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Personal Identity

Psychological Continuity - Forward

(Text as at 06/07/2023 00:43:12)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

Plug Note¹

• Thesis Text:
  1. I think there’s a conceptual difference between:-
     1. Forward psychological continuity, and
     2. Backward psychological continuity.
  2. Imagine the case where₂, I’m put into a duplicating machine₃, but something goes wrong and my body is destroyed by the duplication⁴ process, though my duplicate wakes up perfectly happily. Then, it seems to me, I⁵ would never wake up, and would have no experience beyond entry to the duplicating machine. I would have no forward psychological continuity.
  3. However, my duplicate⁶ does have backward psychological continuity. Any duplicate of me, looking backward, would consider himself to be “me”, having my memories⁷, abilities, plans and so forth, and a body looking just like mine. But, would I⁸ ever wake up as the duplicate? My intuition on the endurantist account, as I have said, is that I would not, though I suspect that on the perdurantist⁹ account, this might be seen as a case of intended fission¹⁰ in which I was intended to wake up twice, provided we consider that the right sort of causality¹¹ is in place.
  4. The above considerations raise issues similar to those in closest continuer¹² accounts of personal identity, and the Only 'X' and 'Y' Principle¹³. How can what happens to someone else affect whether (so to speak) I am me? How could the “right sort of causality” have anything to do with how I experience things?
  5. Fission is, in any case, hard to imagine happening to oneself. Just what does it mean to “wake up twice”? I dare say one could get one’s head(s) around it. The two selves would then be distinct individuals, with distinct consciousnesses, but with a shared past. On the perdurantist account, we were always distinct, but co-located with everything in common.
  6. Let’s consider forward psychological continuity in everyday life. What ensures forward continuity of consciousness¹⁴ in the normal case of sleep and temporary unconsciousness? I cannot know “from the inside” that when I awake I’m the same human being¹⁵ as the one that went to sleep in my bed. The reason I believe this is for external reasons: duplication¹⁶ is not physically possible (or at least practical), and in any case I have no reason to believe it happened to me last night. Other people assure me that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on.
  7. Andy Clark₁₇, raises this question about what ensures psychological continuity – more or less than in the case of Teletransportation – in the case of dreamless sleep, or (hypothetically) being frozen and then thawed out. We might ask what it is in the normal waking case. Maybe the whole thing is related to the arrow of time¹⁸ or in the distinctions between forward-looking psychological properties – desires and intentions yet to be satisfied or acted upon – and memories of what has already taken place.
  8. This is the sort of question that the Logical Positivists would denounce as meaningless, as no empirical evidence can decide it.

• ---

  Further Remarks:
  1. This seems a very important issue to me, and I need to make more of it. For example, in the teletransportation¹⁹ thought experiment²⁰, it seems to me₂₁ that a new person wakes up, but I don’t, nor do I experience anything, though the new person claims to be me. Incidentally, it’s not just a new person²², but a new human being²³ who wakes up.
  2. I will try another thought experiment²⁴ I’ve been considering. It’s often said in the literature that if Teletransportation²⁵ became commonplace as a means of travel, and was conventionally²⁶ deemed to be such, rather than as a means of death²⁷, then life would carry on just fine. Indeed, no-one could notice and difference, either from the inside or outside.
  3. Let’s try a variant: imagine (as maybe many US citizens do) that each night when you’re tucked up in bed technologically-advanced aliens spirit you away and perform horrible experiments on you, in the process scanning your whole body so they can replace your mangled corpse with a perfect duplicate of the original that had been sleeping happily, and return this simulacrum to your bed. Naturally, your partner and anyone else would be unaware of any of this. Also, the person who wakes up – just like the teletransportee – would have no reason to think anything amiss. He would consider himself the same person as went to sleep²⁸ the night before. Life would carry on ‘happily’. Yet in this – admittedly phantastical situation – our sleeper only lives for under 24 hours before coming to a grizzly end and being replaced by someone else. His experience ends on the operating table aboard the starship. If the reality became known, no-one would dare go to sleep. Maybe teletransportation is less grizzly, but it leads to the same death and recreation.
  4. Maybe one could cavil at the details of the experiment: maybe it’s just not possible to extract the information from a human body sufficient to create a duplicate²⁹ without destroying the original, so all the medical experimentation isn’t possible without a mangled body being returned, which would certainly be noticed. So, we might need to modify the TE so that your body is scanned – without anaesthetic, of course, to ensure this isn’t an experience you’d be comfortable with – and two copies are created – one for experimentation and the other for returning to bed. Then, one copy-you lives on happily for a day, and the other meets the grizzly end.
  5. Now, what could make the waker the very same consciousness³⁰ as the sleeper in this scenario? Usually, it is said that there needs to be the ‘right sort’ of causal connection³¹, in particular one internal to the continuant. In this case, there is a causal connection, but it is imposed externally by aliens and their (maybe tendentiously named) duplicating machine. Are objections based on causality of the wrong sort anything more than intuitions that others might not share? I leave this open at the moment.
  6. On the Constitution View³², we are individuated by our First Person Perspective³³. As far as I can see, all these duplicates are qualitatively identical³⁴ (that is, exactly similar³⁵), and so are their FPPs.
  7. Producing a reading list on this topic is difficult as the distinction – to my knowledge – isn’t usually made. There’s a huge overlap with the general literature of psychological continuity and connectedness and that on Teletransportation. For these, see:-
     → Psychological Continuity³⁶,
     → Teletransportation³⁷.