Personal Identity and Life After Death
16
Personal Identity and Life After Death
My personal identity, therefore, implies the continued existence of that indivisible thing which I call myself. Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates, and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers. My thoughts, and actions, and feelings, change every moment—they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or I, to which they belong, is permanent, and has the same relation to all the succeeding thoughts, actions, and feelings, which I call mine.
Thomas Reid, “Of Identity”
When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions. Tis the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
1—Introduction
Death is a dramatic, disruptive event. Nevertheless, a central truth of Christianity holds that personal immortality, in which I myself will survive death and live on in an afterlife, is real. There have been a number of different models for depicting life after death as taught in Scripture, but three of them are among the most popular. First, there is the traditional position on immortality, held by most in the history of the church. In this view, God alone possesses immortality in himself (see 1 Tim 6:16). Still, though human beings are properly and normally to be construed as a unity of material human bodies and immaterial substantial souls, at the time of death a person enters into a temporary disembodied state that is less than complete and then receives a new resurrected body at the general resurrection. The person who survives death is “I myself” in an absolute, literal sense.
A second view may be called the immediate resurrection position on immortality. In this view, when one dies, he or she is immediately given some sort of temporal body while waiting for a final resurrected body, or his or her predeath body is taken away by God at death and replaced with a corpse that is buried. This view has the virtue of allowing for continued personal existence in an intermediate state, but it suffers from the fact that certain biblical texts seem to describe the intermediate state as a disembodied one (see Ps 49:15; Mt 27:50; 2 Cor 5:1-8; Heb 12:23; Rev 6:9-11).
A third, more recent view is called the re-creation position on immortality: when one dies he becomes extinct—there is no disembodied person in an intermediate state—but at the resurrection of the dead God re-creates that person all over again out of nothing. Apart from exegetical difficulties with this view, it is not clear that this position has the resources for holding that the person that is re-created is literally the same person who died years earlier. We will return to this question and to the issue of life after death toward the end of the chapter. However, it should be clear that the intelligibility of personal survival of death (and of any version of such survival) will partly be a matter of one’s general view of personal identity through change. The issue of personal identity is of great interest for its own sake, but it also relates to belief in an afterlife.
Questions about personal identity through change are aspects of the broader issue of sameness and change in general. In chapter nine it was pointed out that before change is possible, the thing that changes must exist at the beginning, during the process, and at the end of the change. If an apple goes from yellow to red, it must be the same apple throughout the change. In general, change presupposes literal, absolute sameness through change. If there is no such sameness, then there is only succession and no real change. There would be a yellow-apple-at-time x that ceased to be and a red-apple-at-time y that succeeded it. In chapter ten we saw that the traditional doctrine of substance is a metaphysical view that seeks, among other things, to account for sameness through change.
However, our purpose in this chapter is not to focus on sameness and change in general, but on the nature of personal identity in particular. What is a human person, and does such a person remain the same through change? If so, how are we to understand this? Traditional Christian theology, common sense, and various philosophical arguments unite to affirm that persons sustain absolute, real sameness through various kinds of change. This position is called the absolute view of personal identity, and it is most often, though not always, associated with substance dualism (see chap. 13).
However, certain contemporary ideologies such as scientism, physicalism, and sensate forms of crude empiricism render absolute sameness through change impossible. For these and other reasons, various empiricist views of personal identity have been offered as alternatives to the absolute view. In this chapter, we will first look at the identity of physical artifacts through change; second, spell out the absolute view and two empiricist views of personal identity (the body position and the memory view); third, assess the arguments for and against these three positions.
Before we press on, a few preliminary distinctions should be made. First, we must distinguish an absolute, strict sense of identity from a loose, popular sense of identity. If an entity x at time t1 maintains absolute, strict identity with entity y at time t2 (say x is Smith at twelve years old and y is Smith at forty-three years old), then x and y stand in the identity relation to each other such that Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility of identicals (see chap. 9) holds for x and y (something is true of x if and only if it is true of y). Everything true of Smith at twelve is true of Smith at forty-three because the very same person who was twelve is now forty-three. In absolute sameness, a person moves through time and exists fully at each moment of his life. Persons have no temporal parts or stages; thus tenses and dates are not parts of persons. Smith at twelve was five feet tall and was to be six feet tall at forty-three. Smith at forty-three is six feet tall but was five feet tall.
We will look more closely at the loose, popular sense of identity when we look at the identity of physical objects. But for now, we should point out that if something sustains loose, popular identity through change, our judgment of sameness is to some extent arbitrary and not to be understood in a strict way. For example, the Kansas City Royals baseball team could change all of its players, managers, owners, and even its stadium and uniforms and still be judged the same team in a loose and popular sense, even if, strictly speaking, the team is different. One issue we will look at is whether persons sustain strict, absolute sameness through change or merely loose, popular “sameness.”
Second, the metaphysical aspects of personal identity must be kept distinct from the epistemological ones. The former focuses on what constitutes personal identity—What is personal identity and what makes it real? What is it to say that person x at time t1 is the same person as y at t2? The epistemological aspects focus on criteria for personal identity: How it is possible to know or justifiably believe that a person at time t2 is the same person as someone at t1? The epistemological problem can be broken down into two subissues that are very different: the first-person issue of how I myself know I am the same person through change versus the third-person issue of how one can know that some other person is the same person through change. Moreover, the epistemological problem includes the question of how we would know (in a first- or third-person way) that personal identity obtains in an embodied state before death versus in a disembodied intermediate state after death. In this chapter, our main focus will be on the metaphysical aspect of personal identity, though epistemological questions will be treated as part of our discussion. We cannot cover all the important views on this topic in the space of one short chapter. Rather, this chapter will focus on three main views that have played an important role in the history of the debate regarding personal identity.
2—The Identity Through Change of Physical Artifacts
The world contains living entities like humans and dogs and physical artifacts like tables and ships. However, the world also contains entities called processes (e.g., the boiling of water) and events (e.g., a birthday party or a baseball game). Consider an event that takes some time such as a baseball game. An event of this sort is extended through time and thus is composed of temporal parts; a baseball game is a sum of nine temporal parts called innings.
Next, consider an artifact like a ship. Such an entity is extended throughout space and thus has spatial parts (e.g., the sides, deck, sails of the ship). Do such physical artifacts maintain strict sameness through change? Do they have temporal parts in addition to physical parts? Such questions have been part of philosophy since its inception, and they have often focused on the ship of Theseus, an ancient Greek sailor and warrior who was a king of Athens. Here is Plutarch’s reference to the ship of Theseus:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
Over the years the ship of Theseus had all its parts replaced plank by plank, nail by nail, and so on, so that the ship that continued to sail had all new parts and none of its original parts. Was this ship replaced or repaired? Was it literally the same ship as the original ship of Theseus or a new ship that merely resembled the original one and continued to function as a vessel of war?
To embellish the story, suppose that each time an original wooden part of the ship was replaced, a plank of frozen green Jell-O and not wood was used. Suppose further that all the original parts that were removed piece by piece over the years were saved in a warehouse and years later were reassembled into a ship composed of all and only the original ship’s parts in the very same structural arrangement. Now, assuming for the sake of argument that the answer is one or the other, which ship would be identical to the original ship of Theseus, the frozen green Jell-O ship or the one with all and only the original parts in the very same structure? Commonsense intuitions and many philosophers have agreed that the original ship is the one with the same parts and structure and not the frozen green Jell-O one.
Let us assume what seems reasonable, namely, that this answer is the correct one. According to many philosophers, four lessons can be drawn from the ship of Theseus and our conclusion to the puzzle. First, physical artifacts do not maintain absolute, strict identity through change. An artifact cannot gain new parts and lose old ones (or have the parts structurally rearranged) and still be the very same ship. Physical artifacts are merely structured parts (property-things) and when the parts or the structure changes, the ship loses its identity. For physical artifacts, strict sameness through change is a fiction. This view is a version of what is called mereological essentialism, from the Greek word meros, which means “part.” Mereological essentialism means that the parts of a thing are essential to it as a whole. If the object gains or loses parts, it is a different object. Many, though not all, philosophers adopt mereological essentialism as the most adequate account of physical objects such as the ship of Theseus.
Second, the best we can hope for is loose, popular identity for artifacts. Some philosophers would advance the idea that such objects become a series of spatiotemporal parts, sometimes called space-time worms or paths, as depicted in figure 16.1.
Figure 16.1. Space-time worm or path
If we claim that a ship is the “same” over time, we mean that the ship is a sum of its spatial and temporal parts. The temporal parts are called object stages or time slices of the object. Several implications follow from this idea. First, the ship does not exist at each moment from its beginning to its destruction; rather, a ship stage exists at each moment. The ship does not exist through time; it is like a baseball game. The whole ship is a sum of each temporal (and spatial) part (ship stage).
Second, if we ask what it is that unites all the various stages of the ship of Theseus into the “same” ship (the same space-time path), the answer will be that all the ship stages stand to each other in some relationship R and no other ship stages (say the various time slices of a second ship owned by Ulysses) stand in that relation R to any of the stages of the ship of Theseus. Various accounts have been given for what R must be: earlier stages must cause the existence of later stages, each stage must be continuous in space and time with its neighboring stages (no Star Trek beam up here!), each stage must closely resemble its neighbors in appearance, or the entire ship cannot lose some arbitrary amount of parts (e.g., not over 50 percent) and part replacement must be slow and gradual. Whatever R turns out to be, it is something that relates the various successive stages of the ship into “one” ship, and R is a weaker relation than identity. Sometimes this relation is called genidentity.
Third, identity is somewhat arbitrary and comes in degrees. For example, we can count the ship with replaced frozen Jell-O parts as the same as the original ship of Theseus until it reaches some arbitrary limit we choose: loss of 51 percent of original parts, loss of one part unless we color the Jell-O brown, and so forth. Sameness is a matter of convention here, and the replaced ship becomes less and less “identical” with the original ship the more parts it loses or the more it fails to resemble the original ship in color, shape, and so forth. We can choose any arbitrary limit for sameness we wish and after that point is reached, we can count the ship that is present a different ship and not the “same” one.
Finally, since temporal (and spatial) parts are essential to physical artifacts, now viewed as space-time paths, it follows that a specific artifact could not have had a different temporal origin and still be the same object (nor could it have lasted longer or traced a different path through space and still have been the same object). If the ship of Theseus had been made a week later from the day it was, in fact, made, it would have a different set of temporal parts, and thus it would be a different ship. As we will see later, it is not clear that the same could be said of persons.
It is time, now, to turn to a clarification of the different views of the identity of persons through time. The absolute view of personal identity holds that persons maintain strict sameness through change. Two different types of empiricist views deny this claim and treat persons like physical artifacts.
3—Three Views of Personal Identity
3.1 Statement of the Views
First, there is the commonsense view, advocated by philosophers such as Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796), known as the absolute view of personal identity. This is sometimes called the simple view for one of two reasons. First, the title may refer to the fact that advocates of the simple view take the entity that grounds personal identity as not composed of separable parts; rather, it is a simple entity (e.g., a personal soul or ego). Second, the title may refer to the fact that being a person is irreducible or unanalyzable into nonpersonal notions, for example, continuity of memory, continuity of personality, continuity of body or brain. In any case, according to this position, persons differ from physical artifacts in that persons maintain strict, absolute sameness through change. Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility of identicals holds between all the moments a person exists except for tenses because persons do not have temporal parts. A six-foot-tall adult is strictly identical to the three-foot-tall person who he was as a child. The child was to have the property of being six feet tall, and the adult currently has that property; the adult used to have the property of being three feet tall that the child had, say, twenty years ago.
Personal identity is absolute; it is not a matter to be settled by convention; it does not come in degrees; and it is not partial. If we ask of a person at time t2 if he is the same person as one existing at t1 earlier than t2, the question will have a yes or no answer. Contrast this with material objects. Suppose half of a table is taken away and replaced with new table parts. Is the new table the same as the old one? Strictly speaking, the answer is no. But we could say that the new table is partially the same as the old one (50 percent in this case) and we may arbitrarily choose to draw a line at 50 percent and say that the table is still the “same” if it loses 50 percent of its original parts or less and not the same if it loses more than 50 percent. But we could draw the line at any point that suits our purposes. If we valued table legs, we might wish to say that the table was the “same” if it still had three original legs even if it had lost more than 50 percent of its original parts. Personal identity is not like that. It is an all-or-nothing affair, not a matter of convention, on the absolutist view.
Next, the absolutist holds that personal identity is unanalyzable and primitive. It cannot be broken down into something else more basic that could be taken to constitute personal identity. The identity of a table can be so analyzed. We can say that the “sameness” through change of a table is to be broken down into a position about the stability of the parts of the table. But personal identity cannot be defined in terms of something more basic than it. Sometimes this is explained by saying that the first-person point of view, the “I,” is illusive and cannot be reduced to a third-person point of view. The “I” is ultimate and serves as the unifier of persons in two senses: First, a person is a unity at a given time. Right now, you may be having several different but simultaneous experiences: an itch in your foot, a thought about personal identity, an awareness of music in the background, a desire for coffee, and a feeling of the chair on which you sit. These different experiences are united as experiences of the same person, namely you, because they are all owned or had by the very same center of consciousness, the same “I.” Second, a person is a unity through time. Over the years your body parts come and go, and your various mental states—memories, personality traits, and so on—come and go. But they are all aspects of the same person because they all belong to the same enduring “I” according to the absolutist view. Thus, upon analysis, the first-person point of view turns out to be grounded in a specific sort of thing that can have a “first-person point of view,” namely, an ego, an “I,” a substantial center of consciousness. Because the first-person point of view is rooted in a substantial center of consciousness that has this first-person point of view, the phrase “first-person point of view” actually refers to a certain kind of point (thing, unified center, substance)—a viewing, sentient sort of point properly called an “I.”
Finally, most, though not all, advocates of the absolutist view hold that substance dualism is the best way to understand the “I” or the ego that accounts for personal identity. I am essentially my soul—same soul, same person; different soul, different person—and it is because my soul exists, owns my mental life, diffuses my body, and endures through change that personal identity has a foundation. Personal identity is grounded in the soul for many advocates of the absolutist view. Thus, upon analysis, the first-person point of view turns out to be grounded in a first-person viewing kind of point—a substantially self-conscious ego.
Two radically different positions about personal identity are called empiricist views. They are also called complex views for one of two reasons: the ground of personal identity is a complex entity (e.g., a series of memory states, a composed body) or that the notion of a person can informatively be reduced to nonpersonal notions (memories, personality traits, bodily continuity). The two main empiricist views of personal identity are the body view and the memory view. Before we look at each, there are three things they share in common, which center on the rejection of the absolutist position. First, empiricist positions start with a view of identity through change derived from physical artifacts and extend this to the identity of persons. This means that personal identity through change, just like that of nations and tables, comes in degrees, is partial, and is to some extent a matter of convention.
Second, personal identity is not unanalyzable. It should be defined in terms of something else. For the body view, “sameness” of person is constituted by “sameness” of body. For the memory view it will be the continuity of various psychological factors—memories, personality traits, interests and goals, and, perhaps, continuity of the brain as the necessary “carrier” of those psychological factors—that constitutes personal identity. Either way, a person is like a process—a person is a series of person-stages that are related to each other in an appropriate relationship. The main point of a theory of personal identity is to spell out what the relationship or connection is between various person-stages that makes them all stages of the “same” person. This means that the first-person perspective, expressed with the word I can be exhaustively replaced without loss of any information by a third-person description of the person in question.
Finally, there is no substantive soul or ego. According to empiricist advocates, such an entity is a prescientific, unobservable, useless postulate. A person is a bundle of physical and mental states at a time (and most physicalist versions of empiricist views go on to reduce mental states to physical states as well, according to various strategies mentioned in chap. 14) and a series of physical and mental states through time.
The body view of empiricism holds that the connection between various person-stages that unites them as stages of the “same” person is that all the mental states of the person are connected to the “same” body. The reason that you are the same as the person who read the first sentence of this paragraph is that the experience of reading this sentence is tied to a specific body, the experience of reading the first sentence was connected to a specific body, and the body is the “same” in both cases. Since sameness of person is analyzed in terms of sameness of body, advocates of this view must tell us what it means for the body to be the same, in a loose, nonabsolute sense, through change. Various answers have been given to this: new body stages must have a certain percentage of parts in common with neighboring stages just before and after it, new stages must be spatiotemporally continuous with neighboring stages, new body stages must resemble neighboring stages in appearance. In each case, the body view often allows for significant replacement of parts, change in spatial/temporal location, and alteration in appearance by later body stages compared to earlier ones. But, generally speaking, such changes must be gradual and continuous and not drastic and abrupt.
The memory view of empiricism holds that it is continuity of psychological characteristics that constitutes personal identity. The internal connections between experiences themselves are all that is needed to make sense of the idea of a series of experiences through time being experiences of the “same” person. Chief among these psychological traits is memory. The reason that you are the “same” person as the person who got up this morning is that you currently have most of the “same” memories as the person who got up (except, of course, you now have memories of the day not possessed by your prior stage upon waking). Note that memories are not seen as epistemological criteria for determining sameness of person; memories constitute sameness of person.
Often the memory criterion is supplemented with the continuity of other psychological factors: continuity of likes and dislikes, goals and interests, character traits, feelings of warmth and ownership of earlier person-stages. Some add that since the brain is what carries and contains these psychological traits, then continuity of brain is a necessary condition for continuity of psychological traits and thus for personal identity. Property and event dualists (see chap. 11) like A. J. Ayer hold that psychological states are irreducibly mental and the self is just a bundle at a time and a series through time of discrete, otherwise ownerless mental stages (feelings of pain, thoughts of lunch, desires for love). Physicalist advocates of the memory view hold that psychological states are not irreducibly mental, but rather can be reduced to brain states or treated in some other way consistent with physicalist views of a person (see chap. 14).
3.2 Assessment of the Views
3.2.1 Arguments for the Absolutist View
a. Basic experience of the self. Suppose you are approaching a brown table and in three different moments of introspection you attend to your own awarenesses. At time t1 you are five feet from the table and you experience a slight pain in your foot (P1), a certain light brown table sensation from a specific place in the room (S1), and a specific thought that the table seems old (T1). A moment later at t2 when you are three feet from the table you experience a feeling of warmth (F1) from a heater, a different table sensation (S2) with a different shape and slightly different shade of brown than that of S1, and a new thought that the table reminds you of your childhood desk (T2). Finally, a few seconds later, t3, you feel a desire to have the table (D1), a new table sensation from one foot away (S3), and a new thought that you could buy it for less than twenty-five dollars (T3).
To repeat something we noted earlier in chapter thirteen, in this series of experiences, you are aware of different things at different moments. However, at each moment of time, you are also aware that there is a self at that time that is having those experiences and that unites them into one field of consciousness. Moreover, you are also aware that the very same self had the experiences at t1, t2, and t3. Finally, you are aware that the self that had all the experiences is none other than you yourself. This can be pictured as in figure 16.2.
Figure 16.2. Basic experience of the self
Through introspection, you are simply aware that you are not your body or a group of experiences. Rather, you are aware that you are the self that owns and unifies your experiences at each moment of time and that you are the same self that endures through time. In short, you are aware of being a mental subject that is in your body, that owns and unites your experiences, and that maintains sameness through change.
It can be argued that such awarenesses are either misleading or nonexistent. For example, David Hume claimed never to have an awareness of his own “I” but only of this or that experience or group of experiences. However, two things seem wrong with this claim. First, how did Hume know which stream of consciousness to focus on in order to look for his own “I”? Wasn’t he already aware in some sense of his own self before he could identify which experiences were his? We will return to this point below.
Second, it may be true that we never have an experience of our own “I” if we allow only sensations (e.g., of color, taste, smell, sound, texture, pain, pleasure) to count as experiences. But it can be argued that the “I” itself is not the sort of thing that could be sensed in that way, and the conclusion to draw from this is not that we are not aware of our own selves, but that there are other kinds of awarenesses besides sensory awarenesses and that our awareness of our own self is by means of a different kind of awareness. It is hard to conceive of something we could be aware of with more certainty than this: while I listen to a song, I am the one having my experiences and that continues to endure during the whole performance.
b. First-person irreducible to third-person. No account of the world in terms of third-person descriptions will be able to capture without remainder my own first-person perspective (the vantage point one uses to describe the world from one’s own point of view). Nor will it be able to tell me which object in that world is I myself. No description of my body or my psychological traits will entail that the entity being described is I. A complete physicalist description of the entire material world, including all the bodies in it, could be given in the third-person perspective (the point of view of an observer, e.g., there is an object at location x that is six feet tall, white, etc.). This would suffice to identify all the physical objects in space and time. But no such description will tell me which body is mine or which entity I myself am.
If we add to this physicalist description an exhaustive description of all the mental states present in all the bodies (e.g., object at location x has memories of being at the 1979 Super Bowl and that object has such and such character traits, desires, and so forth), the problem is still present: such an account will not tell which entity so described is I myself. The “I” and the first-person standpoint cannot be eliminated or reduced to a third-person point of view. My own “I,” my own first-person point of view, my knowledge of myself by direct acquaintance, would be left out of such third-person descriptions.
Certain words are called indexicals: I, here, there, now, then. These words are token reflexive, that is, they systematically change their referents in a context-dependent way. For example, if Smith uses the indexical tomorrow to correctly say, “I will arrive tomorrow,” then on arrival the next day, he cannot say, “I have arrived tomorrow,” since the referent tomorrow has changed from the day before. Rather, Smith would have to say “I have arrived today.”
The most basic indexical word is I (and, most likely, now). Here and now refer to where and when I am. There and then refer to where and when I am not. A complete third-person account of the world will not capture the information expressed by indexicals. This fact can be explained if I am a first-person center of consciousness, a mental substance different from my body and mental states. If my identity consisted in simply being my body or being a certain bundle of mental states, a third-person account of the world would be exhaustive and would clearly identify which object I am. Thus the irreducibility of the first-person point of view supports the absolutist position.
These basic intuitions about the unity and singularity of one’s self and the first-person point of view can be illustrated with a thought experiment. Suppose it becomes possible someday to perform a brain operation on a person in such a way that exactly half of his brain along with half of his body is transplanted and joined to two different half bodies without brains awaiting the transplanted parts. Figure 16.3 diagrams the situation where half of P1 is transplanted to P2 and P3.
Figure 16.3. P1 transplanted into P2 and P3
Suppose further that upon recovery each of the two persons, P2 and P3, manifest the same character traits and have the same memories as did P1. Note first that the transplant would have created two new persons, but P1 cannot be identical to both P2 and P3 for the very simple reason that one thing cannot be the same as two things. On the memory view, sameness of person obtains if and only if sameness of character traits and memories obtain. Thus the memory view would imply that P1 is identical to P2 and P3, which is absurd if taken literally. However, advocates of the memory view hold that P2 and P3 are each P1 in that they both exactly resemble P1 in psychological traits. We will return to this option later.
Since P1 cannot literally be both P2 and P3, what are our other options? It may be that P1 ceased to exist and P2 and P3 are two totally new people, or it may be that P1 survived and is identical to P2 (or P3) and that one new person, P3 (or P2) came into being as a result of the operation.
Either way, we learn two things from the example. First, a person is not identical to his body or his memories and character traits (remember: persons have these things, they are not identical to them or to a collection of them). Why? Because P2 and P3 each have P1’s memories and character traits and an equal share of P1’s brain and body, but they cannot both be P1. Therefore, the fact that P1 is a person must amount to more than just being a brain with memories and character traits or to just being a body.
The second lesson shows us that persons are not capable of partial identity and survival as are physical objects. If you break a table in half and use each half to build two new tables, then it makes sense to say that the original table partially survives and is partly present in each of the new tables. But as we have seen in our brain operation example, the following four options are possible ways to understand what happened: (1) P1 ceases to be, and two new persons, P2 and P3, come to be; (2) P1 survives and is identical to P2, and a new person, P3, comes to be; (3) P1 survives and is identical to P3, and a new person, P2, comes to be; (4) P1 partially survives in P2 and P3. Option (4) may make sense of physical objects like tables, but it is not a reasonable option with regard to persons.
To see why option (4) is not a good one, consider a second thought experiment. Suppose a mad surgeon captures you and announces that he is going to transplant your left hemisphere and body half into one half body and the right hemisphere and body half into another half body. After surgery, he is going to torture one of the resultant persons and reward the other one with a gift of a million dollars. You can choose which of the two persons, A or B, will be tortured and which will be rewarded. It is clear that whichever way you choose, your choice would be a risk. Perhaps you will cease to exist and be neither A nor B. But it is also possible that you will be either A or B. However, one thing does not seem possible—your being partially A and partially B. For in that case you would have reason to approach the surgery with both a feeling of joyous expectation and horrified dread! But it is hard to make sense of such a mixed anticipation because there will be no person after the surgery who will experience such a mixed fate. Partial survival, at least when it comes to persons, does not seem to make sense. Persons are unities, not collections or combinations of things that permit partial survival as do physical objects. The first-person point of view, the “I,” captures this fact.
c. Fear of future pain and punishment for the past. Fear of some painful event in the future or blame and punishment for some deed in the past appear to make sense only if we implicitly assume that it is literally I myself that will experience the pain or that was the doer of the past deed. Future pain or past deeds are not mine by convention, and if real identity is a fiction, it is hard to make sense of these cases of fear and punishment. We would not have such fear or merit such punishment if the person in the future or past merely resembled my current self in having similar memories, psychological traits, or a body spatiotemporally continuous with mine or that had many of the same parts as my current body.
Empiricist theorists have responded to this argument in different ways. Regarding future pain, some have pointed out that empiricist views give a way of grounding altruism, that in future pain we are really concerned for someone else and that is good. Others claim that fear of future pain rests solely on the continuity of “our” desires, goals, and memories. If a person twenty-five years from now were to face pain but had no memories or other psychological traits in common with me now, I simply would not worry about him.
Regarding past deeds, some philosophers grant that retribution is hard to justify on an empiricist view of personal identity. But they go on to point out that other aspects of punishment can be justified (deterrence of others, rehabilitation, protection of society due to incarceration), and those aspects are all that matter in justifying punishing a present person-stage for a past deed.
d. Rationality and thought processes. Some have argued that to realize the truth of any proposition or even entertain it as meaningful, the very same self must be aware of its different parts (e.g., those expressed by the associated sentence’s subject, verb, predicate). If one person-stage contemplated the subject, another stage the verb, and still another the predicate, literally no self would persist to think through and grasp the proposition as a whole.
The same point applies to thinking through the premises of an argument and drawing a conclusion. The same self must be present to unite and compare the premises, see whether they entail a conclusion, and draw that conclusion. If nothing can occupy our attention for a while since we do not endure through time, then we could have only momentary contents and these processes would be impossible. To attend to a proposition or argument, we must continue to be. If this argument is sound, then it means that empiricist views are self-refuting if they are asserted as rational by using supporting arguments, because such theories render this type of rationality impossible.
A major response to this argument is that as each person-stage emerges or ceases to be in a series of thinkings, that stage passes on to the next one its content and a feeling of ownership (“this thought was mine”). Thus, at the time a conclusion of an argument is thought, there is simultaneously a thought of the conclusion and a thought from memory of the premises of the argument. You will have to decide for yourself whether a momentary person-stage could simultaneously combine all these different thoughts at once and if, in fact, this is what is going on when we think.
e. Switch cases. Certain “switching” situations seem to be logically possible: for example, it is possible that one could wake up in an entirely different body or with a totally different set of memories and psychological traits. If he so desired, God could put person A in person B’s body and vice versa, and he could give B memories exactly like A’s and vice versa. In short, alternative biographies are possible: the same person could have had a different body and memories. If this is possible, then this shows that “sameness” of body or memories is not a necessary condition for personal identity. One can continue to exist without psychological or bodily continuity.
Similarly, one’s current body could come to be occupied by a new person in a switch or, in cases of demon possession, one’s body could be occupied by more than one person. In the same way, God could create a double of person A and give that person the very “same” memories and psychological traits as A while A himself retained qualitatively identical memories and traits. In short, distinct but qualitatively identical biographies are possible: the same body or set of memories could be possessed by different persons. If this is possible, then this shows that sameness of body or memories is not a sufficient condition for personal identity.
Advocates of empiricist views can simply deny that such cases are, in fact, logically possible. Or they can grant that they are possible or not possible depending on one’s conception of personal identity and that all this shows is how arbitrary and conventional our concept of persons is.
f. Specific problems in empiricist positions. Finally, absolutists point out certain problems that plague empiricist views but, they claim, not absolutist positions of personal identity. Consider first the body view. For one thing, one can wake up in the morning and know who one is without opening up his eyes. In fact, though it may sound strange, at the moment one awakens he could simultaneously know who he is and that he is an enduring self and doubt that he even has a body. (Suppose he has been reading Hal Lindsey and thinks for a moment that the rapture happened during the night.) The body view has difficulty accounting for this possibility.
Second, as already pointed out, surely demon possession is logically possible and, in fact, there is good evidence that it actually occurs. But in this case, the bodily principle (same body, then same person) is false because two persons “occupy” the same body. Finally, one’s knowledge of oneself is incorrigible; that is, one cannot be mistaken about which self one is. It does not seem to make sense that one could misidentify one’s self at the present moment. But if self-knowledge requires one first to know facts about a certain body and then ascribe that body to oneself, then two problems arise: (1) Such self-knowledge presupposes direct acquaintance with one’s own “I” before one can ascribe a given body to himself. Knowledge of one’s body presupposes and cannot, therefore, constitute self-knowledge. (2) One could always make a mistake in ascribing some body to oneself. Since first-person identification is incorrigible, and since it could not be incorrigible if self-knowledge is acquired according to the picture given us by the body view, then that view must be false.
Regarding the memory view, the problem of circularity arises just as it does for the body view. From the time of Butler and Reid, it has been argued that memories presuppose and, therefore, cannot constitute personal identity. The thing that now makes me the same person as an individual in the past cannot be that I now have that past person’s memories. In order for me to have those memories, I would already have to be that person. In other words, the thing that distinguishes real past memories of an event (where I was the one who did that past event) from qualitatively indistinguishable but only apparent memories, is that in the real case I was there but in the apparent case I was not. Thus memory is only an epistemological test for personal identity but does not give us the nature of such identity.
Second, consider the brain operation thought experiment mentioned earlier in the chapter. It is surely possible that a person could undergo a transplant and two persons come to have all and only the very same set of memories and psychological traits as the original person before the transplant. Some memory advocates claim that in this situation we should simply claim that the original person is the “same” as both new persons. Now it is obvious that they cannot mean by “same” here literal identity because one thing, in this case a person, cannot be literally identical to two persons. What they mean is that sameness is just resemblance. In other words, both new persons are exactly similar in traits to the preoperation person, so it is arbitrary which to count as that person.
But does this really make sense? Can one’s own identity really be so arbitrary? From a first-person perspective, it is easy to imagine waking up after the operation in one body and looking at the person next to one with one’s exact traits and memories. It would not be an arbitrary matter from one’s first-person perspective as to which person he was, though from a third-person point of view someone else may not be able to tell which new person is the preoperation self.
Some memory advocates respond to a case like this by adding a condition to the memory criterion. Person y at time t2 is the “same” as person x at an earlier time t1 if and only if (1) there is continuity of memory and other psychological traits and (2) there is no other person z at time t2 that resembles x as much as does y. The problem with this view is that the case above is simply easy to imagine: an operation could be performed, I could survive as one of the two psychologically indistinguishable people, I could know from my own point of view that I myself am the preoperation person, and all of this is quite independent of whether that other new person exists. How can a person’s identity or nonidentity with a person at an earlier time depend on the existence or nonexistence of another person?
A final problem seems to plague both empiricist views. Since they depict persons as series of stages with temporal parts, then if parts are essential to their wholes (different parts, different wholes), then no person could have been born at a time different from his or her actual birth. However, if such a thing is possible, as would seem to be the case, then empiricist views may be inadequate.
3.2.2 Arguments Against the Absolutist View
Among the arguments raised against the absolute view, three stand out. First, David Hume and a number of others claim that we are never aware of our “I”; we are only aware of our bodies and, through introspection, of our current mental states (e.g., our current sensations of pain and color, thoughts, willings). Thus the “I” is a fiction.
Absolutists have responded in two ways. They point out that we are, in fact, aware of our own self, but such acts of awareness are not like sensations of pain and color. The empiricist limits the types of awareness we can have to the latter, but we do, in fact, have the former in cases where we are aware of ourselves as the enduring owners and unifiers of our mental life and bodies. Further, if we were not already aware of ourselves, how would we know which stream of consciousness or which body to investigate in order to confirm or rule out an awareness of my “I”? Introspection and knowledge of one’s body and mental life presupposes awareness of the “I.”
Second, empiricists claim that if the “I” is some immaterial entity, say a soul, that is in the body and underlies our mental states, then we could never know who someone else is because we only have their bodies, memories, and character traits to go on. We have no direct acquaintance with their bare self. This is a version of the problem of other minds, which states that the absolutist view leads to skepticism about our knowledge of other selves.
Some absolutists respond in this way: they admit that it is always logically possible that, when confronted with a body or set of memories, a different person than we normally know is present. But skepticism need not be refuted by showing that skepticism is logically impossible, and there is no chance whatever for error or doubt in some area of belief (see chap. 4). This same problem of skepticism is present in the existence of the external world (it is logically possible we are having sensations of a world when no world exists). To rebut the skeptic it is enough to point out that in one’s own first-person case, one knows who one is and that one is an enduring self by direct introspective awareness, and that one also can correlate one’s own enduring self with the continuity of one’s body and psychological traits. One learns from this that a good inductive correlation exists between these, and one can then use this correlation to justify the use of bodily continuity and memory as evidence of personal identity in the case of others, even though such continuity does not constitute personal identity and it is logically possible that such judgments are wrong. Empiricists respond to this by saying that such an inductive generalization is extremely weak because it is only built on one case of correlation between an enduring self and continuity of memories and body, that is, your own case.
Finally, some empiricists have argued that postulating an enduring soul to ground an enduring self solves nothing. How do we know that an immaterial soul is not just a collection or bundle of experiences at a time and a series of discrete souls through time? Moreover, how would one know which soul was his? The same problem of identification regarding bodies and psychological traits occurs regarding immaterial souls.
Absolutists respond by claiming that, in the first-person case, one does not “postulate” that he is an immaterial substance that owns his experiences and body and that endures through time. One is directly aware of it and simply reports it to others. There is a major tradition in philosophy which claims that our knowledge of our own selves is among the very best knowledge we have; the clearest and most obvious case of a substance is in our own self-acquaintance. And in acts of introspection we are simply aware of ourselves as enduring, immaterial centers of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and willings. As a matter of ultimate fact, one’s own self simply is such an enduring entity and one’s awareness of this is basic and fundamental.
3.2.3 A Final Word About Thought Experiments and Imagination
Throughout this chapter, many arguments for or against a certain view of personal identity have relied on intuitions about what is possible or impossible. Could body or memory switches be possible or not? Could I survive a transplant as both of the new persons or not? The absolutist view is supported by fairly commonsense intuitions, and it places great emphasis on the first-person perspective and our own introspective awareness. The empiricist views place emphasis on the third-person point of view and, frequently, on modern science. That is, many philosophers believe that a modern scientific outlook rules out dualism and absolutist views of personal identity. In this view, persons are just natural, physical objects like everything else, and we should assimilate our views of personal identity to those of the identity of natural objects like chairs or rocks.
One’s views about personal identity and the related mind-body problem will depend, to a significant degree, on one’s attitude about the proper order between science on the one hand and philosophy and common sense on the other. In our view, three things stand out in this regard. First, as Christians, the absolutist view would seem to be the most natural way to understand scriptural teaching about the self, the reality of a disembodied intermediate state, the final resurrection, rewards and punishments, and so on.
Second, philosophy is more fundamental and basic than science. In fact, scientific knowledge presupposes and is founded on presuppositions that require philosophical formulation and defense (see chaps. 17–20). When this order is reversed and science becomes the benchmark for formulating a philosophical position on some matter, highly counterintuitive results often follow, as is the case with empiricist positions on personal identity.
Third, strictly speaking, the absolutist (and dualist) position is quite consistent with at least certain areas of science, but not with versions of weak scientism in which the findings of science are used to argue for positions about which, strictly speaking, science is silent. Just because computers can imitate intelligence, or because we continue to learn more about the brain and its interactions with the soul, it does not follow that there is no soul and no enduring unified self. Empiricist views of the self are not the direct result of science, but rather the result of science plus the philosophical position that science is the best or perhaps only way to answer philosophical questions outside the bounds of science properly understood. Thus one’s views about personal identity will depend not on weighing intuitions from commonsense and philosophical arguments against those from science, but against those from certain philosophical extensions of science into areas not properly part of science. It is important to keep in mind, then, that the role of science in matters of the mind-body problem or personal identity is not as straightforward as many physicalists or empiricists about identity would have us believe.
Chapter Summary
Absolutist and empiricist views disagree about the nature of personal identity. Empiricist positions assimilate persons to physical artifacts and deny absolute, strict identity through change for persons. Instead, persons are space-time worms with temporal parts; identity is arbitrary and/or comes in degrees. The body version of empiricist views holds that continuity of body is what constitutes personal identity; memory versions reject this and claim that continuity of memory and other psychological traits are what constitute personal identity. Absolutists hold that persons maintain strict, literal sameness through change, that personal identity is unanalyzable and different from artifact identity, and that the first-person “I” is a unity at a given time and through time, which is most reasonably grounded in a substantial soul.
A number of arguments were given for the absolutist view: our basic experience of the self, the fact that the first-person cannot be reduced to the third-person, our fear of future pain and punishment for past wrong, the need for an enduring self to ground our reasoning processes, switch cases that show that body or memory criteria are neither necessary nor sufficient for personal identity, and a set of specific problems that seem to plague empiricist views.
Next, three arguments against the absolutist view were examined: we are never aware of the “I,” an immaterial “I” makes knowledge of other persons impossible, and an immaterial soul does not solve problems of the unity of the self because it could be a collection of experiences at a time and a series of souls through time. Finally, we looked at the role of commonsense intuitions, philosophical arguments, science, and scientism as they figure into thought experiments regarding what is and is not possible.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
absolute, strict sense of identity
absolute view of personal identity
body view of empiricism
empiricist views of personal identity
first-person perspective
genidentity
immediate resurrection position on immortality
indexical
loose, popular sense of identity
memory view of empiricism
mereological essentialism
re-creation position on immortality
space-time worm
third-person perspective
token reflexive
traditional position on immortality
unity at a given time
unity through time