Cloning>selves>philosophers on 'personal identity'

[Leonard Katz]

There's a huge philosophical literature, historical and contemporary,
relevant to the recent query of Steve Hodges and conjectures of Shez.
Anthologies, such as that edited by John Perry, _Personal Identity_, are
good places to start. Derek Parfit's 1984 _Reasons and Persons_, Part
III, is a recent development of the complex-connection-constitution view
of the self, which goes back to the views of David Hume (_A Treatise of
Human Nature_), on which short-lived episodes are fundamental and the
person is, roughly, a suitably connected collection of these. Whether
such a view is correct, and, if so, whether it shows our ordinary views to
be illusory, are questions discussed in this tradition, which continues
today. (Some Buddhist traditions seem similar.)

It's not clear to me why, as Shez thinks, these questions should turn on
whether qualia go with matter or with its high-level organization in
complex systems. In either case, if we take a fine-grained view, we don't
last for the space of a breath, since we're not only exchanging matter
with our environment but also changing our brain's/mind's organization
subtly all the time. Our life involves this and it ends only with death.
The moral, I think, is that we should give up looking for any unchanging
self, any owner of experiences and thoughts, beyond the complex mental
and/or bodily processes that go on. You can say that these (or some of
them, as you choose) just are the self, or that as a point about our
thought or language the self is rather what 'has' these, or that the self
is thus shown not to exist -- but don't think that there's any substantive
difference in which we say, so long as we don't think there's anything
else going on!

Of course, this isn't how we naturally think of things. We are probably
hard-wired to think that we're as solid and unchanging as statues seem to
be and our folk psychology builds on that. But in moments of
enlightenment we do better, at least cognitively.

Leonard
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Leonard D. Katz
lk...@fas.harvard.edu