Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Identity is moral traits -- not mnemonic or physical ones

#1
C C Offline
The self is moral

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/why-m...-identity/

EXCERPT: [...] Kate has Capgras syndrome, the unshakeable belief that someone – often a loved one, sometimes oneself – has been replaced with an exact replica. She also has Fregoli syndrome, the delusion that the same person is taking on a variety of shapes, like an actor donning an expert disguise. Capgras and Fregoli delusions offer hints about an extraordinary cognitive mechanism active in the healthy mind, a mechanism so exquisitely tuned that we are hardly ever aware of it. This mechanism ascribes to each person a unique identity, and then meticulously tracks and updates it. This mechanism is crucial to virtually every human interaction, from navigating a party to navigating a marriage. Without it, we quickly fall apart.

A classic philosophical thought experiment poses the following paradox. Imagine a ship, let’s call it the Nina, whose planks are replaced, one by one, as they age. Eventually every original part is changed, resulting in a boat made of entirely new materials. Our intuition that this is the same ship becomes problematic when the builders reassemble all the Nina’s original parts into a second ship. The Nina’s identity is tied up inextricably with her physicality.

Personal identity does not work this way. As Nina-the-person ages, almost all the cells of her body get replaced, in some cases many times over. Yet we have no trouble seeing present-day Nina as the same person. Even radical physical transformations – puberty, surgery, infirmity, some future world where her consciousness is preserved on a hard drive – will not obliterate the Nina we know. The personal identity detector is not concerned with continuity of matter, but continuity of mind. As the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett wryly observed in his essay ‘Where Am I?’ (1978), the brain is the only organ where it is preferable to be the donor than the recipient.

This distinction, between mind and body, begins early in development. In a 2012 study by Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol and colleagues, children aged five to six were shown a metal contraption, a ‘duplication device’ that creates perfect replicas of whatever you put inside. When asked to predict what would happen if a hamster were duplicated, the children said the clone would have the same physical traits as the original, but not its memories. In other words, children were locating the unique essence of the hamster in its mind.

For Nina-the-ship, no part of the vessel is especially Nina-like; her identity is distributed evenly across every atom. We might wonder whether the same applies to people – does their continued identity depend only on the total number of cognitive planks replaced? Or are some parts of the mind particularly essential to the self?

The 17th-century philosopher John Locke thought autobiographical memories were the key to identity, and it’s easy to see why: memories provide a continuous narrative of the self and they serve as a record of a person’s idiosyncratic history. But evidence in favour of the memory criterion is mixed at best. People who have lost large hunks of memory through retrograde amnesia tend to report that, while the reel of their life feels blank, their sense of self remains intact. Nor is memory deterioration from dementia a reliable predictor of feeling like a different person. Caretakers for these patients often say they can still perceive the same person persisting beneath radical memory loss. If people have an essence that lends them their identity, memory might not be the most promising candidate.

One day not too long ago, a friend came to me with a problem. His wife of many years had begun to change. Once mousy, she was now poised and assertive. Her career had been important to her, now her interests had turned inward, domestic. And while the changes were not so dramatic that they fundamentally altered the woman he had fallen in love with, he was apprehensive about the possibility.

The danger of befriending psychologists is they will use you as their test subjects: I inquired what kind of change would render her unrecognisable. My friend responded without hesitation: ‘If she stopped being kind. I would leave her immediately.’ He considered the question a few moments more. ‘And I don’t mean, if she’s in a bad mood or going through a rough time. I’m saying if she turned into a permanent bitch with no explanation. Her soul would be different.’

This encounter is instructive for a few reasons (not least of which is the intriguing term ‘permanent bitch’) but let’s start with my friend’s invocation of the soul. He is not religious and, I suspect, does not endorse the existence of a ghost in the machine. But souls are a useful construct, one we can make sense of in fiction and fantasy, and as a shorthand for describing everyday experience. The soul is an indestructible wisp of ether, present from birth and surviving our bodies after death. And each soul is one of a kind and unreplicable: it bestows upon us our unique identity. Souls are, in short, a placeholder notion for the self.

But the soul is something else, too. The soul describes a person’s moral sensibility. A flourishing soul, according to Aristotle, was one in the habit of virtuous acts. When the soul is sick, we feed it chicken soup in the form of bite-sized inspirational stories. History’s great psychopaths, its serial killers and genocidal maniacs, are seen as soulless. So are the animate creatures in popular lore: the golems, the Frankensteins, the HALs. The sentient computer who runs amok is a trope of the genre – so much so that, in his short story ‘Runaround’ (1942), Isaac Asimov felt it necessary to propose Three Laws of Robotics to specify ethical guidelines for the wayward robot. Why do we assume that a being without a soul will turn against us? On some level, we must endorse the idea that, without a soul, moral action is not possible.

And where does the soul go when we die? In Western religions, either to a place for the morally good (heaven) or the morally bad (hell). There is no afterlife for good or bad bowlers, the sharp and the dull-witted, the glamorous and the frumpy. Eastern traditions that subscribe to a belief in reincarnation specify that the soul is reincarnated according to the person’s moral behaviour (karma). It is our moral selves that survive us in death.

Recent studies by the philosopher Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and myself support the view that the identity-conferring part of a person is his moral capacities. One of our experiments pays homage to Locke’s thought experiment by asking subjects which of a slew of traits a person would most likely take with him if his soul moved to a new body. Moral traits were considered more likely to survive a body swap than any other type of trait, mental or physical. Interestingly, certain types of memories – those involving people – were deemed fairly likely to survive the trip. But generic episodic memories, such as one’s commute to work, were not. People are not so much concerned with memory as with memory’s ability to connect us to others and our capacity for social action....
Reply
#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:The danger of befriending psychologists is they will use you as their test subjects: I inquired what kind of change would render her unrecognisable. My friend responded without hesitation: ‘If she stopped being kind. I would leave her immediately.’ He considered the question a few moments more. ‘And I don’t mean, if she’s in a bad mood or going through a rough time. I’m saying if she turned into a permanent bitch with no explanation. Her soul would be different.’

Such are the challenges of living with and continuing to love a bipolar relative. Whenever my mother went manic, she was indeed quite the publically embarrassing bitch. It was as if an alter of her usual kind and insightful self rose up and assumed her identity. It was hard during those times not to dislike her or distance ourselves from her. But then what do you do when your mother is committed to a mental ward? Stop seeing her? No. You visit her everyday and hope she comes back--the real soulful mom you know as opposed to this childish and obnoxious imposter. You fight to get her back and remind her why she must come back. So I didn't have the luxury of cutting off someone because they became soulless. Sometimes you have to believe there's still a soul inside even when you don't see it anymore.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  The Non-physical domain of Reality Ostronomos 0 56 Mar 24, 2023 11:02 PM
Last Post: Ostronomos
  The Matter of the Physical world Ostronomos 18 1,160 Aug 14, 2019 11:39 PM
Last Post: Ostronomos
  Daniel Dennett on AI: we need smart tools, not conscious feeling ones C C 3 466 Jun 28, 2019 07:00 PM
Last Post: Zinjanthropos
  What do face transplants say about identity? + Folk concepts C C 2 257 Nov 20, 2017 10:27 AM
Last Post: RainbowUnicorn
  The non-physical contains the physical just as mind contains reality Ostronomos 7 1,607 Nov 3, 2017 10:53 PM
Last Post: Ostronomos
  God is the conscious universe manifesting lower levels of reality such as physical ma Ostronomos 10 1,307 Oct 30, 2017 01:16 AM
Last Post: Syne
  Thinking and identity Magical Realist 1 682 Mar 7, 2016 05:41 PM
Last Post: elte
  Reference and identity Magical Realist 5 1,138 Feb 6, 2016 07:18 PM
Last Post: C C
  Reid on Memory and Personal Identity - recent SEP update C C 0 727 Oct 21, 2014 03:36 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)