body – We Love Philosophy

When last we left this perplexing topic, many of you were trying to get me arrested for a crime another I committed. (I say “many of you” even though only my mom and my lawyer were trying to do that, but my circle of friends has scant points about it, so ‘many’ it was.) When we are looking at memories as the signpost of identity-pointing, there are detours aplenty. Today, we are going to move on to the third of the potential candidates for identity fixing: the physical body.

Are You Your Body?

The pros and cons of the body as a candidate for personal identity here are pretty intuitive, and much of them we have seen earlier (with memories), if in slightly different form. The body is easily recognizable, and, in fact, is how we identify others. Slight changes, such as haircuts or tanning, seem to do little to distort or erase the recognizable features. However, which features matter the most? How many of them are necessary to maintain if one’s identity is to remain constant? Suppose you gain or lose three hundred pounds, you may well feel and be unrecognizable to both yourself and others. Are you a different person?Many soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with missing limbs; are they different people? Both examples will result in the individual’s feeling different, but is that enough for identity to change as well? Think of the liquor store example from my previous post. How would that apply here?

Suppose that I rob the liquor store, but instead of getting hit by a car I instead cut off one of my arms.

Losing an arm

Is the the one-armed man the guilty person (I know Harrison Ford’s answer)?

What if I gain a lot of weight during the six weeks the police look for the robbing murderer?

Getting Fat

I doubt there is much controversy to either of these scenarios, and almost every one of you is going to think that identity has remained constant, that the same person is still there or here or whatever, even if that same person is not exactly the same (what’s the difference?, you might wonder, and good for you, you wondering person; the topic of identity when not dealing with people is going to be dealt with soon).

Remember when we talked about the Ship of Theseus, and I suggested that there are some who suggest that every possible change results in new identity. Such an individual, if she is consistent, would have to say that I am not the person who robbed the liquor store because I cut my fingernails or because I removed some hair. Such a person, though, is not really a person in the traditional sense of the word ‘person’, but is more of a collection of experiences that are joined together. Such a person cannot recall her first date, as all her recollections belong to someone else, just as such a person cannot look forward to a happier time in her life, as it will not be she that is enjoying that time, only someone who looks and thinks much as she does.

Few of you think like that, though. But why? If you are not in the memory camp and the physical features have changed beyond recognition, why is a person still the same even after extensive physical changes? What’s that? Sorry, the sound on my computer is muted — what are you saying at your screen as though Skype were on and our conversation was being passively monitored by virtuous government agencies? Ah, I see. Thoughts! The thoughts have not changed. Good! It’s almost as though you knew where I wanted this post to go. Thanks!

Thoughts and Brains

Of course, by ‘thoughts’ what your philosophically ignorant train of thinking was suggesting was the brain. What most members of the physical camp believe to be the defining feature of identity anchoring is the brain. So long as you have the same brain, you are the same person.

Another way to get to the brain is by elimination. Which parts of the body matter? For the body, that is pretty simple: beards, arms, legs, livers, ears, moles, etc., are all pretty superfluous. The part that matters is the brain. How much of the body matters? Really, again, almost all of the body is superfluous except the brain. What if the brain is damaged and the thoughts no more work good? Well, that is not the same brain then, is it? As far as which parts matter and how much of those parts matter, what am I, a brain scientist? (Yes. Yes, I am. Not in the United States, of course; regulations and all that have proven quite the obstacle to my life goals).

The solution to those worries is normally dealt with by a kind of common sense functionalism. Most of us don’t know Broca’s area from the pubic bone, but if you cannot remember anything from last night back, your brain… it don’t work too good. So the parts and amounts that matter for personal identity are the ones, whichever they are (and brain scientists know which those are), that affect the functioning of the brain.

Simple enough then. You are your functioning brain, and wherever it goes, so go you. Right? Right. Right? Well, dammit.

Swapping Brains

Let’s swap brains, then, you and I, and see where we go. Who wakes up in a svelte killing machine of evolutionary perfection and who wakes up in body aimed at child predation? No, no. There are no trick questions on this site. You will wake up, most of you think, in a body not originally yours. If the swap is permanent, maybe your personality will change based on how people around you treat you (either with sexual fearsomeness or with fear of your sexual perversity), but you are still basically the same person. You are your brain.

Note that this is different from those mind swap movies that are made every other week or so. In those instances, it is, or seems to be, the memories that are swapped and not the brains. A brain-based identity theorist watches those movies and laughs (partly at their sheer delightful hilarity) because the only change is that the individuals involved wrongly believe themselves to be someone else. How could they be, though, since their brains are still where they have always been?

There is really no way to confound anyone’s intuitions about the brain as it relates to identity, is there? Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Sorry, sorry — whoo, man. You really had there for a minute. Alright, let’s get to the confounding.

Suppose a man, let’s call him Gary, was born with half a brain. This happens, you know. Gary can still function and get about, but he only has half a brain. Maybe he cannot recall as much stuff as you can, maybe his motor skills are shaky in places, but he is a person and his name is Gary. Everyone okay with this?

Now let’s suppose that another person, Harry, has a regular, whole brain. But, egads! Harry is hit by a crazed Canadian driver and the resulting life-saving operation leaves him with half a brain. Now, this is not how it would work, but let’s suppose he still has around half his memories and the like. Is anyone here, aside from the identity-extremists, going to suggest that Harry is no longer Harry? Harry is still Harry even if only half of his brain is there since Harry can still function, to some degree, to some recognizable degree, as Harry used to.

Alright, and if we were to swap Harry’s half brain and Gary’s half brain, I suspect that you are going to think they, the people, go whither their brains do. Fine, fine. And if there was a third person, Terry, who lost his brain altogether, where is Terry? Gone. Right.

Brain swaps

What about this, though (and this is due to philosopher Derek Parfit): let’s take Gary’s half and Harry’s half and put them together into Terry’s head. Who is that? It has half of each person’s brain (well, I guess, it has all of their available brain, so whatever) and, so, we are suggesting here, it has half of each person’s memories, is it both Gary and Harry? If not, why not?

If Harry with a brain in his head was still Harry and not dead, then Harry’s half with Gary’s half should make them both be (please try not to laugh) who they once were. Can the one body be two persons? What if both Harry and Gary had had whole brains that we split, combining one half from each in two separate bodies? Can two bodies then be four persons? Oh, philosophy, what have you done to our so carefully coddled beliefs about all that is personally identical in the world?

Next Time…

Next time: clones! And light sabers! And sex!!! But mostly, and only, just clones.

My last post dealt with the Ship of Theseus. It was a kind of primer about personal identity. What you think about the ship, whether it was the same ship or not at the end of the journey, might reflect what you think about identity when it comes to individuals. If you thought the ship was different at the end of the journey, perhaps what matters to you are the physical parts of the body. If you thought that the ship was the same at the end of the journey, perhaps identity lies in something a bit more ephemeral. But what? Well, let’s see. And then let’s see why you’re wrong. (Alec is all about showing you what different people think; I am all about trying to get you to see what you think and why you are wrong for thinking so. That is why Alec gets more fan mail and I get more slashed tires.)

Personal identity has to do with what makes you who you are over time. There are three big common-sense solutions to the question of personal identity:

The soul
Memories/experiences
The physical body

Let’s get rid of the soul right away. Whatever the hell you use to figure out who you are, it is a pretty safe bet that it is not the soul. That is not to say there is no such thing as a soul; maybe there is, and maybe there is not. You do not sense your soul in any sort of direct fashion, and so it is probably not what you use to determine your identity. Most of you who believe in a soul do so because of faith, not because of direct evidence. Is who you are based on faith as well? What if your soul left your body and another soul came in? Would you notice? How? I suspect that most of what believe the soul to be responsible for can be explained by the issues with the other two solutions, and since neither of them really work either, you shouldn’t sweat this one too much.

How about memories/experiences (that slash is going to be important in a later post, so don’t forget it)? If memories are what makes you who you are, what happens when you lose those memories? Suppose you get amnesia. Are you the same person you were before? Let’s just go right to a Lifetime Movie example to test intuitions (your intuitions, of course; mine are forged in the surly steel of philosophic uncertainty).

A woman is driving through, uh, let’s say northern Canada…

…and she loses control of her car, crashing into the Canadian forest.

In a dazed state, with a broken arm and minor head trauma, she wanders a bit until she comes upon a small town. She is quickly noticed and taken to the local medical clinic where they see to her wounds. Upon asking her who she is, where she is from, and if there is anyone they can call, the staff realize the woman has amnesia. Furthermore, she has no ID on her. Despite looking for many days, the townspeople have no luck finding out who she is or where she came from. Still, these are very nice, Canadian people, and so they ‘adopt’ her. She picks a new name, gets a job at the very hospital that helped patch her up, and then gets an apartment. She works there for a year or two, meets and then dates and then marries (awwwww…) a doctor. She is happy. This is Lifetime, though, so the good times only last about forty minutes or so into the tale.

She has been married, as the story goes, for five years, when one day she hears a knock on her door. Opening it, as she is now a trusting Canadian, she sees a man she does not recognize, and yet he seems to recognize her. “I’ve found you,” he says. “I’ve finally found you?”

“Who are you?” our plucky heroine asks.

“I’m your husband,” he says. And he has pictures to back this up: pictures of their wedding, her parents, her childhood, and so forth. She, of course, has no memory of him, her parents, or her childhood.

Now: philosophy!

Not to imply that marriage implies or entails (or anything else like those two) ownership, but this is just the easiest way to ask this question: Whose wife is she? The first guy or the second (current amnesiac state) guy? Keep in mind that we are not writing some sort of Lifetime Slash fiction here. She is probably not going to want to be with both. In fact, if asked, she expresses a clear preference for the second guy (since, you should recall, unless you are being ironic, she has no memory of the first guy).

I’ll have Alec set up some sort of poll for this question, but I am going to go ahead and forecast/predict that the majority of people are going to choose the second guy as the winner. But why, you might wonder, even those of you who agree but who have come to philosophy as a means to better elucidate your thoughts and opinions. Here is why: you believe that memories are what makes a person who she is. You are you because you remember doing the stuff you did. You do not remember all of it, but you think, and perhaps rightly, that you don’t need to. You do remember starting this article (it’s not that long yet, is it?); you remember eating dinner last night; you remember graduating from high school or junior high school or grade school (you preciously precocious bastard); and so on. What you do not remember doing, you common sensically believe you didn’t do. Maybe you are not always right (hey — that is a good topic for a later post! Thanks for that suggestion), but you still have that intuition. Our lovely Canadian is in the same memory leak of a boat. She recalls her current husband, but no other. Hence, she is only the woman she remembers being.

What happened, then, to the first husband’s wife? I suspect many of you are not comfortable with stating that she is dead, but then, where is she if she is not married to the second guy? Gone? Away? Buried deep in the mind of this new woman? Some of you are sure and some of you are not. Note that the answer here becomes murkier when we talk about her parents: did they lose their daughter as their son-in-law lost his wife? Physically no, but mentally yes? Are you comfortable with that? Would alcohol help?

Let’s change the example a bit, and then end this entry, giving you something to think on a bit or two. Suppose instead of a woman driving a car through the Canadian forest, it is me and I am at a liquor store. And instead of a car crash, I am buying a bottle of Maddog 20/20 (they all taste like gas, so let’s get the blue one because it is the prettiest). And instead of being found by benevolent Canadian townsfolk, I am shooting to death the liquor store operator, writing my name and social security number on the wall in his blood, leaving my driver’s license and hair and nail clippings in bag labeled “DNA” on the counter, and then walking outside yelling, “Hey, everyone! I just killed the liquor store operator of my own, sane volition!”

And then, instead of being given a job at a Canadian hospital, and falling in love with a lovely Canadian man, I am hit by a car (maybe driven by a Canadian), given severe head trauma, and awake in a hospital with permanent amnesia, having been arrested by the police who, given all the evidence I left behind, tracked me down in about five weeks.

With those slight and subtle changes in place, we can ask basically the same question we asked above: Is the person in the hospital bed the same as the the person who killed the liquor store operator? If you thought the woman was not the same as the one who had married the first guy in the first story, you should also think that the person in the bed is not the same guy as the one who killed the liquor store operator. And yet… And yet… You do. Why? Do you hate me? Are you sexist? Do you think that justice is more important than metaphysics (it isn’t)? Let’s end here and we will take this up and more in the next installment of: Do you know who I am? Who the hell are you?