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  • Who is The Doctor? Is it this guy? Or this one? How about him?

  • As any good Whovian knows, the answer is yes, all of them.

  • But, also, wait: No.

  • In the show Doctor Who, each incarnation of The Doctor has a completely different body,

  • different mannerisms, likes and dislikes and, to some extent, memories.

  • Sohow are they all The Doctor?

  • Science fiction is great at giving us scenarios to grapple with that seem far-out and only barely possible.

  • But when you think about it, the issue of Who is Who isn’t that much more clear-cut in real life.

  • The fact is, you can take the same questions I asked about The Doctor, and ask them about anyone.

  • Likeme. I mean, are these people any more similar to each otherthan these people?

  • [Theme Music]

  • Last time, we talked about identityor basically, what makes an object the same over time.

  • And the concept can get more complex when we talk about our own identity, or the identity of others.

  • When talking about ships or trees, we might be willing to say yeah, ok, that’s just not the same thing it used to be.

  • But when were talking about, say, me!

  • I have the strong belief that I’m the same person that mom and dad brought home from the hospital back in 1980.

  • I’m that same kid that cut his hand open on that broken flower pot – I have the scar to prove it!

  • And there’s some guy in the future who’s still going to be me, even though hell be all stooped over,

  • and wrinkled, and gray. At least, I hope.

  • And you probably think of yourself in the same waythat youll keep being the same person, from birth to death.

  • But, you could argueand some have

  • that the only thing that really remains constant about you your whole life is your name.

  • And for some of us, even that changes!

  • Philosophers have struggled with the issue of personal identity for a long time,

  • trying to find that special somethingthat essential property

  • that makes you you, the thing that preserves your identity through time,

  • and through all the changes that come with it.

  • Let’s take a look at some of ideas theyve come up with.

  • First there’s the Body Theory.

  • This is sort of the default position that most people have

  • and the assumption that Doctor Who messes with so badly.

  • It says that personal identity persists over time because you remain in the same body from birth to death.

  • Now, in a sense, that’s true – I don’t know anybody outside of, like, Freaky Friday that’s had a body transplant.

  • But, it’s not like you consist of all of the same, identical stuff that you had when you were born.

  • Youve sloughed off and replaced your outer layer of skin, for example, hundreds of times so far.

  • Your red blood cells only live about 4 months before theyre cycled out.

  • Even your skeleton is constantly being remodeled.

  • So, kind of like the Doctoror the Ship of Theseus

  • youre constantly being replaced by new physical versions of yourself.

  • And if you are your body, then how much of you can change until you become a new you?

  • Can you get a haircut? What if you lose or gain a lot of weight?

  • Or grow a beard? Or put John Travolta’s face on your face?

  • Let’s go over to the Thought Bubble and explore the ideas of our bodies, and ourselves, with some Flash Philosophy!

  • 20th century English moral philosopher Bernard Williams proposed a thought experiment,

  • to make us consider where we think our personal identity resides.

  • It goes something like this: You and I have been kidnapped by a mad scientist.

  • He tells us that, tomorrow morning, he’s going to transfer all of your mental content

  • all of your beliefs, memories, personality, everythinginto my brain.

  • And then he’s gonna move all of my mental content into your brain.

  • Presumably, this is how he earned the title of mad scientist.

  • But he also tells us that, after the procedure is complete

  • and your mental content is in this body, and my mental content is in yours

  • hell give one of the bodies a million dollars, and the other body will be tortured.

  • And he’s decided to let you pick which body gets the torture and which one gets the cash.

  • What do you decide? Your answer should give you a clue about where you think your identity lies.

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble!

  • Now our friend John Locke didn’t cotton to the idea that the most essential aspect of a person is her body.

  • For Locke, the thing that makes you you is the non-physical stuffyour consciousness.

  • But Locke recognized that we don’t maintain a single consciousness over the course of our entire lives.

  • We go to sleep every day, but, when we wake up, our conscious selves remember who we were the day before.

  • So Locke posited a Memory Theory of personal identity.

  • He believed that your identity persists over time, because you retain memories of yourself at different points,

  • and each of those memories is connected to one before it.

  • Now, we don’t remember every single moment – I mean, do you remember what you ate for lunch last Tuesday?

  • But you can probably remember a time when you did remember thatlike, say, last Tuesday afternoon.

  • And if you can remember that version of yourself,

  • then youre still connected to the Tuesday-at-lunch person, through a chain of memory.

  • And this process can take us back a lot farther than last Tuesday.

  • Locke said that if you can remember back to your first day of kindergarten,

  • you maintain a memory link to that person.

  • Sure, your Mom also remembers that day, but no one remembers it from the inside

  • the butterflies in your stomach; the way your new shoes felt stiff after a summer of running barefoot.

  • That’s your memory, and since it’s yours, you must be the same person who experienced that memory.

  • The memory theory actually makes a lot of sense, but it’s got some problems of its own.

  • First off, no one remembers being born.

  • Now that’s not a bad thing, really – I mean, I imagine none of us would really want to recall that particular experience

  • or the couple of years that we spent after that, pooping in our pants.

  • But, if personal identity requires a memory, then none of us became who we are until our first memory,

  • which means we all lost at least a couple years at the beginning.

  • What’s more, if youre committed to this view,

  • you have to accept that people stop being the same person if they lose their memories.

  • So, say a person begins to suffer from dementia.

  • Once he’s lost the ability to remember his past, does he stop being that person?

  • So the memory theory presents problems for both the beginnings and ends of life,

  • but there’s also the issue of false memories.

  • Memory, after all, is notoriously tricky.

  • We know that a group of eyewitnesses are likely to recount the same event very differently.

  • So, how do we know that the memories we have are accurate?

  • And if theyre notif things didn’t actually happen the way you remember

  • then how do those faulty memories influence your identity?

  • Do they make you a partially fictional person?

  • So, at first, Locke’s theory seems to have some advantages over the Body Theory,

  • because consciousness and memory persist through your body’s physical changes.

  • But, after just a little interrogation, you find that memory is pretty tenuous too.

  • Now, here’s the sixty-four-thousand-Altairian-dollar question:

  • Does any of this really matter?

  • Like, who cares if there’s a you that persists from your birth to your death?

  • Maybe all you feel like you need to know is that your self has to go to work and pay bills, and that’s plenty.

  • But the matter of personal identity isn’t just a conceptual puzzle.

  • It’s also deeply important when youre thinking about how you should live your life.

  • For example, do you believe that you have obligations to particular people in your life?

  • Well, if those people don’t persist as distinct identities, then your obligations might not either.

  • And the same goes for how people think about you.

  • Your boss only has to give you the raise she promised you,

  • if each of you remains the same person you were when she made the promise.

  • In fact, if next Friday, youre not the same person anymore, she doesn’t even have to pay you!

  • The fact is, weve all built our lives and our society on the expectations that

  • individuals will continue to be who they are, unchangedand those people expect the same thing out of you.

  • So now you can seethis really is your problem. You expect a paycheck.

  • You expect people to keep their promises.

  • But as we learned back with Clifford and James and epistemic responsibility,

  • you don’t just get to believe things without reasons.

  • So if you think you deserve that paycheck, you need to figure out why.

  • Today we talked about personal identity.

  • We considered the two main answers people give to the question of where your identity lies

  • in your body, or in the connected memories of your consciousness.

  • We found some pretty significant problems with each of them,

  • and then we talked about why the persistence of identity is actually something you should care about!

  • Next time, well return to this issue, to talk about whether you really need the idea of a “youthat persists over time.

  • If you still exist then, I hope you join me.

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  • This episode of Crash Course was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio

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