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The First-Person and Third- Person Views (Part I)

David J. Chalmers
[[An overview of "first-person" and "third-person" issues about consciousness, w
ritten when I was a first-year graduate student
at Indiana in 1989. This was Part I of a supposedly 3-part paper - the two remai
ning parts got turned into "Consciousness and
Cognition". This part doesn't reach any firm conclusions, but it captures someth
ing of the eternal internal struggle.]]
Organization, roughly.
Intro to what "first-person" and "third-person" mean.
(outline the probs of the first person)
(convenience of third-person vs absoluteness of first-person)
(explain terminology)
Dominance of third-person, reasons.
(embarassment with first person)
(division of reactions)
(natural selection - those who can make the most noise)
(analogy with behaviourism)
Reductionism, hard-line and soft-line
Appropriation of first-person terms by reductionists.
(mind, consciousness, first-person)
(correspondence of first-person to third-person)
The problems of the first person
(problem of qualia, problem of mental content)
The cult of the first person
The reconciliation - what the third person can tell us about the first person
We CAN'T separate the first-person from the third-person. Even as I write this,
it's my brain that is doing
the thinking.
The First Person and the Third Person
Perhaps the most important duality in the philosophy of mind is that between the
first-person and thirdperson views of mental events. Some might say that the fundamental duality is th
at between mind and
brain, or between subjective and objective - but all of these reduce to the firs
t-person/third-person duality.
The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "M
ind-Body Problem," in these
enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the f
irst person, and how is it
possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person
view of the mental
encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person
. Such phenomena
include some famous philosophical bugbears: subjective experience, qualia, consc
iousness, and even
mental content (although see below. It is notoriously difficult to even talk abo
ut the first person without
slipping into confusion, and these terms may have different connotations for dif
ferent people.).
The distinguishing mark of the first-person view is the air of mystery which sur
rounds it. This feeling of
mysteriousness has led many people to dismiss the first-person out of hand. It p
erhaps has 'spiritual'
connotations not unlike those of the occult or religion. But the first-person is
not to be dismissed so easily.
It is indeed a glaring anomaly today, in the heyday of the scientific world-view
. If it was not for the direct

experience which all of us have of the first-person, it would seem a ridiculous

concept. But it throws up
too many problems to be neatly packaged away in the kind of third-person explana
tion which suffices for
everything else in the scientific world. Pity.
The third-person view, by contrast, poses no deep metaphysical difficulties. The
difficulties here, while not