Derek Parfit’s “Impersonal Survival”

John lies down on a grassy turf, gazing into the deep blue sky. Swallows circle overhead, high above. Bruno leans on his elbows and watches Mary go away with dancing steps across the meadow, picking flowers along the way. In the middle of the clearing grows a large solitary tree putting forth young branches.

John. How can my tiny self survive in this azure!

Bruno. How can it not survive? But your true self is – this azure! […] John, since you mentioned survival, it reminds me of an interesting philosophical book I read some time ago, and one of its main issues is exactly the survival of the self viz. person: I’m talking about the book Reasons and Persons, written in the 80s by the philosopher Derek Parfit. Have you ever heard about him?

John. No.

Bruno. Parfit became renowned already in the beginning of the 80s as a philosopher who introduced into analytical philosophy a new approach to the problem of personal identity, primarily in his article “Personal Identity”, which was later reprinted in the collection edited by Harold Noonan. In his extensive book Reasons and Persons, Parfit further elaborates and provides a detailed explanation of the thought presented in that article.

John. Master, you said that Parfit discussed the question of the survival of the self or person: the self or person – do these two terms mean the same?

Bruno. Not quite, but it is difficult to discern between them. Generally speaking, the person in Western philosophy and particularly in Christian Personalism supposedly means more than the self: the person is supposed to be the one who is aware of himself or herself, his or her identity in the course of time, experiencing himself or herself as the subject of all his/her memories and of the will, is responsible for his/her actions… while the self is usually not given all these attributes, and is, in modern philosophy, understood primarily as the “pure” cognitive subject. In other words: the identity or sameness of the self is supposed to be the necessary, but not sufficient condition for the identity of the person – or the other way round: the identity of the person is not the necessary condition for the identity of the self. Employing the analytical method, which is characteristic for British philosophy, Parfit discusses the question as to what is the meaning of the identity of the person or personal identity, and particularly how to reflect posthumous survival – should it be considered as personal survival or in some other way?

John. Master, please tell me more!

Bruno. Thinking about personal identity starts with the question as to what is actually the criterion for the person’s preservation: what is it that makes me in my life, or perhaps even after death, one and the same person? There is no general consent among analytics, even though the majority shares the belief that, following John Locke, the continuity of psychic life is of crucial importance for the preservation of personal identity – more accurately, the possibility of continuity of psychic states in the course of time (since the actual continuity of consciousness is interrupted, for example, during sleep, while I nevertheless remain the same person) –, and this continuity is made possible by memory. Locke reflected, among other things, the Pythagorean transmigration of souls; he asked himself when and under what conditions could he claim for himself that he is, say, the reincarnated Socrates – and his answer goes something like this: I would be (the same person as) Socrates, if I remembered a large part of Socrates’ life, namely the same way Socrates remembered his past or the way I remember my own. (It shouldn’t be important here whether Locke would have the same soul as Socrates – namely the soul in Platonic or Christian or Cartesian sense.) Nowadays, the majority of analytic philosophers agree with Lock’s criterion for personal identity as the sameness of a mind in time, which is made possible by memory; however, this criterion does have some difficulties; some raise objections, for example, that it implies circle thinking, since memory as such presupposes rather than posits the identity of person which is reminiscent of something, while others observe that we forget many a thing we experience. This is why certain contemporary analytics, among them Bernard Williams, are more inclined to consider the bodily (or brain) sameness as the criterion rather than that of mind; the latter are a minority, although they are right to a certain extent, since we often find our thoughts or other psychic contents even more fleeting or transient than those of our body… but on the other hand, this minority could be objected that it doesn’t answer the question as to who or what connects the bodily parts (as well as psychic contents) into a whole; besides, such “materialistic” viewpoint excludes in advance the possibility of surviving after death, since the human body is subject to continuous changes already in this life, not to mention in afterlife… and so we could go on and on.

John. Quite complicated.

Bruno. It seems complicated, although modern formulations are often only implicit reformulations of some well-known ancient philosophical questions which haven’t been solved yet or may never be solved at all.

John. Which group of analytics does Parfit belong to – majority or minority?

Bruno. More to the majority; to the followers of Locke, although in a unique way… Parfit first of all claims that our usual criterion for personal identity in time can be expressed in the following way:

“Whatever happens between now and any future time, either I shall exist, or I shall not. Any future experience will either be my experience, or it will be not.”[1]

– and then he goes on saying that such a belief has many negative side effects, on the psychological, social as well as ethical level, for example excessive self-interest, serving one’s own interests, persisting in one’s own personal survival at any price and the anxiety of oblivion and death, entailed from it.

John. Parfit is then primarily a moral philosopher?

Bruno. Indeed, we could say so, although in Reasons and Persons he deals with various issues, reaching from mathematics to genetics, but his primary interest is metaphysics of identity and difference. Assuming the habits of contemporary cognitive philosophy, he is inclined to perform the so-called thought experiments; in doing so he refers to David Wiggins’ unusual question: what would happen if the brains – my brains – would be divided in two parts, in the left and right hemisphere, and each of them would be put in a different body – my whole brain in two bodies; what would happen in this case to me? Formally, there are three options: (1) I wouldn’t survive, (2) I would survive as one of the two people, and (3) I would survive as both people.

John. But this is childish playing around with fantasies! How are my brains supposed to divide in two separate and still living and functioning halves?

Bruno. Ha, it is not as impossible as it may seem at first sight: Parfit, following Wiggins, says that the division of brains in hemispheres is possible in principle, supporting this with the argument of the famous example from neurosurgery, when a psychotic patient is operatively healed by cutting the bridge between the hemispheres, which in case of such a patient are in discordance… or are perhaps even too well in accordance. I’m not familiar with the medical details.

John. But I do know what the outcome of such treatment is: they cure the patient by destroying his soul. I know several people who fell in the hands of psychiatrists and neurologists…

Bruno. This I believe, but Parfit isn’t interested here in ethical problems of brain surgery, because he mentions this cutting brains in half as their doubling solely as an instance, the simplest possible case of the branching of the self. The point is that both hemispheres can function relatively independently, what has been witnessed by several other cases, such as the consequences of brain damage, where the uninjured hemisphere gradually replaces the injured one.

John. But such cases – I have also heard about some similar instances at lectures in cognitive philosophy – are highly restricted: they describe specific, mostly constructed situations, which don’t have much in common with ordinary and normal conditions.

Bruno. Quite likely; however, history of science teaches us that science often takes decisive steps exactly in view of border cases: from experiential anomalies stems the theory of relativity, quantum physics and other scientific theories which expanded from a specific and marginal discovery to a much broader field and more general domain.

John. Master, is it possible, in your opinion, to learn certain things about the consciousness and the self in a way similar to discoveries about photons or quarks?

Bruno. I don’t know. Personally, I doubt it, although I cannot entirely exclude it. Science is highly liable to changes… and in a certain sense I must comply with those scientists (or philosophers) who believe that it is important to explain the consciousness as well; of course, if no harm is done. But until now, scientific explanations of the phenomenon of the consciousness are mostly just assumptions.

John chews a stalk of grass, recognizing with one half of his brain how much life lies hidden in this grass jungle: midges, bugs, caterpillars, cockroaches…

John. Excuse me, master, for interrupting your explication of Parfit. What does he have to say about the possibility of survival of the branched self?

Bruno. Parfit goes for the third option: the self is supposed to live on as both people! In his famous article he wrote:

“The alternative, for which I shall argue, is to give up the language of identity. We can suggest that I survive as two different people without implying that I am these people.”[2]

John. What odd syntax! … I don’t quite understand: does the self survive in both of them or not?

Bruno. This passage is actually rather obscure. The logic tells us that the self cannot survive in both, as Parfit suggests, since these two would then be one and the same self. But Parfit insists that the self “survives as two different people” – at the same time denying that the self is “these [two] people”. Logic again asks: the self is therefore neither one nor the other? Well, if it is so, how can the self survive? This no doubt contains a paradox, but it is precisely this paradox that gives us a hint of a new and interesting thought.

John. So, if I understand you correctly, the continuity of my personal identity isn’t the necessary condition of my survival?

Bruno. As odd as it may sound, Parfit actually claims that personal identity isn’t necessary for the survival of the self. He illustrates it with river branches: the branches run parallel; all the way to the estuary, the river disunites and reunites, forming islands, side channels, branching structures…

John. Interesting, but how does Parfit imagine personal survival, if the self, the necessary condition of the sameness of the person, branches out in a multitude of its, say, tokens?

Bruno. Parfit says that it only seems to us – because we are used to think this way – that survival equals preservation of personal identity:

“Will I survive?” seems, I said, equivalent to “Will there be some person alive who is the same person as me?”[3]

John. What would be the other way?

Bruno. Parfit argues that the self, which survives in time, does not necessary imply preserving personal identity, neither in this life nor after death. He then strengthens his claim with a pragmatic argument that, as to the question of survival, it is important to consider primarily all that matters, what is truly important. And what is truly important in our desire for survival? Let’s say that I’m the subject of Wiggins’ experiment of splitting brains, during which my consciousness, my self, or if you will, my person is split, disunites in two or even more people. Parfit says what then truly matters for survival is that –

“The relation of the original person to each of the resulting people contains all that interests us–all that matters–in any ordinary case of survival.”[4]

John. This is then something like when you say that parents survive in their children? That ancestors continue to live in their offspring?

Bruno. Yes, very much the same – but we have to add that Parfit attempts to generalize the notion of survival on all persons, not just biological offspring; not even on people only, but rather on all living beings endowed with memory, consciousness, will – that is to say on persons in the broadest sense. And according to Parfit, this new conception of survival and a different attitude towards biological death opens up a possibility of the ethical renewal of humanity. He says in Reasons and Persons:

“There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.”[5]

What Parfit is trying to tell us is that the question of survival is not the dilemma all or nothing – as is usually thought – but about the “degree” or “quantity” of survival, the possibility of transferring largest possible part of life content of a person to its successors.

John. But birth and death of man cannot be thought in terms of changes of degree; they are, rather, outstanding jumps, cleavages, irrevocable and sharp thresholds between nothingness and being!

Bruno. Parfit rejects this very “self-evident” irrevocableness of death: he endeavors to overcome the typical Western belief that my death implies my absolute end – and that after it I needn’t care about anything any more: Après moi le deluge! Parfit wants to overtake the individual’s death, death of an individual person with the thought that every person continues in such a way that his or her thoughts, emotions, works survive in his or her successors; all of what that person was or wanted to be – and that such survival is the only thing that matters. Immortality is no longer thought as preservation of one and only individual person after death, since

“There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.”[6]

John. Master, we could say that Parfit’s philosophy is close to Buddhism, couldn’t we?

Bruno. Definitely, and perhaps even closer to Upanishad Vedanta. In his own special way, Parfit rediscovered the Indian law of karma, the principle of preservation of works – since karma means “work” – through the whole chain of births and deaths. What I also find important is that Parfit hasn’t come close to Eastern spirituality due to some “external” motive (insofar as the desire for survival as such, even if it is branched out, is not such a motive) but from his own metaphysical reflection.

John. I therefore survive in the multitude of selves…?

Bruno. Something like this. Parfit stresses that the question of the survival of the self doesn’t involve only afterlife, because coming into the world and passing away of the self takes place already in one human life! Exactly in incessant thisworldly births and deaths of our selves we can get the hunch of the possibility and the manner of our afterlife. There is no singular self either in this life or after it – Parfit writes about numerous selves; he speaks about my “past and future selves”…

John. Master, you said: my selves – whose are they after all? Who is the bearer of my future and past selves? Is it myself again?

Bruno smiles. Parfit believes that there simply is no such universal subject, “the underlying person”, the individual soul as the bearer of all selves. The answer to your question would probably be that talking about my selves is just a usual way of expressing ourselves, our façon de parler, which is rather difficult to avoid. However, strictly taken, the self could be considered as the empty signifier. Parfit says:

“If I say, ‘It will not be me, but one of my future selves,’ I do not imply that I will be that future self. He is one of my later selves, and I am one of his earlier selves. There is no underlying person who we both are.”[7]

John. No! Can’t you hear, master, how this manner of expressing breaks the language? It is still me speaking about my own numerous selves… since the English speaking self can use the distinction between the singular I or me and the plural selves, but there is also the other singular: self. It is difficult to escape from oneself, regardless of how I name myself: I, me or self.

Bruno. I agree, although Parfit’s theory is attractive and undoubtedly a fount of wisdom. The goal of his considerations is close to me – but the theory itself is imperfect as any other.

An ant climbs John’s hand, followed by another, and another, and the fourth one. Little living machines: making their way through human hair, and when they reach the elbow, they turn back towards the grass.

John, in his thoughts. Are they led by instinct? Or by the method of attempts and mistakes? Who can tell what hidden pattern leads these sweet little creatures! … Could ants be my other selves? Do we have anything in common? Not very much: spacetime, four basic amino acids … and life. – Life? Is my life the same as theirs? Can I be sympathetic with them because of my feeling of the value of our common life? Hardly so! I rather feel compassion for them, because they are so small and unimportant in this vast universe… like we, people… and because they are mortal, like us. – Mortal? Is my death the same as theirs? No, such equalization is nonsense!

Bruno, in his thoughts. She’s been away for a long time. Where on earth is she?

Nearby, almost within the reach of John’s hand, a cricket sings.

Bruno, still in his thoughts. Has all this, exactly this – the cricket, the ants, the meadow… John and me… waiting for Mary – has it already happened in the past? Is this a memory?

Bruno, back to John. When Parfit writes about other selves, he expresses an interesting idea that “it might be possible to think of experiences in a wholly ‘impersonal’ way”.[8] This idea becomes even more unusual if we apply it to recollective experiences, that is experiences we went through personally in the past, which we keep in our memory, for example a conversation with someone, say with Mary half an hour ago; you could immediately raise the question whether our recollection of the morning conversation with Mary as a remembrance is transferable to the consciousness of a person who today hasn’t talked to Mary? Are there such things as “impersonal” memories?

John. I think that such transfer is impossible, since an experience, let’s say the conversation with Mary, if it was passed on to another person, it would immediately cease to be recollective experience. Memory always refers to my own past experience; how could it refer to an experience of another person? We can feel with the experiences of others, we can imagine them, but we cannot remember them.

Bruno. Usually we do remember only our own experiences, but Parfit still leaves open the possibility that we can remember the experiences of other selves; for this possibility he introduces the notion of “quasi-memories”: I “quasi-remember” a past experience which has been experienced by someone (from among other selves), and in doing so I experience this remembrance as related to my past experience.

John. How do I know that someone else actually experienced it – and that this experience is actually related to my own experience?

Bruno. The thought that man could have quasi-memories originates with the insight that within one life, from birth to death, a number of selves live within us – and the power of memory relates them nonetheless, even though it is deficient and often deceptive: despite the fact that I have been reborn many times in life like Phoenix and that ever new selves settle my ageing body, I remember at least some experiences from my childhood, meaning the experiences of one of my past selves – some other self, now almost alien self to me. You, John, are perhaps too young to feel some of your memories as alien, as recollective experiences of some other self – but in my age, such memories are growing in number. Well, Parfit wonders why couldn’t we then remember experiences of those selves which lived before our biological birth?

John. Is he trying to say that we can remember our previous lives? Like Buddha, who, after his spiritual awakening, saw through all his past lives in his mind…

Bruno. This is probably what Parfit is trying to say, since he is in some respects close to Buddhism. It is interesting, however, that he argues the existence of quasi-memories in a phenomenological manner – he says that my memory of a certain experience doesn’t necessarily contain the recollective experience that it was me who had that experience… and if you think about it carefully, if you look at your memories through the phenomenological epoché, setting aside all theoretical “prejudices” so that all that is left is their immediate givenness within consciousness… you then see that Parfit is right: true, my memories of past experiences usually don’t include the evidence of myself as the subject of past experiences. I remember for example Mary’s scarf; but I don’t necessarily remember myself looking at her scarf, remembering it – unless I eventually remembered my special attitude to that impression, such as my surprise at seeing her new scarf. While on the other hand I always know that I am now, remembering this past.

John. But the possibility of quasi-memories need not imply their actual existence… Why didn’t then Husserl in his extensive phenomenological analyses of memory give account of the possibility of quasi-memories – since we know that he used the term ‘quasi-reality’?

Bruno. On the basic level, Husserl thought differently: for him the very fact that I remember presupposes the identity of the transcendental self – of me myself remembering and within the course of time remaining the same self (and the same person). However, if we, like Parfit, reject the idea that the person’s identity is the necessary condition for the preservation of the self in time, we come to the conclusion that memories of experiences of other selves, even other persons are possible…

John. Master Bruno, don’t you think that Parfit pays too much heed to things which are inexplicable, just like Harding[9]? Would you say that Parfit’s “quasi-memories” are more understandable than Harding’s “headlessness”?

Bruno. There must be a difference between the two, because Harding starts off from his mystical experience, which he tries to explain afterwards, whereas Parfit thinks rationally from the very beginning, extending his thought as far as he can – of course according to his judgment. In Parfit, there is no contradiction between the explicable and the inexplicable; however, there still remains the question as to how far can such an explanation go.

John. And you, master, do you personally believe that memories of the experiences of others are possible? And that there exist such memories?

Bruno. At times I think that we truly have such memories of others – especially in experiencing the déjà vu; but from the point of view of an acceptable philosophical theory, I can see a limit in Parfit’s explanation – insofar still an unknown limit. However, I share with Parfit his belief that what is important for life after death is not the identity of the person, the individual, but rather the preservation of works man created throughout his life and left them to his followers. This means not only great heroic or artistic or scientific works but rather all human thoughts, emotions, memories, wishes, actually the preservation of all the content of the consciousness, into which also the shape of the body, mimics, color of eyes etc. are engraved, since everything is worth for eternity – yes, this belief is very close to me, closer than the Christian belief in individual immortality of the soul, which presupposes the preservation of the individual person’s identity.

John. To me such impersonal immortality is even less understandable than the personal one. If a person cannot survive, where do all the works of man go after death? Who can vouch for them not to lose themselves in the infinity of the world beyond?

Bruno. Nothing is lost – everything can be redeemed.