself in conflict with the idea of oneself as a physical being in the
world? How, if there is a conflict, should it be resolved? This book aims to
provide new ways of addressing these questions, drawing inspiration from
theories about the self in first-millennium India. These philosophers do not
regard the first-person stance as in conflict with the natural, their idea of the
natural not that of scientific naturalism, but rather a liberal naturalism non-
exclusive of the normative. A thought’s being mine involves participation
and involvement: it is a site of spontaneity.
It has nevertheless seemed to many that there is something suspect about
the self. A self is that in virtue of which your thoughts are yours, and mine
are mine. But, so it is said, the ownership of thought is not itself a natural
relation, and only an analysis of subjectivity without selves can be naturalis-
tically respectable, or else an analysis of ownership that makes it an attribute
2 INTRODUCTION
of the body. I believe that there is a deep residual influence of Descartes in

this line of thought. It was Descartes the scientist who banished the self from
the realm of nature; the doctrine of scientific naturalism threatens then to
banish it altogether. Reclaiming the self is thus also a matter of reclaiming
the idea of the natural.
It will, however, require much hard philosophical work before we are in
a position to benefit from a discussion taking place in first-millennium
India. Each of the principal naturalistic Indian philosophies of mind
comes to us freighted with historical assumptions and packaged in extra-
philosophical agendas. Thus Buddhist theory, which I will demonstrate
includes an astonishingly rich and phenomenologically perceptive analysis
of what is taken to be a universal human image of self, comes associated with
an error-theory of first-person thought. Again, the naturalism of the Cār-
vāka, which developed in parallel with Buddhism but has received far less
attention, presents a very penetrating and insightful third-person stance on
our mental lives but combines it with an unacceptably impoverished un-
derstanding of the distinctiveness of first-person phenomena. Neither of
these naturalist philosophies of mind, rich as they are, acknowledge the
importance of unconscious processes or the emotions to the unity of self,
and it is here that the third version of naturalism I will study, Nyāya-
Vaiśes.ika, comes into its own. It will be in the work of this third group of
thinkers that we find a full acknowledgement of the distinctive importance
of the first-person stance within an entirely naturalistic and thoroughly non-
Cartesian account of the mind. Once again we bring into view the philo-
sophical vitality and significance of their picture of mind only when we
disentangle it from a supra-philosophical conviction, this time one about
the manner in which the self persists.
What will gradually emerge from this exercise in conceptual retrieval
from historical sources are the materials for a philosophical explanation of
the compatibility of naturalism with the existence of subjects of first-person
phenomena. According to the theory about the self I shall eventually
propose, the inhabitation of a first-person stance, the conscious presentation
of oneself to oneself as a subject, and the unconscious ability internally
to monitor and compare the contents of one’s thought, sustain distinct
elements in the notion of ownership. Three interrelated but mutually
irreducible modalities of mineness—participation, immersion, and coordi-
nation—are jointly constitutive of a self: the self is a negotiation between
INTRODUCTION 3
self-presentation and normative avowal, a transaction grounded in uncon-

scious mind. Selves are individuated by a relation of common ownership
obtaining between clusters of acceptances, preferences, and intentions,
delimited by normative emotional response and implying agency and sen-
tience and so embodiment.
ƒ ƒ ƒ
I now give an overview of the discussion. Part I, ‘Naturalism and the Self ’, is
methodological. Peter Strawson distinguishes two senses of the term ‘natu-
ralism’, one of which he describes as strict or hard, the other liberal, the first
grounding all explanation in the scientific, the second making an appeal
to what is ‘in our nature’ as social human beings, that is to say, to whatever is
‘a condition of our humanity’. In his promotion of liberal naturalism,
McDowell has recommended Aristotle and the medieval Aristotelian
tradition—with its talk of second nature and of knowing and thinking as
natural powers of human beings—as a corrective to too swift a deference to
unenchanted nature. I agree that we are well advised to reflect again on
more ancient conceptions of the natural, and one of the leading intuitions
that will guide what follows is that an appeal to the naturalistic thought
of first-millennium India is extremely promising. The reason for this is that,
uninfluenced by Cartesianism, mindedness is not perceived as a relation in
conflict with the idea of the natural. Rather than in second natural inten-
tionality, however, spontaneity is located within the idea of ownership
itself.
Indeed, I will show that the varieties of liberal naturalism in India are
already responses to hard naturalistic ideas, and can therefore reasonably be
drawn upon in a rejuvenated reaction now against too exclusive a commit-
ment to scientific naturalism. I begin the book with a chapter simply
charting the historical intellectual context, and one which in not describing
and evaluating philosophical arguments is atypical of the book as a
whole. In this Historical Prelude I identify a variety of forms of naturalistic
thinking in ancient and first-millennium India, in particular Cārvāka Emer-
gentism, early Buddhist trope dualism, and the minimal physicalism of
Nyāya-Vaiśes.ika. It is from a stance grounded in liberal naturalism that the
Buddha investigates the moral psychological properties of suffering
and craving, which are to be understood within a manifestly normative
framework of wrong belief and mistaken conception. The false move he
4 INTRODUCTION
identifies above all else is that of ‘taking as one’s own’ (upādāna) particular
states of mind, and in so doing fabricating an idea of self (satkāya-dr..s.ti). This
fundamental transition to a first-person stance is a move, for the Buddha
invariably a bad one, in the space of reasons, the fabricated idea of self
a mistake. Cārvāka thinkers argue that mental properties emerge when
physical elements are organized in systems of appropriate complexity, just
as the power to inebriate emerges in a mixture of yeast and barley. Their
conception of a human being (purus.a) is that of a physical body qualified by
consciousness; it is the Strawsonian concept of a person, something to
which both corporeal and psychological predicates are ascribed. The self
in Nyāya and Vaiśes.ika, on the other hand, is best understood in terms of a
unity of commitment, preference, emotion, and will, the unity of which
is explained with reference to unconscious psychological mechanisms
supervening on states of the physical body. What makes it a version of
liberal naturalism is the account afforded of ownership: normative relations
of endorsement and participation are constitutive of a thought’s being
‘mine’, and so of the existence of a first-person stance.
In Chapter 1, I develop an analytical framework within which concep-
tions of self can be identified and classified. A conception about self supplies
an answer to the question ‘What am I?’ Until very recently, virtually all
western discussion about the self explored three conceptions: the Cartesian;
the Humean or Reductionist; and the Materialist. These three are far from
exhaustive, and indeed I identify eleven broad conceptions of self, ground-
ing my classification in an orthogonal pair of distinctions: between adjectival
and collective modes of exemplification, and between considerations about
individuation and considerations about ownership. Thus, as well as the
views just mentioned, Indian theory discusses what I will call Ownership,
Pure Consciousness, and Phenomenal views, three types of (Buddhist) No
Place view, the Tornado View and the Flame View. Within this taxonomy
I situate several contemporary theories of self.
I then contrast two methodologies for thinking about the nature of self,
neither of which I regard as fully satisfactory. The method of philosophical
naturalism, which affirms a continuity between philosophy and natural
science, leads to a conception of self as at best a reducible entity, reducible
either simply to the body (Materialism) or else to an interconnected flow of
mental particulars (the Humean view). Diametrically opposed to philosoph-
ical naturalism is an approach to the study of the self that rests on the use of
INTRODUCTION 5
imagination and intuition. Exercises of imagination lead to the discovery of

a different kind of self, a self which consists essentially in thinking. The heart
of the method is that if something can be imagined as separated from
something else without being destroyed, then that other thing cannot be a
part of its essence. This approach leads to broadly ‘Cartesian’ conceptions of
self, and I will describe formulations of the cogito in the Islamic philosopher
Ibn Sina and the Jaina Prabhācandra (both born in the year 980 CE). We
learn from the Indian materialist Payāsi that any temptation to provide an
explanation of the behaviour of the self by analogy with the behaviour of
some physical entity or phenomenon is a trap, for such an attempt invariably
ends up making the self sound like a mysterious crypto-physical being, a
recherché denizen in the physical world.
The chapters of Part II, ‘Mind and Body’, have to do with embodiment,
supervenience, bodily ownership, and physicalism. In Chapter 3, I distin-
guish between emergentist and epiphenomenalist strands in early Cārvāka
theory, and I demonstrate that Cārvāka Emergentists are explicitly com-
mitted to supervenience. Emergentism seeks simultaneously to respect the
idea that the mental is dependent on the physical and also to allow that it has
causal autonomy with respect to it: these find expression in emergentism’s
commitment to a supervenience thesis and an irreducibility thesis. The
leading idea in discussions about emergence is that systems of appropriate
organizational complexity have causal powers which the components in the
system, whether individually or together, do not. Jaegwon Kim has argued
that the two key issues for the development of emergentism as a viable
theory of mind are to give a positive characterization of the relation of
emergence, beyond the mere denial of reducibility, and to solve the prob-
lem of downward causation, otherwise known as the exclusion problem.
This is the problem that an instantiation of the supervenience base is
apparently a sufficient cause for any effect attributed to an instantiation of
the supervening properties. One seems forced to choose between reduc-
tionism (mental properties are ‘nothing but’ physical properties) and epi-
phenomenalism (mental properties are distinct from physical properties but
the residue is inefficacious): genuinely novel emergent causal power is
excluded.
From later Cārvāka discussion I derive in Chapter 4 a new theory of
emergence. Emergence through ‘transformation’ (parin.āma) is the idea that
the emergence of mental states occurs only within a dynamical system, one
6 INTRODUCTION
whose physical states are in a constant process of flux produced by the fusion
of elements and their microcausal powers. The microdynamic in this
dynamical system jointly specifies the physical and mental state of the system
at any given time, and does so only with reference to both the physical and
the mental state of the system at earlier times. Because the domain is itself
in a state of flux, the microdynamic will have variables taking mental
property instantiations, physical property instantiations, and micro-entities
as values. Supervenience functions simply as a constraining condition, one
of the equations that define the system. This is a version of the Tornado
View mentioned above. My claim is that the notion of transformation leads
to a formulation of emergence in which the twin demands of dependence
and autonomy are respected, and sense is given to the idea of downward
causation. I find this solution especially in the work of Bhat.t.a Udbhat.a,
whose theory I argue compares favourably with enactivist, realization, and
fusion models of emergence.
I turn in Chapter 5 to the issue of the material constitution of the self and
its identity over time. Animalism is the view that a person is identical with
the human animal and not with either an immaterial soul or a psychological
continuum. Jayanta, the ninth-century Nyāya philosopher, argues very
tellingly against Animalism. His argument is that the manner of persistence
involved in the preservation of first-person phenomena and other capacities
constitutive of selfhood is not the same as that which characterizes the
persistence of animal bodies. My aim is to show that the Animalism this
argument targets is logically independent of the account of the emergence
of the mental from the physical described in the last chapter, which there-
fore survives the critique unscathed.
A theory of self must do two things. It must tell us what kind of thing a
self is: immaterial substance; suitably interconnected series of conscious
experiences; the categorical basis of such a series; animal body; and so on
(the question, ‘What am I?’). But a theory of self must also give us materials
to answer, within the specified kind, the question, ‘Which one is me?’ This
question is often overlooked, but to neglect it is to court solipsism. The
thought behind the difficulty I will call ‘Attenuation’ is that many theories
of self fail precisely because their solutions to the first requirement imply
that there is no answer to the second. In Chapter 6, I argue that avoiding
Attenuation requires that selves are indeed essentially embodied: that, even
if Animalism is false, one may well still want to maintain that selfhood
INTRODUCTION 7
requires embodiment; and perhaps more strongly, that selves are individ-
uated according to bodily criteria, that an ‘embodied mind’ thesis is true.
I distinguish that thought from another one, the idea that there is a ‘core
self ’ consisting in an invariant presence of bodily feeling.
There are two ways to account for the nature of the presented ownership
constitutive of what I am calling ‘immersion’, the phenomenology of the
first person.1 One, just mentioned, sees it as fundamentally a relationship of
bodily ownership: the theory of a core self as bodily feeling of presence to
oneself is a bodily account of immersion. Other accounts develop an analysis
out of a more detailed study of the intentional and phenomenal structure of
self-consciousness and provide a subjective rather than a bodily account of
immersion. I examine several remarkably rich and insightful analyses from
Buddhist writers who propose subjective accounts of this sort. The chapters
in Part III, ‘Immersion and Subjectivity’, are studies of Buddhist philosophy
of mind in the work respectively of the early Vasubandhu, the later Vasu-
bandhu, Dignāga, Dharmakı̄rti, and Ratnakı̄rti. I return to the relationship
between first-person phenomena and embodiment only in Chapter 12.
Although it is targeted primarily at Vedic and hard naturalistic ideas about
self, in denying self the Buddhist aim is not merely to reject some given
historical theory of self in the Indian discussion, but also to diagnose what
they take to be a very deep but correctable error in our primitive conceptual
scheme and in the phenomenology of self-awareness. It is incumbent upon
them, therefore, to provide an accurate descriptive phenomenology of
the first-personal, so as to be able to identify the error involved. One of
the defining achievements of Buddhist theory consists in its demonstration
that the unity of first-person phenomena is a compositional unity, and so
that there can be unity without simplicity.
It is a key thesis of Buddhist philosophy of mind that there are proto-
intentional psychological processes (skandha) through the joint operation
of which intentional experience is constituted. The five psychologically
primitive processes—registering, appraising, stereotyping, readying, and
attending—belong individually to a level beneath that of intentionality.
1 On immersion, cf. Zahavi: ‘The self is not something that stands opposed to the stream of
consciousness, but is, rather, immersed in conscious life’ (Zahavi 2005a: 125). Immersion, the presented
mineness of experience, and is synonymous with one of the meanings of the highly ambiguous term
‘subjectivity’. Thompson defends a conception of the immersed self according to which ‘the I picks out
the stream from its own self-individuating phenomenal perspective’ (Thompson 2011: 174).
8 INTRODUCTION
Proto-cognitive and proto-affective processes combine to constitute states

of conscious intentional experience, experience which presents the world as
one in which attention falls on objects which are perceptually registered
as falling under schematic stereotypes, as organized in a hodological apprais-
al space of affordance and obstacle, in ways that shape the diachronic flow
by readying for future experience. The great elegance and attraction of
the theory, I argue in Chapter 7, lies in the fact that simultaneously it
recognizes the irreducibility of the phenomenal character of experience, it
admits the joint contribution of sensation and conceptualization in the
constitution of experience, it acknowledges that experience is, as it were,
saturated with affect, that appraisal is built into the fabric of experience, it
maintains that every experience has, as a basic ingredient, a capacity or
tendency to combine in various ways with various others, and it makes the
attention intrinsic to experience.
In the next three chapters I identify three distinct Buddhist accounts
of immersion, the place of first-person phenomena in the structure of self-
consciousness: a mental files theory, a reflexive self-representational ac-
count, and a theory of quasi-subjects. I begin Chapter 8 by distinguishing
between two concepts of self-consciousness. What is sometimes called a
first-person perspective can consist of nothing more than a matter of having
one’s own mental life in view. What I am calling a first-person stance, in
contrast, does require something more: it demands that one’s mental life
presents itself to one as ‘mine’, as owned by me. I develop an account, due
to the later Vasubandhu, in which the phenomenal marking of experience
with mineness (kl..s.ta-manas) is based on drawing information from a mental
file, the repository-consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna). Items in the repository do
not themselves present with mineness, but comprise a sort of first-personal
databank for the mind, information that can be drawn upon in the activity
of bringing the states of the stream into self-conscious attention. The
distinction between the mere occurrence of states with representational
content and the availability of a first-person stance lies, according to this
theory, in the way one’s states access stored information about oneself, and
in doing so ‘root’ the state in one’s deep psychology. The phenomenal
mineness of a mental state, the sense of ownership that comes with it, is
strongly associated with its rootedness in deep strata of the psyche. I situate
this theory in relation to contemporary work on the perspectival de se, the
minimal self, and the idea of transient subjects, and show how it might
INTRODUCTION 9
explain the so-called ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ of first-

person ascription. Vasubandhu also claims, however, that an error is
involved in so thinking about one’s thought as ‘mine’, and consequently
in the use of the first person. I argue that this claim is logically independent
of his constructive proposal.
I next discuss a development that took place in Buddhism in the sixth
century, and subsequently had wide repercussions in the Indian discussion
of self. Reflexivism is the thesis that self-consciousness consists in mental
occurrences being reflexively conscious of themselves (svasam . vedana).
Dignāga’s defence of reflexivism consists in part in a new ‘two aspects’
theory of representation, and in part in an argument that higher-order
theories of self-consciousness are regressive. His argument is based on
thinking about what is involved in the idea that one can have first-person
access to the subjectivity of one’s past mental life. With his theory that
intentional content is comprised of both an object-aspect and a subject-
aspect, Dignāga replaces the phenomenal mineness account of subjective
immersion with a self-representational theory, in which a first-person
perspective consists in turning the subject-aspect of one’s thought into an
object-aspect. The brilliance of Dignāga’s argument consists in its demon-
stration that the possibility of having a first-person perspective on one’s own
mental past requires that a first-person stance consists in being reflexively
self-aware. He is a presentist about first-person stances, their existence
consisting in being reflexively self-aware in the present moment, and his
argument is that this follows from our being nevertheless able to bring the
subjectivity of our past thought into view.
Dharmakı̄rti, Dignāga’s influential reinterpreter, expands the discussion
with a sophisticated analysis of non-conceptual perceptual content. I argue
in Chapter 10 that Dharmakı̄rti’s account should be understood as a version
of the so-called relational theory of sentience (as is also to be found in the
work of Clark and Peacocke), and so, in particular, not as a sense-data
theory. Dharmakı̄rti uses the theory to address the binding problem:
how are flows of sensation bound into thought about robust objects
with determinate identity conditions? The same question for him arises
for self-consciousness: how are flows of reflexive self-awareness bound
into I-thoughts, thought in which the self features as subject. The key
insight is that reflexivity provides a principle by which to ‘tie’ together
the subject-aspects of experiences in the content of self-conscious states.
10 INTRODUCTION
This is an analogue for self-consciousness of the role performed by pre-

sented spatial location in solving the binding problem in perception,
presented spatial location being what ties together the object-aspects in
intentional experience.
Dharmakı̄rti argues nevertheless that binding generates only ‘quasi-
objects’ and ‘quasi-subjects’, entities which lack full criteria of identity
and for which the question ‘Is this the same entity as before?’ cannot be
answered. Something goes wrong when a thought of the form ‘I am happy’
or ‘I am in pain’ occurs, that is, when there is a move up to first-person
present-tense ascriptions of psychological states. What goes wrong is that
such self-ascriptions imply that there is some determinate criterion for
individuating flows of subjectivity when in fact there is none. Just as it is
an illusion to think that one can keep track of waves in such a way as to give
a determinate answer to the question ‘Is this another wave or the same wave
as before?’, so the implication is that it is a mistake to think that when
presented with a new occurrence of reflexive self-awareness there is any
determine answer to the question ‘Is this another, or is it me again?’ Since
the move up to genuine I-thought is precisely the move to forming
a conception of oneself as oneself as a subject of consciousness, the funda-
mental Yogācāra Buddhist idea is that the claim that occupying a first-
person stance requires I-thought involves an error.
The question that later Buddhist thinkers after Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti
will ask is an excellent one. An argument is formulated with great clarity
that reflexivism cannot solve the conceptual problem of other minds, the
problem of explaining how it is possible to form a conception of a mental
life distinct from one’s own or conceive that there can be a plurality of
minds. Reflexivism, argues Ratnakı̄rti out of a suggestion made earlier by
Jñānaśrı̄mitra, entails that there are no phenomenal or intentional bound-
aries between oneself and others within a stream of experience. I include in
Chapter 11 a full translation of Ratnakı̄rti’s closely argued text. The idea that
reflexivism entails conceptual solipsism is confirmed by Kashmiri Śaiva
philosophers, who appropriate Buddhist reflexivism but transform it into
a constitutive theory of self: the self just is that which consists of reflexive
self-representation. Abhinavagupta shows clearly that this view leads to
solipsism, an implication he actually seems to welcome. These difficulties
with reflexivist analyses of subjectivity constitute a partial vindication of the
earlier phenomenal mineness theory. I will claim that, itself reformulated as
INTRODUCTION 11
a constitutive theory, it affords materials for a powerful analysis of the

immersed self in terms of a compositional range of me/not-me constrasts.
My examination of Buddhist theory thereby concluded, I turn in Part IV,
‘Participation and the First-Person Stance’, to an analysis of the philosophy
of mind in Nyāya and Vaiśes.ika thinkers. The leading idea in their work is
that occupying a first-person stance has centrally to do with the bearing of
reason of the whole of one’s mental life. I discuss, first of all, Praśastapāda’s
five arguments against the thesis that mental states are properties of the body
(and so against both materialism and property dualism). I call them the
Unity, Spatial Parts, Persistence, Self-Knowledge, and Self-Reference argu-
ments. The arguments are all attempts to give voice to a single thought: that
the relationships of participation and endorsement that are implied by the
idea of owning a mental state, and so of occupying a first-person stance, are
fundamentally different in kind from any relation of physical exemplifica-
tion. This phase in the argument is one of negative dialectic, its function to
show that the apparent simplicity of the Cārvāka view, that mental proper-
ties are just properties of the physical body, comes at a high price when the
debts of explanation it incurs are appreciated.
The hypothesis of two early Nyāya and Vaiśes.ika thinkers, Gautama and
Kan.āda, is that conscious states of mind nevertheless supervene on the
body; more precisely, they supervene on the physical states of the body
by virtue of an unconscious mechanism of comparison, selective attention,
self-monitoring, information retrieval, and action-guidance. I claim in
Chapter 13 that this metaphysical dependence discharges the requirement
that the theory of mind be a ‘minimal physicalism’, and that it is compatible
with freedom of will and autonomous agency. The procedural activity of
the postulated unconscious mind constitutes a new aspect of the notion of
ownership, one according to which a mental state is ‘mine’ just in case its
contents can be accessed and compared at the subpersonal level.2 This mind
(manas) is therefore properly describable as a self, a sort of ‘underself ’.
Someone who is alienated from their commitments and desires, or, more
extremely, who experiences them as alien insertions, is their owner only in
a comparatively minimal sense. While their description of unconscious
2 Distinct versions of such a subpersonal comparator mechanism are also postulated in Frith (1987,
1992); Campbell (1999); Spence (2001); Reisenzein (2009); and others.
12 INTRODUCTION
procedure is excessively corpuscular, Nyāya-Vaiśes.ika philosophers are

careful to recognize the importance of the idea of the unconscious mind.
Emotions have an indispensable place in the theory of self. According to a
theory first advanced in detail by Kan.āda’s sixth-century reinterpreter,
Praśastapāda, the core attributes of an emotion are an appraisal, an inclina-
tion to action, and a capacity to be felt. Pleasure, for example, is elicited by
the appraisal of something as likeable or pleasant, is exhibited in an inclina-
tion to maintain a continuing relationship with the object, and is felt
as agreeable or gratifying or favourable. Desire is elicited by the appraisal
of something not at hand as potentially so, is exhibited in an inclination to
create a relationship with it, and is felt as a ‘calling out’. Emotions serve to
indicate a relation of common ownership among the commitments, values,
preferences, and intentions of a single subject. For a state to be owned is
therefore precisely for it to engage the whole of one’s being through its
potential to make normative demands on any other owned state: this is
part of what gives substance to the ideas of inhabitation, participation, and
endorsement that attributions of ownership imply. Ownership entails em-
bodiment because some of these demands can be satisfied only in action.
The concept of ownership introduced in the analysis of emotion is different
from that of phenomenologically immersed ‘mineness’ or unconscious
procedural access. It is a normative concept of endorsement and sustains a
third dimension of selfhood, the ‘participant self ’.3 It is the defining feature
of a first-person stance that one occupies and endorses one’s states of mind
and is not merely a spectator of them, and so it is from this stance alone that
the relationships definitive of liberal naturalism, the pulls of reasons and the
demands for action, come into view.
I substantiate the concept of a participant self in Chapters 15 and 16. The
proposal is that items of mind exhibit rational demands only in the context
of a subject. The best argument for there being subjects of consciousness
is that if one’s experience, intentions, preferences, and values are to bear
3 Frankfurt’s concept of identification provides a point of reference: ‘The decision determines what
the person really wants by making the desire on which he decides fully his own. To this extent the
person, in making a decision by which he identifies with a desire, constitutes himself. The pertinent
desire is no longer in any way external to him. It is not a desire that he “has” merely as a subject in whose
history it happens to occur, as a person may “have” an involuntary spasm that happens to occur in the
history of his body’ (Frankfurt 1988: 170). Moran comments: ‘As I understand it, in the activity of
“identification” someone determines what shall be part of him as a person’ (Moran 2002: 214).
INTRODUCTION 13
rationally on one another they must stand in a relationship of common

ownership and not merely one of common causation. Our philosophers
develop this thought in two ways: through an argument first presented by
Gautama at Nyāya-sūtra 3.1.1, that identity of content across sensory mod-
alities requires a unitary subject; and through an argument first presented by
Kan.āda at Vaiśes.ika-sūtra 3.2.16, that the distinctness of distinct embodied
mental lives implies there are distinct unitary subjects.
A unity argument infers the unity of the self from the possible integration
of information from distinct sense-modalities and perhaps also memory.
Several formulations are presented by Nyāya philosophers, some involving
recognition, some binding, and some tracking. These are arguments only
for unity: none of them sustains any conclusion about simplicity, immateri-
ality, or eternality. I point out that although historically such additional
conclusions were drawn, they are neither justified nor necessitated by
the argument. Unity arguments are where the interrelatedness of the pro-
cedural, participant, and immersed selves is most fully expressed; or, to put it
another way, where participation, immersion, and coordination find joint
articulation in the idea of self. I will claim that the strongest version of the
unity argument is one in which one considers what is required of someone
who has the capacity to think of their perceptions in different modalities as
perceptions of one and the same object. The conclusion of this argument is
that it is necessary for self-consciousness and for the possession of a first-
person stance that one conceives of oneself as an individual, and indeed as an
individual who is dependent on a specific physical object, one’s body. If a
mistake is involved, it is not of the correctable sort, and so is not an ‘error’ in
any normatively loaded sense of the term.
It follows from the Nyāya-Vaiśes.ika conception of self that there is a
multiplicity of distinct individual selves. The account of how they are
distinct distances the theory from any Cartesian conceptions of self, which
are faced by the threat that in the limit ‘there is absolutely nothing
left to distinguish any Cartesian “I” from any other, and it is impossible
to see any more what would be subtracted from the universe by the removal
of me’ (B. Williams 1973a: 42). Selves are individuated in terms of a
common ownership relation obtaining between clusters of commitments,
resolutions, and intentions, delimited by normative emotional response and
implying agency and sentience and so embodiment. Historically it would
be a decluttered version of the Nyāya-Vaiśes.ika view that would gain
14 INTRODUCTION
prominence in early modern India, perhaps because of the distinctive support

it affords to an increasingly secular conception of autonomous agency.
An early modern Nyāya thinker will recommend that once liberated the
distinction between selves is dissolved, and he thereby preserves individua-
tion by embodied mental life and rejects altogether an earlier doctrine of
brute individual difference. This is to agree with a point I will make in
Chapter 16, that any imagined state of discarnate existence is not the existence
of a self, and does not represent the survival of any individual.
ƒ ƒ ƒ
My thesis is that in a full account of human subjectivity three distinct
dimensions in the concept of self are in play, corresponding to three
elements in the notion of ownership, each having a naturalistically legiti-
mate role in any viable conception of self. There is an immersed self, the
aspect of first-person presentation in the content of consciousness, ‘owner-
ship’ here referring to a phenomenologically given sense of mineness. There
is a participant self, the inhabitation of a first-person stance, ‘ownership’
involving the relations of involvement, participation, and endorsement
that sustain autonomy. Finally, there is an underself, the procedural moni-
toring of all the states, autonomous or alienated, that one embodies, ‘own-
ership’ now implying a relation of unconscious access to the content of
one’s states of mind. Where my proposal differs from that of any classical
author, Buddhist, Nyāya, or Cārvāka, is in attaching equal significance to
immersion and participation, and indeed in seeing the interplay between
them (mediated by and grounded in the underself ) as constitutive of self.
Strawson is right, therefore, to say that ‘our desires and preferences
are not, in general, something we just note in ourselves as alien presences.
To a large extent they are we’ (P. F. Strawson 1992: 134). My desires and
preferences are me because in accepting them I acknowledge their demands
as my own, an acknowledgement that roots the desires and preferences in
my whole being in such a way that any other state that is also me is subject to
revision in the light of them, and vice versa. They are me because their
conflict or congruence with other of my states is what gives shape to my
emotions as exhibited in inclinations to action and felt affect. They are me
because in accepting them I make myself a participant in the commitments
they incur, in the world as they represent it, both in its factual content
and in the gerundival description of paths to be followed and goals to
INTRODUCTION 15
be shunned. They are me because I am aware of myself in them, an

awareness that creates a range of me/not-me contrasts in such a way that
the phenomenal presentation of the desire as my own consists in the call
it makes on a body of information I have about myself, including my
commitments, capabilities, and values. That is to say, they are me because
my immersion in them consists in their rootedness in deep levels of my
psyche, and not in the mere reflexivity of representation. They are me, in
short, because I am engaged by them and alive to them. And this interplay
between immersion and participation might require a Herculean effort of
ratiocination were it not for the fact that my desires and preferences are also
me because beneath the ground level of consciousness they are bound by
subterranean roots to the rest of me, in unconscious procedures of compari-
son, monitoring, and feedback. So no effort is required, and no coercion:
my desires and preferences are me because in respect of them, there is
autonomy.
This book argues that the self is a negotiation between presented
mineness and normative avowal, a transaction grounded in unconscious
monitoring. Immersion, participation, and coordination are jointly consti-
tutive of self, the first-person stance at once lived, engaged, and under-
written. And all is in harmony with the idea of the natural.

Naturalism, Consciousness, & The First-Person Stance: Jonardon Ganeri

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2

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 16/12/2011, SPi

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 16/12/2011, SPi

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I would like to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research

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Note on Diacritics and Pronunciation x

Part I. Naturalism and the Self

Part II. Mind and Body

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Part III. Immersion and Subjectivity

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The Refutation of Other Streams of Consciousness 206

Part IV. Participation and the First-Person Stance

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Note on Diacritics and Pronunciation

I follow the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) for the

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Key Philosophers Discussed

Dichaearchus (350-285 BCE). Pupil of Aristotle

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xii KEY PHILOSOPHERS DISCUSSED

Ibn Sina (980–1038). Islamic

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

Perhaps the greatest mystery in philosophy is what it is to be a human being.

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of the body. I believe that there is a deep residual influence of Descartes in

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self-presentation and normative avowal, a transaction grounded in uncon-

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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

imagination and intuition. Exercises of imagination lead to the discovery of

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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

Proto-cognitive and proto-affective processes combine to constitute states

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explain the so-called ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ of first-

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

This is an analogue for self-consciousness of the role performed by pre-

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

a constitutive theory, it affords materials for a powerful analysis of the

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

procedure is excessively corpuscular, Nyāya-Vaiśes.ika philosophers are

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

rationally on one another they must stand in a relationship of common

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

prominence in early modern India, perhaps because of the distinctive support

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 15/12/2011, SPi

be shunned. They are me because I am aware of myself in them, an

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