14 DAY TRIAL // One very common idea is that there are some things which are fundamentally personal, things that nobody (maybe only God) can know about. Moreover, this idea comes in conjunction with the idea that there are some things about which you cannot err. For example if you say your head hurts you cannot just be mistaken, it's simply impossible for this to be an illusion - having the illusion that your head hurts means that your head really is hurting. Even if it is your amputated (phantom) arm that's hurting, the pain is nonetheless real. Thus, in regard to this aspect you have a so-called first person authority - if you say it's so, than it is so, because this thing regards your own person. (One obvious question is: What really is a "person"?)
But what about other things? What about more complex feelings, or desires, or even some opinions? Where is the limit between the impossibility and the possibility of error? And more importantly, is this limit a precise barrier or just a fuzzy, gradual transition?
What are the stakes here?
You might be tempted to go with the gradual transition but that option has some consequences you might not be willing to accept. One of the current theories about the relation between brain and mind (or body and soul, if you prefer) states that the mind is simply a product of the brain, a consequence of the inner workings of that electro-chemical machine. But you might feel that having such a physical soul is insufficient - you might want to have a mightier soul.
Of course, what you want to have isn't really relevant for the question of what you actually have, but it is relevant for the question of whether you are willing to accept such a theory or not. So, the possible conflict of interests has been noted.
One of the strongest arguments put forward against that materialist theory of mind is that the mind does some things which are subjective - i.e. deeply personal. These deeply personal things are often called "qualia". The crux of the qualia argument is that you cannot build subjectivity from purely objective bricks. By objective is meant something that can be observed from the outside, something about which two or more people can argue about and so on.
So, the existence of first person authority phenomena is clearly an argument against the materialist theory of mind. Where could that authority come from? Nobody can claim such authority about objective phenomena - these are observed from the exterior and in a dispute about the truth of some claim about such objective phenomena any observer has the same authority as any other, nobody is privileged a priori. But when your head (or even phantom arm) hurts, your claim is a priori privileged. According to the materialist theory that shouldn't happen, if all spiritual matters are ultimately material, then the first person authority shouldn't exist.
So, maybe we do have a mightier soul after all?
What is the extent of the first person authority?
Thinking about this is quite an interesting challenge. You start discovering surprising things. The challenge is to imagine some specific situations when you (or somebody else) could be mistaken about some apparently deeply personal thing.
For example you might think that you will like doing some job. But one of your friends tells you that you are mistaken, that you will not like it. Is it ok to argue about this, don't you have a first person authority about what you like of dislike? Well, it is possible that your friend knows you better than you know yourself in this aspect.
Or you might think you want to eat some ice-cream and your friend tells you that you seem kind of grumpy so you won't enjoy the ice-cream. Again, it's not inconceivable that your friend might be right on this. So, it seems that we don't have first person authority about what we like or desire.
Or think about more dramatic situations. We often construct self-flattering scenarios about why we think various things about other people, but to a closer inspection, these scenarios often prove to be covers for jealousy or vainness. And others can sometimes see through this cover even when we manage to deceive ourselves so well about our real motivations that our story isn't even a lie anymore. So, when you think that you have a certain opinion about some person you might be wrong and self-deceiving.
But what about things like love? Is it possible to think you're in love and to be wrong and somebody else to know it? Think about the following scenario: A month after you have separated from your former girl-friend, with whom you have been together for more than a year, you madly fall in love with another person. And a friend of yours tells you, "This isn't really love, you're just not over her yet and now you have fallen for some superficial resemblance between this new girl and her." But you think your new love is for real - you feel it in your every bone. Nonetheless, you might be wrong and your friend might be right. What you feel might not be what you think you're feeling. You don't have a first person authority even about your own feeling of being in love.
So, the more you think about it and the more you imagine such possible situations, it seems that the domain of the first person authority gets smaller and smaller. You might wonder whether you can be mistaken about other things such as being bored or feeling regret and try to devise scenarios about them. It seems that all we can save are some very basic features of our psyche, things like sensations. The realm of the "deeply personal" seems awfully primitive and universal.
Everybody knows what a pain is or how it feels to be hungry and so on. These things are hardly personal, only their instances appear to be personal. But when it comes to the things which really are personal, things that give us our individuality, these are also the things in regard to which we are most prone to errors. Thus, the qualia argument tries to build a paradox for the materialist theory but it ends up in a paradox of its own: the things which are supposed to be the most personal are also the most primitive and wide-spread.
So, in what aspects of your inner life do you have a first person authority after all? Answer: You have a first person authority in regard to your own description of your inner life. As long as there is no reason to believe you might be lying, your description defines what it means to be in your shoes, what it feels like to be you. "You're the novelist, and what you say goes," wrote Daniel Dennett. But you don't have any a priori authority on the truth of this description. You might be very well wrong about the things that actually happen inside you and about why you are really doing what you're doing.
"If you want us to believe everything you say about your [inner world], you are asking not just to be taken seriously [believed that you're not lying] but to be granted papal infallibility, and that is asking too much. You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what it is like to be you," Dennett wrote in Consciousness Explained.
The first person authority myth wants us to believe that it is theoretically impossible to find out what it is like to be some other person, that each individual is inescapably trapped inside one's own perspective. However, you can find out how it is like to be somebody else more or less in the same way as an anthropologists learns about how it is like to belong to some unusual culture. The anthropologist puts together a story, a "theorist's fiction", about what it is like to live in that culture. This story might refer for instance to various beliefs, attitudes or religious practices. The anthropologist unravels this story, but doesn't necessarily identify with it. In a similar fashion, one can find out what it is like to be somebody else without actually believing that all the assertions are accurate.
"People undoubtedly do believe they have mental images, pains, perceptual experiences, and all the rest, and these facts - the facts about what people believe, and report when they express their beliefs - are phenomena any scientific theory of mind must account for. We organize our data regarding these phenomena into theorist's fictions," Dennett wrote. "Then the question of whether items thus portrayed exist as real objects, events, and states in the brain - or in the soul, for that matter - is an empirical matter to investigate. If suitable real candidates are uncovered, we can identify them as the long-sought referents of the subject's terms; if not, we will have to explain why it seems to subjects that these items exist."
Where does the apparent first person authority come from?
Although you don't have any a priori authority about the truth of what is actually happening in you, it just "happens" that in the vast majority of cases you are nevertheless correct. Why is that? Why is it that usually, in most cases, you know what you want better that anybody else knows? The answer is not very spectacular: You simply are in your own company much longer than anybody else is in your company. You know yourself better than you know anybody else because, on one hand, you observe yourself in many more situations than anybody else can observe you (except maybe for the government) and, on the other hand, because you have a special interest in yourself and people generally learn more about something when they are interested in that subject (and from your point of view you are probably the most interesting subject of all).
Finally, it is relevant to note that even when you are wrong about something (as it is revealed to you later) you usually feel very certain that you are correct. Thus, the fact that you feel very certain about the fact that your head hurts is not a valid argument for the claim that you really feel that! In principle, you might be wrong! You might actually feel something else and mistake the feeling for a head ache.
However, in such very simple cases, involving simple sensations, your experience is very extensive and thus it is highly unlikely that you would be wrong. Sensations are used in everything - it's hard to see how you could develop the experience of sensations incorrectly. But this is just a difference of degree - there aren't two fundamentally different kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of the external world and the knowledge of your inner world. Your knowledge that your head hurts is not fundamentally different from your knowledge that you want an ice-cream or, for that matter, that the Earth orbits the Sun. There is a gradual transition between them.
What makes something subjective is the fact that it belongs to a certain system of feelings, beliefs and desires, a system that is me - this is why something belongs to my "inner world". The subjectivity of my pain or of the sensation of color or so on (name your favorite qualia) comes from the fact that they are correlated to other emotions and thoughts and desires and eventually actions that are also my own (or you could say that I am their system). The subjectivity of qualia is thus not intrinsic, but relational - it's the result of belonging to a certain system. This is the big idea that escapes many people (this is related to the general idea that information is not a "thing" but a relation - see article).
So, how is subjectivity constructed from objective bricks? The answer is that we have subjectivity because the structure of each individual's brain (the neuronal network) is unique. This structure is determined by genes, by randomness and by personal experience. Objectivity resides in the fact that something can be viewed from many different perspectives, while our subjectivity stems the fact that, due to the complexity of each of our brains' structures, our own perspective is unique. How various parts of this structure inside our heads activate and inter-correlate is thus very personal and, as a result, many sensations and emotions and desires and thoughts appear to us as subjective. And we're not just observing them, we are them.