| Avicenna’s Flying Man in Einstein’s Elevator: What Does the Flying Man Know? |
| Paper ID : 1119-IBSIC |
| Authors: |
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Mousa Mohammadian *1, Faeze Fazeli2 1School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India 2Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, IN, USA |
| Abstract: |
| In Avicenna’s celebrated Flying Man Thought Experiment, we are invited to imagine a physically and mentally sound and mature person who suddenly comes into existence. He is flying in the air, in the state of complete sensory deprivation, and without any memory. Yet, according to Avicenna, despite his complete unawareness of his body and his surroundings, the Flying Man has some kind of awareness—in other words, his filed of experience is not empty. But what is the subject of Flying Man’s awareness? This is the central question of our paper. To answer it, we read Flying Man thought experiment through two lenses: Avicenna’s celebrated distinction between essence-existence, on the one hand, and the distinction between the inside observer and the outside observer in thought experiments, highlighted by Einstein in his well-known elevator thought experiment. By looking at Flying Man thought experiment through the lenses of these two distinctions, first, we argue that to say that “Flying Man is self-aware”—the received view that we call the “self-awareness thesis”—although not straightforwardly incorrect, is insufficiently fine-grained and in need of more analysis. Moreover, we show that Flying Man’s self-awareness thesis is potentially misleading especially if it results in thinking that Flying Man’s self-awareness is similar to our self-awareness. Second, we argue that the “essence-awareness thesis,” according to which Flying Man is aware of the essence of his soul is inconsistent with Avicenna’s philosophy—the “essence-awareness thesis” is suggested by Dag Nikolaus Hasse and recently defended by Peter Adamson and Fedor Benevich in their “The Thought Experimental Method: Avicenna’s Flying Man Argument.” Finally, we defend the “existence-awareness thesis,” the view that Flying Man is aware of nothing but that he exists. To be more precise, we argue that Flying Man is not even aware that he exists. Rather, he is only aware of an existent. |
| Keywords: |
| Flying Man, Essence, Existence, Awareness, Einstein, Elevator Thought Experiment |
| Status : Paper Accepted (Oral Presentation) |