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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”

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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”

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Evolution of the Self

Thought-Experimental Results, and More Questions

Evolution of the Self CUIn my story Forking, Elliot Otley is accidentally duplicated.  During part of the story, each Elliot regards his counterpart as another man.  Later, he comes to regard the other Elliot as himself.  The difference between those two attitudes is dramatic.

When he thinks of the other Elliot as a different person, it is as a rival for his property, career and family, everything that he holds dear.  The relationship is one of competition and animosity.  When he starts to think of the other Elliot as himself, the animosity vanishes, replaced by sympathy and understanding.  The relationship becomes cooperative.

When Elliot first learns of the other Elliot’s existence, he responds with hatred and fear, as to a dangerous competitor.  Later, the two Elliots stop competing, and are fully cooperative.  Yet their beliefs about the relevant facts of the case have not changed.  Throughout the story, Elliot knows how travel-by-information works, and what went wrong that led to his duplication.  What changed Elliot’s mind about his relationship to the other was not new factual information. Continue reading “Evolution of the Self”