1. To manage
the problems of definition (what
makes you you) and persistence (what
makes you remain you through all your physical changes) of personal identity, there have historically existed two families of
theories: dualist theories and
reductionist theories. There has been
less support for dualist theories these days, because they appeal to something
that is not detectable in our physical world. This makes them unfalsifiable
theories, and for this reason they are not much considered in the current
scientific and philosophical debate. However, for the sake of completeness I
will not exclude them. I think that every mental phenomenon has a physical
counterpart, but as you will see, my critique of personal identity is mainly
directed against the identity of all physical entities, so some readers may
think that dualism could offer an alternative solution. I think that even a
dualist solution cannot work, and that
Open Individualism offers a better solution which overcomes the most important
problems that cause the contraposition between the reductionist and the dualist
theories.
2. Briefly,
dualist theories postulate that our
personal identity is determined by a soul or a surrogate of the soul, meaning
that there is something that is not detectable by physics that has a defined
identity and therefore each of us has their own defined personal identity. This
answers the need to define the identity of a person (you are your soul) and
explains its persistence (your soul does not change as you grow older). Some
theories may claim that the soul has some characteristics that are not reducible
to anything physical, others may regard it just as a placeholder of personal
identity. In my view, these differences do not matter. Beyond the problem of
unfalsifiability, the crucial defect of
dualist theories is that if we suppose that the personal identity of every
person is defined by their soul, the
reason for the existence of your personal identity is doomed to remain forever
without any rational explanation: you have to acknowledge that you find
yourself being a soul with your own personal identity, but nobody will ever be
able to explain why your soul and your personal identity had necessarily to
exist. You should take this fact as
“given”, as if you were predestined to live your life, from the beginning of
time, and no questions can be asked about it. I will discuss this in more detail
later, when speaking about the Individual
Existential Problem.
3. To avoid
dualism, reductionist theories of
personal identity have to appeal to something physical to which to reduce
personal identity, but this ends up creating more questions than answers. These
theories have been discussed by many reductionist philosophers and are analyzed
by Derek Parfit in his book Reasons and
Persons, published by Oxford University Press in 1984. The problems these
philosophers have discussed cannot have a satisfying answer because they try to define personal identity by
anchoring it to the identity of objects, supposing that objects could be a
solid ground for this purpose, when actually grounding identity in objects has
many problems, as we will see. Moreover, the persistence of personal identity
becomes so difficult to explain that Parfit and other thinkers give it up
altogether, saying that actually we gradually change our personal identity over
the years.
4. At the
beginning of the part of the book that addresses personal identity,
Parfit makes a distinction between
qualitative identity (such is the identity of two things made in the same
way) and numerical identity (such as
the identity of a thing that actually remains the very same thing in time).
Initially, he says that personal identity is about the numerical identity of
each person, but eventually he concludes
that in a reductionist view, personal identity has to be reduced to qualitative
identity, except when more than one person has the very same qualitative
identity. This exception raises more questions than it provides answers, so
the debate remains open. Anyway, Parfit’s
work identifies in Psychological Continuity and Psychological Connectedness the
source of the sense of self. Psychological Connectedness is the holding of
some direct psychological connections such as having the same memories,
intentions, desires etc. Connectedness can hold to any degree. The connectedness
is considered strong if there are enough direct connections between two
psychological states. Psychological Continuity is the holding of overlapping
chains of strong connectedness. These concepts are very important in considering
the Open Individualism framework, because they constitute
our illusion of being different subjects
of experience, of having separate personal identities.
5. On the
reductionist view, a person’s psychological state can be mapped onto the
physical structure made of neurons in our brain. Other philosophers, such as
Thomas Nagel, think that
personal identity necessarily depends on
the fact that our brain is a mass of matter different than that of other brains,
that it is independent in its structure. This means that it is the matter itself
which has a specific identity. Both these
theories have trouble with the persistence of personal identity over time,
because both the matter and the structure of our body change gradually in time.
Parfit thinks that our personal identity
changes gradually whenever Psychological Connectedness does not hold any
longer between the current and a previous psychological state. Parfit does not
define how long Psychological Connectedness must hold sufficiently strongly to
avoid the changing of personal identity; it is possible to imagine it not
lasting more than a single instant, shrinking the lifetime of a single personal
identity towards zero. This is why Daniel Kolak named this view “Empty
Individualism”. In the extreme case, we should imagine being frozen in a single
instant of time, subject to the illusion that time flows. I find this view
claustrophobic, but to dismiss it definitively, we have to consider the
Individual Existential Problem discussed later. Other philosophers are inclined
to think that a persistence based on a mixture of material and structural
elements may allow personal identity to hold for an entire lifetime or a shorter
period of time, but anyway longer than a single instant. Actually, no mixed
model can currently properly answer every problem that arises. The important
point is, all the reductionist theories
of personal identity regard personal identity as depending directly on the
identity of the physical object of your brain or a bigger part of your body.
For this reason, to criticize this concept of personal identity from the ground
up, we have to criticize the identity
concept when applied to inanimate objects.