Ship Of Theseus Paradox - if old planks are replaced is it the same ship?
The Original Puzzle is This:
- Over the years, the Athenians replaced each plank in the original ship of Theseus as it decayed, thereby keeping it in good repair.
- Eventually, there was not a single plank left of the original ship.
- So, did the Athenians still have one and the same ship that used to belong to Theseus?
What if all the old planks, nails,
etc., had been stored in a warehouse
and someone put them back together
again. Would there then be
two Theseus' ships?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Time it Takes to Replace Most Atoms in Your Body by Others
Answer: Every 16 days about 72% of you is replaced.
About 72% of the human body is H2O (liquid water). Every ~16 days nearly 100% of the water is exchanged in a healthy body. Heavy elements like carbon, sodium and potassium take occupancy far longer perhaps 8 months - 11 months. For example the calcium and phosphorus in bones are replaced in a dynamic crystal growth / dissolving process that will ultimately replace all bones in your body.
Other larger organs' atomic replacement can be estimated:
- The lining in stomach and intestine every 4 days
- The Gums are replaced every 2 weeks
- The Skin replaced every 4 weeks
- The Liver replaced every 6 weeks
- The Lining of blood vessels replaced every 6 months
- The Heart replaced every 6 months
The Surface cells of digestion, top layer cells in the digestion process from our mouth through our large bowel are replaced every 5 minutes
In about a year every atom in your body would have been exchanged. Not a single atom in your body resides there forever and there is a 100% chance that 1000s of other humans through history held some of the same atoms that you currently hold in your body.
Why New Atoms Aren't a Fountain of Youth:
- If our atoms are being replaced every day, why do we age?
In a study published in the Annual Report for Smithsonian Institution in 1953, scientists found that 98 percent of our atoms are replaced each year. Atoms make up molecules, which make up cells, which make up tissues, which make up organs.
So with all these new atoms in our bodies every year, why do we get old?
Lawrence Brody, Ph.D., a physicist at the National Human Genome Research Institute, says the problem isn't that the atoms are getting old, but that the structure is.
"Imagine building a sand castle. Four walls, some nice turrets, central spire, a moat—you gotta have a moat," Dr. Brody says. "Now start replacing 100 percent of the sand with nice new sand."
Think about what would happen to the structures of the walls and the turrets. How well would the moat continue to function after all that sand was replaced?
Carbon Copy
Every day, our bodies take in new atoms from the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the liquids we drink. These atoms are incorporated into our cells and fuel the chemical processes that keep us alive.
But our cells are constantly being regenerated. The DNA in each cell copies itself over and over again. Eventually, mistakes creep in and cells develop faults which get copied and passed on.
Suppose a chain mail goes out by fax — it goes to a friend, who faxes it to a friend, and so on. Over time, spots and wrinkles on the paper appear, and these turn up in subsequent copies.
Environmental Damage
Some cells, like red blood cells, white cells or skin cells, have short life spans of weeks to months. Because they replace themselves so often, there is a higher chance a copying mistake will arise.
Cells in our brains, heart, and bones last longer. Although these cells are less vulnerable to copying mistakes, they are more susceptible to damage caused by environmental factors such as radiation or toxins. Either way, cells stop working as well and we grow old.
Oxygen Damage
We need oxygen to survive. But during the normal chemical processes that take place in our bodies, oxygen can produce free radicals. These are highly unstable molecules that can set off chemical reactions that interfere with DNA and damage cells.
Free radicals are thought to play a key role in aging. So what can we do about oxygen?
"Avoid it, and you'd stay young forever," Dr. Brody advises.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11957499
The Component Theory of Identity (CTI) - Objects vs Parts
The identity of an object depends on the identity of its component
parts. This view asserts that sameness of parts is a necessary condition
of identity.
If we want to allow that an object can persist through time in spite of a change in some of its components, we must deny CTI. An object x, existing at time t1, can be numerically identical to an object y, existing at time t2, even though x and y are not composed of exactly the same parts. This seems reasonable, but once you deny CTI, where do you draw the line? Denying CTI leaves us vulnerable to puzzle cases.
Imagine a new version of the problem, in which the replacing of the planks takes place while the ship is at sea: Theseus sails away, and then systematically replaces each plank on board with a new one. (He carries a complete supply of new parts on board as his cargo.) Now we can consider these two possibilities:...
Identity, Persistence, and the Ship of Theseus
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/theseus.html
Heraclitus - Introduction - Stepping Into a River Twice
For Heraclitus everything is "in flux", as exemplified in his famous
aphorism
- "Panta Rhei":
{ Everything Flows, Nothing Stands Still }
Heraclitus is recognized as one of the earliest dialectical philosophers with his acknowledgement of the universality of change and development through internal contradictions, as in his statements:
By cosmic rule, as day yields night,so winter summer, war peace, plentyfamine. All things change. Firepenetrates the lump of myrrh,until the joining bodies dieand rise again in -smoke-called incence.
Men do not know how that which isdrawn in different directions harmoniseswith itself. The harmonious structureof the world depends upon oppositetension like that of the bowand the lyre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
Heraclitus - Change Strife & Opposition - Being vs Becoming
On those stepping into rivers staying the sameother and other waters flow. (click here)
There is an antithesis between 'same' and 'other.' The sentence says that different waters flow in rivers staying the same. In other words,
{| Though the Waters are Always Changing,
{| The Rivers Stay the Same
Indeed, it must be precisely because the waters are always changing that there are rivers at all, rather than lakes or ponds. The message is that rivers can stay the same over time even though, or indeed because, the waters change.
The point, then, is not that everything is changing, but that the fact;
That some Things Change Makes
Possible The Continued
Existence
of Other Things.
Perhaps More Generally; The Change
In Elements or
Constituents Supports
The Constancy of Higher-Level
Structures.
For Heraclitus, Flux and Opposition are Necessary for Life. Aristotle
reports, Heraclitus criticizes the poet who said;
'would that strife might perish from among gods
and men'
...asking if there would be harmony without high and low notes, or
living things without female and male, which are opposites.
(DK22A22)
Heraclitus Views Strife or Conflict as Maintaining the World:
We must recognize that war is
common and strife is justice,
and all things happen according to
strife and necessity. (DK22B80)
If it were not for the constant conflict of opposites, there would be
no alternations of;
day and night,
hot and cold,
summer and winter,
even life and death.
Indeed, if some things did not die, others would not be
born. Conflict does not interfere with life, but rather is a precondition
of life. To maintain the balance of the world, we must posit an equal and
opposite reaction to every change. Heraclitus observes,
{ The Road Up and Down is One and the Same }
Here again we find a unity of opposites, but no contradiction. { One road is used to pursue two different routes } Daily traffic carries some travelers out of the city, while it brings some back in.
The image applies equally to physical theory: as earth changes to fire, fire changes to earth. And it may apply to psychology and other domains as well.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/heraclit.htm
Empedocles - Love & Strife - How Conflict Orders the Cosmos
For Empedocles, love and strife are the two forces that order the cosmos, the love and strife of the gods who are the elements. Heraclitus has already said that war and strife are the “father of all things”, but he also believes that opposites are one and the same, so Empedocles is not far from Heraclitus’ position. Heraclitus also, like Anaximander, sees emotion and injustice in the process of the elements. Like Pythagoras, Empedocles argued that the universe was a sphere of spheres. Like Anaxagoras, he also said that in the beginning the elements were unmixed and the cosmos was a uniform sphere.
Love and strife were in balance, with love holding the sphere together at the center and strife holding the boundaries apart from the nothing or chaos that was outside. Then strife gained in influence, not enough to disintegrate the sphere but enough to cause the initial separation of the four elements and then the mixture and stratification of the elements that became the many levels of mortal beings. As the cosmos works in cycles, love will again gain the upper hand and unite all things back into the original pure unmixed state, which will then again be mixed into a diverse universe by strife in the next round of the cosmic cycle. This is quite similar to the previously mentioned kalpa system of ancient Indian thought.
As the world mixed and stratified, Empedocles said that there were cases of human arms and heads unjoined to bodies, and monsters of various sorts, part animal and part human. Like Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, and like Plato who borrows from both as well as Empedocles, the form of the human is pre-designed and latent, waiting for the cosmos to figure itself out such that it can emerge. The historian Herodotus believed that there were dog-headed people and cyclops living in parts of India, explaining the various monsters encountered by Odysseus on his odyssey. Empedocles’ physics explains the Homeric monsters of the traditional mythology.
Empedocles argues that human beings were formed from pre-human dual beings of both genders, much as the gods and goddesses were undifferentiated in the pure unmixed sphere. In Plato’s dialogue The Symposium, we will read that Aristophanes, the playwright as a character of Plato’s play, the same who lowered his own Euripides as a character into scene to mock the overuse of deus ex machina, argues that love feels like completion because early in the cosmos human beings were joined in pairs before being separated by Zeus, which is why heterosexual men and women find completion in each other and gay and lesbian people find completion in each other. This follows Empedocles’ theory, as love is integration of what was originally united but later separated, while further attempting to explain homosexuality.
Buddhist thought also endorses the idea that all binding together in union is love, and all separation into division is hate, as our minds are the cosmos. To this day, psychology is still puzzling over the relationship between emotion and the basic cognitive acts of association and disassociation. It may seem odd to say that emotion may be at the root of doing all thinking and conceptualization, even supposedly ‘objective’ hard mathematics and physics, but consider that association (cuddling up to the familiar) and disassociation (Ahhh! Get it away from me!) dominate the animal mind and emotions were basic to the mammalian mind long before humanity evolved our complex problem solving minds.
Greek Philosophy – Empedocles
https://ericgerlach.com/greek-philosophy-empedocles/
Anthropological Structuralism vs Anatomical Structuralism
…The structuralist paradigm in anthropology suggests that the structure of human thought processes is the same in all cultures, and that these mental processes exist in the form of binary oppositions (Winthrop 1991). Some of these oppositions include hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, and raw-cooked. Structuralists argue that binary oppositions are reflected in various cultural institutions (Lett 1987:80). Anthropologists may discover underlying thought processes by examining such things as kinship, myth, and language. It is proposed, then, that a hidden reality exists beneath all cultural expressions. Structuralists aim to understand the underlying meaning involved in human thought as expressed in cultural acts...
https://anthropology-bd.blogspot.com/2008/06/structuralism.html
Levi Strauss - Structuralism - Cultural Opposites
… Lévi-Strauss was interested in the ways that meanings are derived from binary oppositions. His structuralist theory considers how opposites generate meaning not only by what each opposite represents but also through the relationship of the binary set. So man and woman each represent a unique idea, but the relationship of the two presents additional layers of meaning. Levi-Strauss argued that binary distinctions generate a hierarchy of meanings and are central to cultural narratives...
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2012/04/levi-strauss-and-derrida-on-binary.html
Structuralism in Anatomy - Neural Systems of Opposites
Speech, like all motor behaviour, is 'a system or structure of relationships'.
Much encoding is done with reference to the system of opposites. Things are above or below, good or bad, fast or slow, large or small and so on. Moreover, the system emphasizes relationships between natural phenomena that are important. We recognize father/mother, friend/foe, day/night, dry/wet and so on endlessly. As Lenneberg puts it 'the human organism is a peculiar sort of “computer” -an object that “computes” relationships'...
In building up categories for communication all languages use some common antitheses, as we have seen, such as good/bad, strong/weak, past/future, or bright/dull. This suggests again that the brain acts as an analogue with certain built in ways of collecting data, especially by use of the spatial brain maps of our surroundings. Such bipolar antitheses are often given a spatial reference (good is above bad, and so on). Similar terms are used about music, in relation to position (high or low tones), and to emotions (cheerful, sad, etc.) (Chapter 20). Verbal operation often uses a visual-spatial process, we ‘move through an argument’, we make ‘progress’ with our studies. Perhaps such clues can be used to understand how the brain operates in the ‘search’ for solutions....
Animals and humans with injuries to certain 'feeding centres' (in the hypothalamus http://tinyurl.com/ozv2c ) eat either too little or much too much. Two regions are involved. Rats with injuries to the more medial nerve cells and fibre tracts of the hypothalamus eat far more than normal ones and become very fat. Animals lacking the more lateral region stop eating and drinking and may starve to death. Thus the lateral areas provide the drive to start eating and the medial ones to stop it.
Indeed records from electrodes in the hypothalamus show that the lateral regions are active when a normal rat is hungry and the medial ones when it has just finished eating and is satiated.
In normal people the influences of the cerebral cortex on hunger are still more complicated. We all form habits as to when to eat, and also how much. People can change their habits according to personal and social demands. We cannot pretend that we fully understand even the simpler controllers of the needs for food. Nevertheless
in the hypothalamus there are those lateral centres that become operative when we are hungry, they give us appetite.
The medial centres send messages when appetite has been assuaged and we are satisfied.
The two areas are interconnected and inhibit each other, corresponding, we may suppose, with the mutual interplay of appetite and consummation.
Thus the actions of eating and drinking are certainly programmed largely by the cells of the hypothalamus and fibre tracts that pass through them. Their activities decide when the need for food will be felt and they are also responsible for indicating that the need is satisfied and that consumption should stop. While this is going on we say 'I ate because I wanted to and when I was satisfied I stopped'. Is there a dilemma in this parallelism? Statements about the wants and satisfactions are accompaniments of brain actions exactly as are descriptions of, say, the shape of the moon. The experience of the need for food and satisfaction at eating it are the accompaniments of brain activity and so are experiences of the shape of the moon. In theory the actions of the cells involved could be read off by electrical recordings from the brain. Conversely by activating the appropriate sets of cells it should be possible to produce either set of phenomena. It is however actually easier to stimulate the brain to make an animal 'thirsty', than it is to make it see the moon.
Programs of the brain. J. Z. Young 1978
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198575459/
Supervenience - Upper-Level Properties Determined by Lower-Level Properties
Supervenience; In philosophy, supervenience is a relation used to describe cases where (roughly speaking) a system's upper-level properties are determined by its lower-level properties. Some philosophers hold that the world is structured into a kind of hierarchy of properties, where the higher-level properties supervene on the lower-level properties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience
https://tinyurl.com/yckmhsmb
The Arrow of Time
Persistence of 4-Dimensional Worms - Theory of Temporal Parts
Worm theorists believe that a persisting object is composed of the various temporal parts that it has. It can be said that objects that persist are extended through the time dimension of the block universe much as physical objects are extended in space. Thus, they believe that all persisting objects are four-dimensional "worms" that stretch across space-time, and that you are mistaken in believing that chairs, mountains, and people are simply three-dimensional (substances).
Perdurantism vs Endurantism - Persistant Edurance From Processes
Perdurance is commonly referred to as four-dimensionalism. Perdurance states this: everyday objects are four-dimensional space-time worms (“spread out in time”), and an object persists through time by having temporal parts at each time segment of its existence. In other words, time should be thought of very similarly to the way that space is thought about. For example, with regard to space: my hand is not me. My foot is notme. They are both spatial parts of me. Perdurantism claims that time works similarly to space in this way. I am spread out in parts over time in what are called “temporal parts.” My temporal part (at time t1) is not me, nor is my temporal part (at time t2). Finally, these two temporal parts are not identical to each other (because they are two numerically distinct temporal parts)...
...Perdurance provides a way to explain real persistence. Since within perdurance an object is a worm (the sum of its temporal parts), there is no way that this worm cannot persist throughout the whole time it is in existence. This is the case because an object is defined as the sum of its temporal parts, and though the temporal parts are not identical to one another, the object is identical to itself. So persistence is accounted for in the very definition of an object: a four-dimensional space-time worm that is “spread out” for as “long” as the time period that it exists...
The Theory of Spacial & Temporal Parts
Material objects extend through space by having different spatial parts in different places. But how do they persist through time? According to some philosophers, things have temporal parts as well as spatial parts: accepting this is supposed to help us solve a whole bunch of metaphysical problems, and keep our philosophy in line with modern physics. Other philosophers disagree, arguing that neither metaphysics nor physics give us good reason to believe in temporal parts.
1. Introduction
You’re performing an amazing trick right now: you’re in two places at once. How do you manage to be down there, near the floor, and yet also be a metre or two up in the air? Well, it’s not so very amazing: your feet are down there on the floor, and your head is up in the air. Having spatial parts enables you to be in several different places, and to have different properties in different places: you’re cold down there on the tiled floor, and also warm up there by the heater, because your feet are cold and your head is warm. Moreover, having parts could let you be in the same place as someone else: if you shared a hand with a conjoined (‘Siamese’) twin, then you could both wear the same glove without jostling for space.
None of this is special to people: inanimate objects also extend through space by having spatial parts. They have different properties in different places, and sometimes they overlap by sharing their parts. These simple facts about spatial parts explain basic features about the way things and people occupy space.
Things and people take up time as well as taking up space: you existed yesterday, and, unless reading this article is a real strain, you will exist tomorrow too. Just as you can have different properties at different places (hot up here, cold down there), you can have different properties at different times (yesterday you hadn’t heard of temporal parts, by tomorrow you’ll know plenty about them).
Some philosophers believe that you take up time by having different temporal parts at different times. Your spatial parts are things like your head, your feet and your nose; your temporal parts are things like you-yesterday, you-today and you-tomorrow. If you have different temporal parts, this would explain how you can exist at different times, and it would also explain how you can have different properties at different times (you-yesterday hasn’t heard of temporal parts, you-tomorrow is an expert). According to these philosophers, then, persisting through time is pretty much like extending through space: it’s all a matter of parts.
Other philosophers reject this picture. They argue that you persist through time as a whole: it’s not just a part of you sitting in front of the computer right now, it’s you, the whole you! It was the very same whole person yesterday who knew nothing about temporal parts, and, by tomorrow, the very same whole person will be an expert. ‘You-yesterday’ isn’t a name for some mysterious part of you which only existed for a day; instead, it’s a stilted way of talking about you, and what you were like yesterday.
Discussions of time, space, identity and change have been part of philosophy since its earliest days, and not every question about persistence obviously concerns temporal parts. For example, can we give criteria of identity through time for artefacts, animals or people? What happens to a ship if you replace all of its planks one by one? What if you keep the old planks, then build a new ship out of them? In addressing these questions during recent decades, however, it has proven useful to discuss whether objects have temporal parts, because the answers that philosophers give to these questions can often depend upon whether they believe in temporal parts.
This article is divided into a number of sections. Section 2 looks more closely at what exactly temporal parts are supposed to be, and at what sorts of things are supposed to have them. Sections 3, 4 and 5 look at a range of arguments in favour of believing in temporal parts, and at the responses of those who reject temporal parts. Section 6 discusses connections between debate about temporal parts, and debate about the nature of time more generally. Section 7 considers whether physics can teach us anything about temporal parts. Section 8 discusses a question internal to temporal-parts theories: what relationship is there between the different temporal parts of a single object? Finally, section 9 touches on special concerns about the persistence of people through time.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/temporal-parts/
The Branching Identity Theory - The Split Brain & it's Selves
Psychological branching identity states that consciousness will continue as long as there is continuity in psychological structure. What differentiates this from psychological identity is that it allows identity to continue in multiple selves. According to branching identity, continuity of consciousness will continue in both the original brain and the upload after nondestructive uploading. Branching identity can also resolve long standing questions about split-brain syndrome and can provide clear predictions about identity in even the most difficult cases imagined by philosophers…
There are Three Main Theories of Personal Identity: Biological, Psychological, and Closest Continuer.
- Those who hold the biological theory believe that the continuity of physical brain is essential for identity and must continue for there to be continuity of consciousness.
- In contrast, the psychological theory requires psychological continuity for identity to be preserved: it is the information content of the brain that matters and as long as memory and causal structure are recreated then identity should continue.
- Those who hold the closest continuer theory claim that consciousness will continue in whatever entity is most identical to the original. Each of these three theories has many variants, most of which share the essential points just discussed.
The Failure of the Standard Approaches to Identity
The standard theories of personal identity cannot provide satisfactory answers to questions about the continuity of consciousness in uploading. Yet we do not need to discuss future technologies to see the failure of the standard theories; they are unable to deal satisfactorily with split-brain syndrome.
After a corpus callosotomy for intractable epilepsy, [ patients appear to have a splitting of consciousness into two selves ] each of which is contained in a different brain hemisphere. This has been termed split-brain syndrome.
Let’s examine how each of the three theories of personal identity deal with split-brain syndrome. Before we can do this we need to examine individuals with a single brain hemisphere.
People born with a single brain hemisphere do not suffer any loss of consciousness. Others loose one hemisphere through disease or accident and it appears their continuity of consciousness continues (Pulsifer et al. 2004).
In fact, neurosurgeons will remove one hemisphere to save someone’s life if no other options are available in a procedure termed a lobectomy (Oncel et al. 2007; Pulsifer et al. 2004; Hayworth 2010). Given the empirical facts it would be extremely difficult for any theory of personal identity to deny continuity of consciousness after a lobectomy. Cases of lobectomy also provide information on how much brain, psychology, or closeness is sufficient for continuity: half or more. Biological theories would claim that the hemisphere is a survivor of the original biological brain and this is enough to keep continuity of consciousness. Psychological theories would claim the surviving hemisphere keeps enough of the person’s psychological structure intact for continuity of consciousness. Those who hold the closest continuer theory would state the survivor of a lobectomy has continuity of consciousness as clearly the surviving hemisphere is more identical than anything else existing to the original brain.
A corpus callosotomy severs most of the connections between the two brain hemispheres and is used to treat intractable epilepsy. Neuropsychological;
Testing after the procedure shows that there are now two independent conscious selves.
Which of these two selves maintains continuity of consciousness with the whole brain before surgery?
If I have this operation, do I wake up as Righty or Lefty?
Remember that if a lobectomy is performed then the sole surviving hemisphere, whether Righty or Lefty, maintains continuity of consciousness. The best the biological theory can do to cope with split-brain syndrome is to claim that whatever hemisphere contains the most biological similarity to the original brain will maintain continuity of consciousness. Yet each brain hemisphere is equally biologically continuous with the whole brain. Similarly, adherents of the psychological theory could claim that whichever hemisphere is most psychologically continuous with the original brain will maintain continuity of consciousness. Again, both hemispheres appear equally psychologically continuous with the original brain and each maintains continuity of consciousness after a lobectomy.6 Therefore the biological and psychological theories cannot answer the question of whether I wake up Righty or Lefty.
Supporters of biological and psychological identity theories have proposed two possible solutions to the problems posed by split-brain syndrome. First, they can claim that neither Righty nor Lefty retains continuity of consciousness. There several problems with this solution. Each hemisphere retains continuity of consciousness when it is the only surviving hemisphere, so why would this change if the other hemisphere is not destroyed? The continuation of consciousness in one hemisphere should not depend on what happens to an independent object. To complicate this problem even further, we could separate the hemispheres and keep one hemispheres, say Lefty, in cryogenic suspension. Would Righty retain continuity of consciousness because it is the only hemispheres currently conscious: or would the mere potential of reactivating Lefty disrupt the continuity of consciousness of Righty? If Righty does retain continuity of consciousness, what happens if we then destroy Righty and reactivate Lefty? Does Lefty then have continuity of consciousness? Biological and psychological identity cannot provide any non-arbitrary predictions in these cases. Therefore claiming neither hemisphere maintains continuity is not a satisfactory solution. The second possible solution is to assume that the brain was originally composed of two separate selves, each with their own continuity of consciousness, and these two selves are separated by the corpus callosotomy. This solution fails because it appears ad hoc, and more importantly, we experience only one unified conscious self (and it is this unified self that we set out to explain in the first place). The possibility that there was only one self to begin with and that both hemispheres retain continuity of consciousness with this self is not considered or is ruled out arbitrarily by non-branching axioms (Swinburne 1984; Olson 2010).
The closest continuer theory is the only identity theory that clearly sets up criteria to determine the continuity of consciousness after fission: only the part of the brain most identical to the original brain maintains continuity of consciousness. Yet if the brain is split into two equal parts the closest continuer theory is not able predict which half maintains identity. This appears to be the case in split-brain syndrome and the closest continuer theory can only arbitrarily decide which half (or if neither) maintains continuity of consciousness. Predictions made with the closest continuer theory will also depend on what we do in the present or future with the other hemisphere.
Parfit rejects the standard theories of identity and develops his own unique solution to the split-brain dilemma: what matters in personal identity is the continuation of what he terms the relationship R (Parfit 1984). Parfit defines R as a continuation of memory and psychology. What differentiates R from psychological identity is that Parfit rejects any notion of non-reductive identity. Parfit claims that memory and psychology are entirely what a person consists of and he rejects anything extra such as consciousness or qualia. Parfit’s theory seems to deal successfully with cases of lobectomy or corpus callosotomy: the surviving hemisphere in the case of a lobectomy, or Righty and Lefty in a corpus callosotomy, all continue a significant portion of the person’s original psychology and memory and are therefore forms of survival…
The Closest-Continuer schema is a theory of identity according to which identity through time is a function of appropriate weighted dimensions. A at time 1 and B at time 2 are the same just in case B is the closest continuer of A, according to a metric determined by continuity of the appropriate weighted dimensions. For example, the metric for a functional artifact such as a ship arguably is equally weighted between the dimension of physical make-up and the dimension of functional structure. So the Ship of Theseus creates a dilemma. Its physical parts are gradually removed at sea and deposited on shore, but they are replaced by new parts that maintain the same functional structure. If the old parts are reconstituted into the same functional structure, is the ship with the new parts the original Ship of Theseus, or does the ship with the old parts warrant that designation? Continuity of physical make-up favors the old-parts ship, whereas continuity of functional structure favors the new-parts ship. There is no closest continuer, given equal weighting, so neither is the original ship.
Nozick, Parfit, and Platonic Glasses
https://www.sorites.org/Issue_20/cooper.htm
Process Philosophy - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
While process philosophers insist that all within and about reality is continuously going on and coming about, they do not deny that there are temporally stable and reliably recurrent aspects of reality. But they take such aspects of persistence to be the regular behavior of dynamic organizations that arise due to the continuously ongoing interaction of processes. In order to articulate a process view of reality, special theoretical efforts are required, however, since the standard theoretical tools of Western metaphysics are geared to the static view of reality. Especially the standard interpretation of predicate logic in terms of static individuals with properties that are exemplified timelessly or at a temporal instant consolidates what is from the process-philosophical perspective an unhelpful theoretical bias. This has forced upon process philosophy a double role as metaphysical and metaphilosophical enterprise—pushing for a paradigm change, process philosophy has the double task of developing new explanatory concepts and providing arguments for why these concepts better serve the aims of philosophy.
Process philosophy centers on ontology and metaphysics, but it has full systematic scope: its concern is with the dynamic sense of being as becoming or occurrence, the conditions of spatio-temporal existence, the kinds of dynamic entities, the relationship between mind and world, and the realization of values in action. Some approaches to process philosophy are conceived on the grand scale and offer a full-scope metaphysics in the form of a systematic theory or comprehensive philosophical view. Other approaches, especially more recent ones, take a more modest approach. They pursue the specific problems that the various philosophical disciplines are engaged in while focusing on the dynamic aspects of each sub-domain. Such process ontologies, process ethics, process epistemologies, process theories of mind etc. are contributions to ‘process philosophy’ more broadly conceived as a research paradigm of philosophical inquiry. They share the guiding idea that natural existence consists in modes of becoming and types of occurrences. ‘Processists’ agree that the world is an assembly of physical, organic, social, and cognitive processes that interact at and across levels of dynamic organization. However, within that broad framework, process philosophers debate about how such a world of processes is to be construed, how it relates to the human mind (which is another process) and how the dynamic nature of reality relates to our scientific theories. In consequence, process philosophers also differ in their view on the role of philosophy itself and in their choice of theoretical style.
Process philosophy opposes ‘substance metaphysics,’ the dominant research paradigm in the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle. Substance metaphysics proceeds from the intuition—first formulated by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides—that being should be thought of as simple, hence as internally undifferentiated and unchangeable. Substance metaphysicians recast this intuition as the claim that the primary units of reality (called “substances”) must be static—they must be what they are at any instant in time. In contrast to the substance-metaphysical snapshot view of reality, with its typical focus on eternalist being and on what there is, process philosophers analyze becoming and what is occurring as well as ways of occurring. In some process accounts, becoming is the mode of being common to the many kinds of occurrences or dynamic beings. Other process accounts hold that being is ongoing self-differentiation; on these accounts becoming is both the mode of being of different kinds of dynamic beings and the process that generates different kinds of dynamic beings. In order to develop a taxonomy of dynamic beings (types and modes of occurrences), processists replace the descriptive concepts of substance metaphysics with a set of new basic categories. Central among these is the notion of a basic entity that is individuated in terms of what it ‘does.’ This type of functionally individuated entity is often labeled ‘process’ in a technical sense of this term that does not coincide with our common-sense notion of a process. Some of the ‘processes’ postulated by process philosophers are—in agreement with our common-sense understanding of processes—temporal developments that can be analyzed as temporally structured sequences of stages of an occurrence, with each such stage being numerically and qualitatively different from any other. But some of the ‘processes’ that process philosophers operate with are not temporal developments in this sense—they are, for example, temporal but non-developmental occurrences like activities, or non-spatiotemporal happenings that realize themselves in a developmental fashion and thereby constitute the directionality of time. What holds for all dynamic entities labelled ‘processes,’ however, is that they occur—that they are somehow or other intimately connected to time, and often, though not necessarily, related to the directionality or the passage of time.
Process philosophers claim that there are many sound philosophical reasons to take the processual aspects of nature, cognition, and action as fundamental features of the real. The perhaps most powerful argument for process philosophy is its wide descriptive or explanatory scope. If we admit that the basic entities of our world are processes, we can generate better philosophical descriptions of all the kinds of entities and relationships we are committed to when we reason about our world in common sense and in science: from quantum entanglement to consciousness, from computation to feelings, from things to institutions, from organisms to societies, from traffic jams to climate change, from spacetime to beauty. Moreover, results in cognitive science, some philosophers have claimed, show that we need a process metaphysics in order to develop a naturalist theory of the mind and of normativity. These arguments form the background for the processist criticism of the focus on substance in Western philosophy. The bias towards substances seems to be rooted partly in the cognitive dispositions of speakers of Indo-European languages, and partly in theoretical habituation, as the traditional prioritization of static entities (substances, objects, states of affairs, static structures) at the beginning of Western metaphysics built on itself. In contrast, process philosophy shows fewer affinities to any particular language group and can allude to a rich tradition of reflection in many of the great schools of Eastern thought. As recently appeared, process philosophy also has an increasing practical dimension, since only if we re-visualize our world as a system of interactions can we come to grips, conceptually and ethically, with the new phenomena of artificial life, artificial intelligence, and artificial sociality, and investigate the exceptionality of human capacities and the scope of moral obligation. Thus contemporary process philosophy holds out the promise of offering superior support for the three most pressing tasks of philosophy at the beginning of the 21st century. First, it provides the category-theoretic tools for an integrated metaphysics that can join our common sense and scientific images of the world. Second, it can serve as a theoretical platform upon which to build an intercultural philosophy and to facilitate interdisciplinary research on global knowledge representation by means of an ontological framework that is no longer parochially Western. Third, it supplies concepts that facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration on reflected technology development, and enable the cultural and ethical imagination needed to shape the expectable deep socio-cultural changes engendered by the increased use of technology, especially automation.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
Process Philosophy - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Process philosophy is a longstanding philosophical tradition that emphasizes becoming and changing over static being. Though present in many historical and cultural periods, the term “process philosophy” is primarily associated with the work of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead(1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000).
Process Philosophy - Wikipedia
Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism,[1] defines processes in the ordinary everyday real world as its only basic or elementary existents. It treats other real existents (examples: enduring physical objects, thoughts) as abstractions from, or ontological dependents on, processes. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy
- If a changing thing really changes, there can't literally be one and the same thing before and after the change.
- However, if there isn't literally one and the same thing before and after the change, then no thing has really undergone any change.
Traditionally, this puzzle has been solved in various ways. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between “accidental” and “essential” changes. Accidental changes are ones that don't result in a change in an objects' identity after the change, such as when a house is painted, or one's hair turns gray, etc. Aristotle thought of these as changes in the accidental properties of a thing. Essential changes, by contrast, are those which don't preserve the identity of the object when it changes, such as when a house burns to the ground and becomes ashes, or when someone dies. Armed with these distinctions, Aristotle would then say that, in the case of accidental changes, (1) is false—a changing thing can really change one of its “accidental properties” and yet literally remain one and the same thing before and after the change.
Of course, this solution to the puzzle depends on there being a coherent distinction between accidental and essential changes, and between accidental and essential properties. Some philosophers find this distinction problematic and have developed other solutions that don't require this distinction. In what follows, we discuss these solutions to the puzzle, along with other puzzles that arise when considering the identity of objects over time.
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Identity and Change
- 3. Necessary and Determinate Identities
- 4. Diachronic Identity Puzzles
- 5. Personal Identity
- Bibliography
- Academic Tools
- Other Internet Resources
- Related Entries
Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy, which won't be discussed; see, e.g., Jinpa 2002, and the entry mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy.)
The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. ‘Self’ is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning and shall be avoided here.
After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on the one that has received most attention in recent decades, namely our persistence through time.
1. The Problems of Personal Identity
There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. Discussions in this area do not always make clear which one is at stake. Here are the most familiar:
Who am I? Outside of philosophy, ‘personal identity’ usually refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. Someone’s personal identity in this sense consists of those properties she takes to “define her as a person” or “make her the person she is”, and which distinguish her from others. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what one’s most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person, in some deep and fundamental sense, one is. This “personal identity” contrasts with ethnic or national identity, which consists roughly of the ethnic group or nation one takes oneself to belong to and the importance one attaches to this.
One’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity, but not being a man and living in Yorkshire, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and living in Yorkshire belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. And these attitudes are all subject to change.
Depending on how the term is defined, it may also be possible for a property to belong to someone’s “identity” without her actually having it: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself, and thus an element of my identity, even though my belief is false.
The Who am I? question—sometimes called the characterization question(Schechtman 1996: 1)—is what determines someone’s personal identity in this sense (Glover 1988: part 2, Ludwig 1997).
Personhood. What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? More specifically, we can ask at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or an electronic computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word person, taking the form ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t…’, with the blanks appropriately filled in. The most common answer is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties then (e.g. Baker 2000: ch. 3). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring those properties (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6).
Persistence. What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist? What sorts of adventures is it possible, in the broadest sense of the word ‘possible’, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one, rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all who existed back then is you? This is sometimes called the question of personal identity over time. That’s because it’s about whether the earlier being and the later being are one or two—that is, whether they are numerically identical. An answer to it is an account of our persistence conditions.
Historically this question often arises out of the hope (or fear) that we might continue to exist after we die (as in Plato’s Phaedo). Whether this could happen depends on whether biological death necessarily brings one’s existence to an end. Imagine that after your death there really will be someone, in this world or the next, who resembles you in certain ways. How would that being have to relate to you as you are now in order to be you, rather than someone else? What would the Higher Powers have to do to keep you in existence after your death? Or is there anything they could do? The answer to these questions depends on the answer to the persistence question.
Evidence. How do we find out who is who? What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? One source of evidence is first-person memory: if you remember doing some particular action (or seem to), and someone really did do it, this supports the claim that that person is you. Another source is physical continuity: if the person who did it looks just like you, or even better if she is in some sense physically or spatio-temporally continuous with you, that too is reason to think she is you. Which of these sources is more fundamental? Does first-person memory count as evidence all by itself, for instance, or only insofar as we can check it against publicly available physical facts? What should we do when they support opposing verdicts? Suppose Charlie’s memories are erased and replaced with accurate memories (or apparent memories) of the life of someone long dead—Guy Fawkes, say (Williams 1956–7). Ought we to conclude, on the basis of memory evidence, that the resulting person is not Charlie but Guy Fawkes brought back to life, or should we instead infer on the basis of physical continuity that he is simply Charlie with different memories? What principle would answer this question?
The evidence question dominated the anglophone literature on personal identity from the 1950s to the 1970s (good examples include Shoemaker 1963, 1970 and Penelhum 1967, 1970). It is important to distinguish it from the persistence question. What it takes for you to persist through time is one thing; how we ought to evaluate the relevant evidence is another. If the criminal had fingerprints just like yours, the courts may conclude that he is you. But even if they are right to do so, having your fingerprints is not what it is for a past or future being to be you: it is neither necessary (you could survive without any fingers at all) nor sufficient (someone else could have fingerprints just like yours).
Population. If the persistence question is about which of the characters introduced at the beginning of a story have survived to become those at the end of it, we may also ask how many are on the stage at any one time. What determines how many of us there are now? If there are some seven billion people on the earth at present, what facts—biological, psychological, or what have you—make that the right number? The question is not what causes there to be a certain number of people at a given time, but what there being that number consists in. It’s like asking what sort of configuration of pieces amounts to winning a game of chess, rather than what sorts of moves typically lead to winning.
You may think the number of people at any given time (or at least the number of human people) is simply the number of human organisms there are then (ignoring any that don’t count as people). But this is disputed. Some say that cutting the main connections between the cerebral hemispheres results in radical disunity of consciousness, and that because of this, two people share a single organism (see e.g. Nagel 1971; Puccetti 1973 argues that there are two people within each normal human being; see also van Inwagen 1990: 188–212). Others say that a human being with multiple personality could literally be the home of two or more thinking beings (Wilkes 1988: 127f., Rovane 1998: 169ff.; see also Olson 2003b, Snowdon 2014: ch. 7). Still others argue that two people can share an organism in cases of conjoined twinning (Campbell and McMahan 2010; see also Olson 2014).
This is sometimes called the problem of “synchronic identity”, as opposed to the “diachronic identity” of the persistence question. These terms need careful handling, however. They are apt to give the mistaken impression that identity comes in two kinds, synchronic and diachronic. The truth is simply that there are two kinds of situations where we can ask how many people (or other things) there are: those involving just one moment and those involving several.
What am I? What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I and other human people? What are our fundamental properties, in addition to those that make us people? What, for instance, are we made of? Are we composed entirely of matter, as stones are, or are we partly or wholly immaterial? Where do our spatial boundaries lie, if we are spatially extended at all? Do we extend all the way out to our skin and no further, for instance? If so, what fixes those boundaries? Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or aspect or activity of something else?
Here are some of the main proposed answers (Olson 2007):
- We are biological organisms (“animalism”: Snowdon 1990, 2014, van Inwagen 1990, Olson 1997, 2003a).
- We are material things “constituted by” organisms: a person made of the same matter as a certain animal, but they are different things because what it takes for them to persist is different (Baker 2000, Johnston 2007, Shoemaker 2011).
- We are temporal parts of animals: each of us stands to an organism as your childhood stands to your life as a whole (Lewis 1976).
- We are spatial parts of animals: brains perhaps (Campbell and McMahan 2010, Parfit 2012), or temporal parts of brains (Hudson 2001, 2007).
- We are partless immaterial substances—souls—as Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz thought (see also Unger 2006: ch. 7), or compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a material body (Swinburne 1984: 21).
- We are collections of mental states or events: “bundles of perceptions”, as Hume said (1739 [1978: 252]; see also Quinton 1962, Campbell 2006).
- There is nothing that we are: we don’t really exist at all (Russell 1985: 50, Wittgenstein 1922: 5.631, Unger 1979, Sider 2013).
There is no consensus or even a dominant view on this question.
What matters in identity? What is the practical importance of facts about our persistence? Why does it matter? What reason have you to care whether you yourself continue to exist, rather than someone else just like you existing in your place? Imagine that surgeons are going to put your brain into my head and that neither of us has any choice about this. Suppose the resulting person will be in terrible pain after the operation unless one of us pays a large sum in advance. If we were both entirely selfish, which of us would have a reason to pay? Will the resulting person—who will presumably think he is you—be responsible for your actions or for mine? (Or both, or neither?)
The answer may seem to turn entirely on whether the resulting person would be you or I. Only I can be responsible for my actions. The fact that some person is me, by itself, gives me a reason to care about him. Each person has a special, selfish interest in her own future and no one else’s. Identity itself matters practically. But some say that I could have an entirely selfish reason to care about someone else’s future for his own sake. Perhaps what gives me a reason to care about what happens to the man people will call by my name tomorrow is not that he is me, but that he is then psychologically continuous with me as I am now (see Section 4), or because he relates to me in some other way that does not imply that we are the same person. If someone other than me were psychologically continuous tomorrow with me as I am now, he would have what matters to me and I ought to transfer my selfish concern to him. Likewise, someone else could be responsible for my actions, and not for his own. Identity itself has no practical importance. (See Shoemaker 1970: 284; Parfit 1971, 1984: 215, 1995; Sosa 1990, Martin 1998.)
That completes our survey. Though some of these questions may bear on others, they are to a large extent independent. It’s important not to confuse them.
David Hume - Problems of Identity Over Time
- 1 Why we have no idea of the self
- 2 Change and identity
- 3 Hume’s view of personal identity
- 3.1 The identities of persons and the identities of other objects
- 3.2 Locke’s theory and the role of memory
- 3.3 Disputes about identity over time are ‘merely verbal’
1 Why we have no idea of the self
Hume begins his discussion of personal identity by, strikingly, denying that we have any idea of the self:
“There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment conscious of what we cal our SELF; that we feel its existence and continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. ...[But] from what impression could this idea be deriv’d? ...For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.
...I may venture to affirm ...that [persons] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement.”
It is, at first, hard to see how this could fit into a discussion of personal identity. If Hume’s idea is that we never notice any self beyond particular mental events, isn’t he denying that there is such a thing as personal identity, rather than giving an account of it? To answer this question, we’ll have to look at Hume’s ideas on change and identity in general, a topic to which he turns next.
2 Change and identity
Hume thinks that we confuse the ideas of identity and diversity (or, as we might put it, distinctness). Examples of identity and diversity are easy to give:
“We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and and uninterrupted thro’ a suppos’d variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity ...we have also a distinct idea of several objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close relation; and this to an accurate view affords ...a notion of diversity ...”
But things are less clear when we consider the case of (what we would call) one object changing over time. Here’s what Hume says about this case:
“suppose any mass of matter to be plac’d before us ...supposing some small or inconsiderable part to be added to the mass, or subtracted from it; tho’ this absolutely destroys the identity of the whole, strictly speaking; yet as we seldom think so accurately, we scruple not to pronounce a mass of matter the same, where we find so trivial an alteration ...and are apt to imagine that ’tis nothing but a continu’d survey of the same object.
...A change in any considerable part of a body destroys its identity; but ’tis remarkable, that where the change is produced gradually and insensibly we are less apt to ascribe to it the same effect. The reason can plainly be no other, than that the mind, in following the successive changes of the body, feels an easy passage from the surveying its condition in one moment to the viewing of it in another ...”
Hume’s line of thought here seems to be something like this: if we change some object x sufficiently, we say that we now have a new object, y, which is not identical to x. But if we change it gradually, or slightly, we are inclined to say that the object before us now is identical to the original object, x. But it is hard to see why it should matter whether an object changes gradually, or dramatically — especially when we consider (256) that we don’t seem to have a fixed standard for distinguishing gradual from dramatic changes. So the most plausible view seems to be that even in cases of gradual change, we have a change in the identity of the object. In such cases, our inclination to regard the object as the same is simply a mistake: the mistake of confusing qualitative (or, as Hume says, ‘specific’) and numerical identity:
“tho’ we commonly be able to distinguish pretty exactly betwixt numerical and specific identity, yet it sometimes happens, that we confound them, and in our thinking and reasoning employ the one for the other.”
Hume seems to think that whenever an object changes and we say that the object after the change is identical to the object before the change, we are confusing numerical and qualitative identity. (What should Hume say about cases in which an object does not change from one time to another? Is it still numerically the same object?)
Moreover, this mistake is accompanied characteristically by another:
“the controversy concerning identity is not merely a dispute of words. For when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confin’d to the expression, but is commonly attended with a fiction, either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or of something mysterious and inexplicable ...”
So, not only do we confuse numerical and qualitative identity in cases of change, but, to support our mistaken opinion that the changed object before us is numerically identical to something before the change, we invent some aspect of the object which has remained unchanged throughout.
3 Hume’s view of personal identity
3.1 The identities of persons and the identities of other objects
Hume thought that this tendency goes a long way towards explaining mistaken views about personal identity. For, he thought, when we encounter several different things existing in succession and differing gradually, one from the next,
“This resemblance is the cause of the confusion and mistake, and makes us substitute the notion of identity, instead of that of related objects. ...Our propensity to this mistake is so great ...that we fall into it before we are aware; and tho’ we incessantly correct ourselves by reflexion, and return to a more accurate method of thinking, yet we cannot long sustain our philosophy ...Our last resource is to yield to it, and boldly assert that these different related objects are in effect the same, however interrupted and variable. In order to justify to ourselves this absurdity, we often feign some new and unintelligible principle, that connects the objects together, and prevents their interruption or variation. Thus we feign the continu’d existence of the perceptions of our senses ...and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation.”
But we should resist this mistake, and think of persons over time in the same way that Hume encourages us to think of other changing objects:
“And here [in the case of personal identity] ’tis evident, the same method of reasoning must be continu’d ...The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects.” (259)
So, as in the case of other objects, we should think of (what we call) persons changing over time as a succession of closely related but numerically distinct objects.
The relations which Hume though relevant here were causation and resemblance (260-1). About the former he says:
“we may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; and these ideas in their turn produce other impressions. ...as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity. Whatever changes he endures, his several parts are still connected by the relation of causation.”
So a person, in Hume’s view, is something like a chain of mental events, related to each other as cause and effect.
3.2 Locke’s theory and the role of memory
This is like Locke’s theory in that it explains sameness of persons over time in terms, broadly, of psychological characteristics and relations rather than material identity or persistence of an immaterial soul. But it differs from it in at least two respects.
The first should be obvious from the above: Locke does not seem to think that there is any particular problem with objects being genuinely numerically identical through change. So he would not seem to share Hume’s view that there is a sense in which thinking of personal identity as genuinely identity is a mistake.
The second concerns the role of memory. Recall that Locke thought that
“For as far as any intelligent Being can repeat the Idea of any past Action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present Action; so far it is the same personal Self.” (§10)
So Locke seems to think that personal identity is to be analyzed partly in terms of memory, or repeating of ideas. But Hume thinks that this gets things backwards. Personal identity is to be explained in terms of causal relations between mental events, and these causal relations are what make memory possible:
“Had we no memory, we never should have any notion of causation, nor consequently of that chain of causes and effects, which constitute our self or person. But having once acquir’d this notion of causation from the memory, we can extend the same chain of causes, and consequently the identity of our persons beyond our memory ...For how few of our past actions are there, of which we have any memory? ...Or will he affirm, because he has entirely forgot the incidents of these days, that the present self is not the same person with the self of that time; and by that means overturn all the most establish’d notion so of personal identity? In this view, therefore, memory does not so much produce as discover personal identity, by shewing us the relation of cause and effect among our different perceptions.”
What is Hume’s argument here? How should Locke respond?
3.3 Disputes about identity over time are ‘merely verbal’
Hume’s discussion of personal identity concludes with a striking claim:
“The whole of this doctrine leads us to a conclusion, which is of great importance in the present affair ...that all the nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties. Identity depends upon the relations of ideas ...But as the relations ...may diminish by insensible degrees, we have no just standard, by which we can decide any dispute concerning the time, when they acquire or lose a title to the name of identity. All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal ...”
Why does Hume say this? What does the fact that the relations of cause and effect can ‘diminish by insensible degrees’ have to do with his conclusion?
https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2006-7/20208/hume-personal-identity.html
Heidegger - Presence (ing) - Present-Past / Present-Present / Present-Future
The Beginning of the History of Being
In this realm Anaximander's ta onta make their presence known:
Anaximander's chreon, as the Being of what-is, is not a "something" which stands "behind" or within separate objects but rather is that which "gathers" things into a neighborhood.
Heidegger also finds in the early Greek thinkers traces of the Temporal significance of presence, the second point above. He comments: "The Greeks experience what-is as what-is-present, whether at the present time or not, presencing in unconcealment" (EGT 36f./349). For Homer and Anaximander, ta onta referred to what is past and what is to come, as well as what is present at some here and now. "Both are ways of presencing, that is, the presencing of what is not presently present" (EGT 34/346). The seer Kalchas, understanding the Being of what-is, comprehends what was, is, and will be. Anaximander, according to the traditional version of his fragment, thinks that things come to be and pass away "according to necessity." Ta onta pay each other compensation for "injustice" according to the "dominion of time."14
Thus, Heidegger argues that the locus of reality for the early Greek metaphysical thinkers was their here and now. What is past was present once; what will be becomes present later. They shift from a mythological orientation in which the "really real" existed at some indeterminate "once upon a time" and "once at a place" to an understanding of Being according to which even the gods manifest themselves at some here and now, as on the battlefield at Troy.
Heidegger also takes the early Greeks as having at least a glimpse of the way that the understanding of Being is dependent upon the quite different sort of time in which we are "in time with" the Temporality of Being. His analysis of Anaximander's notion of ta onta "compensating" each other for their "disorder" according to the "dominion of time" draws on this idea (EGT 40-50/353-364). We will see the nature of this dominion more clearly once we have examined Heidegger's version of the thought of Heraclitus and Parmenides.
6.3 Heraclitus
According to Heidegger, Heraclitus's notion of logos15 involves a similar force of necessity which maintains the order of what-is. Heidegger himself takes this logos to be the legein which "lays out" the world as the context of significance in which things are dealt with in various ways. Logos should be understood as not language or reason but rather as the ordering of what-is by cultural practices. Indeed Heidegger suggests that, if Heraclitus had explicitly recognized the relationship between language and the logos, the history of Being would have gotten off to a very different start (EGT 77/220), perhaps one not so ignorant of its indebtedness. Logos lets what-is manifest itself as what it is, as, e.g., chiseling let the stone show itself as a column or wine-making let the grapes show themselves as fermented juice.
Heraclitus says that the logos reveals that "all is one," that is, "hen panta." Making the next move in the history of Being, Heraclitus does not just see ta onta, the multiplicity of what-is, but rather thinks there is a unity and oneness to what-is. He discovers to on, what-is as a totality.
https://www.scu.edu/media/college-of-arts-and-sciences/philosophy/Chapter-6.pdf
Substrate Independence - How Waves Travel Through Water
What do waves, computations and conscious experiences have in common, that provides crucial clues about the future of intelligence? They all share an intriguing ability to take on a life of their own that’s rather independent of their physical substrate.
Waves have properties such as speed, wavelength and frequency, and we physicists can study the equations they obey without even needing to know what substance they are waves in. When you hear something, you're detecting sound waves caused by molecules bouncing around in the mixture of gases we call air, and we can calculate all sorts of interesting things about these waves—how their intensity fades as the square of the distance, how they bend when they pass through open doors, how they reflect off of walls and cause echoes, etc.—without knowing what air is made of.
We can ignore all details about oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc., because the only property of the wave's substrate that matters and enters into the famous wave equation is a single number that we can measure: the wave speed, which in this case is about 300 meters per second. Indeed, this wave equation that MIT students are now studying was first discovered and put to great use long before physicists had even established that atoms and molecules existed!
Alan Turing famously proved that computations are substrate-independent as well: There’s a vast variety of different computer architectures that are “universal” in the sense that they can all perform the exact same computations. So if you're a conscious superintelligent character in a future computer game, you'd have no way of knowing whether you ran on a desktop, a tablet or a phone, because you would be substrate-independent.
Nor could you tell whether the logic gates of the computer were made of transistors, optical circuits or other hardware, or even what the fundamental laws of physics were. Because of this substrate-independence, shrewd engineers have been able to repeatedly replace the technologies inside our computers with dramatically better ones without changing the software, making computation twice as cheap roughly every couple of years for over a century, cutting the computer cost a whopping million million million times since my grandmothers were born. It’s precisely this substrate-independence of computation that implies that artificial intelligence is possible: Intelligence doesn't require flesh, blood or carbon atoms.
This example illustrates three important points.
First, substrate-independence doesn't mean that a substrate is unnecessary, but that most details of it don't matter. You obviously can't have sound waves in a gas if there's no gas, but any gas whatsoever will suffice. Similarly, you obviously can't have computation without matter, but any matter will do as long as it can be arranged into logic gates, connected neurons or some other building block enabling universal computation.
Second, the substrate-independent phenomenon takes on a life of its own, independent of its substrate. A wave can travel across a lake, even though none of its water molecules do—they mostly bob up and down.
Third, it's often only the substrate-independent aspect that we're interested in: A surfer usually cares more about the position and height of a wave than about its detailed molecular composition, and if two programmers are jointly hunting a bug in their code, they're probably not discussing transistors.
Since childhood, I’ve wondered how tangible physical stuff such as flesh and blood can give rise to something that feels as intangible, abstract and ethereal as intelligence and consciousness. We’ve now arrived at the answer: these phenomena feel so non-physical because they're substrate-independent, taking on a life of their own that doesn't depend on or reflect the physical details. We still don’t understand intelligence to the point of building machines that can match all human abilities, but AI researchers are striking ever more abilities from their can’t-do list, from image classification to Go-playing, speech recognition, translation and driving.
But what about consciousness, by which I mean simply "subjective experience"? When you’re driving a car, you’re having a conscious experience of colors, sounds, emotions, etc. But why are you experiencing anything at all? Does it feel like anything to be a self-driving car? This is what David Chalmers calls the "hard problem," and it’s distinct from merely asking how intelligence works.
I've been arguing for decades that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. This leads to a radical idea that I really like: If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it's only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!
We know that when particles move around in spacetime in patterns obeying certain principles, they give rise to substrate-independent phenomena—e.g. waves and computations. We've now taken this idea to another level: If the information processing itself obeys certain principles, it can give rise to the higher level substrate-independent phenomenon that we call consciousness. This places your conscious experience not one but two levels up from the matter. No wonder your mind feels non-physical! We don’t yet know what principles information processing needs to obey to be conscious, but concrete proposals have been made that neuroscientists are trying to test experimentally.
However, one lesson from substrate-independence is already clear: we should reject carbon-chauvinism and the common view that our intelligent machines will always be our unconscious slaves. Computation, intelligence and consciousness are patterns in the spacetime arrangement of particles that take on a life of their own, and it's not the particles but the patterns that really matter! Matter doesn't matter.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27126
Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology
Foreword
[T]here is really no ‘thing’ in the world.
—David Bohm (1999: 12)
[O]ur mind has an irresistible tendency to consider the idea it most frequently
uses to be the clearest.
—Henri Bergson (1946: 214)
There is a notable lack of substance, not in the writing you will find in this book, I assure you, but out there in the domain of the living. Let’s face it: there is no thing in biology (or, as Bohm would have it, in the world). Things are abstractions from an ever-changing reality. Reality consists of a hierarchy of intertwined processes. If life is change, then the activities driving this change are what we must explain. Yet we lack concepts and experimental approaches for the study of the dynamic aspects of living systems. This severely limits the range of questions we ask, most of the time even without our realizing. The problem is so obvious it is rarely ever talked about. There are very few explicitly processual theories in biology today. As a practising biologist, I’ve always found this utterly baffling and disappointing. We remain strangely fixated on explanation in terms of static unchanging entities.
The prime example of this substance fixation in biology is our love affair with genes, those particulatea agents of heredity and development. It is all too easy for biologists to slip into deterministic and preformationist language, where genes represent some sort of enduring essence of an ephemeral living body. As a result, the mysterious source of gene agency remains unexamined and unexplained. Another example is our insistence that proper ‘mechanistic’ explanations of living organisms must be formulated at the level of component molecules, which we take to be unchanging at the timescales relevant to the processes we study. James Ladyman and Don Ross (2007), in their book Every Thing Must Go, call this the metaphysics of ‘microbangings’, small entities causing their effects by bumping into each other. Ladyman and Ross point out that this view is outdated and inconsistent with the dynamic view of the world given to us by modern physics.
Our fixation on static things leads to fallacious patterns of reasoning, within biology and elsewhere. The French process philosopher Henri Bergson alluded to this in the quote above, while Alfred North Whitehead (1925: 52) put it more explicitly by calling it ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. This consists in the unwarranted reification of objects, which become fundamental and replace the underlying dynamic reality in our thinking. This fallacy is deeply engrained in our cognitive habits. From a very early stage of development, we learn to distinguish objects, to isolate them from their context. Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980: 30–2) have suggested that this reflects a tacit commitment to a doctrine of ‘containment’: we treat the world as a container of objects that change properties or location and interact with one another. Each object is in turn a container with smaller objects inside, and so on. This doctrine is fundamental to our thinking; it forms the basis of set theory and relational logic. It is very deeply rooted in our human nature: all western languages share it, even ancient ones. To identify an object as a container, we must establish its boundaries as precisely as possible. Where and when does it begin? Where and when does it end? We instinctively crave for clear and rigorous answers to such questions.
However, modern science suggests that reality is simply not like that. The world is full of fuzzy boundaries. Seemingly unchanging entities keep on emerging and decaying if we consider them over a long enough time span. Moreover, it is impos- sible to say precisely when they truly become what they are and when they cease to be themselves. Or where they begin and where they end. This problem of identification and individuation is beautifully illustrated by the ancient Greek thought experiment about the ship of Theseus. According to the legend, the ship was preserved by the Athenians for centuries upon Theseus’ return from his journeys. In the process, each plank of the hull was replaced when it started to rot, until none of the original planks was left. Just as in our own bodies, the substance that makes up the ship is constantly replaced. Does this mean that the ship changes over time, or does it remain the same? As this conundrum illustrates, we need criteria for recognizing, individuating, and classifying processes. We need more accurate and adequate thinking tools that let go of the abstraction of the object. In short, we need to transcend the limitations of substance-based thinking. This is what the book you have in your hands sets out to do.
Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré
The Theory of Substances
The Illusion of Substances or - The Instantiation Tunnel -
(caution I am making this theory up right now)
The Theory of Substances: Anything claimed to be a substance, object or noun is really a verb, a history of changing relationships built from other temporary processes. The mind is what the brain (does) - minds and substances are (verbs) not nouns. They have a history of iterations leading up to a current state generated by changes or iterations - not a stable identity but an illusory identity.
The Illusion of Substances: All known objects are really processes involving interactions of components themselves consisting of other processes. Consciousness is as much an object as other processes that re-present a present moment through changing stuff and iterations which they are. Everything is a constantly changing relationship of elemental sub-processes.
- Atoms are illusions of substances since they are made of the changing relationships of protons, neutrons and electrons;
- each which are also illusions of substances since they emerge from or are actually the activities of other sub-atomic particles
- themselves illusory substances possibly down to the level of interacting of strings.
- Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.
- Two main classes of leptons exist: charged leptons (also known as the electron-like leptons or muons), and neutral leptons (better known as neutrinos).
Consciousness is probably mostly an ongoing network of processes like any other object. Since the illusion of consciousness is as much an illusory object as any other emergent hierarchy of processes we know as chairs and tables smeared across spacetime, it appears to be a thing. Illusions of experiencing are fun and hardly boring shows worthy of having anytime the simulation of substances is possible ihmo.
