The Persistence of Self

            T1 is also left intact. Phenomenal continuity holds whenever a given temporal “snapshot” of the contents of a stream of consciousness is experienced as flowing into the next temporal snapshot, and so on. It must therefore be true that a stream of consciousness must exist in any instance in which phenomenal continuity holds. The continued existence of a stream of consciousness obviously necessitates a subject of consciousness, which by my definition is a person. Therefore, it remains true that phenomenal continuity, either by itself or combined with psychological continuity, is person-preserving. And if phenomenal continuity can be maintained across changes of brain and body, then so can the existence of a person as I have defined it.

            It turns out that the foremost effect that my distinction between selves and persons has on Dainton and Bayne’s argument is that it requires that T2 be clarified. T2 reads, “Loss of psychological continuity is survivable” (559). Recall that I define a persisting, self-conscious entity as composed of a self and a person, in which the self is the person’s psychology, so a loss of psychological continuity implies the death of the self and is therefore not compatible with the notion of full survival. With this definition in mind, I propose that T2 be amended to “loss of psychological continuity is survivable by one’s person, but not one’s self.”¹³ This amended version of T2 echoes the point made above, that persistence admits of degrees. Full survival requires the preservation of both the person and self, but preservation of only the person constitutes partial survival.

          My amended readings of Dainton and Bayne’s theses provide a much more descriptive and intuitive account of the imaginary fetal “streamal diverter” case I depicted above. According to the amended framework of analysis, that experiment results in the following events coming to pass: the fetus’s person dies, taking the fetus’s self with it; my self dies when my old psychology becomes unavailable to any person, but my person survives in the body of the fetus and eventually sustains a new self as the fetus matures and accumulates experiences. Is this not a more descriptive, realistic account than that which Dainton and Bayne would have to offer, saying simply that the fetus dies and I live?

           In closing, Dainton and Bayne, in explicating the concept of phenomenal continuity, have provided a tool which seems indispensable in constructing a truly robust Lockean theory of personal identity. They are correct in saying that adjusting the primacy of psychological continuity downward in favor of phenomenal continuity when considering questions of personal persistence is obligatory for Lockeans — imaginary cases such as Bernard Williams’s scenarios are otherwise intractable.¹⁴ Nevertheless, they are too quick to dismiss the importance of psychological continuity. After all, most people care strongly about what happens to them. What exactly is it that a person cares about when he/she cares about him/herself? I (and probably most others) understand the concept of “self” to refer to those qualities that make a person distinct from others. For example, what does it mean to be, say, an individual by the name of Pat? It means remembering a litany of events from Pat’s perspective, having Pat’s set of attitudes and opinions regarding a range of topics; it means having Pat’s particular set of goals and intentions; it means caring intimately about what happens to Pat. The fact that one’s attachment to one’s self consists largely in a desire to maintain the characteristics that make one unique is why phenomenal continuity is an insufficient (albeit necessary) condition for the survival of a self; because, in its most rudimentary form (as in the above fetal example) the maintenance merely of phenomenal continuity does not guarantee that what makes a person distinct from others — the person’s psychology — is kept intact. Surely, we must identify our selves as more than merely minimally sophisticated streams of consciousness devoid of psychological content if we are to construct a theory of the persistence of beings over time that does justice to our intuitions in every situation, however hypothetical or physically impossible such situations may be.

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