Ep. 261: Derek Parfit on Personal Identity (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 261 is something like what constitutes personal identity? And is personal identity really something we should care about? We're reading Most of Part 3 of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons from 1984. More information, please visit Partially Examined Life. There are future experiences that will be related in certain ways to these present experiences happening in Madison, Wisconsin. And I invite you to call the collectivities of these experiences Mark Linsenmayer.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan entirely a product of relation R in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Seth: This is Seth Pas. Well, I thought it was Seth Paskin, but I'm. I'm having memories of Greta Garbo here in Austin, Texas.

1:00 Wes: Meanwhile, I'm torturing you.

1:04 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, one cell away from no longer being myself in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1:09 Seth: Dylan, you're in Santa Fe.

1:11 Dylan: I am for the next six weeks.

1:13 Seth: Ugh, color me envious.

1:16 Dylan: It's 20 degrees warmer here in sunny.

1:20 Mark: You're in Texas, Seth, what the hell do you complain about?

1:24 Seth: Oh, I know it's not. The temperature today was gorgeous in Austin. It's just Santa Fe is such an awesome town and it's so beautiful in New Mexico.

1:30 Dylan: So New Mexico is quite pretty.

1:34 Mark: So we wanted to follow up on our Locke on personal identity episode with a general personal identity episode. But instead of reading a plethora of articles, as I thought we might, we've gotten many, many requests to do Derek Parfit over the years. And he has this giant book, Reasons and Persons, which Wes reviewed a lot of literature and determined that this would be a synoptic. About 100 pages from the middle of the book would cover all our bases well enough. Wes, do you want to kind of start us off?

2:03 Wes: Sure, I think so. Just regarding. Yeah, what we read, I looked at a lot of different things, including an essay that just is a shorter essay that Parfit had written. And I thought this was a much clearer, much more interesting section to read. The reason why I had looked for other things initially is because it's just this. It's a massive book. And then I didn't really know what to excerpt from that. And then it quickly became clear that there is a few chapters to focus on. But, you know, I think the way it starts out is kind of indicative. In chapter 10, we get a nice little thought experiment and then we are off to the races.

And if you look at Some other literature. It just gets you deep into the analytic, including the Stanford Encyclopedia article or the Internet encyclopedia article. You get into the weeds really quickly and your eyes start to glaze over. So I thought, you know, this was a nice reading. And then I think it's nice to start with these thought experiments.

2:57 Dylan: Yeah.

2:57 Seth: He's also got a very demonstrative style. This is untenable. This is unbelievable. This is not. Cannot be countenanced. He just declares that these are the way things are. I found him very readable. You're right. Repetitive. This is great reading, Wes, in the sense of bringing all of the topics together. He really does address, makes clear distinctions, kind of lays all the various things out in a somewhat dryly analytic way. But that's appreciated despite its repetitiveness. What frustrated me was the liberal sprinkling of examples and thought experiments.

He could have just focused on the continuum one, but in one paragraph he can drop like six or seven different examples or hypothetical cases. And it just seems to be a little dilettantish about bouncing between them. And I hope that we don't end up arguing about hypothetical test cases and focus on one or two. Or when we focus on one, we actually do justice to it, not bounce around a lot.

3:55 Wes: Everything is there for a reason. It's just not. There's just so much going on. Despite the fact that I was praising this in comparison to other stuff, it is easy to just get lost in the weeds and not to know exactly what the overarching argument is and what each section is supposed to do. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out.

4:15 Dylan: The book is gigantic. And these examples here, these chapters are such that you really could reduce them a lot. Because he seems to be serving multiple masters. He seems to be serving the master of himself of trying to say what is on his mind about identity. He's trying to serve a master of the argument in giving these examples, which I actually really liked. All the examples and the thinking through the different kinds of cases. And then there's this master of trying to respond to all of these other people. So I found that part to be kind of exhausting.

4:49 Mark: Well, it's funny that this is overall a book of ethics. And his follow up on what Matters 2017 is a three volume book of ethics, which I have not read any of. But I heard someone say something rather dismissive of how many hundreds of pages it takes him to make a fairly simple point. So this is chapters 10 through 13, 10 and 11 are kind of laying out different angles of personal identity. 12, which we said was the most important one is really getting at, is personal identity. The thing that matters. He's overall, even though he tries his best to consider, you know, okay, well, there's some theories of personal identity that are better than others.

Ultimately, he, in chapter 12, is going to use a reductio ad absurdum against the whole idea of personal identity to say that it actually can't do the work that we want it to. But yet obviously there's something we care about when we ask, for instance, if I'm about to teleport is his example, where my current body will be destroyed and it will be rebuilt at a remote location. If I'm worried about whether that is going to actually kill me or whether I'm just going to jump over there, like that seems something that it is legitimate for us to figure out whether we should worry about whether or not that actually comes to pass.

So it seems very weird that there ends up being not really a clear answer for him, is it me or is it not me that's over there? But there is a clear answer for him as to what I should care about, which is in the positive that the me that appears over there really has everything going for it that I want out of the wishing for my

6:16 Seth: own survival out of a me.

6:18 Mark: Yep.

6:19 Wes: The way he starts the book, in a way, he's starting with two competing intuitions about identity. And I think we should say here, we got at some of this in Locke, but we're thinking about what constitutes the identity of a person over time, despite the fact that we undergo so many changes as people, physically and mentally and so on. And what's interesting about some of these readings, including Parfit, is you don't get a lot of talk about, well, what does it mean to be a person in the first place? Because in a way we're saying what a person is by talking about identity conditions for a person.

But the way Locke puts it is that, you know, he associates it with being rational and self conscious, being able to reason and reflect, and also just the ability to be able to use the word I. Right. To be able to say I am a person in a way has a lot to do with being a person. But the other way we tend to think of it is, you know, we might think of things in terms of a stream of consciousness, or we think of our consciousness as like this big container. And what makes you as a person different from me is my thoughts and feelings and all the mental states belong in my container and yours belong in yours, and never the twain shall meet.

You know, I will never be from a first person perspective in your situation. So that's the kind of way of talking about what we might think of as numerical identity, which we can talk about a little bit more. But we can challenge that in intuition about numerical identity with an intuition about qualitative identity, which is, you know, it's what he does, as you mentioned, Mark, at the beginning of the book, by talking about teletransportation. Because we can do two things with that. You know, we can step into the teletransporter. Does he use the word teleportation or teletransportation?

8:02 Mark: He says teletransportation. I don't know why. I think he's trying to. What I've learned from Star Trek is not that, you know, your body, your matter actually becomes energy, and then the energy can flow at the speed of light over there and then be turned back to matter. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about you being scanned, that information being used with some raw materials. They must have some carbon or whatever at the other end to make a new you. And then you, the original you, being actually destroyed. So he just uses that new word

8:35 Wes: to be clear, you know, he gives you two cases. One is overlapping and one is non overlapping, or the overlapping. He also uses this word branching. And that the two cases are what become so confusing because we might be inclined, if everything happens normally and I'm just scanned and then destroyed and then reconstructed on the other end, it might just say, okay, then that's me. You know, it's, it's molecule for molecule. It's exactly like me, so why wouldn't it be me? But then we think, well, we don't destroy me. And now there's two of us. There's me and the replica.

Well, obviously we're not the same person. Like, if I'm in pain, that doesn't mean the other one up, you know, this, they've been transported to. I. They. Which one is it? Have been transported to Mars. You know, obviously if I feel pain, it doesn't mean the replica over there feels pain. So then it starts to get confusing and it seems as if qualitative identity, which will turn out to be psychological continuity, which we'll talk more about, doesn't seem to be enough because numerical identity intervenes. Right? Numerical identity, meaning my pain down here is different from Wes's pain up on Mars.

And it doesn't matter if we're exactly similar in every Other way.

9:47 Mark: Did you guys think of the prestige during this? Where can I spoil the prestige? He uses quantum magic to create a clone of himself. Hugh Jackman does, I believe, to appear to travel across, you know, from the stage where the magic act is being performed to the back of the theater. But what's actually happening is that instead of him just teleporting, what Parfit is describing is actually happening. That the old one falls into a tank and is drowned. It's not even just like dematerialized, but like killed in a graphic way, which is important to the plot of the film. And there seems to be something that as soon as there's another one of you that exists in the universe, that there's just something wrong with that, that the two will immediately try to kill each other. The universe does not like the branching situation.

10:32 Wes: I don't even like people who just have my name. That makes me angry already. But there's also the living with yourself. Have you guys seen that?

10:41 Dylan: With Paul Rudd? And it's a cloning example, which is a really, really great one to consider in this respect.

10:48 Wes: Right. He's just being renewed or something. Like he's going to be rejuvenated by having a copy made of himself. That's going to be.

10:55 Dylan: Yeah, it's this teletransportation example without transporting in space. Right. Where it has all of those aspects to it. But you are being rejuvenated, as you said. You're just getting up. Well, I guess the change there is that they. They do remove all of your bad memories, all the aspects of your psyche that made you a pain in the ass and a terrible person. So it's a little bit. It's a little bit different.

11:22 Mark: I think even in Star Trek they would use that to get rid of all diseases. Like, you might as well if you're in the transporter anyway. You might as well just get rid of that cancer.

11:31 Wes: Yeah. But I think what's so interesting and funny about it is basically they don't kill the old version of him successfully. Right. So he just wakes up in a grave and then he has to go back and confront the new, better version of himself and then hijinks ensue.

11:46 Dylan: I really like thinking through these examples, the transporter example and the other ones, about this question of where is me when I'm talking about. I. I think it's pretty helpful, especially in trying to sort through like, the Cartesian question about is my soul separate from my body? And stuff like that. I couldn't decide whether we get adrift of just the kind of naive question about who am I? And the kind, you know, we have the question of if I confront teleportation, am I going to die? That's one of them. But it seemed like in a sort of normal, everyday way that's not a tele transporter kind of sci fi.

One is. You run into this question with all kinds of changes that might happen to you, be them psychologically or physical. And you ask yourself the question, or you are prompted the question of am I the same person? And in what way am I the same person? And sometimes that conclusion leads you to say, well, yeah, I'm the same person, but somehow I'm really different. So you have to resolve that. And sometimes you have that come up in a different way. And I'm wondering, maybe this is for the end, but did you guys find that we get to any of that kind of normal everyday thinking about identity?

Like, if I get in a terrible accident and I'm paralyzed, am I the same person afterwards? Or if I went through a major depression, am I the same person when I get on the other side of that? Or am I the same person after I have kids or go to college, am I supposed to be the same person?

13:18 Wes: I think you're getting at the fact that when philosophers talk about personal identity, they're talking about impersonal identity.

13:24 Dylan: Yeah, I guess you're probably right. You're probably right. The question of transformation that I'm talking about here and the way in which you stay the same is not really the question they're trying to sort out.

13:33 Wes: You're talking about changes, for instance, in character. You know, we could talk about changes in the body, but we could also just talk about big, big changes in the personality.

13:42 Dylan: Sure.

13:43 Wes: And Parfit will say he'll talk a little bit about this because mainly he's going to talk about this in terms of memory. Right. He's pivoting off of Locke. And the idea of psychological continuity will have a lot to do with memory, but it could also have a lot to do with other mental states and other aspects of ourself, including personality. So we could start talking about personality continuity as well if we wanted to. He just doesn't get into that. He says, you know, I'm going to talk about memory. And then, you know, we could do this. We could talk about the relations between intentions and actions, or between my personality a few years ago and what it is now, and the interconnectedness between those two things as a basis for identity. But that would make things too complicated.

14:26 Seth: One of the things that's fun about this topic is, and I know that the three of you hate my common man, layman approach to philosophy.

14:35 Dylan: We just don't like you, Seth.

14:36 Seth: Yes, you don't like the continuity of my experiences.

14:42 Wes: If we get. If we get into a debate about thought experiments, then we're in trouble.

14:47 Seth: So as I often do prior to an episode, I talk to my parents and my wife about what we're going to talk about. And if I can explain it to them or if I can at least raise the issue and get them thinking like they understand what's at stake, then I feel like I've accomplished something. You know, that's how I think of philosophy. Philosophy that people can't understand is. Save it for academia. Identity is one of those things that everybody has a very definitive view about. They don't understand it and it's easy to confound them. And that's why, what makes it such a fun topic?

Because you start with the idea. You say, here I'm holding up two pens that I just took out of a box. They're identical, right? Well, yes. Are they the same pen? Well, no. Okay, so how are they the same and not the same? Right there you've got qualitative and quantitative identity. And everybody understands that concept, right? Then you say, okay, so are you the same person that you Were that you're 50 now? Are you the same person that you were when you were seven? And suddenly everybody's minds get blown because they want to say yes, but they now having that framework of qualitative and quantity, they can't figure out how to answer the question.

And that's what Parfit does brilliantly in this essay is he sets you up with, here's what we know about identity, qualitative, quantitative. This is our common sense notion. Now let's try to figure out how that explains you as a human being. And he takes us down the rabbit hole. And he does an excellent job of sorting that out. And I happen to agree with a couple of his conclusions. And he comes to the conclusion that ultimately we should not be as married to the notion of personal identity and belief that we have a determinate identity. And I think that's true.

It's not common sense, but it's a much better explanatory framework for that.

16:32 Mark: Dylan was asking, does this get back to sort of the everyday, the real world, humanistic concerns? And yes, I mean, the fact that this is a text of ethics that he ultimately comes down with sort of a Buddhist position, which he says, you were also concerned when you came into this about personal identity. What's my future gonna be? If it's not gonna be me, then I don't care. That's a very selfish, literally selfish view. And if you think that what actually matters to us is not continuity of the same matter so that for sure the teleported you would not be you because it's not the same matter, your matter was destroyed.

Or through the various other thought experiments that he looks at to prove this. If it turns out that a lot of what we would want out of survival comes with not having the normal conditions of personal identity intact, then that means that there really can be. If you say, are you the same person were when you were 7, according to Locke, of course you're the same person. But if you really think that the personal identity concept falls apart when you look at it too closely, then you can really say sort of I'm sort of the same person I was when I was seven.

I'm more that same person than I was of you when you were seven. But still there's not as tight a continuity between future you and present you and past you as you might think. So that kind of reduces the distance between all of us as persons that even us in our normal growth through life share some of the characteristics with these weird sci fi examples such that, you know, we're not as tightly just one controlled ego. If we, if we really want to be thorough egotists and only serve the interests of ourself, like that actually falls apart. You can't, it's not a.

It's. It's not only ethically insupportable, it's metaphysically insupportable.

18:17 Wes: So should we talk about the psychological criterion, the psychological continuity? Because that's basically what he's going to defend. Even though it turns out to be extremely counterintuitive.

18:29 Mark: It starts as a variation off of Locke and an attempt to define what personal identity actually is. So why does he think Locke's version needs updating? Because his version, continuity of, you know, it has a lot in common with it. It's a little subtle, the distinction, I think.

18:44 Wes: Well, for Locke, the idea is that I have a memory, right? I seem to remember having experienced something in the past. And then the fact is that I did experience that and that memory relation is what makes me the same person. That Parfit wants to add a kind of causality clause to this. It has to be the case that the experience that I, you know, my memory now is Actually caused by the experience I had in the past. Right. It's not just implanted or something. But we want to actually expand on that because of course we forget lots of things about ourselves.

I mean, it was kind of. Right. Obvious when we were reading the Locke. It was kind of confusing. And we have to account for the fact. We have to account for the fact that there's so much about ourselves that we forget. And the way that Parfit is going to do that is he's going to make it more of an ancestral relation so that we can have. So for instance, if I remember being young and a certain experience I had in college, but I don't remember a certain, you know, I suppose I don't remember today a certain childhood experience from being a toddler, but me, the person in college, had the memory of being that toddler.

That's enough. Right. It doesn't matter that I don't remember the experience as a toddler, as long as we can get these overlapping chains of memory connections and then we have to say, well, it's got to be enough memories. So what he calls strong connectedness. So I know that's kind of confusing, but that's a rough outline of his more sophisticated psychological continuity criterion.

20:18 Seth: Let me ask a clarifying question. Maybe I misheard what you said is the continuity between the memory and the experience.

20:26 Mark: I thought it was he was attributing to Locke. So this is section 78. I started taking notes where he says that Locke's claim is clearly false. So what is right before that?

20:36 Wes: So he uses this word connectedness. Right. So that's the direct memory connection. And then strong connectedness applies to sets of memories so that if we have enough direct memories between today and yesterday, for instance, we are strongly connected to the yesterday person. And then continuity is this more abstract idea where we just get overlapping chains of strong connectedness. So I don't have to be strongly connected to myself as a toddler as long as the person who was a year older, you know, the four year old was strongly connected to the three year old. I'm not strongly connected to the three year old, but I'm strongly connected to past phases. You know, it kind of transfers ancestrally backwards.

21:23 Seth: Right. That's how I read it too. And I just wanted to make sure I was. I didn't hear that the first time you said it, but yes.

21:28 Mark: Can I just read the couple sentences here? I think this is the same as your paper copy. I have a PDF I found page 200. Locke suggested that experienced Memory provides the criterion of personal identity. Though this is not, on its own, a plausible view, I believe it can be part of such a view. I shall therefore try to answer some of Locke's critics. Locke claimed that someone cannot have committed a crime unless he now remembers doing so. We can understand a reluctance to punish people for crimes they cannot remember. But taken as a view about what is involved in a person's continued existence, Locke's claim is clearly false.

If it was true, it would not be possible for someone to forget any of the things he once did or any of the experiences he once had. But this is possible. I cannot now remember putting on my shirt this morning. That seems like a bad representation of Locke's view, maybe based on just having read Locke. I didn't take Locke to have been saying, you know, that there is a pool of memory, and that as we go through time, we add to this pool, but later, me must have entirely the pool of old me. No, Locke actually acknowledged that people forget things.

So I'm not really sure. I don't know that he's really expressing an improvement over Locke. Maybe just clarifying something.

22:39 Wes: Well, Locke doesn't go into it. That's the main thing. Whatever you think Locke's position implies, he just doesn't spell out a sophisticated enough position to account for memory loss. He just keeps it at a very generic level. So you could take this as saying that Locke wasn't specific enough, or you could. Whatever.

22:56 Dylan: And we don't have to worry in this kind of connected chains about, besides gaps of forgetting that we normally experience. Like this whole continuity thing, there's a spectrum of it, right? I go to sleep and I wake up the next day, and I don't remember sleeping exactly. Like, I don't remember. I remember the fact that I woke up, like, all the stuff that happened during my sleeping. You know, what kind of memory is that? If you have memory of it at all, and then if you have amnesia, you know, or if you go get surgery and you're put under anesthetic, how big of a discontinuity can I have? If it's a short surgery, is that okay? But if it's a really long surgery, did I all of a sudden violate my continuity?

23:38 Wes: Yeah, most stuff we just don't remember, or at least not consciously or we don't have access to those memories, whatever is, you know, actually happened in the brain. But it doesn't matter because really, we just need some percentage to hold from moment to moment or from day to day. And if I'm Connected yesterday and yesterday is connected the day before, and so on and so forth. No matter how far I am from the five year old, that chain gives me continuity to the five year old. Even if, you know, there's nothing now I remember nothing about being a five year old. That's okay. I'm still continuous in the sense that there was a five and a half year old who knew something about the five year old and then so on and so forth.

24:19 Mark: Well, and Parfit does suggest some additions to this memory criteria. Just other mental events that add to this connectiveness that it's equally important that there have been, you know, not just that I can remember the me from five minutes ago who remembers the me from five minutes before that, but that there are continuities of intentions that I intend to do something. I mean, part of having an intention seems like you remember that you intend to do it. I don't know if some of these things might be reducible to memory, but he even wants to say things like dispositional attitudes, you know, beliefs.

24:53 Wes: Well, the connection would be between intentions and acts. So those are the two connected elements. You would have intentions connected to acts. And so he even says on page 208, you could conceive of complete amnesia, someone being a person, even though they have complete amnesia. Just because you can connect character elements of character or intention to acts and then probably a lot of other stuff that we haven't thought of. So it can be much more than memory. And it's conceivable that memory wouldn't be the principal thing, although I think it probably is there.

25:24 Dylan: It's making a very interesting clarification about memory when you say that the most salient portion of or form of memory is that which connects intentions to acts. And that's what goes to what my identity is or my psychological continuity. That's me. Very interesting because it takes memory out of the storehouse mode and points you to what is memory really functioning to do. And I think that clarifying it as connecting intentions to acts is actually a pretty good way to do that. That when you transform in something you tend to do into the future and you act on it, that is a way of clarifying what memory is going to do for you. It's not like remembering, oh, there's a tree outside.

26:13 Wes: I'm trying to think about how memory relates, but the basic idea is I am doing something right now, and an hour ago I intended to do that thing if the person who is doing the thing. So how do I know that we're the same person. Because there's enough of that stuff going on. There's enough of me doing things that some past person intended to do. And if enough of that lines up, then I have grounds for saying they're the same person.

26:43 Dylan: But that's going to go like for me, picking up my glasses. Right. Or opening the refrigerator or going to the bathroom. I mean, all those things. In fact, it's those things that are going to matter more rather than, oh, like in an hour I'm going to go to the doctor. Those are going to be like a tiny fragment, tiny subset of the kinds of things that you're talking about that he's talking about here for making that continuity of intention and action. Because every voluntary action I have involves intention of some sort in the way he's talking about it. Very tiny intentions.

27:16 Seth: Yeah.

27:16 Wes: I think the key thing is we just want to. We want to expand beyond memory and think about any type of connectedness between mental states, but also between our bodies and our mental states, between actions and mental states. We want to kind of get a whole big grab bag of stuff and then talk about its continuousness. And then that gives us a grounds for identity.

27:37 Seth: One of the issues that I found with the is the sort of prioritization of mental activity as opposed to physical activity with respect to the description. And he does, in the early part of the essay, talk about views of identity that associate with the brain and body and that it's really about the brain. If enough of the brain is present, then you can say that it's the same person or whatever. And I do think that there's a little short shrift to the body. And it's actually one of the issues I have with this particular aspect of the book. I fear that the notion of continuity of memory is ultimately going to collapse into continuity of experience.

And what I mean by that is I understand the concept that I have a certain kind of strong continuity with Seth of yesterday and a much weaker continuity of Seth of 30 years ago. But there's a chain of memory, so to speak, that bridges those things. But in reality there is no chain of memory.

28:37 Wes: The chain is between the memory and the actual experience. Those are the two things that are linked. No, I seem to have remembered X. I did experience X. There's the right causal relation between them.

28:50 Mark: Sorry, Seth, sketch out your alternative there.

28:52 Seth: Okay, so basically what I'm saying is that memory's not going to be. It collapses into just continuity of experience. That he's trying to make memory do some job, that it's not capable of doing. And if you want to say that what constitutes identity is the faculty of memory, being able to basically string together experiences with some sort of causal foundation, then you can just as easily say if this thing, something has continuity of experience, whether or not it remembers it is irrelevant. And then you have to start talking about the thing having the experience, the subject of experience, which is one of the other positions that he takes.

29:33 Wes: I don't think it's memory putting these experiences together. Right. You're talking about continuity of experience, which I think is exactly right. It's just how do you establish continuity of experience? How is a past experience for me continuous with an experience that I'm having now? Well, the past experience, I can't be experiencing that because I'm in the present. I had. My only access to it is through memory. So the relation is between present experience and past experience as remembered. Actually, I'm sorry, that's a mistake. The relationship is between a past experience as I experienced it and my memory of that past experience.

30:11 Mark: So there is a place where he sounds more like what Seth was describing. Section 88, the specious present. When he's talking about what explains the unity of consciousness that it sounds like there he's at least considering the idea that it really is a matter of memory from moment to moment. The memory is the thing that provides the chain through experience. Why this experience is mine and the next experience is mine. The next experience is mine. That is purely a phenomenological thing. As opposed to this retrospective long term memory thing, which is more what Locke talks about and what he's talking about with this relation.

30:43 Wes: R. Those are the co conscious experiences or things that belong within the same. But the streams of consciousness can. Right. I could be knocked out for a day. I'm not connected. And that's.

30:53 Seth: I ha.

30:53 Wes: I need memory because my stream of consciousness isn't always active.

30:58 Seth: Isn't that as much as saying that in a certain sense it's begging the question because memory is required to even pose the question of identity. If you had no memory, you'd not be capable of even asking yourself the question of what am I? Do I persist through time? Memory is our tether to time. So if we're asking a question about a personal identity as persistence through time and how do we do that? Memory is just required for it. Required to even ask the question and then to say that, well, memory is the mechanism by which there's something that's just not jiving. Maybe I'm not articulating it but there's something that's just not working for me on.

31:35 Wes: Well, I think you're getting like a famous objection to Locke's memory criterion, right? Which is that it's circular because when we use the term memory, where we implicitly mean my memory. So we can't explain personal identity in terms of memory if we've already built personal identity into the concept of memory. And that's why he will do all of his stuff with what he calls quasi memory. So the new definition, right, Becomes I seem to remember having an experience. Remember having an experience. Someone did have that experience, right? Not I actually had that experience, someone did. And then my memory is dependent on it in the right way. And so he thinks he can get around that. Not all philosophers agree with that. I think many philosophers would still defend the idea that it's circular, but he thinks he's gotten around it.

32:21 Mark: He's pulling a black mirror kind of thing there where imagine that you could have other people's memories injected into you and then you would recognize even though you had those memories from a first person point of view. And I ask you about them, and you can answer all the same stuff, and you phenomenologically remember having them. He says, in that case, since you know that you didn't get them in the normal way, you know that you had them injected into you, you, or frankly, even if you didn't know, if you just didn't actually have that connection that Wes was saying between the memory and then you actually having done that in the first place yourself, then we'll call it not actually your memory. We'll call it a quasi memory.

32:57 Seth: Yeah, I do get that Parfit thinks that he's overcome that objection.

33:02 Wes: You're getting the very core problem of this and why it's so counterintuitive because, like, his whole argument depends on him being able to successfully claim that he can give this impersonal right account this impersonal description, and then build identity out of that personal description of the contents of our thoughts. When normally we think of things the other way around, where identity comes first and we are the container and everything is in the container, and that when we refer to our thoughts, we can't even make sense of them, as Kant thought, unless we're referencing the container. So the container comes first.

33:39 Dylan: There's something that's having the memories and he's having to. He has a structure. I was thinking that he was expanding the what is meant by memory, But I'm more convinced now the way we've Been talking is that he is really super adding something. That this intention and action criteria isn't about expanding what you mean by memory. It's really saying that it might be related to memory. Memory might be a version of it. But it's not essentially impersonal enough to do that work.

34:08 Seth: I'm actually sympathetic to the impersonal and indeterminate model. I want this to succeed. I just feel like any reference to memory is going to bring us back to that circular argument. I want to say that if you can talk about a continuity of experience. Combined with some sort of numerical persistence.

34:27 Wes: Right.

34:27 Seth: Or continuity of physical. A physical location, you know, physical something with the right cause that actually is the right way to go. I just. Memory just seems like a landmine.

34:38 Wes: I think this is a really good place to bring up Williams objection in Section 83. But it's a really good thought experiment for getting at Seth, some of what you're intuiting here. Which is that strangeness of trying to make psychological continuity a basis for identity.

34:54 Mark: Could I just frame it for a second? So you might think that all this talk of minds really reduces to talk of brains. And I think the sophisticated people that he's arguing against. His actual contemporaries. So Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel have more physicalist views. And so Bernard Williams is giving us this very clever version of where the two actually come apart. And we would want to say that even though there is not psychological continuity, there's not continuity of memory. The fact that there is physical continuity means that it's the same person that we would care about. This future person.

35:28 Wes: Yeah. The thing to keep in mind is that these guys are non reductionists. Just like the Cartesian ego people. Right. People who want to say there's a substantial soul or substance as ego are non reductionist. And so are the physicalists. And the reason why people are non reductionists is they want to hold on to this idea of numerical identity. And here's the reason why. Suppose you were torturing someone. These examples are always so nice. Suppose you're torturing someone so that they are in a state of pain. But you are also gradually transforming their minds in such a way, which would also mean their brains, such a way that they become qualitatively a different person.

Right? So if you had cell level or molecular level control over what were going on in my brain. You could gradually change me into Napoleon. And give me all of Napoleon's memories and Napoleon's character and Napoleon's exact brain structure at some time in his life. But do that While you were torturing me and while I was in extreme pain. And we want to ask ourselves, okay, does Wes's pain at some point stop? Does it cease because Wes is destroyed by becoming Napoleon? Well, it doesn't seem like that. Like the pain doesn't ever stop during this thought experiment, the pain completely persists.

So we almost think there's kind of an abstract again, container or bucket for subjectivity, which is there and stays the same. And it underlies everything no matter how much we change things qualitatively. And of course, Bernard Williams does not like a Cartesian ego for that. So he's going to say the brain does it. We have a much better chance of explaining that in terms of the numerical identity of the brain, because in physical objects the numerical identity is more obvious. We can just talk about a continuous spatiotemporal line that they carve out in order to explain their identity.

37:26 Mark: I just want to clarify, when you say doing something to the mind means he's doing something to the brain. In the Williams example, just to quote, the surgeon tells me while I'm in pain, he will do several things. He will first activate some neurodes that will give me amnesia. I suddenly lose all my memories of my life up to the start of my pain. Does this give me less reason to dread what is coming? Can I assume that when the surgeon flips this switch, my pain will suddenly cease? Surely not. The pain might so occupy my mind that I would even fail to notice the loss of all these memories.

The surgeon next tells me while I'm still in pain, he will later flip another switch which will cause me to believe that I am Napoleon and will give me apparent memories of Napoleon's life. Can I assume this will cause my pain to cease? The answer again is no. So I just want to distinguish that between. He gives a later example where actually you are replacing parts of the brain with someone else's neurons. That is not what's going on here. This is just changing your memory.

38:18 Wes: So I'm getting a description which I thought was better, but because, yeah, what Parfit does next is he will give. He's going to take Williams experiment and use it against him in a really ingenious way by coming up with the spectra which we can discuss. So he's going to say, actually this example that Bernard Williams gave definitively shows us that we must be reductionists and not non reductionists like Williams. So then he's going to describe that in terms of replacing things neuron by neuron. Williams doesn't do them.

38:48 Mark: And all these replacement things come down to the idea that you have at the extremes, things that are obviously different, but then because you're gradually replacing something, whether it's replacing memories, replacing character, or actually replacing neurons with exact duplicates, that's one of the thoughts experiments. Or a combination of these, it's tough to explain. At what point does the flip happen between, you know, us and Napoleon or between us and clone Wes? If you're replacing your brain with an exact duplicate or something.

39:19 Dylan: Right.

39:19 Mark: Because if you're a physicalist who does not like teletransportation and thinks that the I'm actually going to die, they're going to make a new version that's qualitatively identical to me. But personal identity is about numerical identity. That will not be me. Well, so think about that as the end state of an operation where I'm getting brain surgery and neuron by neuron, they're getting replaced by exact duplicates. So at the end, you know, it'll be a completely different brain with exactly the same structure. It'll be qualitatively identical, according to the physicalist, that will be a different person.

But how do you say exactly at what point you become that other person? It would be entirely arbitrary to just pick a point and say, oh, as soon as you do exactly half the neurons get replaced, then you become the other person. So he wants to just say that. There is no question, it's just a different description. If you're saying, is the clone me or is the clone not me? As long as there's, you know, it's this transformation, there's only one of them. So, you know, you're not dealing with multiple clones or anything like that. Then there simply is no answer.

It's one of those Wittgensteinian kind of. Well, the concept doesn't extend that far. I don't know what you're talking about. You know, that is kind of the philosophically sophisticated take on is the teleport transportation. Is that me or not? Well, not me under the way that we normally have constructed this concept because we've never run into that kind of weird shit in the past?

40:42 Dylan: This is an empty question formulation. Yeah, because at some level, his refutation of Williams argument. Am I right to say that in some ways, Williams presents his argument where he's already laying it out in terms of a container case? So that container is the container that has the pain and you go through and you're, you know, replacing memories to try to change identity. But the fact is, the Container, there is whatever's containing the pain. And some level the criticism would be, well, you've already predetermined your answer because you constructed the case so that there's already a container. And then what Parfit's going to do is he's going to successively and progressively slowly change the container, the physical pieces, and show that. Well, that it doesn't matter. So this is the service turning it back on Williams.

41:31 Seth: Well, we didn't read Williams, so it's hard to try to give him a more charitable reading. But sure. I mean, isn't the point of the Williams example is to say that the memories don't matter?

41:41 Wes: Exactly.

41:42 Dylan: Yep.

41:42 Mark: They're not essential.

41:43 Seth: They're. They're not essential.

41:45 Dylan: Yeah. Well, and that's what I mean by he's presupposing the container. The thing that's having the pain is the eye.

41:51 Wes: Yeah.

41:52 Seth: The thing that's having the pain for Williams is the brain.

41:56 Dylan: Well, that's the eye.

41:57 Mark: If he's a physicalist about personal identity, that's what he's arguing here. He's saying Locke is wrong, that it's psychological continuity. Physical continuity is just as good. And I think Parfit, insofar as he wants to entertain this at all, it does want to say, contra Locke, that a person with total amnesia is still the same person. You don't have to do Locke's move and say, well, it's the same man, but it's not the same person. He wants to say, like these things normally go together, the physical and the psychological. So really, if either one continues, we'd want to call that the same person.

42:25 Wes: Well, Seth, what were you going to say? Because I think it's not clear he really refutes this pain example.

42:31 Seth: I sort of backtracked after Dylan responded that it's clear how Williams is a physicalist. We understand that. But is Williams committed to saying that he's talking about a subject of pain?

42:43 Wes: Well, I think the problem with the Williams is that when he makes the brain the bearer of personal identity, he opens himself up to a weakness, strangely enough. Right. Williams focuses on the psychological spectrum, and the change is in the psychological spectrum and says, okay, what's the underlying unchanging thing? It's the brain itself. Even though, of course, it implies that there are lots of changes in the brain. There is still this one structure, so and so's brain, and that continues through time and is the recipient of the changes, but it's still numerically one.

43:17 Dylan: And you know that because of the experience of pain, Right.

43:20 Wes: But the common element through all of it, starting out as Seth and becoming Napoleon, is that that pain never goes away. And so we think of that as that subject never goes away. It doesn't matter if it's Seth or if it's Napoleon. It's the same subject. It's the same subject that experiences the pain, you know. Now I'm becoming a little bit unclear on what Parfit's doing here, but I think it starts with saying that we can do this gradually with the brain. You know, the brain doesn't solve everything because we can just imagine the gradual changing in the brain. And then we have to ask, well, you know what? I don't know now. I don't know.

43:55 Mark: So I'm imagining another sort of Black Mirror episode or Twilight Zone or something. But they're like pain vampires. And so they're going to give you a drug. You're going to fall asleep for a little while, then you're going to wake up, total amnesia. And they're going to put you through such pain, unbelievable pain, not leaving any physical scarring, anything like that. Then they're going to give you another drug. You're going to fall asleep again, you're going to wake up, you'll remember before you took the first drug, but you won't remember the pain part at all.

So that little you, during that, however long it was, was psychologically isolated from the before you and the after you and those. The before you and after you were connected in all the same ways. Clearly it's the same brain through the whole thing. According to Williams. I think you would still care. I don't want to go through that pain, but I kind of more agree with Locke. My intuitions say that, like, I might be willing to sell an hour of my time in absolute agony if that me that was being tortured is not something I'm gonna. If anything, I would just doubt, like, it's gonna fuck me up.

Come on. You say I'm not gonna remember it, but, like, it's. God, there's no way that I would get out of that Scot free. That's the thing that would make me, you know.

45:02 Dylan: Yeah. You don't believe in the ISO, the genuine isolation. Yes.

45:05 Wes: I don't remember what happened. But why am I having these nightmares every night?

45:10 Mark: Exactly. That's, I think, what the Twilight Zone episode would play on.

45:14 Seth: Maybe we can talk about what it is that Parfit thinks is happening or thinks is he's showing. There's a nice little passage at the end of 85, because remember, Parfit's trying to. The project here is to argue in favor of a reductionist view. He doesn't want to talk about some sort of solid, persistent, like he doesn't want to talk about a Cartesian ego. He doesn't want to talk about the subject of experience. He's trying to find. He's trying to get away from determinant.

45:42 Wes: But also he doesn't want to be a physical, non reductionist.

45:45 Seth: Right.

45:46 Wes: Should we just say, because at 79, can we say real quick what it means to be a reductionist?

45:50 Dylan: Yeah, we should recapitulate that.

45:52 Seth: Yeah, go ahead.

45:53 Wes: You know, to be a reductionist, it's consistent with any. You could be a materialist, you could be a dualist. I think you can even be an idealist and you can still be a reductionist. So. And you can, obviously in the Williams example, you can be a physicalist and be a non reductionist. So those things are not, don't line up. But the idea is basically that personal identity is reducible, first of all, it's reducible to more particular facts. They're facts about the brain, the body experiences, physical events, mental events, actions, and so on and so forth.

So that's the reductionism part, right? It's reducible to those things and that those things are the basis for psychological continuity. So in other words, reductionism is the claim that identity is reducible to psychological continuity. Then there's the fact that those things can be impersonally described, that you can describe all those things without actually presupposing personal identity, the kind of thing we were getting into with memory. And by contrast, the non reductionist says there must be something else than all of that stuff. The persons must be, some Parfit calls it a further existing fact.

There must be like a Cartesian ego, or a subject owner, container, whatever you want to call it. There must be something above and beyond all of those facts that I described. So what Parfit ultimately wants to say is he wants to say, well, think for example, about nations, right? We're reductionists about nations and people are the same way. So a nation we can say are just their citizens and their territory and their government. They're just the facts and then the interrelations between all those things. I think we should actually think of it as a system like a causal and functional relations.

We can give complete descriptions of nations by describing those facts. But then a nation is also something distinct from those facts. So it's this weird idea that being a person can be something distinct from Those facts, it can be something like being a subject, but it doesn't mean being a separately existing entity, it's just that it's a different description.

47:56 Mark: I think you're muddying things with that last part because he wants to make it clear that there are different kinds of non reductionists. Some of them think that there's a separate entity, like a Cartesian soul, but some of them just think that there is a further fact of the matter. Whereas a reductionist says no, there is no. Like if you were really a reductionist about nations, then you'd say everything there is about a nation can somehow be reduced to laws that are written and territories and people and like those are the facts and there is no France over and above all those other facts.

If you were pulling a Chalmers, pulling a Carnap and trying to make a list of all the facts that there are and reduce any complex facts to the simple facts, let's say pulling a Locke, why not? Then you would not talk about nations at all if you're really a reduction about nations. And so that's his view about personal identities, that you can get rid of it.

48:51 Wes: Yeah, he thinks further existing facts imply separately existing entities. And I think what you've just said makes that clear. So he doesn't really talk about them again for the rest of the essay. But yeah, so France is not some further entity on top of its citizens, territories and government, but France is distinct from those things. In other words, there is a sense in which the whole is greater than the parts. It's just that we think of the whole supervening on the parts and that the whole. We don't reify it, we don't say that there's some separate entity represented by him.

49:20 Mark: Well, I think that's good for now. We're gonna do the rest in part two. You supporters will see that that is the next thing in your feed. Go check it out. Thanks.