The Persistence of Self

            Interpreting the procedure as a brainwashing seems very tenable and renders it at least plausible that A ought to exhibit self-concern for the one who will be tortured. Unlike the first case (in which the B-body-person came to bear A’s memories), the A-body-person has no competitor (impostor?) seeking to claim the name of “A” for him/herself.

            While on the subject of determining which labels to assign to entities, it is worth mentioning that the second difference between Williams’s two cases is that the experimenter uses only the second-person pronoun in the second case; that is, A is told “the torture will happen to you.” This choice of pronoun makes it difficult not to sympathize with A’s self-concern for the resultant person who will be tortured. Williams contends that it is not obvious whether the experimenter misrepresents the situation in speaking that way.

            Williams’s third imaginary case further frustrates an attempt to use any sort of memory criterion to define the persistence of a person. The third “case” is composed of six different scenarios, each involving a psychological alteration being performed on A, followed by the A-body-person’s torture. The psychological alterations depicted in the scenarios proceed piecemeal from the commonplace (amnesia) to the outcome described in Williams’s first imaginary case (in which A’s and B’s mental information are reciprocally exchanged). More specifically, Williams depicts a first scenario in which A is tortured after an operation that causes total amnesia, a second scenario in which this torture is preceded by amnesia and the inducement of certain changes in A’s character, a third that is the same as the second except that illusory memory beliefs are also induced in A, a fourth in which these memories are modeled after another actual person (B), a fifth in which the result of the fourth is accomplished by putting the information into A directly from the brain of B (leaving B the same as before), and a sixth that is essentially the same as Williams’s first imaginary case — A’s and B’s mental information are reciprocally exchanged (172). Clearly, the difference between each successive psychological alteration depicted in the above situations is only slight and incremental (perhaps even merely superficial), leading to the idea that the differences among the scenarios are differences of degree and not of kind. Williams believes that A would have straightforward reasons for fearing the pain of torture if he foreknew that his prospect would be that of situation number one (inducement of amnesia followed by torture). Williams is confident that most would agree with this belief (as am I). Given that A has reasons for fearing the pain of torture in the first situation, and given that each situation features various psychological alterations that differ only incrementally and by degrees from one another, Williams argues that A has reasons for fearing torture if he foreknew that his prospect were any of the above situations. He seeks to show that it is at least plausible that there are cases in which “one’s fears can extend to future pain whatever psychological changes precede it” (180). Still, this arguably tacit endorsement of a more-or-less bodily criterion for the survival of persons is reluctant and unsure (180).⁴ So in the end, Williams’s paper forces ambivalence on the reader, since his imaginary experiments are ambiguous with respect to whether A has survived (176, 180). When, upon reading any of his three imaginary cases, readers intuitively favor one interpretation (e.g., that A has survived a procedure or not), Williams implicitly makes the point that this confidence is a result of how the facts are presented (such as when his first case was neatly arranged to favor an “entities switching bodies” interpretation) and less a result of the facts themselves (Dainton and Bayne 550). As Dainton and Bayne write, “Given an appropriate narrative context, the stipulation that a brain-state transfer device shifts a person from one body to another can seem as natural and plausible as the stipulation that it merely affects a drastic form of brainwashing on a subject who remains in their original body” (552).

            Williams’s inducement of a lack of faith in imaginary cases when they are used as tools in philosophical argumentation amounts to a critical blow to Lockean accounts of personal identity because, as Dainton and Bayne point out, Lockeans generally rely on imaginary cases to justify their arguments (549). In what sense do Lockeans depend on imaginary cases? Lockean accounts of personal identity are characterized by the fact that they frame selfhood and diachronic personal identity in terms of mental states and capacities, with the body merely incidental in that respect. Locke writes,

• Self depends on consciousness, not on substance. Self is that conscious thinking thing, — whatever substance made up of, (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not) — which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness and misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. . . . [U]pon separation of [one’s] little finger, should [one’s] consciousness go along with the little finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body. (245)

In questions of personal persistence, Locke uses memory as the decisive factor: “Absolute oblivion separates what is thus forgotten from the person, but not from the man” (246). (By “person,” Locke means “a forensic term” which “is the name for this self” [249].)

           So far as we know, consciousness and bodies are inseparable in practice. As a result, it does not matter in practice whether one determines personal persistence in terms of diachronic bodily continuity or diachronic psychological continuity. This irrelevance means that in order to justify and illustrate his points, Locke (and for that matter, modern-day philosophers sympathetic to his approach) uses imaginary cases in which the two continuities (that is, diachronic bodily and psychological continuity) diverge. For example, Locke relies on posing situations like the following:

• Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting in the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night, and, on the other side, the same consciousness, acting by intervals, two distinct bodies: I ask, in the first case, whether the day and night-man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato? And whether, in the second case, there would not be one person in two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the same in two distinct clothings? (248)

Page 3