Very nice analysis and connections! But I think an outie quitting the job is very dissimilar to murder because a reversal always remains in the space of possibility: that the outtie might come back to work and bring the innie back. So it always remains possible that the innie will not notice any difference and time lapse but will simply pick up where it was left off. This is in fact what happened in a few places of the show, and this is why I was not moved at all when any character supposedly “died”. This is very different from death, which (as far as I know) cannot be reversed.
Thanks Hongyu 🙏 It's a fair point, but I think it's quite a contingent one. For the purposes of the show, it's true that an outie might come back to work and bring the innie into existence again (also, supposedly the innie exists somewhere in the head of the outie, it's just inaccessible to the outie's awareness/consciousness?) However, say they never do come back, or the technology gets destroyed--then does it constitute murder? Not quite, I still think.
Just one point that jumps at me from this discussion. From the ethical perspective it seem irrelevant (and arguably can be proven irrelevant) whether X at time t and Y at time t2 are the same identity (X=Y). The law of identity dictates only that at any time t X=X and Y=Y, but does not guarantee their continuity in time and does not preclude change in time. Personal identity is preserved if some essential feature (f) remains the same despite other features (g) changing. If there is an f-discontinuity in time between X and Y, such that Y is not the same enduring person as X was, this still does not invalidate the personhood of Y, and any ethical constraints that apply to X must apply to Y, not because they are the same person but because they are persons, and because all persons have moral status.
Hey Michael, thanks for reading mate. If I understand your point correctly, I'd say the entire question under discussion is precisely what is/are (g) and what is/are (f). And you would agree. Parfit wants to say (f) is not really a matter of an essential property, but a spectrum of psychological connectedness. You're saying, it doesn't really matter for ethics, because as long as the entity is a person, the personal identity of that person doesn't matter.
I agree that, as you seem to be pointing out, identity doesn't matter in the case of humans splitting, because both clearly possess the essential characteristics of humankind. Personal identity is irrelevant in this case. I agree.
However, there are cases in ethics where personal identity of this kind does matter.
Let's say Joe committed double homicide in the middle of a burglary. He is sentenced to life in prison. Joe is split into Joe1 and Joe2. Do both go to prison? Or consider a simpler case. Joe's mind is wiped clean so that he reforms memories, values, beliefs, feelings, etc. Should he still go to prison?
Here, it seems like you can't dodge the question of personal identity.
I think the psychological continuity thesis is appropriate, provided it accommodates all ideational content (hence I prefer to call it ‘narrative continuity’), and the narrative continuity of the person cannot be decoupled from the narrative continuity of the body. I therefore do not consider the example of total identity separation as plausible. A person may have lost memories, split personalities, but these are narratively connected and unified as the same agency because they are conditional on narrative continuity of the same body, and the body itself has memory that cannot be forgotten, only incrementally modified. So, Joe1 and Joe2 are the same person.
A different example may be a person who is under hypnosis and does something that he would normally agree to, then comes our of hypnosis and has no recollection of what has happened. We have narrative continuity but not continuous memory. In this case the forgotten action is still an action of the same person, but is a deceptive context, so the hypnotist is responsible for the deception. No conflict of identity.
I think I follow everything except that Joe1 and Joe2 are the same person. The pragmatic restriction to the body given agency/narrative continuity seems plausible. However, wouldn't this lead you to say Joe1 and Joe2 are different people, and not the same as the original Joe, since they now have different bodies and therefore different centers of agency?
The problem with Joe1 and Joe2 (i overlooked the ‘splitting into two’ in my first response) is that this would entail creation ex nihilo, a break in causal logic, therefore both could not belong in the same world. Such body duplication would imply a causal contradiction, undermining the logic of a world. The same would apply in the case where, at time t, identity X ends and identity Y begins, and then at time t1, identity Y ends and X begins again, without a cause, therefore without a sufficient reason. In lieu of psychological continuity, only the causal continuity of the body can explain the continuity of identity, in which case discontinuous psychology must be reduced to the continuity of the body in order to be logically consistent (meaningful) in the same world.
I see your point (I think), but I'm unconvinced. It doesn't seem like a metaphysical or logical impossibility for one brain to be split in half and implanted into two bodies, as Parfit mentions in his introduction. The former part of that experiment (half a brain supporting consciousness, memories, etc.) has already been done many, many times successfully. The point is indeed that practically, day to day, the continuity of psychology is constrained by bodies. That's why personal identity works so often. However, we can imagine cases which are not logically inconsistent (even very plausible, near-future possibilities) where psychological continuity does not map onto the continuity of bodies (mind uploads, etc.)
A brain being split into two is just two parts of the same brain, therefore not the same identity as the original brain. Also, the two parts of the brain cannot be both identical and not identical. The same applies to mind/consciousness. Regarding mind implants/uploads, this faces a different logical hurdle: there is nothing to upload a mind into because the whole world is a part of it. It would imply implanting a mind into a part of itself, which also violates identity. A crucial point is that when we speak about other minds we are really speaking only about something inside our own mind represented by but not identical with some object in the the world as we conceive of it. Consciousness also never begins, because it contains everything, including time. We can speak of babies being born and ‘becoming’ conscious but we are still only referring to time and world as we conceive of, we speak only of the continuous object-language of our consciousness. From the perspective of the child, consciousness does not come into being but is always there for itself, including the meaning of time. Our ideas common descriptions of reality are themselves inconsistent, taking our mind for something other, something external, but this conflates object- and meta languages that we speak about ourselves.
Very nice analysis and connections! But I think an outie quitting the job is very dissimilar to murder because a reversal always remains in the space of possibility: that the outtie might come back to work and bring the innie back. So it always remains possible that the innie will not notice any difference and time lapse but will simply pick up where it was left off. This is in fact what happened in a few places of the show, and this is why I was not moved at all when any character supposedly “died”. This is very different from death, which (as far as I know) cannot be reversed.
Thanks Hongyu 🙏 It's a fair point, but I think it's quite a contingent one. For the purposes of the show, it's true that an outie might come back to work and bring the innie into existence again (also, supposedly the innie exists somewhere in the head of the outie, it's just inaccessible to the outie's awareness/consciousness?) However, say they never do come back, or the technology gets destroyed--then does it constitute murder? Not quite, I still think.
Just one point that jumps at me from this discussion. From the ethical perspective it seem irrelevant (and arguably can be proven irrelevant) whether X at time t and Y at time t2 are the same identity (X=Y). The law of identity dictates only that at any time t X=X and Y=Y, but does not guarantee their continuity in time and does not preclude change in time. Personal identity is preserved if some essential feature (f) remains the same despite other features (g) changing. If there is an f-discontinuity in time between X and Y, such that Y is not the same enduring person as X was, this still does not invalidate the personhood of Y, and any ethical constraints that apply to X must apply to Y, not because they are the same person but because they are persons, and because all persons have moral status.
Hey Michael, thanks for reading mate. If I understand your point correctly, I'd say the entire question under discussion is precisely what is/are (g) and what is/are (f). And you would agree. Parfit wants to say (f) is not really a matter of an essential property, but a spectrum of psychological connectedness. You're saying, it doesn't really matter for ethics, because as long as the entity is a person, the personal identity of that person doesn't matter.
I agree that, as you seem to be pointing out, identity doesn't matter in the case of humans splitting, because both clearly possess the essential characteristics of humankind. Personal identity is irrelevant in this case. I agree.
However, there are cases in ethics where personal identity of this kind does matter.
Let's say Joe committed double homicide in the middle of a burglary. He is sentenced to life in prison. Joe is split into Joe1 and Joe2. Do both go to prison? Or consider a simpler case. Joe's mind is wiped clean so that he reforms memories, values, beliefs, feelings, etc. Should he still go to prison?
Here, it seems like you can't dodge the question of personal identity.
I think the psychological continuity thesis is appropriate, provided it accommodates all ideational content (hence I prefer to call it ‘narrative continuity’), and the narrative continuity of the person cannot be decoupled from the narrative continuity of the body. I therefore do not consider the example of total identity separation as plausible. A person may have lost memories, split personalities, but these are narratively connected and unified as the same agency because they are conditional on narrative continuity of the same body, and the body itself has memory that cannot be forgotten, only incrementally modified. So, Joe1 and Joe2 are the same person.
A different example may be a person who is under hypnosis and does something that he would normally agree to, then comes our of hypnosis and has no recollection of what has happened. We have narrative continuity but not continuous memory. In this case the forgotten action is still an action of the same person, but is a deceptive context, so the hypnotist is responsible for the deception. No conflict of identity.
I think I follow everything except that Joe1 and Joe2 are the same person. The pragmatic restriction to the body given agency/narrative continuity seems plausible. However, wouldn't this lead you to say Joe1 and Joe2 are different people, and not the same as the original Joe, since they now have different bodies and therefore different centers of agency?
The problem with Joe1 and Joe2 (i overlooked the ‘splitting into two’ in my first response) is that this would entail creation ex nihilo, a break in causal logic, therefore both could not belong in the same world. Such body duplication would imply a causal contradiction, undermining the logic of a world. The same would apply in the case where, at time t, identity X ends and identity Y begins, and then at time t1, identity Y ends and X begins again, without a cause, therefore without a sufficient reason. In lieu of psychological continuity, only the causal continuity of the body can explain the continuity of identity, in which case discontinuous psychology must be reduced to the continuity of the body in order to be logically consistent (meaningful) in the same world.
I see your point (I think), but I'm unconvinced. It doesn't seem like a metaphysical or logical impossibility for one brain to be split in half and implanted into two bodies, as Parfit mentions in his introduction. The former part of that experiment (half a brain supporting consciousness, memories, etc.) has already been done many, many times successfully. The point is indeed that practically, day to day, the continuity of psychology is constrained by bodies. That's why personal identity works so often. However, we can imagine cases which are not logically inconsistent (even very plausible, near-future possibilities) where psychological continuity does not map onto the continuity of bodies (mind uploads, etc.)
A brain being split into two is just two parts of the same brain, therefore not the same identity as the original brain. Also, the two parts of the brain cannot be both identical and not identical. The same applies to mind/consciousness. Regarding mind implants/uploads, this faces a different logical hurdle: there is nothing to upload a mind into because the whole world is a part of it. It would imply implanting a mind into a part of itself, which also violates identity. A crucial point is that when we speak about other minds we are really speaking only about something inside our own mind represented by but not identical with some object in the the world as we conceive of it. Consciousness also never begins, because it contains everything, including time. We can speak of babies being born and ‘becoming’ conscious but we are still only referring to time and world as we conceive of, we speak only of the continuous object-language of our consciousness. From the perspective of the child, consciousness does not come into being but is always there for itself, including the meaning of time. Our ideas common descriptions of reality are themselves inconsistent, taking our mind for something other, something external, but this conflates object- and meta languages that we speak about ourselves.