Fun with Identity
I no longer endorse the previous essay on "Identity" that can be found in this blog. In fact, I would like to recant it entirely. The way I phrased the problem at the beginning was very misleading. That’s the main problem with the essay: I’ve articulated everything wrong. The question I respond to, “What is identity?” is the wrong kind of question to ask. Nobody could possibly answer that question – it’s too vague. What I was really talking about, as becomes clear once you get about half-way through the essay, are philosophical theories of “personal identity”. Hopefully, my ultimate point comes across. I still do endorse this basic idea that the philosophical approach to such questions as personal identity is flawed.
Now that I’ve read Reasons and Persons, I also know that the
stuff I said about Derek Parfit was wrong. In the section on personal identity
in that book, Parfit’s thought experiments involving people who are split in
teletransportation or people who get brain transplants and whatnot, and his
painstaking, laborious argumentation against various common philosophical
positions on identity, eventually lead him to the view that “there is no
further fact” to identity and that we should accept what he calls the “Reductionist
view”, namely, that all that matters when you are talking about identity is
continuity and connectedness to “past selves”. I actually don’t disagree with
this, and – contrary to my assumption in the essay – I don’t think he strays
into mysticism and obscurantism at any point. However, I don’t see why not
believing in the Ego and distrusting the intuitive notion of a coherent,
immutable self should logically lead one to completely change one’s life and
one’s view of one’s place in society and the cosmos, and thereby force the
revision of certain moral theories. Yet this is exactly what he claims in Reasons and Persons, and he spends much
of the latter half of the book presupposing it.
The fundamental gripe I have with
Parfit is that he takes abstract, technical moral philosophy way too far. It is true that he himself
thinks that one should actually live by the dictates of the best moral
philosophy. But the problem is that no one else does. And it is also far from
clear that it is even rational to assume
that our moral theories should be perfectly logical, logically consistent and airtight. After all, they’re not scientific theories; they’re
just formalisations of our innate psychology. No normal person enacts altruism
according to prescribed ratios, agonises over the logicality of their every
decision, and worries whether their past decision on one matter contradicts
their current one. No one except Parfit, that is. The guy is incredibly
strange. And the book is incredibly strange as a result.
I can see why moral philosophers
loved Reasons and Persons when it was
published and why it has been so influential, because it is a kind of 400 page
legitimation of moral philosophy as a fully analytic enterprise. As the book indirectly
demonstrates, once you do start treating moral philosophy as if it were quantum
theory or something, you do get some surprising results. But, as I said before,
if you think about it carefully, it’s far from clear that the meta-theory
behind Reasons and Persons – its
doctrinal assumptions, if you like – are themselves logical. What the book
does, essentially, is synthesise the
following: a methodology of exacting analytical rigour, typified by Parfit’s assiduous
and fastidious style of argumentation; the bedrock of our basic, primal
intuitions about how we should treat other people; and our current scientific
understanding of ourselves and the world, which militates against most of our primal
intuitions. Now, it is true that a moral philosopher must rely on primal intuitions to adjudicate questions both big
and small. For example, one has to use them to determine problems like whether
it’s “acceptable” for a moral theory to require us to give 50% of our income to
strangers, or whether it would be ok on a drowning ship to save one of your own
babies instead of the babies of three strangers. But this fact about moral
philosophy is also one of the reasons why going too far with its formalisation is
a bit odd. When you do try to formalise moral philosophy, what you’re
essentially doing is combining our evolved animal psychology with high-level,
abstract philosophy and logical rigour. And the addition of science in Reasons and Persons just makes the
mixture even weirder. It is the science in the book that compels Parfit to make
radical revisions of ancient assumptions. For example, he argues that the “self”
should not be the fundamental moral atom, and he observes that, on account of
the “Identity Problem”, it’s illogical to assume morality still applies to effects
of acts that will be felt in the long-term. Counterintuitive scientific facts thus
become the engine of the “progress” in the book. But how can it be logical to
both take intuitions seriously and ignore them altogether? Could there by any
method to such madness?
To be fair, I think there is some method in Parfit’s synthesis of
intuitions and counterintuitions, though I’m not quite sure what it is. Perhaps
he only disposes of what he views to be the inessential intuitions and leaves
the most basic ones there. However, even if he does have some consistent scheme
like this, it doesn’t diminish the fact that the book does yoke together some
very strange bedfellows.
Most importantly, it is clear
that anyone outside of the ivory tower of moral philosophy would not regard the
bricolage of a book that is Reasons and Persons as having made “progress”.
In my opinion, the laymen’s assessment is the right assessment. Not to be too
horrible to Parfit, but I think the speculation of Parfit’s fellow British
philosopher Simon Blackburn re: Parfit’s 2011 book On What Matters may apply equally to Reasons and Persons. To wit, as impressive as Reasons and Persons is, I think it probably does amount to “a long voyage
down a stagnant backwater”. Literally treating morality as some kind of science
has got to be mistaken.
In some way, I feel sorry for full-time
moral philosophers, because I can’t imagine they have much to do. If they want
my advice, I reckon they should branch into neuroscience or cognitive
psychology. In general, I think philosophy should become more scientific than
it currently is – just as long as it stops before disappearing completely into
the maw of phys and chem and preserves its abstract heart. That’s not a novel
idea, but I think it’s a good one. Moreover, I think philosophy is more likely
to actually make that change than any other of the humanities on account of its
history of association with men we now do call early scientists (David Hume and
Isaac Newton, for example), and its undergirding by scientific knowledge today.
I foresee a world where no
philosopher can be a pure metaphysician. What a paradise that would be!
Now, none of this was meant to
imply that there aren’t interesting things to say about personal identity, and
how our intuitions clash with the scientific truth. In fact, this subject interests
me greatly. Another more concrete way of thinking about personal identity is to
consider a brief summary of the relevant biological facts:
The human body is essentially
just a bag of billions of cells working together in unison to perform millions
of tiny operations all the time, maintaining the function of various systems
around the body and keeping the whole alive. It is also teeming with bacteria. Obviously,
no one cell has any consciousness or self-awareness. That is the miracle of
life: each tiny cog is tiny, insignificant and primordial, yet, together, all
of them create a highly-functioning, highly intelligent creature that can perform
all sorts of extremely complex tasks. And the brain is no different to any
other part of the body in this basic way. The brain is composed of billions of
neurons, which are a strange kind of cell with a series of filaments known as “dendrites”
at one end, and a kind of conductive tail called an axon that carries electrical
impulses. Each neuron transmits electrical signals to other cells across the junction
known as the synapse, regulated by the chemical reactions constantly occurring
in each. According to our best current understanding of cognition (the computational
theory of mind), neurons are arrayed into highly intricate and complex networks
of “information processing”, each connected by kinds of “logic gates”, which in
turn fit into larger and larger “modules”, each ultimately specialised for some
kind of discrete purpose but many interacting with each other in a
superstructural global network. This explains all our cognition, our vision,
our emotion – everything. It explains our sense of a “soul”. Notably, this soul
– at least conceived in the classic, Cartesian sense – must be a highly
elaborate illusion.
As a consequence, there’s no
objective reason why one should think of a creature as fundamentally ‘one’ – at
least in the sense of being a fully self-integrated, autonomous entity (we are obviously 'one' in the sense that we all have one brain). For
very good evolutionary reasons, we have the illusion
of being ‘one’, and of having free will. We have the illusion that we are the master
of the ship, that we are kind of our own self-reflexive homunculus, controlling
everything that goes on. (It’s almost as if we are both in the control room,
twiddling and tweaking the nobs and pressing the buttons, and yet also the ship
itself.) Most importantly, we have the impression of having one infrangible identity.
But science tells us we don’t actually have any of this. We’re not conscious of
any of the machinations that go into a “thought” or that produce a “desire” or
a “belief”, or even any of the reactions and calculations that trigger a
decision. As much as we like to vaunt our “consciousness” and supreme sentience,
much of what goes on in our brains is completely mechanical – robotic, if you
like. The real deep existential truth is that we are very elaborate machines
made of smaller machines made of smaller machines made of complex chemical
compounds made of the fundamental elements made of protons, neutrons and
electrons made of quarks and Higgs-Bosons and whatever the fuck else. That is
who we are. Deal with it.
But should this actually force us
to change our views about how to live our lives? I don’t think so. Apart from
anything else, I don’t think it can. It’s one of those truths that can only
ever remain intellectual. You cannot
hope to “apply” it to real life. In fact, I have no idea what applying it would
even entail. It’s not like it would be as simple as Parfit makes it out to be:
describing the versions of you in the past as “other selves” and caring less
about your own interests.
Also, here’s a really deep
question: if you’re going to apply one deep level of scientific analysis to real
life and use it as a basis for how to live, then why not apply even deeper
levels of scientific analysis? What is the logical reason for stopping at the
idea that there’s no Ego up there in your head? Why not keep going to the
level of analysis that says that life and animation itself is a kind of even
more elaborate illusion because organisms are composed of cells, and cells aren’t
alive? Or that cells are not really best thought of as a coherent, autonomous
whole, but an elaborate composition of chemical constituents? Or that atoms are
not really best thought of as a coherent, autonomous whole, but as an intricate
arrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons? Ad absurdum, ad infinitum.
One philosophical argument I really
like making is the one that might best be called the Argument from Commonsense.
Just as I have argued that morality is so fundamental to our psychology that it
makes little sense to call it a "fiction", I think that perhaps this
idea of the self and free will is such a strong illusion that there’s no point
even calling it an illusion.[1]
This is not a new way of seeing it, of course, but I think it’s a sensible one.
The truth is the notion of the self is a tectonic part of our umwelt as an organism. It is not an objective truth, in the most grandiose,
transcendental definition of objective that physicists and mathematicians like
to use, but it is some kind of truth to us. And since it would be impossible
for any kind of organism (or even superintelligence) to see the universe
without the metaphoric lens of an umwelt –
to somehow simultaneously see all the universe at once through all the frequencies
of the electromagnetic spectrum, to be omniscient and divine and all-wise –
perhaps not even the word intersubjective
really cuts how important this truth is to us. To me, I don’t think it’s
too mystical to say that it lies somewhere between intersubjective and objective.
Well, ok, maybe that is too mystical, but we’ve kind of hit a barrier here,
and none of our concepts can possibly express anything more. “Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
[1] In
the same way that it’s probably pointless trying to convince yourself that
time’s passage is an illusion, since that belief is central to the way we
interpret the world. Can something be an illusion if it is part of the
fundamental fabric of our reality? If there’s no other way of seeing things,
does this term still make sense?
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