Awareness Monism (7/10): AM and the problem of personal identity (contra Parfit)
[This blogpost is a part of the series Awareness Monism, originally my Master’s thesis. Go to the disambiguation page here.]
5. AM and the problem of personal identity (contra Parfit)
The problem of personal identity consists in determining what makes a person A at t1 be the same person as person B at t2, i.e. identifying the criterion of personal identity.
In the case of ordinary spatiotemporal objects, it’s not too difficult to accept that their boundaries are in the end customary and fuzzy, and that sometimes deciding whether something is or is not something else is simply a matter of deciding where it is the most useful to draw the boundaries of things for our pragmatic purposes. But in the case of persons—or, perhaps more specifically and vividly, ourselves (myself, yourself)—to many, it seems that identity and survival must actually be unambiguous, that it cannot simply be a matter of custom, or of degree. A person either is or is not me—given some state of the universe, I am either there or not—I either survive or I do not. This has to be a determinate fact, in all cases.
The mostly hypothetical, but apparently physically possible, scenarios of fission, copying, fusion, etc. are particularly interesting cases to consider in these debates, because they seem to reveal the unique nature of identity as it concerns people (as opposed to ordinary spatiotemporal objects). They reveal the fact that people are not just objects, but that there is an interiority to us that needs to be accounted for.
In copying scenarios, a duplicate of a person is created. One such scenario is the Teletransportation case introduced by Parfit[1]: in a hypothetical future society, long-distance travel could be achieved by scanning a person’s body, and recording the exact type and relative locations of the particles that constitute them, sending the information (instead of the actual person’s particles) to the desired destination, and using that to rebuild the person from the material present at the site. The original might be preserved or destroyed.
In fission or splitting scenarios, a person is imagined to be psychologically and/or physically continuous with two (or more) different people—e.g. by having their brain bisected and each half being placed in its own body.
In fusion, two (or more) people are made continuous with a single person, e.g. by splicing brain hemispheres from two different people.
It is when we look at these scenarios from the first person point of view, imagining ourselves undergoing these procedures (as opposed to looking at the people in the thought experiments from the third person point of view, as objects that we observe in the world), that they are revealed in their existential seriousness: if such a thing were to happen to me, would the resulting person in each case be me? Would they be identical to me? Would I survive, or only my replica? Would their experiences be my experiences, or would they happen to somebody else, who just happens to have the same personality and memories as me? If they were to be tortured, should I anticipate their pain?
If AM is true, these scenarios are revealed as not difficult after all—in all cases, regardless of how much or how little physical or psychological continuity there is between us, the resulting person is me—in the sense that their experiences have the same immediacy as the experiences of the person that I am now. Of course, if we operate with a more content-oriented concept of person, e.g. when psychological continuity actually matters to our survival or identity, this is obviously not always the case.
One kind of famous (dis)solution of the problem, which is, as far as I can tell, actually compatible with the AM claim, is offered by Parfit. His approach to the problem of personal identity is reductionist[2]. He denies that personal identity is a further fact (that the subject of experience is a separately existing entity, “distinct from a brain and body, and a series of physical and mental events”[3]), but consists in facts about psychological continuity. Parfit denies that there is any further “special intimate connection” between the original person and their future selves under normal circumstances that is missing in a mere copy: “My continued existence never involves this deep further fact. What I fear will be missing is always missing.”[4]
On his account, personal identity consists in “relation R”, i.e. psychological connectedness and/or continuity[5] (with the right cause—which, Parfit argues, is any cause), and that relation holding between two people uniquely (so that it doesn’t hold in splitting/branching cases—personal identity is an extrinsic property). Psychological connectedness is a matter of degree, and so is not transitive. Therefore, it cannot in itself account for personal identity, which is not a matter of degree and is transitive. In some cases, e.g. in splitting, where psychological continuity is preserved equally between the original person and the two resulting people, identity is not preserved. However, Parfit believes that personal identity is not what matters. What matters is relation R itself, i.e. psychological connectedness—so what matters might be preserved even if personal identity is not (as in the case of splitting).
According to Parfit, in certain special cases, the question of whether a person is me or not is an empty question—all we need to describe is the kind of psychological and physical relation that a person has to me, and we thereby describe everything there is to know. To say that the person is me or not adds no further information—“it does not describe two different possibilities, one of which must be true”[6], but rather these are two different descriptions of the same reality. That is, identity or survival is not always determinate. And so I might not know whether I am about to survive or die—and yet know everything there is to know.
Parfit identifies two kinds of unities of consciousness: a unity of consciousness at any given time, and of a whole life. Revealingly, these “cannot be explained by claiming that different experiences are had by the same person. These unities must be explained by describing the relations between these many experiences, and their relations to this person's brain. And we can refer to these experiences, and fully describe the relations between them, without claiming that these experiences are had by a person.”[7] However, relations of content account for unity of consciousness of a person if “person” is defined by content in the first place. They cannot be that which makes two experiences belong to me in the sense of both experiences being immediately present and live (like this experience is), i.e. if we want to talk about ourselves as subjects of experience in the sense of awareness. Unity of experience of this kind can only be achieved by an identity of presentation of experience—i.e. identity in its being, identity of awareness. This, however, has nothing to do with its content, but on the contrary with the way of realizing of that content.
I do not disagree with Parfit here—in his exploration of personal identity, he clearly works from a different concept, and I agree that applying the term “person” to awareness is somewhat confusing (as by “person” we usually mean a human being, i.e. a special kind of spatiotemporal object). Parfit says: “Our existence just involves the existence of our brains and bodies, and the doing of our deeds, and the thinking of our thoughts, and the occurrence of certain other physical and mental events.”[8] Indeed, if this is our starting understanding of ourselves, then his analysis misses nothing (if AM is true; i.e. unless there are many awarenesses). It is, however, not the only understanding of ourselves we can have—if we understand ourselves to be empty subjects, that are only contingently the people that they are, that could be someone else, i.e. if we understand ourselves to essentially be awareness, then Parfit’s analysis is not really about us. This, however, does not make it false.
Parfit actually touches on the question of the empty subject (i.e. awareness), who could be anybody, when discussing the possibility of our being “Cartesian Egos”:
“On this view, history might have gone just as it did, except that I was Napoleon and he was me. This is not the claim that Derek Parfit might have been Napoleon. The claim is rather that I am one Cartesian Ego, and that Napoleon was another, and that these two Egos might have ‘occupied’ each other's places.”[9]
He dismisses this approach as possibly unintelligible, since it is disconnected from any “publicly observable or privately introspectible facts”[10]. My intuition on this is different: the fact that such scenarios are conceivable in the first place, that I can imagine a world where I am actually Napoleon—and I can do this easily and with clear understanding of what it would mean[11]‒reveals something crucial about what I am. Again, that is not to say that Parfit’s more psychological understanding of what we are (or what a person is) is wrong; it is simply a different approach. And I agree that it might not be appropriate to call Cartesian Egos of this kind “persons”, since a “person” is normally understood to be a human being, and Cartesian Egos (or empty subjects/awarenesses) are certainly not (identical to) human beings, even though they also, in an important sense, are human beings[12].
The problem with Parfit’s solution is that it doesn’t account for the internality of experience—it seems to treat the problem of personal identity as a problem of identity of just a certain metaphysically unremarkable type of physical object. Even if we accept that the question of whether my teletransported copy is actually the same person or not is an empty question, on account of the fact that we can describe all the empirical facts of the matter without settling it, it does not, and could not, help settle the existential question of whether her experience will be my experience, i.e. whether I can anticipate her suffering, for example[13]. Even though whether an experience is an experience of a particular person or not can be an empty question, whether an experience is mine or not, whether it is given to me or not, cannot be dissolved in this way. Even though a copy of E (or, an experience belonging to that copy), can be more or less E (or, can be more or less E’s experience), an experience, an experiential life cannot be somewhat mine, or more or less mine.
Parfit claims there is no further fact—and under AM also, it is indeed the case that there is nothing that makes the experiences of future E somehow more related to me than any other experience, except for the similarity and continuity of its content (which is a matter of degree)—there is no me-essence that might or might not be exemplified in a person that would make them me. So he concludes: “Ordinary survival is about as bad as being destroyed and Replicated.”[14]
To reiterate: there are several things we care about when it comes to our own survival. We care about preservation of our memories, personality traits, and relationships, and, especially to the degree that they preserve the former, our bodies—but beyond these features, which are really features reflecting content, and which are also available to others (from their point of view), we care about our consciousness being preserved. It is not sufficient that there is a person with our memories and personality traits. What matters is that this person is me. This is why some people have trouble accepting that their copies would be them, why some people seem to care deeply about physical continuity[15], and this is what is missing in Parfit’s solution.
Either an experience is mine, or it is not. It cannot be a matter of degree; and whether an experience is mine has nothing to do with its content—psychological continuity with my past experiences is not required at all.
On the empty understanding of what we are, i.e. if I conceive of myself as awareness, if I find it conceivable that I could be anybody, solutions to the problem of personal identity that focus on content become irrelevant, or secondary, because they do not address the key question. If one notices one’s awareness and its essential simplicity, reductionist solutions to the problem of personal identity become problematic, precisely because they do not account for this feature.
This overlooked feature of what we are is also recognized by Klawonn. He says that it is “more correct to characterize [Klawonn’s] theory of the I-dimension as a theory of self-identity than as a theory of personal identity”, whereas he holds that “the most fundamental existential concerns depend on self-identity rather than identity as a person. It is for instance my continued self-identity which makes my own future relevant to me, e.g. so that a future experience of pain is going to have precisely the kind of immediate relevance that only my pain can have to myself”[16].
Nevertheless it would seem that if we accept Parfit’s reductionist solution, AM follows. Our survival as particular people can sometimes be an empty question—but if there is no fundamental difference between people that would resolve the problematic personal identity cases, that means there is no difference in the interiority of experience, i.e. awareness, either. So if we understand ourselves to be empty subjects, i.e. awareness—if I am only contingently bound to this particular person—then, if Parfit is right about there being no further fact that binds me to my future self in a unique and essential way, I am everybody.
Again: it seems to me that the reason why the question of personal identity is a special case of object identity is because we (or, some people at least) recognize that there is something essentially indivisible about the interiority of experience. Whereas the boundaries of objects are decided based on what is practical, and the special cases in between need not concern us too much—they are a matter of useful convention—it doesn’t feel right to accept that our own boundaries are similarly conventional. Our intuition is that there has to be an unambiguous answer to whether some person is me or not, whether I survive or not. We mix up content, i.e. psychology (where the boundaries are fuzzy), with awareness, i.e. with how that content is revealed, its being. We identify with content, yet we cannot get rid of the intuition that our survival is a binary matter, a matter of “essence”. Parfit dismisses any such essence; he analyzes people as objects, whose identity and survival is a matter of setting practical boundaries, and which can be in some special cases an empty question. His solution is, it would seem, therefore not only perfectly compatible with AM, but actually entails it.
If there is nothing that distinguishes between experiences of different people other than their content—if there are no souls—then there is no identity or relation between yesterday’s E’s experience and the present one (besides psychological continuity, i.e. continuity of content) that is missing between E’s present experience and your present experience. There are no souls, and so the only difference between experiences is that of content—ergo, there is no difference in how they exist, and so AM is true.
There is no way around it—if you don’t believe that you (in the sense of awareness) are all conscious beings, you believe in souls. I don’t mean it as a reductio—I think the soul-solution has been unjustly dismissed in contemporary times, presented as a kind of obvious falsity, a blind alley of thought, an absurdity, a silliness (similarly to how solipsism is treated). This to me seems an artifact or a symptom of the dominance of the matter-first, sometimes scientistic worldview (and understanding of “being”) of our times, dismissive of anything that is in any way reminiscent of mysticism or religion, rather than resting on sophisticated arguments which would justify such dismissal. However, that is what AP amounts to—the existence of some number of “individual substances”, which differ from one another not in virtue of having different properties in the usual sense, but purely haecceitically (i.e. they simply are different substances, they are not different in virtue of their properties). Under AM, there are only experiences—but all have the same subjective character.
So if we agree with Parfit that there is indeed no further fact, then AM is true. If there is no deep distinction between us, then we share the same awareness. If E’s experience now and some E’s experience ten years ago do not both manifest some special essence that makes them both mine, then all experiences are like this experience now. To say that I am essentially nowhere, that there is no essence of me, amounts to saying that the essence of me is everywhere—they are two ways of saying the same thing. I exist here—but if there is nothing special about here that could account for this fact, then that means I am everywhere.
If there is no me-essence, then the me-essence is everywhere.
[1] Parfit 1984, p. 200
[2] Reductionists deny there is a further fact that determines personal identity; they hold that personal identity reduces to facts about physical or psychological continuity. Non-reductionists posit a further fact that constitutes personal identity. AM could be understood either to entail a postulation of a further fact about persons beyond psychology or physiology (i.e. awareness), or to also amount to an essentially reductionist view about people, because it holds that there is no distinction in awareness between people, and so it cannot be used as a criterion of personal identity (else we end up with Open Individualism—see Chapter 1, Part 2 of this thesis).
[3] ibid., p. 223
[4] ibid., p. 280
[5] “Psychological connectedness is the holding of particular direct psychological connections. Psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness” ibid., p. 206
[6] ibid., p. 235
[7] ibid., p. 217
[8] ibid., p. 216
[9] ibid., p. 228
[10] ibid., p. 228
[11] It would mean that instead of E’s life being live to me, instead of my experiencing the world from her perspective, it would be Napoleon’s.
[12] Perhaps the way a block of marble can be a statue; i.e. an experience of a human being is a certain kind of content that an awareness can manifest.
[13] cf. Fasching (2021): “The core of the problem of personal identity only comes into view when it is considered from a first-person perspective. When one thinks of other persons and asks under which conditions one regards them as the same persons over time, one might think of things like the sameness of the body, of the fact that the respective person remembers her past experiences, that her experiences and actions are sensibly connected, that the person displays a certain constancy of personality, and so on.”, “Things radically change, however, as soon as one considers such questions from a first-person perspective: When I, for example, imagine that I am facing such a fission procedure, it seems that the question of whether I will be one or the other of the two future persons – whether I will experience the pain of the one person or the happiness of the other, for example – is a question that must have an unambiguous answer, and one that is not a matter of some arbitrary decision or convention. In other words: It does not seem to be an “empty question”. There seem to be definitely two different conceivable possibilities of what may happen which are not just different descriptions of the same states of affairs […] – that is, from a first-person point of view I can clearly imagine different courses of events where objectively (from a purely third-personal perspective) everything would be the same […].”
[14] Parfit 1984, p. 280
[15] Apparently presupposing that their consciousness is bound only to (generated by) a particular object in the world. Correctly tracking that object therefore amounts to tracking our identity and survival.
[16] Klawonn 2009, p. 93