The Persistence of Self

                    In their paper, “Consciousness as a Guide to Personal Persistence,” Barry Dainton and Tim Bayne explicate a Lockean account of personal identity, in that it is framed in terms of mental states and capacities. However, it diverges from more mainstream accounts by concentrating on phenomenal continuity, as opposed to psychological continuity of the type described by Locke (241) or more recently Parfit (206), as a criterion for the persistence of personal identity over time (Dainton and Bayne 549).¹ Phenomenal continuity refers to a relationship between experiences; that is, when experiences are members of unified streams of consciousness of the kind we usually enjoy, they are related by phenomenal continuity (Dainton and Bayne 549). Dainton and Bayne view this shift of perspective as obligatory for Lockeans, mostly because it dispels challenges posed to Lockean methodology by certain thought experiments, particularly a longstanding dilemma described by Bernard Williams, discussed below (549). I seek to prove in this paper that Dainton and Bayne’s analysis is correct to the extent that phenomenal continuity is indeed an indispensable concept in accounting for the persistence of a person over time. However, their first and second theses — which, taken together, hold that phenomenal continuity is sufficient to preserve a person over time and that the loss of psychological continuity can be survived (559) — require adjustment to yield more consistently compelling and intuitive conclusions regarding certain imaginary cases. I submit that persisting, self-conscious entities (such as the average human being) should be understood as constituted by a person and a self. To introduce this idea very briefly here, I define the person as the subject who experiences the contents of a stream of consciousness; the person persists as long as the entity senses a relationship of temporal continuity between his/her successive phenomenal contents. In contrast, I define the self (roughly) as the psychology of the person. I amend Dainton and Bayne’s second thesis in light of this distinction to make it more consistent with our intuitions regarding our persistence conditions.
            In “The Self and the Future,” Bernard Williams poses three imaginary cases that are only slightly dissimilar from one another. The first involves a situation that could be construed as a body-switch: two human beings (hereafter referred to as “subjects”), A and B, are hooked up to a brain-state transfer device which imprints A’s body with information from B’s brain and vice versa (161). Prior to the brain-state transfer, A and B are told that one of the two entities that results from the procedure will be given a large sum of money and the other will be tortured; A and B must choose (prior to the procedure) which resultant subject — the A-body-subject or the B-body-subject — receives which treatment. Suppose A privately tells the experimenter that he chooses the B-body-subject to get the money and B requests the opposite circumstances. The switch is then thrown and the brain states are transferred. The experimenter, realizing he cannot fulfill both requests, arbitrarily accords with B’s wishes, giving the money to the A-body-subject and torturing the B-body-subject. Williams depicts the reactions of each ensuing subject: the B-body-subject (since he has A‘s memories) complains that he did not choose this outcome and also that he chose in the way he did precisely because he did not want the unpleasant things to happen to him. Meanwhile, the A-body-person will be gratified that he received the money and will be vindicated that he chose wisely. Williams writes:

• These facts make a strong case for saying that the experimenter has brought it about that B did in the outcome get what he wanted and A did not. It is therefore a strong case for saying that the B-body-person really is A, and the A-body-person really is B; and therefore for saying that the process of the experiment really is that of changing bodies. . . . This seems to show that to care about what happens to me in the future is not necessarily to care about what happens to this body. (164)

Following this line of reasoning, Williams holds that this scenario demonstrates that one should identify oneself with one’s memories (167).

            The second imaginary case is similar, but designed to pull the reader’s intuitions in the opposite direction, towards the idea that “[one’s] undergoing physical pain in the future is not excluded by any psychological state [one] may be in at the time” (169) and thus towards a more bodily criterion for personal survival.² To this effect, the second case includes only A and the experimenter.³ The experimenter tells A, always using the second-person pronoun, that A will be tortured after having impressions of a past, which exactly fits the past of another currently living person, installed into his brain (167, 168). In this case (in contrast to the first, above) A becomes fearful. Why would he fear the torture of his body in this case but not the previous one? Consider the two key differences between Williams’s first and second cases. First, the second presentation does not mention B. This omission of B frustrates an interpretation of the procedure in terms of “switching bodies” (which was a ready analogy in Williams’s first case); instead, it encourages the reader to interpret the procedure as a brainwashing, such that A continues to exist after the procedure, psychologically altered but still capable of experiencing pain. To this effect, Williams portrays A’s inner monologue thusly:

• I can at least conceive the possibility, if not the concrete reality, of going completely mad, and thinking perhaps that I am George IV or somebody; and being told that something like that was going to happen to me would have no tendency to reduce the terror of being told authoritatively that I was going to be tortured. (168)

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