Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (18 page)

Hume is pointing out that the self is elusive. It is unobservable. If
you `look inside your own mind'to try to catch it, you miss because
all you stumble upon are what he calls particular perceptions, or
experiences and emotions. You don't also get a glimpse of the `I'
that is the subject of these experiences. Yet we all think we know
ourselves with a quite peculiar intimacy. As we saw, Descartes
thought that this self-knowledge survived even `hyperbolic' doubt.

This nugget of the self has seemed to many philosophers to have
another remarkable property. It is simple. The self is not composite.
Here is one of Hume's contemporaries, the `common-sense' Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid (171o-96):

A part of a person is a manifest absurdity. When a man loses
his estate, his health, his strength, he is still the same person,
and has lost nothing of his personality. If he has a leg or an
arts cut off, he is the same person he was before. The amputated member is no part of his person, otherwise it would have
a right to part of his estate, and be liable for a part of his engagements. It would be entitled to a share of his merit and demerit, which is manifestly absurd. A person is something
indivisible... My thoughts, and actions, and feelings, change
every moment; they have no continued, but a successive existence; but that self or 1, to which they belong, is permanent, and has the satire relation to all the succeeding thoughts, ac-
tionsandfeelings which I call mine.

This simple, enduring `l' is the thing which Hume complained he
could never stumble upon. Reid bangs the table, and announces its
existence.

The simplicity of the soul conveniently opens the door to a traditional argument for its immortality.

All change and decay is the coming together or falling apart
of composite things. So, anything that is not composite
cannot change and decay. The soul is not composite. So, the
soul cannot change or decay.

As it stands, the first premise might not look all that compelling. It
would require some kind of defence. The idea would be that in any
natural (physical) change, we can detect something that is conserved. If you break a biscuit, the matter of the biscuit is conserved.
It used to he thought that atoms are conserved, so that chemical
change would be simply the rearrangement of atoms in a substance. Now we might think we have to dig deeper: perhaps it is
energy that is conserved, or sub-atomic particles whose rearrangements are responsible for changes in composite stuff. In either
event, it is only the compositions that change. The real `stuff' (fundamental particles, energy) just keeps on.

If you could really defend the first premise as an a priori truth,
and if you think Reid has given good grounds for the second
premise (the soul is not composite), then the argument looks
pretty good. Of course, it is equally an argument for the existence
of my Self before my natural birth, which might be a hit deflating.

Might all these thoughts be illusions? Should we really accept
that list 2 gives us even bare possibilities? Never mind, for the moment, whether these possibilities actually obtain, as various believers hold. Let us ask instead whether they are even coherent.

OAK TREES AND SHIPS

It is good to reflect how strange some of the beliefs on the second
list are. They prise the self away from everything that seems to give
it an identity, whether body, history, memory, or even mind. Does
this make any sense? To approach this, let us turn our attention
away from ourselves and think about the identity of other things.
We can turn again to John Locke, who made an interesting observation about vegetables or plants:

That being then one plant which has such an organization of
parts in one coherent body partaking of one common life, it
continues to be the same plant as long as it partakes of the
same life, though that life be communicated to new particles
of matter vitally united to the living plant, in a like continued
organization conformable to that sort of plants.

Locke points out that we can have the same oak tree, for instance,
through a period of time, although the constituent `atoms; or cells
or molecules, change. What is required is `partaking of the same
life, or in other words what we might think of as an organizational
or functional unity. It does not matter whether the bits remain the
same, so long as this unity of function is maintained. And so long
as it is, we talk properly of the same oak tree. So we have the same oak tree as a sapling, and as a mature tree, after some branches have
dropped off, and so on.

Locke can use this insight to explain why we identify the same
human being through the normal changes of life. `Same man or
woman' is like `same tree' or `same monkey'. It accommodates
growth and change, so long as there is continuity of function, or of
organized life. So far then, so good. Locke has got a good hold on
what enables us to reidentify the same human being (thought of as
a large mammal: what you see when you look in a mirror) or same
plant through time. Why should anything change when we come
to the self?

If we look at the second list of things with which I began this
chapter, we will see that if we confine attention to plants and animals, none of the thoughts there gets a foothold. They make no
sense at all. We do not think of a particular oak tree, `Hey, that tree
might have been a maple,' unless this means that we could have
planted a different tree, a maple, where we actually planted the oak.
But then it would have been a different tree. It wouldn't have been
that very oak dressed up, as it were, as a maple. Similarly, we do not
imagine trees surviving organic death, so that the very same tree
might come back, for instance, as a daffodil. So if there is nothing
different to being the `same self' than being the `same human
being, and if we settle the identity of human beings through time
rather as we settle the identity of animals, then it looks as if none of
the thoughts on list 2 should make any sense.

The same oak tree, at two different times, need not he the same
aggregate of identical molecules, at the two different times. The
same is true even of inorganic things. Consider the cloud that streams off the summit of Everest. To the mountaineer the same
cloud may drift off the summit for hours or days. But it is changing
its composition every second, as the wind tears water molecules
through it at a hundred miles an hour. It is the same cloud for all
that. We tolerate differences of constitution, at least up to a point.
We think like this when we think of human groups, such as clubs or
teams. We think of ourselves as supporting the'same team' year in,
year out, although the membership of the team (and possibly its
management, and its ground) changes. The glorious history of the
regiment would not be nearly so glorious if we could only identify
the same regiment as far back as its present membership. We also
think like this when it comes to inanimate things with a function.
It is still the same computer, although I add to its memory, change
the screen, update the system, and so on.

We are often quite careless about how much change to tolerate
while still regarding it as the same `thing': witness the joke about
the Irish axe which has been in the family for several generations,
although it has had three new heads and five new handles. Sometimes we get confused: an illustration is the case of the'ship of Theseus'. Theseus goes on a long voyage, and in the course of it bits of
his ship need replacing. In fact, by the end, he has tossed overboard
used sails, spars, rigging, planks, and replaced them all. Does he
come back in the same ship? We would probably say so. But suppose some entrepreneur goes round behind him, picking up the
discarded bits, and reassembles them. Can't the entrepreneur
claim to have the original ship? But surely we cannot have two different ships each of which is identical with the original?

SOULS AND ELASTIC BALLS

So perhaps to make sense of the thoughts in list 2 we would invoke
an'immaterial substance'-the mysterious, simple, soul of Me. It
might even seem that these thoughts are sound enough to give
some kind of argument for Cartesian dualism, it only being within
that framework that they make any sense. But then Locke makes an
extremely interesting move. We have seen that plants and animals
survive change of material substance. So why shouldn't persons
(me, you) survive change of soul substance?

But the question is, whether if the same substance, which
thinks, be changed, it can be the same person, or remaining
the same, it can bedif/erent persons?

And to this I answer first, this can he no question at all to
those, who place thought in a purely material, animal, constitution, void of an immaterial substance. For, whether their
supposition be true or no, 'tis plain they conceive personal
identity preserved in something else than identity of substance; as animal identity is preserved in identity of life, and
not of substance. And therefore those, who place thinking in
an immaterial substance only, before they can come to deal
with these men, must shew why personal identity cannot be
preserved in the change of immaterial substances, or variety
of particular immaterial substances, as well as animal identity is preserved in the change of material substances, or variety of particular bodies.

Locke's wonderful move is to point out that even if we are very
worried by personal survival through time and change, invoking
`immaterial soul substances' won't help. Why not? Because just as we count plants through time regardless of change of material elements, so we count persons over time without any reference to
`immaterial substances. There is a nice illustration of his point
given by Kant. In this quotation from his masterpiece, the Critique
of Pure Reason, `representations' are things like experiences or
thoughts-what Descartes would have lumped under `cogita-
tiones'-contents of the mind:

An elastic ball which impinges on another similar ball in a
straight line communicates to the latter its whole motion and
therefore its whole state (that is, if we take account only of the
positions in space). If, then, in analogy with such bodies, we
postulate substances such that the one communicates to the
other representations together with the consciousness of them,
we can conceive a whole series of substances of which the first
transmits its state together with its consciousness to the second, the second its own state with that of the preceding substance to the third, and this in turn the states of all the
preceding substances together with its own consciousness and
with their consciousness to another. The last substance would
then be conscious of all the states of the previously changed
substances, as being its own states, because they would have
been transferred to it together with the consciousness of therm.

The point is that we don't know anything about `immaterial substances'. Perhaps our immaterial substance gets replaced every
evening, like the change of disk drive in a computer that preserves
all the software and files.

All this is quite enough to put grave doubts in front of the argument for immortality that we considered. As Kant continues:

For we are unable front our own consciousness to determine whether, as souls, we are permanent or not. Since we reckon as
belonging to our identical self only that of which we are conscious, we must necessarily judge that we are one and the
same throughout the whole time o/ which we are conscious.
We cannot, however, claim that this judgment would be valid
from the standpoint of an outside observer. For since the only
permanent appearance which we encounter in the soul is the
representation 7' that accompanies and connects them all, we
are unable to prove that this 'I it mere thought, may not be in
the saute state o(flux as the other thoughts which, by means of
it, are linked up with one another.

We can summarize the negative point by saying that nothing in our
inner musings about `myself' licenses thinking in terms of a permanent inner substance, capable of surviving even the most remarkable changes and possibilities. But each of Locke and Kant has
a more positive point to make.