He Is Tenacious

In comments, TMcD argues against my last post. (Btw, I meant no offense to Oakland. I'm not sure about this, but my guess is that when Stein said that quote, there probably wasn't much there. Certainly nothing like the Oaktown that's there now, that TMcD and I have both been to. I mean, she must have been there in, what, the 1920s? But that's really beside the point.)

Here's one paragraph that I want to respond to:

Ok, so you want to hinge your theory of identity on "continuity of consciousness," eh? So how do you deal with amnesiacs? Are they two completely different people, one before and one after losing their memory? If they lose memory repeatedly, are they born anew each time? What about "Memento" men, who have fragmented memories? Yours doesn't seem like a very good answer, Mr. Materialist Science, if there is continuity of physical body. It would seem to push you into an idealist position that assigns mental events a reality independent of the physical.

But what I said was simply that if there were a physically identical-to-me person in a zillion years, that person wouldn't be me, because he wouldn't have continuity of consciousness with me. Or, to use the snobby Stein quote, one more time, there's no me there.

I think that we have to be careful what theory of personhood we are discussing. For example. A corporation is a person for legal purposes, a person which (I refuse to use "who") cannot die a natural death. But it can do almost everything else a person can do, from a legal point of view. It has continuity of existence separate from the identity of the persons composing it. So there's a theory of legal personhood that is quite different from personal identity. (A corporation may suffer from a loss of "institutional memory," but those memories are not essential for artificial persons. And yes, I know that's a metaphor, although an exceedingly useful one.) If, for example, I were to have some kind of accident and lose all memories of my past life, then that radical break would make me a different person, from one perspective, than I am right now. I would still be the same person, from a legal point of view. I would still own the same property and even have the same degrees, even if I couldn't remember any of the stuff I used to know (that's curious).

To take a rather radical direction here, let's say there's a death-row prisoner who develops a brain fever which completely erases his personality and memories. He no longer remembers his homicidal past. But he's still on death row, because the judgment and conviction pertain to legal personhood, not . . . identity. (A less extreme version of this, of course, is the case of the redeemed death row inmate.)

So, I think that amnesiacs can become different people, if they have long-term effects. Not from a legal point-of-view, but from the perspective of personal identity. If there really are "Memento" or "Blank Slate" persons, who wake up every morning with no memory of who they are, I would say that such people really have no personal identity. The first question such people would ask, of course, is "Who am I?"

That is not an idealist perspective. I'm assuming that continuity of consciousness has a physical/material cause. The best evidence for that is that amnesia, etc. are often the result of traumatic injuries to the brain. So my best guess, as a non-cognitive scientist, is that my personal identity is based in my brain's wiring. If my brain's wiring were to be substantially re-wired, then I might become a completely different person. But then my identity would be nowhere. It would have ceased to exist. (No leaping to another body, unfortunately.)

Btw, my sense is that transporter technology is impossible. But if it did work, the reason it would would be because the device perfectly re-constitutes my physical body, including my brain, in a different location. Preposterous, but that's how it would have to work.

To take another example, which TMcD doesn't raise. Sometimes on television a character will manage to put "his consciousness" into a computer (I'm not sure I've ever seen a female character do this, although that evil scientist once stole Kirk's body on the original Trek). Even if it were possible to write a complex program that would "think" exactly like me, I don't see how one ensures the continuity of consciousness across the flesh-machine barrier.

Anyway, this is rambling. I did want to defend myself against the charge that my position is derived from a sense of superiority to those who believe in an afterlife. I think that I've said, below, that I'm as bothered by the thought of dying as the average person, maybe even more because I don't imagine singing the praises of God forever in the chorus of angels, or however else one wants to imagine the afterlife. I mean, I do think that belief in the afterlife is a wrong belief, and there is something like what TMcD addresses in thinking that most people you interact with, on a regular basis, hold wrong beliefs that are central to their identities. But I tend to be tolerant of differences of opinion of these questions, and I don't hold it against people if they hold what I perceive to be wrong beliefs. I mean, how could I? I'd have a rather low opinion of almost everyone, if that were the case.