THE DIACHRONIC MIND An Essay on Personal Identity, Psychological Continuity and the Mind-Body Problem by MARCSLORS Researchfellowof the Royal.
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But no such conclusion follows. Assuming that a human vegetable is not a person, this is not a case involving a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time. The memory criterion purports to tell us which past or future person you are, but not which past or future thing. It says what it takes for someone to persist as a person , but not what it takes for someone to persist without qualification. So it implies nothing at all about whether you could come to be a vegetable or a corpse. For the same reason it tells us nothing about whether you were ever an embryo.
The persistence question asks what it takes for something that is a person at one time to exist at another time as well. It asks what is necessary and sufficient for any past or future being, whether or not it is a person then, to be you or I:. Those who ask 1 rather than 2 usually do so because they assume that every person is a person essentially: By contrast, something that is in fact a student could exist without being a student: Person essentialism is a controversial metaphysical claim, however.
Combined with one of the usual accounts of personhood, it implies that you could not have been an embryo: Nor could you come to be a human vegetable. For that matter, it rules out our being biological organisms, since no organism is a person essentially: Whether we are organisms or were once embryos are substantive questions that an account of personal identity ought to answer, not matters to be settled in advance by the way we frame the debate.
So it would be a mistake to assume person essentialism at the outset. Asking question 1 prejudges the issue by favoring some accounts of what we are, and what it takes for us to persist, over others. It rules out both animalism and the brute-physical view described in the next section. It is like asking which man committed the crime before ruling out the possibility that it might have been a woman. There are three main sorts of answers to the persistence question in the literature. The most popular are psychological-continuity views , according to which the holding of some psychological relation is necessary or sufficient or both for one to persist.
You are that future being that in some sense inherits its mental features—beliefs, memories, preferences, the capacity for rational thought, that sort of thing—from you; and you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited in this way. There is also disagreement about what mental features need to be inherited. We will return to some of these points. But most philosophers writing on personal identity since the early 20th century have endorsed some version of this view.
The memory criterion mentioned earlier is an example. Advocates of psychological-continuity views include Johnston , Garrett , Hudson , Lewis , Nagel A second sort of answer is that our persistence consists in some brute physical relation. You are that past or future being that has your body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like. It has nothing to do with psychological facts. Call these brute-physical views. That has to do with the evidence question. Their advocates include Ayers You may think the truth lies somewhere between the two: This usually counts as a psychological-continuity view as we have defined it.
Here is a test case. Imagine that your brain is transplanted into my head. Those who say that you would be the one who gets your brain usually say so because they believe that some relation involving psychology suffices for you to persist. Those who say that you would be the empty-headed vegetable say so because they take your persistence to consist in something entirely non-psychological, as brute-physical views have it.
Both psychological-continuity and brute-physical views agree that there is something that it takes for us to persist—that there are informative, nontrivial necessary and sufficient conditions for a person existing at one time to be a thing existing at another time. A third view, Anticriterialism , denies this. Psychological and physical continuity are evidence for identity, it says, but do not always guarantee it, and may not be required.
The clearest advocate of this view is Merricks ; see also Lowe It is sometimes associated with substance dualism, but the connection is disputable see Swinburne , Olson There are anticriterialist views about things other than people as well. Anticriterialism is poorly understood. Most people—most Western philosophy teachers and students, anyway—feel immediately drawn to psychological-continuity views Nichols and Bruno give experimental evidence for this.
If your brain were transplanted, and that organ would carry with it your memories and other mental features, the resulting person would be convinced that he or she was you. Why should this conviction be mistaken? This can make it easy to suppose that the person would be you, and that this would be so because he or she is psychologically continuous with you.
It is notoriously difficult, however, to get from this thought to an attractive answer to the persistence question. What psychological relation might our persistence through time consist in? We have already mentioned memory: This proposal faces two objections, discovered in the 18th century by Sergeant and Berkeley see Behan , but more famously discussed by Reid and Butler see the snippets in Perry First, suppose a young student is fined for overdue library books. Later, as a middle-aged lawyer, she remembers paying the fine. Later still, in her dotage, she remembers her law career, but has entirely forgotten not only paying the fine but everything else she did in her youth.
According to the memory criterion the young student is the middle-aged lawyer, the lawyer is the elderly woman, but the elderly woman is not the young student. This is an impossible result: Identity is transitive; memory continuity is not. Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you can remember only your own experiences. To remember paying a fine or the experience of paying is to remember yourself paying. That makes it trivial and uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember—that is, that memory continuity is sufficient for personal identity.
It is uninformative because you cannot know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether he is the one who had it. Suppose we want to know whether Blott, who exists now, is the same as Clott, whom we know to have existed at some time in the past. The memory criterion tells us that Blott is Clott just if Blott can now remember an experience Clott had at that past time.
So we should already have to know whether Blott is Clott before we could apply the principle that is supposed to tell us whether she is. There is, however, nothing trivial or uninformative about the claim that memory connections are necessary for us to persist. One response to the first problem is to modify the memory criterion by switching from direct to indirect memory connections: Neither move gets us far, however, as both the original and the modified memory criteria face a more obvious problem: For instance, there is no time when you could recall anything that happened to you while you dreamlessly slept last night.
The memory criterion has the absurd implication that you have never existed at any time when you were unconscious. The person sleeping in your bed last night must have been someone else. A better solution replaces memory with the more general notion of causal dependence Shoemaker , 89ff. We can define two notions, psychological connectedness and psychological continuity. A being is psychologically connected , at some future time, with you as you are now just if she is in the psychological states she is in then in large part because of the psychological states you are in now.
Having a current memory or quasi-memory of an earlier experience is one sort of psychological connection—the experience causes the memory of it—but there are others. For example, most of your current beliefs are the same ones you had while you slept last night: We can then say that you are psychologically continuous , now, with a past or future being just if some of your current mental states relate to those he or she is in then by a chain of psychological connections.
Now suppose that a person x who exists at one time is identical with something y existing at another time if and only if x is, at the one time, psychologically continuous with y as it is at the other time. This avoids the most obvious objections to the memory criterion. It still leaves important questions unanswered, however. Suppose we could somehow copy all the mental contents of your brain to mine, much as we can copy the contents of one computer drive to another, and that this erased the previous contents of both brains.
Whether this would be a case of psychological continuity depends on what sort of causal dependence counts. The resulting being with my brain and your mental contents would be mentally as you were before, and not as I was. He would have inherited your mental properties in a way—but a funny way. Is it the right way? Psychological-continuity theorists disagree Shoemaker Schechtman gives a different sort of objection to the psychological-continuity strategy.
A more serious worry for psychological-continuity views is that you could be psychologically continuous with two past or future people at once. The psychological-continuity view implies that she would be you. If we destroyed one of your cerebral hemispheres, the resulting being would also be psychologically continuous with you. Hemispherectomy—even the removal of the left hemisphere, which controls speech—is considered a drastic but acceptable treatment for otherwise-inoperable brain tumors: What if we did both at once, destroying one hemisphere and transplanting the other? Then too, the one who got the transplanted hemisphere would be psychologically continuous with you, and would be you according to the psychological-continuity view.
But now suppose that both hemispheres are transplanted, each into a different empty head. The two recipients—call them Lefty and Righty—will each be psychologically continuous with you. The psychological-continuity view as we have stated it implies that any future being who is psychologically continuous with you must be you.
It follows that you are Lefty and also that you are Righty.
Personal Identity
But that cannot be: And yet they are. If you are Lefty, you are hungry at that time. If you are Lefty and Righty, you are both hungry and not hungry at once: Psychological-continuity theorists have proposed two different solutions to this problem. What we think of as you is really two people, who are now exactly similar and located in the same place, doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The surgeons merely separate them Lewis , Noonan For each person, there is such a thing as her first half: They are like two roads that coincide for a stretch and then fork, sharing some of their spatial parts but not others.
At the places where the roads overlap, they are just like one road. Likewise, the idea goes, at the times before the operation when Lefty and Righty share their temporal parts, they are just like one person. Whether people really are made up of temporal parts, however, is disputed. Its consequences are explored further in section 8. The other solution to the fission problem abandons the intuitive claim that psychological continuity by itself suffices for one to persist.
It says, rather, that a past or future being is you only if she is then psychologically continuous with you and no other being is. There is no circularity in this. We need not know the answer to the persistence question in order to know how many people there are at any one time; that comes under the population question. This means that neither Lefty nor Righty is you.
They both come into existence when your cerebrum is divided. If both your cerebral hemispheres are transplanted, you cease to exist—though you would survive if only one were transplanted and the other destroyed. That looks like the opposite of what most of us expect: In fact the non-branching view implies that you would perish if one of your hemispheres were transplanted and the other left in place: And if brain-state transfer is a case of psychological continuity, even copying your total brain state to another brain without doing you any physical or psychological harm would kill you. The non-branching view makes the what matters?
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Faced with the prospect of having one of your hemispheres transplanted, there is no evident reason to prefer that the other be destroyed. Most of us would rather have both preserved, even if they go into different heads. Yet on the non-branching view that is to prefer death over continued existence. This leads Parfit and others to say that that is precisely what we ought to prefer. We have no reason to want to continue existing, at least for its own sake. What you have reason to want is that there be someone in the future who is psychologically continuous with you, whether or not she is you.
The usual way to achieve this is to continue existing yourself, but the fission story shows that it could be achieved without your continuing to exist. Likewise, even the most selfish person has a reason to care about the welfare of the beings who would result from her undergoing fission, even if, as the non-branching view implies, neither would be her.
In the fission case, the sorts of practical concerns you ordinarily have for yourself apply to someone other than you. This suggests more generally that facts about who is who have no practical importance. All that matters practically is who is psychologically continuous with whom. Lewis and Parfit debate whether the multiple-occupancy view can preserve the conviction that identity is what matters practically.
Another objection to psychological-continuity views is that they rule out our being biological organisms Carter , Ayers This is because no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient for a human organism to persist. If your brain were transplanted, the one who ended up with that organ would be uniquely psychologically continuous with you and this continuity would be continuously physically realized. On any psychological-continuity view, this person would be you: But no organism would go with its transplanted brain.
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The operation would simply move an organ from one organism to another. So if you were an organism, you would stay behind with an empty head. Again, a human organism could continue existing in an irreversible vegetative state with no psychological continuity. If you were an organism, you could too. Human organisms have brute-physical persistence conditions.
But a healthy, adult human organism seems a paradigm case of a thinking being. This raises three apparent problems. First, if the organism we call your body can think, your not being an organism would imply that you are one of two intelligent beings sitting there and reading this entry. More generally, there would be two thinking beings wherever we thought there was just one. Second, the organism would seem to be psychologically indistinguishable from you.
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In that case it cannot be true that all people or even all human people persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Some—the animal people—would have brute-physical persistence conditions. Third, this makes it hard to see how you could know whether you were a nonanimal person with psychological persistence conditions or an animal person with brute-physical ones. If you thought you were the nonanimal, the organism would use the same reasoning to conclude that it was too. For all you could ever know, it seems, you might be the one making this mistake.
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Imagine a three-dimensional duplicating machine. The process causes temporary unconsciousness but is otherwise harmless. Two beings wake up, one in each box. The boxes are indistinguishable. Because each being will have the same apparent memories and perceive identical surroundings, each will think, for the same reasons, that he or she is you. But only one will be right. Suppose the technicians who work the machine are sworn to secrecy and immune to bribes. Did I do the things I seem to remember doing?
Am I n nonanimal that would go with its transplanted brain, or an organism that would stay behind with an empty head? The only way to avoid them altogether is to say that we are organisms and that there are no beings who persist by virtue of psychological continuity. One response is to say that human organisms have psychological persistence conditions. Despite appearances, the operation would not move your brain from one organism to another, but would cut an organism down to the size of a brain, move it across the room, and then give it new parts to replace the ones it lost—presumably destroying the animal into which the brain is implanted.
This may be the view of Wiggins A more popular view is that, despite sharing our brains and showing all the outward signs of consciousness and intelligence, human organisms do not think and are not conscious. Thinking animals are not a problem for psychological-continuity views because there are none Shoemaker If human organisms cannot be conscious, it would seem to follow that no biological organism of any sort could have any mental properties at all. Shoemaker argues that this follows from the functionalist theory of mind , , Finally, psychological-continuity theorists can concede that human organisms are psychologically indistinguishable from us, but try to explain how we can still know that we are not those organisms.
The best-known proposal of this sort focuses on personhood and first-person reference. It says that not just any being with mental properties of the sort that you and I have—rationality and self-consciousness, for instance—counts as a person. A person must also persist by virtue of psychological continuity. It follows that human animals are not people. So the organism is not mistaken about which thing it is: And you are not mistaken either.
You can know that you are not the animal thinking your thoughts because it is not a person and personal pronouns never refer to nonpeople. See Noonan , , Olson ; for a different approach based on epistemic principles see Brueckner and Buford None of these objections arise on animalism, the view that we are organisms. This does not imply that all organisms, or even all human organisms, are people: Being a person may be only a temporary property of you, like being a student.
Nor does animalism imply that all people are organisms. It is consistent with the existence of wholly inorganic people: It does not say that being an animal is part of what it is to be a person a view defended in Wiggins Animalism leaves the answer to the personhood question entirely open. Assuming that organisms persist by virtue of some sort of brute-physical continuity, animalism implies a version of the brute-physical view. A few philosophers endorse a brute-physical view without saying that we are animals.
They say that we are our bodies Thomson , or that our identity through time consists in the identity of our bodies Ayer This has been called the bodily criterion of personal identity. Its relation to animalism is uncertain. Most versions of the brute-physical view imply that human people have the same persistence conditions as certain nonpeople, such as dogs. And it implies that our persistence conditions differ from those of immaterial people, if they are possible.
It follows that there are no persistence conditions for people as such. The most common objection to brute-physical views is the repugnance of their implication that you would stay behind if your brain were transplanted e. Unger ; for an important related objection see Johnston In other words, brute-physical views are unattractive in just the way that psychological-continuity views are attractive. Animalists generally concede the force of this, but take it to be outweighed by other considerations.
First, animalism avoids the too-many-thinkers problem. Second, it is compatible with our beliefs about who is who in real life. Every actual case in which we take someone to survive or perish is a case where a human organism survives or perishes. Psychological-continuity views, by contrast, conflict with our belief that each of us was once a foetus. When we see an ultrasound picture of a week-old foetus, we ordinarily think we are seeing something that will, if all goes well, be born, learn to speak, and eventually become an adult human person.
Yet none of us is in any way psychologically continuous with a week-old foetus. In order to set up a list of libraries that you have access to, you must first login or sign up. Then set up a personal list of libraries from your profile page by clicking on your user name at the top right of any screen. You also may like to try some of these bookshops , which may or may not sell this item.
Separate different tags with a comma. To include a comma in your tag, surround the tag with double quotes. Skip to content Skip to search. Published Dordrecht ; London: Language English View all editions Prev Next edition 3 of 3. Check copyright status Cite this Title The diachronic mind: Physical Description vi, p.
Series Philosophical studies series ; v. Contents Machine derived contents note: Personal Identity and the Metaphysics of Mind. A Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity: The Five Problems Revisited. N-Continuity as a Part of Folk-Psychology. The Relevance of N-Continuity. Interpretationism and Mental Realism. Notes Includes bibliographical references and index. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Related resource Table of contents only at http: Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?
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