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16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 2. Mental Continuity / b. Self as mental continuity

[Self as the continuity of our conscious existence]

22 ideas
For Socrates our soul, though hard to define, is our self [Vlastos on Socrates]
     Full Idea: For Socrates our soul is our self - whatever that might turn out to be.
     From: comment on Socrates (reports of career [c.420 BCE]) by Gregory Vlastos - Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher p.55
     A reaction: The problem with any broad claim like this is that we seem to be able to distinguish between essential and non-essential aspects of the self or of the soul.
A person is the whole of their soul [Plotinus]
     Full Idea: Man is not merely a part (the higher part) of the Soul but the total.
     From: Plotinus (The Enneads [c.245], 5.1.12)
     A reaction: The soul is psuche, which includes the vegetative soul. The higher part is normally taken to be reason. This seems pretty close to John Locke's view of the matter.
For Locke, conscious awareness unifies a person at an instant and over time [Locke, by Martin/Barresi]
     Full Idea: Central to Locke's account of the self is the idea that consciousness is reflexive and that it plays a dual role in self-constitution: it is what unifies a person not only over time, but also at a time.
     From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by R Martin / J Barresi - Introduction to 'Personal Identity' p.37
     A reaction: This is a good explanation of Locke's view, and shows clearly why Locke does not hold a 'memory' theory (unless, of course, one held the view that all consciousness is memory). Consciousness unites self, or self unites consciousness?
If the soul individuates a man, and souls are transferable, then a hog could be a man [Locke]
     Full Idea: If identity of soul makes the same man, and the same individual spirit may be united to different bodies, it is possible men living in distant ages may have been the same man. But if the soul of Heliogabalus is in a hog, we would not say a hog is a man.
     From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.06)
     A reaction: [compressed] Locke uses this to say that Heliogabalus remains Heliogabalus, despite being in a hog. This is a good case of conceivability being very misleading about actual possibility. If Heliogabalus is transferable, then of course he isn't physical.
Identity must be in consciousness not substance, because it seems transferable [Locke]
     Full Idea: If the same consciousness can be transferred from one thinking substance to another, then two thinking substances may make but one person. For one consciousness being preserved, whether in the same or different substances, personal identity is preserved.
     From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.13)
     A reaction: I take the sensible modern view to be that the transfer of the same consciousness between two different physical substances is absurd, since consciousness is (at the very least) entailed by the physical state. Could there be mentally identical twins?
If someone becomes conscious of Nestor's actions, then he is Nestor [Locke]
     Full Idea: Let a person once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor.
     From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.14)
     A reaction: This seems to invite the sort of response Butler offered, that it would be a given that it was YOU who was thinking Nestor's thoughts, and presumably becoming puzzled thereby. If I imagine Troy, am I thinking Nestor's thoughts?
If a prince's soul entered a cobbler's body, the person would be the prince (and the man the cobbler) [Locke]
     Full Idea: Should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince's past life, enter the body of a cobbler, everyone sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable for the prince's actions. But who would say he is the same man?
     From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.15)
     A reaction: This is another case of conceivability being misleading about possibility. I take this transfer to be utterly (metaphysically) impossible, and hence not a good 'intuition-pump' for assessing what personal identity means.
On Judgement Day, no one will be punished for actions they cannot remember [Locke]
     Full Idea: In the Great Day, wherein the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of.
     From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.22)
     A reaction: If you could persuade devout criminals of the truth of Locke's idea, you could make a fortune selling them 'forgetfulness pills', which guaranteed they couldn't remember a thing on Judgement Day. Or perhaps that's what marihuana does.
Locke sees underlying substance as irrelevant to personal identity [Locke, by Noonan]
     Full Idea: The heart of Locke's account of personal identity is the claim that identity of substance is irrelevant.
     From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.25) by Harold Noonan - Personal Identity 2.6
     A reaction: It is irrelevant whether a sound recording is made of wax, vinyl or CD-stuff. This is a functionalist view. A basic question is whether we consider it naturally or metaphysically possible to make a person out of anything other than brain.
We know our own identity by psychological continuity, even if there are some gaps [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: To discover one's own moral identity unaided, it is sufficient that between one state and a neighbouring (or just a nearby) one there be a mediating bond of consciousness, even if this has a jump or forgotten interval mixed into it.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27)
     A reaction: Leibniz appears to accept the psychological continuity view of personal identity (which was probably a new problem to him), even though he rightly rejects the account based purely on memory.
Causation unites our perceptions, by producing, destroying and modifying each other [Hume]
     Full Idea: As to causation, the true idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of different perceptions, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence and modify each other.
     From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature [1739], I.IV.6)
     A reaction: He suggests that the associations of memory and causation might be sufficient to produce identity of the mind, and he gives the priority to memory. Eventually the good empiricist despairs because you cannot experience the links.
Are self and substance the same? Then how can self remain if substance changes? [Hume]
     Full Idea: Is the self the same with substance? If it be, how can that question have place concerning the subsistence of self, under a change of substance? If they be distinct, what is the difference between them?
     From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appendix)
     A reaction: Locke seems to think there is a characterless substance which supports momories, and the latter constitute the self. So if my substance acquires Nestor's memories, I become Nestor. Hume, the stricter empiricist, cares nothing for characterless things.
A man is a succession of momentary men, bound by continuity and causation [Russell]
     Full Idea: The real man, I believe, however the police may swear to his identity, is really a series of momentary men, each different one from the other, and bound together, not by a numerical identity, but by continuity and certain instrinsic causal laws.
     From: Bertrand Russell (The Ultimate Constituents of Matter [1915], p.124)
     A reaction: This seems to be in the tradition of Locke and Parfit, and also follows the temporal-slices idea of physical objects. Personally I take a more physical view of things, and think the police are probably more reliable than Bertrand Russell.
The memory criterion has a problem when one thing branches into two things [Williams,B, by Macdonald,C]
     Full Idea: The memory criterion for personal identity permits 'branching' (where two things can later meet the criteria of persistence of a single earlier thing), which presents it with serious problems.
     From: report of Bernard Williams (Personal Identity and Individuation [1956]) by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things Ch.4
     A reaction: Of course, any notion of personal identity would have serious problem if people could branch into two, like fissioning amoeba. If that happened, we probably wouldn't have had a strong notion of personal identity in the first place. See Parfit.
One of my future selves will not necessarily be me [Parfit]
     Full Idea: If I say 'It will not be me, but one of my future selves', I do not imply that I will be that future self. He is one of my later selves, and I am one of his earlier selves. There is no underlying person we both are.
     From: Derek Parfit (Personal Identity [1971], §5)
     A reaction: The problem here seems to be explaining why I should care about my later self, if it isn't me. If the answer is only that it will be psychologically very similar to me, then I would care more about my current identical twin than about my future self.
If my brain-halves are transplanted into two bodies, I have continuity, and don't need identity [Parfit]
     Full Idea: If the two halves of my brain are transplanted into different bodies just like mine, they cannot both be me, since that would make them the same person. ..But my relation to these two contains everything that matters, so identity is not what matters.
     From: Derek Parfit (The Unimportance of Identity [1995], p.314)
     A reaction: I challenge his concept of what 'matters'. He has a rather solipsistic view of the problem, and I take Parfit to be a rather unsociable person, since his friends and partner will be keenly interested in the identities of the new beings.
Over a period of time what matters is not that 'I' persist, but that I have psychological continuity [Parfit]
     Full Idea: We should revise our view about identity over time: what matters isn't that there will be someone alive who will be me; it is rather that there should be at least one living person who will be psychologically continuous with me as I am now.
     From: Derek Parfit (The Unimportance of Identity [1995], p.316)
     A reaction: Parfit and Locke seem to agree on this, and it is no accident that they both like 'science fiction' examples. Apparently Parfit wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone threatened to cut his corpus callosum. I rate it as a catastrophe for my current existence.
We only have a sense of our self as continuous, not as exactly the same [Flanagan]
     Full Idea: We only have a sense of our self as continuous, but not as exactly the same.
     From: Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.178)
     A reaction: Russell said this too, and it seems to me to be right. Personal identity is far too imprecise for me to assert that I remember my ten-year-old self as being identical to me now. Only physical objects like teddy bears can pass that test.
It seems absurd that there is no identity of any kind between two objects which involve survival [Fine,K]
     Full Idea: Pace Parfit and others, it boggles the mind that survival could be independent of any relation of identity between the currently existing object and the objects that subsequently exist.
     From: Kit Fine (Vagueness: a global approach [2020], 3)
     A reaction: Yes. If the self or mind just consists of a diachronic trail of memories such that the two ends of the trail have no connection at all, that isn't the kind of survival that any of us want. I want to live my life, not a life.
Maybe we should see persons in four dimensions, with stages or time-slices at an instant [Martin/Barresi]
     Full Idea: Some recent philosophers have argued that we should replace the three-dimensional view of persons with a four-dimensional view according to which only time-slices, or 'stages', of persons exist at short intervals of time.
     From: R Martin / J Barresi (Introduction to 'Personal Identity' [2003], p.3)
     A reaction: At first glance this seems to neatly eliminate lots of traditional worries. But why would I want to retain my identity, if someone threatened to brainwash me. I also want to disown my inadequate earlier selves. Interesting, though. Lewis.
Maybe personal identity is not vital in survival, and other continuations would suffice [Martin/Barresi]
     Full Idea: A modern question is whether personal identity is primarily what matters in survival; that is, people might cease and be continued by others whose continuation the original people would value as much.
     From: R Martin / J Barresi (Introduction to 'Personal Identity' [2003], p.3)
     A reaction: When put like this, the proposal seems hard to grasp. It only makes sense if you don't really believe in a thing called 'personal identity'. I don't see how you can believe in it without also believing that for you it has central importance.
In continuity, what matters is not just the beginning and end states, but the process itself [Macdonald,C]
     Full Idea: What matters to continuity is not just the beginning and end states of the process by which a thing persists, perhaps through change, but the process itself.
     From: Cynthia Macdonald (Varieties of Things [2005], Ch.4)
     A reaction: This strikes me as being a really important insight. Compare Idea 4931. If this is the key to understanding mind and personal identity, it means that the concept of a 'process' must be a central issue in ontology. How do you individuate a process?