On Persistence and the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics and
how this bears on Personal Identity
‘Most
people think that they have a ‘self’ that persists over long stretches of time,
through significant psychological (and physical) changes. Is this belief
justifiable?’
The answer to
the question is ‘No, it is a religious commitment, in the sense that it is a
belief that makes no sense when logically analysed which nevertheless plays a
massive role in our lives, society and culture’. This response may seem overly
tendentious, but I see it as unavoidable.[1]
In A Treatise of Human Nature, David
Hume discusses the question of personal identity in a broader defence of an error theory about identity of
macroscopic particulars over time. I submit that Hume’s fairly short discussion
of these issues in this book is better than that of leading late-20th
Century four-dimensionalist metaphysicians like W.V.O Quine, David Lewis and
Theodore Sider (and better from a four-dimensionalist’s perspective). I believe
this because I think Hume fully embraces the view that the way we commonly
think and talk about individuals or particulars in the world is not based on an
accurate understanding of reality, which I believe to be true. In this essay, I
will argue that Hume is right that
there are no concrete entities in our (speaking loosely) Heraclitean world
which persist numerically identically through time[2];
that Hume is right to see humans or other living creatures as, as far as
persistence is concerned, not very metaphysically different from other living
(and even non-living) macroscopic objects; that he is right that we “confound
[…] “numerical and specific identity [qualitative identity or close
resemblance] […] and in our thinking and reasoning employ one for the other”
[Hume, 1736: Book II, Section VI]; and that he is right to position himself as
a relativist or normativist about accounts of personal identity, a position
which opens up the conceptual possibility for attempting to adopt a different –
perhaps morally and emotionally superior [Parfit, 1984; Schopenhauer 1818-19] –
religious commitment than the conventional ‘endurantist’-type religious
commitment.
I’ll begin this
essay by trying my best to briefly stake out the neologistic vocabulary that I
have decided to use to try to express my Humean position on ‘identity of
objects over time’ (a position whose popularity obviously isn’t helped by the
fact that it’s very hard to think about and articulate). I think that the
language we use to talk about (at least) macroscopic particulars/individuals – i.e. objects or things which
are concrete, living or not, i.e. not species
or types – is metaphysically in
error, because we talk as if there don’t just solidly exist instant-instances (instance-time slices)
of species or sorts, but as if there solidly exist properly persistent instances
of sorts (“the [extended-through-time] cow”, “the apple”, “the tree”, “that
shoe”) – which is false.[3]
But saying that this is false raises a universe of problems. Further disambiguation
becomes overwhelmingly difficult, because we are bogged down in a language
which in its fundamental conceptual structure contradicts what we are trying to
convey.
One thing I can happily say that we
can ascribe properties to instant-instances of sorts. But I certainly do
not want to say that we have to radically rethink the nature of sorts
themselves so that they become merely abstract groupings of intrinsically
similar instant-instances; making this kind of revision would be very
undesirable. The more important point is that it would be unnecessary: we can
accept that the ontology we use in everyday language, as well as in the
biological and social sciences (and the chemical sciences too, but I want to
stick to the ‘macroscopic’) is not God’s ontology (let ‘representationalism’,
as Huw Price [2013] uses the term, be damned), because, whilst sorts may or may
not be as real or more fundamental than instant-instances (Platonism versus
nominalism is still perfectly alive), there is no question that persistent
individuals do not exist as fundamentally as instant-instances – and yet all of
our sorts collect together these imaginary entities. (It would still be a
useful and important project to attempt to give an account of how you can save
a non-extreme-reductionist ontology while accepting that there do not exist
persistent individuals, but this is a short essay; one crutch is that a
proponent of my position can still talk about evolution patterns of
instant-instances with similar intrinsics, and therefore avoid weird
conclusions like that early embryos of mammals should all be grouped together
because they’re all intrinsically very similar when they’re early embryos
(ignoring DNA differences).)
Onto the argument.
In Section IV Part VI of A
Treatise of Human Nature, “Of Personal Identity”, Hume points out some childishly simple empirical facts about the
way living humans undergo change:
“Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.
Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and
faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul,
which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment.” [Hume, 1894/1736:
134].
These suffice to show that the notion of “some philosophers” that for
each person there exists one entity called a “Self” of “perfect identity and
simplicity” has no basis in reality, and thus that there is not really such a
thing (in exactly the same sense that there is not really such a thing as
ghosts) [133].
Like me, Hume doesn’t think that humans are metaphysically special in
terms of persistence, and it is therefore natural that after observing that the
endurantist notion of the Self has no basis in reality, he quickly moves onto a
deeper discussion of how our untutored thoughts about the persistence of
“animals and plants” (and even non-living macroscopic ‘things’, one notices)
lead us to an “absurdity”.
As he explains, “Our propension to confound identity with relation is
so great, that we are apt to imagine something unknown and mysterious,
connecting the parts, beside their relation.” [135].
For those who are concerned about such things, he also observes
correctly that “the controversy concerning identity is not merely a dispute of
words” because “when we attribute identity, in an improper sense [the numerical
sense], to variable or interrupted objects [collections of causally related
object-instances which become increasingly different with distance across the
4-d block], our mistake is not confin’d to the expression, but is commonly
attended with a fiction, either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or
of something mysterious and inexplicable.” [135].
As Hume’s words imply, the burden of proof lies on the mystic or
lunatic who claims there is numerical identity between instance-instants with
different properties, not on the person who points out that there is
unambiguously not (or that you don’t really mean numerical identity).
A natural response by a perdurantist or stage theorist to this would be
to protest that I’m ‘copping out’ of actually giving my own account of
persistence or personal identity, and with no overwhelmingly compelling reason
to do so: after all, my radical Humean empiricism has massive costs in severing
too violently the connection between language and reality, in the process
laying waste to canonical theories of reference and also popular Quinean
notions about ontological commitment. However, the truth is that Lewis’
perdurantism and Theodore Sider’s stage theory are pointless, since they don’t
actually give an account of our concept of personal identity, but something
completely different (for no reason, since they’re also not descriptions of
anything in reality).[4]
As David Braddon-Mitchell has suggested [real-life], in the ordinary speech of
human time-slices, sometimes the time-slices (if we’re talking about big enough
time-slices that there is ‘room’ to utter a sentence) use the word “I” to mean
the nearby time-slices which will soon emerge from them (“I really want to get
drunk”) – a kind of usage for which the stage theory sort of ‘accounts’ – and
yet human time-slices often also think of themselves as collections of lots of
the time-slices to which they are causally connected, even though these
time-slices are very different (“I’ve had a good life”, “She’s a good person”),
a usage which very roughly aligns
with the perdurantist account of persons as four-dimensional ‘worms’. I say the
latter only very roughly aligns with
the perdurantist account of persons because, in truth, the perdurantist account
of persons doesn’t nicely line up with any
part of our everyday talk. Four-dimensional worms are not agents who perform
actions, nor do they have responsibilities, nor do they speak or act or think,
nor do they have memories, and so on.
The non-perdurantist David Wiggins makes a similar kind of argument
against perdurantism, in slightly more high-falutin’ language: “Anything that
is part of a Lesniewskian sum [a mereological whole defined by its parts] is
necessarily part of it…But no person or normal material object is necessarily in
the total state that will correspond to the person- or object-moment postulated
by the theory under discussion” [1980: 168]. This is a way of saying that the
‘4-D worm persons’ have very different modal
properties from persons as we naturally think of them. We want to say that
“I might have done this” or “I might have been this” but if what “I” is is
really a worm all of whose temporal parts
are necessary components, then
one is forced to turn to the analysis of such sentences that Lewis himself
turned to: “there is a world in which a counterpart of mine might have done
this”. [Lewis, 1971: 205]
This is clearly not intuitive!
After Hume has finished pointing out that that our fundamental way of
breaking up the world as a set of environments populated by individuals which
persist over time has no reality, he makes a strong relativist claim about the
nature of philosophical disputes about what It takes for “survival” or
continuity of the “Self”: “As the relations, and the easiness of the transition
may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard, by which we can
decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to
the name of identity.” [139]. This claim falls straight out of accepting the
Humean view of the unreality of persistence. There is good reason to think that
the psychological continuity-and-connectedness account of personal ‘identity’
is, overall, a better account of what we typically think it takes for survival
than the physical continuity account [Nichols S & Bruno M, 2010], but no
reason to say one is True: they’re both just ways of thinking about what people
generally think matters about our existence.
As this human instance-instant suggested in the introduction, this
human instance-instant thinks it’s more liberating and morally desirable (and
‘in tune with reality’ in at least a weak sense) to try to jettison attachment
to the idea that there is a fixed “you” and to instead focus more on being ‘at
one’ with sentient life. Many mystics and philosophers have held this kind of
view, as is well-known. Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation advocated that we are all tiny
parts of the great universal force-of-striving known as “the Will”, and that to
achieve tranquillity, enlightenment, freedom and pure knowledge
(self-consciously analogous for Schopenhauer to Buddhist nirvana) we must engage in a heroic struggle to try to become at
one with the universal Will against
our own will-to-live, manifest in our
base and animalistic instincts and impulses. Such a philosophy led him to write
many magnificent passages like the following:
“This freeing of [“pure,
will-less”] knowledge lifts us as wholly and entirely away from [the individual
will], as do sleep and dreams; happiness and unhappiness have disappeared; we
are no longer individual; the individual is forgotten; we are only pure subject
of knowledge; we are only that one eye of the world which
looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from
the service of will in man alone. Thus all difference of individuality so
entirely disappears, that it is all the same whether the perceiving eye belongs
to a mighty king or to a wretched beggar; for neither joy nor complaining can
pass that boundary with us.” [1909/ 1818/19, Vol I: 262].
Derek Parfit’s most famous passage from Reasons and Persons concerns the feeling of liberation he received
from realising that there is not really any such thing as a persistent Self,
the moral virtue it helped him acquire, and the reduction in his fear of death
it brought about:
“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. Other people are closer. I am less
concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of
others.
When I believed the Non-Reductionist View, I also cared more about my
inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be
me. I can now redescribe this fact. […] My death will break the more
direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it
will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact
that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen
this, my death seems to me less bad.” [1984: 281].
In summary, I think Hume was right: there are no persistent
individuals, and there is no spooky Self which somehow preserves numerical
identity between different human time slices. From this, it follows, as Hume
saw, that conflicts over accounts of personal identity are essentially
conflicts over what people think matters.
From this basis, in turn, one can see that it may be morally and emotionally
good for many people to try to weaken their endurantist intuitions.
Reference List
Hume, David (1737). A Treatise of Human Nature, 1992
edition, Prometheus Books, New York.
Lewis, David
(1971). “Counterparts of persons and their bodies”, Journal of Philosophy, 68 (7): 203-211.
Nichols, Shaun
& Bruno, Michael (2010). “Intuitions about personal identity: An empirical
study”, Philosophical Psychology, 23
(3): 293-312.
Parfit, Derek
(1984). Reasons and Persons,
Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Schopenhauer,
Arthur (1909/ 1818/19). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp.
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, London.
Wiggins, David
(1980). Sameness and Substance, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Uncited:
Gallois, Andre,
"Identity Over Time", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/identity-time/>.
Noonan, Harold
and Curtis, Ben, "Identity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/identity/>.
Hawley,
Katherine, "Temporal Parts", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/temporal-parts/>.
[1]
And what is this “I”? This human instance-instant (instance-instant of the kind
“human”) doesn’t know. Every time the human-instance instant (or human ‘time
slice’) typing the words uses the first-person pronoun in this essay he (the
instance-instant with male sex) means “the human instance-instant typing the
words”.
[2]
Not being an ontological Quinean, in the sense of believing in the project of
trying to construct a ‘flat’ ontology (or literally any other Quinean
doctrine), I more mean to say that particulars which persist numerically
through time, if we want to say they exist because it’s convenient, are clearly
less fundamental – dependent on the instant-instances – and are also ontologically
posterior to the abstract sorts (it
seems to me that I’m basically forced to the latter view by adopting the
former, though I won’t elaborate on that point because I don’t have space).
[3]
I’ll later make an argument for this. The high modality is explained by the
fact that I think this is obviously true. I should probably temper these
sentiments in light of concerns about disagreement of epistemic peers.
[4]
This may be too harsh… Probably: I’m only 20.
No comments:
Post a Comment