There is no time! The enemy has broken through the outer perimeter and will be upon me in moments. The station shakes and foundations crumble as laser blasts rip through the remaining defenses. I rush from my quarters, a home I had somehow managed to make personal and comforting despite the uniformity of space-station architecture, and it hits me: I may never see these belongings again. Through the transways filled with black smoke and flames I am running, tripping over fragmented wall panels, loosened pipes -- entropy reigns -- then god! over dead bodies, co-workers fallen in the surprise attack.
But there is no time to stop. I must make it to the transporter while the telepods are still functioning. If they can complete full analysis before this inner sanctum is breached, I'll be on my way to Earth, to the telepod receivers somewhere safe.
I can still feel the station shaking, falling apart, from here, but there are no signs of destruction in the transporter room. I run a quick check on the settings and step into the telepod sender, where my entire microphysical structure is to be analyzed, destructively mapped, and transmitted to the sanctuary of my home world, where receiver telepods will reconstruct my deconstructed self.
While preliminary analysis takes place -- has it always taken this long -- I see (and feel) flash images from the past: the New York city rooftops and enclosed back alleys explored in childhood, the bite of concrete into uncovered knees, the sting of disinfectant, the smell of my father's cigars, his cologne, the taste of bile in my throat when I first got wasted, the feel of the wet cloth a girlfriend at the academy used to distract me from my fever -- the face of my husband in darkness, killed two years ago when the enemy campaigns began. There is no sense to it: a mandala of sensual moments, the scraps that make up a person's past, the parts they never got in my academy bio.
Then F L A S H ! ! ! -- I am taken apart by the telepod . . .
. . . only I'm not. I'm still here. The process is complete -- the telepod computer has finished its loop, but after the flash, and maybe a moment's darkness as my consciousness recovers, I'm supposed to be elsewhere, reassembled in a safer place. That was how it happened the last time I teleported, when they first beamed me to this quadrant.
The lights flicker, the transporter room door is blasted open, and the stormtroopers are on me. I struggle from the telepod, and try to slip past them, hoping that the bulk of their combat suits will trip them up, or slow them down, but one of the bigger pigs knocks me to the floor. I watch the club come down into my face -- another flash -- and darkness.
When I awaken, I am tortured for information, then killed.
Groggy. Confused. Your eyes hurt, and you can't focus. A warm hand takes yours and helps you up. A technician escorts you from the telepod receiver. Earth. Thank God, it worked. You ask the technician if she's heard anything of the battle on Mars. She looks embarrassed and leads you into an office adjoined to the transporter room. Inside a skinny man, with thick old-fashioned glasses invites you to sit, then explains.
The battle on Mars was lost. The signals and images arrived from the security cameras (you hated feeling constantly watched, but you adjusted) at the same time your own teleporter signal hit the reassembler banks. The central computer had been knocked out during the first phase of the attack, and the decentralized sub-units running the telepod sender failed to synchronize the mapping process with deconstruction. You were never destroyed on Mars, yet your signal has fallen to earth, and here you sit.
You watch on the vid-screen: you -- this person who looks like you -- rush from the telepod (the telepod you still remember stepping into) and the enemy surrounds her. She is forced to the ground and beaten. You remember imagining what they would do to you if you failed to escape. Watching it, it is even more horrible.
"I'm afraid the Federation can't recognize you as Captain Kelly,"he says from behind his glasses, "since, as you can see yourself, she died on Mars over an hour ago."
The second assumption is that metaphysical mind/body dualism offers us no help in our philosophical investigations into personal identity. According to dualism, the maintenance of personal identity is simply the maintenance of one's non-material soul. Questions of personal identity are also about the continuity of the soul, but where soul is not taken to mean a mental substance, wholly independent of the material world. What we do take it to mean is not yet clear, but let me forewarn that when I use the term soul in this essay, I will be referring to the seat of sentience, the self-aware first person with whom we are all intimately familiar, and not the soul-stuff of any mystical or religious doctrine.1
There are several different questions that one can ask of our traveller, this translation of Captain Kelly: (1) Does she have a self, a first-person narrative of her experience and personal history? (2) Is she a person? (3) And if she is indeed a person, is it intelligible to claim that she is the same person who stepped into the telepod sender -- that she is who she thinks she is? (4) If she is Captain Kelly, by what criteria has she maintained her identity?
I will only directly address the last questions, assuming that issues of selfhood and personhood will necessarily be developed and will inform the question of identity. As Perry points out in his introduction to the issue of Personal Identity,2 criteria of personal continuity can mean criteria of being the same person, or can mean ways of knowing that someone's self has survived. This essay will use criteria in the first sense.
There are many things that are true of all of us throughout our lives. Many of these qualities -- though universal to persons -- are accidental to personhood and identity. Until appendectomies, all persons had appendixes and similarly, some present universal quality of persons might lose its universality with future technology. So it becomes important to isolate and identify the unifying principle we consider necessary to the maintenance of personal identity. My project is to begin with someone who has clearly maintained her identity since the beginning,3 and slowly take away, a step at a time, carefully chosen attributes of her physical and psychological makeup, checking to see which of these losses would allow the identity to continue and which would destroy it. Clearly, different schools of thought will have different stages at which they claim the identity has been destroyed. I will take the wide view of identity and argue for its persistence while I continue to take it apart, but whether my arguments succeed or fail, it will be informative to see what one must commit oneself to philosophically by staying in or bowing out. Since Captain Kelly had been successfully teleported to Mars before the story opens, many will say that she is already not the person who first stepped into a telepod.4
So let's begin with simple cases: We would agree that under normal circumstances (no teleportation or mind-programming or any other kind of tampering or replication). Cadet Kelly at the academy is the same person she was as a child, exploring the rooftops of New York. We all maintain our identities under normal circumstances, but what accounts for this personal continuity?
What accounts for object identity through time and space? The body of Kid Kelly and the body of Cadet Kelly are neither the same form nor the same matter. Why do we say that she still has the same body? One might say that her body is a history of sorts: imagine if she had badly cut her hand as a young tomboy. She might be able to look now at the scar and think I remember cutting myself there.... Similarly, her entire nervous system has been cybernetically shaped and reshaped by all the sensual experiences of her body through its life.5
But this doesn't help us distinguish between the normal case and the teleportation scenario. A body that is qualitatively identical to Kelly's will also be an embodied history of Kelly's past. A straight-forward body account of personal identity will not be concerned with a past and a future body being qualitatively identical, but with their being numerically identical -- the two bodies must be the same physical thing, the same object6. Such an account requires a statement of the numerical identity of physical objects. A simple and straight-forward account of physical identity is the spatiotemporal (ST) criterion of object identity:
Object X at time t1 is the same object as object Y at time t2 iff
(1)if t1 = t2 then X and Y occupy the same space; otherwise,
(2)there is an unbroken causal path through space and through time leading from the location of X at t1 to that of Y at t2.
That is, there is a continuous path of object-instances from X to Y through space/time (an ST-path). From the simple view, bodily identity is the object identity of a living body.
As might be expected however, the simple view is too simply stated. Different parts of a body can follow divergent ST-paths. If a person loses weight or looses a limb, she can still be the same person. One need not maintain one's entire body for the identity to survive.
Could the identity survive a brain-transplant? Suppose you and I were to switch brains. My brain is surgically removed and kept alive and functional. So is yours. My brain is transplanted into your brainless body, and yours can now take up residence in mine.
Our sensations and memories are inexorably tied to our brains and nervous systems, and presumably one's subjective perspective -- one's consciousness -- is in some important way correlated to the system that receives and structures sensation. Assuming that the two new brain-body combinations could function as adult, intelligent human beings, it would seem to the my-brain-your-body combination as if I had a new body, as if my brain were using your sense-organs to show me the world. Similarly you would find yourself inhabiting the body that has always been mine. By switching brains we have actually exchanged bodies.
It would seem that where your functioning brain goes, there you will follow. This is the assumption behind the famous brain in the vat story with which college philosophy classes are introduced to Descartes' Meditations and the fear of living in a virtual reality, created by an evil deceiver and maintained by his supercomputer.
The straight-forward body account can't handle these special cases, but a simple revision can give us the brain account of personal identity:
(B)If enough of brain B1 traces a continuous ST-path to brain B2 to be the brain of a living person, then the person of B1 and the person of B2 are one and the same person.
It is important that we require the brain to be that of a living person. The very same assumption that informed the brain-switching scenario -- that the brain structures the essential perceptions of the self -- forces us to require that the brain be functioning, that such sensation and cognition be possible.
But even the living brain is not itself sufficient for the continuity of personhood. Consider what I call the zombie response to the brain account:Suppose Duke is kidnapped and unwillingly mind-programmed in such a way that he loses all his memories and all traces of his individual personality or psychological character. The zombie can move around and carry out simple commands, but his consciousness is fleeting and ephemeral and he has no self-awareness. Suppose further that this were done, not by traditional zombifying or brain-washing methods, but done technologically, in such a way that the physical bases for Duke's memories and character no longer exist. Where voodoo zombies may theoretically recover their former identities, and Moonies can be deprogrammed, Duke's brain can not in principle ever recover the psychological characteristics it once embodied.7
Why would one want to argue that this zombie is still Duke, that it is the same person? Our intuitions conflict here. We might want to say that the mind-erasure is something happening to Duke, that Duke has lost his memories (rather than having ceased to exist). Or we might feel that claiming Duke has lost his memories is a convenient way to refer to the history of Duke's body, but that Duke's personhood, that which makes him the individual human person he is or was, is in some essential way linked to Duke's consciousness. We take personal identity to be the maintenance of one's self, and we take selfhood in the personal sense, to be deeply connected to self-awareness. This set of intuitions would seem to hold the permanent and irreversible loss of one's self-consciousness to be an equally permanent end of the existence of one's self. One might call this the Continuity of Consciousness account of personal identity.
If someone objects to the Continuity of Consciousness account by the argument that personal identity is just object identity of the living brain, but fails to give a supporting argument other than a claim about intuitions, we might as well conclude that this brain identity theorist means something different by personal identity then we do. He is, in effect, claiming that all that matters is the continuity of embodiment, that psychological accounts aren't relevant. However, such is not the position of all embodiment proponents. Some recognize the theoretical distinction between a person and a live human body, but claim the separation can never actually take place. Bernard Williams offers a few thought experiments in support of the brain- and body accounts, but he does so in response to the psychological continuity account of personal identity, so we will return to him shortly, when his arguments can be given in context.
Consider a somewhat more problematic counter-argument to the brain account, the divided brain: There is a new procedure of P-cloning8 that allows both resulting person-candidates to claim ST-continuity with the original person. This procedure maps and monitors every cell in the original body, but rather than compiling a blueprint for teletransmission, the procedure causes each cell in the body to clone itself, to undergo mitosis (like an amoeba). The body is then twice its size and heavily redundant, but the duplicated cells now slowly migrate to one side, and the entire person divides into two bodies, identical with each other, and identical with the pre-procedure original.9 They both wake up dumb and confused, but each upon regaining its senses claims to be the original person. In this case of local p-cloning (as opposed to telecloning) each duplicate has equal claim to the original identity, whether that's all or none.
It is consistent with the brain account to claim that since enough of brain B1 traces a continuous ST-path to both B2 and B3 to be the brain of a living person, then the person of B1 and the person of B2 are one and the same person, and the person of B1 and the person of B3 are one and the same person.
We will return to the issue of a branching identity, but for now suppose that in an earlier and less-successful stage of the p-cloning technology, one of the duplicates, P-clone1 claimed to be and seemed in every way to be the original person, while P-clone2 was retarded and had only unreliable access to the memories of the original. While the retarded duplicate is not now physically identical to the original person, its brain does maintain the requisite ST-path of the brain account of personal identity. If we'd rather grant a stronger claim of identity to P-clone1 then to P-clone2 (as I think most of us would) then this claim must in some way be based on an account of psychological continuity.
Any claim for non-psychological, physical continuity will apply equally well to either duplicate.10 What both the zombie and divided brain responses seem to show is that the brain may be (and is) the seat of psychological life, but that it is not a determinant of personal identity,11-- it cannot constitute one's self. Object continuity is perhaps necessary -- that is still to be debated -- but it is certainly not sufficient to account for the survival of the soul.
(1)All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.... (The Dhammapada, Chapter 1.)
Rather than accepting even the necessity of object identity for personal identity, I will present the Psychological Account as it is usually given elsewhere: as a competing criterion to the Physical Account. Afterwards, we will consider the Combined Account, according to which both Psychological and the Physical continuity are taken to be necessary to personal identity, though neither can in itself constitute the continuity of one's self through time.
The pioneer12 of the psychological account of personal identity was John Locke, who claimed that personal identity was maintained through memory. There are, for our purposes, two kinds of memory: memory of facts and memory of personal experience. I remember that the computer file that stores this paper is called Body & Soul and I remember deciding on that file name. The first memory is of a fact, like remembering someone's phone number, the second is a subjective memory (i.e., the memory of a first-person account of something in experience). Locke's theory of personal identity is the first in a series of theories using memory relations to define the continuity of persons, where memory means experiential or subjective memory. Locke's claim is that Cadet Kelly is the same person as Kelly the kid because the cadet has a reflective experiential memory of being the child. We can state Locke's memory relation as L:
(L)Person A is the same person as person B if and only if A remembers (has a subjective, first-person memory of) being B.
So a suspect is not guilty if he cannot remember being the criminal. He is no more the person who broke the law, according to the relation L, than anyone else is. Locke's theory is too naively stated as it stands for two reasons: (1) People don't remember everything they did; the suspect's not remembering is not the same as the suspect being in principle unable to remember, and (2) even in some cases where we might be in principle unable to remember something we did, we still want to claim that such things were done by us. I remember waking up and telling a friend of the dream I'd just had, but I don't remember the dream itself. Whether or not I'm the same person who had the dream, I am still the same person who recounted the dream to my friend, and there might be reason to believe that the memory of the recounted dream is lost to me forever.13
The first revision to Locke's relation, L, is to change remembers to remembers or could remember. Therefore, although I am not right now remembering everything I did yesterday, I could in principle bring to mind an experiential memory of most of it. So we have in place of L:
(R)Person A is the same person as person B if and only if A remembers or could remember an experience of being B.
Even with this revision, however, R is a non-transitive relation (like next to: X is next to Y and Y is next to Z, but X is not next to Z), where personal identity seems to be transitive by definition.14 If Charlie Parker is Bird and Bird is the person who played saxophone with Miles Davis, then Charlie Parker played with Miles Davis.
The second revision is to take the ancestral15 of R, R*, rather than the non-transitive relation R itself. If R(x,y) and R(y,z) then R*(x,z) whether R is transitive or not:
(R*) Person A is the same person as person B iff (1) The relation R holds between person A and person B; or (2) there is a person C such that R*(A,C) and R*(C,B).
The relation R*(A,B) holds therefore if there is an R-path or chain of successive person-stages leading from the person-stage of person A to that of person B.
So while I don't remember the recounted dream and perhaps cannot remember it, I remember recounting it, and presumably, while recounting it, I remembered the dream itself. I have through the relation R what Parfit calls a direct connection to the recounting and to anything else I can actually bring to memory. Taking the ancestral of such a direct memory connection will give me a transitive relation linking me now with the person of the past who woke up remembering the dream. Parfit calls R* and other such ancestral psychological relations psychological continuity:
I can now define two general relations:
Psychological connectedness is the holding of particular direct connections.
Psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness. (Derek Parfit)16Of the two relations, Parfit holds continuity to be more relevant to personal identity, since it is the transitive relation, but it is important to discuss connectedness, because strong continuity will be the ancestral of strong connectedness. What Parfit means by an overlapping chain of strong connectedness is that the R-path is redundant: today I remember things from both yesterday and last year; yesterday I remembered things from the day before and from last week, etc., forming an overlapping memory chain backwards through my personal history.
Two stages of a person's life can be psychologically connected to varying degrees, and it would be wrong-headed to attempt a specific cut-off point between a strong and a weak level of connectedness, "But we can claim that there is enough connectedness," Parfit suggests, "if the number of direct connections, over any day, is at least half the number that hold, over every day, in the lives of nearly every actual person.... When there are enough direct connections, there is what I call strong connectedness."17
Not only should the strength of continuity be considered; we should also be concerned with the depth of the connections, where depth is established by psychological relations other than experiential memories: with transitions of beliefs, with the connectedness of intentions and actions, the continuity of a person's underlying character or personality, and of general first-person narrative transitions consistent with the rest of strong- and deep continuity. Memory transitions can be thought of as the surface structure of the psyche. The deep structure of the soul is the underlying system of implicit and unconscious states and transitions of the psychological character. It is difficult to give transition relations for deep structure, because the underlying system is almost certainly not symbolic in the explicit and statable ways that our subjective memories are. So rather than explore the different attempts to state specifically what strong-connectedness of belief transitions and character continuity would consist in, we can use memory theories as our paradigm for psychological continuity and understand that restrictions and concerns found in the memory accounts should apply to other forms of deep connectedness.
He tried to remember precisely what he had felt, though it was not he who had felt those emotions, but an earlier, lesser self. (Plagiarized Material, by Fernandes / Joyce Carol Oates)Some critics of memory theories18 claim that experiential memories presuppose personal identity, and therefore cannot be used to define it. The difference between remembering a phone number and remembering dialing the phone number is that the second is, in a way, a memory of myself. It is a subjective memory, where I am the subject of a particular experience. Since memory theories use experiential memories as criteria, and memories are experiential memories only if they are memories of what happened to the person remembering them, such memories presuppose, rather than define the person doing the remembering. (The same will be true with all other experiential psychological qualities.)
Parfit counters this argument with the idea of quasi-memories, which I will here call virtual memories, for reasons that will become clear. A virtual memory has the qualitative character of an experiential memory, but need not have happened to the person remembering it -- it need not have happened at all.
In Parfit's first example, he imagines that he is knocked unconscious in a climbing accident. His friend later claims to have called out just before Parfit fell. Parfit seems to remember hearing the shouted warning, yet it is well established that we lose irretrievably the immediate contents of our short-term memory when we are knocked out. Parfit might have apparent memories of a first-person experience that he cannot in fact be remembering. While he would call this a false apparent memory, I will call it a virtual memory, and leave its truth-value undecided. But even if virtual memories don't reflect real events, they still seem to presuppose personal identity.
Let me propose three virtual memory scenarios to show how Virtual Psychological Accounts can escape this criticism and what significance the Virtual Account holds for the problem cases.
Real subjective memories may presuppose the personal identity of the subject, but virtual memories do not. I can have the virtual memory of someone else's first-person narrative, yet not be the person who had the experience I am virtually remembering. If we revise the ancestral relation, R*, so that it concerns virtual memories, and allow that real memories are a subset of virtual memories (the ones which are true), then the new relation -- call it V* -- holds in this case for Rachel's real memories and not for the merely virtual ones, because while the qualitative subjective character of the virtual memories is as strong as the real ones', they are not part of a strongly continuous overlapping chain of such memories, leading from Rachel's childhood to her present stage of life.
(V)Person A is the same person as person B if and only if A has a virtual memory (could remember virtually) being B.
The relation V describes a virtual psychological connection, and V* an overlapping chain of such connections. V*(A,B) means that between person A and person B there is strong virtual continuity.
Second-person Kelly on Earth, certainly has the relation V* with Captain Kelly before teleportation and therefore with Cadet Kelly and Kid Kelly as well. Even if we recognized the requirement that the first-person scenario of V* be matched with a true third-person scenario of Kelly's life, second-person Kelly meets the criterion, because she remembers her childhood vividly, and the remembered childhood did in fact take place. Similarly, second-person Kelly seems to have V*, deep-continuity, and all other psychological criteria for personal continuity with first-person Kelly before teleportation.
According to the Psychological Account as we have so-far developed it, second-person Kelly is indeed the woman who stepped into the telepod, no matter what the Federation decides, although she is certainly not the woman who was killed on Mars.
The only considerations left for the case of Captain Kelly are (1) the branching of identity (Captain Kelly need not have died on Mars, and the Psychological Account would grant equal continuity to both first- and second-person Kelly) which we will return to later; and (2) possible criticisms of any Psychological Account that does not include object identity of embodiment. Bernard Williams offers such a criticism.
The third implant scenario doesn't directly concern the teleportation case, but does introduce new issues concerning continuity of embodiment and Williams' general argument.
In one of Gibson's novels, people can sensually plug in to experiential autobiographies. Imagine implanting into Rachel's mind not the experiential biography of some fictional person, but of Zora, a real person other than herself. Now, V* holds between Rachel's body and its new virtual past, and the experiential, first-person memories are of a true personal history.
The problem is that Rachel can not have two conflicting psychological paths that are equally deep. Rachel's body could take on all the memories and character of Zora, but she could not also maintain her own memories and character consistently without becoming split-personality. If this is true, then once the implants have become systematic and thorough enough, a new person, Zora2, might start to occupy Rachel's body. In fact, Rachel and Zora might undergo a body transplant: If Rachel and Zora underwent some operation, whereby Rachel's body took on V* and all deep psychological characteristics of Zora, and Zora's body took on those of Rachel, then the Psychological Account of personal identity, as it has so-far been stated, would claim that Rachel and Zora had switched bodies, without exchanging brains.
Bernard Williams disagrees with this conclusion, and sees the body-switching claim as the downfall of the Psychological Account of personal identity. He offers the following argument against the entire project of finding sufficient psychological criteria for personal continuity.
Suppose Zora is told that her body is about to take on all psychological characteristics, memories, etc. of Rachel, and that Rachel's body will take on her's. She is further told that after the operation, one of the two bodies will be tortured while the other enjoys some reward. If Zora believes the Psychological Account, she would be wise to request that the pleasure be given to the Rachel-body and the post-op torture to the one from which she is now speaking. After the operation, if her wishes are followed, the person of the Rachel-body will think Thank goodness I chose as I did before the operation, for otherwise I would be undergoing the horrors I see my previous body suffering now... and the person of Zora's pre-op body will have no memories of making such a decision. Apparently, Rachel -- now in Zora's body -- will wish that Zora's request had not been followed, and that it was her previous body, the Rachel-body, now experiencing the suffering.
While this scenario does indeed seem to support the Psychological Account and the interpretation that Rachel and Zora have switched bodies, Williams claims that such an interpretation is false. Suppose instead of the body switching scenario, Zora is told that her body will soon be tortured. She would be understandably upset. Not only will she be tortured, but before this happens, she is to undergo a procedure whereby she will suffer severe and irreversible amnesia. This should only add to her anxiety. After the memory-wipe, she will be given a whole new set of memories, and the personality of someone else. She knows that once this has happened, she will not be able to remember having been warned, but none of this offers her any comfort, for she will still be in great pain, and while she will be given the characteristics of a different person, the procedure will still be something happening to her, Zora, whether she remembers being Zora or not. If she thinks she is someone else during the torture, this would certainly be a form of madness, offering no relief from the pain.
But this second scenario describes the same thing happening to Zora's body as happens in the first scenario where we had wanted to claim that Zora left her body, and took up residence in Rachel's. If Zora has reason to fear the operation of the second scenario, then she should have exactly the same fears in the first.
If she is told that while she is here, suffering the post-amnesia torture and insanity, someone somewhere else will be given her memories, this should offer her no relief, for nothing happening outside of Zora's body -- even something as significant as Rachel suddenly thinking she is Zora -- can keep the pains of the mad scientist's infliction out of this, Zora's real body.
Bernard Williams' story is brilliant and emotionally convincing. Each stage in the loss of one's own psychological identity, and each addition of strong psychological continuity with someone else brings only more anxiety. But Williams' torture story appeals to our fears more than our reasons, and while it is clear that our fears and beliefs must remain a concern to our philosophical considerations, many fears are grounded in misinformation or limited understanding of what is involved in certain situations.
Williams claims to have chosen pain as a personal experience absolutely minimally dependent on character or belief. No amount of change in my character or my beliefs would seem to affect substantially the nastiness of tortures applied to me.21 Suppose, however, that in a similar scenario, the evil doctor informs Williams that he is to become The Great Nanook, whose will and character are so strong as to withstand any amount of torture and pain. Nanook may pass out if his body cannot withstand the pain that his character can ignore, but while conscious, Nanook is for our purposes able to will himself into a morphine-like acceptance of what others would find agonizing pain.
In this case, Williams' fear should not be the fear of experiencing pain, since he will almost be relishing the test of his will. Rather, he should fear his irreversible amnesia and insanity, or (I would argue) he should fear his looming non-existence,22
A better understanding of physical pain and personal experience should undo much of Williams' argument, showing that our fears mislead us on the issue of identity and suffering.23
Williams appeals to the fact that we associate pains first with the body, and not with consciousness. Pain and pleasure are experienced as if they were sensations, as things going on in our bodies independent of our perception of them. But one's memories, emotional predispositions, expectations are as much a part of personal pain as tissue damage and signals along nerve pathways: "Pain is an emotion masquerading as a sensation."24 Pain is, in fact, a psychological event more than a physical one.
This may sound absurd, or at least perverse, but there are several puzzle cases in pain research where our intuitions on the meaning and status of pain are divergent and contradictory25: real pain in phantom limbs, phantom pain in undamaged bodies. We speak of pain both in terms of its physical causes and in terms of its psychological effects (including the immediate experience of pain), even though these two senses can conflict. In the case of the perverse surgeon, that conflict is brought into stark relief.
If someone who had never been anesthetized were told she was about to experience great pain in surgery, but that she would not be aware of it, it would be understandable if she felt anxiety about her immediate future. But would someone who had known both the experience of pain and the experience of anesthetized surgery feel such anxiety? I imagine that in such a circumstance I would either take the theorist to be misusing the term pain or decide that it was not pain that is so horrible but rather the personal experience of pain.
How is Williams' torture story different from my surgery story? Williams imagines himself in Zora's situation, being asked whose body should receive the pain. The evil doctor tells Williams that he will irreversibly lose all psychological continuity with his present self, that his brain is to be altered in such a way that all implicit and explicit psychological constructs are to be lost. The doctor also tells his victim that during this process, he will maintain full consciousness of the excruciating pain that is involved in the memory-wipe. Parfit points out that continuity of consciousness is part of psychological continuity,26 but takes this to be a small point. He assumes that Williams wouldn't mind altering the story so that he loses consciousness before being unplugged from his past.
It is important to add this to the scenario, however, so that we can make no appeal to any form of psychological continuity. Without the revision, the torture story would be an attack on memory theories of identity alone, and not on strong-continuity.
But I take Parfit's addition -- combined with my own comments above on the nature of pain experience -- to be the downfall of Williams' entire argument. The victim should be scared, but not of the pain he will feel under the doctor's wicked care. He should be scared because he is about to cease to exist. If I am right, then he will not feel the pain as he ceases to exist, because if he feels the pain, then he maintains psychological continuity. If he loses consciousness before the mind-wipe, and then undergoes torture, I claim that he does not feel the pain. I want to distinguish the question of the nastiness of torture from the question of who is suffering it.27
Insisting on a break in consciousness, along with the break in all other forms of psychological continuity (if indeed this can be done without killing the body as well as the person embodied28) changes the story enough to be isomorphic to the following story of Zombie Pain: Duke is zombified as described earlier and his body spends a year in servitude with only fleeting memories from moment to moment, no psychological strong-connectedness to the body's activities of an hour ago, and only a fleeting ephemeral consciousness. Occasionally, the master tortures the zombie-Duke for his pleasure. Should the pre-captured Duke, had he been aware of his fate, fear the future of his body (specifically the pain of torture) or should he rather fear the end of his existence?
One mithat psychological continuity is necessary but not sufficient for personal identity, that physical continuity is equally necessary. This Combined View recognizes that the zombie is no longer Duke, but neither is the post-op Zora-body now embodying Rachel. This view would seem to claim as well that the woman on Earth is not Captain Kelly, no matter how profoundly continuous her psyche is with the woman who died on Mars. Neither did the once-teleported Captain Kelly grow up in the city or attend the academy.
Such an argument would insist on the requirement of a V*-type account, while maintaining that such psychological continuity must be embodied along an unbroken ST-path, that both psychological and physical continuity are required for personal continuity. This is perhaps the most convincing of the monist views from the surface, because it accurately describes how we actually do remain who we are, while sorting out all the science fiction cases according to the majority of our initial intuitions, but there are fatal flaws in it: while there is still to be addressed the important issue of psychological embodiment, the ST-path of object identity has not been argued to be more necessary than the appendix of yesteryear -- it does no work in the survival of the psyche; where the brain serves an essential purpose in both our physical and psychological continuity, ST-paths per se serve no such purpose. The Combined View's requirement of object identity seems to me ad hoc, but that to which it is directed, namely, the requirement that personal identity remain in principle accessible to only one future person at a time, has already been undone by the P-cloning story presented earlier. Both P-clone1 and P-clone2 can have equal claim to continuity of psyche and continuity of embodiment. The two are not the same person, but it seems that in all accounts so-far presented, we would want to claim that both were the person who underwent P-cloning.
I think one appeal of the Combined View is that it guarantees Continuity of Consciousness: the self survives because self-awareness is continuous, uninterrupted;
But must continuity of consciousness require strong temporal continuity? Can the present stage of the Psychological Account of identity -- Strong and Deep (Virtual) Psychological Continuity -- be practically separated from the ST-continuity of the earlier brain account?
Imagine that while you have been reading this paper, you have been secretly mapped and a cell-for-cell duplicate29 has been created elsewhere for interrogation. We have already established that this duplicate is not you, since you are here reading and it is elsewhere being questioned about your life. But the present claim of the psychological account is that your duplicate woke up this morning when you did and did all the the things you did today (because it did them too); you and your duplicate are different branches in the life of the person you both were last night. This is hard to imagine. It's easy to empathize with this duplicate, because although the two of you have never met, you know it better than anyone else in the world, but the duplicate only thinks it's you: you didn't fall asleep in one place and wake up in two. You've been here all along, fully awake and completely conscious.
There are two things wrong with this version of the Continuity of Consciousness account. First, none of us has uninterrupted conscious continuity with our selves of the past. According to the unbroken continuity claim, people who have died and been brought back to life on the operating table are only duplicates of their former selves. Their identities can't have survived, much as we have always taken them to. Similarly, it would seem that while I remember doing things yesterday, that wasn't really me, because I've lost consciousness since then at least once.30
The second problem with the claim is that it assumes there would necessarily not be continuity of consciousness between a person and her future mapping of that day. From the point of view of the duplicate, she was minding her own business, when F L A S H ! -- here she was, suddenly surrounded by technicians. Any claim that she only thinks she has continuity of consciousness seems untenable, since no first- or third-person account can ever have more certainty of such continuity than we do in our own lives.
The duplicate's case is no different.
The problem is that the concept of personal identity is closely linked to the concept of numerical identity, where all accounts of personal identity so far have offered us qualitative identity without guaranteeing that there will only ever be one of me in the future. Robert Nozick offers the idea of the closest continuer as a metatheory of personal identity. Rather than worrying about which school of thought has a better handle on personal continuity, Nozick recommends taking all types of criteria into account and granting identity to the person who most closely continues the original person, based on any relevant criteria, as long as the candidate does in fact meet some set of criteria.
One problem with closest continuer is that one might never know if she is who she thinks she is. But Nozick has no problem with this. He takes identity to be a contextually-based ontological question, and not an epistemological one. According to his account, if Captain Kelly had survived on Mars, then the woman on Earth would be a brand-new person with no real claim to her apparent identity. But since Captain Kelly did in fact die before Clone Kelly was ever embodied, Clone Kelly has complete and sole claim to being Captain Kelly.
One thing that Nozick's closest continuer criterion does, is show how legalistic and silly an insistence on one-one accounts of identity must become to handle the problem cases. Where the closest continuer is probably an excellent legal paradigm for personal identity31, what concerns philosophers is not identity per se, but rather (as Parfit concludes) the survival of the self. It is not important that there be only one of me; what is important is that my soul not cease to exist. We might, as a result of the transformational dialectic of personal identity, decide to do as Professor Gangadean advises, and abandon the philosophical grammar of identity, replacing it for now with Parfit's talk of past and future selves.
Although metaphysical dualists see the soul as indivisible by definition, I see no reason why monists can't conclude from the arguments for psychological continuity (and even from those for continuity of embodiment) that a person's soul or self might branch through time. But before we can explore the implications of this conceptual shift, we must develop a new philosophical grammar, free from the one-one limitations of identity-talk.32
[Strong AI] implies that the fabric of a computer does not matter. The way in which it realizes its computations is -- almost in both senses of the word -- immaterial.
What matters is the organization of these processes. This philosophy replaces the concept of the immortal soul with an alternative form of immortality. There is a remote possibility that the computations of a human mind might be captured within a medium other than a brain. A facsimile of a human personality could be preserved within a computer program.... The concept of interacting with a dynamic representation of an individual's intellect and personality is sufficiently novel to be disturbing. It raises moral, metaphysical and scientific issues of its own.33
Let's change the story from the preface and add a fifth to the list of person candidates: Virtual Kelly. Suppose that when Captain Kelly's teleportation signal hit the reassembler banks, the telepod receivers had been out of the requisite matter for re-embodiment. Rather than keeping the blueprint in static storage, the technicians upload it into a virtual reality of a room with comfortable furniture and a computer terminal. Once uploaded, the signal is not a static blueprint, but a dynamic representation as Johnson-Laird describes above. Virtual Kelly would virtually remember her attempt to escape from Mars, just as second-person Kelly did in the original story. Although she is not of this world and occupies a different logical space from our own physical universe, her reality is instantiated in ours, so this virtual woman (this person analog34) can communicate with the real technicians through the virtual computer in her virtual room.
If, when the reassembler is restocked, virtual Kelly's blueprint is used rather than the original teleported signal, then the person created would have strong and deep psychological continuity with Captain Kelly (and therefore with the child and the cadet as well) and also with Virtual Kelly whose memories are of occupying a different logical space (though it felt no different from our own). The child grew into a young woman who was teleported to Mars, then later escaped an enemy attack by beaming down to Earth. There she spent time as a virtual person in a facsimile reality before being re-embodied and continuing her life among us. On Mars, after her escape, a sister self -- first-person Kelly -- was captured and killed, but that was a brief event on a different branch of the Kelly narrative. That Kelly is not this one.
This story takes the arguments for psychological continuity and applies them beyond the point where they have been seriously discussed before. This is because no philosophers (as far as I know) have yet begun to argue the topic of Virtualism: the idea that simulating in minute detail all of the formal rules of our reality would not be just a simulation35 but the creation of a virtual reality, a reality which itself has a claim to solid ontological status. Virtualism takes the Cartesian brain-in-the-vat (which might have been the first presentation of the idea of Virtual Reality) to its logical extreme: not only is everything I experience the product of deception, but my very experience might be instantiated in the same deceitful space.
The main objection to Virtualism is the Searlean36 idea that no merely syntactic or formal system can reproduce the causal properties of the thing being simulated. Searle holds that meaning, semantics and consciousness arise only from the causal connections in the brain, connections that when formally simulated lose all causal properties, including meaning and consciousness. Where it is not at all clear to me what Searle would have to say about the case of Captain Kelly, it is quite clear that he would grant second-person Kelly every requisite of self-awareness, and some form of personhood, but deny either of these to Virtual Kelly.
Virtual Identity is clearly the stage at which Searle and all other anti-AI thinkers bow out of the deconstruction. It's even possible that some AI proponents might take virtual types to be real, while claiming that virtual tokens are only facsimiles of real tokens. Or alternatively they might say that there are certain concepts which have only informational reality, such as computation, flocking37 and intelligence, while things like personal identity, biological life and perhaps pain have reality only in terms of their place in the real world.
But even if we were to claim that Kelly never really sat in that virtual chair, typing at the virtual terminal, the re-instantiated physical Kelly is psychologically continuous with those technologically hallucinated events. Perhaps Virtual Kelly only thinks she's human, when in fact one's humanity involves biological facts in the real world, but we can begin to distinguish being a person from being human. Personhood involves self-awareness, psychological continuity, and perhaps potential or ability to participate in the moral or linguistic community. If we take a person to be the nexus of social roles or a locus of responsibility then Virtual Kelly seems to do as well as any of the other Kelly's. When we say that our humanity plays an essential role in who we are, we are saying something about our organization and the role it plays in our life. All these things will still be true for Virtual Kelly.
If Searle, et al. are right, and no virtual re-instantiation could have actual mental processes38, then either Kelly re-embodied ought not to have any memories of her virtual existence (in which case, no claims of continuity can even be made) or she will have artificially induced virtual memories of events that never happened. Still, she will maintain profound continuity with her past self on Mars. But what if Virtual Kelly is never re-embodied in our space? She must spend the rest of her life in the computer-instantiated reality. According to Searle, she will be a soulless automaton modeling a mental life. Strong AI disagrees, but the Psychological Account of personal identity can remain agnostic. If functionalism is correct then Virtual Kelly will be psychologically continuous with her earlier life and will be the same person, transported to a new logical space.39
...[I] Might even have found a way to rejoice on her behalf, or found a way to trust in whatever she's since become, or had built in her image, a program that pretends to be [her] to the extent that it believes it's her. (William Gibson, "The Winter Market")
An implicit assumption revealed in this paper is the idea that the identity is a construction, and not a fundamental ontological entity. This view has deep roots in the history of philosophy. The principle tenet of Buddhism is the denial of the identity, of the soul of the individual. In the Western tradition, Hume claimed that the appearance of identity40 is the result of a coherent chain of associated perceptions (where perception means any of the psychological criteria given here as deep continuity). According to such accounts, the self is a coherent system of psychological qualities whose reality is informational, but whose actuality is necessarily embodied. This conclusion is similar to the informed matter accounts of Aristotelian being: as long as the form is appropriately embodied, the substance is taken care of. But what does it mean for the form's embodiment to be appropriate? How deep is the psychological character?
Suppose that Virtual Kelly were to be re-instantiated in our physical world in a body other than her own. Duke's old body is unoccupied at the moment, so suppose that the patterns from either the teleportation signal or from Virtual Kelly were to be translated into the zombie's brain and nervous system. Imagine the ex-zombie trying to adjust to this new body, this new gender. He might look in the mirror and marvel at his new bald head. He might think to himself now I finally know what it's like to move around in a man's body. Perhaps the incompatibilities between Duke's body and Kelly's nervous system would only allow for a functional map of conscious mental phenomena.
The relation V* and other forms of virtual psychological continuity would still be maintained, but subconscious and implicit knowledge might have to be abandoned.
Our Psychological Account holds that continuity must be deep as well as strong, but how deep is deep enough? Bernard Williams in his alleged body-switching story, imagines that one of the two subjects has a wooden leg, while the other has a whole body. After the switch, he imagines that the one-legged body remarks on how strange it feels to be missing a limb. Williams doesn't reflect long on this idea, and comments in a footnote that he does not know enough about the body's habituation processes and how they would affect an attempted mind-switch. But the question is more than a brief stumbling block for the issue of psychological embodiment. We cannot make the mistake of confusing mind/brain distinctions with the idea that mental patterns are the sorts of neutral programs that can be re-embodied in any general hardware.
There are scant grounds ... for hoping that anything with the hardware-independence of a program can be read out of a brain (at a periodic mind taping session). There is even less hope that such a mind tape, even if it could be constructed, would be compatible with another brain's hardware. Computers are designed to be readily redesignable (at another level) by the insertion, in one big lump or rush, of a new program; brains presumably are not. (Dennett)41.
This point -- that psychological characteristics are necessarily embodied in the nervous system, and not merely recorded like software on a reusable disk -- might be the undoing of Williams' argument for requiring ST-continuity of embodiment.42 Our minds and bodies do not obey software/hardware distinctions and so Williams' torture story does not (and cannot) succeed in separating psychological connections from their physical instantiations. The conclusion must therefore be taken to show not the requirement for continuity of embodiment, but how hard it in fact is to separate the form of psychological continuity from the form of its embodiment. This offers no problems for the original case of Captain Kelly, because any embodiment-specificity of her mental patterns will be reproduced in the exact duplicate brain, but the question needs to be addressed seriously in the story of Virtual and post-Virtual Kelly. One problem with the question of psychological depth is that it assumes that conscious mental phenomena are possible without an underlying subconscious or implicit level of mental functioning.
Connectionism and other areas of cognitive science suggest that this is not so.43
However, even if we could map a surface continuity of Kelly's psychological character into Duke's zombified body, it is decidedly unclear what we should say about this hybrid creature. Where both first- and second-person Kelly could bring to memory the sting of disinfectant ... the taste of bile ... the feethe wet cloth ..., hybrid Kelly might only be able to see (not feel) eel) flash images of the past. Duke's body was never cybernetically shaped and reshaped by all the sensual experiences of Kelly's past: it is not a history of her life. If Duke had been a writer, then hybrid Kelly might find she now seems to remember in her fingers how to touch-type, where in her previous body, she had only been able to hunt-and-peck. She might remember all her academy training in her head while being able to remember very little of it in her body. While the mapping might conceivably achieve a strong virtual continuity, it seems quite unlikely that such continuity could have any real depth. If zombie Duke's nervous system could in any way be programmed to instantiate Kelly's surface patterns (and even this possibility is dubious) then the resulting person would likely experience the world as a schizophrenic does -- as incoherent and discontinuous.
Have we then created a new creature, as the name hybrid Kelly suggests (is the zombie now possessed?), or have we rather driven this branch of Kelly's personal narrative into a schizophrenic phase? Is the hybrid really Kelly? Perhaps this question can only be answered by fiat, or by hybrid Kelly herself. Perhaps it is a question that doesn't make sense.
The Combined Spectrum: Imagine two axes of continuity: one physical, one psychological, forming a two-dimensional grid. At the origin of the matrix is Rachel whose psychology and embodiment are continuous (as required by the Combined View, presented earlier). As we progress along the psychological axis, Rachel is less psychologically continuous with herself and more so with Zora. As we progress along the physical axis, fewer of Rachel's cells are her own. They are replaced by the cells of Zora, whose memories she is acquiring on the psychological axis. At the extreme corner, opposite the origin, is Zora herself, whose psychological and physical continuity are undeniably strong and distinct. Where in the middle ground are we no longer looking at Rachel, but rather at Zora? Clearly we would only be able to give arbitrary cut-off points, no matter how thoroughly we knew all facts involved.
Similarly, we cannot say objectively either that the hybrid is or is not Kelly. Parfit's point is that whether or not the self has survived is not always a question with a determinate answer. Any argument which tries to undo the Psychological Account by levels of degree is missing this point. Our psychologies may be more subject to questions of degree than are our biological bodies, but what we value about our selves is tied inexorably to our characters and our mental life. It should hardly surprise us then that the soul is cloudy stuff.
Buddha has spoken thus: Brethren, actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. There is no one to cast away this set of elements and no one to assume a new set of them. There exists no Individual, it is only a conventional name given to a set of elements.44
The Buddhist claim briefly mentioned earlier, that identity is a construct and not something with a primary claim to ontological or metaphysical status, may be more radical then I suggested. If the soul is a dynamic pattern, then questions concerning the identity of persons might never be determinate. Perhaps all such questions are empty. If this is the case, then not only should we take Parfit's Combined Spectrum to show that personal identity is not always a matter of fact (at least not a matter of objective fact) and that any cutoff between self and other will have to be arbitrary; we should rather conclude that identity is never a matter of fact (objective or otherwise), and that all attempts at criteria for continuity must necessarily fail. Not only does this suggest that it is wrong to make any strong claims about the continued identity of Kelly through teleportation, but it is also incoherent to make a claim of identity between the child of her memories, and the young cadet we had thought she'd grown into. If we fully adopt the the denial of identity, then it is not even appropriate to make strong claims of continued selfhood for Kelly ambling normally across the room, where she maintains strong spatio-temporal continuity and all other forms of continuity described in this paper.
But even denying the identity doesn't undo our account of strong and deep virtual continuity for the psyche. The denial rather reduces the ultimate importance of such an account-- of any account -- by reducing the importance of the question. But inasmuch as we want to say that Kid Kelly grew up to be the woman in the academy, we can also claim that Captain Kelly teleported to Mars where she began a career that would end in death along one branch of her future and in legal confusion along another. Whether or not we accept the Buddhist denial of identity and of the Individual, we still care about what we take our selves to be. Even if there is no ultimate account of personal identity and of the survival of future selves, we do take ourselves to maintain identity; the secular soul appears continuous. It is important to me that I remember who I once was, that I see how I've become who I am. I care a great deal about what is to happen to me in the future. According to the arguments presented here, I should have just as much selfish concern for a future self without spatio-temporal continuity as I have for one with an unbroken ST-path. Neither person has a stronger claim to being me.
Williams has shown us that we care deeply about our embodiment, that for whatever reason we do seem to care about the future of our physically continuous bodies. Perhaps Duke should feel a selfish concern for his post-zombification body. Maybe both Duke and Kelly should feel allegiance to their hybrid combination -- although each would feel a deeper selfishness for the survival of more strongly continuous selves. Williams sees this loyalty and concern for the body as incompatible with a purely psychological account of soul survival, whereas I have argued that our dedication to embodiment is a dedication to the depth of our embodied psyches rather than the physical objects through which they are embodied.
What we are left with in the end is a sense of the self as a dynamic organization of holistic and coherent mental processes,45 tracing transformationally continuous patterns through time. What specifically is required for such an intentional system (what it takes to have a self) is not answerable in this paper. However, what the psychological account would claim is that if it were possible to duplicate all strong and deep psychological connections (by whatever means) then one would have re-instantiated a soul, that the survival of future selves involves the continuity of just such connections.
The beginning of personal identity is too complex a topic now, both politically and philosophically, for me to present defendable views in this thesis. I will therefore refer to the beginning and remain agnostic on when that is, or whether it's even the sort of thing one could localize in time.
For simplicity sake, let's call the woman on Mars Captain Kelly whether or not she is the same person who had once never been teleported.
This fact will become quite relevant at the end of this essay.
Technically, anything -- no matter how abstract or non-material --can be defined as an object, but in this essay I will use the word object to denote physical objects -- material things in the world of space and time.
One can imagine a modified situation where Duke's mind was somehow backed up before zombification. Perhaps this backup could be technologically re-instantiated in the zombie's brain, but this scenario begs the question.
The term clone technically refers to the creation of a duplicate genotype, a genetic replica, or type replica rather than token replica. What I am here calling a P-clone would be a token replica, a duplicate of the phenotype. The P- stands either for phenotype, or -- more question beggingly -- for person.
If you have trouble imagining the physical possibility of p-cloning, here described, then you can substitute ParfitUs divided brain account from his essay "Personal Identity," in which one brain is divided into Left and Right half-brains, each one psychologically continuous with the original whole. These divided half-brains can now come to occupy numerically distinct g-clones of the original host body. Present indications are that this process may be possible in the near future.
Another possibility is the closest continuer account (P-clone1 is a closer continuer of the original than is P-clone2 ), but certainly what is closer about P-clone1 is precisely those physical patterns which embody its psychological continuity with the original.
In fact, I chose the example of the dream specifically because some people believe dreams and memories of dreams to be residual of the chaotic, sensual noise our bodies take in while we sleep. If I have a clear memory of a dream I had, it is probably the memory of a memory, and not the memory of the dream itself.
Actually, one of the possibilities I will later suggest we consider, is that while personal identity is unidirectionally transitive through time, it may not be transitive in both directions. While second-person Kelly is not the Captain Kelly who died on Mars, they may both have been the girl of the back alleys and rooftops.
The term ancestral I take from Perry (intro). The asterisk notation I take from computer science, where the ancestralrelation is called transitive closure.
cf. Butler, Reid and Perry in Perry (1).
This leaves unaddressed any questions about the identity or person-status of a creature with V* to a fictional past. This is an issue that has long concerned my philosophical thinking, but I take it to be tangential to the issue of personal identity as it is here being addressed. D
Into her mind? Into her brain? At this point, I have not developed a strong enough scheme to make rigorous levels distinctions.
Williams, "The Self and the Future," p. 188 (in Perry).
Identity is suffering -- First of the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha. Actually, I had originally wanted to do my thesis on the relation of pain and experiences to personhood and identity, but I had been assuming a wide psychological criterion of personal identity. I decided it was smarter to explore the psychological account before I could investigate its specifics, and it was the psychological account of personal identity to which I am first dedicated, rather than hypotheses on the importance of pain and pleasure.
Professor Jonathan Schull, Haverford College Psychology Department, Biological Psychology lecture, spring term, 1989.
Melzack & Wall, p. 61: "The proportion of amputees with phantom limb pain is astonishingly high. The most careful investigation (Jensen et al., 1983, 1985) found that 72 per cent of amputees had phantom limb pain 8 days after amputation, and 65 per cent had it 6 months later..."
Parfit (1): "It may be objected that, if I remain conscious throughout this ordeal, there will at least be one kind of psychological continuity. Though I lose all my memories of my past life, I would have memories of my ordeal. In particular, I would continue to have short-term memories of the 1st few moments, or what is sometimes called the specious present. Throughout my ordeal there would be an overlapping chain of such memories." p.230.
Actually, this is more than a parenthetical comment, and I will return to the issue of embodiment-specificity in the last section of this essay, Second Thoughts.
The term duplicate may seem to beg the question if we take it to mean not the original, but our language did not develop to accommodate cases of branching identity...
Actually, some might claim that dreamless sleep is not the loss of consciousness but the move to a different state of consciousness (eg. Jonathan Paul T92), but I honestly canUt imagine what that would mean, unless it is a tricky way of claiming the functional continuity of the brain.
3 3 Just as the law assumes unless otherwise specified that one's estate is left to the closest relative, new laws could specify that a personUs estate be passed on to a closest continuer at death. If the closest continuer had been created within a specified probation time, then that estate would include rank, office, legal obligations, etc.
Developing such a discursive system for moral philosophy is the source of Derek Parfit's interest in Personal Identity.
Johnson-Laird (1), p. 391-392. [All italics are mine.]
Kosman. (If Virtual Kelly does have an inner life, then her name might be considered a misnomer: her body is virtual, but she is real. Alternatively we might consider the set of real persons to be a subset of that of virtual persons.)
The phrase "just a simulation" has to be clarified for the area of Virtualism, which holds that when a simulation becomes thorough and accurate enough, it becomes a synthesis or recreation of the original.
No where does Searle go into much detail concerning the idea of virtual realities, but his position on the ontological status of simulation (no matter how thorough or accurate) is made clear in his papers on strong AI [Artificial Intelligence].
Craig Reynolds who works in the new field of RArtificial LifeS (see Langton (1)) reproduces natural flight behavior in computer simulations. He gives his boids [bird-oids] minimal rules of behavior and studies the patterns of flocking that result from group interactions. GENUINE LIFE IN ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS: It is important to distinguish the ontological status of the various levels of behavior in such systems. At the level of the individual behavors, we have a clear difference in kind: boids are not birds; they are not even remotely like birds; they have no cohesive physical structure, but rather exist as informational structures -- processes -- within a computer. But -- and this is the critical but -- at the level of behaviors, flocking Boids and flocking birds are two instances of the same phenomenon: flocking. Langton (1), p. 32.
Hofstadter and Dennett (1): "Minds, Machines, and Programs". J. Searle.
We might conclude that her body is virtual while she is not.
Perry: "Of Personal Identity", D. Hume. (According to Perry, Hume claims that there is no such thing as personal identity. Perry takes this not to be an argument against the project of exploring the criteria of identity, but to be similar to ParfitUs claim that personal identity is not a form of numerical identity, that there is no substance called the Self whose independent existence is a pre-condition of experience. The Self, for Hume, is precisely the coherence found at the center of experience, and the continued identity of the self as described in The Psychological Account.)
Hofstadter and Dennett (1), p. 252.
It becomes important at this point to distinguish between ST-continuity of embodiment and what might be called transformative continuity of embodiment.
cf. Johnson-Laird (1), chapter 10.
Parfit (1), p. 502. Parfit cites Cila Mara, quoted in Th. Stcherbatsky, The Soul Theory of the Buddhists, Bulletin de l'Academie des Sciences de Russie, 1919, p. 839.
Holistic refers to the the thesis of supervenience or emergence: the idea that the organization will display qualities and characteristics not to be found in the sub-systems. Coherent means that the holistic system will involve a self-perpetuating organization that maintains a history of the transformations that have previously shaped it.