Technological Fictions and Personal Identity: On Ricoeur, Schechtman and Analytic Thought Experiments

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 In the past, Schechtman's view was an overtly narrative one (1996, 2005). Her current Person-Life View (2010, 2014) still has strong narrative elements, but is less straightforwardly a narrative theory.

2 That is, the narrative theory that she was defending at the time. Her new Person-Life View, although not a straightforward narrative theory, also commits to phenomenological connections, as we shall see.

3 Schechtman thinks his talk of “the same consciousness” is a commitment to a phenomenological connection – a person's consciousness is not the same one in virtue of being made up of a particular set of memory and other connections, it just is the same one. But this would open him up to the very objections that he presses against immaterial substance as being that which provides for a person's persistence.

4 I present a more detailed response to the difficulties Schechtman and Wilkes present in Beck (2014).

5 Those parts of it, unlike my brain, that I experience: “In truth, the expression ‘my brain' has no meaning, at least not directly” (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 132).

6 Whether literary fictions always respect the corporeal condition and whether this distinction is a useful one are questions I raise in Beck (2006).

7 In more ways than the one I am about to explain. For instance, Parfit's version has the original cells destroyed as their states are recorded, not later, during the transmission. There is no duplication in his first description.

8 More needs to be said about what would make its criterion of identity sufficient. I make a suggestion in Beck (2015). There are other ways available as well, such as Daniel Kolak's arguments that fission does not destroy identity (Kolak, 2008).

9 The example comes from my 2015 paper, where I present a more detailed response to Schechtman's arguments that the reductionist Psychological View cannot account for the special concern we have for our future selves.

10 “And thus we may be able without any difficulty to conceive, the same Person at the Resurrection, though in a Body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here” (Locke, 1975, p. 340).

11 Cf. the sensible discussion in Williams (1970, pp. 161–63).

12 I have gestured at that story here, and do so in more detail in Beck (2015).