The Diachronic Mind: An Essay on Personal Identity, Psychological Continuity and the Mind-Body

244 Pages·2001·7 MB·English

by  Marc Slors (auth.)

THE DIACHRONIC MIND
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
VOLUME 86
Founded by Wilfrid S. Sellars and Keith Lehrer
Editor
Keith Lehrer, University ofA rizona, Tucson
Associate Editor
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker, University ofM assachusetts at Amherst
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University, New Orleans
Marian David, University ofN otre Dame
AlIan Gibbard, University ofM ichigan
Denise Meyerson, University ofCape Town
Fran~ois Recanati, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris
Stuart Silvers, Clemson University
Nicholas D. Smith, Michigan State University
The titles published in this series are listed at the end ofthis volume.
THE DIACHRONIC MIND
An Essay on Personal Identity,
Psychological Continuity and the Mind-Body Problem
by
MARCSLORS
Researchfellowof the Royal Dutch Academy for the Arts and Sciences
and assistant professor ofp hilosophy at the University of Nijmegen,
The Netherlands
....
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
"
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5706-8 ISBN 978-94-017-3276-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3276-5
Printed on acid-free paper
AII Rights Reserved
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permis sion from
the copyright owner
TABLE OF CON1ENTS
PREFACE
vii
1
~OOUCTIONANOOVERVlliW
1
2
SEITING THE STAGE:
PERSONAL IDENTITY ANO THE MErAPHYSICS OFMIND
1. Introduction 6
2. The Problem of Personal Identity over Time 7
3. The Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity over Time 12
4. The Neo-Lockean Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity 16
5. The Circularity Objection 19
6. Problems of Logical Form 21
7. The Lack of a Third-Person Criterion for Reidentification 23
8. The Unity of the Mental Bundle 25
9. The Individuation ofPersons 26
10. The Neo-Lockean Criterion and Physicalism: a 'Natural' Alliance 28
11. One 'Solution' to Five Problems 35
3
PARFIT'S REDUcrIO OF A SUBSTRATUM-ORIENTEO
CONCEPfION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTINUlTY
1. Introduction 43
2. Relation R 45
3. Relation R and the Neo-Lockian Paradigm 51
4. Psychological Atomism 56
5. The Central Place of Q-Memory in the Neo-Lockean Paradigm 61
6. The Trouble with Q-memory 64
7. Contents and Contexts. The Other Four Problems 74
8. Conclusions 79
4
A CON1ENT-ORIENTEO CONCEPTION
OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTINUITY
1. Introduction 82
2. Two Kinds of Psychological Continuity 83
3. Levels of N-Continuity 91
4. The Unity of N-Continuous Sequences. The Role of the Body 93
5. N-Continuity and Psychological Connectedness 105
6. Summary 109
vi
5
A PSYCHOLOGICAL CRI1ERION OF PERSONAL IDENTITY:
THE AVE PROBLEMS REVISITED
1. Introduction 111
2. Circularity, Q-Memory, and N-Continuity 112
3. Narrativity and Logical Form 119
4. Third-Person Criteria of Reidentification: The Role of the Body 127
5. In Between the Ego- and the Bundle Theory 131
6. Contents, Substrata and the Individuation of Persons 134
7. Summary 138
6
N-CONTINUITY AS A PARTOF FOLK-PSYCHOLOGY.
1HE UNK BE1WEEN PERSONAL IDENTITY AND THE IDEN1TI1ES OF PERSONS
1. Introduction 140
2. Lower-Level N-Continuity as a Trivial Part of Folk-Psychology 142
3. The Problem ofIdiosyncratic Practical Reasoning 146
4. A Bipartite Solution. Induction and Higher-Level N-Continuity 153
5. N-Continuity and the Identities of Persons 160
6. Conclusion 164
7
NONREDUCTlVISM:
THE RELEV ANCE OF N-CONTINUITY
1. Introduction 166
2. Nonreductive Physicalism as Epiphenomenalism 169
3. Three Interpretations of the Above Argument 173
4. Anomalous Monism and the Nonreductivist's Dilemma 178
5. Strategic Intermezzo. Presuppositions Behind the Dilemma 185
6. Diachronic Holism and Irreducibility 189
7. The Resulting Picture 198
8. The Mental and Its Explananda 200
9. Summary 207
8
APPENDIX:
INTERPREfA TIONISM AND MENTAL REALISM
210
NOIES
217
REFERENCES
225
INDEX
231
PREFACE
The ideas expressed in this book began to evolve from 1995 onwards,
while 1 was writing my PhD dissertation. Chapters 1-5 stiH follow the
basic structure of my thesis. After 1997 1 published a number of articles
on ideas developed during the writing of my thesis. The comments of
colleagues and friend, of the various anonymous referees of the
respective joumals and the comments and criticism 1 received after the
articles were published and/or when they were presented at conferences
have helped me tremendously to modify and sharpen my view on the
issues discussed. From 1998 onwards, a grant of the Dutch Organisation
for Scientific Research (NWO) allowed me to rewrite-at the University
of Nijmegen-what are now Chapters 1-5 and to widen the ideas
expres sed therein through the addition of two further chapters, Chapters
6 and 7, and an appendix. 1 am grateful to NWO, the University of
Nijmegen and Utrecht University for the opportunities they gave me to
develop my ideas.
This book would not have existed in its present form without the
help, comments, and criticism from a large number of people. l' d very
much like to thank Joel Anderson, Lynne Rudder Baker, Ton van den
Beld, Jan Bransen, Bert van den Brink, Stefaan Cuypers, Ton Derksen,
Robert Heeger, Cynthia and Graham Mac Donald, Anthonie Meijers,
Wim de Muijnck, Philip Pettit, Marya Schechtman, Maureen Sie, Michael
Smith, Gertrudis van de Vijver, and Theo van Willigenburg. 1'd
especially like to thank my wife Elsbeth Veldpape, to whom 1 dedicate
this book, for her love, support and patience.
Abcoude, December 2000
-1-
INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
This book is about the connection between two seemingly disconnected
problems in Anglo-American philosophy: the problem of personal
identity over time, and the so-called mind-body problem.
As an initial, crude characterisation of the first problem,
consider the following case. Imagine yourself leafing through a photo-
album, pointing at a slightly yellowish photograph of a young child
and saying to a friend: "that kid is me." The situation seems
straightforward and unproblematic at first glance. You are asserting that
a person at one point in time-you at present-and a person at some
previous time-the kid on the photograph-are in fact the very same;
the two of you are identica!. But what is it that makes yau identic al with
that kid? In what respects are you and he/she alike to such a extent that
it doesn't make sense to speak of two persons? Your body looks
different now. It is even made up of different atoms and molecules.
Your mind has changed significantly as well. You have acquired new
beliefs and new desires and dropped a large number of old ones. Still,
in an important sense you are the same person. That, at least, is what
our moral and legal practices presuppose. What, then, does this
'sameness' consist in, given that you have changed so dramatically in
so many ways?
The second problem is of a less practical nature. It is about the
relation between the mind and the brain. We know that the mind is
somehow supported, constituted or realised by the brain. But does that
mean that we can actually reduce the mind to the brain? Does it mean
that we can somehow cast descriptions of ourselves that use phrases
such as 'believes that. .. ' and 'desire that. . .' III purely
2 CHAPTER 1
neurophysiological terms? Or, less radically, can we understand the
regularities between mental states as regularities that are instantiated by
physical items and their physical interrelations? And if not, can we
nevertheless consider the mind to be a physical 'thing'?
At first inspection, these problems seem unconnected. In fact,
while looking at the literature on both issues, it is easy to get the
impression that they have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
This impression is misleading. As I will argue in the next chapter, there
are substantial, widely shared, though largely implicit assumptions
about the fact that a theory of personal identity requires a number of
claims from contemporary philosophy of mind. The dominant view in
analytical philosophy has it that personal identity over time is
constituted by the continuity (not identity) of a person's psychological
make-up. And as it turns out, a majority of philosophers working in
this are a-I shall refer to them as the neo-Lockeans-implicitly draw
on the current physicalist orthodoxy in philosophy of mind in order to
explain what psychological continuity consists in and why it can
analyse personal identity.
The fact that a number of assumptions about the connection
between philosophy of mind and philosophy of personal identity are
largely implicit is not very interesting in itself. The main claim of this
book, however, is that once these assumptions are articulated, a
misleading and fundamentally inaccurate 'picture' of the human mind
emerges that nevertheless underlies both contemporary psychological
continuity theories of personal identity and current theories of mind.
This 'picture,' 1 shall argue, forestalls the solution to a number of very
serious problems facing a psychological continuity theory of personal
identity on the one hand and a nonreductive and yet non-dualist
solution to the mind-body problem on the other.
It is quite impossible, at the outset, to give a detailed
description of this 'picture' and the reasons why it blocks solutions to
problems facing theories of mind and personal identity. Let me give a
rough indication instead. The view of the mind that I shall argue
underlies contemporary psychological theories of personal identity, is
one in which the contents of mental states are fully identifiable at one
point in time, just like the brain states with which they are identical
(either as tokens or as types). The connections between these mental
ThITRODUCTIONANDOVERVffiW 3
states that link them over time so as to produce psychological
continuation are consequently conceived of in terms that abstract from
these states contents. They are oft en characterised merely as 'causal
connections,' even though it goes without saying that causality is
insufficient for full blown psychological continuity.
A picture of the mind roughly along these lines is widely,
though oft en implicitly endorsed. The reason for that, as 1 shall explain
in the next chapter, is that it yields a conception of psychological
continuity that is considered to solve or evade a number of objections
against the claim that psychological continuity can analyse the concept
of personal identity. In the chapters that follow, however, 1 shall claim
that this picture is false. Or rather, I shall claim that it doesn't work.
Despite appearances to the contrary, this picture of the
diachronic existence of the mind cannot solve or evade the objections
against a psychological criterion of personal identity. The suggestion
that it can is rooted in a failure to see that these problems alI stern from
the diachronic atomism with regard to mental contents that is inherent
in these neo-Lockean theories of psychological continuity. This
psychological atomism-the idea that a mental state's content is not co-
determined by the contents of mental states at other times-is in fact
enhanced and not countered, by a conception of psychological
continuity that is strongly oriented towards the causal interconnection
of physically realised, synchronically identifiable mental states. The
above sketched picture of the mind, I shall argue in the course of this
book, is part of the problems facing psychological continuity theories
of personal identity, not part of their solution.
This could mean that we have to give up on the possibility of
a psychological continuity criterion of identity. But since a
psychological criterion has a number of intuitive advantages over its
main rival (see the next chapter), a bodily criterion, this option does not
seem to be too attractive. Instead, I shall claim that the reasons why this
picture of the mind fails to yield an ac curate conception of
psychological continuity, point towards an alternative picture of the
diachronic existence of the mind. This alternative can be characterised
by contrasting it with the picture described above.
The difference between the two views is in the way they
construe the existence of the mind in and through time. In the picture