The question of personhood remains one of the most daunting in philosophy. One would think that a discipline as old as time would provide a more sophisticated answer to the problem than a drunken man’s 3-am-at-the-bar drivel. Philosophy has never been a fortress for certainties, and anyone who claims to have a definitive solution to the problem may be shouting it from inside the padded walls of a psychiatric ward.
And yet, the bemusement offers a unique opportunity to traverse the myriad disciplines gathered at the impasse, for even something as remote as quantum entanglement is ultimately entangled with the question of the subject capable of perceiving the mystery in question. The question of personhood lurks in the corners of every self-excavation worthwhile, and of course, like all seemingly simple things, no one has a concrete answer.
Merely attempting to answer the question, however, seems like a rite of passage for any philosopher, which is why it is no surprise that the discussion has yielded a multitude of approaches ranging from, on one end: Daniel Dennett’s dour checklist where he appoints himself as the bouncer, blockading the nightclub of personhood and unremorsefully leaving out the mentally-deficit and those awful little creatures that some of us choose to call ‘infants’ (Dennett, 1988). On the other end of the spectrum, and directly appropriated from Buddhist thought is the axiom that has come to permeate every self-help guru’s book blurb: there is no such thing as persons or selves since categories are projected illusions, borders that we force on to an otherwise entangled one (Shiah, 2016).
Perhaps, where one plants his flag in these vast untamed plains says more about one’s own psychological temperament than it does to move the needle forward. The question, along with our collective ideals, remains suspended above our intellectual maturation, judging us with a prescient disappointment regardless of the analytical toolkit one chooses to stencil over the problem.
What further complicates the question is that whichever lecture hall in which one may choose to wall oneself in refuge from the bewilderment, myopia appears with Faustian pacts offering partial relief in exchange for a pledge of allegiance. Dennett is far from being the only one with absolute certainties. In neuroscience, the problem is reformulated into a problem about biological locations (O’Connor, Joffe, 2013). Linguists, including Noam Chomsky, are unsure whether our language has any real bearing on the world and view the question as a problem with language reference (Cipriani, 2016). Logicians, on the other hand, have added it to the piling scraps of logical paradoxes inherent to logic itself (Kerckhove, Waller, 1998).
Even more so, eclectic approaches are becoming increasingly difficult to encounter in a world that forces us into echo chambers of overspecialization. Joseph Margolis’ Three Paradoxes of Personhood is a direct response to this very lament and presents the problem of personhood as one that is resistant to unidimensional paradigms, but one that requires an examination in lieu of the paradoxical tensions made bare only when interposed between two or more approaches (Hermann, 2017).
This essay is, by no means, an attempt to explore such juxtapositions. This ‘essay’ is in the sense that Michel de Montaigne meant the word when he first used it: an attempt to arrive at an understanding of the problem, rather than an admission of my own pledge of allegiance to a singular approach or a reiteration of certainties. An intellectual, as Edward Said once put it, is ‘an outsider, living in self-imposed exile, and on the margins of society.’ (Bishara, 2013) Subscribing to any mode of thought transforms the knowledge seeker into a veiled warrior, fighting for affirmation but, ultimately, blind to the truth.
The definition of personhood which concerns contemporary philosophy today was laid down by John Locke in the latter half of the 17th century as the Western world was still waking up from its Aristotelian slumber. In his essay, Of Identity and Diversity, we get the first modern conception of identity tethered to consistent self-identification rather than to the soul or the physical body. In the same essay, he further laid the principle of individuation, stipulating that no two things of the same kind can occupy the same place at the same time nor can an individual occupy two different places at the same time, or as he put it, ‘which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and place… (Locke, 1694).
To further extrapolate, Locke conjures the image of an inconsistent Socrates. He says, ‘If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person. And to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-Twin did, whereof he knew nothing because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such Twins have been seen.’ (Locke, 1694)
For Locke, a person is an entity that can consistently and self-reflectively conceive of itself as itself over time, a definition he later used to justify personal autonomy and, further, both guilt and punishment. He later links this sameness of consciousness to a moral and legal account of personhood in which subjects are morally and legally accountable; a definition without which neither Locke’s political philosophy nor the modern social contract would have come to be. It seems important to be aware of this since Locke’s conception is endemically persistent in our collective imagination and is at least conceivably entangled with our modern conceptions of the relationship between the individual and society, which have come to inform the parameters of the very discussion we are trying to detail. There is, of course, much disagreement with this definition, but the definition itself has come to prescribe the parameters of the discussion even if it were in opposition.
Some of these invisible walls that have come to dominate theories of identity in Western philosophy are the supposed necessity of discernment of either the continuity or the position of identity. In other words, locating identity in space and time, either physically or mentally. Whilst Locke tethered his conception of identity to memory, David Hume argued for a different kind of mentalism, one that, he argued, is linked to the direct sensory experience. He stated that ‘all the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which [he calls] impressions and ideas.’ (Hume, 1956) In this sense, Hume categorically differentiates between two different mental states: momentary instances experienced by the senses and reflections upon those senses that persist as ideas. Identity, for Hume, is a scaffolding of these two distinct mental states, which renders identity a bundle of ever-changing experiences.
Derek Parfit modernizes the definition of bundle theory presented in his essay, Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons (Parfit 1984). In the essay, Parfit uses the split-brain cases to defend bundle theory. Perhaps, it is best understood when contrasted with the body theory: a position that tethers the persistence of identity to the persistence of the singular, physical body. Since the body is in constant flux and undergoes persistent cellular and neurological deaths beneath the surface, it becomes difficult to justify the persistence of identity.
The objection is further illustrated with the thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus which considers a ship embarking on a voyage around the world during which, the ship occasionally falls under disrepair and the crew is required to replace certain parts accordingly. When the ship reaches its final destination, every part of it has been replaced at least once. The question is whether the ship remains the same or can be truthfully referred to with the same name. The Ship of Theseus has come to compellingly embody the argument against physicalism.
Derek Parfit is less intrigued by the makings of the bundled identity and more with the chaining of individual experiences that collectively constitute the subjective experience of the self (Parfit 1984). Here the notion of identity is in constant flux, even more so than it was in Hume. An image that comes to mind is that of a waterfall, where no single water droplet or a collection thereof could possibly be said to constitute the waterfall, and yet the waterfall persists, always in flux and, yet, always remaining.
Parfit, in his essay, begins by illustrating the split-brain cases which drew him into philosophy and were a series of psychological tests described by Donald MacKay. The tests made use of the fact that each of the two hemispheres controls a separate half of the body including its visual field and can receive two different answers written by the person’s two hands (Parfit 1984).
In other words, one could imagine a scenario where the same person is receiving two different streams of consciousness made only apparent when the dominant hemisphere is suppressed or damaged. Parfit concludes that every person is having two separate, distinct experiences at the same time, and is therefore without a prescribed form or inherent identity that persists independently of perception. He further makes his case with an argument from David Wiggins where we are asked to imagine a case where a person’s brain is divided into two halves, each transplanted to a different body and both going to live long and, perhaps, happy lives. Parfit concludes that if it was his brain that was split neither person would be him, since he would have seized to exist as his existence was contingent on a bundle of experiences no longer possible after the division (Parfit 1984).
Parfit’s most convincing argument is further elaborated when he asks us to imagine a threshold whereby a proportion of our neurons and cells is progressively replaced with exact duplicates. He asks us at what percentage does one cease to be oneself (Parfit 1984). Not being able to conceive of an exact border where identity is either retained or replaced entirely constitutes a compelling paradox of identity not dissimilar from the infamous Sorites paradox where we are asked if a heap of rice reduced by a single grain at a time seizes to be a heap and at what threshold.
This may seem like an interjection since it was never stated or acknowledged in Parfit’s essay, but it is precisely what lays bare the invisible boundaries that inform not only Parfit’s view but any unidimensional attempt at understanding the problem of personhood. It is by no means a criticism or a counter-argument to Parfit’s convictions, but, at the very least, one must be aware of the eclectic dimensions absent from the discussion. Parfit, after all, instructs us to reject our intuitions about identity and personhood in favour of his own convictions stated through a carefully curated selection of studies and thought experiments. Parfit wishes to convince us with the certainty of a heart surgeon as he is about to cut open a patient’s chest.
Whenever a discussion is reduced to binary, either-or statements, we lose the complexities which permeate our personal, everyday perceptions, as it will necessarily oppose our intuitions. This does not mean that our intuitions are necessarily true, but perhaps, that our intellectual maturations are not complex enough to fully realize those intuitions. A reiteration of Joseph Margolis’ lament might prove useful at this point: certain questions require an examination in lieu of the paradoxical tensions made bare only when interposed between two or more approaches (Hermann, 2017).
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