I was trying to answer the question “Is there any meaningful sense in which I can expect to wake up as myself tomorrow, rather than Brittany Spears?”
What would it be like for you to wake up tomorrow as Britney Spears?
If you mean that someone with your memory and personality wakes up in Britney Spears’s body, that is very improbable and we don’t need any fancy philosophical gymnastics to see it. If you mean that someone with Britney Spears’s memory and personality wakes up in Britney Spears’s body (while someone with your memory and personality wakes up in your body) but in some mysterious sense that person indistinguishable from Britney Spears is you, I have to ask whether you really regard that as a coherent proposition.
Personal identity, like most other varieties of identity, is somewhat conventional but not arbitrary. Most of the time, the persons who exist at time t+1 are very similar to the persons who exist at time t—plus some new ones, minus some deaths, and with a few dramatic changes due to injury and whatnot—and there’s an “obvious” way to assign identities between those times.
The feeling of one’s own identity is a bit different (but still somewhat conventional and not arbitrary). You remember doing some things yesterday, while inhabiting a body very much like the one you’re in now; those are things you can imagine doing again if you were in the same sort of situation. Accordingly, you regard the person who did those things yesterday as you. Conveniently, this lines up pretty well with the notion of personal identity other onlookers will likely adopt. In weird scenarios where, e.g., you remember two different sets of events from yesterday, or your memories from yesterday are of inhabiting a very different body and doing very uncharacteristic things, you would likely be in some doubt as to whether the memories were “really yours”. In some of those weird scenarios (e.g., as you’re pondering the question, a chap in a white coat says “aha, it seems my experimental memory-implantation procedure has worked!”) you would probably decide that they weren’t. In others (e.g., what you remember yesterday is being in a wolf’s body and chasing people, and a different chap in a white coat is now explaining that lycanthropy turns out to be real after all) you would probably decide that they were “really yours” but be tempted to say that “I wasn’t really myself then”. But these things are all somewhat conventional and they all admit of degrees.
Perhaps I’ve just been thinking about this stuff for too many years, but for me it’s all in the category of “slightly disturbing but pretty much obvious”. Perhaps that’s where it will end up for you too :-).
When I first considered this I was a youth and didn’t know about different types of identity or cognitive psychology.
I just wondered why ‘I’ think and why ‘I’ didn’t think the thoughts of somebody else.
I didn’t identify identity with continuity of memories: I wasn’t aware of the possibility to model idenitity that way.
My idea of “me” was intuitive. But it was sufficient abstract that it didn’t mean a continuity of personality. If it meant the identity of the abstract reasoning-process. The process doing the resoning just in the moment of my thoughts. Why did that process think (in/for) me and not (in/for) somebody else?
So you could say that the question was rather about the identity of that reasoning process. And maybe Skeptityke conceived of something along these lines. In any case because the imagined reasoning process is abstract it could as well think for somebody else. Why didn’t it appear to do so. It was a riddle I didn’t solve then.
The solution is quite easy in hindsight:
The abstract reasoning process doing my thinking has no identity. Identity is coupled to state and all state has been abstracted away. It could execute its processing on some other beings state and that being would
It is not the reasoning process which perceives itself reasoning it is the resoning process working on my memories and other transient state which causes the perception of some reasoning process going on.
See also Righting a Wrong Question which could be applied here as follows: Not “Why do I have identity” but “Why do I think I have identity”.
One could models the process that makes you and Brittney Spears as two different processes. Or you could view it as one process that moves the two states forward. In this sense you could say that you wake up as both but off course their brainstates don’t know about each others inner workings. If you undergo lobotomy or multiple personality disorder you would probably still identify with all the pieces even if they can’t (fully) communicate with each other. (Or rather the pieces would acknowledge their common origin and close ties they have with each other)
What would it be like for you to wake up tomorrow as Britney Spears?
If you mean that someone with your memory and personality wakes up in Britney Spears’s body, that is very improbable and we don’t need any fancy philosophical gymnastics to see it. If you mean that someone with Britney Spears’s memory and personality wakes up in Britney Spears’s body (while someone with your memory and personality wakes up in your body) but in some mysterious sense that person indistinguishable from Britney Spears is you, I have to ask whether you really regard that as a coherent proposition.
Personal identity, like most other varieties of identity, is somewhat conventional but not arbitrary. Most of the time, the persons who exist at time t+1 are very similar to the persons who exist at time t—plus some new ones, minus some deaths, and with a few dramatic changes due to injury and whatnot—and there’s an “obvious” way to assign identities between those times.
The feeling of one’s own identity is a bit different (but still somewhat conventional and not arbitrary). You remember doing some things yesterday, while inhabiting a body very much like the one you’re in now; those are things you can imagine doing again if you were in the same sort of situation. Accordingly, you regard the person who did those things yesterday as you. Conveniently, this lines up pretty well with the notion of personal identity other onlookers will likely adopt. In weird scenarios where, e.g., you remember two different sets of events from yesterday, or your memories from yesterday are of inhabiting a very different body and doing very uncharacteristic things, you would likely be in some doubt as to whether the memories were “really yours”. In some of those weird scenarios (e.g., as you’re pondering the question, a chap in a white coat says “aha, it seems my experimental memory-implantation procedure has worked!”) you would probably decide that they weren’t. In others (e.g., what you remember yesterday is being in a wolf’s body and chasing people, and a different chap in a white coat is now explaining that lycanthropy turns out to be real after all) you would probably decide that they were “really yours” but be tempted to say that “I wasn’t really myself then”. But these things are all somewhat conventional and they all admit of degrees.
Perhaps I’ve just been thinking about this stuff for too many years, but for me it’s all in the category of “slightly disturbing but pretty much obvious”. Perhaps that’s where it will end up for you too :-).
When I first considered this I was a youth and didn’t know about different types of identity or cognitive psychology. I just wondered why ‘I’ think and why ‘I’ didn’t think the thoughts of somebody else. I didn’t identify identity with continuity of memories: I wasn’t aware of the possibility to model idenitity that way.
My idea of “me” was intuitive. But it was sufficient abstract that it didn’t mean a continuity of personality. If it meant the identity of the abstract reasoning-process. The process doing the resoning just in the moment of my thoughts. Why did that process think (in/for) me and not (in/for) somebody else?
So you could say that the question was rather about the identity of that reasoning process. And maybe Skeptityke conceived of something along these lines. In any case because the imagined reasoning process is abstract it could as well think for somebody else. Why didn’t it appear to do so. It was a riddle I didn’t solve then.
The solution is quite easy in hindsight: The abstract reasoning process doing my thinking has no identity. Identity is coupled to state and all state has been abstracted away. It could execute its processing on some other beings state and that being would
It is not the reasoning process which perceives itself reasoning it is the resoning process working on my memories and other transient state which causes the perception of some reasoning process going on.
See also Righting a Wrong Question which could be applied here as follows: Not “Why do I have identity” but “Why do I think I have identity”.
One could models the process that makes you and Brittney Spears as two different processes. Or you could view it as one process that moves the two states forward. In this sense you could say that you wake up as both but off course their brainstates don’t know about each others inner workings. If you undergo lobotomy or multiple personality disorder you would probably still identify with all the pieces even if they can’t (fully) communicate with each other. (Or rather the pieces would acknowledge their common origin and close ties they have with each other)