Archive for the ‘Parfit’ Category
Monday, October 18th, 2010
Our investments in the future do not stop paying dividends when we die. Other beneficiaries may cash the cheques, but that does not represent a loss to ourselves, because our connections to them are not fundamentally different from our connections to ourselves during our remainder of our lifetimes. In that way, it’s as though someone else always cashes the cheques.
In practice, this means we need not hold all our future eggs in one basket. We have no reason to invest only in ourselves. It is no less rational to work towards goals that benefit other people, or the non-human world, than it is to work for our own benefit. They may be goals for places far outside our homes, and for times following our personal deaths. We can commit ourselves to goals at future times when there will be no one alive for whom we now feel full-blown self-concern. Like Terry Fox, we can engage with a future in which we will no longer exist. (more…)
Posted in death, morality, motivation, Parfit, psychology, self, self interest, self-concern, unselfishness | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
I am always skeptical of claims that humans are unique. The facts that we use tools, and clothes, and language, have failed to differentiate us from other species. The more we learn about nature, the less well defined seem to be the boundaries between natural domains.
Avoiding sweeping generalizations, I will still say that the human species has gone further than others in some directions, including preoccupation with the future and awareness of death. I doubt my cat Charlie thinks further ahead than his next meal, and not even that far when his belly is full. Charlie lives in the day, and in the hour: he hunts with ferocious intensity, and sleeps soundly afterwards. I, in contrast, devote most of my energy to projects which may not yield results for weeks or years, results which in some cases (like the Phantom Self project) are highly uncertain. Charlie lives mainly in the scene of his immediate experience; I concern myself mainly with the future portrayed in my imagination. Charlie’s experience is, by and large, an accurate representation of the world he lives in; but the future events I imagine are often very different from events in the real future, as it finally turns out.
As early as young adulthood, some people feel a need to plan their entire lives. Our society encourages them: to choose a career path, for example, that will finance a mortgage. Before young people have paid off their student loans, ads exhort them to start saving for retirement. Careful planning for the future is praised as prudent behaviour.
Such prudent planning allowed our ancestors to make the transition from roving bands of hunter-gatherers to settled agrarian societies – a transition that presaged a population explosion and the beginning of human dominance of this planet. Success in farming required thinking about next year. Migration to colder climates would have been impossible without the ability to think things through: to preserve and tan the hides of slaughtered animals with the intention of making clothes and footwear; to collect stones and sods in summer in order to build shelters for the coming winter. Natural selection favoured the species – ours – with the greatest ability to plan for the long term. And so it has continued to this day: our powerful imaginations allow us to coordinate our efforts, invent, design, and build, anticipate potential disasters and sometimes successfully avoid them. Being so preoccupied with our futures leads inevitably to thinking about our deaths. (more…)
Posted in afterlife, anticipation, death, Hazlitt, human replication, motivation, Parfit, personal identity, religion, self interest, self-concern, Williams | 1 Comment »
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. – William Hazlitt
As early as 1796, when he was just eighteen, the English essayist William Hazlitt may have become the first Westerner to see that self-concern is not rationally required.
Hazlitt published his insight in 1805, in his Essays on the Principles of Human Action. Introducing the 1990 edition, John Price informs us that “The reading public and the reviewing journals regarded it, for the most part, with indifference or hostility.” Hazlitt’s Essays and the idea they contain fell into obscurity for the best part of two centuries, after which the idea re-emerged independently as part of a new wave of thought about personal identity (more…)
Posted in anticipation, Barresi, Hazlitt, human replication, morality, motivation, Nozick, Parfit, personal identity, Raymond Martin, self interest, self-concern | No Comments »
Friday, May 21st, 2010
Published in 1998, Raymond Martin’s Self-Concern set a new direction for the philosophical discussion of personal identity by shifting the focus from “the normative question of whether this or that should matter in survival to the largely descriptive question of what…actually does…matter.” Martin questions the philosophical goal of trying to show that we all should (rationally) respond in the same way to the puzzle cases – a goal shared by Parfit and his opponents – calling the attempt “survival-value imperialism.” In examining how people actually value their own survival, his book goes a long way towards characterizing the conditions that make it difficult or easy for people to self-identify across time. It is largely about the psychology of self-concern. (more…)
Posted in anticipation, death, fission rejuvenation, human replication, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, psychology, Raymond Martin, Reasons and Persons, religion, self, self interest, self-concern, teleportation | No Comments »
Friday, February 26th, 2010
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.
- Persons are entities that can be multiply instantiated, like tunes, dances, literary works, electronic files, computer programs, and genes.
- 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.
- Persons are distinct from the living biological organisms they depend on, as software is distinct from the hardware it runs on. (more…)
Posted in anosognosia, death, evolution, human replication, identity, Kamitani, neuroscience, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, Pro-Life, psychology, Ramachandran, religion, sanctity of life, self, self interest, teleportation, Trivers | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
We are not Cartesian egos. We are not biological organisms either.
Not Cartesian egos
A Cartesian ego is a kind of mental or spiritual thing that is thought to inhabit a human body and give it life. Many people believe we can exist independently of a human body – that we survive the death of our bodies, continuing to have experiences either without a body, or by being reborn in another body.
I hardly need to argue against Cartesian egos. The idea is in widespread disrepute without any assistance from me. It is hard to reconcile with a scientific view of the world. We have no convincing evidence that such things exist. Until we have, we should use Occam’s Razor for its intended purpose to prune them from our conceptual scheme. Leaving them in creates clutter and awkward problems.
One problem comes from split brain research. When the corpus callosum connecting a patient’s two cerebral hemispheres is cut, two centres of consciousness appear where there was one before. Should we conclude that the surgeon’s knife divided a spiritual substance? Instead of deepening our understanding, this multiplies mysteries.
Despite its academic unrespectability, the idea that we are Cartesian egos is embraced by billions of people. It is deeply involved with emotion, as this passage from Umberto Eco’s novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana illustrates:
One evening the spiritual director stood in front of the altar balustrade, illuminated – like all of us, like the entire chapel – by that single candle that haloed him in light, leaving his face in darkness. Before dismissing us, he told us a story. One night, in a convent school, a girl died, a young, pious, beautiful girl. The next morning, she was stretched out on a catafalque in the nave of the church, and the mourners were reciting their prayers for the deceased, when all of a sudden the corpse sat up, eyes wide and finger pointing at the celebrant, and said in a cavernous voice, “Father, do not pray for me! Last night I had an impure thought, a single thought – and now I am damned!” (more…)
Posted in Animalism, Cartesian ego, death, Eric Olson, itravel, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, self, self interest, teleportation, thought experiment | No Comments »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
To find the right answers, ask the right questions. I have skated around the question, “Is there a rational justification for self concern?” without coming up with a solid argument that settles it one way or the other. But there is a related question which can be answered.
Two Views of Teleportation
As we have seen, teleportation by means of information transfer can be viewed in two ways. The facts of the case are: I am scanned in North Vancouver and my information is sent to Omaha, where it is used to construct a living replica of me. Meanwhile, the original in North Vancouver is destroyed. Two views of these events are:
SURVIVE: I am transported from North Vancouver to Omaha.
DIE: I am killed in North Vancouver, and someone else – my replica – is constructed in Omaha.
People who think about teleportation disagree about whether SURVIVE or DIE is an accurate description of the case. How can it be settled which view is true – or whether neither is true?
People who disagree about SURVIVE and DIE do not disagree about the facts of the case. The facts are not in question. No scientific experiment can be devised to settle which of SURVIVE and DIE is an accurate description of the facts. (more…)
Posted in death, Hazlitt, identity, itravel, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, Reasons and Persons, self, self interest, teleportation, thought experiment | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Imagine, in the early days of books, a small library consisting entirely of original manuscripts. Some of them are very old, and have been attacked by mice. Some have deteriorated so much that their pages crumble to dust when the custodian of the library tries to read them. He mourns the loss of these books, and contemplates the inevitable decay of the remaining books with sorrow. To be sure, new manuscripts are occasionally added to the library, but they cannot replace the volumes that are lost forever. This goes on until, one day, the young assistant librarian has an idea. “This book will be unreadable in five years,” he tells his elder. “But I can read it now. If I copy the words of this book onto sheets of new vellum, and bind them in a strong new binding, we will be able to read it for many decades to come.” The old librarian tenderly strokes the cracked spine of the crumbling volume, and shakes his head. “What good is a copy? It wouldn’t be the same book.”
In the previous post, I summarized one of Derek Parfit’s main arguments that personal identity – being the same person over time – is not what matters in survival.
Human fission – one person ‘splitting’ into two – is clearly imaginable. It is physically possible, and is not far from being technically possible. Parfit argues compellingly that fission would preserve what is important in survival. Specifically, if Parfit knew that both of his cerebral hemispheres were about to be separately transplanted into two separate bodies, he would have the same rational justification for anticipating the experiences of both of the post-op survivors as each of us has for anticipating his or her own future experiences. This, despite the fact that the original Derek Parfit ceased to exist when he was divided. In this case, ceasing to exist is very unlike ordinary death. Ceasing to exist just consists in the fact that the two post-op survivors are different persons from one another, and neither one is the same person as the pre-op Derek Parfit. Loss of identity of this kind does not matter. (more…)
Posted in David Lewis, death, human replication, identity, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, Reasons and Persons, replication, self, self interest, teleportation, thought experiment | No Comments »
Friday, January 1st, 2010
Part 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) (more…)
Posted in Bauby, brain transplant, consciousness, death, Fechner, human replication, neuroscience, Parfit, personal identity, philosophy, psychology, Reasons and Persons, replication, self, self interest, split brain, thought experiment | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Parfit’s Glass Tunnel
In 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) (more…)
Posted in Capgras, de Waal, ethology, evolution, Gallup, Gergely, Michael Lewis, Mitchell, neuroscience, Nozick, Parfit, personal identity, phantom limb, philosophy, psychology, Ramachandran, Sacks, self, self interest, thought experiment, Watson | 1 Comment »
