Philosophy Of Personal Identity

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 12:52 AM' timestamp='1259819520' post='2013654']
Ok. I can't go into great detail right now because of time constraints, but basically I'm at an impasse.[/quote]
Np bro. Me too.

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 12:52 AM' timestamp='1259819520' post='2013654']Soul theory appears to be incomplete because it can't explain why we are able to continuously re-identify other human beings over time. We don't have direct access to souls, so how exactly can we be using the soul as the identifying characteristic? (That's not to argue that there isn't a soul, just that it doesn't help in determining personal identity.)

Body theory in my opinion falls short because we can easily imagine having a body transplant, and still fundamentally being ourselves. Or, there's an invented hypothetical case in Perry's dialogue: one woman is hit by a streetcar and another has a stroke. Doctors see that they have one healthy mind and one healthy body, so they combine the two... so which survived? Most people are inclined to say that the woman whose mind was used, was the woman who survived. So intuitively body theory seems irrational.[/quote]
Theory three might be good old Thomistic hylomorphism. The either/or, soul or body, suggests dualism but for Aquinas the person is a body-soul composite and a description of personal identity would not separate the two. I could rant on this topic for sure, but I'm eager to talk Trek atm. lulz.

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 12:52 AM' timestamp='1259819520' post='2013654']Psychological connectedness seems more plausible at first, but it all goes to hell in a handbasket when we look at fission/fusion cases, as, I suppose, most theories will. Think about Star Trek transporters. Let's say you've got a transporter, and it functions by first making a 'readout' of your entire makeup, then destroying your elements, and sending that readout to wherever you want to go and reforming the elements there. Makes sense, right? We can imagine that this is still "you", because it is connected to you by memory stages. Well let's say that there was a problem with the machine this time. You're transported, but your elements aren't destroyed at location one. Now we have two "you's", both connected by psychological stages, but different beings. Either we have one being experiencing two incompatible experiences, which seems logically impossible, or the one being is now two entirely separate beings, and thus you did not actually "survive".
[/quote]
A few observations:

1. There are episodes of Trek (first in TNG) which show that a person is fully conscious during transport. I admit that this is weird but there is that one episode where Barclay gets transported and they show what it is like from his perspective. I suppose the idea is that even though your matter is converted into energy to be transmitted through subspace (or whatever the 'matter stream' might be), and even though your pattern can be stored in the pattern buffers, there is somehow a consciousness that remains, perhaps 'attached' to your raw energy since there have been episodes where people's consciousness were turned into pure 'energy' (whatever that means) and there are episodes that show people being aware of beaming.

2. But what about episodes such as 'Relics' where a person is simply suspended in the transporter buffer? This happened often for brief amounts of time, and I guess five seconds or forty years doesn't really matter, it is the idea that a person can be 'stored' in a pattern buffer of some kind (technically a pattern degrades with time but this is a limitation of the technology and Mr. Scott was a unique case). Basically this seems to imply that the human person, apart from their 'energy' I suppose, is reducible to raw data. This would seem to contradict the idea of a transcendent principle to personhood. But is the 'pattern' supposed to be the whole person? Perhaps the 'energy' is supposed to still embody a transcendent principle somehow (e.g., Barclay's consciousness) even though it is temporarily without spatial form but the transporter process returns this 'energy' to a material state (via the 'pattern').

3. Okay, what about that episode where Will Riker was caught up in a transporter malfunction that created an exact copy of himself? Remember, they find him years later and he changes his name to Thomas Riker and later makes an appearance in DS9 as a bad guy? Anyway, one might interpret that incident thusly: there was a weird disturbance that caused Riker's 'energy' to emerge from subspace in two places and the receiving pads at those two places responded by rematerializing the energy with Riker's pattern from the buffers. But wouldn't this imply that Riker's consciousness (per the Barclay incident above) is then the same as his 'energy' in some sense, such that a duplication of the energy equals a duplicate consciousness? Not necessarily. I would assert a conception of the substrate of consciousness as a substantial form and the 'energy' (which, incidentally, exists in subspace where the laws of physics as we know it don't quite apply) as a kind of incorporeal matter in which the substantial form can inhere, although temporarily. The transporter then bestows corporeality to the energy through conversion to matter (in the normal space-time sense) according to the last saved pattern in the buffers. There have been instances where a person's body was transformed into energy and then restored according to an old pattern, such as that episode where an alien turned picard into pure energy and to save him they 'beamed' him from his pure energy state using his last saved pattern and when he materialized he had no memories from the time that pattern was saved until the present which suggests that memories at least are dependent upon the body.

4. Another interesting case is that of Tuvix in Voyager where Neelix and Tuvok were combined into a new person in a transporter accident. How can this be explained? By the end of the show Janeway made the decision to try a procedure whereby Tuvix (a new and distinct person) would be beamed and then they would somehow restore the Tuvok and Neelix patterns separately but it would kill Tuvix. This would seem to suggest that the consciousness of Neelix and Tuvok were non-existent for the duration of Tuvix's life but can be recreated based on the molecular pattern. This contradicts all of the episodes that depict a human consciousness in a pure energy state and as conscious during the transport operation. Unless there is some strange explanation for the phenomenon of transporter awareness, such as it is an illusion created by the process itself and when seen through the eyes of the transported only appears to be a seamless conscious experience.

More to come...

[Veridicus]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 12:52 AM' timestamp='1259819520' post='2013654']
Think about Star Trek transporters. Let's say you've got a transporter, and it functions by first making a 'readout' of your entire makeup, then destroying your elements, and sending that readout to wherever you want to go and reforming the elements there. Makes sense, right? We can imagine that this is still "you", because it is connected to you by memory stages. Well let's say that there was a problem with the machine this time. You're transported, but your elements aren't destroyed at location one. Now we have two "you's", both connected by psychological stages, but different beings. Either we have one being experiencing two incompatible experiences, which seems logically impossible, or the one being is now two entirely separate beings, and thus you did not actually "survive".
[/quote]

The latter is true. It reminds me of a Star Trek TNG episode where Will Riker was beamed up but a second copy of himself was left on the planet for several years. This also reminds me of The Prestige.


And btw, *Clearing Throat*; perhaps the non-juxtaposition of these theories allows for the inconsistency of a given theory to be logically accounted for.

[Veridicus]

Additionally, something similar happened to Teal'c in an episode of Stargate SG1.

[Veridicus]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' date='03 December 2009 - 02:13 AM' timestamp='1259824396' post='2013729']
Np bro. Me too.


Theory three might be good old Thomistic hylomorphism. The either/or, soul or body, suggests dualism but for Aquinas the person is a body-soul composite and a description of personal identity would not separate the two. I could rant on this topic for sure, but I'm eager to talk Trek atm. lulz.


A few observations:

1. There are episodes of Trek (first in TNG) which show that a person is fully conscious during transport. I admit that this is weird but there is that one episode where Barclay gets transported and they show what it is like from his perspective. I suppose the idea is that even though your matter is converted into energy to be transmitted through subspace, and even though your pattern can be stored in the pattern buffers, there is somehow a consciousness that remains, perhaps 'attached' to your raw energy since there have been episodes where people's consciousness were turned into pure 'energy' (whatever that means).

2. But what about episodes such as 'Relics' where a person is simply suspended in the transporter buffer? This happened often for brief amounts of time, and I guess five seconds or forty years doesn't really matter, it is the idea that a person can be 'stored' in a pattern buffer of some kind. Basically this implies that the human person (apart from their 'energy' I suppose) is reducible to raw data. This would seem to contradict the idea of a transcendent principle to personhood. But is the 'pattern' supposed to be the whole person? Perhaps the 'energy' is supposed to still embody a transcendent principle somehow (e.g., Barclay's consciousness) even though it is temporarily without spatial form but the transporter process returns this 'energy' to a material state (via the 'pattern').

3. Okay, what about that episode where Will Riker was caught up in a transporter malfunction that created an exact copy of himself? Remember, they find him years later and he changes his name to Thomas Riker and later makes an appearance in DS9 as a bad guy? Anyway, one might interpret that incident thusly: there was a weird disturbance that caused Riker's 'energy' to emerge from subspace in two places and the receiving pads at those two places responded by rematerializing the energy with Riker's pattern from the buffers. But wouldn't this imply that Riker's consciousness (per the Barclay incident above) is then the same as his 'energy' in some sense, such that a duplication of the energy equals a duplicate consciousness? Not necessarily. I would assert a conception of the substrate of consciousness as a substantial form and the 'energy' (which, incidentally, exists in subspace where the laws of physics as we know it don't quite apply) as a kind of incorporeal matter in which the substantial form can inhere, although temporarily. The transporter then bestows corporeality to the energy through conversion to matter (in the normal space-time sense) according to the last saved pattern in the buffers. There have been instances where a person's body was transformed into energy and then restored according to an old pattern, such as that episode where an alien turned picard into pure energy and to save him they 'beamed' him from his pure energy state using his last saved pattern and when he materialized he had no memories from the time that pattern was saved until the present which suggests that memories at least are dependent upon the body.

4. Another interesting case is that of Tuvix in Voyager where Neelix and Tuvok were combined into a new person in a transporter accident. How can this be explained? By the end of the show Janeway made the decision to try a procedure whereby Tuvix (a new and distinct person) would be beamed and then they would somehow restore the Tuvok and Neelix patterns separately but it would kill Tuvix.

More to come...
[/quote]


I acquiesce. You are a much bigger Star Trek nerd than I am... Haha. "I can't go into detail right now bro..." and then you wrote like 4 paragraphs about Star Trek. Pure Awesome.

Edited December 3, 2009 by Veridicus

[txdinghysailor]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 12:15 AM' timestamp='1259813749' post='2013592']
Does anyone here know enough about the philosophy behind personal identity to have a conversation with me about it? I find the whole concept very perplexing as one examines it more closely.

The question is "how does a person persist from time 1 (t[sub]1[/sub]) to time 2 (t[sub]2[/sub])?

Basically we have three theories:

Soul theory: A person persists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub] if their soul persists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub],

Body theory: A person persists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub] if their body (as a living thing with the capacities thereof persists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub],

Psychological connectedness (memory) theory: A person persists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub] if they maintain memory or mediate memory at t[sub]2[/sub] of t[sub]1[/sub].


Specifically, we can also ask (philosophically, of course) whether immortality is logically possible after bodily death, as we look deeper into Soul Theory and PC Theory.



So, anyone want to start, or am I going to be pondering this on my own for a while?
[/quote]

So basically if you take the integral from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub] and it exists or isn't an improper integral a person exists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub].

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='txdinghysailor' date='03 December 2009 - 07:54 AM' timestamp='1259848482' post='2013787']
So basically if you take the integral from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub] and it exists or isn't an improper integral a person exists from t[sub]1[/sub] to t[sub]2[/sub].
[/quote]
More like if you differentiate it and don't find any critical points.

[txdinghysailor]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 09:58 AM' timestamp='1259848734' post='2013792']
More like if you differentiate it and don't find any critical points.
[/quote]

Haha i have no clue what critical points are anymore. Calc I was soooooooooooo long ago! But now I know how to prove the commutative property of the convolution integral.

[Nihil Obstat]

All I know is that there's a significant chance that my pure math career is over after I write my final this semester.

[txdinghysailor]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='03 December 2009 - 10:02 AM' timestamp='1259848964' post='2013795']
All I know is that there's a significant chance that my pure math career is over after I write my final this semester.
[/quote]

That's nice. All i know is that once I'm done with Multi next semester I only have one more math class ever! And it's Advanced Engineering Math, which I've heard isn't that bad...