Indeterminacy of Personal Identity

The following is a condensed version of a longer discussion on the epistemology of our identity. Epistemological endeavors concern what knowledge we have access to and how it is we come about knowing it. It is relevant to considerations about the lack of meaning in the universe in several ways. If this silly little paper is any indication, we live in a time where the more we understand about reality, the more our intuitions about it are upended. Who are we really? Are we a group of cells expressing a distinct sequence of DNA? Maybe we are disembodied soul or mind that persists beyond this grouping of cells. Are you actually the same person you were from you childhood? Personal identity it seems is hard to tie down. Which is very concerning when it is the basis of so much of how we frame our existence. If we are unsure about who we are, then how can we go about assigning responsibility and meaning to our selves? If our lives were to have meant something, it should be explicitly clear whose life we are living. At the moment, all we can go off of is conjecture.

Wasserman (2009) addresses what he sees as the consequences of the complex view of personal identity put forward by Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984). The complex view, synonymous with reductionism, states that facts about personal identity consists of other, impersonal facts. Facts like the organization of neurons in the body and the continuity of thoughts and experience. To Parfit, an implication of this position is the Indeterminacy of Personal Identity (IPI): questions about personal identity can lack determinate answers. The IPI is illustrated by a thought experiment involving a cellular replacement machine. A man, Frank, enters the machine and a specified amount of cells, from 1 to all, will be swapped out for the cells of Einstein. For Wasserman, under the complex view, it will be indeterminate whether or not the new person, Frankenstein, is the same person as Frank for a wide range of replaced cells. Wasserman’s intuition leads him to reject this notion. He suggests that this innate aversion is rooted in opposition to indeterminacy about what is to be done. In the case of the cellular replacement machine, Frank has committed a capital crime. Wasserman submits that we accept that we are then obligated to punish Frank for his transgression. If Frank was to enter the machine before the punishment and a majority of Frank’s cells remain, would we still be obligated to punish Frankenstein for Frank’s misdeed? From this he posits the Indeterminacy of Obligation (IO): it is possible for questions about obligations, rational or moral, to lack determinate answers. After establishing these two conditions, Wasserman formulates the Indeterminacy Argument (IA) against the complex view of personal identity:

(1) If the complex view is true, then IPI is true

(2) IF IPI is true, then IO is true

(3)  IO is false.

So, (4) The complex view is false

Wasserman argues that under these conditions, it can not be indeterminate whether or not we are obligated to punish Frank because, as a moral realist, questions about moral obligation must have determinate answers. This results in (3) and the rejection of the complex view.

I will defend the complex view of personal identity by taking an epistemic approach that is more charitable and less vulnerable to objection than the one put forward by Wasserman. Explicitly denying the conditional of the (1) above. But first it is important to discuss how Wasserman arrived at this formulation. To him, “something deep inside” says that there must be an answer to questions like “will I survive?” between his current identity and some future version. Wasserman queries why is the intuition to reject indeterminacy about personal identity is so strong? Though this is a valid question, he just assumes that all share “our” deep-seated “opposition.” Many raised outside the Western tradition, namely the Buddhist tradition, would not have this innate repulsion to indeterminacy about identity since they reject its existence in the first place. Further, those who do not share his moral realist position might also not feel an intuitive discomfort with indeterminate obligations either. Though appealing to intuition can lead to claims that can be rigorously evaluated, it is important to point out that they are unique to each individual person.

In rejecting the complex view, he must posit the further fact found in the simple view, or non-reductionist, that accounts for one’s personal identity. This bloated ontology rings my intuitive alarm as much as indeterminate moral obligations set off his. Let us return to the cellular transformation machine. In the process of turning Frank into Einstein, one cell will replace the location and function of the same. But this use of the word cell is too broad and too loosely associated with accepted theories of the relationship between chemistry, biology, and the self, synonymous with personal identity in this paper. Since we are taking the complex view, the impersonal facts of personal identity are not just any cells in Frank. These facts are the structural and functional relationship of neurons in the brain and nervous system. In other words, the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). Neuroscience is nowhere near confirming the existence of the NCC but it seems to me a direct consequence of taking the complex view. In his interpretation, you could replace the 100 billion neurons, a small fraction of a human’s ~30 trillion total cells, in Frank’s brain with those of Einstein and still not know whether or not Frank remains when you determinately have Einstein in Frank’s body. This suggests that there very much is a fact of the matter when it comes to the transition of Frank to Frankenstein. Further, under the complex view, his like for like cell replacement masks the true consequences of this operation. If the one cell being replaced was, for example, a pyramidal axon that runs from the frontal lobe to the cerebellum and branches out all along the way, the effect could be very drastic. Once one neuron is changed in a synaptic chain the whole system begins to function differently going forward. If these types of changes were made to neurons responsible for the NCC, the number of cells that separates Frank from Frankenstein could be quite small. Given these conditions, we are only currently in an epistemically blocked position when it comes to cases of personal identity. Therefore, the question of personal identity will be metaphysically settled in the future. Of course, he considers the cellular transformation machine not because it will one day become a reality. Wasserman is concerned with personal identity changing over time. Analogous to the machine, our cells, atoms, and neuronal connections are all “swapped out” as we age. My version of the epistemicist response should alleviate Wasserman’s fears of moral and rational indeterminacy. In the future, when personal identity is tied to impersonal facts that definitively maintain sufficient continuity, we could determinately know when a criminal like Frank is sufficiently disconnected from the person who committed a crime. Rather than leading to indeterminacy of obligation, it settles it.