On The Subjectivity of Mind, or If It's Like Anything To Be A Tree
One of the arguments for the claim that we are not our bodies but are something else is that the body and the external world is objective and publicly accessible, whereas the way we feel, what it's like to be who you are, is subjective and private -- only you have privileged access to your mental states. Invoke a little bit of Leibniz's law here, and you have to say they're two different things because they have different properties. Invoke a little bit of Descartes' method of doubt there, and you conclude that you are essentially the mind (a thinking thing, a res cogitans), because you cannot doubt that you think (ego sum, ego existo; cogito ergo sum), whereas you can doubt all the other things. I'm not convinced by this though. I don't think the external world or the body is necessarily publicly accessible in the way that people often assume it is. I agree that a lot of it is -- we can see birds, we can see people's skin, we can touch the bark of the tre...