John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
First night:
Dramatis Persona:
Gretchen Weirob (W): Philosophy Prof. dying from injuries from a motorcycle accident.
Sam Miller (M): Chaplain & friend of Weirob's
Dave Cohen (C): Former student of Weirob's.
Statement of the Problem
HJ: Issue of personal identity framed in terms of question of survival
P2: Weirob doesn't require evidence that life after death is probable, will take comfort in idea that survival after death of the body is even possible.
P3: W: "Within the next couple of days this body will die. It will be buried, and it will rot away. I ask that, given these facts, you explain to me how it even makes sense to talk about me continuing to exist."
HJ: Hope requires possibility not probability. If I have a ticket, I can hope to win the lottery, even though my doing so is tremendously improbable.
HJ: Possibility of life after death of body often just taken for granted, but is it really possible?
HJ: Could say the same thing about norms and the possibility of objective values, they are taken for granted but hard to defend under scrutiny.
HJ: Miller's belief that god wouldn't doom us to a short life is an argument for probability, not possibility.
Survival and Identity
P3: W: "Survival means that tomorrow, or sometime in the future, there will be someone who will experience, will see and touch and smell or at the very least, think and reason and remember. And this person will be me. This person will be related to me in such a way that it is correct for me to anticipate, to look forward to, those future experiences."
P4: W: "the only relation that supports anticipation and memory in this way is simply identity"
HJ: Is this true: Weirob always takes this claim and her own identity for granted.
Identity vs. Exact Similarity
P5: M: "Two people meet a thousand years from now, in a place that may or may not be part of this physical universe. I am one and you are the other. So you must have survived. Surely you can imagine that. What else is there to say?"
P5: W: "We sometimes use 'identical' to mean 'exactly similar' as when we speak of 'identical twins'. But I am using 'identical' in a way in which identity is the condition of memory and correct anticipation. If I am told that tomorrow, though I will be dead, someone else that looks and sounds and thinks just like me will be alive would that be comforting?"
P6: W: "Similarity, however exact, is not identity. After all, what comfort could there be in the notion of a heavenly imposter, walking around getting credit for the few good things I have done."
HJ: Identity more and less than exact similarity: two things can be exactly similar without being identical, two things (me at 30, me at 34 can be 'identical' without being exactly similar).
HJ: Why should we want more than exact similarity.
For some things (food) it doesn't seem to matter.
For others it does: Q: why would doppelganger replacements bother us.
(Even if it were exactly similar)
Q: Why would replacement cloths bother us.
A: Historical connection important to us.
-Why is this so?
-Is it irrational to care about history in this way?
-Compare posthumous harm, unperceived harm
-Phenomenal/causal properties the same with duplicate.
-Only the historical properties different
-Historical properties causally irrelevant, but they still matter to us.
-Would a doppelganger replacement of us be satisfying at all?
NO: personal projects, it gives me no comfort to think that double will see movies.
Yes: gives some comfort to think double will care for parents.
-How much comfort you get from doppelganger may depend on how invested you are in personal and impersonal projects.
-Personally I would take some comfort in such a heavenly doppelganger, especially if it thought that it was me.
How would you feel if you discovered that you were a doppelganger?
-How would you feel about your apparent friends and relatives?
Identity = same soul
P6: M: "What is fundamentally you is not your body, but your soul or self or mind."
-Is consciousness a thing that can survive the death of the conscious body, or is "our consciousness" just an illusion of grammar.
P7: W: "Now when you say I am the same person that is not a remark about this body you see and could touch Rather it is a remark about a soul, which you cannot see or touch or smell."
P8: W: "If you cannot see or touch or in any way perceive my soul, what makes you think the one you are confronted with now is the very same soul you were confronted with at Dorsey's?"
Souls identified with bodies
P8-9: View that you can re-identify souls in virtue of reidentifying corresponding bodies would have problems with identifying souls in heaven, since they are not attached to original bodies.
P.9: Same body = same soul not known a priori since it wouldn't be true in heaven, must be a generalization based on experience.
P10: W: "But where doe you get this principle {same body/same soul}? To establish such a correlation in the first place, surely one must have some other means of judging sameness of soul."
P10: W: "Either you really do not know the person before you now is Gretchen Weirob, the very same person you lunched with at Dorsey's, or what you do know has nothing to do with sameness of some immaterial soul."
P10-11: analogy with our knowledge of chocolate types and the markings on them.
P11: W: "Since you can never, so to speak, bite into my soul, can never see or touch it, you have no way of testing your hypothesis that sameness of body means sameness of self."
Souls identified with psychological characteristics.
P12: M: "Similarity of psychological characteristics a person's attitudes, beliefs, memories, prejudices, and the like is observable. These are correlated with identity of body on the one side, and of course with sameness of soul on the other. So the correlation between body and soul can be established after all by this intermediate link."
P13: W: "I do not see how similarity of such traits [belief, character, memory] requires, or is evidence to the slightest degree, for identity of the mind or soul.
P13-14: Analogy with blue river: always has same 'personality' but the water that is actually in it is always changing.
HJ: Personality of river determined by bank. Perhaps souls are like water, and the brain is like the bank that shapes it.
P14: W: "For all you know, the immaterial soul which you think is lodged in my body might change from day t day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute, replaced each time by another soul psychologically similar. You cannot see it or touch it, so how could you know?"
Reductio
P14: W: "You are the one who say personal identity consists in sameness of this immaterial, unobservable, invisible, untouchable soul. I merely point out that if it did consist in that, you would have no idea who I am."
P15: W: "I am saying that if you know who I am, then you are wrong that personal identity consists in sameness of immaterial soul"
HJ: this is not a skeptical point, but is drawing a skeptical consequence as part of another's theory as part of a reductio.
Argument from one's own case
P15: M: "The correlation can be established in my own case. I know that my soul and my body are intimately and consistently found together. From this one case I can generalize, at least as concerns life in this world, that sameness of body is a reliable sign of sameness of soul."
15: Discussion, and then setting aside the problem that Miller's solution requires generalizing from one's own case to that of everyone else.
15: W: "How is it you know in your own case that there is a single soul which as been so consistently connected to your body?"
16: W: "I grant you that a single person has been associated with your body since you were born. The question is whether one immaterial soul has been so associated or more precisely, whether you are in a position to know it."
16-17: Four possibilities considered:
1. Same soul always
2. Same soul until 5 year ago, switch, same soul after
3. Souls switch every five years
4. Souls switch every five minutes
It is then argued that we have no way of telling which is true in our own case.
17: W: "a soul according to your conception doesn't look or feel like anything at all. And so of course 'souls' can afford no principle of identity. And so they cannot be used to bridge the gulf between my existence now and my existence in the hereafter."
17: W: "I haven't based my argument on there being no souls or the sort you describe, but merely on their total irrelevance to the question of personal identity, and so to questions of personal survival."
17: W: "I think I am just a live human body."