L4.1: Lottie's tutorial on personal identity (Some history and Dennett)
(The casual younger reader of the thrilling adventures of the JugginsVerse will probably wish to skip back to here. Lottie herself almost certainly would do, too, to save herself this rather dense lesson on the philosophy of personal identity. But Hipparchus has bullied the editor into including some of his teaching in the JugginsVerse, dry fare though it is, and it helps to show that life at the Potting Shed is not all about solving mysteries or mystical encounters. For rare souls interested in philosophy, Hipparchus teaches a single session on truth here and several on philosophy of thought and language here.)
It is Monday and a new week always brings Lottie (a teenager axolotl) that same balance of optimism about possibilities and pessimism that she faces a whole week of morning long tutorials with her sometimes ferocious tutor Hipparchus. For once, however, she has not lingered over breakfast and is almost on time. Perhaps to get it over with.“Good morning” says her tutor cheerfully. “Today we’re going to have a philosophy tutorial. Stop that groan right now! We’re going to discuss personal identity. And to start with, we can think of this as expressed in the question: what makes you, now, the same person as you were yesterday or last year? Or, a more concrete example. We all heard someone making an awful fuss about stubbing theiry toe in the showers this morning. Are you the person who made that racket? Is it you who was and thus still is responsible?
“We can call this a question of reidentification. It is not the only question but it will do to start.”
“But I don’t think I am the same as I was last year. I’ve changed in all sorts of ways. My football skills have improved. I can dribble and then strike the ball into the back of the net. Every time! Almost. Also I know a bit of philosophy, too, not that that’s any good.”
“Yes. That is one use of ‘the same’. A person can change over time and thus be not quite the same. But note that I just said that a person can change. To say that presupposes some sameness: it is one and the same person who changes. So what makes for the same person?
“Let us start with a simpler example. George Washington famously cut down an apple tree with an axe. Let us assume that this axe has been preserved to this day but in its long life has required several new handles and several new blades. Is the current axe the same axe? Is it Washington’s axe?”
“Well it is and it isn’t! It’s made of different parts. So it’s not the same. It’s not identical. But I suppose if the parts were changed gradually and if, to make it a better example, there were lots of pieces to be slowly replaced…”
“More like the Ship of Theseus whose many wooden planks were slowly replaced over time…”
“Yes. Then I suppose we might say it is or was the same overall axe or ship. It doesn’t really matter. We can say what we like.”
“That is a common response to this question” said Hipparchus. “In the case of artefacts like this it does seem that we just need to establish some convention and that is as deep as the answer can go. It seems natural to think of artefacts like the axe and the ship as functional kinds. They remain the same entity in part (though only in part as their continuous career through time and space matters) because they retain a specific function even though their material has changed. But people tend to be quite relaxed about this.
“Note that we have already skated over an ambiguity. When you said that the new axe was not identical to the original axe and when you said that, all the same, it might be the very same axe, you suggested at first that the new axe isn’t qualitatively identical to the old - by not having the very same qualities or properties or even component parts - but that it might be quantitatively identical. It might be the very same one.
“But I don’t think I am the same as I was last year. I’ve changed in all sorts of ways. My football skills have improved. I can dribble and then strike the ball into the back of the net. Every time! Almost. Also I know a bit of philosophy, too, not that that’s any good.”
“Yes. That is one use of ‘the same’. A person can change over time and thus be not quite the same. But note that I just said that a person can change. To say that presupposes some sameness: it is one and the same person who changes. So what makes for the same person?
“Let us start with a simpler example. George Washington famously cut down an apple tree with an axe. Let us assume that this axe has been preserved to this day but in its long life has required several new handles and several new blades. Is the current axe the same axe? Is it Washington’s axe?”
“Well it is and it isn’t! It’s made of different parts. So it’s not the same. It’s not identical. But I suppose if the parts were changed gradually and if, to make it a better example, there were lots of pieces to be slowly replaced…”
“More like the Ship of Theseus whose many wooden planks were slowly replaced over time…”
“Yes. Then I suppose we might say it is or was the same overall axe or ship. It doesn’t really matter. We can say what we like.”
“That is a common response to this question” said Hipparchus. “In the case of artefacts like this it does seem that we just need to establish some convention and that is as deep as the answer can go. It seems natural to think of artefacts like the axe and the ship as functional kinds. They remain the same entity in part (though only in part as their continuous career through time and space matters) because they retain a specific function even though their material has changed. But people tend to be quite relaxed about this.
“Note that we have already skated over an ambiguity. When you said that the new axe was not identical to the original axe and when you said that, all the same, it might be the very same axe, you suggested at first that the new axe isn’t qualitatively identical to the old - by not having the very same qualities or properties or even component parts - but that it might be quantitatively identical. It might be the very same one.
“But now, what of you? You eat and, I’m afraid to say, defecate; you shed old skin and grow new skin. If I’m not mistaken, you have grown slightly bigger over a year. Are you the same Lottie, the very same creature?”
“Well I am. I may not be qualitatively identical to how I was. I mean: I’m different in lots of little ways. My body is different. I have different thoughts. I can do things I couldn’t do. But I’m still Lottie.”
“And when you say that, do you mean that we may as well call you that. We may as well speak this way. That’s the convention we use?”
“No! I really am the same person!”
“But if your body is different, what makes you you? And why does this seem a much more black and white fact than Washington’s axe?”
“No idea, Teach!”
A little history
Hipparchus sighs and then reaches down two books from his selves and flicks got the right pages.
“This is what John Locke says.”
“Well I am. I may not be qualitatively identical to how I was. I mean: I’m different in lots of little ways. My body is different. I have different thoughts. I can do things I couldn’t do. But I’m still Lottie.”
“And when you say that, do you mean that we may as well call you that. We may as well speak this way. That’s the convention we use?”
“No! I really am the same person!”
“But if your body is different, what makes you you? And why does this seem a much more black and white fact than Washington’s axe?”
“No idea, Teach!”
A little history
Hipparchus sighs and then reaches down two books from his selves and flicks got the right pages.
“This is what John Locke says.”
11. Personal Identity. This being premised, to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what PERSON stands for;—which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consideritself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without PERCEIVING that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls SELF:—it not being considered, in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances. For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done. (Locke 1975: II.xxvii.11)
Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Where-ever a Man finds, what he calls himself, there I think another may say is the same Person. It is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery. (Locke 1975: II.xxvii.28)
“Ah” - Lottie - “So that’s a difference between personal identity and axes. We have mental lives! Bodies are secondary! It’s souls that matter!”
“And that seems to be Locke’s idea. He considers what now seems a familiar notion of science fiction or gothic horror. The soul of a prince could be placed in the body of a cobbler and if so the continuous identity of the prince would follow the prince’s soul, not his body, even if this would cause epistemic difficulties for others. To avoid religious baggage we can say that the prince’s ‘self’ is transferred.”
17. The body, as well as the soul, goes to the making of a Man. And thus may we be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here,—the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it. But yet the soul alone, in the change of bodies, would scarce to any one but to him that makes the soul the man, be enough to make the same man. For should the soul of a prince, carryingwith it the consciousness of the prince's past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same PERSON with the prince, accountable only for the prince's actions… (Locke 1975: II.xxvii.17)
“Good. So that’s sorted. That was a really good quick lesson. Thanks. I’m off now!”
“Not so fast. Here’s what David Hume, whose life didn’t quite overlap with Locke, wrote.”
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.... If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a differentnotion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. (Hume 1978: 252)
“Oh. I see. So looking into his mind, he can find his mental marbles but not the bag that holds them all together?”
“A surprisingly poetic idea, Lottie! But yes: if there is some ‘principle’ that gathers together someone’s ideas, it is that principle that looks to be a good basis for what makes a person the same person over time or what comprises their self. Yet Hume implies that this could never be experienced. And being an empiricist, this was a particular problem for him. Without an experience to correlate with a concept then the concept itself is threatened. We do not need that restriction, but even so, what could be the self that constitutes Lockean identity over time, given bodily changes?”
“Hume himself adopted a kind of bundle theory. The self just is a collection of mental elements but not what binds them together.”
“I’m just spit-balling here” - Hipparchus winces - “but Hume just wouldn’t come across my thoughts would he? He’d only ever come across his. Might that be enough? Imagine that I’ve got some marbles and you’ve got some marbles. One possible ‘bundle’ of marbles might be half of mine and half of yours. Or all the blue ones. But my marbles are mine and yours are yours. So a bundle theory doesn’t seem enough. But might what it is missing - that mine are mine, yours are yours, but I only ever experience mine - be enough? I couldn’t experience your thoughts”
“And what if, per impossibile, you did?”
“Er. Well then they’d be mine after all!”
“That is not a silly idea. Let me leave it for the moment and tell you about Daniel Dennett because he is one of the main proponents of a family of responses to Hume and Locke.”
Dennett
Hipparchus outlines the main themes of one of Dennett’s papers which argues that selves are abstract objects akin to centres of gravity, and that serve particular purposes but whose equivalent ‘theory’ takes the form of a narrative not mechanics.
“Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who defends the idea that persons are self-creating. He claims that a self is a ‘centre of narrative gravity’. To outline his view, he suggests an analogy with the physical notion of a centre of gravity.
“A centre of gravity is just an abstractum. It’s just a fictional object. But when I say it’s a fictional object, I do not mean to disparage it; it’s a wonderful fictional object, and it has a perfectly legitimate place within serious, sober, echt physicalscience. (Dennett 1992: 104)
“The idea of a centre of gravity is deployed within a branch of physics to describe and predict the behaviour of physical systems acting under physical forces. What a centre of gravity is depends on this theoretical context and it is one of the useful tools and ideas that go to make that context. The concept is one amongst others interdependent on a theoretical stance.
“Selves are given similar treatment. Like centres of gravity or mental states, they are theoretical, even fictional, entities articulated within an interpretative theoretical stance.
A self is also an abstract object, a theorist’s fiction. The theory is not particle physics but what we might call a branch of people-physics; it is more soberly known as a phenomenology or hermeneutics, or soul-science (Geisteswissenschaft). The physicist does an interpretation, if you like, of the chair and its behaviour, and comes up with the theoretical abstraction of a centre of gravity, which is then very useful in characterising the behaviour of the chair in the future, under a wide variety of conditions. The hermeneuticist or phenomenologist--or anthropologist--sees some rather more complicated things moving about in the world--human beings and animals--and isfaced with a similar problem of interpretation. It turns out to be theoretically perspicuous to organise the interpretation around a central abstraction: each person has a self (in addition to a centre of gravity). In fact we have to posit selves for ourselves as well. The theoretical problem of self-interpretation is at least as difficult and important as the problem of other-interpretation. (ibid: 104)”
“In saying this, what’s he really trying to do? What’s it about?” Lottie finally interjects.
“I think that it is useful to consider the perceived alternative to it that Dennett rejects. He gives a clear statement of this in the following passage which starts with a brisk re-iteration of the advantages of his narrative account for describing some forms of psychopathology such as multiple p;efrsonalitty disorder but also mentions the alternative to which it stands opposed.
We sometimes encounter psychological disorders, or surgically created disunities, where the only way to interpret or make sense of them is to posit in effect two centers of gravity, two selves. One isn’t creating or discovering a little bit of ghost stuff in doing that. One is simply creating another abstraction. It is an abstraction one uses as part of a theoretical apparatus to understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behavior of some very complicated things. The fact that these abstract selves seem so robust and real is not surprising. They are much more complicated theoretical entities than a center of gravity. And remember that even a center of gravity has a fairly robust presence, once we start playing around with it. But no one has ever seen or ever will see a center of gravity. As David Hume noted, no one has ever seen a self, either. (ibid: 114)”
Lottie says: “I remember you talked about abstracta and illata before, when discussed concepts as aspects of thought. So Dennett thinks that selves are abstractions. They are not things to be found in the mind at all. One couldn’t directly experience one. But they are made up, like Hume’s bundles, by gathering events and thoughts and suchlike into some sort of story? In my example of your marbles and my marbles, the right bundles are the ones that fit into stories, one of which corresponds to you and one to me? But - hold on! - who is telling these stories? Hasn’t he just helped himself to the idea of a self who tells its own story?”
“A good thought. The point of Dennett’s example of the robot which narrates its behaviour is that whatever plays the role of the teller need not amount to a self. But that just was an analogy. In our case, it raises the question of what would be the equivalent of the robot. And it seems hard to avoid the idea that the notion of a story - if it is to play any kind of elucidating role - will require an author and then it seems odd if that author isn’t us. But we are also supposed to be the story itself.
“Given that in his book on consciousness, Dennett rejects the idea that there is a place in the brain where all experience ‘comes together’ calling this the ‘Cartesian Theatre’, he might be happy to say that subsidiary and mindless bits of the brain do this work, a bit like the robot. But then it is hard to know what the connection is between what they produce and any actual story, told in words.
“In fact, fans of this approach often seem quite lax in talking both of selves as stories and of rational subjects as authoring their stories.
“I have a couple of other qualms. One concerns the materials for the story itself. It seems to me that these will often have to presuppose a notion of self in giving an account of one main topics of the story: that the subject of the story - the self - has or experiences various mental phenomena. Unlike tables and chairs, mental phenomena essentially have subjects - us! - so how could a story be told of the having of neutral subject-less experiences which subsequently constructs us? What are these subject-less experiences? Pains which occur generally and to no person? They don’t seem to be experiences like ours. But if the stories concern familiar experiences then they will presuppose the very thing the account was supposed to explain. Pains, say, as being experienced by someone, as pains are.”
“So is there nothing in this story idea then?”
“Well note that Dennett was trying to solve a problem that Hume generated and which - from our perspective at least - seems a response to Locke’s idea that personal identity has to do with mental continuity. That’s why he says that selves just are narratives. But we might think that narratives are important even if we do not advance that striking claim.”
“Such as?”
“Well such as:
- That selves can, of necessity, construct narratives.
- That selves experience themselves in narrative form. That is, that a sense of self is of a narratively structured form of existence.
- That lives are essentially narratively structured.
- Or that some longer term aspects of lives, ant least, are essentially narratively structured.
- That the construction of a narrative, while not conceptually necessary to be a self, is a contingent necessity for flourishing.
- That the proper aim of psychotherapy is the construction of a narrative.”
“Good! Yes, we need to keep track of our problems. We don’t have long today so I am going to suggest why our sort of life, the life of a rational subject, has to be at least partially narrative in form. This has to do with the idea that rational subjects think and act under conceptions of rationality. That is just what it means to be a rational subject. I will then suggest why that connects to both flourishing and the aims of psychotherapy. And then, like a magician producing a ferret from their trousers, I’ll try to address your problem with a gnomic flourish. But you won’t like it. Come back quickly after the coffee break.”