 OK, good afternoon. So today is one last time on personal identity. And then I'll just tie up the remaining loose ends today. And then we sweep on to the next section. On Tuesday, we'll be looking at Churchland's famous article, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes, which actually gives a bit of a, have any of you looked at this article yet? OK, when you look at it, you'll see that it gives a very clean solution to all the problems about the mind that we've addressed so far. It really, if it's right, it really addresses everything very rapidly. But today I want to look at, I want to give a kind of perspective on what is going on in the discussion of Parfit and identity and what matters to us. If you remember right back in the very first meeting of the class, we were talking about the kind of objective understanding of the world that physics gives you. And I was saying, when you think about what's in the world as described by physics, the Big Bang, electromagnetic radiation, gluons, that's all that's there physics is telling you. And the terrifying thing about that picture is that in that picture of the world, there is nothing that it would be possible to care about. I mean, nothing that really matters at all in itself. And if you ask, well, how does the stuff that we care about become visible to us? Well, it seems to me that when it comes in, it's with a kind of imaginative or empathetic or perspective-taking viewpoint. You can discern the characteristics of the world that matter, that you could care about, only when you're taking up and imagining the world from a particular perspective. That's why everything you care about drops out when you're thinking about the world physically, because you have that objective standpoint. So as I've been doing the course of this year, it's really seemed to me more and more of a force of this remark of Nagel's that you can think about the subjective character. You can't think about the subjective character of experience without relying on imagination, without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. So you can, in principle, understand a bat cell by cell. You can have a comprehensive objective understanding of a bat cell by cell. Why any of that is of any interest or importance is going to be completely opaque to you until you understand something about the bat's subjective life, until you have some kind of imaginative or perspective-taking understanding of the bat. So imagination really is the key notion here. There are these two broad ways of understanding what's going on, getting an objective analysis of it, and having an imaginative, empathetic understanding of it. Now, in the case of the self, getting an understanding of what matters, if this general take is right, that's going to require imaginative projection. If you're thinking about what I care about in survival, of whether it matters that it's me, you're going to have to imaginatively project yourself into this mental life. And that just seems to require the use of I. And the use of I brings with it a concern with identity. This may be a bit obscure right now. I'll spend a while trying to spell out this connection between I and identity in just a moment. I mean, thinking about whether you can have an imaginative understanding of animals that don't have I, I certainly have a colleague who talks with great disdain about the idea of getting behind the furry brow. I mean, projecting yourself into the mental life of an animal as such, she thinks, is just daft. There's no such thing. You can have the illusion that you're getting behind the feathered brow if you're thinking of animals. But that just can't be done. I mean, are you trying to think about imagining what the mental life of a bird is? Well, I mean, its head is too small. You can't get in there and see the world from its perspective. Because you're always thinking of yourself as self-conscious when you're doing that, as if you could reflect on what the world was like from that perspective. I don't know. That's pretty radical. Anyone who has a dog has the experience of thinking, boy, this is what he can do. This is what he can't do. This is what he's enjoying. This is what they're not enjoying. I don't know if that's an illusion or not. But certainly, with us, with each other, if you're talking about someone else's uses of I, that really does involve an exercise of imagination. So that's just for kind of orientation. I want to, that's kind of large, vague orientation, if you see what I mean. There's contrast between two ways of thinking about the world objectively and imaginatively taking up a perspective in the world. And if that's reasonably clear, I'm inclined to just go straight on and look at how this plays out in the case of Parfit. So how's Parfit's argument working? We began by asking what self-interest, what is it that I'm concerned about when I'm concerned about the self? I'm going to put a microscope on what the self is and ask, what is it that I care about so passionately here? And Parfit gives this contrast between thinking that a Cartesian soul, thinking that you are really a blob of ectoplasm, and thinking that you can break yourself down into components and how those components are put together to form a self. And he says, the thing about the Cartesian soul doesn't really make sense. Nobody really believes that anymore. All that you've got in the self is the body and all the experiences. So when you analyze the self into its components and the way those components are assembled, you see that that concern to survive isn't really a concern that I should survive. It's not that there is a simple thing. The self is not a simple object like a Cartesian soul. That's not what's going on. What you've got here is a body and a complex of experiences. And what you want to survive, what you want is that there should be a causal connection between that body and complex of experiences and a later body and a complex of experiences. That's what the concern to survive is. I hope this sounds very familiar. So what I care about is that the string of experiences that's causally related to these present experiences and this body should be as long-lasting and rich as possible. But that's the analysis we get now of what you care about in caring to survive and wanting to survive. I think that actually there's been a slight of hand here. This is why I go over it like this. So watch me very carefully as I go through this. Something that Parfait doesn't call attention to. In fact, that I think Parfait doesn't even realize has happened when we've got to this point. So the argument goes, what I'm concerned about when I'm concerned about my own survival is that a body and a complex of experiences should be causally propagated into the future. So identity here is causal continuity without branching. And then when I do get branching, I have a ton of causal propagation of this body and this complex of experiences. So that's better than ordinary survival. So identity is not what matters in survival. And this is to be a conservative critique in the sense that we were talking about with marriage or baptism ceremonies last time, that this is not supposed to be someone coming from right outside our ordinary concerns. Keep in place all the concerns that motivate ordinary self-interest to say you can satisfy all those concerns without basing them on a concern with identity. But the trouble here, I think, I think what's really happened is that if you're going to talk about my concern with my own survival, you have to use I, right? You say, I want it to be that I should survive. If you're in one of Williams' cases and you're thinking someone's going to suffer terribly here, I really hope it's not me or you're told there's going to be an earthquake and very few will get out, you think, well, I hope one of them is me. On the face of it, the structure of our ordinary concerns depend on using I, me, myself, terms like that. Now, Paffet is saying we should replace our use of I with the use of terms like this series of experiences and this body. Instead of saying I'm hungry, you might say, this series of experiences includes a present experience of hunger. Instead of saying I will survive, you might say this series of experiences will be causally propagated into the future. Paffet doesn't really highlight that this is what's going on, but the use of I is being eliminated. He's saying replace it with this talk about this string of experiences and this body, and that will have lots of beneficial effects. But it seems to me that we can't actually articulate our ordinary concerns without using the first person. And the first person just brings with it a concern with identity. And what's happening here is that Paffet focuses us on the question, should we be reductionists or should we think there's a Cartesian soul? Do we think that the person is complex or do we think that the person is simple? If you think that the person is complex, we're going to start talking in this kind of way about this string of experiences and this body, and we're not going to use I anymore. But really, the important thing here is not whether you think that the self is simple or that the self is complex. The important thing that's happened here is that we've shifted away from thinking in terms of an imaginative or empathetic understanding of what's going on to a fully objective description of the situation. If you're thinking of yourself as this body and this string of experiences, that's not thinking of yourself from the standpoint of the participant anymore. You're just thinking of yourself as one among many things in the room. You see what I mean? You're no longer asking, is it me? You're just saying, there's that body, that string of experiences, that body, that string of experiences, this body, this string of experiences. You ordinarily think, yeah, but one of them I attach special weight to, because that one's me. But at this point, we're meant to have cut away that thing, but that one's me. So all I'm left with is the objective description of a whole bunch of bodies and a whole bunch of strings of experiences. But that just is having an objective standpoint in the world. And what I was saying a minute ago is once you have a fully objective standpoint in the world, once you're letting go of the idea that one of these things is me and that there are people here who matter particularly to me, once you've let go of that, you can't see why anything matters at all. Part of it focuses your attention, I mean, his own attention on whether you're being a reductionist or thinking in terms of a Cartesian soul. But in the course of doing that, what happens is that he shifts away from thinking in terms of a first person engaged imaginative standpoint of things to thinking of things purely objectively. And once you've hit that purely objective standpoint in the world, there is no saying why anything matters. Things only matter from a subjective, engaged standpoint. And another way to put it is to say, suppose you believe in the existence of Cartesian, whether you're a reductionist or a Cartesian has got nothing to do with it at this point. Suppose you believe in Cartesian souls, and you say, now, what is a Cartesian soul? Why do I care about the prolongation of this Cartesian soul? And you say, well, a Cartesian soul is a bit of ectoplasm. Why should I care about that? Is this one this bit of ectoplasm? But why does that matter? You can only see why it matters when you say, and that bit of ectoplasm is me. So when you say, the only way you can articulate the concern to survive is to say, is it going to be me? And if you put it in terms of, is it going to be me? That just brings in identity. That's not just a matter of causal connections that might or might not be there. Whether or not you had identity. I is a singular term. I is a name. It refers to an object. When you say, I am hungry, I'm going to survive, that just brings in reference to a thing. You're talking about how things are with a particular object. So if you're going to articulate your concerns using I, that just brings in a concern with the identity of a particular thing. And so you don't make it through fission, for example, because that particular thing isn't there through the fission. On the other hand, if you shift away from using I and say I'm going to describe everything third personally, then you are giving a fully objective standpoint in the world. And then you're not going to be particularly concerned but you're in survival all right, but you are not going to be particularly concerned about anything at all. Because you've achieved that fully objective standpoint from which you can't see why anything matters. OK. I'm happy to pause there, but I'm also going to, I'm not going to change subject. I'm going to go on about this a great deal more. Any questions at this point? Yeah. OK. This series of experiences, I really care about this one. Well, the thing about that is it really is clearly so arbitrary. That's what I meant last time about the analogy of a football team. Suppose I just take one, well, out of the room, I just take one body and one string of experiences and I say, hey, that one, that one I really care about. Yeah. Then anybody would say, but where did that come from? That is just completely out of the blue. I mean, I don't mean to be unsympathetic here, but if you say why this one rather than any other, it really seems like the obvious question and there is no answer to it. Yeah. The only answer you could give that would make any sense is because that one's me. If you say, oh, you think that one's you, then of course it drops into place. Yeah. But cut that away. What is left? Yeah. Jackson? I care that. Well, that's exactly it. If you say I care that my goals are accomplished, that makes perfect sense. That's completely intelligible. But if I just take out of the room, everybody's got their own goals, right? If I just pick one random set of goals and I say, well, I can't even say I'm going to go for these ones. These are important. These are more important than any of the others. Why would that be? You see what I mean? It only drops into place once you've got it. These are my goals. And even if I look at someone else's goals and I say these are very important, what I mean is something like, you can only make sense of what is going on when you say, and I'm going to make these my goals. Therefore, they have this particular practical importance. Come back to that. Doesn't there have to be something? Very good. I think that's completely true and very important. And yeah, actually, I hadn't thought of that point in this context. I mentioned it earlier when I talked about HH prices picture of psychedelic experience, or what's the word I want? Paranormal experiences, which you thought were some unknown experiences that weren't had by anyone bumped into yours. And that's a wild picture. But you're saying, OK, I think Parfan thinks he's got enough to be the thing that's having the experiences if you've got a body there. But you might press it a little bit harder and say, there must be something that can say, I am having these experiences. Something that brings in the persisting self. You can't make sense of experience without a persisting self that has it. So talk about the experiences as such is going to bring in identity. I think that's an important point. Yeah, and I haven't got to press that in this context. One, two. That's true, yeah. That makes perfect sense. You can care about the identity of a nation. You can care that my nation should survive and so on. Even though you don't want to say the whole thing has experiences, that I don't understand. You've got a bunch of it. Are you going for the HH price thing that there could be just experiences floating about, not had by anyone? Yes, that's right. Of course the work has an identity. Right, yes, yes. Yeah, well, yes, right, right. Yes, you're hard. You're hard. I mean, the threat here is we've reached a perspective from which nothing matters. And you're going to say, that's right. Nothing matters. I'm shocked at this demonstration of nihilism and once a young. But no. I'm really sorry. Seriously. What I mean, the way to frame that is I can actually see, I can absolutely see the possibility of blowing away all our ordinary concerns and saying nothing matters. Something really radical or saying, even saying, we should restructure all our ordinary concerns completely. We should raise them to the ground and rethink what we care about from the ground up. But that's not what Parfum means to be doing here. He means to be saying, keep in place your ordinary concerns. Just think about what it is that you value most, like a critic of the ceremony of marriage, who says, you can have all that you really value here without the actual ceremony. He's trying to subvert it from within the way that a critic of marriage might do that, other than the ceremony of marriage might do that. Say, keep, be as conservative as you like in your values. You can have everything you care about without the actual ceremony. You can have everything you really care about without actual identity. That's what Parfum means to be doing. He doesn't mean to be reaching a standpoint for which nothing matters. Hunger in the third world was a big problem, but me and my family, that I'm really going to do something about right now. That's great. That's very important. I think something like that is probably what Parfum would say, actually. But the point I want to make is, if you do say that, it's become a different kind of point that he's making. Is this right? Let me play back to you what I think you just said. Suppose you say there are just all these bodies and strings of experiences. That's all there are in the social world. And none of them is to be privileged as mine. But now I still care about pain. I can still hold on to caring about pain. So I still want to reduce pain. My own pain doesn't get at all privileged in the reduction. Pain millions of miles away might be harder to do something about. But really, it matters everybody as much as pain over here. So I really reach that standpoint where I don't privilege those that are close to me. That, I think, is much more radical. I mean, Parfum meant to be saying, keep self-interested and think about what you value from the standpoint of self-interest. This is much more like a Martian perspective where you're thinking, look at the world objectively. What's there? And the thing is, I think from the Martian perspective, it's not going to be easy to hang on to the idea that this stuff matters. Because if you ask, why does pain matter? If you're trying to explain to a child why hurting your little brother is wrong, right? I mean, what do people say to children the whole time? They say, how would you like it if it was you? If you were the one that was getting that done to you? You see what I mean? It says, project yourself into that position. And it was you, that thing. And you were in the position where you say, is me feeling this pain? That would be awful. Therefore, you should think that's awful. If you take away that standpoint of subjective empathy and say, no, I don't go for subjective empathy. I just see that there is this psychophysical magnitude pain. And I want to reduce the C-fiber firing as much as I can. Why would that be? If someone really has no empathy, yeah, there's no exercising empathy, yeah? So the idea is, if you keep hold of the first person and your capacity to project yourself into someone else's shoes, then you can understand why this thing stuff should matter. But otherwise, it seems arbitrary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, okay, very good. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I really don't want to close off that line. I actually think that's exactly what Parford would say by way of response. But I'm not going to drift off this subject. I'm going to keep on this very point and try and elaborate it a bit. So let me try and develop this a little bit. And then there was this passage I read out, I think it was last time from Parford, which I think is, it's actually the best thing he ever wrote this couple of paragraphs when he's talking about the beneficial effects it has on you when you reflect on fission cases and you reflect on the importance of being a reductionist and thinking that the self is just a bunch of components suitably assembled. That we are strongly inclined to believe that our continued existence is a deep, further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity. When I believe that my existence was such a further fact, when I thought there is the soul, there was the real me and I wasn't a reductionist, when I believe my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel through which I was moving faster every year and at the end of which there was darkness. When I thought, no, all there is is this body, this string of experiences and its causal continuation, when I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel fell away, I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people, but the difference is less. So it's not that he's thinking of the thing quite from the point of view of Mars. He's not thinking there are all these pains and so on in the world, but he's trying to hold on to that difference between my life and the lives of other people, but the beneficial thing is the difference is less. Now that's, I actually think that's quite inspirational and it's clearly quite passionate. He really, you know, that is deep in him. But what's going on here if you think about this very explicitly and prosaically, what are you saying is, let's replace I with this series of experiences causally dependent on this body. And when you do that, you see immediately that it's very arbitrary to care more about what happens to one string of experiences rather than another, right? If someone's asking what's in it for me, and that seems like such a basic question, what's in it for me, it's not like you need, I don't understand, what are you getting at when you say what's in it for me, right? But if you say what's in it for this series of experiences causally dependent on this body, then why should anyone care about that? Unless you think that's me, if you see what I mean, but if you don't have that, then why should you care about that? Now that's what Parfit is saying is so valuable here. You distance yourself from your own concerns, from your concern with what happens to this string of experiences and this body. You're getting a kind of distancing that is beneficial. You get a distancing from your self-interest that is a good thing. When you replace I will survive with this series of experiences will be causally propagated into the future. If we're all thinking, well what I want is that this series of experiences will be causally propagated into the future, our obsessive self-interest will really be undermined because we see how arbitrary it is. But the thing is if we throw out I and we don't have that anymore and we just have this talk about strings of experiences, we really get a lot of distancing. You can't locate yourself in the world the way that we ordinarily do. There's a famous example of self-location given by John Perry in Stanford philosopher John Perry. Perry gave this example, I like this because it gives you a glimpse into the lives of philosophers. What a great philosopher does when they're not in a lecture room. I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor pushing my cart down the aisle in one side of a tall counter and back the aisle in the other seeking the shopper with a torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip round the counter, the trail became thicker but I seemed unable to catch up. I mean, it's very easy to, I should have a picture of Perry it's actually very easy to imagine him doing this. But you see the scenario, right? He's going round and round. Can you guess the denouement? Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch. I believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making a mess and I was right but I didn't believe that I was making a mess. Now this is a simple example but what's important about it is it really crystallizes where I comes in. Before he says I was making a mess he knows exactly what the objective situation is. He understands the objective situation perfectly. He's got it. There is a shopper with a torn sack and there can't going round this aisle making a mess. The moment of revelation comes when he says I'm making a mess. There are two quite different beliefs here. The shopper with a torn sack is making a mess and I am making a mess, right? So this one tells you what's going on objectively. This is a subjective thing. I'm the one doing that. And here's Perry. That seems to be something I came to believe and that changes everything when you think I'm the one making a mess. I stopped following the trail around the counter and rearranged the torn sack in my cart. My change in beliefs seems to explain my change in behavior. So that's important when you think I'm the one that's doing it. This is not an example itself of any great importance but it really matters. You behave very differently when you think I'm the one that was doing that from when you think merely someone is doing that. But now Parfit is telling us don't use I. Don't talk in terms of I. Instead of I'm making a mess, what you think is only this series of experiences is associated with a body that is making a mess. Now, why should you care about that? Why should you stop then and try and clear the thing up? I mean, you're distanced from your own concern to survive when you think like this but you're also distanced from your own actions. I mean, if I found that series of experiences associated with that body was making a mess, well, so what? I mean, that doesn't give me any important new information that's gonna make me stop and clear the stuff up. So if I think this series of experiences is associated with a body that's making a mess, I'm not thinking I'm doing that, I'm the one responsible, I better clear it up. There's that distancing that Parfit likes that makes the glass walls fall away, that reduces the gap between you and other people, but it also eliminates your most basic ideas about what you're doing and what you're responsible for. You know, the things that every child is taught that has dint into them. You're the one that did that, yeah? If you're the one that did that, then you ought to clear it up. But you mean, Perry's obviously very well brought up. But what Parfit wants is to destroy that, to blow that up. Is not what he's focusing on, he's thinking there are these beneficial effects to the distancing and you're concerned to survive, but you're not going to be able to hang on to these really basic ideas about the difference between what you're doing and what you're responsible for and what someone else is doing and what they're responsible for. That's the whole, it's not an intended effect, but it's kind of an automatic consequence of that distancing. Plain as day. So distancing is what Parfit is saying is beneficial, but I think it's actually disruptive of even the tight, the smallest parts of ordinary human life. Okay, so fission, you would have all you wanted through fission, is that really right? The idea is after ordinary death, there are few, if any, experiences causally related to these present experiences in this body. After fission, there'll be far more experiences than there would usually have been causally related to these present experiences in this body. So fission is actually better than ordinary survival, even though I no longer exist. To delete the I is the argument. It's not expressing what I really care about. But is this really right? If fission happened, would you be just as well off as before? Oops, right. Would everything be just fine? Would you have doubled what you wanted? Parfit thinks there might be a few technical difficulties. Lefty and righty are the same wife, for example, but these are basically just practical problems. Suppose you ask, would lefty remember doing what X did? Put up your hand if you think the answer is yes. Okay, put up your hand if you think the answer is no. Okay, no, yeah. One, you are right, assuming I haven't got memory remembering mixed up again, then you're correct. How can they remember? In order for lefty to remember doing what X did, must lefty be the same person as X? Memory. I hope I'm getting this round the right way. I'm sticking to my guns. In order for lefty to remember doing what X did, lefty has to be the same person as X. A brain slide is not a memory. What is a brain slide? A quasi-memory. If I gave you the brain slide of my trip to the Taj Mahal, yeah? You seem to remember that you did it. Yes, that's right. It wasn't X. These are two different people. Remember, we've been through this. X and lefty are different people. Follow me very closely here, yes? He would have memory impressions of it causally derived from what X saw and did. Yeah, no question about that. Yeah, but if I have very vivid memory impressions of what Napoleon did at Waterloo, yeah? If I'm thinking that was so unfair and so on, yeah? Are these memory impressions of the guns, the noise, the people, yeah? Am I remembering surrendering at Waterloo? Not unless I am Napoleon. I can remember, sure, I can remember someone else doing it, yeah, but if I'm remembering this from the inside, is that a memory of what I saw and did? No, exactly. So lefty does not remember doing what X did. Lefty has quasi-memories of what X saw and did, yeah? Okay, now look, I mean, for example, let me share with you, I don't want to seem to boast, but when I was 10 years old, I won a prize. I got a book, I didn't know what it was for, but in the book it was inscribed, what the prize was for. It was for general excellence. And in many difficult times, between then and now, that memory has kept me going. So this is me, right? I remember getting that prize. I think, boy, that was great. I showed the lot of them. I showed that, David Barr, anyway, right? And now, here is lefty struggling in a difficult world. And lefty has that memory impression of getting a prize for general excellence. And let's suppose that lefty understands the situation. Is that going to be of any help to lefty? All he's remembering is that someone else won that prize. That's no good. I mean, that's great for X, right? But that doesn't help lefty. Lefty is going to be completely distanced from all his earlier memories. It's gonna be, he's no more right to those memories than righty, and they can't both have the right to them. Well, I'm saying once lefty understands the situation, he will realize that these are not memories of what he saw and did. So these memories will be of no help to him. He will not be connected to this past self in the way that actually matters for all of us. I mean, I gave a very simple example, but of what keeps you going is your memories of your early days with your family or whatever, right? The kind of thing that everybody hangs on to, then these have all been lost. That is that complete distancing from your own psychological life here. If you're being told you have everything that matters through fission, you have lost the consolation of memory, right? That is one big psychological thing that has really gone. And the memory impressions have to be true. If you have memories that are important to you that you want to hang on to, it's not enough that they just be pleasing. They've got to be correct. And both lefty and righty seem to remember doing these things earlier. They can't both be right. They're actually both wrong. Neither of them did that stuff, saw that stuff. So once lefty and righty understand the situation, they're going to be distanced from those memories. They'll realize that these are memories of what someone else saw and did. So all these, if X has built up memories that X values, if you have built up memories that you value, and then you fission, these memories are effectively lost. There is no one around who can remember what you saw and did. So once Y1, once lefty and righty and understand the situation, from X's point of view, what you want with survival is that there should be someone who really remembers, who really and truly remembers seeing and doing what you saw and did. But that's gone here. Now, once you start thinking about this, this is actually just a tip of the iceberg. So much of what we care about in ordinary social or psychological life is really heavily tied up with identity. I mean, suppose I vow to love you forever, and then there's fission. Well, what happens there? I mean, suppose I want to be bound by this vow. This is going to be a very, I should lefty and righty both be bound by the vow. Should just one or the other of them be bound by the vow? Put up your hand if you think this is at least a difficult situation. Yes, right. Surely it's a difficult situation. You don't have all that psychologically matters to you through the split tier, because you can't have two different people being bound by the vow. You wanted to be, you wanted, your plan was to have a certain position of uniqueness here. You did not want to be just one of a large gang, right? So you can't hang on to your original vow through the fission. And of course, that's just one case. There are so many things that you are bound by, your ties of loyalty or hatred or whatever, to other people. And these are just lost in fission. After fission, there's no one around who's bound by the promises and obligations I have. And after fission, once lefty and righty understand the situation, lefty and righty might feel, oh, well, I have this strong commitment to this other person. But once they understand the situation, they're going to say, that wasn't me. It wasn't me that made that vow. Why should I be bound by it? Yep. Yes, there's just lefty, yeah. Well, lefty, it depends on the situation, right? You can tell a story when lefty thinks this is just great. It's not a memory case like that, though. Yeah. If, he would feel like, if righty, if the fission took up to here, yeah, and then righty died, something like that. Well, at this point, lefty and righty are both different people to the original person, yeah? So the key point is that lefty, being a different person to the one who made the vow, is not bound by the vow. Even if lefty has impressions of what happened in this lifetime, they're not memories of what lefty saw and did, yeah? They're not, they're quasi-memories. They are reliable memory impressions, but they're not memories. And he seems to remember doing that stuff. So he's not bound by the vow, even if righty dies. It wasn't him that made the vow. I see. I see, right. Well, what I'm arguing is that identity really matters here. And that if you've got enough of fission to challenge identity so that you don't have the same person here, then those vows go, yeah? If identity is lost, then there's no need for lefty to keep faith with the vows. So long as if righty doesn't take a toll, then you've got identity. Unless he does have to keep faith with the vows, yeah? I'm arguing that identity as such is really important here in the way we ordinarily think. Just if you're loyal to someone for what, you saved my life 10 years ago, right? I will always owe you one for that. And then I've fissioned. Well, you didn't save lefty's life. You didn't save righty's life, yeah? They don't owe you a thing. You see what I mean? I agree that you could keep them in ignorance so they don't realize it's the same person, yeah? But I'm making the point, once they find out what's gone on, that the fission happened and that there isn't identity, they will be released from all that. So after fission, there's no one around who's bound by the promises and obligations you have. And I don't see that that is actually as good as oddly survival. I think that the psychological connections between the past and the future that really matter to us are being lost here. You can't really analyze this in terms of just causal continuity, where you can have causal continuity without identity. You need identity as such. I mean, there's no reason for lefty and righty to regard themselves as bound by your past intentions, the intentions that someone else had in the past. So if memory's gone in fission and you don't have these forward-looking connections either, then you don't have the backward or forward connections that really matter so much in everyday life. Why couldn't this be just like ordinary survival? And here's another simple example. Suppose I owe you $20, right? You lent me $20 one time and then I fissioned. What is your situation going to be? You get $20 from both lefty and righty. You get $40, do they each have to give you $10? I mean, the thing is, if lefty and righty are not identical to the one you gave $20 to, then neither lefty, you don't get a thing, actually. Lefty and righty don't owe you anything. I suppose I owe you $20 and then I fissioned, and then you fissioned. Do my fission products each have to give both each of your fission products $20? What? The contract is void, yes. I mean, we're really talking about a breakdown. I mean, this is a very simple example, right? But obviously society just depends on tons of stuff like this. We're not talking about something that's just a kind of harmless curiosity of people fission. You're talking about something really subversive. There's not as if the ordinary case in which you've got identity is just a special case of this more, or something that, if fission is a purely general case and everything could carry on pretty well as it does if everybody was fissioning, and then identity is just the kind of local variant that we happen to have. That's not right at all. The foundation, the whole foundation of our psychological lies would just be thrown out if fissioning started happening. I mean, Parfitt is incredibly nonchalant about this kind of thing. He says, consider, this is from a book you wrote in which a lot of it's about this. Consider next the relations between the resulting people, lefty and righty, and the woman I love. I can assume that since she loves me, she will love them both. But she could not give to both the undivided attention that we now give to each other. But that's all right. It's just kind of like starting as if she started a new job. You see what I mean? She wouldn't be able to give you quite as much attention as before, but that's okay. You can live with that. Wait a minute. This is the kind of passage that you read and you read, and you think, does you really mean that? I can assume that since she loves me, she will love them both. What's your hunch? Can you pick your hand up if that seems fair enough? I'm just curious. I mean, there may be something called a generational or something here, I don't know. That seems fair enough. Okay, a small but significant number. And if you think, wait a minute, I don't know what's going on here, but this is pretty weird. And if you think this just doesn't follow at all, she, no, we're starting from scratch here. My last option was a kind of abstaining option, right? Like this is pretty weird. It's certainly not obvious that since she loves me, she will love them both. The last option is kind of obvious that she has no commitment to loving them both. I'm not, can't tell if you guys are raising questions or okay, okay, yeah. No, no, but Parfait's assuming that she knows they both exist. She understands the situation perfectly. It's not the same person. That's the whole point, it's not the same person. You don't have identity here. I mean, if they married, she could rightly say this is not the man I married. Yeah, they're very similar. Right. Yeah, I mean, this really ramifies. I mean, if you think about cloning, yeah, if you're cloned, then by this kind of argument, your partner should go for the clone just as much as they go for you. I mean, so, I mean, yeah. There are real life cases, but anyway, Jackson, yeah. Our concept of what's, sorry. Our concept of identity brings down what you have in front of you. That's right. Of identity, yeah. Yes, it's not this conservative critique. That's right. I mean, it's all right to come from completely outside our ordinary emotional concerns and say, well, whatever your favorite mad prescription is, you know, we all ought to paint ourselves blue or something, you see what I mean? You can do that if you're coming from completely outside ordinary concerns, but the trouble is that once you do that, you have no idea what the rules are. You have no idea. You don't have enough friction to know what you should say we ought to do or what we ought not to do. The stuff about what matters, what we care about, what's important, that only operates in a particular social, psychological, cultural context. And we're not operating in a situation where identity doesn't matter. We're operating in a situation where identity is really fundamental to everything we care about. It's not like it's just there, but it's a wheel that turns nothing. It's not really functioning as part of what concerns us. It's part of the background to everything else we care about. And if it goes, then we have really no idea what is happening anymore. You're at liberty to agree or disagree, but is it clear what I'm saying? Yeah? So this is why I think Parfit can't possibly be right. This can't be the right analysis of what's going on in survival because our ordinary concerns are so bound up with the concern to survive, with the concern of identity. But it is really puzzling because Parfit is surely right about what's objectively there. Now when you look at it objectively, what you've got is our body, the strings of experiences and causal continuity. It is, he is correct, too. I mean, that's what I meant last time. He has argued it very powerfully. The conclusion just can't be right, though, it seems to me. Sorry? Illusion? Yes. Right, well, what is important to matter about? Well, what is important to care about? What really matters? Can't depend on an illusion. It depends on an illusion. It can't really matter. I mean, Locke seems to me to have got this much more right than Parfit. And here is Locke. In this personal identity, it is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment. That's the same point, right? Locke thinks identity, one reason identity matters is, it matters for punishment, for criminal cases and so on. Happiness and misery being that for which everyone is concerned for himself and not mattering what becomes of any substance, not joined to or affecting that consciousness. And here he means, by consciousness, he means being able to reach back in memory or being able to reach forward into the future person. If the consciousness went along with a little finger when it was cut off, that would be the same self, which was concerned for the whole body yesterday as making part of itself. Rejections then, it cannot but admit as it's own now. So what matters to you could be had without your body, if your little finger was cut off and consciousness went with it, if it remembered what the body had been doing yesterday, then that would be the same self that was concerned for the whole body yesterday as today is concerned only for the little finger. If the same body should still live and immediately from the separation of the finger, have it so and procure your consciousness, whereof the little finger knew nothing, it would not be a tall concern for it as a part of itself. I mean, the body would say, well, that was the old finger, bye-bye. It would not be a tall concern for it for the finger as a part of itself, nor could it own any of its actions or have any of them imputed to him. So sameness of person, not sameness of human being, is what matters in punishment. So I think Locke's right that it's the body, not the, sorry, there is not the body that matters for identity. It is sameness of consciousness in his sense, something like psychological connections between past and future. When you're planning your future, it's the future person, not the future human being that you're concerned about, but it is identity. It's always identity that's a concern here. Questions, comments? I think I'm actually going to stop here with a little bit early, but I think you guys may be, I assume you guys may be exhausted after your exertions. This is what I think. I spent the whole night just telling you what I think. Yeah, I'm ending with a claim that identity matters and that the identity that matters is not the identity of a human being, but the identity of a person in Locke's sense, the identity that goes with sameness of consciousness. You know what could be plainer than that? The future of the new body is a clue. No, I'm saying if I'm the prince, then I care about what's happening with the cobbler body person. The prince body person can get on with it. Good luck. In quasi-memories, you might feel identified, but they're not memories. I mean, I would say they may not be memories of yours. I announced that we would stop and they never started shuffling paper, so come and pick this up at the end. Okay, so next week, we move on to a quite different part of the forest. Relieve personal identity behind. Okay, thanks, guys.