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Pill Pod 36 - Identity Shmolitics · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:00
  Guys, did you know this Something just blew my mind before we start here
• 0:03
  that freezies apparently are only called freezies in Canada. What you, guys,
• 0:10
  that's not true. What they call apparently in the States they call them freeze
• 0:15
  pops, and they also get called zuper dupers in Australia or icy pole.
• 0:23
  Just so, freezy is a snack, mate, that's a cute suck.
• 0:28
  If I'm like, hey, give me a suck on that icy pole,
• 0:32
  I don't know. That's just way too literal. Yeah, suck on my
• 0:35
  icy pole, fucker, Come on, Australia, be better. It's these
• 0:40
  in super Bowl cultural differences that strain our relationships with our friends down south.
• 0:45
  Yeah, you know, what they call smarties are what we call rockets.
• 0:51
  That's right. That's so weird too. I would be so pissed if I
• 0:54
  wanted Smarties and I ended up with these little sugary pills. Yeah, rockets
• 1:00
  are disgusting, So anyone who is not Canadian, I wonder if other countries
• 1:04
  have it too. No, our smarties are like m and ms, except
• 1:07
  the chocolate taste different inside. It's like I think BRIT's also have our kinds
• 1:11
  of smarties, but yeah, I don't know. I just saw this freezy
• 1:15
  thing someone tweeted and was just like important question, like what are these called?
• 1:18
  And it was a picture of freezes and then a bunch of people were
• 1:21
  saying like freeze pops or like other stuff, and I was like, what
• 1:23
  the fuck is going on here? What's next? They don't have bag milk
• 1:26
  down there, Hey, we don't have bag milk on the West Coast.
• 1:33
  I really think it's a pretty useless thing, to be honest with you,
• 1:36
  but it's weird how many things are just think the Canadian Like, I led
• 1:40
  in Mexico for a couple of years and what I realized that was really disappointing
• 1:44
  is they had no fucking salt and vinegar chips. Like I knew that ketchup
• 1:47
  chips were kind of like a uniquely US thing, but like salm vinegar I
• 1:51
  thought was kind of a worldwide favorite and all dress too. I think Canada's
• 1:55
  got all dressed, but America for that, with ten million types of series
• 2:00
  and things like that. Salt vinegar is also like probably most English speaking world,
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  like I would imagine they lived that in Britain, and like the States
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  obviously has it too. Well, now we've established our identity as Canadian identity
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  are continuous and connected identity. And when you define your identity in terms of
• 2:19
  the products you consume, what's that called capitalist ideology? Which is what I
• 2:24
  wish we were talking about today. Yeah, this is so soapills you love
• 2:29
  this one. This is like your favorite topic ever? What freeze pops or
• 2:31
  identity? Let's roll the music. Freezies are indeed identity. Although I would
• 2:45
  be okay with ice poles or whatever you said to icy poles. It's very
• 2:50
  literal, it's very analytic philosophy to describe it as an icy pole. But
• 2:54
  we could ask the analytic philosophers what truly is the nature of language and how
• 3:00
  it reference icy polls or freezies or second freezy. I be referred to as
• 3:05
  a two as a relationship between a one and a two. Well, hello
• 3:10
  listener. If you clicked on this episode expecting some hot takes on initialisms,
• 3:15
  you fell up for the clickbait identity schmolitics. Is that what you're going to
• 3:22
  call the episode? That's the name. Yeah, we're actually talking about identity.
• 3:25
  That's facts, But that's absolutely true. It's a nineteen seventies. Take
• 3:30
  that Matt made us read. I don't think Matt's ever going to be allowed
• 3:34
  to choose an article again. I'll see it's too early to say. Or
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  we'll just get you back, Matt. We'll just get them back by picking
• 3:43
  like Brett as Timpin, or just something completely to the other side of the
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  spectrum. Next is the Tour to Babel. The reason I chose this is
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  joy speaking part. It is considered, or was considered up until twenty seventeen
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  when he passed away, one of the world's most influence philosophers, particularly in
• 4:00
  the Anglo American tradition. And there's kind of two strands to his work which
• 4:04
  are proven influential. One is his argument for what it calls the triple theory,
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  which is an attempt to kind of integrate what he considers to be the
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  three main strands of moral thought together consequentialism, contractualism, and utilitarianism. Sorry,
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  and actually let me just stop you right there too. And I should
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  just be clear to the listeners that right now what we read was called personal
• 4:26
  identity by philosopher Derek Parfitt in Philosophical Review in January of nineteen seventy one.
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  If you want to find it online. You can read it before listening to
• 4:33
  the rest of this podcast to follow along if you want to, or don't
• 4:38
  read, or just don't because you're you're going to have to do some ground
• 4:41
  rules before. Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of the big threads of
• 4:44
  moral thought and analytic philosophy. But then I don't want to get into today.
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  Actually, oh great, well this is why. Right. That's this
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  is one of the things that Parfitt is known for. Right, it's this
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  three volume book on what matters right, and you know, also other things
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  like the Repugnant Conclusion, which Eric and I might actually chat about since I
• 5:01
  know his thoughts on it. But long story short, the other thing that
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  he's known for is his critique of the self, or the notion that there
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  is a thick or strong version of the self that we can talk about.
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  And this also has moral implications since perfect makes this really kind of striking argument,
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  which is that kind of drawing later in his life on Nietzsche actually saying
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  that if you go back and you look at many of the moral arguments philosophers
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  and the European tradition are put forward, most of them are predicated on some
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  theory of what the self is, and that the self is that what matters,
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  right, And we could talk about like the different flavors of self food
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  that he kind of diagnoses, But the argument he makes is that the self
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  actually doesn't really exist, right. Yeah, European philosophy in this respect is
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  just a kind of misguided effort to talk about something that we had no business
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  talking about. And consequently, once you kind of withdraw this notion of selfhood
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  from our moral vocabulary, we can't really talk about morality in the same way
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  any longer because it's not about interests or saving this whole before we get to
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  the before we get to that, we should take this. We should take
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  this step by step, I think because the Yeah, so, the majority
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  of the audience will not have read this and probably will not read it.
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  So whatever you say about it, we're gonna have to go slow, which
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  is hard because we've been arguing about this hardcore and chat for two days.
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  Well have we been arguing about it? Provide any necessary context discussion listeners,
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  I'm sorry. Also, we have a no jargon rule. Usually I enforce
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  that, but I'm already feeling myself getting read around the ears because of how
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  much this article pissed me off. So we're going to use the talking stick.
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  Try to indicate when you have to make a point, but keep your
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  points short because otherwise we're going to be talking over each other. I'm gonna
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  try. But question of the day do we have personal identities? And if
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  so, what are they consistent? How do we talk about it with language?
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  And the thing is, funnily enough, I agree with the conclusion generally,
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  yes, though not at all with the method by which he reaches the
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  conclusion. And for that reason I am skeptical of his conclusion because of the
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  way he reaches it. And I don't know how much we're going to deal
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  with this today, But it is to say, is identity as a concept
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  or too singular to express the vicissitudes and variability of time memory? And can
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  you all attribute that the one thing called the self? And then, by
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  extension, of course, as Matt was bringing up, can you make a
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  moral philosophy or a political philosophy based on the self? His answer is we
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  should be skeptical of it because the self is subject to time change, flissitudes
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  of life and all that. So it was tough to get through though that
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  it is tough to get through and like, I don't I mean that that
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  was a good little rundown, but yeah, I mean, I guess another
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  way of putting it too, is like it's delving onto the question of like
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  is there some sort of a stable like human like, yeah, I guess
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  identity is right, But I mean it kept making me think that this is
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  like a kind of against philosoph essences of human essences, that it's like everything,
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  it's much more of a process. Like in some ways he's pointing out
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  almost like a common sensical thing that we have even kind of talked about.
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  It's one of our jokes about twenty year olds being idiots, right, And
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  I think it's predicated on the fact that you change so much. You know
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  that That's why it's like embarrassing for me to think about how much I loved,
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  you know, Richard Dawkins when I was twenty years old, because there's
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  something intuitive about the fact that that really doesn't feel like me anymore. But
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  we do insult twenty year olds, we're insulting ourselves X amount of years ago.
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  Still, but was it really me? Like, I mean, what
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  way was that myself? So I think that's like another way of sort of
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  setting up the question. Yeah, I was big into blank Fit eighty two
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  when I was fourteen years old, so believe me, I know I thought
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  take off your pants and jacket. I mean, I mean the basic way
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  that Locke sets it up is like, if you remember it, then it's
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  you, and if you don't remember it, then it's not you. That
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  is that fair? That's probably really simple, But that's kind of yeah,
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  that's that's the view that Parfitt is kind of gonna like take on, like
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  kind of disagree with and go in a different direction with. But basically,
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  yeah, I make fun of twenty year olds because I still remember being one.
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  I am good towards my students when I teach because I still remember having
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  gone through their exact process and some of the shit that I had to deal
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  with, and so I feel very sympathetic. Whereas it's hard to have sympathy
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  with people who you've never been through their situation or you can't remember it,
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  or you don't have that sort of sympathetic psychological connection to their own situation,
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  so it becomes harder to like, you know, be nice to them or
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  feel bad for them or something like that. Well, I'll just I'm gonna
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  briefly kind of summarize what he takes to be like the things that he's targeting,
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  because it is the locky and theory of selfwad but it's more than that,
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  right, So just putting it really briefly, he says, if you
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  go back through the history of European philosophical thought, and there's a lot of
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  implications that quote from this we can talk about later. He says, there
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  are kind of four candidates that are plausible for what the self happens to be.
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  You know, what makes you you if you want to call it that,
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  right, and put it really briefly, like the answers are the soul
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  is what makes you you, And that's really been very popular in Greek philosophy,
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  Christian philosophy. I could also call it Islamic philosophy as well. Right,
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  the soul is what makes you you. Then the second kind of like
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  candidate put forward is the body. The body is what makes you you.
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  Right, So because I have this body, you know, and there's a
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  lot of connotations to that, that's what makes me me. Right. Then
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  the third candidate, which he thinks is considerably more plausible because he just doesn't
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  think the soul or the body theories really have a lot of traction any longer.
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  For reasons we can discuss. But the third candidate is the brain.
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  Right, the brain is what makes me me right. So as long as
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  I have the same brain tomorrow that I do today, I'm still me right.
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  And there's some interesting insplications that we can dive into with that, Like
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  what if you mentioned you know what about real world came, Well, they're
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  people who have had, for instance, brain accidents or have part of the
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  brain removed, right, And then we'll client people around them will say,
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  well, you're a different person now, right. There's some interesting kind of
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  implications for that where you can actually test this theory. But the fourth candidate,
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  which he thinks is the strongest theory for reasons that we can unpack,
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  and he doesn't really talk about it that much in this paper, but it
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  comes out a lot more prominently in his book Reasons of Persons is like Ech
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  was saying the Lockean theory of self withod that it's my memories of being someone
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  yesterday and then the year before, and then the year before, and the
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  kind of psychological continuity between who I was then and who I am right now.
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  That makes me me right, So I am Matt mcmanness because I remember
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  being Matt macmadness at age ten and age one. Age two I don't remember.
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  I don't remember being Victory at age two. But by the way,
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  but I guess what I mean, there's the reason that in your life that
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  you would remember, of course, of course, but I guess that prevents
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  you from making those silly arguments like you die when you wake up and then
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  you're born each morning, or you die when you go to bed and then
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  you're reborn each morning when you wake up again. Psychological continuity was probably originally
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  meant to take on certain absurd conclusions like that, right, yeah, And
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  there are more sophisticated versions of this, right I mean. One of the
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  things that he points out is that obviously not everyone's a lockey in right it
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  thinks that we're tabia la rasa, and that our experiences are who makes us.
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  But he says, if you think about something I can't, right,
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  and the Cantean theory of selfhood, right, it's still experiential in a certain
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  sense, in that what determines who we think we are is a kind of
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  will that operates in tandem with a phenomenal world as it appeals to us.
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  Right, So it still has this kind of experiential component to it. But
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  he says, you know, what's starting to emerge with modern philosophy is European
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  philosophy, is this conviction that maybe the reason why we can't pin down what
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  the self is is because there just really is no self, right in a
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  strong sense of the word. You know, it's kind of an illusion,
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  was created, as it were, by language. Sometimes a very productive and
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  useful illusion, but nonetheless an illusion. Now perv It doesn't always go that
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  far, but he certainly flirts within in Reasons and Persons where he says,
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  actually, it's quite possible that the Buddhists might have had the right answer that,
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  in fact, one of our obligations as moral agents is to gradually do
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  away with this vision of the self and to recognize that there's a fundamental continuity
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  between who I think I am and everyone else. So I need adopt a
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  more kind of holistic ontology of the world than the kind of philosophy of the
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  subject that you see emphasized in conventional European thought. I mean, like intuitively.
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  That's correct. You clearly did some supplemental reading, because none of that
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  was in the article that we read today, So I wish I had read
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  the rest of it, but with this article today. The method by which
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  he takes this on, as most analytic philosophy does, is by starting with
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  an abstract af thought experiment that you have limited options out of a truth table,
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  and you can pick which when you like best. Except he goes through
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  all the ones that he doesn't like, gives you the reason why that they're
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  untenable, and then finally gets to his point at the end. But his
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  thought experiment is in our weird parallel reality that does not this one, but
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  his counterfactual reality. If you have a brain and you put your brain into
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  a new body, now no one would say, he says, no one
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  would say that you are a different person. That one's fine. However,
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  we can also cut your brain in half and put it into two different bodies.
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  Now we have a big question, are you Is your identity continued once
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  your brain is replaced into a new body? Is it both of those?
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  Is it one of those? Call them lefty and righty? For which left
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  and right? And it's also based on is it neither of those? So
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  you have three options to choose from. If you're talking about identity as continuity,
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  Are you now? Is are you dead and now exist in two places
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  at once, because that would be a restructuring of identity or is it not
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  an identity or is it yes identity? So he goes through these plit identity.
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  Yeah, So he goes through these three options and gives a whole bunch
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  of silly examples, like and I don't I don't actually mean silly as in
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  stupid here. Other parts are stupid, but silly is like if you had
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  if you could split your own corpus colosum in half while you're writing a math
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  exam, and then you could have each half of your brain right half of
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  the math exam, you'd be done twice as fast, and then you could
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  reunify your identity after would that actually be identity? So yeah, and you
• 15:37
  could watch your left hand do the do the work that like you're not actually
• 15:41
  doing if you're on the left on the right half, and like, how
• 15:43
  weird. So it was, it was, but it is worth mentioning that,
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  like and he mentions this an article, right, there's like some cases
• 15:50
  of people who survive where like half their brain was obliterated. So it's like,
• 15:54
  yes, it's it's obviously like a ridiculous example, but it's not.
• 15:56
  It's not based on nothing. It's based on the fact that, like,
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  resumably you could survive with half a brain. This is actually cool though.
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  Okay, so it's not you survive with half a brain in that example,
• 16:04
  because it used to be a cure for epilepsy to actually sever exactly the corpus
• 16:10
  colossum. And there's some funny stories I've heard that we're not in here,
• 16:12
  but like people would be choosing an outfit to wear that day who had their
• 16:18
  their brains severed from our one half to the other, and they would pick
• 16:21
  an outfit with their internal narratives saying, I want to wear this because I
• 16:25
  like it because it's blue. But then their other hand would pick a different
• 16:29
  outfit and put it on the one that they didn't want to put on.
• 16:33
  So it was like there's two sides of their brain navigating for captain of the
• 16:37
  ship, and one side wins out and the other side wins out. But
• 16:41
  it's not always the conscious side that wins out in these experiments. But nevertheless,
• 16:45
  well, okay, I just wanted to kind of situate this in context,
• 16:48
  right, because I mentioned there are kind of four candidates and gives for
• 16:52
  what with self would be his mind in European philosophy. There might be other
• 16:56
  candidates, and some people have argued that, but those are the four big
• 16:59
  ones he thinks, right, and interesting. He never really deals with the
• 17:03
  soul view, right. He kind of just says, nobody really believes and
• 17:07
  souls in the sense that Plato does or you know, Tate Augustine did anymore.
• 17:10
  So we can kind of put that aside, right, And then there's
• 17:12
  some people who might criticize him for that, you know, theologian, But
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  he says, you know, the body of view is sometimes popular, but
• 17:18
  inherently and he wrote another paper on this, right, not very attractive,
• 17:21
  since we wouldn't want to say, for instance, that if my hand was
• 17:23
  chopped off, or my legs were chopped off, or even if I was
• 17:26
  dismembered, that I disappeared, right, So you can take away fifty percent
• 17:30
  of my body and in a certain sense we might say I am still there.
• 17:34
  Right, And so the kind of stronger version of a physicalist argument,
• 17:38
  right, a kind of good scientific materialist argument is that, okay, so
• 17:41
  it's not the body that makes you you, right, or at least not
• 17:45
  most of your body, it's the brain. Right. And the kind of
• 17:48
  point of this thought experiment is to act as a heuristic going back to the
• 17:52
  like Plato's allegory of the cave. Right, it's a thought experiment that get
• 17:55
  you think about this, because he says, well, what about the brain
• 17:59
  generates selfhood? Right? Is it actually the brain that generates this sense of
• 18:03
  selfhood? And you know, he gives a more refined version of this thought
• 18:06
  experiment later on that doesn't evolve cut it in the brain and half wor he
• 18:08
  says, Okay, imagine I were to clone your body and then clone your
• 18:11
  brain, and this brain had all the same memories as the other brain,
• 18:15
  and I put it back in the same body. And then these two figures
• 18:18
  wake up and kind of go off on their own separate businesses. Right,
• 18:22
  they have the same body and they have the same brain. But as soon
• 18:25
  as one of them has a different experience than the other, we start to
• 18:29
  like to say that there's something distinct about them, that they're not the same
• 18:32
  person. Right, So thiscessarily says, well, maybe it's the locky in
• 18:36
  view that's more attractive, which is the conclusion that he reaches in this paper.
• 18:40
  So it's not the brain that makes me who I am, since it
• 18:41
  is possible for someone to have the same body and the same brain as me
• 18:47
  physically indistinguishable in respect, but not being me. It's the experiences that we
• 18:51
  have that make us who we are. And later on he criticizes this view
• 18:53
  as well. Right, But I think it's a pretty powerful argument as an
• 18:56
  intuition pumped, if you want to call it that, right, Because it
• 19:00
  does seem to me that even if somebody had my body in my brain,
• 19:03
  if he goes out marry someone else, you know, decides to become a
• 19:07
  fucking gamer, you know, YouTube gamer rather than a critical theory podcaster,
• 19:12
  you know, and he sits there talking about World of Warcraft or fucking whatever
• 19:15
  they're playing nowadays, you know all day long that he's a different person than
• 19:19
  me, Right, I mean I think that's pretty possible. Yeah, I
• 19:25
  mean it makes sense to me because in our day and age too, like
• 19:30
  you have all these identities on Facebook, and people who set themselves up as
• 19:33
  these as these personal or these public intellectuals and you're trying to figure out who
• 19:38
  somebody is, and we all talk about you know, you're not the person
• 19:41
  that you sort of put out online. You're you're something else. Your identity
• 19:45
  is is somewhere else. It's not there. You can't like represent it,
• 19:48
  you can't summarize it, you can't make a list of things. And so
• 19:52
  it's like identity is always obviously already a kind of slippery concept. But I
• 19:57
  tried to look for some stuff. Maybe someone can suggest if there's anything out
• 20:02
  there, because their parfit basically takes the opposite view of I mean, he
• 20:08
  starts with by going against the opposite view of the embodied mind theorists, if
• 20:14
  you're into like philosophy of mind, who already start with the assumption that your
• 20:18
  mind is not confined to your brain, but it's actually distributed throughout your brain,
• 20:25
  your body, and your environment and all of the social and psychological connections
• 20:30
  that you have with it. And so it's more of a the You could
• 20:33
  call it distributed cognition, you could call it the embodied mind or the extended
• 20:37
  mind theory. And I'm interested if these people have ever confronted or if there's
• 20:44
  been any clashes between Parfit's starting point and like the way that these people take
• 20:48
  for a start. Well, I had the same I had the same like
• 20:51
  question too, because as someone who's like very influenced by Mary let Ponti,
• 20:53
  I obviously have sympathies to like the embodied mind. But I guess, like
• 20:57
  the conclusion I kind of came to was that they're not really talking about the
• 21:00
  same question because like I think, like, I don't think identity and embodied
• 21:06
  mind are necessarily the same thing. I think the I think the embodied mind
• 21:10
  like it still runs into similar problems. I think Matt kind of touched on
• 21:12
  them before with like, you know, if you take away because I don't
• 21:17
  think identity is the same as like a theory of what the mind is,
• 21:21
  Like, I think those are two separate questions. But I don't know if
• 21:22
  I like, I think, yeah, so I don't know if they would
• 21:25
  actually necessarily have anything in principle. I mean, when I was reading the
• 21:29
  article, obviously I had a problem with the thought experiment because of someone who
• 21:33
  does like like is convinced by the embodied mind theory. I was like,
• 21:37
  well, this idea that you could put a half a brain into a different
• 21:38
  body like it's ridiculous, it's incoherent with like everything that I that I've learned
• 21:42
  from, like Mary la pontin phenomenology. But but I was like, that
• 21:45
  doesn't really matter because it's just the thought experiment. Like it's like the question
• 21:51
  is broader about like how do we change like over time? Like how am
• 21:55
  I the same person? Where can I locate a self? Is different than
• 21:59
  I think a theory of cognition. While we're on this, I mean,
• 22:03
  okay, so his identity is basically means something like what do you call I
• 22:08
  when you say here's me versus the rest of the world. But since you
• 22:11
  brought it up, could you explain how merleu Ponte's embodied phenomenology would differ from
• 22:18
  this so he could at least put that aside, because as soon as he
• 22:22
  started talking about cutting up brains and putting them in bodies, that's every merleu
• 22:26
  Pontian's response. That was my response immediately, Well, okay, but since
• 22:30
  I name dropped it. Merleu Ponti French phenomenologist, quick summary is you can't
• 22:37
  just take a brain out of its substrate and transfer it wherever you want and
• 22:41
  think that its habits its reality, its identity can just be translated one to
• 22:47
  one when it's moved, because the medium, the body, is the thing
• 22:52
  that creates the world and its meaning and how to interpret and navigate it.
• 22:56
  Anyway, Victor, I wondered if you could explain that position a little more
• 23:00
  well, I think, I mean, I think that like the main response,
• 23:03
  I mean, I could get into the weeds here, but I'll try,
• 23:04
  I hopefully come up with like a concise, uh like explanation. But
• 23:08
  I think the basic idea, like of of an embodied subjectivity is just that
• 23:12
  you can't like that, you you have to notice the way, like so
• 23:17
  much of our perception and our and our experience of the world is actually like
• 23:21
  an emergent property of our entire like embodied engagement with the world, and so
• 23:25
  much of what we are is a result of that embodied engagement. Like just
• 23:27
  for one, like one kind of simple example would be, you know,
• 23:32
  like you you're looking at a rock wall. Let's say you're like a rock
• 23:34
  climber or not a rock climber. This is an example I think maryla Ponty
• 23:37
  uses right, and like how the world solicits you to it, not because
• 23:41
  of like some cognitive judgment that you're doing rational judgment, but because of the
• 23:45
  way your body as like what Mary Leponti calls the body schema, has been
• 23:49
  at tuned. So like you know, if you're a rock climber, that
• 23:52
  rock wall is gonna solicit your engagement with it. It's gonna pull you in.
• 23:56
  You're gonna see opportunities for engagement that have that are directly related to how
• 24:00
  your body's been attuned, as opposed to some mental rational judgment where you're like,
• 24:04
  I could put my hand there. It's it's much less cognitive. I
• 24:07
  guess, like our our entire subjectivity in the world. Then I think,
• 24:11
  you know, classical theories that want to locate all of cognition in the mind,
• 24:15
  they kind of forget the role that the body has in in I guess
• 24:18
  what we are. But then like to bring it back to parfit, I
• 24:22
  don't know, like I don't I like, so he's making these these these
• 24:26
  claims. But if you moved one brain into a different body, like I
• 24:30
  think the consequence of holding like a more Marile Pontine view would be that that
• 24:36
  just like isn't possible somehow, because like the the it's it's like the entire
• 24:41
  experience of cognition like depends on the entire kind of central nervous system and the
• 24:45
  body and all of those things. And like I guess, hype the idea
• 24:49
  would be that, like you could just put a brain into another body,
• 24:52
  because the whole system works as one thing. I think what you would see,
• 24:56
  what you would say is something like if the brain and even survive,
• 25:00
  that the experience of it would be so traumatic that it wouldn't be recognizable as
• 25:07
  the same system. So to think that you are in your brain, and
• 25:11
  if you just moved your brain to a new body, and this is a
• 25:15
  Hubert Dreyfus's argument against putting your brain into a computer. If you put you
• 25:19
  just transferred your brain into a computer, everything that you're used to about being
• 25:25
  in the world, about experiencing like even a rock wall as an object of
• 25:29
  climbing, if you had a different physical medium, that experience would be so
• 25:33
  traumatic that if your brain didn't just die of shock, it would have a
• 25:37
  serious, long rehabilitation to go through before that could even be recognizable as a
• 25:44
  functional brain. Again, Yeah, because I figured out we should read that
• 25:48
  article for a future episode the Treyfus that would be a fun one. And
• 25:51
  just before we get into the Parfit stuff again, just to add on to
• 25:55
  that, I think if we can all sort of readily agree that identity is
• 25:59
  a fiction to some degree, it's something we build, it's something we construct,
• 26:02
  it's something of ourselves that we project into the world. And I think
• 26:07
  the difference here is sort of the material out of which that is constructed.
• 26:11
  And if it's some kind of full holistic not just brain, but body and
• 26:18
  soul and community and environmental relations, then that's the material out of which you
• 26:22
  construct an identity. And so even if we can all readily agree that identity
• 26:27
  is a fiction, the material maybe is a little bit different what we see
• 26:30
  goes into identity. And then the second thing is Parfit considers identity is not
• 26:36
  important, which is another sort of contentious point because people do invest a lot
• 26:41
  of importance in their identity. And his argument is almost I mean, he
• 26:45
  lays this out right at the beginning of the article, so I'm not really
• 26:48
  jumping ahead, but he just really says that if you think that all these
• 26:52
  important moral value questions turn on what is identity, or that you have an
• 26:56
  identity, then you're wrong. You shouldn't consider ident need to be important in
• 27:00
  these moral questions. We can answer these questions without getting into the identity question,
• 27:07
  because the identity question, as he shows through the use of these teletransportation
• 27:12
  and brain hemisphere ectomy examples, is an undecidable he'll claim. He says,
• 27:18
  it's just something that we cannot decide. And that's the only purpose that he
• 27:22
  uses these weird examples for us to show that you can't expect a clear answer
• 27:27
  about who would be whom? Where would identity goless situation? You can never
• 27:32
  ever expect a clear answer to that. So let's set that aside and then
• 27:36
  get to the moral questions, and then we'll find that even identity here is
• 27:40
  not important for moral questions and value questions. Yeah, and this is actually
• 27:45
  what I just wanted to say, because I do think actually the phenomenological objection
• 27:48
  is a good one, and it's something that he spent a fair amount of
• 27:51
  time on. So, for instance, there have been some critics who contended
• 27:53
  that he undervalues the importance of the body for a theory of selfhood, and
• 27:57
  he gives another kind of less we say eccentric thought experiment where he says,
• 28:02
  well, imagine there was somebody who's frontal whose rebral cortex was offentially non functioning,
• 28:08
  but most of their brain was still operational and was able to maintain their
• 28:11
  fundamental bodily functions. So they were hooked up to a machine in a hospital.
• 28:15
  You know, most of their brain was active, it was keeping their
• 28:18
  body going. They're being fed through a tube, but it was very clear
• 28:22
  that the cuba cortex was never going to function again. Even though ninety percent
• 28:26
  of the brain was working. We would still probably say that and the body
• 28:30
  was still intact, that that person was gone, right, that they were
• 28:33
  effectively no longer there. And what he kind of pretends on this basis is
• 28:38
  that we need to distinguish between processes of cognition, right, or what the
• 28:42
  brain does. And as Victor would put it, in a theory of identity,
• 28:47
  right, who I am? My account of self food? Right?
• 28:49
  And he says that one of the difficulties that we find again in European philosophy
• 28:53
  is this notion of selfhood has been so centralized that most people aren't really even
• 28:57
  able to consider processes of cognition independent of some account of selfhood. Right.
• 29:03
  This is kind of the Carkhesian ghost that haunts us, all right, this
• 29:07
  notion that whatever it is that I'm conscious of, there has to be a
• 29:11
  me that's conscious, and there has to be a me that is engaging in
• 29:15
  cognitive processes. Right, So, right, And what I want to get
• 29:18
  at is, again, it's not like he's trying to argue that phenomenology is
• 29:23
  wrong, right, it's version of the self is wrong. What he's contending
• 29:26
  is that there really is no version of the self, right, that we
• 29:30
  really need to morally emphasize. And I'll get it very briefly into his teletransportation
• 29:33
  argument, because that's I think also a really interesting one that I'm sure your
• 29:37
  pills will be really pissed off about. Right. But he says, you
• 29:40
  know, think about it like this. You know, the last candidate standing
• 29:42
  is this locke in theory of the self a personal identity, right, that
• 29:45
  I am my memories, right, that you can put my brain into another
• 29:49
  person's body. But as long as I wake up remembering that I am me,
• 29:53
  I still am me. Right, And he says, think about it
• 29:57
  like this, right. Imagine you know, you're going into a teletransporter and
• 30:02
  your body is essentially cloned on Mars, and you wake up and you see
• 30:06
  on the screen this other person with your memories on Mars. But then the
• 30:11
  person who's running the telettransportation machine says, we're We're really sorry to tell you
• 30:15
  this, but your body is going to dissolve right now. You're going to
• 30:18
  die and be destroyed. But don't worry. You know you're still alive,
• 30:22
  right, you know, there's this person with your body, with your brain
• 30:25
  and your memories carrying on on Mars, right, And Parfitt says that would
• 30:30
  probably not be of a lot of comfort to me as the original person,
• 30:33
  because my body, brain, and memories are still going to be destroyed even
• 30:37
  though they live on in this other person's kind of like the Prestige the movie
• 30:41
  The Prestige. Yeah, exactly right, And he says, this goes to
• 30:42
  show you that even the lockey in memory theory of the self is subject to
• 30:47
  this very serious problem, right, because it doesn't even seem like memories give
• 30:51
  us a theory of the self the way that we want to. And there
• 30:53
  are people who try to recover it or argue from you know, well,
• 30:56
  there are different ways of kind of resuscitating on this base. But the conclusion
• 31:00
  he makes is that we should just drop the whole idea of selfhood for the
• 31:03
  most part entirely and move on prioritizing different things, since it just leads to
• 31:07
  all kinds of paradoxical situations that can never be resolved. But paradoxically, when
• 31:12
  you say European, you're basically meaning the intellectualist tradition of European exactly, not
• 31:19
  the actual phenomenological tradition that I mean. I guess it would be questionable whether
• 31:26
  he encountered hide grow or something like that. It doesn't. I don't.
• 31:30
  I don't think that. I don't think that any any I don't think that
• 31:32
  most continental theorists like that I can think of would. I feel like most
• 31:37
  would have the same reaction that Pills had, you know, would be like,
• 31:41
  well, I agree with the conclusion, like like this is this seems
• 31:42
  right? Like yeah, that the self is an illusion. It's not.
• 31:45
  It doesn't have a stable kind of you know, like a kernel of like
• 31:51
  objective reality. It's kind of a fiction. I think that most continental metaphysics
• 31:55
  kind of assumes that, or even or even psycho psychoanalysis does, likebernetics says
• 32:01
  that it's an Anglo tradition. I would say that he would I think you
• 32:05
  would say. In fact, I know you would say, because he talks
• 32:07
  about this in his other three volume book, right that yes, you know.
• 32:09
  And in fact, he references Hidiger and Nietzsche by saying that the intuitive
• 32:13
  elements of this argument, although they put it less systematically than they he did
• 32:16
  in his big book Reasons as Persons, but he says, the interesting thing
• 32:20
  about it is they never actually draw out the moral implications of what they're saying
• 32:23
  talking about, right, I mean, if you think about Nietzsche, right,
• 32:27
  Nietzsche says, you know, in a certain sense, our moral task
• 32:30
  is to become who we are, right, become who we truly are.
• 32:32
  Tidigger says, we have to live authentically. Right. So, even though
• 32:36
  they are critical of certain aspects of the notion of personal identity, they can't
• 32:39
  think of a moral way of evaluating the world without reintegrating some vision of selfhood
• 32:45
  and prioritizing it in their outlooks. Right, And he says, you know,
• 32:51
  this is really true. If you look at a lot of continental theory,
• 32:52
  which we've talked about before, everyone stresses in some way, shape or
• 32:55
  form, emancipation. Right, And part of it would say if you really
• 33:00
  don't believe in the South, then the only response to that is emancipation for
• 33:01
  who for what right? There's no one left to be emancipated, So we
• 33:07
  need to do away with all this rhetoric. Just to summarize a little bit
• 33:10
  where we're at. If you appeal to something like the social contract theory of
• 33:15
  society, then it's a society that's made it's an aggregate made of a bunch
• 33:22
  of individuals, autonomous individuals. Each autonomous individual is thus going to have opinions,
• 33:29
  and they're going to be seeking their self interest and they're going to be
• 33:30
  trying to weigh in on politics in the way that best serves them. So
• 33:36
  this whether or not there's an individual at the center of this matters quite a
• 33:43
  lot. So we have this guy's version of it, which is essentially positivist.
• 33:49
  In the end, it's like, what do we call the thing that
• 33:52
  everybody thinks is themselves? And then we have I mean, we'll get to
• 33:55
  this at the end instead of right now. But there's a lot of their
• 34:00
  explanations for this. I think I mentioned systems theory, mentioned cybernetics, even
• 34:07
  even just the intercebjectivity of language. I think speaks to this being like,
• 34:12
  it's not it's not just what the eye thinks of itself that creates itself.
• 34:16
  There's a whole bunch of interpellative or intersubjective, including language itself, is evidence
• 34:22
  of the fact that these different individuals exist. But do we want to go
• 34:25
  through a few more of his arguments about why that's not? Because he's he
• 34:31
  loves the freaking thought experiments. What if you combined with another person, would
• 34:37
  your beliefs cancel out? If if you are a conservative and I'm a liberal
• 34:42
  and we combined our consciousnesses, would we just cancel out the beliefs and have,
• 34:46
  like you, a political a politically and different person at the end of
• 34:50
  it, become a floating voter if you if you're if you're one side votes
• 34:54
  labor, one side votes conservative or something. He also says, I don't
• 34:58
  like gingers, which I thought was weird to put in. Yeah, so
• 35:01
  either elements of the two parts would cancel each other out, or some kind
• 35:06
  of middle ground, like if one was stronger than the other, or some
• 35:09
  kind of like middle ground would reach would be reached if they're equally as strong.
• 35:14
  And so if you like chocolate ice cream, in the other side that
• 35:17
  you're being fused with, like vanilla ice cream, you might like chocolate swirl
• 35:22
  after that, if you could find some kind of fucking middle ground product that'll
• 35:27
  that'll replace your identity God, just like you know this this art reading this
• 35:31
  article like as a as a Treky, like a Star Trek fan, especially
• 35:35
  of like the Next Generation Deep Space nine, Like there's a couple episodes that,
• 35:37
  like speak are exactly to this. Like there's a there's a there's an
• 35:42
  alien species called the Trill where they have this like this like kind of like
• 35:46
  pair. I guess it's not parasitic relationship. It's more of a symbiosis where
• 35:52
  they have a symbiant that like gets passed from humanoid which is more like a
• 35:55
  human to human like up generations, but the simp symbiote lives like thousands of
• 36:00
  years and it gets passed from person to person and it keeps all of the
• 36:05
  memories of all the previous bodies that it was in and then like and there's
• 36:08
  like an episode where I think one of the characters gets the symbiote and then
• 36:12
  like her her like opinions about stuff changes, right, like she stops liking
• 36:15
  food, starts liking other foods because she's like taken in all these other previous
• 36:19
  memories. So yeah, I mean there's a lot of kind of like fodder,
• 36:22
  uh for like kind of stuff that's that's explored in Star Trek. Well,
• 36:25
  and actually, this is why I'm a bit surprised you didn't like this,
• 36:28
  Pells, because yeah, deluse like science fiction also for a reason,
• 36:31
  right, And this is one of the things that perfect foregrounds, right,
• 36:34
  which is wait, hold on, hold on. Just because person a prime
• 36:38
  and person a one reference science fiction thought experiments in philosophy does not mean that
• 36:45
  person a prime and person a one maintained the same ce preference for fiction thought
• 36:50
  experiments to equal state of affairs, one in which philosophy and science fiction experiments
• 36:54
  are both the same thing. No, no, I know, but I
• 36:57
  mean this is what I'm like too. The thing about it is that these
• 37:00
  kind of heuristic devices that you see developed in great science fiction are really useful
• 37:06
  for thinking through these problems in a concrete way that's also digestible and understandable to
• 37:10
  people. So I'll go back to the kind of argument he makes about the
• 37:13
  tele of transportation argument. Right, So a lot of you I know what
• 37:16
  we all kind of are critical of this idea, possessive individualism. Right,
• 37:21
  so it has its roots in locky and philosophy, amongst others. Right,
• 37:23
  if you follow cp McPherson's idea, right, and you know, possessive individualism
• 37:28
  is essentially the idea that what matters is that I own myself and it's important
• 37:34
  that I own myself because what I want are to have the kind of experiences
• 37:37
  that are valuable to me in life, right, which means I want toccumulate
• 37:42
  resources in order to have the kind of experiences that I want in life,
• 37:45
  and so on and so forth. And importantly doesn't it mean you own the
• 37:47
  products of your labor of your body as well? Like you own your body,
• 37:52
  and you own the products of the labor of your body, like Locke
• 37:55
  talks about, when you join your labor to something, it becomes yours.
• 38:00
  And this is actually something that's shared by Locke and even people like Margal exact
• 38:05
  exactly. You own the labor of your body. So it's not like this
• 38:07
  is a weird thing he's picking out a strange corner of philosophy. It's quite
• 38:12
  exactly. And it puts up that like sometimes Locke actually puts this or Locky
• 38:15
  ins like, Hi, I put this in almost bodily terms, right,
• 38:20
  that my property is almost a part of me if you think about, you
• 38:23
  know, legal personhood, right, What I own and who I am can
• 38:28
  sometimes become very indistinguishable, right, because they're so inextricably entwined in the philosophy
• 38:32
  of possessive individualism. Right, and the teletransportation thought experiment Star Trek y as
• 38:37
  it is, is meant to show you. Look, even this idea that
• 38:40
  you are your memories or your experiences that lock for grounds so importantly doesn't really
• 38:45
  hold water, right, because somebody can be there with your body, your
• 38:50
  brain, your memories and not be you fundamentally right, they're on Mars going
• 38:54
  off living your life with all that, but they're not who you are.
• 38:58
  Well, quickly, can I just say there is actually a Star Trek episode
• 39:00
  where like a Rightker you're nine, right, there's a transporter accident where he's
• 39:06
  like he's like he's on some planet and then he gets transported up and like
• 39:10
  leaves and everything's fine, but it turns out there's like an accident and a
• 39:14
  fluctuation and a copy of Riker stays on the planet and get ends up being
• 39:17
  stuck there for like twenty years or they and then they find him, like
• 39:22
  or it's fifteen years later, and then they both confront each other and they're
• 39:24
  both very different people. And his ex girlfriend is basically like, I like
• 39:28
  the younger version of you better. Well, he's not younger, he's the
• 39:30
  same age he's like, but he's still like stuck in the old past,
• 39:34
  right because his career didn't move on. He's just been stuck on this planet
• 39:37
  the whole time. Yeah, And I mean, one of the things that
• 39:38
  he says that I think is really interesting is it's not like he's saying Proper
• 39:43
  was a very humble guy in a lot of ways that this is a really
• 39:45
  novel argument right where he says, look, you know, there are various
• 39:49
  kinds of European philosophers that anticipated this, Nietzsche and Heidiger amongst them, with
• 39:53
  the kind of anti essentialist account of the self. He also points out that
• 39:58
  this was put forward a lot more forcefully and things like Buddhism. Right again,
• 40:00
  this idea that it self is illusion that we need to overcome. But
• 40:04
  he says the problem with European philosophers is they never are willing to accept the
• 40:07
  moral implications of what they're talking about. So you could even see him as
• 40:10
  giving a kind of Nietzsche and critique of Nietzsche right where he says, you
• 40:14
  know, Nietzsche again argues that the point of life is to become who I
• 40:17
  truly am. Right, Heideger has to rescigrect some idea of selfhood by talking
• 40:22
  about authenticity, right, many left wing philosophers have to argue about emancipation for
• 40:28
  self creation. Right, and he says these are still too beholden to the
• 40:31
  philosophy of possessive individualism. And it shows you how stringent a hold it has
• 40:37
  on our imagination, right, that no European philosopher, even those that critique
• 40:39
  the idea of the self, can think of a way of thinking of imagining
• 40:45
  what's important without the self or some kind of self adjacent concept, right.
• 40:50
  And in his later work he says, that's what I'm going to try to
• 40:52
  do. I'm going to try to come up with a kind of moral theory
• 40:54
  that is not really tied to selfhood right at all, which, as it
• 40:59
  turns out, is a really difficult thing to do, since, of course
• 41:01
  then you have to ask well, who is it that's being moral and on
• 41:05
  behalf of what right? Which is the problem we spent three thousand pages unconvincingly
• 41:09
  try to answer, I should say, very unconvincingly, well can I?
• 41:15
  But quickly can I? Can? I just say, like to the to
• 41:16
  the point about you know, I think it's it's interesting because it's making me
• 41:20
  think of our our anarchy episode which Eric wasn't here for but the rest of
• 41:23
  us were, and like chaos. I think, doesn't that that that argument
• 41:28
  for anarchism of that particular book kind of seem to depend on a very narrow
• 41:31
  definition of autonomy that I think is maybe somewhat comparable to this like very narrow
• 41:37
  definition of selfhood that doesn't really make sense to me. And like, I
• 41:39
  think that's one of the problems that I had with the Anarchy book is like
• 41:43
  this, like this strict definition of autonomy, it's like what do we It's
• 41:46
  kind of illusory, and then it's like you're making room for something when really
• 41:50
  what matters, I think is like our social relations and our cooperation with others.
• 41:53
  And I think to some extent there's something analogous here where it's like,
• 41:57
  really what matters is not like some strict stable identity that I can locate,
• 42:00
  but it's really like the life processes and like the kind of different I think
• 42:06
  he calls it degrees right of continuity, degrees of connectedness, Like all these
• 42:09
  things are really what matters. And I think that there's something compelling about that
• 42:13
  for sure. And I just want to offer one kind of all a branch
• 42:16
  to Eric, because I think you might actually really like this, because one
• 42:19
  of the things that he says is once you start to abandon, really abandon
• 42:22
  the philosophy of possessive individualism, right, and realize that the self is not
• 42:27
  what matters, and that the disconnect I draw very sharply as a European thinker
• 42:31
  between myself and everyone else starts to become blurred. I realized that my obligations
• 42:37
  stem far beyond just towards the human It stends towards things like future generations,
• 42:45
  right, those who continue on above me. It also extends to non human
• 42:47
  animals, because the disconnect I draw between myself and human animals also starts to
• 42:52
  break down. There's some people, if you argued, it even applies to
• 42:54
  the environment, right, The notion that myself should be prioritized over other on
• 43:00
  cognitive a cognate living things might be problematic right now. He doesn't spot out
• 43:06
  all of these implications in the book, because I mean, it was already
• 43:07
  doing a lot. But he says, you know, this seems to at
• 43:12
  least have an elective affinity with what I'm saying, right that once we get
• 43:15
  rid of the self as the locus of what matters, there's all kinds of
• 43:19
  interesting possibilities that open up. One of the most obvious ones again when he
• 43:22
  talks about future generations, is if I'm not what matters purely and exclusively,
• 43:27
  why should I prioritize myself over somebody who might exist five six, seven,
• 43:31
  eight, nine, ten generations from now right, which, if you really
• 43:36
  think about it, has some pretty fucking weird implications, right Yeah, if
• 43:40
  I can, if I can take your olive branch and stick it up my
• 43:44
  bum for a second, I think that I do appreciate, like some aspects
• 43:50
  of Derek Parfitt's argument, like my little caricature of like we are all rational
• 43:54
  individuals in a marketplace of ideas, making rational decisions day and day, Like
• 44:00
  that doesn't apply to him because he doesn't think that we are rational individuals because
• 44:05
  for him, you know, rationality is one of the basis for sort of
• 44:09
  self interest because you think, well, if I'm me and what's rational is
• 44:15
  that I have self interest in me, then I'm going to do things also
• 44:19
  for my future self because that will be me as well. And so what
• 44:22
  I should do now should either be you know, immediately beneficial or beneficial to
• 44:27
  me somewhere down the road. And insofar as my progeny also carries on my
• 44:32
  sorts of projects in life, then I should also. And it creates these
• 44:37
  like insular It creates this insularity around this idea of rational egoism, and he's
• 44:43
  trying to break that. So I do appreciate that, and the and the
• 44:45
  vistas this kind of opens up, well, what if we're not just connected
• 44:49
  with other human beings, what if there's connectedness with other non humans as well,
• 44:52
  and environments and ecosystems. So I mean, I mean, I am,
• 44:57
  I'm pregnant with the possibilities. But but the way he just articulates all
• 45:04
  of this in this first paper, which is really all I've read of Parfit,
• 45:07
  there's just certain things that get to me. I mean, one just
• 45:13
  simple analogy that I come up with is that you know, he treats identity
• 45:19
  like the view that he's sort of arguing against, as really just like a
• 45:22
  bunch of links in a chain, when maybe we should really think of identity
• 45:27
  more as like a twined rope with many, many strands, so that it's
• 45:30
  not simply as weak as the weakest link. It's more like a bound,
• 45:36
  fibrous thread that stretches across time, and some of those connections can be severed.
• 45:42
  Well, I mean, I don't think that's actually an analogy that is
• 45:45
  completely out of sorts. He just doesn't think of it, but not here
• 45:49
  anyway. But so I do appreciate various things that he sends here. I'm
• 45:53
  curious. I'm curious actually to you Pills, you know, like, let
• 45:58
  maybe it's worth bringing up what is what do you find so objectionable about the
• 46:02
  method? And is it and would you say that it's purely an esthetic objection
• 46:07
  or do you think that there's philosophical consequences that you are opposed to that that
• 46:12
  follow from this this kind of method. Uh No, it's a linguistic objection,
• 46:15
  mainly because when he says we should do away with the concept of the
• 46:20
  self and I appreciate Matt making us all charitable to this, because I think
• 46:24
  it's some of it is silly. I'll give you that. Like the second
• 46:28
  I read stuff like this, my brain goes into like critique mode where I'm
• 46:31
  looking at every line going fuck this, fuck this, look this, look
• 46:34
  this. But I read the entire thing front to back, gritting my teeth,
• 46:40
  and I appreciate what's being said here. But what's really being said when
• 46:45
  we should do away with the concept of the self is we should do away
• 46:49
  with the language of the self and the process of self identification, which is
• 46:54
  only one very small aspect of the self. But this is what logical positive
• 46:59
  ism is about. It's playing language games with thought, experiments with words with
• 47:05
  variables, and making graphs and shit like that. So we can say,
• 47:09
  find that there's some continuity with other thinkers that we need to do away with
• 47:14
  the language of the self. But when you're referring to those other thinkers,
• 47:17
  a lot of what they say Nietzsche included is you do have self interest,
• 47:23
  but the self interest is not derived from one single kernel. Self interest is
• 47:30
  one drive among many that makes up sort of a chaotic mass that comes to
• 47:35
  be identified as the self, and the identification is really important because whether or
• 47:39
  not you think that self exists, it does at least as a word,
• 47:45
  at least as an identification that people in basically every language say I as the
• 47:50
  subject of a sentence. So it just exists on that ground alone. Now,
• 47:54
  the question that's being asked here is what does this self refer to?
• 48:00
  And he kind of says it refers to nothing, which I think is really
• 48:05
  wrong, because if you're doing that, then all the insights of critical theory
• 48:08
  that we usually talk about on this show is that you don't just make decisions
• 48:14
  about yourself. You're in a world of systems where other things make decisions about
• 48:20
  you too. You're a criminal or you're like an upstanding citizen or whatever,
• 48:25
  or even identity politics more properly, when we're talking about like systems of institutionalized
• 48:32
  racism or something like that. That's not you deciding that I'm not a self
• 48:37
  or I am a self. That's something else that makes a decision about you.
• 48:42
  And we can talk about state apparatuss and ideological state apparatuss. So to
• 48:46
  say let's get a rid of the language of the self, I mean,
• 48:51
  even if that were a valid goal, that we could just decide in a
• 48:54
  philosophy paper and publish it that everyone should stop saying the word doesn't make the
• 49:00
  word go away. And it also allides what the other interpretations of the self
• 49:06
  is, which really do have large consequences in every system that you interact with,
• 49:12
  because the world isn't the way that you describe it using your logical language.
• 49:15
  The world is a whole bunch of power systems, competition, and different
• 49:22
  ways of processing information. Really, all this is to say is that just
• 49:28
  because the word doesn't refer to the same thing through every one of your thought
• 49:31
  experiments doesn't mean it doesn't refer to anything at all. If it makes me
• 49:37
  feel better. I criticize them for exactly this in my first book, Making
• 49:39
  Human Digny Central International Law, like basically saying, you know, there's really
• 49:44
  no critical account of society in any of this. It's a very philosophical,
• 49:50
  like big p philosophical argument. Then only an Oxford philosopher could come up with,
• 49:53
  right, since it's kind of dissociated from the broader world. And like,
• 49:57
  I completely agree that parts of this are really kind very silly, hyper
• 50:00
  intellectualized, and you kind of ask yourself like what's the cash value in my
• 50:07
  normal life? You know what I mean? How when I go about criticizing
• 50:09
  actually existent institutions of repression and domination on this basis. But I do think
• 50:15
  in his later books, I don't want to get too much into this because
• 50:17
  they're fucking long. He does actually have an argument for this right, where
• 50:21
  he says, look, you know, part of the problem is that possessive
• 50:22
  individualism, like Eric was saying, tends to lead us to think that the
• 50:27
  thing that I should be doing, essentially is looking after me. And there's
• 50:30
  a theory of selfhood that's built into this, right, which is that I'm
• 50:34
  looking after me now because I expect that in the future future me is going
• 50:37
  to be better off, and I look forward to making future me into somebody
• 50:43
  who's wealthier, more powerful, et cetera, et cetera. And this creates
• 50:45
  a kind of ideological environment where people engauge in competition to try to improve their
• 50:50
  situatedness, or at best, the situatedness of their next of kin. Right,
• 50:54
  you know that my children will carry on my project of self aggrandizement me
• 51:00
  Right, And he says, actually, what we should be doing is dropping
• 51:02
  this kind of possessive individualist morality, whether in it's Nietzsche and slash Continental or
• 51:08
  liberal variance, and focusing on a kind of consequences. I like, yeah,
• 51:15
  And insofar as his theory is saying, you know, like like personal
• 51:21
  identity is not super important for certain moral questions or maybe all of them.
• 51:25
  Like I think I agree with him, but then I'm not gonna make that
• 51:29
  extra step and be like, so this is a good basis for utilitarianism,
• 51:32
  right, because then you get into utilitarianism and then it just turns into this
• 51:37
  strange zero sum game where it's like, you've got to produce more happiness,
• 51:42
  but if you have more people who are less happy, their happiness could still
• 51:45
  add up to more than less people who are more happy, So we should
• 51:50
  go with the more people who are less happy options. Like, it just
• 51:52
  becomes this weird like calculus of happiness and goodness, and I think that puts
• 51:58
  a lot of people off of the stuff because then that just seems very managerial,
• 52:02
  like you're training a class of people to go and run a society based
• 52:06
  on these views, and that's a little bit scary to me. But like
• 52:08
  I said, I do, like, you know, he's not gonna also
• 52:12
  take like the sort of neo conservative view that there is no such thing as
• 52:15
  society. It's just a collection of individual rational individuals. So I mean,
• 52:21
  I'm on the fence, which is okay because I'm not on the other side
• 52:25
  of the fence. I'm straddling. So what do you do when the cop
• 52:30
  says like put your hands up and get get up against the wall, and
• 52:34
  you're like, sorry, officer, I don't have a self. I'm not
• 52:37
  even here. I'm not You quickly saw off your arm and be like,
• 52:44
  see, I'm a different person now. I wasn't a criminal when I know
• 52:49
  my past self was a criminal when I was in prison. I am no
• 52:52
  longer. Can I come out now? It's funny, isn't isn't there like
• 52:54
  isn't there a part in like Jean Paul Sart like talks about like his account,
• 53:00
  it's just like you you know, there are no does he talk about
• 53:05
  the homosexual that there is no actual homosexual there's only like homosexual acts or something
• 53:08
  like that, like each each choice, each decision you make, or something
• 53:13
  like that. Well, see, that's like a perfect example actually, because
• 53:16
  Sara was talking in the context of existentialism and what you do is primary.
• 53:22
  But from Fucaut's history of sexuality, there was no such thing as sexual orientations
• 53:29
  until it was constructed as a social category. So you have some sense among
• 53:32
  the Greeks where it's something that some people do, and then it becomes a
• 53:37
  category of deviants under the Christian knowledge state, and then it's a psychiatric category,
• 53:43
  and today it's a state sanctioned category. Right. So it's not like
• 53:46
  there's a kernel of reality or gene that defines sexual orientation as identity. But
• 53:53
  clearly it's real, even if it's contiguent. Yeah, exactly exactly. But
• 53:57
  I think you know, but you raise an interesting question before pills just about
• 54:00
  like so what is the you know with the cop example? Right, Like
• 54:04
  obviously these words are are like playing some sort of a heuristic role, right,
• 54:08
  So like if we accept Parfit's account, which I think it's convincing by
• 54:13
  and large, So like, you know, what is the deviceive representation?
• 54:16
  When I say the deviceive representation, I mean like the word the self,
• 54:21
  Like what is it representing if there is no real self? You mean in
• 54:25
  that example, yeah, or just in general, like yeah, in the
• 54:30
  example or like in general, what's the what's the like kind of implication?
• 54:35
  He says, right at the end, he gave me a trigger word.
• 54:37
  Trigger word is the wrong word. He gave me a word that like put
• 54:40
  me onto what my answer to this would be if I were asked, because
• 54:45
  he says there is no underlying person who we both are referring to his past
• 54:50
  self and then his current self. And then he says, this is a
• 54:54
  decision. So decision for me references system theory, and in systems theory,
• 55:01
  it depends on which system at that moment, whether it's a like a social
• 55:07
  system, like a legal system, or whether it's a medical system like the
• 55:12
  doctor is diagnosing you. It depends on where you are in every single context
• 55:16
  what the self constitutes. So if it's a cop arresting you, the context
• 55:22
  there is whether or not you've done something legal or illegal, So then you're
• 55:25
  either a criminal or an innocent person being arrested. If you go to the
• 55:30
  doctor, you're not a full individual. You're just a body that's probably broken
• 55:36
  or needs to be improved in some way. If you're going to court,
• 55:39
  you're either I don't know, a plaintiff or being charged with something you know,
• 55:45
  So it depends on where you are in each intersubjective context, how the
• 55:49
  self is located. But I agree with him only on the fact that there
• 55:54
  is not one thing that goes through all those events as the same thing,
• 56:00
  except as the person who describes themselves as I. So that's valid, but
• 56:06
  it is almost a floating signifier in the sense that that saying I doesn't actually
• 56:12
  refer to all those instances. Right, So there is subjectivity then, right,
• 56:16
  as opposed to like, so there's no self that there is subject to
• 56:19
  pudjectivities. Yes, but subjectivity in the logical sense is really just almost grammatical,
• 56:28
  like something that can be a subject of knowledge, some subject which can
• 56:32
  be conserve as something you can predicate some other thing on, like you have
• 56:37
  to like obviously like a huge submerged portion of parfit that we're not bringing up
• 56:43
  here is in is in formal logic where he actually draws these arguments out and
• 56:49
  in like there are just basic logical categories A if A, then B,
• 56:53
  if B then C. So does that mean A is C as well?
• 56:57
  Like he like this is all that that's almost like the structure of his argument
• 57:01
  is these logical categories. But I was going to say in terms of systems
• 57:06
  theory, it would be interested in how interesting how this might cash out,
• 57:09
  because we've done episodes on like autopoesis a concept from systems theory about what gives
• 57:15
  a system sort of its identity across time and if identity for the Patreon,
• 57:20
  yeah, Patreon episodes. But if you are looking at systems, like what
• 57:25
  constitutes the identity of the system, how does it maintain its identity across time?
• 57:30
  And then at what point do we say that it's a different system.
• 57:34
  Now almost again with Parfit, it's almost like, I mean, we're not
• 57:37
  talking about persons now, we're talking about any sort of system, but it's
• 57:42
  the same sort of thing. Does identity matter there? He even gives a
• 57:45
  national identity example, like the nation considers itself continuous right from its founding to
• 57:52
  the present day, But is it really the same thing, like that's at
• 57:57
  each moment pick nineteen fifty and nineteen eighty. It's not really important for him
• 58:00
  whether it's the same or not, because again we're getting into the identity questions.
• 58:06
  Yeah, I should say he does have a very very thin account of
• 58:09
  selfhood where he basically says, you know that there's a kind of continuity that
• 58:15
  carries on that isn't necessarily psychological and might actually be invested in other people.
• 58:22
  But this is the kind of way that we describe the self using the language
• 58:27
  that we use. But you know, what I wanted to argue is that
• 58:29
  there are ways that you can respond to this, but most of them tend
• 58:31
  to actually take certain Parfitian objections on board. So in analytical philosophy of mind,
• 58:37
  there's kind of two broad schools of thought. Right, one is you
• 58:40
  know, materialism, if you want to call it that, and the other
• 58:45
  is some iteration of rational yeah, physicalism, right, And you know physicalism
• 58:52
  is usually associated with people like Dan Dennen, Right, you know, the
• 58:54
  argument that the mind just is the brain, the mind is what the brain
• 58:59
  does, say, And then you have people like David Chalmers, and then
• 59:01
  people like John Searle will say, well, no, consciousness is something that's
• 59:06
  different than the brain. It's kind of over and above the brain. It
• 59:09
  needs a brain in order to emerge, but you can't necessarily reduce suggest to
• 59:13
  its physical properties. Okay, don't want to get into all that because it's
• 59:15
  pretty complicated. But the kind of argument that they perfect influence this is by
• 59:21
  signifying that far too often in the history of European thought, we've kind of
• 59:24
  drawn this one to one relationship between consciousness and selfhood, right, that to
• 59:29
  be itself is just to be conscious. Right, And what both the physicalists
• 59:32
  and the rationalist if you want to call them back, kind of taken on
• 59:36
  board is the idea that actually identity is something that's not necessarily a stinct from
• 59:43
  consciousness, but can't be just drawn or we can't be just conflated with consciousness.
• 59:46
  Right, that the notion of the eye that we're all talking about,
• 59:50
  if we can speak about it at all, has to come from somewhere else,
• 59:52
  right then just the fact that we're conscious. And you know, Dannett
• 59:55
  has this interesting argument drawing upon profit, saying that it's kind of like a
• 59:59
  hologram that in plays as part of emergent physical properties that we call the mind.
• 1:00:04
  Right, this idea of the eye is a virtual thing. And Traumers
• 1:00:08
  has a different kind of argument in the same respect. But it's worth doting
• 1:00:12
  that none of them are willing to go back to this old argument that you
• 1:00:15
  would associate with something like intellectualism, right, which is that consciousness equals selfhood.
• 1:00:20
  And I think that really speaks the power of Parfit's arguments right, that
• 1:00:22
  they were stringent enough that they shifted the conversation in a pretty interesting new direction.
• 1:00:30
  So there's like, there's two sorts of things underpinning parfits argument against personal
• 1:00:36
  identity and why it doesn't matter, And one of them is what I'm looking
• 1:00:40
  at the I'm looking at some stuff on the rootligion encyclopedia of philosophy here,
• 1:00:45
  and so what we've been discussing so far with the fission fusion examples, separating
• 1:00:52
  brains, putting brains together, or whatever is called the diachronic thesis over time.
• 1:00:57
  And then he has his argument from reductism, which is another the second
• 1:01:02
  pillar, and reductionism is basically saying that you can describe reality that refers to
• 1:01:13
  bodies, and you can refer to your experiences, you can talk in other
• 1:01:15
  words, you can talk about the world without reference to person's personal identity,
• 1:01:22
  and in that sense it would be complete, it would leave nothing out of
• 1:01:25
  the description by not referring to persons. So it's a reductive It almost sounds
• 1:01:31
  like a physicalism here reality can be completely described without reference to persons. So
• 1:01:37
  it's you have an impersonal description argument underlying this other sort of this this sort
• 1:01:45
  of identity fission argument that he presents, and the reductionist argument is I think,
• 1:01:52
  much much weaker for me anyway, but because I disagree with it.
• 1:01:58
  But again, I don't know if I disagree with the idea that it can
• 1:02:00
  be you can describe reality without reference to persons without personal identity. Okay,
• 1:02:06
  maybe, I mean I'm not I don't have anything ready against that sort of
• 1:02:09
  way of thinking, but it just seems to me to lead to kind of
• 1:02:14
  I don't know, other avenues that I don't want to go, maybe like
• 1:02:17
  a sort of Dokins molecular biology, where we're just vehicles for genes and the
• 1:02:24
  whole identity and value questions are in a completely different sphere. They're almost like
• 1:02:29
  not important. And then so when it's not important in that respect, you
• 1:02:34
  got to think, okay, well, then where's the humanism from this coming?
• 1:02:37
  Because if we accept this argument and we say, okay, identity doesn't
• 1:02:42
  matter, then it's almost like an equation like that plus that equals we should
• 1:02:46
  be altruistic. But where's the force behind that? Where's the effective force behind
• 1:02:52
  that argument? Where it's really just more like a mathematical calculation supported by extremely
• 1:03:00
  brilliant and subtle and amazingly logical views that he's presenting here. It's brilliant and
• 1:03:07
  subtle, and I wish I could could have written a paper like this,
• 1:03:10
  just as much as I wish I could have written songs I don't like very
• 1:03:14
  much. But it's a problem for me anyway. But I think it's not
• 1:03:20
  just a problem for you, because this is ex I mean, you hit
• 1:03:22
  the nail on the head, I think, with exactly the problem that he
• 1:03:24
  devoted the rest of his life to. After the reasons in person, it's
• 1:03:28
  not this paper, because he says, I'm now showing you that the self
• 1:03:31
  doesn't really exist in any strong sense, and that's not what matters. But
• 1:03:36
  so much of our moral vocabulary turns on some notion of selfhood to give it
• 1:03:40
  that kind of force, right, And he says, this is exactly why
• 1:03:45
  people like Nietzsche and Heidegger and Bentham really struggled with coming up with argument you
• 1:03:52
  know, where they would come up with arguments against the self and the prioritization
• 1:03:54
  of the self, but they have to sneak it back in because otherwise they
• 1:03:58
  can't give an account of what we should value what's important because value has to
• 1:04:01
  be value to someone. Right. And this is a point where he gets
• 1:04:05
  into Shiitwick right, where Cidric says, the ideally our ethics or our morals
• 1:04:10
  would be completely impartial, right, removed from any self interest, any kind
• 1:04:14
  of personal motivation whatsoever. Right. But if you do that, then on
• 1:04:18
  what basis do you say people should be moral since there's really no one left
• 1:04:23
  to value anything. Yeah, I get that, you know, for entirely
• 1:04:26
  impartial about the world. Then if we entirely impartial in our approach to ethics,
• 1:04:30
  why should we just be entirely impartial or indifferent to the whole notion of
• 1:04:33
  morality? And Cidric says this is the most profound problem in moral theory,
• 1:04:39
  and he actually says, I can't solve it, right, it's just irresolvable.
• 1:04:42
  We should be impartial, not self interested in our approach to what's important.
• 1:04:45
  But unless we are self interested, we have no reason to prioritize doing
• 1:04:49
  something right. And of course I completely agree that the way we talk about
• 1:04:55
  things is really important and has an effect on those things, or the sort
• 1:04:59
  of underlying is sumptions of the way we talk about things. So even if
• 1:05:01
  we do preserve language of the self. I mean, we have to sort
• 1:05:05
  of shift the basis in a certain way. But again, like how do
• 1:05:09
  we actually do that is one question, But it really it goes to the
• 1:05:12
  heart of all the political correctness today because the way we talk about things does
• 1:05:16
  matter. And whether you're a grumpy person who just wants to talk about things
• 1:05:20
  the way you want to talk about them and that's it, then that's fine.
• 1:05:25
  But I mean that's the problem and you're just running up against it,
• 1:05:29
  is that the way we talk about things does matter. But this is a
• 1:05:34
  This is the again, the problem with the way that this argument is spelled
• 1:05:39
  out like this, because it's assuming that language is the type of thing that
• 1:05:45
  can be ontologically correct or ontologically incorrect about things. So if even if the
• 1:05:51
  word self is a wrong word and doesn't refer to something, then it doesn't
• 1:05:58
  actually make any difference because what he's doing by making this whole I mean,
• 1:06:02
  like Eric said, you got to have respect for the guy because it's well
• 1:06:05
  done. But still it's a game. And the assumptions that are that it
• 1:06:10
  is based on is specifically that language is not something that's used by people in
• 1:06:15
  context for different reasons at different times. It's about a truth finding a fact
• 1:06:21
  finding mission that we have to have the right terms for things. Yeah,
• 1:06:27
  I think Richard Rardy, in his own analytical way, try to push in
• 1:06:30
  this direction. I don't know if he actually read Parfitt. I can't remember
• 1:06:32
  any references to Parfit in this work, but you know already says something similar.
• 1:06:36
  Whereas like the problem with Parfiti type arguments is they are subtle and nuanced,
• 1:06:43
  and they seem very powerful when you push them to an extreme, but
• 1:06:46
  they are dependent upon a kind of analytical approach to language that mistakes the fact
• 1:06:51
  that language can do many different things. Right. So maybe when we're talking
• 1:06:57
  about the self, it's just a kind of language game that we play because
• 1:07:00
  it's the vocabulary that we've inherited from the European philosophical tradition, and it's useful
• 1:07:04
  for certain things, you know what I mean, it's useful to make certain
• 1:07:08
  kinds of claims, and already says you know, maybe in the future we
• 1:07:11
  will come up with a new kind of language that's not dependent on the self,
• 1:07:15
  right, and Parfet will help us figure it out. But this isn't
• 1:07:18
  something that the philosophers can dictate to you from an armchair. It's something that
• 1:07:21
  has to emerge organically in our community, right, And the fact that somebody
• 1:07:27
  who's the smartest parfeit or stituit can't really think about a non self oriented approach
• 1:07:32
  to what's important just demonstrates that our language hasn't shifted enough in that direction yet.
• 1:07:38
  We don't have the vocabulary to talk about a non self oriented approach to
• 1:07:42
  value. Back to hermeneutics. Yeah, and that's the way I would kind
• 1:07:46
  of respond to this, because I agree with what everyone said here that I
• 1:07:49
  don't think his own I never really thought his own moral theory was basically expencing,
• 1:07:56
  right, And yeah, and it's because I think he never really solves
• 1:07:59
  this problem. But I think that's because the problem is really runs so deep,
• 1:08:02
  right that it's hard to see how it could be solved without this kind
• 1:08:05
  of transition in our moral vocabulary that takes place at a broader cultural level.
• 1:08:10
  I love this. If I could just drop a quote in here, this
• 1:08:13
  is This is Charles perse talking about personal identity in eighteen ninety two. He
• 1:08:18
  says, he says, he says, a strong light has been thrown upon
• 1:08:21
  the subject of personality by recent observations of double and multiple personality. The theory
• 1:08:29
  which at one time seemed plausible that two persons in one body corresponded to the
• 1:08:32
  two halves of the brain, will I take it now universally be acknowledged to
• 1:08:38
  be insufficient. But that which these cases make quite manifest is that personality is
• 1:08:45
  some kind of coordination or connection of ideas. And he goes on that way
• 1:08:48
  in his law of mind essay, so very much same sorts of ideas coming
• 1:08:55
  up here in the pragmatist tradition. But Perce is not a nominalist. He
• 1:08:59
  believes in the reality of general ideas, and he recovers a sense of personality
• 1:09:04
  through that path, which I won't go into. But I do think that
• 1:09:10
  when this language of selfa does drop away, when and if it's not that
• 1:09:15
  people won't be unique anymore. It's not like we will regard people either as
• 1:09:20
  extensions of ourselves, which is basically just Roman slavery, and you're an extension
• 1:09:27
  of someone, but you won't regard everybody as atomistic individuals who you kind of
• 1:09:31
  have to knock on the door of their consciousness and say, hey, do
• 1:09:34
  you want to vote today? And then they have the choice of whether or
• 1:09:38
  not to do that. And you could say that that's not okay. You
• 1:09:41
  could say that that's okay, you don't have to participate in the democratic institutions
• 1:09:45
  because you're unique. I think that we wouldn't be in those necessarily be in
• 1:09:51
  those sticky situations if the language of personal identity does sort of lose its importance.
• 1:09:59
  But again, like we said, there will be a lot of sort
• 1:10:00
  of backwork to do because marginalized identities and the ways that people try to move
• 1:10:08
  towards social justice by asserting their own identity is still a huge factor in loads
• 1:10:14
  and loads of academic pursuits. And I think it's a little bit difficult to
• 1:10:17
  get away from that. I couldn't I can see like a white guy from
• 1:10:21
  Oxford being like, we have to get rid of personal identity. But I
• 1:10:25
  couldn't see like a scholar from Algeria or somebody like that saying it. Although
• 1:10:31
  I mean, I couldn't consider somebody like I don't know, like dairy DAEs
• 1:10:35
  putting a whole load of stock into personal identity either for very different reasons.
• 1:10:41
  But I don't know. I'm just trying to be nuanced here. Doesn't like,
• 1:10:45
  isn't there a distinction to be made though, between like personal identity and
• 1:10:48
  this kind of like trying to locate the continuity like the as sort of like
• 1:10:55
  having a subject independent identity like this stable thing and just like something like like
• 1:11:02
  someone who has like the phenomenal field, like the fact that you have a
• 1:11:04
  phenomenal fields as a subjectivity as as an embodied being with a history. Like
• 1:11:11
  I don't know, like what's the difference between, I guess, like like
• 1:11:15
  is that idea compatible? Right? Because I don't think that the implication of
• 1:11:17
  this view is that like you know that you like a subjectivity doesn't have some
• 1:11:24
  history, which I guess I thought of that because of Eric you were mentioning,
• 1:11:27
  you know, like if you're a racialized individual, right, like the
• 1:11:30
  stuff that you go through, like your experience in the day to day world
• 1:11:34
  is different, right, And it's just I don't know, I just want
• 1:11:36
  to flag that, you know, just saying that there's no personal identity doesn't
• 1:11:41
  mean that like experience disappears or something. Right. I think that's exactly what
• 1:11:45
  he would respond to, right. I think it's saying, look, we
• 1:11:47
  can drop the language of personal identity in selfhood without dropping the idea that,
• 1:11:51
  again, there are conscious beings that have experiences in the world. Right,
• 1:11:57
  but we just need to drop the idea is that there's something called I that
• 1:12:00
  has conscious experiences in the world. Right. You can even make a kind
• 1:12:03
  of an argument for this having a kind of phenomenological quality to this, because
• 1:12:08
  again he liked Heidiger right by saying that Heidiger is on the right step with
• 1:12:11
  this anti essentialist approach to the concept of selfwood that what I am, if
• 1:12:16
  anything, is what I do rather than you know, this Cartesian ghost in
• 1:12:19
  my mind right. He just doesn't think that he spells out the implications fully
• 1:12:24
  enough that way, No do I do. Analytic philosophers not take Wittgenstein seriously
• 1:12:30
  because I made a when I was writing, I kept writing his name in
• 1:12:33
  the margins because I thought that that was something that they would be responding to.
• 1:12:36
  But it doesn't seem like he does he takes up any space in their
• 1:12:41
  mind. He does. I mean, actually, if you want to know
• 1:12:43
  the honest truth, Wickenstein had such a huge and dominating impact on analytical philosophy,
• 1:12:49
  including analytical philosophy of mind. If you think about Gilbert Ryles, the
• 1:12:54
  concept of mind and William van rman Quine and his kind of approach to these
• 1:12:57
  issues also right, that perfect kind of was conceiving as kind of a fresh
• 1:13:01
  new voice precisely because he didn't take that road, you know, he didn't
• 1:13:04
  decide to draw on with consigning and accounts of the social subject and so on.
• 1:13:10
  He took this kind of weird sci fi e route instead. So at
• 1:13:14
  the time it was considered pretty refreshing, right, actually almost audacious that somebody
• 1:13:18
  would do this without reference to that. Nowadays, I agree with you that
• 1:13:21
  I think he kind of went too far in the other direction by ignoring things
• 1:13:25
  like language and stuff. But well, I just mean in terms of his
• 1:13:30
  objection is that the word selfhood or identity personal identity doesn't actually refer to something,
• 1:13:39
  but it's clear that it does refer to different things a lot of the
• 1:13:44
  time, and he kind of, I mean, his word what it was,
• 1:13:47
  a psychological continuity, does so much work in covering up all the distinct
• 1:13:55
  ways that we use the word sameness when it refers to identity. And this
• 1:14:00
  is kind of why I was bringing up the systems theory approach before, because
• 1:14:03
  when you say I, it's it doesn't mean the same thing all the time.
• 1:14:09
  It doesn't, and it's especially doesn't mean like a declarative statement almost all
• 1:14:15
  the time. It's usually an intentional statement or some directionality, sometimes intention but
• 1:14:21
  not always. He seems to think it's like only intention and intention based on
• 1:14:26
  memory. But this is this is exactly ugment Ryle put forward in the concept
• 1:14:30
  of mind, right, which I actually I do think is legit right.
• 1:14:32
  And you can see Ryle, I don't want to go too far with this
• 1:14:36
  because I haven't really thought about it all that. But Ryle does something similar
• 1:14:40
  to what Parfitt is doing in using Wickensteinian resources rather than one's Parfitt uses by
• 1:14:45
  saying precisely what you're doing right that look, there's the specter of the Cartesian
• 1:14:48
  ghosts that is at the epicenter of many of our accounts of the mind and
• 1:14:54
  of selfhood. And he says, Wickenstein is essentially knowing why we can do
• 1:14:57
  away with these and instead of talking about there as being about some there being
• 1:15:01
  some kind of eye and try to pin down what that means, we just
• 1:15:04
  talk about the kind of different activities that we deploy with the word I,
• 1:15:11
  if I make a speech act hey guys, I'm sucking on an icy pole.
• 1:15:16
  It's not making an ontological connection to all of my past selves. Well,
• 1:15:20
  he does say, you know, like when you think about the idea,
• 1:15:26
  I'll just bring this in like of implanted or fabricated memories, for instance,
• 1:15:30
  And you do take the concept of identity as seriously and central as the
• 1:15:35
  people he's arguing against sort of do, then you might say that my fabricated
• 1:15:41
  and false memories are also part of me, and then that opens the door
• 1:15:45
  to all kinds of weird like reprogramming people and shit kind of arguments. But
• 1:15:49
  he does say that, you know, let's treat memory as an idea,
• 1:15:55
  and when you bring that idea to your mind, there's no mark or stamp
• 1:16:00
  on that idea that says this is your memory, or this is a memory
• 1:16:03
  that I experienced. This is just a memory that you have, and you
• 1:16:08
  infer that you experienced the content of that memory, whatever it's showing you.
• 1:16:13
  But there's no from a logical point of view that I is not internal to
• 1:16:18
  the idea or the memory. It's that's something you've added on. That's the
• 1:16:23
  extra part. That's the identity part that you got to get rid of.
• 1:16:26
  In a way, and so this sort of services his argument in a little
• 1:16:30
  way by saying, like, okay, so if your memories aren't necessarily your
• 1:16:32
  memories, they're just memories of some past experience, then that's a basis for
• 1:16:40
  continuity. I mean, if I have an intention to build a hotel,
• 1:16:45
  but I die too young and my children take up that project and complete the
• 1:16:48
  hotel, there's a certain kind of value to that sense of continuity between generations.
• 1:16:56
  Should we start arguing about whether my children are me, Well, no,
• 1:16:59
  that's that's obviously silly right away. But there's a certain sense of continuity.
• 1:17:04
  Uh, it's not one to one because they have all other kinds of
• 1:17:08
  desires and feelings and maybe apprehensions about the project. But there is a degree
• 1:17:15
  there. And that's what his point is is, it's all about degrees.
• 1:17:18
  We don't want to treat identity like it's a one to one relationship. There's
• 1:17:24
  you have a degree of you know, sameness with past selves and a degree
• 1:17:29
  of sameness with future selves, and that's that's as far as it should really
• 1:17:33
  go. That was my favorite part of this argument actually was the false memories,
• 1:17:41
  because it yeah, yeah, again, like just to frame it for
• 1:17:44
  the listeners. He's he's countering locks you are your memories by pointing out that
• 1:17:50
  we have false memories. And this made me think of like psychoanalysis, where
• 1:17:56
  you can have a false memory that is very formative to what you think of
• 1:18:00
  yourself and how the way that you react to other people even if it never
• 1:18:05
  happened. So yeah, I like that. Or even think about when you
• 1:18:09
  wake up after a dream, how much like inference and connections, your brain
• 1:18:13
  sort of automatically does that by the time you're describing your dream to the analyst,
• 1:18:17
  like, it's not the dream you had. The dream you had was
• 1:18:20
  probably some fragmented crazy town thing, like a lot of dreams are. But
• 1:18:27
  what our mind sort of automatically does is it builds the connections. It tries
• 1:18:30
  to impose a narrative, It tries to make some kind of order out of
• 1:18:33
  the memories, and that part that construction, that fiction, if you will,
• 1:18:39
  is then built into it and you can't really tell the difference between is
• 1:18:42
  this false, is this real? Was this my experience or was this somebody
• 1:18:45
  else's experience? And fraud kind of makes this point too, is that you
• 1:18:50
  elaborate your dreams and it's that sort of elaboration in the psychological connecting that's going
• 1:18:57
  on there. That's the interesting part. It doesn't matter that you dreamed about
• 1:19:00
  riding a flying unicorn naked over Toronto. It doesn't matter that that's the dream.
• 1:19:05
  It matters on how you sort of elaborate that dream and make connections to
• 1:19:09
  other aspects of your life. And that's why it's the talking cure, because
• 1:19:13
  it just gets people to you know, it gets people thinking about those things,
• 1:19:15
  and so almost psychoanalysis like embraces the lack of personal identity built into these
• 1:19:23
  kinds of things. Well, and any of you read the short story by
• 1:19:27
  Filip K. Dick, we can remember it for your wholesale no one,
• 1:19:30
  Okay, Well, it's the basis of total recall. You might remember,
• 1:19:32
  you know, there's the Art Schwarzenegger movie, and then there's the crappy I
• 1:19:35
  recall. Yeah, you do recall. But the reasons why he thinks these
• 1:19:41
  sci fi examples are good because you know, one of the things that we
• 1:19:44
  can remember for your whole style about is Philip K. Dick wrestling with exactly
• 1:19:46
  this problem, right, which is, what if it was possible for us
• 1:19:49
  to implant memories in your brain. So you remembered being someone different in your
• 1:19:55
  past than you actually were. Does that mean you would wake up after this
• 1:19:59
  process and you effectively be someone different? Right? You know you'd have the
• 1:20:01
  same body, the same brain. Uh, you know, nothing had changed
• 1:20:05
  in that respect, but your memories are different. And Dick seems to say,
• 1:20:10
  yeah, you would be right because you're still beholden to this kind of
• 1:20:13
  locke In idea, right, that your memories are what makes yourself. And
• 1:20:15
  Parfet's challenging that because he says, look modally, in a possible world,
• 1:20:20
  if you could think of something like teletransportation being possible, I can show you
• 1:20:25
  how even this memory theory of the self can fall victim to extreme problems,
• 1:20:30
  right when we realize that somebody can have your memories and still not be you.
• 1:20:34
  Right. So, I think this is why some people find analytical philosophy
• 1:20:39
  a bit wacky when it comes to the thought experiments, because they'll say,
• 1:20:41
  wow, nobody would that would never actually happen. We're never gonna have teletransportation,
• 1:20:45
  just like we're never going to have you know, phili K Dix.
• 1:20:46
  We can remember it for your wholesale But the point is to show that modally,
• 1:20:49
  since you can conceive of this occurring in a possible world, we can't
• 1:20:54
  say that this has to be a theory of selfhood that's constant everywhere and in
• 1:20:58
  all places, in all times, because it theoretically could be if you want,
• 1:21:01
  invalidated in these kinds of scenarios that we can think about, right.
• 1:21:06
  And I think that this way of going about doing philosophy can be frustrating sometimes
• 1:21:12
  because yeah, you do think like, wow, that will never actually happen,
• 1:21:14
  right, But I think in its best with these kinds of like these
• 1:21:17
  kind of parfidian heuristics or thought experiments disforce you to kind of think about the
• 1:21:21
  issue in a way that those intuitions you pump your intuition films there you go.
• 1:21:29
  It's kind of interesting that he focuses so much on disproving the locke In
• 1:21:33
  theory when I mean you could also consider it like, just because you have
• 1:21:39
  any amount of memories, the second the instant you're in a different environment,
• 1:21:44
  you're going to have different memories than your copy would I thought that would like
• 1:21:48
  because from a systems theory perspective, again, to bring it back to the
• 1:21:53
  thing that I know something about any time that an environment disrupts or tries to
• 1:21:59
  challenge your decision making behavior, then you're a different system. So it would
• 1:22:04
  never be a question of if someone has your memories, are they you because
• 1:22:08
  they wouldn't be where you are, so this would never even occur as a
• 1:22:12
  problem. And even like a cybernetaches, I mean, well, say and
• 1:22:17
  I do just want to say, I'm happy that we had this discussion.
• 1:22:20
  I know Pills wasn't too happy about it. I'm feeling much better now,
• 1:22:25
  Matt, since we starting off with freezies was a good I don't know,
• 1:22:29
  I just I like part Foot. I mean, I think that he has
• 1:22:31
  a lot of crazy things to say, and I'm never going to forgive him
• 1:22:33
  for being that tedious over the three books that I read. But these intuition
• 1:22:38
  pumps, as Victor put, I think are pretty pretty impelling, and they
• 1:22:42
  did try to force me to re evaluate certain constts that I had, for
• 1:22:46
  instance about the importance of self food and my own kind of moral outlook.
• 1:22:50
  Yeah, I mean the part of the self that seems to matters, the
• 1:22:55
  part that matters when you're sitting alone contemplating thinking aboutilosophy, which, as you
• 1:23:00
  know, Hidegger and Drefus emphasizes that you're like, most of your life really
• 1:23:08
  is spent in a state of like absorbed, coping with the world, and
• 1:23:13
  questions of identity again are not really coming up because you're not every time you
• 1:23:16
  pick up a hammer, you're not asking me, is this a sufficient addition
• 1:23:20
  to my identity? And then you put it down and you're like, oh
• 1:23:23
  my god, I lost the hammer. Now you don't think that way when
• 1:23:25
  you're absorbed and coping and using tools and getting about in the world. So
• 1:23:30
  in a way, he's presenting a philosophy of philosophical identity, which matters I
• 1:23:36
  guess you could say when you're sitting alone, thinking, contemplating, writing philosophy,
• 1:23:43
  but maybe it doesn't matter quite so much in the world because I think
• 1:23:46
  of a more maybe cognitivist pragmatist perspective would look at maybe the role identity when
• 1:23:53
  you're investigating some sort of issue and something happens and you want to get to
• 1:23:56
  the bottom of the matter, you want to get to the truth, you
• 1:23:58
  want to produce an added quit idea. How do you do that? You
• 1:24:01
  go out into the world and you experiment, you investigate, and you allow
• 1:24:05
  reality to then come into your mind, because what reality does, what reality
• 1:24:11
  is is that which resists. It's that which pushes back. It's that which
• 1:24:15
  doesn't allow us to just have any idea about how things are. It's something
• 1:24:19
  that stops us from simply making up all kinds of crazy fictions. And so
• 1:24:26
  you might say there's no ultimate reality to anybody's identity. But we're always against
• 1:24:30
  reality in some sort of way when we're trying to get about in the world
• 1:24:34
  and make our ideas of ourselves. When we think we are one thing,
• 1:24:39
  something might happen and we might say, my god, I wasn't the person
• 1:24:43
  that I thought I was, or something like that, and reality comes into
• 1:24:45
  play and it pushes back. And I think a more pragmatist or a more
• 1:24:49
  cognitivist perspective would be maybe a little bit healthy for Parfit, because he's too
• 1:24:55
  much in the sort of logical atomist conception where ideas are like these atoms and
• 1:25:00
  particles that are in minds. Whereas as person would say, you know,
• 1:25:05
  just the same way that we say we don't say motions are in bodies,
• 1:25:10
  we say bodies are in motion, the same thing we should say we're not
• 1:25:13
  thoughts aren't in humans, humans are in thought. I completely agree with you,
• 1:25:17
  right, I say we should wave the flag for cocking the pragmatism by
• 1:25:19
  saying that, look, you know, even at the idea of selfhood is
• 1:25:24
  ultimately illus your e or it's so thin that we can do away with it.
• 1:25:28
  Nonetheless, you know, I think there are certain useful things that we
• 1:25:30
  can do with the language of selfhood, amongst others. Amongst others being a
• 1:25:35
  critique of real abstractions, right, which is something that Marx talks a lot
• 1:25:40
  about. Right. Yes, it's possible that things like the self, whether
• 1:25:45
  talking about the private self or corporate self, food or whatever, might not
• 1:25:47
  exist in kind of col hardened to your reality. Nonetheless, because we treat
• 1:25:53
  them as important, they assume a kind of social significance. And just to
• 1:25:56
  say, like, another sort of way of looking at these issues is that
• 1:26:00
  identity is not something that's fully present at all moments in time. You're not
• 1:26:04
  all of who you are in every single moment. In a sense, you're
• 1:26:09
  an unfolding journey of a bunch of ideas in a way that you are sort
• 1:26:14
  of in a in a sense. And this is what like the perscene argument
• 1:26:18
  here again is that is that if personality is a general idea, and then
• 1:26:23
  all general ideas really are. You feel them in the moment, in the
• 1:26:26
  living present as self consciousness, and then when you come to think about them,
• 1:26:30
  they become general ideas. And like you said, those those ideas have
• 1:26:33
  real effects on the world, and they're unfolding. Identity is always incomplete.
• 1:26:40
  That's another maybe way to look at it. That parfits assuming that we have
• 1:26:44
  this sense that identity is what it is, it's whole, and it's always
• 1:26:48
  here, and he wants to say that let's get rid of that. But
• 1:26:53
  then maybe we can bring something else in saying, well, maybe identity is
• 1:26:56
  incomplete. Parts of your identity go away, part new parts are added.
• 1:27:00
  And it's more about the connection of the ideas than it is about like the
• 1:27:05
  abstraction of it all into a single sort of idea where you know, I
• 1:27:10
  have my birth, my death, and I am what takes place between.
• 1:27:15
  Well, I wouldn't mind talking about identity not as not as just even you
• 1:27:20
  die when you go to sleep and you're born when you wake up, but
• 1:27:24
  as small as a moment does that's how often you're born and die. Yea,
• 1:27:28
  go there we go peer process peer becoming instant identity. Just to add
• 1:27:32
  one. Yeah, I often think about how you know, when I,
• 1:27:36
  when I like have a family or kids or something like that, it's like
• 1:27:40
  independent victor will be dead. Yeah, but like, but that's not necessarily
• 1:27:45
  a bad thing. New victor, family victor, a new one will will
• 1:27:47
  emerge from the ashes of the day of the dead, of the dead,
• 1:27:53
  independent victory. And then don't think of those future selves as completely separate.
• 1:27:57
  They're already being determined by certain parts of your present. You just maybe think
• 1:28:01
  of it as something separate and way far away. Yeah, it's gonna suffer
• 1:28:06
  with liver damage. It's your fault in the woods. All right, Well,
• 1:28:12
  we survived a analytic article. Don't ever spring that on me again,
• 1:28:16
  please. All right, Yeah, I'll be the end of that. We'll
• 1:28:19
  do more. We'll do more. There, let's break for you guys.
• 1:28:24
  Uh, you guys, ready to break for some freezing and break for some
• 1:28:27
  for some icy polls. Frozen pops. Frozen pops. Here we come.
• 1:28:31
  Uh. This is Pill Potter thirty six. Peace, Thanks listeners, irritate
• 1:28:38
  signing it out