The Illusion of Continuity
Over at The Odds Are One, the Transient Gadfly (has there ever been a better bloggernym than that?) has a post about posts that he started but didn't, well, you know. And one of the Posts of the Damned (or damned posts) is in response to this post that I wrote in response to a TMcD comment back in December. Here's the gist (and by gist, I mean, of course, the whole thing, with a few additions, which is decidedly not, um, the gist):
Emery says this:
The eternal return thing is just strange [this is in response to TMcD comment attached to this post]. Clearly, the repetition of my consciousness is an impossibility, because if it happened again, it wouldn't be mine. Part of individual identity is the continuity of existence. I am me because I was me yesterday, and the day before, and back in 1985, and back in first grade, in 1975, and so on. If there was some physically identical-to-me person in three trillion years, that would be a physically identical-to-me person, not me.
[This is TG:]I made this same statement, although in a totally different context. Suffice to say I agree with the conclusion of the argument. I don't, however, agree with the a priori (that it's because of some sort of bodily or existential continuity). Most all of the cells that made up Emery in 1975 have died and been replaced, the osteoclasts and osteoblasts have torn down and rebuilt the matrix of his bones several times over, and that person was four years old or so and Emery is in his mid-30s (I have met Emery only once, and I didn't know Emery the person I met and Emery the blogger were the same person (and I will happily accept arguments that they still aren't) until last week). But this isn't why I reject the idea of continuity as being the key to our sense of identity. In fact I think that continuity is a complete illusion....
What I'm curious about here is the use of the word "illusion." I agree 100% with TG that the physical Emery is in a constant flux, that old cells die, new cells replace them. The continuity of the physical human being is an illusion, in the sense that it is a misperception of an underlying reality. But the mental me subjectively experiences a keen sense of continuity. I have a whole pile of photo albums, and I can remember the events surrounding almost all the photos in them. Indeed, I took most of those photos, and I can remember doing so. I can still become emotionally upset about events that I remember from 10, 20 years ago, and I can remember certain emotional highs, as well, even from childhood. I am the "I" in those memories, the first-person in a first-person narrative.
To describe that subjective experience as an illusion is, it seems to me, to posit that there's a deeper truth. In one sense, that deeper truth would be (?) that there are discontinuities, personality singularities, so that my memories of Little League, for example, aren't actually my memories.
But that can't be true, can it? I mean, this is one place where subjectivity trumps objectivity, right? The fact that I experience the continuity means that it can't be an illusion. Those are my memories.
Now, from a different perspective, my sense of continuity is clearly a construct, and I would agree that it is a constantly evolving construct. The story that I tell about my life changes as new chapters are written (actually, the stories that I tell about my life change). Old events take on new meanings, and certain memories become more (or less) important. I'm not arguing with that, that the continuity is, to a great extent, a construct. But it's a construct made from materials (if that is the right word) that have continuity. Again, these memories are my memories. They reside, somehow, in my consciousness, and that without those memories, I would not be me.
I should conclude this post before it gets into Philip K. Dick territory. (E.g., what if the physically identical Emery in three trillion years had my memories, and this subjective sense that he, and not me, is the "I" in the story of Emery's life? Would he then be me, too (or me-2)?)
But I want to append, here, a short thought on a common experience that I have (common may be the wrong word, but bear with me). Sometimes we lose contact with a friend for a long time; sometimes we re-encounter someone we knew a long time ago, often in a completely different context. Let's say that this is a person we knew relatively well; not necessarily, in all cases, a friend, but certainly an acquaintance. The common experience is to think, "Well, that's the same old John that I knew back in college." This is a strange experience, because we all think that people change over the years. But, for most people, I think, there's a basic personality template, a basic outlook, that is pretty constant.
That, at least, is my subjective experience of this, even with other people.
posted by Number Three @ 1:25 PM
2 Comments:
The idea that the continuity is an "illusion" is a direct result of the imaginative metaphors at play in the enlightenment "scientific" episteme. Partly because modern science developed in conjunction with the inventions of the microscope and the clock, we tend to think about reality as a mechanism whose reality depends upon its smallest moving parts. But this also means that the larger "mechanism" (i.e., the clock) is essentially artificial.
In political theory, Hobbes's proclamation that man is, literally, a machine, is probably the best example: "what is the Heart but a Spring, and the Nerves but so many Strings?" So Hobbes doubted that anything in human nature existed that could not be ultimately ascribed to our simplest atomic desire: that for self-preservation. Politics becomes an artificial machine designed to channel these atomic energies. Hume takes this even farther by pointing out that the premises of material science don't even allow you to believe in "causation," since you never observe the causation, only the cause and effect in "constant conjunction." Partly in response, Kant concluded that even "time," the medium of causation, was artificial--i.e., the clock is an illusion--an imposition of the human mind on an inchoate and unknowable reality (the "noumenal"). There are corrolaries here in both religion, where the scientific perspective suggets we must doubt anything that cannot be built up from observable data points, and politics, where "libertarians" doubt that there is any reality beyond the "individual" and his or her desires, which should be harmonized in a mechanistic "contract." Yet if we take the mechanical metaphor seriously, we have to doubt that even what we observe is the ultimate substrata of reality, because there's always something smaller--a problem raised by quantum physics.
The logic at play here seems to me exactly the same as that at work when we talk about individual identity and the continuity of consciousness. As moderns schooled in the metaphors of the clock and microscope, we intuitively doubt that anything "constructed"--like consciousness or the clock--is ultimately real or "natural." But when you think about it this way, you have to ask how much of this is scientific "truth," and how much is a function of the imaginative metaphors by which science projects its world-view and subconsciously shapes our values.
Continuity being a "construction" is, in many many ways a much better word than "illusion." I like to think I might have eventually come to it myself had I ever gotten back to this post and gotten around to making this argument.
The Philip K Dickean argument is sort of my jumping off point for this: if someone were to take some sort snap-shot of Emery of sufficient granularity (say, down to the quantum state, for some definition of "quantum state") and then, piece by piece build an exact copy of Emery. We lock you both in a dark closet and spin it around, both of you would come out looking exactly the same, with the same memories, and dizzy. It's my claim that even though one of you is technically a copy of the other, both of you have an equally valid claim of at some point "being" the five year old Emery. We both agree that physical continuity doesn't give you any actual claim to having been that person, your connection to the person is the chemical patterns that formed in your brain between then and now that tell you the experiences of the five year old Emery happened to "you." But the Emery-copy has those exact patterns in his brain as well. At the same time, the copy's (whichever one of you he is) has a definition of continuity from five-year-old Emery to now-Emery that's radically different from the one we more or less take for granted.
Anyway, I never fleshed out that argument. But that was the start of it. As you were.
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