Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (19 page)

THE BRAVE OFFICER

Locke says that it is `the same consciousness that makes a man be
himself to himself'-and neither the subject nor third parties
looking on care whether that consciousness is'carried'by enduring
substances, or by a succession of different ones. He himself goes on
to expand the emphasis on consciousness by claiming that a person A at a time is the same person as person B at an earlier time only
in so far as A is conscious of B's experiences. In other words, A must
remember thinking what B thought and remember sensing and
feeling and acting as B sensed and felt and acted.

The suggestion has some consequences that we might quite like.
It rules out, for instance, the possibility that I am Cleopatra, reincarnated, since I am not conscious of having done or felt anything that Cleopatra may have done or felt. The memory wipeout
destroys personal identity. Similarly, I can be sure that I will not live
another life as a dog. For no dog could remember doing things I
did; if it did remember them (but think of the neural complexity
required!) it would not be a dog, but at best a doggiform human
being. But dogs are not doggiform human beings.

On the other hand, the suggestion has some consequences we
might not like so much. It means that I cannot survive complete
amnesia, for instance, since whatever person remains after such an
event cannot be me. But it also has problems with partial amnesia.
Suppose I commit a crime, but then, perhaps because of the untoward rush of blood or adrenalin, retain no memory of the time in
question. Then it seems to follow from Locke's theory that I am not
the person who committed the crime. I am the same human being,
but not the same person. It seems that the one human being is inhabited by multiple successive personalities, as memories come
and go.

Thomas Reid presented a version of this problem, as the `brave
officer objection':

Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at
school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from
the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made ageneral in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to
be possible, that, when he took the standard he was conscious
of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his taking the standard, but had
absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging. 't'hese things
being supposed, it follows, from Mr. Locke's doctrine, that he
who was flogged at school is the same person who took the
standard, and that he who took the standard is the same person who was made a general. Whence it follows, if there be any
truth in logic, that the general is the same person with him
who was flogged at school. But the general's consciousness
does not reach so fitr back as his flogging; therefore, according
to Mr. L,ocke's doctrine, he is not the person who was flogged.
Therefore thegeneral is, and at the same time is not, the same
person with him who was flogged at school.

In fact, Locke himself was perfectly aware of this problem. His
reply is simple:

But yet possibly it will still be objected, suppose I wholly lost,
the memory of some partsof my life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be conscious of
them again; yet am I not the same person, that did those actions, had those thoughts, that I once was conscious of though
I have now forgot them? To which I answer, that we must here
take notice what the word I is applied to, which in this case is
the man only. And the same man being presumed to be the
same person, I is easily here supposed to stand also for the
same person. But if it be possible firr the same man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at dif/i'rent times, it is
past doubt the same man would at different times make different persons.

A way of reconstructing his point is this. Either `same person' just
goes along with `same human being' or it does not. If it does, we all
agree that we have the one human being from infancy to death, re gardless of mental capacities. And none of the thoughts on list 2
make any sense. The reason for saying that `same person' does not
go with `same human being, for Locke, is that we allow that if one
man has `distinct incommunicable consciousness' then we have
different persons, successively inhabiting the one body (we might
also think of multiple personality disorders). But in that case, it is
surprising, but correct, to say that the senile general is not the
schoolboy.

Locke's reason for his view is, in a way, the very thing Reid disliked. He thought that we primarily need a notion of the `same person' through time in order to justify claims of responsibility. He
thought that personal identity was a `forensic' notion, meaning
one whose home is in courts of law. We can see the point of his idea
by considering cases where a doddering eighty-year-old is suddenly charged with crimes, say, from the war some sixty-five years
ago when he was a naive conscripted teenager. Is this fair? Suppose
he genuinely retains no memory of his crimes. Then to him, it is as
if he is being condemned for deeds done by a completely different
person. And this seems unjust: if the person has no consciousness,
then he cannot `repent' of his deeds just because they are not part
of his own self-consciousness. They cannot weigh on his conscience.

Locke was aware, of course, that we do not conduct our own
courts like that. Amnesia is not a valid excuse, after all. But he
thought this just reflected our suspicions, since it is too easy to
claim amnesia. In God's eyes, real amnesia really excuses. He would
treat the genuinely amnesiac eighty-year-old as a different person
from the one-time war criminal. This might sound attractive, but not quite so good in the case of the crime committed because of the
rush of blood to the head, where we might say that it is neither here
nor there that the agent has forgotten it. We might want to distinguish degrees of memory loss.

What of Reid's charge that Locke's theory contravenes logic itself, involving a contradiction? The contradiction is called `failure
of transitivity' of identity. Transitivity is the logical law that if
A = B and B = C, then A = C. Here the schoolboy = the officer, and
the officer = the general, but for Locke it is not the case that the
schoolboy = the general. This is what Reid calls a contradiction.

This certainly seems odd, but perhaps the oddity comes from
abstracting out `identity' when what we are really talking about is
`is the same person as'. Consider again any composite, such as a bicycle or a ship. Suppose age of ships matters, for instance to
whichever tax bracket they get into. Perhaps antique ships over
fifty years old are taxed less. When is the later ship, then, a genuine
antique? (Here we can imagine Theseus and the entrepreneur who
picked up the original pieces each trying to claim the tax break.) If
these tiresome entrepreneurs became common, we might have to
pass a law sorting out which is the original ship. A law might say
something like:

A ship must be registered every year, and to count as the
same ship as on any particular previous year, a vessel must
contain at least 55 per cent of the material making up the
ship on the first day she was registered that previous year.

Then we can reproduce Reid's structure: you can easily verify that
under this code Argos, might he the same ship as Argos„ and Argos. the same ship as Argos„ but Argos, not the same ship as Argos,. But
the law itself seems quite sensible, rather like laws which specify
what something has to contain to count as butter or to count as
corn-fed. And surely a sensible law cannot give rise to a contradiction?

Well, ships are composite things, made up of parts, and that
seems to be what gives rise to the problem. So perhaps Reid's argument that you cannot have A = B, B = C, but not A = C, only goes
through if each of A, B, C is simple, not composite. Now, as we saw,
Reid himself held that the soul was simple, but Locke did not, so
perhaps the argument does not count against him.

THE SELF AS BUNDLE

We saw Hume pointing out that when you reflect on the contents
of your own mind, you find individual memories, thoughts, passions, experiences, but no you. Hume himself thought that if you
did not (and could not) encounter something in experience, then
you had no right to talk of it. Your mind could not embrace it, or
even `touch' it. Hence, consistently, he held that the self was nothing but an aggregate of its `perceptions' or experiences, together
with whatever connections there are between them. There was
content, but no container. This is sometimes called a `no owner-
ship'theory of the self, or the `bundle'theory of the self. For Hume,
like Lichtenberg in the first chapter, we have `it thinks, or rather,
`thoughts go on'. But we do not have an owner or possessor or `I'
doing the thinking.

The standard problem with this is that it requires that we can
make good sense of the idea of an unowned experience. But it is
objected that this is incoherent. It treats experiences as'objects' or
things in their own right: the kind of thing that might float around,
unowned, waiting to be scooped into a bundle with some others,
like sticks lying in a forest. But, the objection continues, this is a
mistake, for experiences are parasitic, or adjectival on persons who
have them. What does this mean?

Consider a dent in a car. We can talk about dents: this dent is
worse than that one, or will be more costly to repair than the dent
we suffered last year. But it is logically impossible that there could
exist an `unowned' dent, a dent without a surface that is dented.
Dents are, as it were, the shadows of adjectives. In the beginning
there is a surface, the surface is changed by becoming dented, and
then we abstract out a noun, and talk about the dent. The noun
`dent' is logically downwind of the adjective, `dented'. Similarly a
grin is downwind of a face that is grinning, which is the joke behind Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, which disappeared leaving only
its grin behind.

So the objection to Hume is that 'experiences' are in the same
way parasitic on persons. You cannot imagine a pain, for instance,
as a'thing' floating around waiting to be caught up in a bundle of
other experiences, so that it might be accidental whether it, that
very same pain, attaches itself to one bundle or another. In the heginning there is the person, and the onset of a pain is just the event
of a bit of the person beginning to hurt, just as the onset of a dent
is a bit of a surface becoming dented.

Kant puts this point by talking of the'I think' that accompanies all my representations. In other words, my experiences cone billed
as 'mine'. I do not first become acquainted with the experience,
then look round for the owner, and then (provided, against Hume,
that this last search is successful) announce that the experience is
one of mine. Rather, for me to feel a pain is in and of itself to be
aware that I am in pain.

But how is this possible, if Hume is right that we are never aware
of a'self'? It is all very well comparing pains to dents, and it is certainly true that when I am aware of a dent this is only because I am
aware of a dented surface. But at least we are aware of surfaces,
dented or not. Whereas if Hume is right we do not seem to be aware
of our soul or self.

Perhaps the way forward has to be to deny that the'self' is the
kind of thing of which awareness is possible. Wittgenstein talks of
cases where we describe ourselves as subjects of experience:'I hear
the rain' or'I have a toothache' He points out that in this kind of
case'there is no question of recognizing a person'.1t is as impossible that in making the statement "I have a toothache" I should
have mistaken another person for myself, as it is to moan with pain
by mistake, having mistaken someone else for me.' You cannot
misidentify the subject as yourself. Wittgenstein thinks this gives
rise to an illusion:

We feel then that in the cases in which 'I' is used as subject, we
don't use it because we recognize it particular person by his
bodily characteristics; and this creates the illusion that we use
this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has
its seat in our body. In fact this seems to be the real ego, the one
of which it was said, 'Cogito ergo smn' 'Is there then no mind, but only a body?'Answer: the word 'mind' has meaning, i.e.,
it has a use in our language; but saying this doesn't yet say
what kind of use we make of it.