Personal Identity and Deep Persistence

Mysterious stuff...

This Substack post is briefer and less developed than my usual work product, because I’ve been very busy. I could have held off for another week or two, but those weeks will be even busier than the last few have been, and I can’t afford to hemorrhage any more eyeballs to Francis Fukuyama and Cartoons Hate Her. Nobody buys energy drinks from non-famous philosophers.

Anyway, so yeah…good old diachronic personal identity. I haven’t read any of the literature after like 1990 or so, and barely any before that, and the view I favour is…“cryptic”, perhaps? “Gestural”? But I think there’s something to it, so here we go…

What I care about when I care about surviving is the persistence of my phenomenal consciousness. I don’t think it’s a substantive question whether my persistence requires persistence of my consciousness or persistence of my body or persistence of this Substack, but what I care about in the survivally way is persistence of my phenomenal consciousness. To care about X in the survivally way is to think that the possibility of almost all of the the other things one deeply cares about depends on X. I could enjoy the first Rage Against the Machine record without my body, in theory, but not without my consciousness. Ditto for lots of other stuff.

Okay, then, what does it take for my consciousness to persist? IIRC, it’s common to answer questions like this by saying “Oh, well there are these slices or stages of consciousness, and there must be some set of relations between them maybe involving qualitative similarity but certainly causation, that binds them all into a chain that we call ‘the same consciousness, persisting over time’.” But it is easy to imagine cases in which a temporal stage of consciousness causes another temporal stage of consciousness in a very direct way, and where those two stages are qualitatively very similar, but we would not be at all tempted to call them parts of the same consciousness. And then I start to think that even in ordinary cases of what seems obviously like persistence, the causal relations and qualitative similarity that obtain between different stages of consciousness are not radically different enough from those that obtain in the non-persistence cases to make a difference. So I think the right story about persisting consciousness does not advert to causal and similarity relations. The right model is not of separate things linked together in just the right way to yield a persisting thing.

Rather, the right model is of something sticking around. As I sit here on my yacht off of Mykonos, lounging against a Corinthian column, I ask: Intuitively, just intuitively for now, what is it in virtue of which this the same column that was there five minutes ago? I answer: A thing, a whole thing, sticks around — a very different explanation of why this is the same economic calamity that began three years ago, or why this is the same criminal organization that gave me this scar in my youth. Now the natural response here is: Look, Andrew, this is not how macro-sized objects work. There are lots of little thingies attracting and repelling each other, and doing fundamentally probabilistic shit and action-at-a-distance and other weird stuff, and it's their behaviour that makes this the same column. So if we want to say that the column persists, it's not fundamentally because of one indivisible thing that sticks around, but because of the flying around and whatnot of all the little things

“I judge wisely, as if nothing ever surprised me, lounging between two pillars of ivory” — Killah Priest, 4th Chamber (Sorry, this is a quick post; you’re lucky to be getting visuals at all…)

But what was wrong to say about the column is, I think, right to say about about consciousness. The right story of why consciousness persists does not invoke temporal parts and causal or other relations between them, but rather the same consciousness sticking around. If we picture nodes and arrows and stuff, we’re not picturing what’s pertinent to diachronic personal identity worth caring about; if we picture a band stretched out through time, we’re more in the ballpark. Now "sticking around" and persistence may seem like the same concept, but they're not. It’s an open and meaningful question — although you're right to worry about the meaningfulness, tbh! — whether a consciousness persists because of relations between parts, or because a thing sticks around. So I want to call the kind of persistence that might happen because of relations between parts, and might happen for some other reason, "shallow persistence", and the "sticking around" kind I've been talking about "deep persistence". I think that consciousness is the sort of thing that can deeply persist, and that I survive in the sense I care about only when it does so.

My thought is that deep persistence is the kind of thing that can be represented non-conceptually, and that we should interpret the kind of knowledge-seeking imagining that we do when we think about difficult cases as an attempt at representing facts about the deep persistence of a consciousness. That there is some non-conceptual representation involved goes towards explaining why questions about deep persistence are substantive ones, not ones like "Squirrel" (see the meta-ethics post) in which apparently disagreeing parties are, I claim, simply drawing lines in different places around what may well be the same things. Inquiry about personal identity — or at least, the kind that I find myself drawn to! — can be understood as centred around the quest to imaginatively acquaint oneself with facts about the deep persistence of consciousness so as to represent them non-conceptually.

Now, I could say more about how this representation works, or what the implications of my account are for tele-transporters and the afterlife and sleep. But then I'd be writing a long, good post, and so I’ll leave that there. Next time I will have a magnum opus, I promise!