Just ran across these little gems on YouTube — overviews of important philosophers done in three minutes, with excellently bad animation!
Here’s one on Aristotle that’s good (although it’s almost four minutes long, tsk tsk):
And one on Locke:
And a good one on Kant’s ethics:
The glory days of Artificial Intelligence — those heady days when researchers thought genuine intelligence and perhaps even consciousness would transcend the bonds of human brains and sit comfortably on computer hardware — well, it was a fun time to be alive. And check out this gem:
http://www.csail.mit.edu/videoarchive/history/aifilms
An awesome historical collection of AI videos housed at MIT.
This one’s my favorite:
A silent, grainy, low-res film of Terry Winograd’s awesome SHRDLU in action. For those of you youngsters out there, SHRDLU was really quite a remarkable achievement in computer programming. And the fact that Winograd’s first release of the software was in 1968 makes it all the more remarkable. The idea was to create a program that could parse real English sentences and respond intelligently to them. Winograd realized that he couldn’t tackle the problem in an unlimited domain (that is, his program wasn’t going to be able to talk about everything a human might be able to), so he limited the program’s world to a virtual table top with some blocks on it, and a virtual robotic arm that could pick up and move those blocks. Within this tiny domain, SHRDLU was really very impressive. Frankly, I’m still impressed by the program today, even though it’s more than 40 years old.
Here’s a sample excerpt from a human-SHRDLU interaction:
Person: WHAT DID THE RED CUBE SUPPORT BEFORE YOU STARTED TO CLEAN IT OFF?
Computer: THE GREEN PYRAMID.
Person: THERE WERE FIVE BLOCKS TO THE LEFT OF THE BOX THEN.
Computer: NO, ONLY FOUR OF THEM: THE RED CUBE, TWO LARGE GREEN CUBES AND A LARGE RED BLOCK.
Person: PUT THE BLUE PYRAMID ON THE BLOCK IN THE BOX.
Computer: OK. (does it)
Person: IS THERE ANYTHING WHICH IS BIGGER THAN EVERY PYRAMID BUT IS NOT AS WIDE AS THE THING THAT SUPPORTS IT?
Computer: YES, THE BLUE BLOCK.
Person: DOES A STEEPLE
Computer interrupting: SORRY, I DON’T KNOW THE WORD “STEEPLE”.
Person: A “STEEPLE” IS A STACK WHICH CONTAINS TWO GREEN CUBES AND A PYRAMID.
Computer: I UNDERSTAND.
Person: ARE THERE ANY STEEPLES NOW?
Computer: NO.
Person: BUILD ONE.
Computer: OK. (does it)
Person: CALL THE BIGGEST BLOCK “SUPERBLOCK”.
Computer: OK.
Person: HAVE YOU PICKED SUPERBLOCK UP SINCE WE BEGAN?
Computer: YES.
Person: WHY DID YOU DROP IT?
Computer: BY “IT”, I ASSUME YOU MEAN THE SUPERBLOCK.
Really impressive language processing.
AI researchers (and philosophers) at the time were a little too impressed with SHRDLU, and thought that genuinely intelligent computers were surely close at hand. In fact, Winograd himself, after wrestling for years with SHRDLU and computational language processing, came to the conclusion that AI researchers were generally far too optimistic about their achievements, at least as regarded the actual supposed intelligence of their creations. Winograd wrote:
“Most current computational models of cognition are vastly underconstrained and ad hoc; they are contrivances assembled to mimic arbitrary pieces of behavior, with insufficient concern for explicating the principles in virtue of which such behavior is exhibited and with little regard for a precise understanding.” [Winograd, 1987]
This was a cold shower for a lot of optimistic AI researchers, and a bolster to philosophers who opposed functionalism. But this is a topic for another post.
Happy AI film viewing!
Today’s ethical quandary is an oldie but a goodie: A scientist has created a time machine that can take you back in time to when Adolf Hitler was a baby (let’s say at five months old). You will be sent to his nursery at a time that baby Hitler is alone. The nature of the time machine is such that you are only there for a maximum of two minutes. You cannot bring baby Hitler back to the future with you. You can, however, kill him. Ignoring the question of whether it is possible to change the past or not, should you kill Hitler when he was a baby or not?
My students, following my example, don’t take long before offering up “Hitler and the Nazis” whenever I ask for an example of great moral evil. Indeed, if there were a prohibition on mentioning Hitler, I’m not quite sure what I’d do, pedagogically. I suppose I’d have to resort to fictional super-villains. (Maybe I should anyway. It’s not as depressing to talk about Lex Luther.)
So, faced with the opportunity to wipe out the source of perhaps the greatest evil perpetrated in the last couple of centuries, what would I do?
My initial thought is: Of course I would kill baby Hitler. But there are some mitigating ideas that cross my mind soon after.
For one thing, Hitler was not alone in carrying out the Holocaust, and perhaps it would have happened regardless of his existence. It could well be that social forces were pointing Germany in that direction, and that another figurehead would’ve stepped into Hitler’s place, if Hitler hadn’t been available. If we’ve learned anything from time travel movies it’s that the whole thing is very unpredictable. But let’s put this worry aside for the time being, and address my feeling that the baby Hitler should be killed.
I imagine that this is the popular intuition here. But what is the basis for this intuition? Well, I can see two probable bases: utilitarianism, and righteous vengeance.
Utilitarianism is the philosophical stance that ethical decisions should be made strictly on the basis of weighing the possible good and bad outcomes of your actions. Famously, utilitarianism says that, other things being equal, ten lives are more valuable than one life, and so an action that kills one person in order to save ten is ethically justified. (We’ll save the finer points of this theory for another post. Utilitarianism is not, as you might imagine, free from problems.) Well, if you can save ten lives by killing one, just imagine the scenario where you can save millions by killing one. That’s the scenario we’ve been tasked to analyze here. By killing the baby Hitler, we are ostensibly saving millions of lives that will eventually die at his command.
Another thing that makes me pause, when thinking about killing baby Hitler, is that I’m tremendously squeamish about death, and the idea of killing a baby (even an evil one) makes me blanch.
Gregory Peck, confronting a moral dilemma.
Now, psychological squeamishness, one could argue, has no place in ethics. If something is the right thing to do, and I don’t want to do it, I’m just wrong about that, despite whatever my superego is telling me.
But there is an aspect of this squeamishness that is actually philosophically relevant, and it revolves around the issue of virtue. Most theories of ethics are action-based. Utilitarianism, for instance, is supposed to tell you what to do in any given situation. Virtue ethics (Aristotle is most often credited as its founder) is based more on the idea of developing a good character — the idea is that if you are a generally virtuous person, you’ll generally make the right decisions when faced with moral dilemmas.
Well, it is reasonable to argue that it’s the sign of a virtuous character to be squeamish about killing a baby. And so perhaps killing the baby Hitler is the wrong thing to do, if we are to take virtue ethics seriously. Of course, it’s also the sign of a virtuous character to save millions of lives if you can, and so virtue ethics sends us mixed signals on this one.
In the end, I think that killing the baby Hitler is the right thing to do. And if you try to justify sparing his life, on the basis of virtuous squeamishness, you’re probably displaying the unvirtuous trait of cowardice.
There are some philosophers who argue that utilitarianism goes wrong in cases of human death, because it’s just wrong (and impossible) to weigh a life. But I say there’s something wrong with a theory of ethics that tells us we can’t weigh one life against millions.
Alec makes some good points in his write-up of the issue. I think that baby Hitler should also be killed, but I am not sure that it is for the same reasons. Let’s see.
What should we do if we have the chance to save a life, and we can do so at little to no peril to our own life? We should save the life. Few people would argue that point. Well, I might argue that point. I am not entirely convinced that life, least of all human life, is always worth saving, and that is not even based on the character or worth of the (human) life. That is a matter for another post though, perhaps. Here, I am content to go with the status quo and agree that life should be preserved.
If you see a person about to cross the street, but he does not see an oncoming car, you should alert the person to the danger, grabbing him if necessary (and, again, if it does not immediately imperil your own life). Should we save life if the only way that is available to us is to end the life of another? Whew. Good question. Do we have time left for this? We do? Dammit.
Hitler was a bad, bad, superbad, person. If anyone ever deserved to die, it was Hitler. Perhaps, as Alec suggested above, Hitler was not the sole person responsible for all the evil attributed to his movement, but he was close enough to the sole person. Would most of it still have happened had Hitler not have been? While that is an interesting question, I don’t see that it matters much here. Baby Hitler is, as a baby (philosopher-speak: qua baby), is not evil, has not committed evil, and does not, in any modern understanding, exhibit evil tendencies or character. We are going to kill baby Hitler for what adult Hitler will bring about.
This is an interesting sense of justice: we are trying to balance a wrong that has yet to happen, but will certainly happen. The ‘balancing’ act however, is such that it will ensure the evil never occur. If that is so, then our act is unjust. If we do not do this act though, then great evil will result and that seems to make not committing the act unjust as well. There is a true dilemma here, and each horn is going to do whatever you think would make for the least possible cliche here.
This is not a true dilemma of the ordinary sort as we know what will happen if we do not act. We are 100% positive (Mel Gibson’s father aside) about what will occur if Hitler is not killed as a baby. Hence, I suggest that all the time travel does for this scenario is modify our verbs in a way that bothers us. In a justice sense, baby Hitler has to die for what we know adult Hitler will do.
As for the squeamish factor that Alec notes above, I think I agree, but only as an interesting artifact. Can we trust squeamishness as a guide to morality? No, but nor does Alec think so. It is a suggestion or a clue at best.
Would I feel squeamish about killing baby Hitler? I would like to say no, because of the greater good I would be serving, but that would be a lie. I would be a little squeamish; he is a baby after all. Were I to look at his little mustache and think for even a moment about the evil commands that would march out, albeit much later, from beneath it, however, I would full on vomit with squeamishness were I not to kill him.
Lives will certainly be saved by killing baby Hitler and an enormous evil will be excised from the world. Will some other evil fill that void? More than likely, as the world seemingly sucks. Will that substitute evil be more evil than Hitler? Who can say? Baby Hitler should be killed because more lives will be saved, including infant lives, than will be lost by the singular act of killing baby Hitler, and this we can be remarkably certain of given our futuristic knowledge.
And if it turns out we were wrong, surely we would appear to ourselves in the past to stop us before it is too late. Right?
This is a new feature here at We Love Philosophy where Alec and I will look at some piece of film or literature or whatever, a piece that few if any would consider to have philosophical themes or import, and try to find philosophical themes or import within. This is not an easy task and may be better abandoned than pursued, but, as my old P.E. teacher used to tell me: “Go ahead and try Thomas, just so you will know I was right about your failing.” Let’s try. We will start with a brief synopsis of the work selected and then the picking and stretching will begin.
For the inaugural posting within this topic we chose a topic sure to kill this topic nigh-immediately: the film The Awful Dr. Orlof. Alec chose this. I agreed with the choice, but remember that this was Alec’s remarkably ugly baby.
Dr. Orlof and his blind sidekick.
[Note from Alec: I’m really terribly sorry. I recommend that no one watch this movie. Ever. If you see it playing one night on Turner Classic, throw your TV out. And move.]
Since this movie is on Netflix and came out in 1962, and we’ve warned you not to watch it, we are going to ignore any worries about spoilers and just lay the whole intricate plot out. Dr. Orlof is kidnapping and then killing young girls in order to cure his daughter. A few specific points should be made: Dr. Orlof himself does little of the killing, but has a blind ‘special’ assistant, Morpho, do so; the cure seems to involve skinning the women, or at least some body parts of the women; it is not entirely clear what is wrong with his daughter aside from a kind of catatonic listlessness and mild scarring; the entire police force is hopeless and remarkably uncaring about the people they have sworn to protect.
While Dr. Orlof is having girls taken and killed by Morpho, a police detective is trying to find the killer — this after four women have been reported missing. The police department really kicks into action when a man is found murdered though. I suppose one could make an argument that the movie is sexist here, but, to be fair, they found the dead body of the man, and the bodies of the women are still just missing. The police detective’s fiancee gets involved in the investigation for reasons that are never clear, but not much of the movie is, so let’s not hold that against her. She, the fiancee, is kidnapped by the doctor who, I think, needs her breasts to complete the treatment of his daughter (the contents of such a thought are uber-creepy). Dr. Orlof is eventually killed by the monster he inspired to kill for him, and that monster dies as well.
Oof. So, now that the summary is out of the way, whither whence the philosophy cometh? Some of these entries are going to require more stretching than others. This first entry is beyond Stretch Armstrong levels and approaching Mr. Fantastic/Plastic-Man levels. Here goes: we are going to divide this into two sections. Ethics and Epistemology. I will take the ethics section, for reasons that have yet to be explained, and Alec will take epistemology. The ethics topic of the movie is fairly straightforward, unlike everything else in the movie: is the life of one person dear to you (here, Dr. Orlof’s daughter) worth more than the lives of (at least) five strangers? And if the answer is yes, is it morally allowable to have an irrational person do the killing for you? For that last question, there is a sub-question dealing with who is to blame for the killings. Morpho did not seem to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he was remarkably capable of tracking and killing, despite his blindness (which I think was almost entirely due to the papier mache mask he was wearing).
The epistemology part is a bit of a stretch, but that is what we are here for. Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge — what makes something knowledge and what justifies our beliefs. There are a couple of questions about the movie that fit that description: 1) As no one had ever tried Orlof’s methods before, what justified his belief in them (assuming that he was justified at all); 2) How did the detective’s fiancee ‘know’ that she had seen the killer? Is women’s intuition a reliable font of knowledge?
Dr. Orlof is clearly not a utilitarian. At least, based on what we are given by the plot, Dr. Orloff is not a Utilitarian. His acts are all aimed at making his daughter better/cured (as it is never clear what her condition is beyond a sort of laissez faire attitude about life combined with a bad make-up job), and this is never suggested as being anything other than purely selfish on his part. She, Orlof-fils, is never portrayed as a brilliant scientist, or a dedicated humanitarian, or a inspirational person. Rather, she is the doctor’s daughter and so she must be fixed.
Utilitarianism is the ethic that the right action is the one that creates the most pleasure and the least pain for the greatest number of people. Ergo, Orlof is not a utilitarian.
He is selfish to a degree that many of us would find startling were he a real person (Note to Alec: this was not based on true story, was it?). We all love those in our family. Well, many of us love at least someone in our family. Within that group are many who say, truthfully or so they believe, that they would do anything to save or preserve the life of their loved one. Perhaps that includes even dying, if doing so would certainly, or damn near certainly, save or preserve the life of the loved one. Such an attitude is not entirely selfish, of course.
Dr. Orlof, however, not only loves his daughter, and not only loves his daughter more than he loves anyone else, but he loves her to the point that other lives are meaningless when compared to her own. The lives of other human beings are merely tools for Orloff to use to better aid his daughter. “What I want,” Dr. Orlof seems to be saying through his actions, if not through well-written dialog, “is what determines what is right for me and so for the world. If it is not what you want, whoever you might be, then I will sic my blind murderer on you as well.”
This is a kind of hedonism, the idea that pleasure is the most important goal, but of a non-universal character. It is one thing to say or argue that the goal in life is to be as happy as possible. That can be universal in the sense that it is what you think is so for everyone. “Hey,” you might say to me, “why are you sitting at that desk when you could be having fun?” Good question.
Alright, I am back. Thanks for suggesting that I take a break. See? A hedonist need not be a selfish prick, at least a universal hedonist need not be. Orlof, though? He’s a selfish prick. His pleasure is what matter the most to him. One could argue that he does what he does (or gives the orders to kill that he gives) because he is thinking only of his daughter, a kind of pass-the-buck hedonism.
“Your pleasure is what matters the most, such a person would say to you, “so tell me what would make you happy and I will do it.” That almost sounds like altruism: the sacrificing of one’s happiness so that another is made happy in your stead. Ignoring whether or not altruism truly exists or is rational (hey — future topics!), is that what Orlof is guilty of? I doubt it. His daughter never says or indicates that she approves of what he is doing; in fact, there is no indication at all that she is receiving any benefit at all from the murders and procedures her father is performing. Perhaps Dr. Orlof is telling himself that what he is doing is for his daughter alone, but all the visual evidence (that I shudder to recall) indicates he is doing it for himself.
So, is selfish hedonism a valid ethical standpoint? Sure, I suppose. It is as valid as any other ethical standpoint, so long as you do not take as a given that all or even most or at best some people are equal to yourself in terms what it takes to be happy. Is that what you think? Are you an Orlofian? Are you???
How did I get stuck with the epistemology piece of this? Sigh. Oh well, here goes what might literally be nothing.
First things first, let’s dive into the women’s intuition thing. So, in the movie, the detective’s fiancee happens to see the killer (without knowing that he’s the killer), and somehow is immediately convinced that she has just seen the killer.
Is she justified in this belief?
You know what? Let’s dive right back out of this women’s intuition thing. There’s nothing good that can come of the discussion, is there?
What’s more interesting here is the sentence “Is she justified in this belief?” This contains two of the three components to what might be considered having genuine knowledge of something.
When can we be said to know something?
Obviously, belief has to factor into it.
Belief
If Dr. Orlof is the murderer, but I don’t believe that he is, then I really can’t have knowledge that he is the murderer. So belief is certainly necessary for knowledge, though it’s also not sufficient.
Suppose Superman is the murderer. If I believe that Dr. Orlof is the murderer, I still don’t have any knowledge that Dr. Orlof is the murderer. (My belief is false.)
So we need to account for truth — circumstances that match our beliefs.
Truth
If I believe that Dr. Orlof is the murderer, and he is in fact the murderer, then can I say I have knowledge of him being the murderer?
Well, though truth is definitely necessary, it’s not sufficient.
Suppose Dr. Orlof is the murderer. But I believe he’s the murderer only because I dreamed about him being the murderer the night before. Do I have knowledge of Dr. Orlof being the murderer in this case? Nope. In effect, I’ve just made a lucky guess, and this shouldn’t count as knowledge.
So we need to account for the idea that knowledge should also be justified.
Justification
If I don’t know that Dr. Orlof is the murderer, but my wife (who never lies to me) tells me she saw Dr. Orlof murdering the victims, do I have knowledge yet?
Justified true belief. A pretty darn good working definition of knowledge. (Though we’ll talk about a famous counterexample to this definition in a future post.)
So does the detective’s wife have knowledge that Dr. Orlof is the murderer? Well, she has the belief that he is, and it’s true that he is, and so the question hinges on whether or not her women’s intuition can form the basis of a justified belief. I won’t take a stand on that issue here. Feel free to take a stand in the comments…
Dualism is the age-old belief that there are two sorts of stuff in the universe: physical stuff (the stuff that constitutes brains and bodies and stones and trees and cats), and mind stuff (or “soul” stuff, if you like). It found it’s most cogent expression in Descartes’ Meditations, where early on he remarks that there is one thing clearly, distinctly, and uniquely possessed by the mind: Thinking.
Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am — I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be… I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing…
Whatever else he might be, it is definitely the case that Descartes is a thinking thing. Go ahead and doubt the existence of what we usually think of as the real world — stones, trees, and cats. Say that it’s all an illusion, or a dream, or that there’s an evil demon deceiving us about the true nature of things. But one thing that’s certain is that if Descartes is being deceived, Descartes is being deceived — even if his mind is being fooled about things, it is his mind that is being fooled.
Well, if the mind has this certain specialness that the rest of the world (if it exists at all) doesn’t, then the mind and the body must be separate sorts of things:
[B]ecause I know that all which I clearly and distinctly conceive can be produced by God exactly as I conceive it, it is sufficient that I am able clearly and distinctly to conceive one thing apart from another, in order to be certain that the one is different from the other, seeing they may at least be made to exist separately, by the omnipotence of God; and it matters not by what power this separation is made, in order to be compelled to judge them different; and, therefore, merely because I know with certitude that I exist, and because, in the meantime, I do not observe that aught necessarily belongs to my nature or essence beyond my being a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists only in my being a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is merely thinking]. And although I may, or rather, as I will shortly say, although I certainly do possess a body with which I am very closely conjoined; nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I, [that is, my mind, by which I am what I am], is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.
Here is dualism: the idea that mental and physical substances are of an entirely different kind from one another. And, in fact, the idea goes further — mind-stuff is inherently non-physical. It doesn’t exist in space-time (otherwise it would just be a variety of physical stuff), and it doesn’t need the body in order to exist.
Hollywood, always up for exploiting a good philosophical idea, has a proud history of using dualism to good dramatic effect. There are a plethora of mind/body transfer stories told on film.
And early film taking full advantage of dualism was “Here Comes Mr. Jordan”, in 1941. The story has our hero, a boxer named Joe, die in a plane crash at the start of the film. Unfortunately, the death was a mistake, due to the slip-up of an absent-minded angel. Joe wasn’t really supposed to die for a good long time. (We can use this example to talk about determinism. Maybe someday…) Joe, obviously, isn’t happy about this, and so God allows Joe’s soul to be transferred into the freshly dead body of a corrupt millionaire, just murdered by his wife. Misadventures ensue, as the personhood — the identity — of Joe tries to navigate his way in a new body, in new circumstances.
The key for our discussion here is that Joe’s mind — his personhood; his soul — is completely separatable from any physical body. It is a different sort of stuff entirely, and can be housed in any host body by a sufficiently powerful supernatural being.
You might, at this point, be thinking the following very reasonable question: But how does this non-physical mind stuff actually interact with a physical body? Well, that’s a damn good question, and sits at the core of many criticisms of dualism. We usually think of causation as a purely physical process. Billiard balls smash into billiard balls and make them move; atoms collide into atoms, generating heat and occasionally atomic detonations; you push a door in order to open it; an avalanche crushes trees beneath its mass;… physical objects and physical movements cause other physical objects to move. How is a non-physical thing (a mind) supposed to cause anything physical to happen? If you’re a dualist, you’re in trouble here. The mind (a non-physical thing) thinks that you should raise your right hand; the physical hand moves. What is the causal chain here? Descartes postulated that the mind finds its way into the brain via the pineal gland; but this is really no answer — it just delays the answer. The new questions becomes: How does the mind interact with the pineal gland? And we are back at square one.
“Here Comes Mr. Jordan” was remade in 1978 as “Heaven Can Wait”, with Warren Beatty.
And ever since there has been no shortage of dualistic cinema to amuse us and make us question our philosophical takes on the philosophy and metaphysics of the mind.
Actually, there were several Disney flicks that got in on the dualistic action, before “Heaven Can Wait”.
1959’s “The Shaggy Dog”, starring Fred MacMurray as an unfortunate soul who gets transferred into a dog’s body:
In 1976, the franchise was continued with “The Shaggy D.A.”, starring (if you can call it that) Tim Conway as another unfortunate mind-transfer victim, into another dog’s body. (“The Shaggy Dog” was, naturally, remade in 2006 with Tim Allen, and a million dollars worth of computer graphics.)
“Freaky Friday” was another Disney movie that might have been the first actual mind-swap movie:
In this movie, a daughter and a mother actually swap minds — the mother’s mind takes up residence in the daughter’s body, and vice versa. A clearer illustration of dualism at work can’t be found. The mind “stuff” is completely separable from the body, and indeed can be transferred into a new body with the right sort of voodoo.
Dualism has, of course, also found its way into horror movies. Of course, every ghost movie, or life-after death movie, can be said to be dualistic in its nature. But one of the funniest expressions of dualism in a horror movie comes from the “Child’s Play” franchise, wherein the mind/soul of a murderous psychopath is severed from his own body and transferred into a talking children’s doll. The mind stuff doesn’t even need a brain, apparently! And it can control the doll’s movements to the extent of being able to wield knives and run relatively fast.
Dualism eventually gave birth to behaviorism, which begot physicalism, which begot functionalism. This isn’t the place to discuss all of these, but suffice it to say that functionalism is closely tied to the field of artificial intelligence, and thus is tied to a stack of other movies, from “2001” to “The Matrix”. But we’ll save that for another post.
When last we left this perplexing topic, many of you were trying to get me arrested for a crime another I committed. (I say “many of you” even though only my mom and my lawyer were trying to do that, but my circle of friends has scant points about it, so ‘many’ it was.) When we are looking at memories as the signpost of identity-pointing, there are detours aplenty. Today, we are going to move on to the third of the potential candidates for identity fixing: the physical body.
The pros and cons of the body as a candidate for personal identity here are pretty intuitive, and much of them we have seen earlier (with memories), if in slightly different form. The body is easily recognizable, and, in fact, is how we identify others. Slight changes, such as haircuts or tanning, seem to do little to distort or erase the recognizable features. However, which features matter the most? How many of them are necessary to maintain if one’s identity is to remain constant? Suppose you gain or lose three hundred pounds, you may well feel and be unrecognizable to both yourself and others. Are you a different person?Many soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with missing limbs; are they different people? Both examples will result in the individual’s feeling different, but is that enough for identity to change as well? Think of the liquor store example from my previous post. How would that apply here?
Suppose that I rob the liquor store, but instead of getting hit by a car I instead cut off one of my arms.
Is the the one-armed man the guilty person (I know Harrison Ford’s answer)?
What if I gain a lot of weight during the six weeks the police look for the robbing murderer?
I doubt there is much controversy to either of these scenarios, and almost every one of you is going to think that identity has remained constant, that the same person is still there or here or whatever, even if that same person is not exactly the same (what’s the difference?, you might wonder, and good for you, you wondering person; the topic of identity when not dealing with people is going to be dealt with soon).
Remember when we talked about the Ship of Theseus, and I suggested that there are some who suggest that every possible change results in new identity. Such an individual, if she is consistent, would have to say that I am not the person who robbed the liquor store because I cut my fingernails or because I removed some hair. Such a person, though, is not really a person in the traditional sense of the word ‘person’, but is more of a collection of experiences that are joined together. Such a person cannot recall her first date, as all her recollections belong to someone else, just as such a person cannot look forward to a happier time in her life, as it will not be she that is enjoying that time, only someone who looks and thinks much as she does.
Few of you think like that, though. But why? If you are not in the memory camp and the physical features have changed beyond recognition, why is a person still the same even after extensive physical changes? What’s that? Sorry, the sound on my computer is muted — what are you saying at your screen as though Skype were on and our conversation was being passively monitored by virtuous government agencies? Ah, I see. Thoughts! The thoughts have not changed. Good! It’s almost as though you knew where I wanted this post to go. Thanks!
Of course, by ‘thoughts’ what your philosophically ignorant train of thinking was suggesting was the brain. What most members of the physical camp believe to be the defining feature of identity anchoring is the brain. So long as you have the same brain, you are the same person.
Another way to get to the brain is by elimination. Which parts of the body matter? For the body, that is pretty simple: beards, arms, legs, livers, ears, moles, etc., are all pretty superfluous. The part that matters is the brain. How much of the body matters? Really, again, almost all of the body is superfluous except the brain. What if the brain is damaged and the thoughts no more work good? Well, that is not the same brain then, is it? As far as which parts matter and how much of those parts matter, what am I, a brain scientist? (Yes. Yes, I am. Not in the United States, of course; regulations and all that have proven quite the obstacle to my life goals).
The solution to those worries is normally dealt with by a kind of common sense functionalism. Most of us don’t know Broca’s area from the pubic bone, but if you cannot remember anything from last night back, your brain… it don’t work too good. So the parts and amounts that matter for personal identity are the ones, whichever they are (and brain scientists know which those are), that affect the functioning of the brain.
Simple enough then. You are your functioning brain, and wherever it goes, so go you. Right? Right. Right? Well, dammit.
Let’s swap brains, then, you and I, and see where we go. Who wakes up in a svelte killing machine of evolutionary perfection and who wakes up in body aimed at child predation? No, no. There are no trick questions on this site. You will wake up, most of you think, in a body not originally yours. If the swap is permanent, maybe your personality will change based on how people around you treat you (either with sexual fearsomeness or with fear of your sexual perversity), but you are still basically the same person. You are your brain.
There is really no way to confound anyone’s intuitions about the brain as it relates to identity, is there? Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Sorry, sorry — whoo, man. You really had there for a minute. Alright, let’s get to the confounding.
Suppose a man, let’s call him Gary, was born with half a brain. This happens, you know. Gary can still function and get about, but he only has half a brain. Maybe he cannot recall as much stuff as you can, maybe his motor skills are shaky in places, but he is a person and his name is Gary. Everyone okay with this?
Now let’s suppose that another person, Harry, has a regular, whole brain. But, egads! Harry is hit by a crazed Canadian driver and the resulting life-saving operation leaves him with half a brain. Now, this is not how it would work, but let’s suppose he still has around half his memories and the like. Is anyone here, aside from the identity-extremists, going to suggest that Harry is no longer Harry? Harry is still Harry even if only half of his brain is there since Harry can still function, to some degree, to some recognizable degree, as Harry used to.
Alright, and if we were to swap Harry’s half brain and Gary’s half brain, I suspect that you are going to think they, the people, go whither their brains do. Fine, fine. And if there was a third person, Terry, who lost his brain altogether, where is Terry? Gone. Right.
What about this, though (and this is due to philosopher Derek Parfit): let’s take Gary’s half and Harry’s half and put them together into Terry’s head. Who is that? It has half of each person’s brain (well, I guess, it has all of their available brain, so whatever) and, so, we are suggesting here, it has half of each person’s memories, is it both Gary and Harry? If not, why not?
If Harry with a brain in his head was still Harry and not dead, then Harry’s half with Gary’s half should make them both be (please try not to laugh) who they once were. Can the one body be two persons? What if both Harry and Gary had had whole brains that we split, combining one half from each in two separate bodies? Can two bodies then be four persons? Oh, philosophy, what have you done to our so carefully coddled beliefs about all that is personally identical in the world?
Next time: clones! And light sabers! And sex!!! But mostly, and only, just clones.
