Abstract
When it comes to personal identity, two approaches have long ruled the roost. The first is the psychological approach, which has it that our persistence through time consists in the continuance of certain of our psychological traits, such as our memories, beliefs, desires, or personality. The second is the biological approach, according to which personal persistence consists in continuity in our physical or biological makeup. Amid the bipartite reign of these approaches, a third contender has emerged: the phenomenal approach. On this approach, personal persistence consists in continuity in phenomenal consciousness or the capacity for phenomenal consciousness. In this paper I will introduce and defend a new argument for the phenomenal approach. In the process, I will argue against the psychological and biological approaches. I will also address some lingering questions and outline further ways to develop the phenomenal approach.
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Notes
Here (and in what follows) I am setting aside anti-criterialism—the view that there are no criteria of personal identity (or any other object’s identity) through time. I have argued against anti-criterialism elsewhere (see Duncan 2014, forthcoming). Rather than rehearse those arguments here, I will simply set anti-criterialism aside and work within the assumption that there is a criterion of personal persistence.
Recent consciousness-based theories are somewhat scarce. Dainton and Bayne (2005) sketch some potential approaches to such a theory, and Dainton (2008) and Bayne (2010, Ch. 12) each describe their separate views. John Foster (1991, Ch. 8) and Peter Unger (1990) also propose consciousness-based theories.
I’ll say a lot more about capacities for consciousness—including what exactly they are, how they are individuated, and how they persist through time—later on, in Sect. 3.
Here, for various reasons, my example is a thought. But some (e.g., Carruthers 2011; Prinz 2011) deny that thoughts are conscious. These philosophers should feel free to substitute my talk of thoughts with talk of inner speech or some other conscious event. Doing so will not affect my point. Also, here I do not mean to be making any substantive assumptions about the individuation of thoughts or any other conscious event—about, for example, whether ‘2 + 2 = 4’ should be understood as a single thought or rather a series of shorter thoughts. ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is just an arbitrary example. Feel free to think up your own example, if you like.
This point may be seen as an invocation of Descartes’ Cogito. But one needn’t accept Descartes’ argument, or various claims associated with it, in order to accept that I can be certain that this thought is my thought. Many philosophers, only some of whom are sympathetic to Cartesian doctrines, accept that we are “immune to errors of (self-)misidentification” (see below for more on this). This claim should also be kept separate from claims about self-knowledge in general, or in other domains. To say that I can be certain that this thought is my thought does not entail that our powers of introspection are immune from error in general or even that they are particularly reliable.
See, for example, Shoemaker (1968), O’Brien (2007), Evans (2001), Howell (2006), and Gertler (2011, p. 215–217). I take the claim that we are immune from the sort of errors mentioned above to be uncontroversial. It is controversial which cases are to count. But the case that I have described should be safe by anyone’s standards. And even if it is not—if, for example, you think that ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is too long of a thought to be immune from error through misidentification—then feel free to just pick a different, shorter thought. Maybe just think about something for as quickly as you can—for a few milliseconds, perhaps. It’s doubtful that any thought of which we are aware, or that’s ever been used as an example to illustrate immunity from error, is instantaneous (see Duncan (2015a)). So some such thought will do.
Olson (2007, p. 41) says that detached cerebra aren’t even organisms, let alone animals. However, some philosophers who might be called animalists say that cerebra are (or at least can be) organisms if they are separated from the body (see van Inwagen 1990). These philosophers might say that you do persist from t to t*. So the present argument does not apply to those versions of animalism.
Of course, any theory of personal persistence can be stated in disjunctive form. A psychological continuity theory, for instance, can be stated as a disjunction of all the determinate mental continuities that make for psychological continuity. But the kind of theory we want to consider here is one with multiple sufficient (and only jointly necessary) conditions that are divergent enough from each other that the theory isn’t better stated in terms of a single, non-disjunctive necessary and sufficient condition. And, again, no one that I know of defends such a theory.
This view is not only intuitively plausible (or so I say), it may also soothe other intuitions that may at first seem to be at odds with the phenomenal approach. For example, some philosophers say that we people are more than just experiencers—thinkers, feelers, and perceivers. They say we are also agents (Velleman 2006); or we are essentially capable of reflection and self-evaluation (Taylor 1976); or we are essentially crafters of self-narratives (Schechtman 2011; MacIntyre 1984); or we are essentially bearers of moral responsibility (Locke 1689/1975). I believe that these philosophers are mistaken—for some of the reasons I gave in the previous section against animalism and various psychological continuity theories, I don’t think we are any of the above things essentially. However, given my view that personal persistence requires the continued capacity for self-experience, I can help explain why the above traits may seem to be essential to us. I think the above traits are connected to our essence in that the capacities for action, reflection, self-evaluation, and self-narration are grounded in our capacity to undergo experiences that contain self-experiences. They depend on the kind of self-awareness afforded to us by our distinctive form of consciousness.
I say “such as parts of the brain, perhaps,” but my claim that people have the capacity for consciousness in virtue of the nature of certain of their parts is compatible with wide range of views—even, for example, substance dualism. Most substance dualists say that minds/souls are simple (i.e., they lack proper parts). But then the above claim would just be that people have the capacity for consciousness in virtue of the nature of their one part—their simple immaterial soul.
I’ve added “directly responsible” here because removing a person’s arm (for example) would change her structural features, but not in any way that’s relevant to her capacity for consciousness.
This is not to say that there is no fact of the matter as to whether an intervention counts as appropriate stimulation. I think there is always a fact of the matter as to whether something is a person, as to whether it is conscious, and as to whether something has the capacity for consciousness. Thus, I think there is always a fact of the matter as to whether an intervention merely stimulates (rather than creates) a capacity for consciousness, and thereby counts as appropriate stimulation. Still, there will be borderline cases. But that’s true of almost any theory of personal persistence (Consider: being caught up in a life, being an animal, having the same mental states or characteristics as, and various other conditions that feature in theories of personal persistence, all admit of borderline cases).
See Lewis (1976, p. 17) and Shoemaker (1985) for discussion of this causal dependence. Dainton and Bayne (2005) contend that this sort of dependence should not be construed as causal—that it can be based on a kind of experiential dependence. It’s not clear to me why the experiential dependence that Dainton and Bayne describe shouldn’t count as a kind of causal dependence, broadly construed. But not much turns on this point.
Four-dimensionalists may prefer to talk about persistence in terms of a series of non-identical object stages that are related in some way other than by strict identity. If this is one’s view, then invoking the transitivity of identity won’t work here. But one can get the same result by characterizing sameness in capacities for consciousness over any period of time in terms of the ancestral of CC-Connectedness, whereby person stage P has the same capacity for thinking as person stage P* if and only if P is CC-Connected to P*, or P is CC-Connected to a person stage who is CC-Connected to P*, or P is CC-Connected to a person stage who is CC-Connected to a person stage who is CC-Connected to P*, and so on.
Notice that this view rules out “gappy” existence; that is, it implies that people cannot come back into existence after having gone out of existence. I embrace this implication. But it does yield some (apparently) counterintuitive results. For example, suppose that, at time t, Aurora suffers a traumatic brain injury and loses the capacity for consciousness. But then suppose the brain heals so that, by time t*, a person—call her ‘Aurora*’—replete with the capacity for consciousness, wakes up as if from the dead. Aurora and Aurora* are not CC-continuous. So, at stated, my view entails that they are not identical. But is that right? For some, this may seem like the wrong result. So they may wish to adjust my view as follows. The first step is to add a clause to my characterization of CC-Connectedness saying that CC-Connectedness may obtain between people at non-adjacent times if some to-be-specified causal dependence and/or overlap in parts connects their capacities for consciousness. Then the next step is to say that a chain of CC-Connections needn’t be unbroken in order for CC-Continuity to obtain. So Aurora and Aurora*, for example, may be CC-Continuous. Gappy existence is thus tolerated. I leave further details to believers in gappy existence.
There are other issues that defenders of the phenomenal approach are in a unique position to address, but that have already been addressed. For example, Dainton and Bayne (2005) show how the phenomenal approach makes sense of certain puzzling (and paradoxical) mind transfer cases, such as those introduced by Bernard Williams (1973).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ross Cameron, Nina Emery, Mark Fiocco, Brie Gertler, Harold Langsam, Trenton Merricks, Paul Nedelisky, Adam Pautz, Nick Rimmel, Tomoji Shogenji, Jack Spencer, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and/or conversations on various versions of this paper.
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Duncan, M. A new argument for the phenomenal approach to personal persistence. Philos Stud 177, 2031–2049 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01297-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01297-x