Slide 1
Could you know you exist without bodily sensations?
The philosopher Avicenna asks us to imagine a person without ordinary bodily sensations. Could that person still be aware of existing?
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You ordinarily know yourself amid sensations: pressure underfoot, movement, sight and sound. Avicenna asks the reader to imagine a person for whom those ordinary routes of bodily awareness are absent, and then asks what awareness would remain.
Slide 2
Imagine a person with no ordinary bodily contact
Avicenna imagines a newly created person suspended with separated limbs. The person has no ordinary bodily contact.
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The person is imagined as newly created and suspended, with limbs separated so they do not touch. The scenario excludes the usual sensory contact through which a body becomes apparent. These are stipulated conditions in an argument, not instructions for a real procedure.
Slide 3
Avicenna proposes that self-awareness would remain
The Flying Man argument removes ordinary sensory contact. It proposes that awareness of one’s own existence would remain; this is a premise, not a measured observation.
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Remove sight of the body, contact between its parts and ordinary sensory encounters with the surroundings. Avicenna proposes that the person would nevertheless affirm their own existence. That remaining self-awareness is the crucial premise, not a measured observation.
Slide 4
Awareness of yourself differs from awareness of your body
Avicenna uses that proposed self-awareness to distinguish knowing oneself from awareness of bodily features. Whether it establishes an independent self is a further question.
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The argument uses this proposed awareness to distinguish the self from awareness of bodily features. A philosophical objection asks whether failing to be aware of a body establishes that the self is independent of one. What can be imagined and what exists are different questions.
Slide 5
The distinction leaves a premise to examine
Knowing that you exist is not identical to knowing what your body is like.
Accepting that distinction does not settle every claim about the soul or the mind’s relationship to the body.
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The Flying Man separates two questions often run together: awareness that I exist, and awareness of what my body is like. Accepting that distinction need not settle every claim about the soul, embodiment or the relationship between mind and brain.
Sources
- Self-Consciousness, Spring 2018 edition
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy