Name

How do we know our own name?

We know someone else's based on some character. This is most evident with identical twins where physical characteristics are so similar that it is hard to tell them apart. What we may need to do is talk to them to see their personality. If this is also the same we can check for information they remember which links them to a place and a time. For example if they can't remember what they ate when you last had a meal together.

If the twins were never apart however then this is hard. It would be like a Turing test where we had a fixed period of time to determine who was who and if we couldn't then we could conclude, not that they were "a conscious person", but rather there was no difference between these two persons. We would then have to rely on what each of then told us, in other words what they called themselves. No good one saying "i'm me and not them" and the other saying exactly the same. We need them to uniquely identify themselves.

Now how can we tell whether they are telling the truth? We have to be able to mark them with a constant characteristic and compare what they say relative to that mark - measure them so to speak. Suppose we could put them in different cells then ask them their name, write it on the door and ask them each day. They need to always say the same thing AFTER isolation. What was said before is not important!

But what if they are called the same name? Lots of people have the same name. What we tend to do in that situation is give them a nick name. Two Marks renovating my cousins place gained the names Mark-the-floor and Mark-the-plasterer for obvious reasons just as people gained the names Margaret Thatcher or Adam Smith in days of yore. And usually people come t accept their monikers. But it is not satisfying if our two twins keep calling themselves say John. It is as though 'inside' they still don't accept their difference. Outside however we can test their memories and gradually their different histories will show up; for example if we give them different meals and then ask them to remember their meals. This is what Buddhism calls streams of consciousness which I believe is the way that we pass through time for Buddhist theory (but i am unsatisfied by this explanation: it doesn't really get to the heart of the illusion of "self" because we can just replace the idea of self with "my stream of consciousness").

Now is this how we know our own name? Do we look for a character in order to know that it is us? That is the problem for a speculative philosophical moment. In reality however we don't think like like this. Our name is a part of our learned behaviour. From a young age we know what to do when addressed. Almost like a dog who can tell when he is being called because his master is looking at him and saying this word in that high pitched way. Our name becomes part of the language game that surrounds us and in which we have grown up. In this way our name is unique to the social context in which each of us finds ourselves. It is not about naming some object but rather 'being' part of a team and social reality. So how do we know our name? It is because we are part of a social reality in which our name gets used. What is my name? Is a question we are a fool if we can't answer just as I felt very childish not to be able to spell my middle name when I was 11. In the same way we learn to address other people in this culture for a variety of purposes. So it is not so much a case of directly refering to a 'self' when we use a name - a thing called 'Alva' that is naming that thing (any self-reference) - but rather being part of a society that uses this word in particular situations and "Alva" becomes just a social context rather than an object . . Just as a "goal keeper" is a context in a game of football so "Alva" is a context in the game of English Western society. So our twins above are perplexing because they seem to be able to cheat at something that is so fundamental to this society. Just as a man the size of a goal mouth would 'cheat' at goal keeping!