Split brains, teletransportation, and personal identity

phil 20229
Jeff Speaks
February 14, 2008

1 What is a theory of personal identity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 Parfit’s example of teletransportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3 Cell replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4 Split brain patients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5 Reponses to the problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1 What is a theory of personal identity?

Suppose that you have a person, A, who exists at some time, and a person, B, who exists
at some later time. A theory of personal identity is a theory which tries to answer the
question: what does it take for A and B to be the same person?

Note that this is not a theory which described how we usually recognize and identify
people. For example, I usually recognize you by some combination of your appearance
and where in the room you sit. But of course two of you could, in an elaborate prank,
change seats and have extensive reconstructive surgery which made each of you look much
like the other. But this would not mean that either of you became the other person.

It is surprisingly difficult to come up with a theory of personal identity which is not open
to obvious objections. For example, you might be at first inclined to suggest that A and
B are the same person if and only if they have the same body. But now consider ‘body
swapping’ examples of the sort you might see in movies. Many people think that this sort
of thing at least makes sense, and so is in one sense possible; but if it is, doesn’t that
mean that A and B might be the same person even if they do not share a body?

Furthermore, what does it even mean to have the same body? You’re constantly gaining
and losing cells, so that your body now has hardly anything in common with your body
10 years ago. But does this mean that you really are not the same person now as you
were then? Surely not.

A second initial thought is that A and B are the same person if they have the same per-
sonality, or the same consciousness, or the same memory. But, again, there are problems
here. You don’t have the same memories, or exactly the same personality, as you had a
year ago; but that doesn’t mean that you are not the same person. Suppose that you
met someone who, by some strange chance, had personalities and memories more similar
to yours now than yours now are to the you of 5 years ago. Would you think that that
person was identical to you, or as much the same person as you as the you of 5 years ago?

2 Parfit’s example of teletransportation

Here’s a potential solution to the problems with the ‘personality’ theory: maybe we should
focus on examples of persons at consecutive times, or near enough. Maybe for such pairs
of persons at times we can say that if they’re similar enough psychologically, and if the
psychological states of the later one are caused by the psychological states of the earlier
one, they are the same person. Then we could say, in the above case, that A and B are
the same person if there is some chain leading from the former to the latter made up of
‘consecutive persons’ of this sort.

This seems to have

the virtue that it
makes sense of the
possibility of cases
of teletransportation,
ofthe sort that Derek
Parfit described in
his book, Reasons
and Persons. Read-
ing about this sort
of example, it seems
very plausible that
the person who emerges
from the teletrans-
porter is the same
as the person who
entered. And this
Parfit’s description of simple teletransportation. fits well with the sort
of ‘personality’ the-
ory sketched above:
the person who emerges from the teletransporter is psychologically very similar to the
person who enters, and the psychological states of the person who emerges do seem to be
caused by the psychological states of the person who entered.

However, as Parfit noticed, these cases are not as unproblematic for the psychological
theory as they seem.

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In this version of the
case, the psycholog-
ical theory seems to
lead to the conclusion
that the person who
enters the teletrans-
portation machine is
identical to both the
person who is on
Mars, and the per-
son who is still on
earth. But that can’t Parfit’s description of the ‘branch line case.’
be right, since the
person on Mars and
the person on earth are clearly different people.

Assuming the above psychological theory, we can state the resultant paradox like this:
1. If A and B are separated by a very small amount of time, are
very similar psychologically, and are such that the psychological
states of B causally depend on the psychological states of A, then
A = B.
2. The person who enters the teletransporter = the person who is on
Mars after the New Scanner runs. (1)
3. The person who enters the teletransporter = the person who leaves
the teletransporter on Earth after the New Scanner runs.
4. If x = y and y = z, then x = z. (Transitivity of identity)
C. The person who is on Mars after the New Scanner runs = the
person who leaves the teletransporter on Earth after the New
Scanner runs.

The problem is that the conclusion seems clearly false. Does this show that premise (1),
which states the ‘personality’ theory, is also false?

3 Cell replacement

This might incline you to adopt some version of the ‘body’ theory of personal identity.
But this view too has problems. Suppose that someone gets an organ transplant. Clearly,
this will not result in the cessation of their existence, even though part of their body
was replaced. But what if half the organs in their body are replaced? Would they still
continue to be the same person? Can you see a way to recreate the problem we saw with
the transitivity of identity for this view?

Should the proponent of the ‘body’ theory link identity to the whole body, the brain, or
what? If the brain (or part of it), does this mean that brain replacement surgery is, in
principle, impossible to survive, and always results in the creation of a new person?

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A different version of the problem: the proponent of the ‘body’ theory will surely admit
that you could have 1% of the cells in your body replaced, and must deny that you could
have 99% of the cells in your body replaced. So, somewhere there must be a dividing
line, such that changing that many or more of your cells would result in your ceasing to
exist. But is this really plausible? Could it really be the case that if 46.7% of the cells
in your body are replaced you remain the same person, but that replacing 46.8% of your
cells results in your death, and the creation of a new conscious being?

4 Split brain patients

The examples of teletransportation and cell replacement pose problems for particular
theories of personal identity. Parfit thinks that the examples of split brain patients —
which are real, not imagined — should cause us to question our views about the sorts of
things that people are.

An explanation of the split brain data, and the evidence that there is more than one
stream of consciousness.

These cases give rise to the following paradox:

1. In split brain cases, the patient will give reports of two different
psychological episodes — say, seeing blue and seeing red — which
must have occurred at the same time.
2. The split brain patient will say that they are aware of only one of
these conscious episodes.
3. There are two separate streams of consciousness belonging to the
patient. (1,2)
4. One person cannot have two separate streams of consciousness; for
each stream of consciousness, there must be a separate person.
5. The split brain patient, while their corpus callosum is severed, is
more than one person. (3,4)
6. If you repaired the patient’s corpus callosum, you would not be
destroying a person; in severing the patient’s corpus callosum, you
would not be creating a person.
7. The split brain patient, before having their corpus callosum sev-
ered and after having it repaired (if this were possible) is more
than one person. (5,6)
8. You are are I are in every relevant respect just like the split brain
patient, before having their corpus callosum severed and/or after
having it repaired (if this were possible).
C. You and I are more than one person. (7,8)

There’s a sense in which this conclusion does not make sense. You can understand the
intended conclusion as the claim that our concept of a person is somehow inherently
unstable, and leads us to contradiction when we consider cases such as split brain patients.

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 5 Reponses to the problems

Parfit thinks that the appropriate response to these problems is to adopt the bundle theory,
which you can think of as a version of the four-dimensionalist theory that we discussed
in connection with the problem of the statue and the clay. In explaining the Bundle
Theory, Parfit compares persons to clubs; and say that the identity of persons over time
is analogous to the identity of clubs over time. If this is true, what’s the analogue of the
members and rules of the club in the case of persons?

Consider the version of the teletransportation case in which you emerge on earth, and see
‘yourself’ also emerging from the machine on Mars. Now suppose you find out that the
machine has caused irreversible problems with your nervous system which will cause you
to die in 10 minutes. Should the existence of your clone on Mars make you feel better
about the situation? What should the bundle theorist say? Is there a big difference
between the case in which the person on earth vs. the one in which the person on Mars
survives?

Suppose you are a dualist, which means that you think that persons are immaterial things
distinct from their bodies. How should you respond to the above problems?

What if you think that persons are material beings, but you do not want to be a bundle
theorist? What should you say about, for example, the cell replacement example?