The Persistence of Self

           Before posing such a case, it is necessary to go through some details of Dainton and Bayne’s paper in order to defend some inferences I will draw. To this end, consider that phenomenal continuity is sustained by a stream of consciousness. Dainton and Bayne ask, “How simple can a stream of consciousness get before it leaves its owner behind? How primitive can the contents of a stream become before it ceases to support one of us?” (560). One can imagine a situation — meditative trance, for example — in which one’s stream of consciousness excludes all the sensations with which we are familiar except an awareness of one’s breathing. Extreme cases like this suggest that the contents of a stream of consciousness must meet some minimum level of sophistication in order to constitute a stream of consciousness in the first place. Dainton and Bayne suggest placing this minimum at a low threshold, proposing that we could survive on a very rudimentary consciousness, perhaps like that which people have in the womb, with no cognitive sophistication at all (560, 561). (While Dainton and Bayne acknowledge some room for debate here regarding whether we experience rudimentary consciousness of this sort prior to birth, I agree that one’s phenomenal continuity, at least, is sustained by such a simple kind of consciousness in the womb.⁸ As they say, why shouldn’t a person persistas long as his/her stream of consciousness flows on, regardless of how primitive its character becomes? [561])⁹ I hold that at least this minimally sophisticated type of content must exist in all persons’ streams of consciousness. This line of reasoning follows from Dainton and Bayne’s above conclusions: the one thing all people have in common is their personhood, and the minimally sufficient criterion for the persistence of personhood is the continuing presence of the type of minimally sophisticated content described above. In other words, to qualify as a person in the first place, one must experience a stream of consciousness that is at least at the minimum level of sophistication. Any more sophisticated type of content enjoyed by a person’s stream of consciousness must exist in addition to this minimum type of consciousness. This notion — that all people’s streams of consciousness have some minimally sophisticated content in common — is in keeping with any sensible notion of what an increase in the sophistication of consciousness must entail; for example, if a basic bodily feeling (say, awareness of the passage of time) is present at the minimal level of sophistication of conscious experience, how is one to conceive that this faculty could be absent at a more sophisticated level of conscious experience? Whatever people can experience at consciousness’s lowest threshold of primitiveness must be indispensable to personhood and therefore exist (at least tacitly) in all people.

            Now that it is understood that all people’s streams of consciousness share a certain content in common, I will pose a thought experiment somewhat similar to one of Dainton and Bayne’s, in which a person’s phenomenal and psychological continuities come apart, via the use of a streamal diverter (which diverts a person’s stream of consciousness instantaneously from one brain to another, but does not transfer any of his/her psychology [556]). The experiment follows: I — call me Pat — will have my stream of consciousness instantly diverted such that it becomes sustained by another’s body. (In other words, I will come to experience events as they are rendered by this other person’s nervous system.) The other person’s stream of consciousness will not undergo any such transfer, and so will be annihilated during the procedure. Remember, my psychology will not make the transfer since a brain-state transfer device is not being used in tandem with the streamal diverter; as a result, none of my memories, beliefs, desires, and other psychological states will survive. The person whose brain my stream of consciousness will be diverted into has no cognitive sophistication at all, and his/her brain can support only a stream of consciousness of the minimum sophistication required for him/her to be considered a person in the first place. This other person can be imagined to be a fetus in the womb if the reader subscribes to the notion, as Dainton and Bayne seem to (561), that such a creature is in fact a person; if not, the reader can substitute whatever he/she considers to be the most rudimentary form of person imaginable.

            What would actually happen in such a procedure? According to Dainton and Bayne, I would survive, since their first and second theses (T1 and T2) assert that phenomenal continuity is all that is required to preserve a person and the loss of psychological continuity can be survived (559). But is this really a sufficiently accurate description of what occurs in the procedure? I do not think so. Consider what actually happens — everything that has ever characterized my existence as a unique human (my psychology) is annihilated. So what is left? Only that minimally sophisticated stream of consciousness, that bare aspect of personhood which is common to all people everywhere. To say, because of this minimum degree of personal persistence, that “I” survived the procedure is to equate my self entirely and solely with the single, bare quality of personhood itself, and nothing else — no further unique characteristics. Following the procedure, I am only that which all people sustain in themselves — the bare capacity for awareness. I find it extremely counterintuitive to describe me simply as “surviving” in this transformation. Such an account of the events is not descriptive enough. This procedure kills the “Pat” in me — every quality I had ascribed to myself as Pat ceases to characterize me anymore. My memories as Pat are irretrievably lost. If the entity into which my stream of consciousness is diverted is a fetus, this fetus will eventually grow more cognitive capacity and the contents of my stream of consciousness will be characterized by increasing sophistication according to the fetus’s development of memories, personality characteristics, and other dispositional states. But this new psychology will be completely different from that which I had previously possessed. In light of this complete psychological reformatting, I would see no reason to identify my current self with this ensuing entity; in fact, if I were told that the ensuing individual were going to be, say, tortured, I would not be any more concerned than if I were told the same of any random stranger.¹⁰

            It seems to me that Dainton and Bayne, in order to allow for a more thorough, accurate, and intuitive account of the above thought experiment, should amend their argument slightly. I submit that persisting, self-conscious entities (such as the average human being) should be understood as necessarily composed of two parts, a self and a person. I define the person as the subject who experiences the contents of a stream of consciousness. (The person persists as long as phenomenal continuity obtains in his/her case.) I define the self as all the cognitive processes that are potentially realizable (in the brain) and that stand consistently ready to be triggered in specific types of situations so as to impinge upon the person’s stream of consciousness in (more or less) dependable, regular ways. (However, I intend this definition to exclude potentially realizable cognitive processes that are standing available to impinge upon consciousness solely because of the spatiotemporal orientation of the person’s body with respect to its surroundings. For example, if you stare at a painting in a museum, the cognitive process by which the painting can be depended on to remain in the visual field should not count as a constituent of your self, because such a process is available to impinge upon consciousness in a dependable way solely because of the orientation of your body in its environment. In other words, potentially realizable cognitive processes that are standing available to impinge upon consciousness solely as a result of the immediate operation of the physiological methods of perception, such as sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, equilibrioception, thermoception, proprioception, nociception, etc., are not constituents of the self.)

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