mind & identity · new to this edition
swampman
a bolt of lightning, a dead tree, and a perfect copy of a philosopher who may never have had a thought.
In a 1987 paper called “Knowing One’s Own Mind”, Donald Davidson told a short and very strange story about his own death. It takes a paragraph to tell and has kept philosophers of mind arguing ever since, because it pulls apart two things that never come apart in real life: what is in a head right now, and the history that put it there. Answer each step before reading on. The later steps ask whether your earlier answers still hold.
swampman walks home and talks to davidson’s friends. is he thinking?
Davidson is out walking near a swamp when lightning strikes a dead tree beside him. His body is reduced to its elements. At the same instant, by pure coincidence and out of different molecules, the tree is turned into an exact physical replica of Davidson as he was a moment before.
In Davidson’s words, the replica “departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference.”
Nothing designed Swampman, copied him or meant him to exist. His likeness to Davidson is a stupendous accident. But atom for atom, his brain is Davidson’s brain.
When Swampman greets an old friend by name, is anything going on in his mind?
further reading
- knowing one’s own mind original paper
- on swampkinds original paper
- teleological theories of mental content stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- externalism and self-knowledge stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- donald davidson stanford encyclopedia of philosophy