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Section 4.1: The Self as Psyche |
| Direct and Indirect Memory Theory and Psychological Continuity | |
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Obviously, Leibiz and Locke have issues with the Soul Theory (as their two TEs show) because they have strong intuitions that the "pins" (memories, experiences) have at least a necessary relationship to personal identity. The Soul Theory denies this, and that's why they attack it (King of China TE shows how without pins, souls don't seem sufficient, and the Nestor TE seems to show that souls are necessary either). Thus we have Locke's Memory Theory (MT), which states: X is the same person as Y if and only if X shares at least one memory with Y. Thus, if I had a memory of something that Plato once did, Plato and I would be one and they Fawke same person according to MT. Now, according to Locke, not all memories or mental events count as the kinds of memory that undergird personal identity. Specifically, Locke thinks that the only kinds of memory that count are experiential memories, namely memories of things that one experiences through the five senses. So, a memory of me once seeing a particular sunset is experiential and counts. But having a mental event such that I now have the thought that "two plus two equals four" would not count, because it is not experiential. Such mental events can be shared between people, since they are not experiences. As a result, there is no doubt that Plato and I share a lot of beliefs about math. But that doesn't make us one and the same person. So we should amend MT to read: X is the same person as Y if and only if X shares at least one experiential memory with Y. Problems: 1. The Inconsistency Objection The inconsistency objection was raised by Thomas Reid, a philosopher who lived about a hundred years after Locke. Reid's problem was this -- he felt that Locke's theory violated a basic axiom of identity called transitivity. Transitivity is: Transitivity of Identity: if A = B, and B = C, then A = C How does Locke's theory violate this? Simple. Let's use Reid's example TE of the senile general. Let's assume that X at 80 years old shares a memory with X at 40 years old. Moreover, assume that X at 40 shares a memory with X at 10. By transitivity of identity, X at 80 is identical to X at 10. However, by Locke's theory X at 80 does not share a direct memory with X at 10, so X at 80 is not the same person as X at 10. So Locke's theory violates transitivity. This is a fairly big problem, since transitivity is an accepted axiom of identity and doesn't appear in any way false. Reid proposes to fix this problem by creating Indirect Memory Theory. B. Indirect Memory Theory (IMT) According to IMT, X is the same person as Y if and only if X and Y share at least one indirect memory. What is the difference between indirect and direct memory? Direct memory: a memory that you can consciously recall Indirect memory: a memory that you cannot consciously recall, but which a stage of yourself can consciously recall. Reid now uses IMT to fix Locke's account to make it consistent with transitivity. Here's how: if X at 80 can recall an experience of X at 40, and X at 40 can recall a memory of X at 10, then X at 80 has an indirect memory of X at 10's experience. As such, X at 80 is identical to X at 10, a result that agrees with transitivity. Problem: 2. The Circularity Objection This objection can be used against Locke or Reid's account. The basis of the objection is about the status of memory itself. Obviously, both MT and IMT both use memories as the "glue" or stuff that holds people together over time as one and the same individual. If this is right, then we must be sure that memory is what we think it is. What I mean is this -- the assumption behind memory theory is that the identity obtains because the person remembering is remembering an actual experience had by an earlier stage of that person. But how do we know that memories preserve this criterion? Essentially, the problem here is that it does not seem as if all memories are real, and indeed it does seem as if some memories are merely apparent. Real memory -- a memory of an event experienced by the person was actually caused by the event it records. Apparent memory -- a memory that either didn't happen or one that wasn't caused by the event it records. The main problem in distinguishing these from each other is that attempts to do so seem to immediately run into problems of circularity. A "circularity" problem occurs when what you are trying to prove is presupposed by what you are using to prove it. So in this case, here's the issue. One way to say that a memory is "real" is to say that the person who experiences it is the same person who is now remembering it. But notice here that to show which memories are real we need to rely on an account of personal identity to do it. But this won't work, because we only know if one person is the same as another person by using memory as a criterion! So, evidently, this is a circularity issue. How do we fix this problem? Sidney Shoemaker came up with his concept of "q-memory" to help fix this situation. Instead of defining memories in terms of identity, he defines it in terms of causes. A person is said to have a q-memory if and only if (1) that person seems to remember the experience (2) someone had the experience (3) the existence of the memory was caused in the right way by the experience itself The criteria are easy to understand. (1) means that X at 80 has a recollection of X at 10. (2) means that someone had the experience of which X at 80 is recollecting. (3) means that the existence of the memory that X at 80 is having can be traced back to the actual experience itself, so that there is a causal link (even if indirect) between the experience and the memory. Criteria (1) and (2) are pretty straightforward. (3) is more difficult. Here's the difference: If a hypnotist induced into you a memory of climbing a mountain, this would not pass (3) because the having of the memory cannot be traced back causally in any way to the actual experience. If I recorded some of your memories and then put them in my head and experienced them, this causal relationship would be preserved, and so it would pass (3). So, using this new notion, IMT can be rephrased as IqMT: X and Y are the same person if and only if X and Y share at least one q-memory. Problem: 3. The Insufficiency Objection The insufficiency objection is very straightforward. It suggests that there is more to "who we are" than just a collection of memories. As such, to such an objector, even if X shares all of Y's memories, X is not the same person as Y because although memory may be a necessary condition of personal identity, it is not a sufficient condition of it. What such objectors usually want to add are things like desires. Desires get to the heart of not only what we remember, but what we want, what our character is composed of, what our life-plans are, and so on. A person who wants to be a thief is surely different from a person who doesn't want to be a thief, even if they have all the same memories. Such objectors, then, add q-desires to the situation, following the same criteria laid out above for memory. With these new terms in mind, we can now move on to the next theory. C. Psychological Continuity Theory Psychological continuity theory attempts to incorporate what was learned via the inconsistency objection and what was learned via the insufficiency objection. First, they come up with two new concepts: X is psychologically connected to Y if and only if X and Y q-remember and q-desire the same things. X is psychologically continuous with Y if and only if X and Y form an overlapping series of persons who are psychologically connected. With these in tow, finally we get PCT: X is the same person as Y if and only if X is psychologically continuous with Y.
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