For a brief second right now I thought about just posting my notes (which are in bulleted form in Microsoft Word) and letting you draw your own conclusions from them, but I wanna discourse with myself again and see if I can shed any light on my own thoughts.
For starters, lemme lay down a few things:
- I will be referencing The Prestige again, so be on the lookout for spoiler alerts (I'll let you know when I get there)
- A necessary condition is defined as: "X must fulfill these conditions in order to be Y"
- A sufficient condition is defined as: "If X fulfills these conditions, then it is Y"
- For my purposes, I synonymized these definitions, since we never really separated the two in philosophy
Hokay. So. Let me take you through one of our discussions, which revolved around a ship, called the Ship of Theseus. This ship is made up of 100 wooden planks, let's say. It runs fine, but after a while, one of the planks needs to be replaced. No problem, and it's replaced with a replacement plank. Is this still the Ship of Theseus? One would figure so, since it's only got 1 replacement plank. What about 2 replacement planks? 30? 50? 99? What about 100? Once you get there, you have to take into account the sentimental value of the ship. Technically, it's not the same ship since it's made up of different planks, but sentimentally, it is still the Ship of Theseus. This deals with the numerical identity of the ship (i.e., there is one object at two different times).
So let's generalize that. What are the necessary and sufficient (n/s) conditions for an object to be numerically identical to an object at another time? For this example, I thought about a music stand of some sort. (I was really thinking about the the podium stand that holds papers while I was in class, but just think of a music stand. It's easier to picture.) You can paint the music stand a different color, and it still might be the same stand. You can change the shape of the vertical pole, and it still might be the same stand. You can change the height of the pole, or size of the base, and it still might be the same stand. The thing with that though, is that you're looking at only one component of the stand, and assessing the stand as a whole based on that one change. That centration is what gets people believing that the stand doesn't change. You can't look at only one aspect of your object (centration) - in order to assess the object at time B as opposed to the object at time A, you have to look at it as a whole and at its end product. Another example brought up in class was a door. If you take door A, and change its doorknob, paint the door a different color, and change the location of the window, you can look at any single one of those changes and argue that it's essentially still the same door. But if you imagine these two doors A and B next to each other, they're clearly different, since they don't have the exact same physical properties.
Well, arguing that seemed easy enough - I'm pretty firm in those beliefs and examples I just described. But what if we take it the next level up? Let's talk about the n/s conditions for the same person and the same consciousness to exist. As far as person goes (taking on a more physical sense), I believe that we're always changing, instantaneously. Our hair is always growing, our fingernails are constantly growing, and while these changes are minuscule and insignificant on their own, they eventually add up. And I'm not saying that these specific changes alter who we are - consciously, I'm not a different person compared to who I was 3 minutes ago because my hair is a little longer. That wasn't as fun as thinking about our consciousness.
One of the views of the n/s conditions for our consciousness to stay the same is called the memory view, which says that a person must remember the experiences of an earlier time in order to be the same person as the person at the earlier time. So take a person, and think about him when he's 60, 40, and 10 years old. The memory view argues that if the person at 60 remembers all of the experiences of the 10 year old, then they're the same person. I completely disagree with this; who you are at 60 isn't at all similar to who you are at 10. It's easy to argue - plenty of things change in those 50 years, including but not limited to higher education, marriage, children, and whatever else you can come up with in those 50 years. Things change, and just because you remember your experiences, doesn't make you the same person.
Next, we talked about amnesia and whether or not it destroys a person. And I think that it definitely does – it’s not that the fact that you don’t remember anything makes you a different person, it’s the fact that you don’t remember anything and you acted differently based off of that makes you a different person. It’s not about what you remember or don’t remember, it’s how you act.
Clearly I haven't run into any problems yet, but don't worry - here they are. (This is also where the spoiler alerts come up for The Prestige, so if you haven't seen it, tread carefully. I don't give as much away in this post than I did in my first one about the movie, but you've been warned.) Think about this example. You walk into a box. A box that will teleport you wherever you want. To make it simple, let's say locations A and B. As you travel from A to B, your particles are scattered, and a spontaneous rearrangement is constructed once you arrive at B. Same personality, same memory. Is it you? I first said that if there's no duplicate, then yes. Everything at location B is the same as it was at location A. The thing that contradicts The Prestige is that Angier was duplicated, instead of just teleported. However, that further disagrees with what I believe; if I believe that we're always changing, it shouldn't matter what happens to you at location B. At location/time B, you're someone who's been teleported, while that was never the case at location/time A. Alright, so why am I inclined to believe that but not what happened to Angier? I really wanna say that it's the same person (in the teleportation example), but I didn't believe that the "n+1"th Angier was the same one as the first Angier, since he's gone through the trick n+1 times. It doesn't matter what happens to his conscious or memory or whatever. I do feel like this is a cop out. In saying that it doesn't matter what happens to you (because you're a different person all the time), I'm not really making a decision regarding whether or not the person at location/time B is the same one as he is at location/time A. I suppose that that just means that I'm following what I believe steadfastly, but it's probably more likely that it's just cognitive dissonance (holding conflicting ideas simultaneously).
Then we took the example of bodies and brain. Take brain A and body A, and brain B and body B. Swap brains. So now, brain A is with body B, and brain B is with body A. Where is person A? I say that person A is with brain A/body B, meaning that the brain is the trump card in this situation. So, it would follow that since the person at location/time B has the same brain as he does at location/time A, then it would be the same person. So now it would follow that I'm saying that if the "n+1"th Angier has the same brain/conscious as the first Angier who performed the trick, then it's the same person. Which contradicts what I said about Angier during my discourse about The Prestige. +100 cognitive dissonance.
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