Personal identity
responded to with the assertion that psychological connectedness holds at least as much significance in survival as continuity.
While Parfit argues that both relations are of importance and not necessarily one more than the other in Reasons and Persons , in Personal Identity he suggests that psychological connectedness matters more in survival than continuity. I agree with the latter. One reason given is both intuitive and rationally defensible: the features provided by connectedness – memory, character, etc – can be lost, with continuity of these relations holding despite. You could lose the essential aspects that you consider make you, you (e.g., your ambitions, your personality-traits), while still being a psychologically continuous individual. 18 To illustrate, by this time tomorrow you could lose all your memories apart from those created from this present point onwards, and psychological continuity would still hold because it consists in the overlapping chain of psychological connections. If this happened with all your psychological connections, what would separate tomorrow-you from anyone else, in terms of their relation to present-you in what matters? I would say very little. You should treat your concerns about the future of tomorrow-you as having more similarity to your concerns about the future of anyone else. Wiggins, defending the ‘brain criterion’, and Williams, defending bodily continuity as a necessary condition of personal identity, form the main arguments for the physical criteria of personal identity. Wiggins states that the identity of a person consists in the ‘ continuance in one organized parcel ’. 19 That is the brain. which contains the ‘vital’ element of what makes someone a person (it is the source of psychological continuity and connectedness). In the transplant case discussed above, Wiggins therefore believes that we should identify Brownson with Brown. One advantage that Wiggins ’ criterion has over a neo-Lockean criterion is that it does not allow for identity to be a one-many relation – in the fission case, Wiggins can hold that neither of the resulting people are the original. Subsequently, he would say, since you have the same brain as when you were ten, you are the same person. Williams would come to a similar conclusion, but on the count that you have the same body (i.e., you would be able to track its spatio-temporal path). Wiggins’ argument seems intuitive. However, one must dissect why a person’s continued existence matters for them and base their criterion for survival on the result. In any ordinary case the continued existence of one’s bra in provides psychological continuity and connectedness. Indeed, in any ordinary case, the brain criterion does not conflict with the psychological criterion. It does conflict with the Parfitian view I have been defending, however, in that it implies that the identity provided by sameness of brain is what matters and is how we should distinguish persons. While psychological connectedness and continuity are normally caused by continuity of the brain, if we observe the hypothetical case of Parfit’s ‘teletransporter’, 20 it reveals a situation in which psychological continuity and connectedness holds without continuity of the brain. Here, a proponent of the brain criterion would see stepping in
18 For a further explanation, see ‘What Does Matter’ in Parfit 1984. 19 Wiggins 1967.
20 Parfit’s ‘teletransporter’ thought experiment details the following scenario: you step into a machine on Earth (the ‘teletransporter’); the states of your cells are recorded, and this information is transmitted to a corresponding machine on Mars via radio; your cells on Earth are instantly destroyed, and you are recreated on Mars using local stores. Mars-you is completely psychologically continuous and connected with Earth-you. The recreation feels like a moment of unconsciousness. See ‘What We Believe Ourselves to Be’ in Parfit 1984.
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