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PH1102E

Week 9

The self and personal identity

I. Personal identity: background

A. Why does personal identity matter?

1. Personal identity and moral responsibility

2. Personal identity and the end of life

B. Traditional theories of personal identity

1. The bodily continuity theory

2. The psychological continuity theory

II. The phenomenological theory

A. Streams of consciousness

B. Phenomenal selves

C. Implications of the phenomenal continuity theory

1. Frink again

2. Death

III. Objections and replies

A. Short-term memory objection

B. Octopus objection

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I. Personal identity: background

Once you were a small child. Now you are an adult. What is this “you” that was once a child and is now

an adult? And whatever it is, exactly in what sense does it survive from one year -- or one day, hour,

minute, or second -- to the next?

These questions lie at the heart of the problem of personal identity. Philosophers have offered a variety

of answers to them, several of which I’ll discuss below. But before getting into that, let’s consider why

the questions matter. Why should we care what it is in us that survives over time, and how?

A. Why does personal identity matter?

There are at least two reasons.

1. Personal identity and moral responsibility

The first reason relates back to something we considered when we were discussing free will,

determinism, and moral responsibility. Recall that some philosophers (such as Galen Strawson) say that

determinism and moral responsibility cannot coexist. One way they argue for this is by means of the

“Mad Scientist” thought-experiment. In this thought-experiment, a decent, mild-mannered man named

Smith falls victim to a mad scientist, in the following way. One night, when Smith is sleeping, the mad

scientist -- let’s call him Dr. Frink -- secretly anaesthetizes Smith and plants remote-controlled electrodes

in his brain. (Neither Smith nor anyone else ever discovers that Frink has done this.) These implanted

electrodes do not give Dr. Frink any direct access to Smith’s glands or muscles, but, by activating the

electrodes remotely in specific ways, Dr. Frink is able to produce in Smith any desire that he, Frink,

wishes Smith to have.

For example, Frink can stimulate in Mr. Smith a desire to murder Mrs. Smith, his beloved wife of 35

years. Since Smith is a decent mild-mannered man, and since he loves his wife, he finds this sudden

desire he has to murder her disturbing and alarming. Certainly he is not moved to act on it by murdering

his wife; more likely he reacts to it by seeking psychiatric treatment, or psychological therapy.

But Dr. Frink has anticipated this. His electrodes also allow him to shut-down Smith’s powers of desire

suppression, as well as to erase all of Smith’s loving feelings for his wife, eradicate all his fond memories

of their time together, and replace all of these with feelings of hatred, and false memories of years of

marital strife. Let us suppose that Frink induces all these psychological changes in Smith by remote, and

only then stimulates in him the desire to murder his wife; the results for Mrs. Smith are predictably

tragic.

According to the the Humean theory of moral responsibility, a person is responsible for what he does

provided that he does it intentionally. “But,” says the anti-Humean, “in the thought-experiment, Mr.

Smith murders Mrs. Smith intentionally. After all, to kill a woman intentionally is just to succeed in doing

something that you believe and desire will result in her death. Well, when Mr. Smith stabbed his wife

fifteen times with a butcher’s knife, he believed and desired that this would result in her death. So,

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Smith killed his wife intentionally. Yet it hardly seems right to hold him morally responsible for his wife’s

murder! And if the judge and jury do find him guilty of murder, that will only be because they do not

know about Dr. Frink’s electrodes.”

But the anti-Humean does not stop there. He goes on to point out that if determinism is true, we are all,

in a sense, at the mercy of Frinks. It’s just that the Frinks that govern us are not mad scientists, but

features of our genetic makeup and environment. We have no more control over these genetic and

environmental factors than Smith has over Frink, and these factors determine our psychological traits --

beliefs, desires, capacities for desire-suppression, etc. -- at least as completely as Frink’s activities

determined Smith’s pyschology. Consistency therefore demands that if we should not hold Smith

morally responsible for killing his wife in the scenario described, then neither should we hold anyone

responsible for anything -- at least, not if determinism is true.

What can a Humean say in response to this? I suggested that he could respond that Mrs. Smith’s killer is

morally responsible for her death, but that Mr. Smith is not responsible for her death, since Mr. Smith is

not Mrs. Smith’s killer. What makes this paradoxical-sounding reply possible is that -- according the

Humean -- Dr. Frink’s extensive interference with Mr. Smith’s beliefs, desires, etc. effectively destroys

Mr. Smith, and replaces him with an outwardly indistinguishable, but in fact completely different

person. It was this person, who has inherited Mr. Smith’s body (thanks to Frink’s meddling) who is

morally responsible for killing Mrs. Smith. Mr. Smith himself was never at the scene of the crime.1

This reply to the anti-Humean relies heavily, indeed entirely, on the claim that the person who married

Mrs. Smith was not the same as the person who killed her (their outward bodily resemblance

notwithstanding). So here, at the heart of the issue of freedom and responsibility, arises the question of

personal identity.

2. Personal identity and the end of life

On some level, most of us fear death. And if you fear death, what you fear is the prospect that you -- the

“you” that exists now, your self -- will someday not exist. Is this fear rational?

Some philosophers argue that it is not rational, on the grounds that your self will always exist. But in

order for that to be so, this self must have a very special character -- it must, for example, transcend any

purely bodily aspect of your nature. The hope for immortality is therefore predicated on some specific

conception of the self; it is a hope that is justified only if the “you” that exists now is of such a nature as

to be able to buck the second law of thermodynamics indefinitely.

1 If you find yourself inclined to say that the person who killed Mrs. Smith shouldn’t be held accountable no matter

who he is, since, whoever he is, he did what he did only because of the bad character he received from Frink, you

should reflect that we usually do not absolve child-abusers of moral responsibility for their abusive behavior, even

though in many cases this behavior comes of a character formed by the abuser’s own abusive parents.

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Other philosophers argue that the fear of death is irrational, but for completely different reasons. These

philosophers believe that it is irrational to fear death, even if death is inevitable -- even if your self will

perish along with your body. According to these philosophers, if you attain a proper understanding of

what your self really is, and of what it really means for it to survive from one day to the next, you will

realize that your instinctive attachment to your self is a mere prejudice. Once you understand what the

persistence of the self really involves, you will realize that you have no more reason to fear your own

death than you have to fear the death of anyone else -- perhaps less reason.

Finally, there are philosophers who hold that there is nothing irrational about the fear of death.

According to these philosophers, the “you” that was once a child and is now an adult will one day be

nothing -- or at any rate, nothing that can be identified with you. Perhaps the best thing to do in this

case is to ignore death, not in the hope that it will go away (it won’t), but in order to make the best of

what life offers in the interim.

B. Traditional theories of personal identity

Traditionally, two theories have dominated philosophical discussion about personal identity. One of

these is the bodily continuity theory. The other is the psychological continuity theory.

1. The bodily continuity theory

According to the bodily continuity theory, you are nothing more and nothing less than an organism -- an

animal of the species homo sapiens -- and your capacity for survival from one day to the next is the same

as that of any other organism.

Equating the self with an organism has certain advantages. For example, it helps explain how the adult

“you” can be the same person as the infant “you,” despite the fact that the two “yous” are physically

and psychologically so different from one another. The key to understanding this, say the bodily

continuity theorists, is to recognize that an organism changes only gradually, losing and gaining cells in

an incremental way. It is possible that your body now contains not a single cell that you were born with.

Still, we can say that it is the same body, since the original cells were not replaced by new ones all at

once, but only in a gradual fashion. It would have been quite different if at some point the infant “you”

had been annihilated and immediately replaced by an adult. That adult would not have been you, or

anyway it would not have been the same person as the baby it replaced. But since the adult “you” is a

more natural and organic development from the infant, we can say that you were once the infant, and

that the infant was the same person, the same self, as you (albeit smaller and more helpless).

An analogy is the “Ship of Theseus.” According to legend, this ship was used in an annual ceremony in

ancient Athens. Whenever one of the planks of the ship would begin to show signs of wear, the

Athenians would replace it with a fresh plank. After several hundred years of this, the ship contained not

a single one of its original planks. Yet it was still the Ship of Theseus; it was the “same ship,” in a way

that it would not have been, had the original ship at some point been completely dismantled, and a new

ship built in its place.

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Although the bodily continuity theory has its merits, it is far from ideal. One objection to the theory is

that my body will survive my death -- for a while, at least -- whereas I will not survive my death (or, if I

do survive it, I won’t survive it as my body). But this is a superficial objection: what the bodily continuity

theorist meant was that I am a living organism, a living body. A more serious objection is that my body

could survive as a living organism, even if I became “brain dead”; i.e., even if I lost all capacity for

thought, feeling, desire, emotion, etc. Yet it hardly seems plausible to suppose that I could survive such

a complete loss of mental capacities. This does not force us to conclude that I am not an organism, but it

does force us to recognize that I am not merely an organism. It forces us to recognize that the survival of

a “self” involves something beyond the survival of a living body.

There are also more subtle, metaphysical difficulties with the bodily continuity approach. Returning to

the Ship of Theseus, suppose that the Athenians always kept the old planks in a warehouse, and, after

several hundred years, someone reassembles these old planks into a complete ship. We now have two

ships on our hands: a fresh-planked ship, and a worn-planked ship that is just like it (apart from the

wear). Which of these, if either, is the Ship of Theseus? Perhaps there is no definitive answer to this

question. But then neither is there a definitive answer to the question of who would be you, if someone

had been saving all the cells you shed over the course of your life up until now, keeping them alive in

some kind of nutrient bath, and suddenly reassembled them into a living human body just like yours. But

even if you are comfortable with the idea that there is no right or wrong answer to the question, “Which

ship, if either, is the Ship of Theseus?” you are probably not so comfortable with the idea that there is

no right or wrong answer to the question, “Which homo sapiens, if either, am I?” This again suggests

that it is a mistake to equate personal identity with bodily identity.

2. Psychological continuity theory

Recognizing the flaws of the bodily continuity theory, some philosophers have developed a different

account of personal identity. This account focuses on the psychological traits of a person. The idea,

basically, is that you are above all a psychological being: a being with beliefs, desires, and a whole

complex of psychological traits that make up what we call “character.” Of course, a typical adult is

psychologically much different from an infant. The adult “you” has precious little in common with week-

old infant “you,” psychologically. Psychologically, the adult “you” more closely resembles an adult

chimpanzee than it resembles the infant “you.” What makes the infant and the adult the same self -- the

same “you” -- is not, therefore, psychological resemblance or similarity. Rather, it is psychological

continuity. For just as your infant body did not develop into your adult body in a single sudden leap,

neither did your infant mind develop into your adult mind in a single sudden leap. As you mature, you

acquire new beliefs, desires, and character traits gradually -- and lose them gradually as well. The

psychological transition from infancy to adulthood is profound, but it is a transition that you survive, due

to the fact that each stage of your psychological history is an incremental development from the

previous stage, which was in turn an incremental development from the stage that preceded it, and so

on, and so forth.

One aspect of the mind that psychological continuity theorists particularly emphasize is memory. Early

versions of the theory simply held that you -- the “you” that exists today -- are the same as the you that

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existed yesterday, because the you that exists today can remember the experiences of the you that

existed yesterday. These early theories proved to be too simplistic, however. For example, they implied

that you were never a week-old baby, since you -- the you who now exists -- cannot remember any

experiences of a week-old baby. To address this kind of problem, later versions of the memory theory

took a more nuanced approach. According to these theories, in order for a present person B to count as

the same person as some past person A, it is unnecessary that B have the ability to remember any

experience of A. It is enough if B can remember an experience of a person who can remember an

experience of a person who can remember an experience of a person...who can remember an

experience of A.

Suppose, for example, that the Old General can remember his adventures as a Dashing Captain, but

cannot remember anything that he did as a Young Boy. Old General still counts as the same person as

Young Boy, provided that Dashing Captain could remember the experiences of Young Boy. In this case,

we can say that Old General is psychologically connected with Dashing Captain, and that Dashing

Captain is psychologically connected with Young Boy, but that Old General is not psychologically

connected with Young Boy. (At least, he is not psychologically connected with Young Boy in terms of

memory.) Still, there is an indirect psychological link between Old General and Young Boy -- a link

mediated by the connection between Old General and Dashing Captain, and between Dashing Captain

and Young Boy. We call this indirect link psychological continuity, and say that Old General and Young

Boy are psychologically continuous with one another, despite the fact that they are not psychologically

connected to one another.

The psychological continuity theory is by far the most popular account of personal identity. It exists in

many variations, but the central idea is always the same: for an earlier self A to be the same self as a

later self B, is for A and B to be psychologically continuous with one another, either via memory or some

other psychological trait or traits.

II. The phenomenological theory

Dainton and Bayne consider the psychological continuity theory to be inadequate. To understand why,

consider the following hypothetical situation. You are sitting at home, watching television. You are

focused on the program -- it is the finale of Singapore Idol, and you are praying that the underdog will

win. As you sit mesmerized by the televised performance, something major is happening in your brain.

You are having a rare kind of stroke that affects only the parts of your brain responsible for your

psychological (as opposed to phenomenal or experiential) traits. Or perhaps Dr. Frink has struck again --

it doesn’t matter. The point is that as you watch T.V., absorbed in your program, you are undergoing

sudden and massive psychological changes -- changes that you do not notice, since they all have to do

with aspects of your psychology that are irrelevant to your experience of the T.V. show. Your memories

are getting erased, and your desires -- except for the desire to keep watching the show -- are being

replaced by new desires that bear little resemblance to those you had before. Your most basic character

traits are being profoundly altered -- if you had a gentle, mild-mannered disposition before the stroke,

after it you will have a rough and hot-tempered disposition. If before the stroke you were a timid

wallflower, after the stroke you are a gregarious and aggressive adrenaline junkie. If you were a quietly

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devout Christian before the stroke, you emerge from it a vocal atheist. If durian used to make you ill, it is

now your favorite food. Etc.

Given the suddeness and the wide extent of these psychological changes, a psychological continuity

theorist has no choice but to conclude that you do not survive this stroke. The stroke puts an end to you,

and leaves some new person in your place.

But Dainton and Bayne think that this is the wrong conclusion to draw. At least, it is the wrong

conclusion, provided that your stream of consciousness persists throughout all these sudden and

massive changes to your psychology. For let us consider things from your point of view. From your point

of view, watching the T.V., what is going on? Well, you are intently focused on the contest. You are

having visual experiences of shapes and colors flitting across the T.V. screen, auditory images of the

contestants’ voices, and various more peripheral experiences (of the wall behind the T.V., of the sound

of traffic outside your apartment, of the feeling of the sofa cushions under your rump, etc.). These

experiences flow along uninterrupted, and, we are assuming, unaffected by the stroke, whose effects

are, again, limited to the portions of your brain responsible for the psychological rather than

phenomenal aspects of your mind.

The show ends. Your contestant lost. You suddenly feel quite strange -- you have a sudden urge to go

bungee jumping. When you ask your mother where your bungee cord is, she gives you a puzzled look,

and you fly into a rage, demanding to know where she has hidden it. You storm out of the apartment,

and, passing a group of nuns in the hall, berate them for perpetuating a belief system based on

ignorance and superstition. Out in the street, you catch a whiff of durian and follow it to a fruit stand,

from which you purchase six durian, devouring them on the spot.

But throughout all of this, your experiences stream along smoothly and continuously. At no point do you

“black out” and emerge in a radically new conscious state of mind. One experience slides into the next,

just as it always has.

Dainton and Bayne think that in this hypothetical scenario, you survive. You survive in a dramatically

altered form, but, all the same, it is you who now exists in this form. The fact that your conscious

experience continues uninterrupted throughout the entire episode is powerful evidence that you persist

throughout the entire ordeal. But this would be impossible, if personal identity were entirely a matter of

psychological continuity. For the stroke has broken all psychological links, direct or indirect, between the

pious, durian-loathing couch-potato “you” and the religion-scorning, durian-addicted, bungee-jumping

“you.” Your self has survived the stroke, even though your psychology has not. Therefore the survival of

the self cannot be a mere matter of psychological continuity.

A. Streams of consciousness

The basic idea behind the phenomenological conception of the self is that your self follows your stream

of consciousness: you are, as it were, carried along by your stream of consciousness, wherever it goes,

and whatever happens to it.

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To turn this basic idea into a proper theory, Dainton and Bayne have to tell us more precisely what they

mean by a “stream of consciousness.” And in order to see what they mean by this, it will help to

understand what they mean when they speak of “consciousness” or “conscious experience.”

Elsewhere, Dainton distinguishs between a “simple conception” of conscious experience and what he

calls a “naive perceptual” conception of experience. According to the naive perceptual conception of

experience, what makes our experiences conscious is that we observe them “from the inside,” or, as we

sometimes put it, with our “mind’s eye.” So, just as we perceive ordinary objects -- cars, buildings, trees

-- with our ordinary eyes, we perceive our inner experiences with our inner eye, our mind’s eye.

Dainton agrees that we sometimes inwardly perceive (or “introspect”) our own experiences. But he does

not think that such inward perception is essential to experience. He thinks that most of the time, we

simply have our experiences without paying attention to them. When you are walking down the street,

for example, you are having lots of experiences -- visual, auditory, olefactory, etc. If an angry dog

appears in front of you, you have a visual experience of the dog, you perceive the dog. Do you also

perceive your visual experience of the dog? Most likely, you are not paying any attention to your visual

experience of the dog at all -- your mind is focused on the dog itself, and how to avoid getting bitten by

it.

In Dainton’s view, all that is essential to any experience is the fact that there is “something it is like” to

have that experience. In theory, you could have experiences without ever noticing you had them --

without ever paying any attention to the experiences (as opposed to the external objects of which they

were experiences).

A stream of consciousness, as Dainton and Bayne understand it, is a series of experiences in this “what it

is like to have it” sense of experience. But not just any old series of experiences counts as a stream of

consciousness. If I see a Flash! and immediately afterward you hear a Bang!, the Flash! and Bang! do not

belong to a single stream of consciousness.

This suggests the following definition:

(D) Two experiences, Experience #1 and Experience #2, belong to a single stream of consciousness if

they happen one after another in the same person.

For Dainton’s and Bayne’s purposes, however, this definition will not do. Why not?

DB’s ultimate goal is to say what it is for a person to exist from an earlier time to a later time; in other

words, Dainton and Bayne are trying to give an account of personal survival. Specifically, they want to

explain personal survival in terms of streams of consciousness. But if they wants to explain personal

survival in terms of streams of consciousness, they cannot also explain streams of consciousness in

terms of personal survival! That would be circular. Yet, if they were to define “belonging to a single

stream of consciouness” as in (D), they would, in effect, be defining streams of consciousness in terms of

personal survival. For in order for Experience #1 and Experience #2 to occur one after another in the

same person, that person must survive from the time of Experience #1 to the time of Experience #2. The

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point here is simple: if Dainton and Bayne want to explain “same person” in terms of “same stream,”

they can’t turn around and explain “same stream” in terms of “same person.”

So Dainton and Bayne cannot use (D) to explain what they means by a “stream of consciousness.”

Instead, they proposes the following account of streams of consciousness.

Consider your conscious state of mind at any given time. According to DB, this will typically be a

“dynamic” state of mind, in the sense that it will involve an appearance of events unfolding in time. (The

“unfolding” might, in some instances, be a mere matter of repetition, as when you hear a continuous

droning sound which simply gets renewed from one moment to the next.) To take a simple example,

suppose you are listening to someone playing scales on the piano. The individual notes sound in

succession, and, as each note is played, you have a corresponding auditory experience: Do, Re, Mi, Fa,

So, La, Ti.

What is it for these experiences belong to a single stream of consciousness? According to DB, it is for

them to constitute a series of “overlapping” experiences. By saying that two experiences, Experience #1

and Experience #2, “overlap,” DB mean two things: (1) that Experience #1 and Experience #2 both have

briefer, successive experiences as parts; and, (2) that some (at least one) of these briefer experiences is

a part of both Experience #1 and Experience #2. In other words, the two experiences (#1 and #2) have at

least one “sub-experience” in common.

For an analogy, consider what happens when a king dies and his eldest son ascends to the throne. In

some countries, the traditional declaration that signifies this event is: “The King is dead, long live the

King!” Here we have one event -- the transfer of power from one man to another -- figuring as the last

episode of one series of events (the old King’s reign) and the first episode of a subsequent series of

events (the new King’s reign). Just as the successive reigns are connected by virtue of their having this

event in common, so too, according to DB, successive episodes of consciousness (successive “specious

presents”) can be connected by virtue of having an experience in common. For a less political analogy,

consider what happens when the Sun sets here in Singapore. Our sunset is someone else’s sunrise. Here

we have a single natural event -- some fractional rotation of the Earth -- included as the last event of

one day (ours), and the first event of another day (some people far to our west). Just as our today and

their tomorrow have an event in common, so, according to DB, does your auditory experience Do-Re

have an experience in common with your later experience Re-Mi; namely, the Re experience.

When two experiences have a sub-experience in common like this, they are phenomenally connected.

And if two experiences are phenomenally connected, then they belong to the same stream of

consciousness. But two experiences can also belong to the same stream of consciousness without being

phenomenally connected. In order for an experience B to belong to the same stream of consciousness as

an experience A, it is enough if B is phenomenally connected to an experience that is phenomenally

connected to an experience that is phenomenally connected to an experience...that is phenomenally

connected to A.

The situation here is perfectly parallel to the one we encountered when elaborating the psychological

continuity theory. The point is that in order for two experiences to belong to the same stream of

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consciousness, it is not necessary that they have a part in common -- not necessary, that is, that they be

phenomenally connected (in DB’s sense). It is enough if they are linked indirectly through intermediate

phenomenal connections. So even if your Do-Re experience is not phenomenally connected with your

Mi-Fa experience, these two experiences can still belong to the same stream of conscious, since it can

still be true that your Do-Re experience is phenomenally connected to your Re-Mi experience (via Re),

and your Re-Mi experience phenomenally connected to your Mi-Fa experience (via Mi). In this case, we

say that the Do-Re experience is phenomenally continuous with the Mi-Fa experience.

And now Dainton and Bayne can define “belonging to the same stream of consciousness” without doing

so in terms of personal survival. They say that two experiences belong to the same stream of

conciousness, provided only that they are phenomenally continuous with one another, in the sense just

explained.

B. Phenomenal selves

DB’s account of streams of consciousness is only the first part of their theory of personal identity. At

first, we might be tempted simply to equate selves with streams. For example, we might be tempted to

say that, in general, for an earlier self A to be the same self as a later self, B, is simply for A and B to have

experiences that belong to the same stream of consciousness. That would certainly corroborate the

intuition that in the stroke case considered earlier, the victim survives the sea-change in his

psychological traits. For it is clear from the description of the case that the victim’s pre- and post-stroke

experiences all belong to the same stream of consciousness.

But we cannot simply equate selves with streams of consciousness. This is because selves sometimes

lose consciousness, as when they fall into dreamless sleep, or undergo general anaesthesia. Since you

have no experiences when you are sleeping without dreaming, you have no experiences at that time to

link the previous day’s stream of consciousness to the coming day’s. The previous day’s experiences and

the coming day’s experiences therefore do not belong to the same stream of consciousness. In order to

allow that you will be the same person when you wake up as you were when you fell asleep, DB must

find some way of linking discontinuous streams of consciousness together.

Their solution to this “consciousness gap” problem is to shift the focus away from experiences

themselves, and towards the things that cause or produce experiences. Suppose you are in a deep,

dreamless sleep. Well, then you obviously aren’t having any experiences. But the fact remains that you

would be having experiences if you were awake. Whenever you have experiences, your experiences are

produced by something (your brain, let’s say). This thing that produces your experiences -- this

“experience producer” -- exists even when it is not actually producing experiences, just as a movie

producer exists even when he is not producing movies. When not actually producing experiences, your

experience-producer (the part or aspect of you that produces your experiences) lies dormant, but not

dead. And if it were roused from dormancy, it would produce experiences. (In this respect, it may differ

from the movie producer.)

Now, what decides whether an earlier experience-producer is the same experience-producer as a later

experience-producer? We can’t say that the earlier and later EPs are the same just as long as the

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experiences they produce are phenomenally continuous with one another. For it could be that one or

both of the EPs is dormant, in which case it does not produce any experiences at all. What we can say is

that an earlier EP is the same EP as a later EP just as long as either (1) the two EPs produce experiences

that are phenomenally continuous, or, (2) the two EPs would produce phenomenally continuous

experiences, if it were the case that they both produced experiences.

This, then, is Dainton’s and Bayne’s final answer to our original question: the “you” that existed as an

infant is the same as the “you” that exists now as an adult, because if all the experience-producers that

existed between now and the baby’s time had actually produced experiences, then the baby’s

experience-producer would have produced experiences phenomenally continuous with the experiences

that are now being produced by the experience-producer that is producing your present experiences. In

other words: there is a temporal series of EPs between the infant “you” and the adult “you,” such that if

all these EPs had actually produced experiences, then your present experiences would have been

phenomenally continuous (in DB’s sense) with the experiences of the infant “you.”

C. Implications of the phenomenal continuity theory

1. Frink again

What does the phenomenal continuity theory of personal identity imply for the Humean’s response to

the Mad Scientist thought-experiment? The Humean’s response, you’ll recall, was that the man who

killed Mrs. Smith was not Mr. Smith, but someone else who has, thanks to Dr. Frink, taken over the body

that once belonged to Mr. Smith. In other words, the Humean’s response is that the murderer of Mrs.

Smith is not the same person as Mr. Smith.

But if the phenomenological conception of the self is correct, the Humean’s response fails. For there is

nothing in the Mad Scientist thought-experiment to prevent us from supposing that Smith’s

consciousness flows along in a continuous stream, the same as it ever does. After all, Frink’s electrodes

only allow him to control the parts of Smith’s brain responsible for desire formation, desire suppression,

memory, and similar cognitive factors. As far as the continuity of Smith’s stream of consciousness is

concerned, Frink does not interfere at all. So, by DB’s theory, Mr. Smith does survive Frink’s meddling,

meaning that it is Mr. Smith who kills Mrs. Smith.

It would be different, if we accepted the psychological continuity theory of personal identity. Frink

causes major disruptions to Smith’s psychology. A psychological continuity theorist can therefore agree

with the Humean that the post-Frink “Smith” is not the same person as the pre-Frink Smith. But Dainton

and Bayne cannot say this. They must agree with the anti-Humeans that it is indeed Smith who kills his

wife.

Must the Humean therefore reject the phenomenological account of personal identity? Possibly. But he

might try a different approach first. The Humean might distinguish between people and selves, arguing

that who you are as a person depends on your psychology, while who you are as a self depends on your

phenomenology. He could then suggest that when we are considering whether “someone” merits praise

or blame for something he has done, we are really considering whether some person merits praise or

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blame. In other words, the Humean can try to argue that, when it comes to issues of moral

responsibility, it is people, rather than selves, that matter. If that is true, then the fact that Mr. Smith’s

self killed Mrs. Smith is irrelevant to questions of moral responsibility; all that is relevant is whether Mr.

Smith’s person killed her. And, given the suggested connection between personhood and psychology --

together with the fact that Frink has hopelessly scrambled Mr. Smith’s psychological traits -- we can

safely conclude that Smith’s person did not exist at the time the crime was committed.

Is this a convincing reply from the Humean, or just a desperate dodge? I’m not sure. Would the Humean

be better off simply rejecting the phenomenological theory of personal identity, on the grounds that it

opens the door to moral nihilism? Again, I’m not sure. The only thing I am sure of is that the Humean

needs to say more, if he is to convince us that Frink poses no threat to the Humean conception of moral

responsibility.

2. Death

The implications of the phenomenological theory for the rationality or otherwise of fearing death are

less clear. If the phenomenal continuity theory is correct, then when I fear my own death, what I fear is

the future non-existence of anything that capable of producing experiences phenomenally continuous

with my present. In other words, I fear that someday there will be nothing capable of producing

experiences that would relate in a certain indirect and largely counterfactual way to my present

experiences. When you put it that way, the feared thing does not sound so very fearsome. So perhaps

the phenomenological conception of the self (like the psychological) implies that our ordinary fear of

death is irrational.

III. Objections and replies

We have actually already considered one objection to the phenomenological theory: the Humean

objection that it implies a disconnection between the concept of a self and the concept of a morally

responsible agent. This was an inconclusive objection, inasmuch as it was predicated on a controversial

Humean conception of moral responsibility.

A. Short-term memory objection

A more direct objection comes from proponents of the psychological continuity approach to personal

identity. Go back to the Singapore Idol thought-experiment. The claim there was that your experience

exhibits phenomenal continuity throughout the scenario, but that your psychology suffers an abrupt

discontinuity. Given that you survive in the thought-experiment, it follows that psychological continuity

is not the important thing when it comes to personal survival.

In response to this, a proponent of the psychological continuity theory can point out that it is unclear

that there is total psychological discontinuity in this case, since it is unclear that there is psychological

discontinuity at the level of short-term memory. As you are watching your favorite contestant sing, do

you really fail to remember what words she sang from one moment to the next? Do you utterly fail to

record any memories at all -- even very short-term memories, on the order of milliseconds? If you are

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recording such memories, then there is a basis to claim that your post-stroke self is psychologically

continuous with your pre-stroke self. It will just be a psychological continuity mediated by a large

number of psychological connections between very brief memory states. On the other hand, if you are

not recording such memories, it is unclear in what sense you can be said to be having phenomenally

connected experiences, and therefore unclear that your pre- and post-stroke selves are even

phenomenally connected.

How can Dainton and Bayne reply to this? Here, they will invoke the “simple conception” of experience

against the “naive perceptual” conception. Remembering a past experience, they will say, is a way of

thinking of it, or noticing it. So any experience can exist without being remembered, since (according to

the simple conception) any experience can exist without being noticed or contemplated. We can

therefore suppose that the stroke even eradicates your short-term memories, without materially

affecting your stream of consciousness.

How convincing is this? It depends on how convinced you are by the simple conception of experience.

Can you be so mesmerized by the singer’s T.V. performance that at each moment you have no

awareness of anything but the one note she is singing at that moment? If you think so, you’ll probably

side with Dainton and Bayne. Otherwise, maybe not.

B. Octopus objection

Finally, one might object to DB’s claim that maintaining a continuous stream of consciousness is

sufficient for personal survival. Experience can change quickly. You can close your eyes and ears and

then suddenly open them to blinding light and deafening sound. You can wake up from a psychedelic

technicolor dream to the dark, silent reality of your bedroom. None of these experiences involves a

phenomenal discontinuity, or any break in your stream of consciousness.

Given how suddenly and dramatically our conscious experience can change without breaking the

continuous stream of conscious, we can imagine our stream of consciousness continuing on through a

whole rapid sequence of such changes. In the space of just several seconds, for example, it might be

possible for me to transition from my present, ordinary experience into a conscious state of mind

phenomenally indistinguishable from that of an octopus. According to the phenomenal continuity

theory, I would survive this change. After all, my consciousness will stream continuously into the

octopus state of mind. We can even imagine that my body undergoes a correspondingly rapid change,

morphing from my ordinary human form into the form of an octopus. Since bodily continuity is,

according to Dainton and Bayne, irrelevant to questions of personal survival, they must say that I would

survive even this transformation.

To put it bluntly: the phenomenological theory appears to have the consequence that I could quite

literally become an octopus -- and not merely in the sense of being destroyed and replaced by an

octopus, or in the Kafkaesque sense of having my (human) mind inserted into an octopus’ body. No,

DB’s theory entails that the same self that is now typing this sentence could someday be a perfectly

ordinary octopus, completely indistinguishable from other octopi, and with no memory of ever having

been anything else.

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How can Dainton and Bayne reply to this? I think their best reply would be simply to accept this as an

implication of their theory. As hard as this may seem, there does seem to be some basis for it. Suppose

that you are the one who faces the prospect of being transformed -- bodily, psychologically, and

phenomenally -- into an octopus. The sorcerer (or scientist) who is about to do this to you offers you

two options. After he transforms you, he will either release you into the sea, in an area that is a natural

habitat for octopi, or, if you prefer, he will sell you to the sushi bar down the street. If you are not utterly

indifferent to these choices, that suggests that you do lend some credence to the idea that the octopus

will, in some sense, be you. And this may be all that Dainton and Bayne require to block the objection.

M.W.P.