Amber asked:

Is "What it is like to be you" an essential part of you (i.e. your mind)?

Is it possible for a scientist or psychologist to understand who you are? The mind and body problem
is difficult to understand. I read Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like to be a Bat?' but I still do not know
why, 'what it is like to be me' is an essential part of me.

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You can still be a person without much sense of what it is like to be you. Apparently, this is what it is
like for schizophrenics, who are quite obviously people with a mind, but it has been found by
psychologists that people with such an illness have difficult with recent autobiography and also with
the understanding of the mind of others. An understanding of the mind of others, which is really
constitutive of an understanding of the mind, is obviously going to disturb any understanding or
feeling of what is like to be a person, and, given the autobiographical difficulty, what it is like to be me.
Neuroscientists are definitely interested in and researching this problem of continuity and coherence
in psychological personal identity

I think that what it is like to be me has to fall with an autobiographical and physical field. Could an
amnesiac have an idea of me if there is no continuity, nothing to identify from moment to moment? I
don't know. The problem is that philosophers argue in accordance with logical principles and would
say that you could have a subjective experience of "me" in one moment without autobiographical or
physical experiences being relevant. This is what the "what is like to be me" problem is about:
subjectivity: That which is private and cannot be shared. But this pure subjectivity wouldn't determine
what it is like to me, because it is purely positional

The question "what is it like to be a bat" is a type problem. We cannot know what it is like to be
another species, especially a bat which has very different sense experience. But the question is also
intra-species in the sense just described.

Rachel Browne

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