Extract from the Strawson paper [draft]. (Question: did he ever publish this paper?)
". . .
3 Terms and assumptions
To introduce the notion of a thin subject is not—not yet—to make any assertion about the nature of reality that can be sensibly disputed. It is simply to introduce a certain way of talking about something whose existence is not in question. The way of talking may be disliked or thought unhelpful. Attachments to linguistic and theoretical habits can be as intense as attachment to dietary prohibitions, and can incorporate a conviction that other habits (of linguistic or theoretical idiom, or diet) are intrinsically wrong. True—but the phenomenon I refer to in speaking of thin subjects is indisputably real and utterly commonplace. It is the subject of experience understood in precisely the sense in which it is true to say that there is a
subject of experience in the L-reality only when (and whenever) there is
experience in the L-reality. To claim that this is an unnatural or perverse way to section reality even when doing metaphysics is simply to reveal one’s habituation to those natural notions of the subject of experience that allow that a subject of experience can persist through times of experiencelessness. The thick or traditional use is certainly more basic in ordinary thought, but this is no reason to disallow the thin use.
The existence of thin subjects is not an assumption, then. I am making certain assumptions: I have assumed that materialism is true, and I am now going to assume that human thin subjects are relatively short-lived entities. I am going to take it, in other words (and contrary to Descartes), that it is an empirical fact about the human process of consciousness that it is non-continuous in a certain way. I believe, in fact, that it is non-continuous in such a way that there are many subjects of experience in the L-reality in any normal waking day. Others, perhaps, believe that it is continuous in any waking day but interrupted at night.
An outright temporal gap in consciousness in the L-reality is obviously sufficient for non-continuity, but is not necessary, on the present view: an experientially unitary period of experience or ‘pulse’ of thought (in William James’s terminology) may succeed another in a temporally seamless way and yet count as a discontinuity for the purposes of counting subjects.
[24]
Let me also register my view (it is as much a terminological decision as an assumption) that subjects of experience are happily thought of as
objects, even when they are thinly understood, as here. Let me make this conditional:
if one is going to talk of objects at all in one’s metaphysics, then it is I think not hard to show that thin subjects have at least as good a claim to be called objects as anything else.
[25] For very briefly, all concrete reality is substance (this view will be supported by the discussion of the object/property distinction in §9); [ii] whatever objects or individual substances are, they are physical unities of a certain sort; and [iii] there are no more indisputable physical unities than subjects of experience.
[26]
That said, I think matter is best thought of as what one might call ‘process-stuff’, and that all physical objects are best thought of as processes, even if the converse is not true. And I take it this to be true on a three-dimensionalist (3D) view of objects as much as on a four-dimensionalist (4D) view.
[27] We have to combat an intense staticism in our thought about matter and objects. Matter is essentially dynamic: essentially in time and essentially changeful.
[28] All reality is process, as Whitehead was moved to observe by his study of twentieth-century physics, and as Heracleitus and others proposed long ago. Perhaps we would do better to call matter ‘time-matter’, or at least ‘matter-in-time’, so that we never for a moment forget its essential temporality. We think of matter as essentially extended, but we tend to think only of extension in space—something that can, we intuitively feel, be given to us as a whole at an instant. But space and time are interdependent. They are aspects of spacetime, and all concrete spatial extension is extension in spacetime.
[29]
It follows from this interdependence alone, I think, that there is no ontologically weighty distinction between objects and processes given which objects are not truly said to be processes, although there is for many purposes a perfectly respectable distinction to be made between them. ‘From this alone’: there is in fact no need to invoke the spacetime of relativity theory, for even if relativity theory is false in its account of the essential interdependence of space and time there is no metaphysically defensible conception of a physical object—a ‘spatio-temporal continuant’, as philosophers say—that allows one to distinguish validly between objects and processes by saying that the latter are essentially dynamic or changeful phenomena in some way in which the former are not.
[30] The source of the idea that there might be some metaphysically deep distinction between objects and processes lies in natural everyday habits of thought that are ordinarily harmless and indeed useful, and yet are disabling—almost perfectly unhelpful—in certain theoretical contexts. It seems to me that we philosophers continue to be very severely hampered by this habit of thought even when we have, in the frame of theoretical discussion, fully agreed and, as we think, deeply appreciated, that objects are entirely creatures of time, process-entities.
[31] Later on I will pick up a similar point about the distinction between objects and properties.
Certainly the brevity of human thin subjects should not count against their claim to be objects, and, hence, physical objects. ‘The prejudice that the real is the persistent must be abandoned’,
[32]and the everyday human temporal scale has no special validity. If W-particles and Z-particles are fundamental particles then they will presumably count as objects in almost any serious materialist metaphysics that countenances objects at all, and they are considerably more ephemeral entities than thin subjects; and 10–34th of a second, a very short time by human standards, ‘seems by the standards of early-universe physics as interminable as an indifferent production of Lohengrin’.
[33]
Thin subjects certainly exist, then, and are to be counted among the objects, on the present scheme of things; although objects are processes, wholly constituted out of time-matter, process-stuff, and although ‘subjectivity’ may turn out to be helpful alternative to ‘subject’, in certain contexts, by the time I have finished. I take it, as a materialist, that all thin subjects are entirely constituted out of process-stuff in the brain. Cerebral process-stuff is constantly being recruited or corralled into one transient subject-constituting (and, equally, experience-constituting) piece or synergy of process-stuff after another. This, I propose, is what the conscious life of a human being consists in. (I will say more about ‘synergy’ shortly.)
My (empirical) bet is that thin subjects last for a maximum of about three seconds, in the human case,
[34] with many being much shorter. I think that there is always some complete interruption of consciousness in any longer period of time, although this is not phenomenologically accessible to most people in normal life. There may either be a straightforward temporal gap, as already remarked, or there may be a new experience, with a new subject, following seamlessly on from the previous one. The next experience may even overlap the previous one temporally, as one recruitment or neurons gathers pace and peaks in consciousness before the previous one has died to nothing.
[35]There is no particular difficulty in the idea (whether or not it happens is an empirical issue).
These experiences—these experiences-with-subjects—are I propose primitive unities (they are of course physical unities, on the materialist view). They are ‘indecomposable unities’, in William James’s terms, in the sense that no subpart of one such experience-with-subject can be said to be itself a whole experience-with-subject.
[36] One experience-pulse means one subject. If overlap of the sort just imagined occurs in the L-reality then there are for a brief time two experiences-with-subjects in the L-reality; this is what the consciousness of Louis consists in, at this time. But neither of the two (thin) subjects that are numerically distinguishable at time
t on this view of experiences as successive neuronal recruitments is aware of there being two subjects at
t; nor is Louis the whole human being considered as a (thick) subject of experience aware of this at
t. The phenomenology of experience may be and usually is of continuous experience.
[37]
I will elaborate this view as I go along. Let me stress that ‘thin’ carries no implication of brevity. The basic definition of thin subjects allows that they might last for hours or days, even if they cannot do so in our case. In some creatueres they might cease to exist only when very rare periods of complete experiencelessness occur—only in dreamless sleep, say. One could even suppose, with Descartes (on one reading), that thin subjects are immortal.
—So what is the relation of a thin subject to a human being? What is the relation of this putative thin subject
s in the L-reality to Louis the human being?
I take it that it is a completely straightforward part-whole relation, like the relation between Louis the whole human being and one of his toes or transient spots.
s is a spatiotemporally bounded piece of process-stuff which one may call
ps, Louis considered as a whole is also a spatiotemporally bounded piece of process-stuff which one may call
pL, and
ps is ontically distinct from
pL in the way in which any (proper) part of an object that is itself correctly thought of as an object (a cell, a hand, a finger, depending on your view) is ontically distinct from the larger object of which it is a part.
s is also
not ontically distinct from Louis in any sense in which such a part of Louis is not ontically distinct from Louis.
[38]
I take [
s =
ps] to be a
simple identity claim, not a
constitutive identity claim—if, that is, a constitutive identity claim is one that allows that the constituter can possibly exist in the absence of the constitutee, or conversely. On this view, neither
ps nor
s can exist without the other—unlike the statue of Pegasus and the lump of bronze out of which it is made (to take a familiar example), on most accounts of the relation between them.
s could not possibly have consisted of anything other than the particular synergy of process-stuff
ps and
ps could not possibly have existed without
s existing.
[39]
In the same spirit I take it that the identity conditions of subject-constituting synergies of process-stuff are a strict function of their parts, in whatever sense they have parts: add or subtract one single subject-constituting ‘particle’ or ‘string’ or ‘field’ or ‘physical simple’ or
ultimate, as I will call the ultimate constituents of reality, whatever they are, and you no longer have the same synergy or the same subject.
[40]
This decision runs contrary to common intuitions about the conditions under which something (e.g a subject of experience) can be correctly said to remain the same thing. I will consider some counterfactuals later.
I hope the word ‘synergy’ does some work against the staticist tendencies of our natural picture of objects. It is not wrong, nor even particularly unclear, to say that
s (or
e) consists of a piece or bit or segment of process-stuff, for the essentially temporal, dynamic nature of what is in question has already been strongly marked by the term ‘process-stuff’. But a piece of process-stuff could be dynamic in every part (every piece of physical process-stuff
is dynamic in every part, every atom is essentially in internal uproar) without necessarily being synergetic in any very interesting way, let alone synergetic in the way required for it to be a subject or an experience.
[41] It is the
synergy of process-stuff
ps that
constitutes—
is—s. It is not as if the piece of process-stuff, involving 1010ultimates, say,
already wholly constitutes s, and it is then a
further fact about
ps that it is synergetic in a certain way. It is a portion of synergetic process-stuff that constitutes/is
s—the physical object that is the subject of experience. . . . ."
