The First-Person Perspective:  A Test for Naturalism
by Lynne Baker

As Baker explains, most philosophical work on consciousness assumes that the most difficult challenge for science is to explain why any form of subjective awareness exists at all.  (As Nagel, Jackson, and many others have argued, it does not now appear that a complete neurophysiological account of human behavior will make any essential reference to subjective states.) 

Baker claims that most philosophers in this field tend to assume that explaining subjective awareness is the hard problem, and that explaining self-consciousness is not too big a deal.  Baker disagrees, and goes on to argue that self-consciousness poses some serious problems for naturalism.

Although Baker uses the term “self-consciousness” she is not using it in the classical sense, refuted by Hume, as a distinct subjective impression of an entity we would call the self.  Rather, she is speaking of a particular cognitive capacity that allows us to make meaningful reference to ourselves, and to conceive of ourselves as distinct from everything else.  This is what she calls the “first person perspective”.

To get at this notion, she distinguishes two levels of the first person perspective, weak and strong, the first which can be meaningfully attributed to non humans, and the second which probably can not.

Weak first person perspective

The weak first person perspective arises whenever we find it useful to explain a being’s behavior by reference to a mental perspective. 

•	“The dog digs because it saw you bury the bone there and it wants it.”

 An explanation like this makes sense only if the dog does in fact have an egocentric perspective. 

The important point here is that while the dog may be said to have beliefs and desires, the dog has no conception of belief or desire, nor of himself as the bearer of belies and desires.

Medium strength first person perspective

Baker does not actually distinguish a medium strength perspective, but she discusses a few experiments with chimps that reveal a first person perspective that is stronger than the weak perspective, but still well short of the strong first person perspective she attributes to humans.

Chimps exposed to a mirror over a long period of time eventually seem to discover that they are looking at themselves.  Most animals show no such recognition, and only engage in other-directed behavior (i.e., if they show any behavior at all, it is the behavior that is typical of behavior to others.) Chimps initially show other-directed behavior, but eventually begin grooming themselves in front of the mirror.  When a weird mark is put on their face they look in the mirror and start fussing with it in a way that seems to indicate it is having a thought like: 

•	What’s this weird mark on my face?

Baker’s point here is that this is still quite a bit short of the strong firs person perspective.

Strong first person perspective

Characterizing this perspective is a bit difficult.  Baker says:

For strong first-person phenomena, it is not enough to distinguish between first-person and third person (which chimps may be doing); also one must be able to conceptualize the distinction, to conceive of oneself as oneself…..It is not just to have thoughts expressible by means of “I”, but also to conceive of oneself as the bearer of those thoughts.

So, dogs can distinguish between themselves and the world, but they can not conceptualize the distinction between themselves and the world.

Chimps can conceptualize the distinction between themselves and other chimps, but they still do not conceptualize themselves as the being making the distinction.

Grammatical explication

Consider two different kinds of utterances:

•	I am tall.
•	I wish that I were tall.

Used meaningfully, the first utterance shows a weak first person perspective in the sense that it distinguishes between oneself and others.
However, the second utterance is the expression of someone who conceives of herself as an individual who distinguishes between self and others.  In other words, the second statement might be unpacked as:

•	I have a wish concerning myself, the very individual who is making this wish, that I were tall. 

So, the strong first person perspective seems to come down to the ability to have intentional states concerning oneself conceived as an individual with intentional states.

At this point Baker adopts the convention of identifying any thought that shows the strong first person perspective with an *.   So there are “I” sentences, which simply show the weak first person perspective, and there are “I*” sentences that show a strong first person perspective.  

(Note:  Baker is careful to say that she is not making any kind of Cartesian argument for a spooky “I” entity, but it’s important to see that she is still keying on the special ability to occupy the first-person perspective as what threatens a fully naturalistic account of human cognition.  So in this limited sense her argument is continuous with the Cartesian tradition of thinking that our way of knowing the self is indicative of it having a special metaphysical status.)

Relational character of the first-person perspective

Baker argues, that self-knowledge is inherently relational.  This means that if there were no external world, there would be no self knowledge.  The argument proceeds as follows:

(1) x has a first person perspective iff x can think of herself as herself*.
(2) x can think of herself as herself* only if x has concepts that can apply to things different than x.
(3) x has concepts that can apply to things different from x only if x has had interactions with things different from x.
Thus (4) if x has a first-person perspective, then x has had interactions with things different from x.

Baker represents (3) as the critical premise.  The rationale for it is entirely naturalistic:  any viable theory of concepts acquisition must explain their as having come from somewhere outside of us. This is the externalist perspective that would have been denied by internalists like Descartes, and all those who participate in the Epistemic Romanticism criticized by Stich et al.  

But really, the critical idea here is that you can not have strong self-knowledge if you don’t know anything about the external world, because self-knowledge essentially requires the ability to explicitly distinguish between yourself and the external world.

The indispensability of the first person perspective.
 
Baker gives two argument for thinking the strong first person perspective is indispensable.

Argument 1: I* sentences are not eliminable.

Here Baker notes that the weak first perspective is arguably eliminable.  For example, the use of the term “I” in 

•	I am getting into an awful muddle.

might be eliminated without loss of meaning by simply saying

•	This is an awful muddle.

If we explain the fact that a dog is peeing on itself by saying that it realizes that it is in big trouble, this does not mean that we are attributing to it the belief

•	I am in big trouble.

If we are going to attribute any sentence at all it might just be something like:

•	Oh, shit.

This is why Descartes’ Cogito argument is flawed.  The premise, “I think” may just as well be expressed as “Thinking is occurring”  But, Baker points out that another Cartesian statement:

•	I am certain that I am thinking.

Can not be adequately expressed in a way that makes no essential reference to the I.  

Argument 2:

The first person perspective is ineliminable from some kinds of psychological explanations.  

For example, Shirley Boot is listening to the radio station which announces that the winner of this month’s lottery is Shirley Boot.

There are two ways of expressing the fact that Shirley Boot now knows that she won the lottery.

•	Shirley Boot knows that Shirley Boot won the lottery.
•	Shirley Boot knows that she, the very person who now knows that Shirley Boot won the lottery, won the lottery. 

Baker thinks that it is only the second formulation, which expresses the first person perspective, that explains the elation of Shirley Boot  Similarly (to use Baker’s example) Oedipus’ realization that he is the killer of King Laius can be expressed as

•	Oedipus knows that Oedipus killed Laius.
•	Oedipus knows that Oedipus himself killed Laius. 

Baker thinks that the second formulation is what actually explains Oedipus’ grief.  

The Homunculus Argument

In order to understand the rest of this paper it is important to understand the homunculus argument.  The homunculus argument is essentially a circularity criticism with respect to  the explanation of mental phenomena.  For example, if one explains the processing of visual phenomena as the effects of light on the eyes with a resulting internal visual image, then the question just becomes how that image is understood.  It seems as if a little man must be inside of us to experience the image, and this just starts the explanation all over again:  we get an infinite regress of homunculi.

Baker does not use this vocabulary, but she uses a homunculus like argument to show  that, so far, no one has produced a naturalistic explanatory framework that makes sense of the existence of the first-person perspective.  It is as if we have a little homunculus inside of us responsible for self-consciousness.

Baker examines a couple of different attempts, but we’ll just focus on her examination of David Rosenthal’s theory of consciousness.

Rosenthal understands consciousness of our own mental states in terms of the ability to have higher order thoughts about our own mental states.  So, using headaches, we can separate three levels of mental states.

•	M1:  The headache.
•	M1’:  I have a headache.
•	M1’’:  I am conscious of having a headache.

Baker (interpreting Rosenthal) generalizes these levels as follows:

•	S is in mental state M.
•	S has a thought that S is in mental state M.
•	S has a thought that S has a thought that S is in mental state M.

But Baker points out that this interpretation lacks the first person perspective as she defines it.  A being can instantiate each of these levels without ever realizing that it is S herself that is in mental state M.  This is pretty hard to grasp, so let’s look at one of her concrete examples.

Suppose that Jones is being tested on her ability to read PET scans and that she is reading a contemporaneous PET scan of her own brain.  Although she knows that she is reading a PET scan of an altert subject names Jones, she does not realize that that Jones is herself*…. Now suppose that the telephone rings in the next rom, where she thinks that the subject Jones is loacated.  At t, she points to a lit-up portion of the brain on the screen and syas to the tester, “Now Jones is hearing the phone.”  In so saying, Jones is expressing her thought that now Jones is hearing the phone.  At the same time, with no conscious inference, she says to herself, “Jones is having the thought that Jones is hearing the phone.”

So what’s the point?  The point is that a situation like this instantiates all of the conditions above, but fails to capture the first-person perspective.  Baker thinks this failing is general.  She thinks that any attempt to explain conscious mental states in terms of mental states that are not themselves conscious, will fail to capture the first person perspective.