On 1/10/2015 12:44 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 28 Sep 2015, at 12:26 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The person's psychological continuity would be preserved. I
consider I would survive if my psychological continuity was
preserved without my physical continuity necessarily being
preserved; in fact, the only reason I endeavour to have my physical
continuity preserved is because it's the easiest way to preserve
psychological continuity. Preservation of physical continuity
without psychological continuity, for example if someone has a head
injury that wipes out all cognitive function, is not something
anyone aspires to.
That might be your opinion, but others beg to differ. It is a common
experience that people feel crises of personal identity after losing
limbs; after mastectomy for breast cancer; after severe facial
disfigurement.
What is colloquially called a "crisis of personal identity" in these
cases is not the same thing as we are discussing. People may consider
that they have changed in a fundamental way, but they don't think
they are not a continuation of the person they were before the
problem occurred. Moreover, insofar as physical changes cause a
change in the sense of self, it is entirely through their
psychological effect. If your face were disfigured while you were
asleep, it would not affect you until you looked in the mirror in the
morning.
I think the real point here is that personal identity is irreducibly
multi-dimensional. It is not all about psychological continuity, about
memory, or about physical causality and bodily continuity. All of these
factors, and many others come into play. You cannot rely solely on
memory, because your memory may be faulty. In fact, we routinely check
memories against physical records, physical continuity, the action of
causal laws, and all the rest. It is this complex that makes up the
continuity of the person. Some metric across these factors determines
what differences are significant, and which differences we simply adjust to.
I suggest that since it is unlikely that you have undergone any of
these in their more extreme forms, your personal opinions on the
matter count for very little. I have had very close and personal
experience of the latter case -- loss of most cognitive function
with essentially no visible physical change to the body. There was
never any doubt that that body continued to be the person I knew.
One certainly does not aspire to that situation, but if it arises by
mischance, personal identity is not destroyed. Why do many people
continue to love and care for their loved ones, even when they are
in the extreme end states of Alzheimer's? Or in a long lasting coma?
I have had both personal and professional contact with people who
have severe dementia. The reason it is so terrible a disease is that
in its end stages the person you knew has gone.
Or maybe the person has changed so that you don't recognize them -- they
might see it differently. How would you know?
Bruce
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