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The Phenomenal Self by Barry Dainton (Hardcover, 2008)

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This achieved, Dainton turns to the most pressing problem facing any experience-based approach: losses of consciousness. How can we survive them?. He shows how the problem can be solved in a satisfactory manner by construing ourselves as systems of experiential capacities.

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Barry Dainton presents a fascinating new account of the self, the key to which is experiential or phenomenal continuity. Many philosophers, following John Locke, take mental continuity to be the key to personal identity, to explain the persistence of the same person through changes. But mental continuity comes in different forms. Most of Locke's contemporary followers agree that our continued existence is secured by psychological continuity, which they take to be made up of memories, beliefs, intentions, personality traits, and the like. Dainton argues that that a better and more believable account can be framed in terms of the sort of continuity we find in our streams of consciousness from moment to moment. Why? Simply because provided this continuity is not lost - provided our streams of consciousness flow on - we can easily imagine ourselves surviving the most dramatic psychological alterations. The Phenomenal Self is a full-scale defence and elaboration of this premise. Along the way Dainton discusses such questions as: How can we survive losses of consciousness? How simple can a self be? How are we related to our bodies? Is our persistence an all-or-nothing affair? Do our minds consist of parts which could enjoy an independent existence? Is it metaphysically intelligible to construe ourselves as systems of capacities? The book concludes with a novel treatment of fission and fusion.