Lloyd's 'microcosm' argument

Lloyd Strickland has suggsted (to me) that my thought that I am one thing, a mind (and not a (mere) sequence of things - perceptions) is to be understood on the analogy of the thought I might have that the universe (in the sense of everything existent) is one thing and not a (mere) set of things.

Don't we regard the universe as a single thing? Yet doesn't it consist only of a set of things? Might not my belief that I am one thing be like that?

This comes down to the question: what is the significance of my belief that I am one thing? In the case of the universe I am perfectly happy when challenged to concede that it is really a multiplicity of things, but will not want to be stopped from thinking of it as one thing the rest of the time.

Is this like it is with my belief that I am one thing and not a multiplicity?

I think if it were so, if we were so prepared to concede we were not one thing, the role of responsibility in our lives would not have the place it has. There is no justice, only an extraordinary theology, in one thing suffering for the misdeeds of another.

But of course Hume himself managed to realize that in reality he was a multiplicity rather than a single thing. If he could live with with this idea, maybe the rest of us could too.

There is another difficulty however. As human beings we think of ourselves as acting, and it is not clear that we could do so unless we thought of ourselves as temporarily extended. I can have the thought that I want to eat, but I will only think of myself as making a sandwich to meet this situation if I think of the thing being hungry as one and the same as the thing having their hunger met.

In other words, my belief that I am one thing has much deeper roots than my belief that the Universe is one thing. I cannot concede that I am a multiplicity of things with anything approaching the casualness with which I can concede the multiplicity of the Universe.

Is this another way of putting the same point? - The sense in which the Universe is one thing is not the sense in which we think of ourselves as one thing. I think of myself as one thing and this enters into many of the other thoughts that I have - into all of them if Kant is right.

Well, this may be misleading. What I have argued is that I can give up my belief that the Universe is one thing much more easily than I can give up my belief that I am one thing.

What does Hume say to the question: how do I arrive at my belief that the Universe is one thing?

I think Lloyd's answer to this is that it is a result of the fact that the universe is everything, that there is nothing that is not one of the things that make the universe up. Lloyd's point appears to be that it is this fact that somehow misleads the mind into thinking there is one thing there rather than a lot. All there is to a person are perceptions, and the person only knows about their own perceptions, so somehow all their perceptions get to be thought of as one thing - ???

But you don't need a special explanation of why the universe is sometimes thought of as one thing. Lots of sets of things are thought of as single things for various purposes. Teapots, for example, which are nothing but sets of physical particles (I know this is old fashioned, but the point I think can be translated into current physics).

And as L himself has observed, you could force the concession that to speak of a sequence of perceptions is itself to speak of one thing, namely the one sequence that it is.

However, am I missing L's main point, which is that there is something special about our thought that the Universe is one thing? His point is: the mechanism which leads me to think that may be the mechanism that leads me t think I am one thing.

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Created 08:06:05

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