Mineness and personal identity
This is chapter 6 of my work Subject of experience and personal identity.
The problem of personal identity is the problem of determining whether some person is the same person as some other person. In other words: If there is a person A and a person B, under what circumstances is it the case that person A is the same as person B? Different solutions to the problem of personal identity offer different criteria of personal identity by which this question can be answered.
Reductionist theories hold that the fact of personal identity reduces to, or consists in, certain other facts – they deny that personal identity is a distinct further fact. The psychological criterion of personal identity reduces personal identity to facts about psychological continuity („with the right kind of cause“[1]); the physical criterion to facts about physical continuity. On these theories, the identity of persons thus consists in continuity of body or mind (memories, personality).
Non-reductionist theories hold that the fact of personal identity is not reducible to other facts – “personal identity is a further fact distinct from physical and psychological continuity”[2]. On these theories, whether some person is the same person as some other person cannot be derived from the fact of their physical or psychological continuity or lack thereof. Even after describing all the physical and psychological facts that hold for two people, we cannot based on these facts alone determine whether they actually are the same person. So “what makes a person the same through time is the persistence of a certain feature or entity – consciousness, mineness, selfhood, the ‘I’ and the self are the most popular candidates”[3]. That is, on this view, the identity of persons consists in identity of a certain feature of theirs, for example, that they have the same soul[4]. However, the best-known non-reductionist theory of personal identity simply holds that a person is „a separately existing entity, distinct from his brain and body, and his experiences“[5]. That is, not that two people are the same person because they have the same soul (or self, etc.), but that a person simply is a soul (or self, etc.). Two people being the same person in virtue of both people having the same soul is not the same as two people being the same person because they are the same soul. A person in the first sense is something that has a soul, just as they have a body – in the second sense, a person is (identical to) a soul, i.e. it would seem „person“ is just another name for a soul.
Mineness could serve as a criterion of personal identity – on this criterion, person A at T1 is the same person as person B at T2 if the experience generated by the brain of person A at T1 has the same mineness as the experience generated by the brain of person B at T2. This would, however, be an extremely impractical criterion, because it does not track the features of people (human beings) that we care about in our personal and societal functioning. Also, it is impossible to determine which mineness an experience has – or whether there even is an experience for some person!
Practically speaking, we do not care about the mineness of experience when we interact with other people – we primarily care about their psychology as it expresses itself in their actions, i.e. we care about what they do. We only really start caring about mineness when pondering our own survival. This is because we see ourselves „from inside“. It is also only in our own case that we can imagine having a different personality and body and yet still remaining ourselves. For people who are not us, what matters is their body and mind, because we only interact with them as objects in the world, that is, only with their „exteriors“ (even though we assume that exterior is reflected in a corresponding interiority ‒ if we knew other people were p-zombies, we would arguably behave differently towards them).
We cannot even determine whether a person is not a p-zombie (with the exception of the person that we ourselves are, of course) – still less can we tell whether the mineness of their experience is the same mineness as that of some other experience. And so we cannot properly use this criterion ‒ if that were what we decided the identity of persons consists in, we would not be able to tell whether two people are the same person. The word „person“ has immense importance e.g. in legal matters. So there is little reason to repurpose it in this way to stand for a concept that has very little practical use. We need it to track psychological continuity, i.e. behavioral tendencies.
And yet, I argue, it is mineness which matters most for our own survival. I care less that the person that I am survives than I care that there exists an experience that is mine, i.e. which has the quality of mineness peculiar to me. Edralis could conceivably exist without me, and I could exist without her. If it is the case that I (the subject, mineness) am reincarnated after Edralis dies, for example, even if my past life as Edralis is totally forgotten, there is something that matters to me that survives ‒ mineness survives, and so there are more experiences that are mine. In those experiences, I survive.
That we can conceive of ourselves as continuing to exist even after our memories are wiped clean suggests that there is something beyond a particular psychology that we want to continue to exist when we think about our own survival. We can imagine that the person that we are survives –in some person psychologically continuous with the person that we are now– without our surviving (as them). Unless we are „inside“ that person, unless their experiences are ours, i.e. have the property of mineness, that there is a person psychologically continuous with the person that we are now is (in itself) irrelevant to our survival (i.e. to the continuing existence of some experience for us – an experience with the same immediacy as this experience now, of you reading this for you, of Edralis writing this for me, has).
That is, psychological continuity is not what my survival (as mineness) consists in (even though it might actually always correlate with it). If it were, then it would not be conceivable that I could be reincarnated tabula rasa. And so even though psychological (or physical) continuity might be something that is necessary for my survival because it somehow causes me to come into being, it is not that in which my survival consists. That is because my survival simply consists in the continuing existence of an experience for me, i.e. some experience that actualizes the mineness peculiar to me.
But then it would seem that the question of the identity of persons is better formulated as two distinct questions: the question of the identity of persons in the usual and practical sense (i.e. identity of human beings) and that of the identity of ourselves. Because in inquiring about whether some person in the world is the same person as some other person, we are looking at them as objects in the world, i.e. what matters is only their „exterior“, since their „interior“–their experiences– is effectively non-existent to us (and ours, to them). But in inquiring whether some person in the world is a person that I am, it is precisely this invisible interiority that matters to me – is (was, will be) this person’s experience mine, or not? Of course, from where we are, we cannot know – yet it is what we care about (among other things).
Of course I would also rather survive as Edralis than as some other person, and so I do care about psychology, about the preservation of my memories and personality, etc. But to survive without memories is better (arguably) than not to survive at all – and, what is crucial, it is conceivable, which means psychological continuity cannot be what my survival consists in. Psychology matters only if it is indeed myself whose psychology it is. That there exists an Edralis, psychologically continuous with the Edralis that I am now, is in itself irrelevant as regards my survival (the survival of my mineness), unless that Edralis is myself – even though it might actually be the case that psychological continuity is a good indicator of my survival, for example because it is a good indicator of physical continuity, and physical continuity (of the brain that generates this experience) is what causes my existence to be preserved. But it is not what my survival consists in.
Unless we first define what the terms „I“ or „person“ mean –without a prior understanding of what the words are supposed to refer to– there cannot be a true or false answer to the question of what I am or whether two people are the same person. That is because in that case it is a question about how the word is to be used, not about how that entity referred to by the word „works“. It is not a question about a particular already identified concept or thing in the world, but about how a certain word is to be used – that is, what concept it is to be connected with. In order to determine what (additional) properties some entity possesses (actually or potentially), the entity first needs to be identified, pointed out, defined – that is, something must already be known about it.
And it seems that the different views of personal identity are, rather than disagreeing with one another, just describing the world differently. The different conceptions of personal identity are just formulating and operating with different definitions of the word „person“. There is no common „thing“ they are pointing out in the world, about the properties of which they have different opinions that can be true or false. Rather, they are constructing different things, cutting out different boundaries in the world. What they have in common is that they all talk about „persons“, i.e. what they have in common is a word. But what it is that they talk about, what they are referring to, differs between them.
There is no actual disagreement between the friends of the physical and the friends of the psychological criterion – but because they use the same word, „person“, it might seem that there is. But what these views share and argue about is only the label, and not the entity that they inspect and draw conclusions about, for there is no such common entity – even though they might partially pick out the same entities (e.g. a cluster of matter that is some human body at some point in time) as parts of the entity they define into existence by setting rules for where it begins and where it ends. There is no dispute, because there is no objective truth of the matter about how the boundaries of objects in the world are to be drawn. The different conceptions are just different, and not incompatible, descriptions of the same world. Persons are (usually) understood to be human beings, and human beings are objects in the world – and so, as is the case with all objects in the world, the boundaries of persons are ultimately –if pushed far enough– fuzzy. In some cases, as Parfit points out in his analysis of personal identity, whether two people are the same person is an empty question – that is, a question about which it is true that “even without answering this question, we can know everything about what happened”[6].
But whether I am some person, whether some experience is mine or not, whether I survive or not – these are questions to which only two possible answers exist: „yes“ and „no“. I cannot survive only partially, and it cannot possibly be the case that the question of my survival is an empty question! At any given point in time, either there is a person that is me (whose brain generates an experience for me), or not – there either exists an experience for me, or not – a particular person’s experience either is mine, or not – I either exist, or not.
Yet when we look at human bodies and brains, psychologies and memories, all we find is a spectrum and a continuity, and we can devise thought experiments where two people can be continuous with one person or one with two (or more) people. There is no inherent identity between one person and another – as with all objects in the world, identity is constructed (by us) based on some form of useful continuity. And as with all objects in the world, there are several continuities of different kind that we can choose to focus on, continuities that tend to correlate and meet in a single object, but can potentially diverge. Two people are made „the same“ person if they are psychologically continuous or if their brains are continuous, etc. But all we do when we identify people using one criterion or another is draw boundaries in the world one way or another. The world (that which we apply our concepts to) is the same – we just focus on different aspects of it, pick them out and unite them by making them parts of the same (spatio-temporally extended) objects, and give those objects importance and priority (in our social functioning and daily lives) over other possible objects picked out by other criteria. We use our words (e.g. „person“) to refer to objects defined by some criteria, and we do not normally keep track of the others, for we lack a word for them – and vice versa, we do not have a word for them, because we do not feel the need to keep track of them.
There is no reason why the view of personhood that draws the boundaries of „person“ using the criterion of psychological continuity should be „more correct“ (as opposed to perhaps „more popular“, or „more useful“) than the one using the physical criterion (or any other criterion). There is no way to judge between the views as regards their fit to reality, because they are not about the same thing. They are suggestions about how to use a certain word, and so which concept from the infinite concept-realm to choose to guide our societies and actions.
Some suggestions might be more pragmatically useful – for example, our justice system would be toothless if it tracked people by the physical continuity of their brains in a world where people regularly underwent a sort of body-renewal in which their brain patterns were copied into a different brain in a new body (destroying the old brain in the process). If what matters is that people who have the tendency to murder be prevented from murdering, physical continuity is irrelevant (or relevant only indirectly, inasmuch as it brings about psychological and thus behavioral continuity). If my brain is reprogrammed by some evil mad scientist so that my personality and memories are changed and now I have the personality and memories of a serial killer, it does not matter for the purposes of our preventing further murders that I never committed the crimes and used not to have the desire to murder, because now I remember committing them and have the desire to murder. What is actually useful to keep track of –if we care about people not being murdered– is people’s tendencies to act a certain way.
There are „persons“ whose identity consists in psychological continuity, „persons“ whose identity consists in physical continuity, etc. These are different concepts and they pick out different entities. These entities are then referred to by the same word („person“), which creates the illusion of there being an actual disagreement about what persons are. But there is no disagreement, because the different views are definitional proposals –which cannot be false and cannot be in actual conflict– rather than hypotheses about some entity that is properly identified before they are proposed.
But the issue under discussion, then, is not properly metaphysical, but rather pragmatic or ethical: how should the word „person“ be used? Which concepts should we pick and organize our societies around? Again, if we care about murders not being committed, then we want those with the tendency to murder to be identified and isolated in some way: and so it makes sense to ascribe „guilt“ or „criminal responsibility“ to entities that have the inclination to murder – this means that, for that purpose, psychological continuity is what matters. We draw boundaries in the world, i.e. construct things in order to simplify the tracking of properties that are useful to us – it is useful for things to behave in a predictable manner.
We keep track of „people“ because it is useful to keep track of „people“. That candidate concept of personhood which proves the most useful based on the preferences we have for how we want to live will be chosen and referred to by the word „person“. We have only a limited number of words (that we actually use), and so we only pick the most useful concepts from the concept-realm to parse (and thereby construct) our world and orient ourselves by.
Why do we have a word for a cup, but not for a cup and the 0.5 cm of whatever material happens to be around it? Because the material of a cup sticks together, because we can manipulate it, because it is useful to us; but the object consisting of a cup and the 0.5 cm of whatever is around it offers very few affordances. Why don’t we have a word that refers to the object consisting of my copy of the book A Dance with Dragons, the currently largest boulder at the bottom of the Dead Sea, and the left ventricle of the heart of Queen Elizabeth I on March the 3rd, 1561? Why don’t we, in our daily lives, work with this concept? Because an object like that is useless to us. That is why we don’t think about it and why we don’t have a word for it. But we could, if we wanted. All the material is there – and the concept exists; all we need is to pick a word for it[7]. The parts of this object are too far apart, in time and space – and not even connected thematically. It’s easier for us to keep track of the world (or rather, those parts of the world we care about) if we only keep track of its distinct continuous parts, and not of such compound objects – and there is an infinite number of such useless and hard-to-track compound objects. The moment things are too far apart and move and interact with other things independently, it usually makes pragmatic sense not to construe them as one and the same object, but instead as several different objects – but there is no deep metaphysical truth about which boundaries track „real“ objects[8].
And so back to people – the point is, there is no truth of the matter about where a person’s boundaries are without first defining where they are supposed to be. Different views of personal identity are about different things in the world – different complex entities whose parts are glued together by some concept or another and referred to by the same word. The disagreement is purely verbal/conceptual/normative.
But this is not the case with ourselves. It seems to me that this is what people favoring the physical criterion are trying to get at – they believe that their consciousness (and, most importantly, their mineness with it) is bound to a particular brain. And so they survive as long as that brain exists. People who favor the psychological criterion seem to be disregarding the internality of people, but looking –very pragmatically– at people from the outside. It doesn’t matter what soul you have or whether you are a p-zombie – if you have the personality of my wife and the memories of my wife, then you are, in all the ways that matter, my wife. I can’t tell whether you have the same soul as yesterday, or whether you are a p-zombie – but I can track your behavior.
The key thing is, as I’ve been trying to argue, that the „I“ is not an object in the world, available to intersubjective scrutiny – and so of course if we track ourselves using criteria that apply to objects in the world, we get confused about ourselves. The questions of our survival and our identity cannot be empty – but the survival and identity of people, ultimately, can be, if people are simply objects in the world defined by their perceptible characteristics, their psychology and physiology. What matters for the survival of the person that I am (especially what matters to others) is not the same thing that matters for my survival. That in which the survival of the person that I happen to be consists (e.g. psychological continuity) is not the same thing as that in which my survival consists (i.e. identity of mineness). [9]
When we think about ourselves as objects in the world, as people, as human beings, we cannot but arrive at the same conclusion about ourselves as we do about other objects ‒ that our boundaries are fuzzy, and sometimes it is not clear where a person begins and where they end. But our boundaries, as subjects, are not fuzzy, and so we cannot be objects in the world. Rather than objects in the world, we are subjects for whom the world is. Our survival is a private matter, invisible to other subjects (unlike the survival of people); and our identity does not consist in continuity of some publicly available objects in the world.
There is no-thing that makes me me. There is no criterion, no continuity that makes this subjectivity the same subjectivity as some other subjectivity – the subject of one experience and that of another are the same simply if they are the same subject, i.e. if the experiences have the same mineness.
But we cannot point to a mineness and ask: is this the same one that was „in“ this person yesterday? We cannot examine experiences like we do objects in the world. We can assume there exists some experience for some person and we can assume that experience exists in the same subjectivity (i.e. with the same mineness, for the same subject) as some other experience, but there is no way for us to find out whether this is the case or not. Others’ interiority, and even our own past and future interiority, is unreachable.
So the moment mineness is introduced into the discussion, the investigation becomes properly metaphysical: there must be a fact of the matter about which experiences are mine. Even though we are trying to establish what the fact is about a real feature of the world, because of its nature –the nature of subjectivity, of phenomena– it is impossible. We cannot establish a fact about phenomena beyond those immediately accessible to us.
What we can do is formulate different theories or hypotheses about how the world might be – what our existence might be predicated upon. And these are properly hypotheses – not different proposals about how to use some word, but claims that can be true or false, even though there is no way for us to validate or falsify them. We can compare them and argue about which are more parsimonious or aesthetically pleasing, but their truth cannot be verified.
Mineness is not socially relevant – regardless of whether a person is a p-zombie, and regardless of whether they are experienced by one mineness or another, if they murder, we want to stop them. They might be a p-zombie, or their experiences might have a different mineness every day, or have the same mineness as Napoleon’s experiences did, or they might actually be me – what matters is their personality and their behavior. That is what is actually accessible to others, unlike their experience or the mineness in/for which that experience takes place. To me, from where I am, their experience is invisible and entirely inaccessible.
That is why it seems to me that the problem of personal identity needs to be split into two: the “external” and the “internal” one. Thomson presents the same point in his comparison of Kolak’s (1986) and Parfit’s (1984) views of personal identity: “(…) purely impersonal theories of personal identity of the empirical self, such as Locke’s, ignore the essential indexical aspect of the subject or the I and thus are radically incomplete. However, what they leave out, the essence of consciousness, provides for no individuation of persons.”[10]
The “external” question, the part of the problem that concerns the identity of persons in the sense of humans, defined by their psychologies and/or physiologies, is a problem of the identity of ordinary objects in general – or rather not a problem at all, for where the boundaries are (to be) drawn is largely a pragmatic matter, a matter of social convention, and not a philosophical mystery. A person, an individual human being, is a useful, if not outright indispensable concept for our social functioning: and so this part of the problem is purely normative. The boundaries of persons can be drawn in many ways, using different criteria, and we will ultimately use whichever concept is the most useful for us in our current cultural circumstances. If technologies such as teletransportation or fission or mind uploading are ever realized, our concepts will shift accordingly[11] to accommodate the new reality of human (or trans- or post-human) existence. In the meantime, the concepts that we currently operate with are, under these scenarios, simply being stretched too far. This is the question of personal identity “from the outside”, from the third-person point of view – it concerns people as objects in the world.
We are led to the “internal” question when we inquire into personal identity in the sense of identity of ourselves, as subjects of experience, of the I – and this question is properly metaphysical. The question “Is this person me?” (where “me” refers to the mineness of experience) must always have a determinate answer: the answer cannot be anything other than an unequivocal “yes” or “no”. If the experience of that human being at that point in time possesses the quality of mineness, then that person is me. If not, then they are not. This is the question of identity “from the inside” – it concerns the internal dimension of people, their subjectivity, the givenness of their experience – i.e. mineness.
The trouble with this part of the problem of personal identity –and the reason why it is properly metaphysical (by which I mean not conceptual, but also not amenable to being settled by empirical means)– is that it is in principle impossible to determine the nature of the mineness that the experiences of other people have (or even of the same person that one is, but at some other point in time than the current now). We are trapped in our own momentary phenomena. Whether the experience of some person at some time possesses the same quality of mineness as the experience of some other person, or even the same person at some other time, is not something we can look at. We have a rough hypothesis about how it works –one mineness, one brain– but we have no way to test it, and the hypothesis becomes problematic when we consider scenarios like teletransportation, brain fission and fusion, and mind uploading.
Psychological and physical continuity do not matter intrinsically for my survival (in the sense of me as mineness) – they are not what my survival consists in. They might matter intrinsically for the survival of persons, depending on how we define the latter. For my survival, i.e. the preservation in existence of mineness peculiar to me, they might matter instrumentally, if one or the other turns out to be my cause or a necessary condition of my survival – if it turns out that each mineness is bound to a particular brain, for example.
But my survival does not consist in there existing psychologically continuous experiences (or people who are psychologically continuous): for it is conceivable that there exist experiences psychologically continuous with this one experience (which is mine), or that there exist people psychologically continuous with the person that I am, yet that I no longer exist; and it is also conceivable that I continue to exist in an experience which is not psychologically continuous with my previous experiences. Neither does it consist in the continued existence of a brain that is continuous with the brain that generates this experience. The existence of a psychologically continuous experience or of some particular brain might be an indicator of my continuing existence, and their existence might in fact turn out to be necessary for my continuing existence, but that does not mean that that is what my existence consists in – I am not a brain.
What my survival –in the deepest and most interior sense– consists in is there existing an experience with the property of mineness peculiar to me – regardless of its content or cause.
[1] Parfit 1984, p. 207
[2] ibid., p. 325
[3] Klawonn 2009, 67
[4] We could say that what makes a person the same person as some other person on the psychological criterion is “identity of mind”, i.e. their having the same mind (or, on the physical criterion, the same body) – but unlike souls, which are normally considered simple, bodies and minds are complex and temporally extended, and thus the problem would only shift back to what makes some body or mind the same body or mind as some other body or mind – and we end up, again, with continuity. Whereas the soul of some person at T1 and the soul of some other person at T2, if they are the same soul, are not the same soul in virtue of their continuity – they just are the same soul. This, arguably, makes the soul some sort of universal (and an endurer).
[5] Parfit 1984, p. 210
[6] Parfit 1984, 213
[7] Note that we, strictly speaking, already have a name for it: “the object consisting of my copy of the book A Dance With Dragons, the currently largest boulder on the bottom of the Dead Sea, and the left ventricle of the heart of Queen Elizabeth I on March the 3rd, 1561”.
[8] But of course depending on what we mean by „real“.
[9] Notice that two people that are not the same person on the psychological criterion can be the same person on the mineness criterion. For example, if I am a reincarnation of Queen Victoria, then Queen Victoria and Edralis are the same person on the mineness criterion; but clearly they are not the same person on either the psychological or the physical criterion.
[10] Thomson 2008
[11] I.e. we will pick some other concepts from the concept-realm to which to refer by our words.