Posted on

The Plastic Self

Neurologists have demonstrated plasticity in the spatial sense of self, or body-image.  Not only are the ‘phantom limbs’ of amputees somewhat malleable, under special circumstances (and also remarkably intractable under others), but we can be induced to perceive a detached rubber hand, lying on a table, as our own hand, and even to feel that the table-top itself is part of our own body.  But how plastic, if at all, are our ideas of ourselves extended into the future and the past?

Published in 1970, Bernard Williams’ “The Self and the Future” is one of the seminal papers that gave rise to the contemporary philosophical debate on personal identity.   Williams presents two series of thought-experiments, which lead his own intuitions in opposite directions on the question whether a future person, described as having a certain relationship to his present self, would be himself or someone else.  One set of cases tends to persuade him that what matters in personal identity – the relation that makes us the same person over time – is psychological continuity.  The other set of cases makes him think that bodily continuity is more important.  Williams reports being left “not in the least clear” which is right.

Williams presents this as a philosophical problem.  I suggest it is more fruitfully regarded as an experimental result – a single data-point in a psychological experiment, with Williams as both subject and experimenter.  If repeated with a larger, and less contaminated, sample population, such an experiment could shed the light of empirical research on the question with which I opened this post.  I hope someone will undertake such a study, which could lead in interesting directions. Continue reading “The Plastic Self”

Posted on

What We Are

What are we, if we are informational entities?

Like most people (and unlike some philosophers) I will stick to the view that we are persons.  In this post I will try to state clearly what persons are according to the theory of persons I recommend, which I call the Information Theory.  I will begin to flesh the theory out, by drawing out some of its consequences.

The Information Theory

Here are some claims of the Information Theory of Persons.

  1. Persons are entities that can be multiply instantiated, like tunes, dances, literary works, electronic files, computer programs, and genes.
  2. Like all those things, persons are entities that can be expressed as information.  A person can cross a spatio-temporal gap in the form of information carried by any convenient medium, such as electronic files.
  3. Persons are distinct from the living biological organisms they depend on, as software is distinct from the hardware it runs on. Continue reading “What We Are”
Posted on

Parfit on What Matters

Parfit's Division1Part Three of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is titled “Personal Identity”.  One of its central claims is what Parfit calls the Reductionist View: that persons are not “separately existing entities” over and above their brains and bodies.  What is important about being the same person at different times consists primarily in psychological continuity and connectedness.

Another, related claim is that being the same person is not in itself very important.  In particular, it is not a rational justification for self-concern.  If I know that someone in the future will not be myself, that is not a good reason not to anticipate having that person’s experiences.  What is important are the underlying, real relations of psychological continuity and connectedness.  And even they do not have exactly the same importance that we tend to believe personal identity has.

Part Three of Reasons and Persons contains 150 pages of closely-reasoned arguments which are by and large original, compelling, and illuminating.  I will not try to restate all of Parfit’s arguments, or to comment on them all; instead, I strongly recommend his book to anyone interested in this subject.   In this post, I will review one of Parfit’s more important lines of argument in Chapter 12, “Why Our Identity is Not What Matters.”

Brain-Splitting

Parfit begins this chapter by making a refreshing break from the philosophical practice of thought-experiments, building instead on actual cases documented in medical literature.  These are the famous ‘split-brain’ cases, in which surgeons severed the corpus callosum, the main bundle of nerve fibres connecting the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, as a treatment for epilepsy.  Cutting the connection reduces the severity of epileptic attacks by preventing seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to the other.  But there are side-effects.

The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness’.  (p 245) Continue reading “Parfit on What Matters”

Posted on

The Phantom Self

Parfit’s Glass Tunnel

Dali Phantom selfIn the Introduction to this project, I said:

It’s the strong – and I believe, irrational – hold that the idea of the self has over us, and particularly its role in motivating action, that led me to characterize it as the ‘phantom self’.  Like the Phantom of the Opera, the self has a powerful voice that demands to be obeyed.  Like an amputee’s phantom limb, it is a vividly felt presence – but there is nothing really there.

It is time to flesh out that characterization.

No contemporary philosopher – perhaps no philosopher ever, in the West – has done more to break the phantom’s grip than Derek Parfit.  In Reasons and Persons, Parfit argues persuasively that, although we are strongly inclined to believe that our continued existence is “a deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity”, that belief is not true.  He goes on to describe the difference this philosophical conclusion made to his own life.

Is the truth depressing?  Some may find it so.  But I find it liberating, and consoling.  When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself.  My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness.  When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared.  I now live in the open air.  There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people.  But the difference is less.  I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others. (RP p 281) Continue reading “The Phantom Self”

Posted on

Progress in Replication Technology

Nanomanufacturing3All that’s needed to make a case for radical reform of the idea of self is a thought-experiment with a clear and compelling outcome.  However, the world is full of people who pay no attention to thought-experiments, however revealing they may be in exposing inconsistencies in everyday ideas, because thought-experiments aren’t ‘real’.  These are people from Missouri, as the saying goes, who demand to be shown.  And I have nothing to show, yet.

But even people from Missouri can be convinced to take a possibility seriously if there’s enough evidence that, although not here yet, it’s coming fast, probably not very far away, not in front of the house yet but closer than the next county.  Like the second Al-Qaeda attack on American soil.  Something worth thinking about.

This post examines the possibility whether we will one day have the capability of replicating a living human being, and if so, when might that be?  Continue reading “Progress in Replication Technology”

Posted on

The Phantom Neuroscientist

Cubist KingIn recent weeks, I have been devouring V.S. Ramachandran’s books and videos on what can be learned about the brain by studying patients with neurological damage.  To clarify my title, Ramachandran is not a phantom himself, but a doctor of phantoms – actually a ‘phantom-buster’.  He is famous for curing phantom-limb syndrome – an amputee’s stubborn, often debilitating, physical awareness of a limb that has been surgically removed – by an amazingly simple, low-tech trick with mirrors.

The ‘Phantom-Buster’ Mirror Trick

One of Ramachandran’s patients was desperate for relief from pain in his phantom arm, which he felt to be cramped and paralyzed.  As described in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness:

We propped up a mirror vertically on a table…so that it was at right angles to his chest, and asked him to position his paralyzed phantom left arm on the left of the mirror and mimic its posture with his right hand, which was on the right side of the mirror.  We then asked him to look into the right-hand side of the mirror so that he saw the mirror reflection of his intact hand optically superimposed on the felt location of the phantom.  We then asked him to try to make symmetrical movements of both hands, such as clapping or conducting an orchestra, while looking in the mirror.  Imagine his amazement and ours when suddenly he not only saw the phantom move but felt it move as well.

Continue reading “The Phantom Neuroscientist”