Parfit’s Response to Reid
The teleportation analogy supports Locke’s view on the transferability of consciousness. Parfit implies that someone existing now is the same person if he remembers the earlier person’s thoughts, actions, or experiences. It contradicts Reid’s objection that identity is logically transitive; a person comes into being, exists for a while, and ceases to exist.1 Reid alludes that personal identity holds when an individual goes through a continuous chain of stages linked by memory and psychological similarity. A teleported person will not have gone through the same stages as the original person but will share physical characteristics, memories, and psychological similarities. However, there is no guarantee that the duplicate person will have the same memory and psychological aspects as the original after some time.
Due to varying environments and external events, an individual on earth can have different experiences than a replica on Mars. At similar stages in the future, some attributes such as attitude, beliefs, desires, intentions, and memory continuity may differ from the original. Parfitt’s assumption that a teleported person will preserve psychological continuity despite the environmental variation may be false.2 If the original and duplicate continue to exist through time, B1 identified at a time t+1 will have a slightly different history from B2. Similar to organ transplants, a person receiving a brain transplant may only display the identical psychological traits of the donor up to and not after the transfer. Therefore, what constitutes the personal identity of one human is a combination of self-consciousness with continuous history, location at any moment in that history, developments, and outcome of events happening during the past or currently.
Parfit’s Response to Butler
Butler’s criteria of memory conditions are also called into question by Parfit’s analogy of brain transplant and teleportation. If the original is destroyed after teleportation, the duplicate can easily claim to be the original using Butler’s criteria. For instance, the duplicate person can prove he did what he claims and that the historical event triggered his memory if the event truly happened. Psychological continuity and connectedness normally sufficient for personal identity may be insufficient in fission cases. Therefore, Parfit’s analogy of psychological continuity only gives rise to new criteria for ascertaining any accounts of personal identity.
The split-brain transplant example suggests the possibility of survival without identity, which contradicts Butler’s concept of psychological continuity.3 Nevertheless, a person undergoing a brain transplant will likely experience psychological continuity more than memory continuity. If the person survives the transplant while preserving sufficient memory from both donors, he will exhibit two personalities with the ability to recollect events from previous donors. However, new experiences, formed memories, gained preferences, and abandoned interests will influence the psychological attributes of the duplicate, making him distinct from the original. Since a single person cannot have more than one identity, it will result in psychological incompatibility that can destroy the subject’s developments, events, fixed spatial location, and continuous history determines whether there is a person at every stage. Therefore, a person must satisfy all these criteria to prove identity, assuming that an individual exists physically.
Self or No Self Approach to Personal Identity by Hindu-Buddhist
Buddhists hold a different perspective of personal identity from the western metaphysical view. They disagree that personal identity is a unified whole living through time or a product of reason. They hold the doctrine of no-self, a view of the nature of self as the rejection of unified self-cognition. Buddhists believe a person may not be a single substance existing through time but a series of “person stages”.4 Therefore, Bushism holds that personal identity is delusional and everyone is a self that does not exist in reality.
The self-approach of personal identity is more realistic than the no-self doctrine. Our memory establishes the existence of a continuous self because it can remember the past and ascertain events that occurred during that time. If I did the thing I am now recalling, it means it is part of the content in my memory, and I am identical with a thing- a subject of experience that existed in the past. Therefore, I can infer that I existed through time. Similarly, establishing that other objects lived in the past also justifies my beliefs it existed through time, and so does the recognition of myself as a subject of experience in memory.
Most Buddhist no-self appeals seek to establish that beings are not physical organisms, including the mind and senses.5 Buddhists presuppose that beings are agents of knowledge, which is the component that experienced the past because physical organisms are incapable of knowledge by themselves.6 However, knowledge in memory refers to the inner self that recognizes me as a distinct entity. Knowledge cannot exist independently without being contained in a medium like a brain. Therefore, the no-self arguments can be interpreted as linguistics because recalling something is a subject of experience or having undergone the experience. By remembering something, I recognize myself doing or undergoing it.
Buddhists believe that the self is eternal, a conscious entity that continues unchanged through its transformation, meaning humans have a permanent physical form. According to Taber, a state of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, would make the self arise and disappear if they were distinct from the self.7 Nevertheless, proper evidence of personal identity entails remembering things that happened in our lives in the past. Suppose I can remember that I conversed with such a person, including most things in the conversation, and my memory testify this was done by myself. In that case, I must have existed at the time and continued to live until today.
In my view, the contemporary debate on personal identity is dependent on establishing the continuous existence of self. The continuously existing self-concept needs to translate into a criterion for personal identity, which is more plausible through self-recognition. If one identifies with self A, which is strictly identical to a self B that existed before now, then that person is the same, having lived through time. Therefore, that person cannot be a delusion, as alleged in the Bushism doctrines, but an individual with a real identity. The person’s psychological aspects, such as experiences, interests, and preferences, change from childhood to adulthood, but he remains the same because these changes only contribute to a continuous flow of consciousness.
Bibliography
Taber, John. “The Mimamsa Theory of Self-Recognition.” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 1, (1990), 35-57.
Townsend, Aubrey. “Introduction to Personal Identity.” Lecture Course Material, the university of X, 2022.
Footnotes
- Townsend, Aubrey. “Introduction to Personal Identity.” Lecture Course Material, the university of X, 2022, 5.
- Townsend, “Introduction to Personal Identity,” 9.
- Townsend, 9.
- Taber, John. “The Mimamsa Theory of Self-Recognition.” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 1, (1990), 38.
- Taber, “The Mimamsa Theory”, 38.
- Taber, 38.
- Taber, 43.