DE SE PREFERENCES AND EMPATHY FOR FUTURE SELVES1

Abstract

I argue that we grasp distinctive, self-involving truths, or de se truths, through immersive experience. Drawing on examples involving gameplay and virtual reality, I defend the value of immersive exploration and virtual first personal perspectives, and explore the relation between a virtual first personal perspective and a real world first personal perspective. I then develop the connection between immersive modes of presentation, the de se, and transformative experience, and show how our grasp of qualitative truths in experience relates to our grasp of de se truths (and tensed truths) in experience. Tying the value of immersive gameplay and augmented reality to the value of gaining an immersive understanding of our future and possible selves, I argue that imaginative immersion in one’s future experience is a distinctive, experience-based way to discover de se truths. I close my discussion by exploring a case where an epistemic transformation scales up into a personal transformation. In such cases, the discovery of new phenomenal truths can lead to the discovery of new de se truths. When you face a life-defining change, you can ask yourself: Who will I become? This can be understood as a question about who you are and who you will become, asked from your first personal, subjective perspective. As such, it is also a question about the nature and character of your future lived experience, because the nature and character of your conscious, lived experience is a defining constituent of who you are. Framed this way, knowing your future lived experience is a way of knowing your future self. In this paper, I will explore this way of understanding one’s self, with a focus on understanding life-defining changes. “Who will I become?” when asked in high-stakes, life-defining contexts, connects the metaphysics of the self to the role of imagination, empathy, testimony, and the de se in self1 Thanks to Nilanjan Das, Josh Dever, Martin Glazier, Adam Lerner, Dilip Ninan, Simon Prosser, the St. Andrews metaphysics reading group, and the UNC transformative experience working group for discussion. 2 Life-defining choices, as self-involving choices, need not be self-interested in a selfish sense. Life-defining choices don’t even need to be self-involving choices. We often think about the futures of others who will be affected by our choices, and about how they will be formed. I will focus on self-involving choices for simplicity, but what I will say in much of this paper applies to the way we think of these choices for others as well as ourselves. 3 In this way, what I am saying has ideas in common with Chang (2015), Korsgaard (2009), and Bratman (1999): you make yourself into who you are partly because of your commitments and your choices. This partly defines who you are. But my focus is on the role of decision theory, new experience, the first person, and cognitive modeling in all of this, not on practical reasoning per se.