The Self Through the Lens of "Flat-Physicalism," a Musical Portrait

Project proposal: The Self Through the Lens of "Flat-Physicalism," a Musical Portrait

This project lies at the intersection of composed poetry (lyrics and compositions) and analytical philosophy, and it investigates the role of the thesis of "Flat Physicalism" (recently developed by Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker; see Shenker, 2017; Hemmo and Shenker, 2019) in constructing and reconstructing essential aspects of our self trough composed lyrics. Physicalism is the thesis that "everything is physical" (e.g., Stoljar [2001]; Elpidorou [2018]), or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that there is "nothing over and above" the physical (e.g. Dowell [2006]; Wilson [2005]). Flat physicalism further adds that when a physical token obtains, it is everything that there is, this is the only sort of type that can be (i.e., 'physical types'). In this sense, using the terminology "self" adds nothing to the entire physical ontology: it only denotes an aspect of a physical token that is given by its partial description, and that can be shared by other tokens. This reality has no vital meaning and/or idealistic aspects. Our self-experiencing, self-shaping, self-knowledge, self-moral, and self-communicating are part of this fundamental (physical) reality. Hence, the question is, how can we explain and express our won selfhood in a way that is compatible with the fundamental reality of the world, and even comes as a natural consequence of it, as this reality is described by the natural sciences? Some people might wrongly think that a view in which everything is physical eliminates the self. However, physicalism does not say that the self does not exist, but rather that the 'self' is an aspect of the physical world (!). Moreover, according to this reductive approach, high-level concepts are known to change and their meaning changes. The reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, for example, has resulted in a profaned alteration in the meaning of "heat" to "average kinetic velocity." This new understanding has enabled us to develop the theory of heat more efficiently than ever and with the success, we are all witnessing today. A comparable study in the context of the self and its place in the (physical) world, in my opinion, brings fresh meaning and new conceptual resources for exploring the notion of the 'self'. This project includes five composed lyrics that express and investigate the self and its place in the world along with these new ideas framed by the flat physicalism thesis. The use of composed lyrics allows the depth and beauty of the physicalist approach's concept of the 'self' to be presented not just through academic and intellectual discourse, but also through art, which best portrays emotion, moral questions, and social relationships that we are all familiar with from our daily lives.