The Persistence of Self

Lockeans’ recourse to hypothetical scenarios like those above is what philosophers have in mind when they write that Lockean accounts of personal identity rely on imaginary cases to justify their arguments; Lockeans’ reliance on this rhetorical technique is what leads Dainton and Bayne to note that effective attacks against the use of imaginary cases as tools for justifying arguments serve as effective attacks against Lockean accounts of personal identity in general.

            So how do Dainton and Bayne discharge the threat and make sense of Williams’s argument? They argue that Williams’s scenarios are only able to induce contradictory responses in the reader because no mention is made of phenomenal continuity in any scenario (550). They hold that, when a distinction is made between phenomenal and psychological continuity, no ambiguity can exist (550). What is phenomenal continuity? The “base ingredients” are not dispositional states, as in psychological continuity;⁵ rather, they are phenomenal states (i.e., experiences). Phenomenal states are unified, in both the synchronic and diachronic case, by phenomenal connectedness (553). Synchronic phenomenal connectedness is manifested in the “togetherness” or “unity-within-consciousness” of our experience of the various contents of an average conscious state, such as current conscious thoughts, bodily sensations, perceptions, etc. (553, 554). Phenomenal connectedness also holds diachronically in that “each brief phase of a stream of consciousness is experienced as flowing into the next” (554).⁶ Furthermore, experiences at different times which are not phenomenally connected can be phenomenally continuous if they are linked by an overlapping chain of direct phenomenal connections (554), which introduces transitivity to the relation of phenomenal connectedness. This distinction between phenomenal connectedness and phenomenal continuity mirrors the distinction Parfit makes between psychological continuity and connectedness (Parfit 206) that effectively addresses the kind of transitivity objection Reid aims at Locke’s theory of identity (Reid 248, 249). ⁷ Dainton and Bayne hold that phenomenal continuity is different from psychological continuity, however, in that psychological continuity is a causal relationship, whereas phenomenal continuity is an experiential one (549). They acknowledge some room for argument on this particular point (though they personally find implausible the type of reductive analysis necessary to make such an argument against their position [555]), but they contend that those favoring an opposing argument must at least acknowledge that phenomenal and psychological continuity are distinct since the former cannot be reductively analyzed in terms of beliefs or memories (554). Dainton and Bayne’s explication of their concept of phenomenal continuity sets up their answer to Williams: they say that the outcomes of his imaginary cases depend on whether phenomenal continuity is preserved in each case, a fact about which Williams provides no information. If phenomenal continuity is preserved for A and B throughout any of the memory-swapping/brainwashing procedures that Williams portrays, then A and B follow their flow of experience (559), regardless of any changes in their psychology. As Dainton and Bayne write,

• Williams’s scenarios should be baffling; we are unsure what to make of them because we are left in the dark about what really matters from the point of view of one’s continued existence. The readers fill in the details about phenomenal continuity for themselves, and the narrative structure of [Williams’s scenarios] leads them to fill in the relevant details in different ways [for each scenario]. But . . . clarifying the fate of a subject’s stream of consciousness also removes any doubt about the fate of the subject themselves: they invariably follow the flow of experience. (559)

Thus, they resolve Williams’s puzzle, something which they contend that neither physical nor standard psychological accounts of personal identity can do (570).

            In their paper, Dainton and Bayne make three particularly important claims that I will reproduce mostly verbatim below, in the interest of brevity, and because I will be referring to them in the subsequent argument:

• The Inseparability Thesis: self and phenomenal continuity cannot come apart; all the experiences in a single (non-branching) stream of consciousness are co-personal. (557)
  (T1) [Phenomenal continuity, either by itself or combined with psychological continuity] is person-preserving, even across changes in brain and body. (559)
  (T2) Loss of psychological continuity is survivable. (559)

I take issue with T1 and T2. When they are applied to certain imaginary cases in an effort to determine whether a person has survived some procedure, they can yield very counterintuitive results that are not at all compelling.

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