6 - Experience

Summary

Most adults during most of their waking hours experience what they take to be themselves as perceivers. By “most adults” I mean most in modern industrialized cultures; people in so-called primitive cultures may be different. By “most adults experience what they take to be themselves as perceivers” I mean, roughly, that when most adults experience either their own internal states or objects in the world, they simultaneously experience what they (mistakenly) take to be themselves as fixed, continuous points of observation on those internal states or external objects. By “fixed” I do not mean fixed forever or fixed absolutely, but rather relatively stable as compared with the dynamism of most of the rest of experience.

I call this illusory experience of self the perceiver-self phenomenon. It is, I think, a profound form of alienation and, hence, of human suffering. And I think it figures importantly in the formation of core human values and in fear of death. However, in this chapter I want only to defend the much more modest claim that the influence of this phenomenon needs to be taken into account to understand surrogate-self-identification, in particular, why people tend to surrogately self-identify with certain real and hypothetical continuers and not with others.

First, I want to answer those philosophers - nurtured on Book I of Hume's Treatise - who are skeptical that they ever, let alone almost always, experience what they take to be themselves as perceivers.