Apathy

Recently, my anxiety topped out and the predictable result happened: emergency shut off. I've slipped into depersonalization. It feels like Actually David has fucked off and some sort of Backup David has had to take over.

I don't really feel anything, but logically I know that I need to maintain Actual David's interests in the world or else shit will fall apart, leaving Actual David a mess to deal with whenever he ends up getting back. I'm groping for metaphors, but it's like the store of Me is being run by the assistant manager who knows how to do everything but simply has no personal investment in the outcome, and just feels annoyed and harried by the unwelcome responsibility of running the show (or having to do anything, really). Perhaps maybe I shut down improperly and have rebooted in safe mode, only bare bones functionality until the problem is properly sorted. Maybe this is what Sam felt like when he lost his soul in season five of Supernatural.

During times like this, I feel like an observer watching myself go through the motions. When I care, I will often philosophize about the difference between this "I" and "myself," what is observing and what is being observed, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to properly express what it feels like when I say "I'm not me." The inherent paradox is staggering and nonsensical, but I feel it nonetheless.

Such times will inevitably lead to isolation, which is largely fine. I'm a fairly isolated person to begin with, so few would notice. I end up believing that it would be detrimental to Actual David's life if I were to attempt anything resembling sincerity with those who are normally close to me. They would notice the disconnect and take offense, if prior evidence indicates. Their opinions of me would, if history holds, shift to believing me to be "emotionless," "robotic," "rehearsed," or "distant." At this moment, all of those labels would be accurate, but I don't necessarily believe them to be on a longitudinal scale.

To carry the metaphor, the assistant manager believes himself to be competent enough to run the store for the untrained customer's needs. However, if any higher ups came to inspect things, they would immediately notice the AM's failings, drawing attention to how unprepared the general manager was for his own absence. The AM also knows that most of the problems come from the fact that he doesn't truly care about the outcome, but still doesn't want to get the GM in trouble.

So, yeah. That's where I am. Hollow and apathetic. Likely only for the moment. Time is flying past me and recollection of recent events is very hazy, as I'm not doing the normal human contextualization of events with emotional judgment. I guess it would stand to reason to ask why even bother writing this? Partly as a "Please excuse our mess while we remodel" warning/supplication. Partly because I'm aware that documenting my mental illness can help people and helping people is a good thing to do. Partly to lower people's expectations for me, mostly so that when Actual David returns, he won't have a pile of shit to clean up, as I anticipate serious feelings of guilt with the return of emotion.

So yeah. That's where I'm at. There's no need to worry about me; I'm likely more stable than usual. I'm performing all necessary life functions as well as normal. The worst I can say is that I've let some cosmetic issues go due to seeing no practical value in expending energy to maintain them. I've also not communicated this current situation before this post, so there's the chance someone could have noticed my change in behavior and been offended by it, which I certainly didn't intend. It takes a while for me to catch up with what is going on inside me. By the time I have adequate explanation, the damage is done. So it goes.

As for now, the store is tended, if sparsely. Please excuse our mess.

The Ghost and the Machine

The Ghost and the Machine

Identifying Lockean Problems Through Science Fiction

John Locke’s empiricism explores a number of notions on identity that may not be as fleshed out as one might hope. Many other philosophers have attempted to clean up untidy ends, while others pull at the loose strings to unravel his ideas even further. One of the key points foundational to his system is the parsing out of various types of being. He offers accounts for what  he believes constitutes identity over time for vegetables, animals, men, and persons. His division between “man” and “person” is perhaps one of the trickiest and most important concepts, a space in which many debates rightfully take place. In order to examine and intellectually test the implications of Locke’s system, one must engage in thought experiments that defy conventional laws of nature. There is no better arena to explore these notions than science fiction. This paper will examine Locke’s notions by discussing the conceptual integrity of identity through John Crichton’s “twinning” in the television show Farscape and the process of teleportation in Star Trek.

In order to rigorously examine these experiments, some criteria must be determined to establish on what identity can be based. Vegetables, the simplest changing life forms, require material organization that allows for the change from one form – such as a seed – to another – a tree. It must also have a story of continuity, a “continuity of insensibly succeeding parts united to the living body of the plant” (Locke, 210). Animals are a step up the chain in that they possess perceptive abilities. Man possesses the capabilities of the “lower” forms, but not much more than that – Locke discusses the possibility for a soul, but assigns no empirical value to it. The identity of man is judged by his place in space and time, so there must be spacio-temporal consistency, just as with the vegetable and animal. These notions combined can be discussed as part of bodily continuity theory.

Alternately, there must be psychological continuity theory. In this, Locke explains the nature of identity for the person, a very different organized being than man. The person is the conscious, perceptive being that can reflect upon his self. The primary identifier of the continuity of consciousness is memory, the self’s ability to maintain a personal story connected through time. This is where the ground becomes shaky, as memory is a deeply unstable notion. Harold Noonan states “if memory and consciousness are together regarded as logically necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity then forgetfulness ensures the loss of, or an interruption in, personal identity, and this is surely implausible. That is, it is implausible to hold that my past identity as a person should depend on the present vagaries of my memory” (173). Another concern is that “Memory could not be logically sufficient for continued personal identity because memory is only ever partial, what is remembered is only ever a subset of what the individual was actually conscious of at the time that is remembered” (Helm, 184). However, for the sake of argument, it can be said that memory acts as an imperfect informant from one period of time in a person’s life to the next. This imperfection should in no way undo Locke’s entire project, but does allow for many reasonable challenges.

With this framework established, the boundaries must be tested. Under the restrictions of this rather humdrum universe, there are seldom significant outliers to the traditional human experience which shed light on the “normal” notions of identity. Mental illness can offer some perspective, especially those individuals afflicted by multiple personality disorders, persistent vegetative states, or fugue states. These human organisms do not properly synch with the expected one-to-one ratio of man to person. However, Locke has provided at least some answers to these cases. The truly difficult cases lie in speculative fiction. These thought experiments allow for hypothetical conclusions to be drawn from a variety of interesting – if unlikely – situations. Through these reflective exercises, Locke is put through his paces to see just how well he would hold up in the case of unlikely situations.

The first unlikely situation is pulled from the science fiction television show Farscape. At a certain point, the main character, John Crichton, is subjected to a process called “twinning.” It is described as “the splitting of Crichton into two identical beings; neither of the Crichtons can be called a copy and neither is the original; they are both equally John Crichton” (“John Crichton”). This is an example of a hypothetical situation referred to by Sydney Shoemaker as “branching.”

The very instant that Crichton experiences fission, there seem to be two versions of the John Crichton. Both have equal, legitimate claim to be called Crichton in the historical sense of identity through memory and retrolineal spatio-temporal continuity. However, from that point on, they are both experiencing different subjective realities and, as such, each can only be referred to as a John Crichton. Crichton A and Crichton 1, named so for the purposes of this paper, experience almost all forms of continuity required to maintain personal identity as John Crichton. Each is thereafter exposed to different environmental and interpersonal stimuli, resulting in slowly diverging behavior patterns, which would also fit rather well with Locke’s notions of tabula rasa and its implications for the empirical development of identity. This is a source of great distress for the Crichtons, as each one considers himself to be the original and the other to be a usurping pretender.

Paul Helm would not agree that either have a legitimate claim to Crichtonhood, saying “Given Locke's criterion of identity no divided consciousness could be identical with the undivided consciousness since there is another consciousness spatio-temporally continuous with the original but distinct from the other consciousness... Locke's criterion of identity seems to require us to say that upon division the original consciousness went out of existence” (183). Helm argues that a consciousness must be connected with itself forward through time, not simply backwards through memory, in order to maintain continuous personhood.

In his discussion on the identity of vegetables, Locke states that a plant must exist as organized matter “constantly from that moment both forwards and backwards” to be considered the same plant (210). This also applies to both animals and men, but not necessarily to the person. Locke says of person that “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (211). It must then be the case that, at least to John Locke, John Crichton the man died the moment he was divided, though Crichton the person could arguably have lived on in the forms of Crichton A and Crichton 1. Bodily continuity is destroyed while psychological continuity diverges into two persons growing ever more unique.

The other hypothetical situation is the concept of identity and the use of transporter technology from the classic show Star Trek. As a means of near-instantaneous long distance teleportation, a transporter dematerializes an individual and rematerializes him or her at another location. This is a process of total destruction and recreation, as a person’s being cannot be physically transmitted through space. This concept is very similar to Sydney Shoemaker’s hypothetical “brain state transfer” procedure, in which “Precise details of your brain states will be recorded and then, simultaneously, your entire body will be destroyed and, in another location, exact duplicates of your brain states will be implemented in the blank brain of a body previously cloned from you” (Naylor, 390). In the case of Star Trek, an exact duplicate of one’s body is also created. On the show, characters are portrayed as calmly being atomically destroyed and remade with seemingly no disorientation or discomfort.

From the Lockean stance, a few problems arise here. First and foremost, there is not just a gap in memory (as a night of drinking may produce), but a momentary gap in existence. For at least a few seconds, there is no Captain Kirk. His position in spacio-temporal continuity ceases entirely. This would eliminate the possibility for bodily continuity outright. Captain Kirk the man must no longer exist. Thus it remains, does Captain Kirk the person persist?

Andrew Naylor does not believe he does. Returning to the brain state transfer procedure example, a new clone “would not be you according to a properly formulated psychological continuity theory [because] the psychological states of the clone would date not from any times prior to the onset of the operation of the BST-device, but only from the time at which the device structured the brain states in which those psycho logical states are realized” (390). Naylor believes that the memory of doing a certain action, e.g. making out with a hot alien, must have been generated during the act of getting down with said alien.

While this may hold sway with the bodily continuity theorists, it does not seem to refute psychological continuity. It shouldn’t matter when the memories were created in the “new” mind. A strict empiricist should realize that it makes no difference that memories are newly instantiated in the mind – memories are not required to have developed immediately responding to external stimuli. One can never verify the inception of a memory empirically as it is impossible to return to the original stimuli to experience the memory being created. The knowledge of the development of memories itself lies in memory and is therefore hazy at best. The true empiricist should recognize that the only requirement is that the memory can be recalled. The only sensation that is able to be recognized is the immediate sensation of the act of remembering. One cannot verify the age of a memory, only place it within a temporal context relating to other memories. As such, memories are only situated relationally – they don’t come with fixed time stamps. The personal identity, the thinking, sensing mind that extends backwards to past actions must remain if the person carries with him or her the narrative of collected life events. Strictly speaking, the age of particular memories have no empirical value and should not could. This implies that the person persists, albeit with a fresh new man after every away mission.

Consciousness is constantly being interrupted, usually on a daily basis. Sleep interrupts personal continuity, and yet the person persists. Locke says “Socrates waking and sleeping are not the same person” (213), showing that these gaps in personhood are rather quotidian. Identities are continual, not continuous, and this is a source of no small anxiety for individuals and societies. People use connective narratives – “I was asleep/drunk/temporarily insane” – to avoid having to confront the possibility that, for at least one evening, they did not exist as the discrete individuals they claim to be. Over the course of a nap, a person ceases to exist, which can be a very troubling notion. The truth is not in the details for Locke, but in the overarching trends, just like identity. Each person is a chaotic advancement through time, not some imperious, unbroken line. While his system is in no way unimpeachable, it certainly offers a greater account for the unavoidable Heraclitean flux that people seem to experience as a necessary part of daily life.

Works Cited

Helm, Paul. “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 208 (Apr., 1979): 173-185. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

“John Crichton.” Farscape Encyclopedia Project. Farscape Encyclopedia Project. 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

Locke, John. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Modern Philosophy.” Ed. F. E. Baird and W. Kauffman.4^th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. 173-239. Print.

Naylor, Andrew. “Personal Identity Un-Locke-Ed.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 2008): 387-396. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

Noonan, Harold. “Locke on Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 205 (Jul., 1978): 343-351. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.