A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality Notes

Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality

Seeming vs. Actually Remembering

Analogy: Someone claiming to be Napoleon remembering Waterloo. They may seem to remember, but they weren't there and aren't Napoleon, so it's not actual memory.
Weirob: The thought of someone in the future merely seeming to remember this conversation wouldn't provide comfort related to survival.
The experiences of a "deluded imposter" are not something to look forward to.
Weirob: Only someone actually remembering this conversation (or the experiences) would show the possibility of survival.
Miller: Imagines someone being deluded and someone actually being Weirob and remembering present thoughts.
Weirob: What's the difference between imagining delusion versus actual memory?

Hypnotism Example

Two people: One talking to Miller, the other in the next room being hypnotized.
The hypnotist suggests the second person will remember the thoughts and words of the first person.
Both individuals later claim to remember the same thoughts and utterances.
One is remembering, the other only seeming to remember.
The person actually remembering is the one who was in the room talking to Miller.
The other is under hypnotic suggestion.
The content of what they are thinking/saying is the same.
The difference lies in the relation to the past thinking and speaking; one has a memory, the other doesn't.
Both seem to remember, so real remembering requires a further condition.
The "real rememberer" is the one who actually thought or did the past thought or action, in addition to seeming to remember it.
The real rememberer is identical with the person who did the past thinking and uttering.

Miller's Argument and Weirob's Critique

Miller's argument: Survival is possible because it's imaginable, and it's imaginable because identity with a Heavenly person is imaginable.
Imagining a person in Heaven who seems to remember my thoughts/actions AND is me.
Weirob: This is a tight circle. Doubts about the Heavenly person being me lead to doubts about whether she is really remembering or only seeming to.
The possibility of someone seeming to remember after death doesn't resolve the issue of survival.
Only someone actually remembering is sufficient for identity.
Doubts about survival and identity translate to doubts about whether the memories would be actual or merely apparent.
Weirob critiques that Miller only guarantees the possibility of a deluded Heavenly imposter.

Cohen's Intervention: Causation and Memory

Cohen believes Miller's idea wasn't presented fairly.
Cohen aims to break the circularity of using real memory to explain identity and identity to distinguish real from apparent memory.
Returning to the hypnotist case: Weirop points out two putative rememberers, asking what marks the difference and claims the answer must be the circular one that the real rememberer is the person who actually had the experiences both seem to remember.
Cohen: The experiences themselves cause the later apparent memories in one case, while the hypnotist causes them in the other.
The rememberer is the one whose memories were caused in the right way by the earlier experiences, distinguishing them from the hypnotic subject without appealing to identity.
The idea that real memory is apparent memory plus identity is misleading.
Example: Cohen seems to remember knocking over the Menorah as a child, but it's because he was told the story, not actual memory.
Real memory is apparent memory caused in the appropriate way by past events (e.g., hearing parents talk about the Menorah incident caused the memory-like impressions).

Analyzing Personal Identity

Weirob: Personal identity is analyzed into memory, and memory into apparent memory caused in the right way.
A person is a causal process.
Weirob questions how this helps Miller's defense of survival.
In ordinary memory, the causal chain never leaves the body; it involves storage in the brain.
How can the states of my brain upon death influence the apparent memories of the Heavenly person?
Cohen: He wasn't intending to defend survival but likes the idea that personal identity can be explained by memory and not just body identity.
Miller: Cohen's idea provides a basis for further defense.
Gretchen's challenge was to explain the difference between two persons in Heaven: one who actually remembers your experience (and so is you) and one who simply seems to remember it.
Miller suggests the one who is you is the one whose states were caused in the appropriate way (even if not in the normal earthly memory way).
God would have created the Heavenly being with the brain states she has because you had the ones you had at death.
It's not the exact form of the dependence of later memories on earlier perceptions that makes them real memories, but the fact that the process involved has preserved information.
Weirob: If God creates a Heavenly person, designing their brain to duplicate my brain upon death, that person is me. If they come to be with those memory-like states by accident, it wouldn't be me.
Miller: Exactly.

The Duplication Problem

Weirob: If God can create one person in Heaven and make her me, why couldn't he make two? Would both be me?
If A is B and C is B, then A is C (where "is" means identity).
If each Heavenly person is me, they must be each other, but the assumption was that God creates two, physically distinct, individuals.
Either God doesn't really create someone identical to me but merely similar, or God is limited to making only one such being.
Weirob sees no reason for such a limitation and concludes God could create someone similar but not someone who would be me.
Either this analysis of memory is wrong, or memory is not sufficient for personal identity, because it leads to absurdity.
Cohen: Why can't Sam simply say that if God makes one such creature, she is you, while if makes more, none of them is you? It's possible he makes only one, so it's possible you survive.
*He had in mind the case in which there is no God to take the appropiate Heavenly persons, or God exists, but doesn't make even one. You have simply shown that there is another way of not surviving. Instead of making too few Heavenly rememberers, He makes too many. So what? He might make the right number, and then you would survive.
Weirob: This amounts to a change in position; now it's not just memory alone but memory plus lack of competition (absence of other rememberers) that's needed for identity.

Extrinsic Identity and its Implications

Cohen admits it's a change of position, asking if the changed position is untenable.
Weirob: From the Heavenly person's perspective, saying "Oh, I must be Gretchen Weirob, for I remember doing what she did" is tenuous.
They are only entitled to say, "Either I'm Gretchen Weirob, or God has created more than one being like me, and none of us is."
Identity becomes dependent on things wholly extrinsic to her, not just her states of mind but the existence/nonexistence of others.
Weirob: God creates one of me in Heaven (good), then another (bad, because I won't survive). How can doubling a good deed make it worthless?
Cohen: Is there some contradiction in his suggestion that only creation of a unique Heavenly Gretchen counts as your survival?

The Absurdity of the Theory

Weirob: It's not contradictory, but it seems odd, indicating something wrong with the theory.
Having a relationship with a Heavenly person is important and comforting, making it appropriate to anticipate their experiences.
Why should having that relation to another being destroy my relation to this one?
It's not about identity, because if she is to remember my experience, I can rightly anticipate hers; doubling makes no difference.
Since memory doesn't secure identity when there are two Heavenly Gretchens, it also doesn't when there is only one.
Cohen admits there's something ad hoc about it, but maybe that's how the concept works.
Weirob: An infinite pile of absurdities has the same weight as a contradiction.
Suppose God created this Heavenly person before I died; then He in effect kills me.
If God can create such beings in Heaven, surely He can do so in Albuquerque.
Weirob would suddenly cease to be; there would be a new person with false memories.
This is nonsense; however carefully God duplicates me, I would not cease to be who I am.
Your theory gives the wrong answer in this possible circumstance, so it must be wrong.
Weirob sticks to the straightforward view that she is a live body, and when it dies, her existence ends.

The Third Night: Shifting Focus to Personal Identity

Miller gives up trying to convince Weirob about survival.
Cohen wants to discuss personal identity itself, without the complication of survival after death.
Weirob's position: Personal identity is identity of a human body, nothing more, nothing less. A person is just a live human body with certain capacities like consciousness and rationality.

The Case of Julia North

Cohen: The case of Julia North in California disproves that.
Julia North was run over by a streetcar while saving a child.
The child's mother, Mary Frances Beaudine, had a stroke.
Julia's healthy brain and wasted body, and Mary Frances' healthy body and wasted brain, were transported to a hospital.
Dr. Matthews performed a "body transplant," moving Julia's brain into Mary Frances' body.
The survivor was obviously Julia, as everyone agreed, except Mary Frances' husband.
Julia North had one body before the accident and another after the operation; one person had two bodies.
So, a person cannot be simply identified with a human body. Something must be wrong with Gretchen's view.

Weirob's Refusal and Rejection of the Assumption

Weirob refused Dr. Matthews' offer to perform the same operation on her.
Miller and Cohen assume the survivor of such an operation is the same person as the brain donor.
Weirob rejects this assumption, believing the survivor of Julia North's operation was Mary Frances Beaudine, and the survivor of an operation on her would not have been her.
Miller believes Weirob has an irrational attachment to her body.
Cohen: The survivor of Julia North's operation had no idea who Mary Frances Beaudine was; she remembered being Julia.
Weirob: She seemed to remember being Julia, emphasizing the importance of the distinction between real and seeming memory.
The operation resulted in Mary Frances Beaudine surviving deluded, thinking she was someone else.

The Legal and Conceptual Battleground

Cohen: The case was litigated, and the Supreme Court said the survivor was Julia.
Weirob: Is the Supreme Court infallible?
Cohen: It's a case where two criteria for judging identity conflict: bodily identity and psychological continuity.
Usually, they coincide, but in this case, they don't.
If we choose one criterion, the survivor is Mary Frances Beaudine with psychological changes.
If we choose the other, Julia has survived with a new body.
We have to choose which criterion is more important.
It's a matter of choice of how to use our language, how to extend the concept "same person" to a new situation.
The overwhelming majority took the survivor to be Julia.
The Supreme Court settles how old concepts apply to new circumstances.
The notion of person is such a concept.
Weirob: You think who the survivor was, was a matter of convention, of how we choose to use language?

Convention vs. Fact: The Aspirin Example

Cohen: Yes.
Weirob: An example: Agreeing to the operation, anticipating continued existence, then being told the Supreme Court changed its mind, so the survivor will not be me.
Weirob would then refuse to take aspirin for the headache because it's not her who will have it, but someone else.
If I were correct to anticipate having the sensations and thoughts that the survivor is to have the next day, the decision of nine old men a thousand or so miles away wouldn't make me wrong.
And if I was wrong to so anticipate, their decision couldn't make me right. How can the correctness of my anticipation of survival be a matter of the way we use our words? If it is not such a matter, then my identity is not either. My identity with the survivor, my survival, is a question of fact, not of convention.
Cohen admits to being befuddled, seeing the absurdity in supposing the correctness of anticipation is a matter for convention.

Revisiting the Memory Theory

Miller: Whether fact or convention, why won't you admit the survivor would be you?
Miller appeals to his theory that personal identity consists in memory.
The theory explains our ability to judge our own identity without examining our bodies.
It explains the willingness to say the survivor of Julia's operation was Julia.
Memory is sufficient for identity, and bodily identity is not necessary.
Cohen agrees completely, adding another argument against Weirob's view and in favor of memory theory.
Identity is the condition of anticipation; we have a particular concern for that person in the future whom we take to be ourselves.
What is there about mere sameness of body that makes sense of this asymmetry?
Why is the identity of your body of such great importance? Why care so much about it?

The Importance of Psychological Properties

Weirob agrees that identity of person is a very special relationship.
Since her theory is that identity of person is identity of body, she should be able to explain the importance of the one in terms of the importance of the other.
Cohen: Properties of persons making them valuable are psychological or mental: character, personality, beliefs, attitudes, convictions.
They are what make every person unique and special.
Psychological properties are the basis of one's importance to oneself.
They are just the properties that personal identity preserves when it is taken to consist in links of memory.

Weirob's Counterarguments

Cohen and Miller favor the memory theory because it explains how to judge one's own identity without examining one's body and explains the importance of personal identity.
Weirob is still not persuaded.
The survivor will think she is me but recall the importance of distinguishing between real and merely apparent memory.
Cohen: The distinction is made on the basis of whether the apparent memories were caused by the prior experiences in the appropriate way.
The survivor will seem to remember because the traces those experiences left on my brain now activate her mind in the usual way. She will seem to remember them because she does remember them, and will be you.

Brain Rejuvenation and the Duplication Dilemma

Weirob is feeling weak and wants to go over things slowly.
We all agree the survivor would seem to remember doing what I have done and would take herself to be me.
We all first agree that this much does not make her me, because this could all be true of someone suffering a delusion, or a subject of hypnosis.
Cohen: Some further condition is satisfied, which makes her apparent memories real memories.
The crucial thing is that there is causual chain from the perception of the events, and their later memory.
Is it absolutely crucial that the same brain is involved?
Weirop explains by reference to Dr. Matthews. In our conversation he explained a new procedure on which he was working, called a brain rejuvenation. By this process, which is not yet available only the feasibility of developing it is being studied a new brain could be made which is an exact duplicate of my brain—that is, an exact duplicate in terms of psychologically rel-evant states. It might not duplicate all the proper-ties of my brain-for example, the blood vesselsin the new brain might be stronger than in theold brain.
Cohen: If the survivor of the operation would be you?
Exactly. You may assume that Dr. Mat-thews' technique works perfectly so the causalprocess involved is no less reliable than that in-volved in ordinary memory.
Cohen: Then I would say it was you No! Wait!
No, it wouldn't be you-absolutely not.
I have added this one
MILLER: But why the sudden reversal? It seems to me it would be her. Indeed, I should try such an operation myself, if it would clear up my dizzy spells and leave me otherwise unaffected.\
Weirop asks everyone to think she is leading them into a trap. If they say it is her, then she will say,