Notes

        ¹ While I write that Locke accounts for personal persistence in terms of psychological continuity, he might more technically be said to endorse a psychological connectedness criterion for the persistence of personal identity over time since his notion of the identity relation does not allow for transitivity (as Reid points out [248, 249]).
        ² When Williams writes that “[one’s] undergoing physical pain in the future is not excluded by any psychological state [one] may be in at the time” (169), he notes the exception of certain psychological states, such as unconsciousness, which preclude the experience of pain (169).
        ³ Actually, Williams does not frame the second case in terms of A and the experimenter; instead, he uses the first-person perspective. For example, he writes “Someone in whose power I am tells me that I am going to be tortured tomorrow” (167). Since this is the only one of Williams’s cases thus depicted, I describe it in the third-person for the sake of comparison.
        ⁴ That is, Williams waters down his conclusion by preceding it with the word “perhaps” (180) and acknowledging that he risks being incorrect.
        ⁵ Components of one’s psychology are dispositional states in that they manifest themselves as tendencies to believe, remember, opine, etc., in certain ways. To hold a given belief, for example, is a dispositional state — it consists in being disposed to act a certain way in response to certain stimuli. If I believe it is wrong to litter, this belief manifests itself as a disposition to harangue those who litter (and probably refrain from littering myself).
        ⁶ The amount of time over which diachronic phenomenal connectedness can obtain is very short, lasting perhaps about one second (Dainton and Bayne 554).
        ⁷ Reid takes issue with Locke’s notion that “as far as [one’s] consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (Locke 241). Reid points out that this doctrine implies a contradiction. Assume some person, A, currently remembers the time when he/she performed a certain action, B; furthermore, at the time when he/she did B, he/she remembered performing an even earlier action, C, but now A’s memory of C is lost. Logically (if identity is a transitive relation), A should be the same as the one who did C, but Locke would have to hold that this is not so, since A’s consciousness does not currently extend so far backward.
        ⁸ But not one’s “self” — I will develop this particular point below.
        ⁹ To avoid confusion: Neither Dainton and Bayne nor I hold that phenomenal continuity can be maintained over periods of unconsciousness such as dreamless sleep, anesthesia, etc. They acknowledge that this creates a problem for their theory (do we die every time we fall asleep?); they label it the “bridge problem” and offer some solutions at the end of their piece (562).
        ¹⁰ I do not mean to imply that the degree of my concern corresponds with the degree of my moral indignation. I would submit that one can feel an equal amount of moral indignation given two distinct situations and nevertheless be more concerned about one than the other, insofar as one commands more attention than the other (for example, by being torture that happens to me).
        ¹¹ To clarify, when I say “the first clause of the Inseparability Thesis” I mean its first
grammatical clause.
        ¹² It might be objected that in certain situations where a human being is unconscious (severing phenomenal continuity), it is often the case that the constituents of the self are preserved (in the configuration of the brain) until the human being wakes up. This preservation of one’s psychological elements through periods of unconsciousness could be taken to demonstrate that my amended reading of the Inseparability Thesis is false, that phenomenal continuity and self are in fact separable. My only disagreement with this objection to my interpretation of the amended Inseparability Thesis would be somewhat pettily terminological. It is true that the self could be said to lie dormant during periods of unconsciousness, like dreamless sleep, and then make itself available to the person immediately upon waking. However, it is still the case that at any given moment in which unconsciousness obtains, the self is not available to any conscious subject. Since I define the self in terms of such availability, it seems inappropriate to say that there is a self during periods in which unconsciousness obtains. (Such a statement would amount to saying that the constituents of the self are available to consciousness during unconsciousness.) Instead, it would be more clear to describe a situation of dreamless sleep as one in which the physical system responsible for rendering the self retains its functionality, although the self is not present because there is no person to which it can be made available.
        ¹³ The alternatives (that it is survivable by both person and self, or by self alone) are disallowed since they are not consistent with the way I defined my terms.
        ¹⁴ In my terms, perhaps I ought to say that downplaying psychological continuity in favor of phenomenal continuity is obligatory when considering the question of “person-self persistence” — not just personal persistence — in order to capture a whole individual in the language I use (as opposed to just his/her person).

Works Cited