The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 126 of 254
Self-experience exists whether or not selves do
I may have to think of myself as having a unity over time, but that does not mean that I really have it. How we must think about things at certain times, for certain purposes, in certain ways, does not necessarily tells us about how they actually are. Kant recognised this: ‘The identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is therefore only a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence, and in no way proves the numerical identity of my subject.’12 Or, in Galen Strawson’s words, ‘self-experience exists, as a form of experience, whether or not selves do’.