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Date: Thurs, 24 September 1998 22:34:19 -0400

Subject: Re: Questions for Joe

From: Zo <zoalex@aol.com>

To: mepstein@aol.com

Mime-version: 1.0

X-priority: 3

Mark, If your lawyers still insist on my summary of my thesis here it is -- Why can't they just get Liddy's article?

The idea was this. It puts Derek Parfit and the Buddha on the same page.. Parfit was picking up threads from John Locke and David Hume and Bertrand Russell and argues that on no plausible account are we as persons what we usually take ourselve to be in some fundamental and important respects. When we examine our beliefs about our survival through time, we find we tend to believe we are "DENSE" (that is the term I used for Determinate and Separate). Determinate means: the question of our surviving any event would always in any possible situation have a definite yes-or-no answer. Separate: we exist as an entity separate from experiences.

Parfit originally wanted to be a novelist, you know, and tells great stories as part of his arguments which is why I hope after all these years you've finally read the 3d part of Reasons and Persons, the part I am talking about (just skip the first 2 parts). He argues that on no plausible theory are we Determinate and Separate -- even though we tend to believe we are. The idea of possible indeterminacy of identity = situations are conceivable in which a question like "did I survive?" would be an empty question: one could know all the facts there are to know, but still not have an answer to that question!

For example, to illustrate this Parfit asks us to imagine a bunch of sci-fi stories (say, a million) as follows. It is the basis for his Spectrum argument. In the first story you walk into a room. Madonna is there, as is a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and surgeons. You say hello. You walk out. You survived! (That's all folks!). Second story is similar: You walk in. Madonna and the Team are there. The Team exchanges a few of your cells with Madonna's. No big deal. You survive again. 1000th story: Things begin to get messy. The Team exchanges, say, your nose with Madonna's plus the psychologists have a way to exchange memories and plans-- so you get a few of hers. Afterwards you have a new nose and your psychology is changed a bit, but not much, and you survive. --I realize these stories are weird, but stay with me.-- Jump to story #500,000: things very messy here. The Team replaces about half of your bodily organs with Madonna's plus roughly half of her memories, plans, etc.: no need to be too precise: spell it out however you want to. The question is: do you survive? Let us wait to answer this. (This question is the important one, as I will explain.) ok, Jump to story #999,999: You walk in, say hello to Madonna and the Team, which replaces a few of Madonna's cells with some of yours and then kill you. Madonna walks out. You do not survive. Story #1,000,000: You walk in, Madonna walks out. The Team kills you. You don't survive.

ok, whats the point? First let's summarize the conclusions of the stories we've considered:

story #1: you survive

story #2: you survive (w/ a few of M's cells)

story #1000: you survive (w/ M's nose, some memories)

story #500,000: ????

story #999,999: you do not survive

story #1,000,000: you do not survive

The idea is in each of the stories in this spectrum of a million stories the Team replaces somewhat more of your body and psychology with Madonna's than in the preceding story in the series. Now assuming that all that is involved in our survival through time are physical and psychological continuities (the body plus memory relations, plans and actions, and so forth) --that is, assuming there is no entity = me existing Separately from the physical and psychological continuities -- then Parfit can use this series of stories to make his point: in the middle stories (e.g. #500,000) there is no Determinate yes/no answer to the Question: do I survive the visit to the room with Madonna and the Team?

Compare another series of stories where in the first story you paint something red and in the next story you paint it just slightly less red by mixing in a trace of yellow. So you have:

story #1: red

story #2: red

story #1000: red

story #500,000: ????

story #999,999: orange

story #1,000,000: orange

In the middle of this spectrum of stories we could have an empty question whether the object you paintd was red or orange. There obviously are going to be many points in this series of stories where you could know everything about the amounts of red and yellow paint, and about wavelengths of light, and so forth, and still there’d just be no answer to the question is it still red? With the color spectrum we are used to this idea, there is nothingn particularly shocking about the indeterminacy in this spectrum of stories about red and orange --

--but I think it is very surprising to see that there is the same type of possibility in the spectrum of stories about me, for the question, is it still me?

Parfit’s argument for the possibility of personal indeterminacy is this: you survive in story #1. You do not survive in story #1,000,000. If in each and every story in the series there is a determinate yes or no answer to the Question, then there'd have to be a switch from yes to no somewhere in the series. Yet given that each story in the series is very similar to its neighbors in the series, it isn't plausible to suppose that the relative small differences in degree of physical and/or psychological continuity would make for the drastic difference between your survival and non-survival. It is more plausible to say that for many of the stories in the middle of the series, the Question is empty: we can know all the relevant facts (e.g. about cells and organs, memory transfers, etc. etc.) and still not know whether the you/Madonna-like monster that walks out of the room is you! The question is empty; personal identity is not necessarily determinate. This is radically contrary to our usual intuitions about ourselves as persons.

To Parfit's discussion of a Determinate Separate entity, I had the buddhists adding Exercising control. In western philosophy this falls under free will, which Parfit didn't include in his discussion. We tend to believe that as agents, we Exercise control over future events, and that somehow we can do so independent of our current mental states. The buddhists deny this, and at least in some of the literature this is what their no self ideas (anatta) boil down to. Of course, when one considers it, it is a mystery how we could have any control overy things independent of our current states--yet I think we tend to assume it nonetheless. This is related to the idea of being an entity existing Separate from experiences and having control over those experiences. I think we assume a sort of external control over self and experience that is analogous to our physical control over objects like basketballs -- when I move a basketball in space-time, I control it as an agent external to the basketball. --anyway, this is what Exercising control stood for. True, we do have some control over experience, but freedom has to be understood as emerging from within experience itself rather than characterizing an agent somehow controlling experience from the outside.

Actually I can't remember what the other letters stood for. I can’t remember what the N and other E stood for, but those are the main ones, so you have DEnSe:

Determinate

Exercising control independent of current states

Separate

Are we DEnSe? We tend to assume Yes, but there's no way to make sense of this assumption. If you look at the current literature (or current 5 yrs ago) almost nobody was challenging this. There's a consensus: we are not dense (that is, we are light where light is the opposite of dense -- I liked putting it that way but it irritated Erin. I think maybe because it drew too obvious a parallel for her to WIThompson's tricky title The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light -- hmmm, wonder what she'd say now after doing the Nieztsche book). Obviously I'm not saying that the consensus among philosophers makes us Not Dense; I'm just summing up the discussion. Ok.

Now Parfit wanted to show there are important practical consequences of our not being dense (of course he didn't use that term). The practical consequences involve our use of moral concepts involving personal existence through time, like when you praise me today for what I did yesterday, or (more apropos) blame me now for what I wrote last month. There are many others: e.g. commitment (like in marriage). Parfit wanted to explain the connection between his insights about personal identity and moral aspects of real life.

But he did very little in the book to explain the connections. He wanted to, but he just didn't do it. He didn't connect non-density with real life. He does have one measly little argument showing if we're not dense then there is a theory of rationality (the "Self interest" theory), which he discussed earlier in the hard-to-read first two parts of his book, -- this Self-interest theory, he explains, is harder to defend if we're not dense. This was an abstract and minor consequence. And Parfit has been thoroughly and completely trashed in the literature about the personal-identity/morality connection: Typical is Susan Wolf's type of comment: I agree with everything he says about persons -- he convinced me to be a reductionist about personal identity -- but he changed none of my views about morality.

One of the problems is his reliance on a thought experiment in which somebody like Kirk gets beamed down twice to a planet. This is "fission" where there are all relations between events that make for our identity over time, but since it happens twice--there are two people later with those relations--Kirk himself doesn’t survive. Parfit says Kirk’d have "what matters" but wouldn’t survive because afterwards there’d be two non-identical guys each with equal claim to be the original Kirk. So neither of them could be identified with the original without contradiction (or at least without a big question--why that one rather than the other one?). Parfit goes from there to make his points about the ramifications of non-density for moral theory and practical life. He wanted to argue, for instance, that actual identity through time is not as important as the psychological and physical relations that do the unifying through time. So even if Kirk would not survive, nonetheless he’d have what matters. In any case, his arguments have not seemed to work. I’m not sure why. Perhaps his discussion got hijacked by over-reliance on thought experiments like fission.

Mark, it is here where the buddhists are some 2500 years ahead. The connection between non-density and practical real life is right where the Buddha was coming from.

There are some minor differences between Parfit's theory and what the Buddha taught. E.g. Parfit doesn't deny that persons exist whereas the buddhists usually do. This is just verbal. The real point (as I argued) is they agree we as persons are not dense. This is contrary to common sense but does not necessarily require one to say people don’t exist. In fact, the question about existence/non-existence is similar to Hilary Putnam's question about cats as robots: Suppose cats were to be discovered to be robots from Mars. Would cats still exist? One can say "No; cats by definition are animals not robots, therefore cats don't exist and never did. We were just wrong when we thought there were cats in the world." The other side replies, "Sure cats exist! See-- there's one right now--come here, Fitzki--of course, he is very different from what we had assumed about him!" It is a question about how to use the concept CAT and word cat given the new information.

The amazing thing about the consensus about ourselves -- that we are not DENSE -- is that it is more astonishing then if cats were found out to be robots, which maybe we could make sense of and keep our lives normal. The world would even make more sense because we would know why Fitzki is so remote! :)

But can we make sense of not being dense? This question is not being picked up on very well, in part because Parfit was so conversative with his assumption that we do exist. Perhaps the practical implications become more vivid given the buddhist no self idea-- in contemporary terms (like Putnam on cats) this would the idea that my being dense is so central to my concept of myself thast if I'm not really dense, then I don't exist at all. Although Parfit did a magnificent job explaining how commonsense is wrong about personal identity he stumbled when he tried to apply it to real life. He sees it should make a difference but never explained how it does.

All of this is at the conceptual level of philosophical and psychological theory. In one place Parfit points out that he thinks the Buddha would agree with his views (p. 273). More important than the conceptual framework one uses, I conjectured, and whether or not the Buddha would agree with his theory is the following difference: the Budhha was working with meditation methods so that not-being-dense could be known directly in experience. He experimented with the meditation techniques that were current in India at his time (of which there were many, perhaps even more than in contemporary western societies, although they'd be different since so many of those available now bear the influence of the Buddha himself). He claimed to discover, using these techniques as well as his own innovations, that one can experience one's own non-density (to put it that way); and then this experiential knowledge can come to play a vital role in moment to moment everyday experience.

btw, notice how my words used in the normal way can obscure the main point being made here by making a perfectly coherent idea seem incoherent. If one says (as I just said) one can experience one's own non-density and then goes on to use a no cats (=no self) type interpretation--so, strictly speaking, there is no one to experience anything-- then one is incoherent. The point here is simply to be careful how one uses the words. This is related to what I said about Parfit's conservative use of language: the non-existence (no self) idea cannot even get formulated coherently given a complacent use of "me" and "I". And yet my main point here is that the "no self" idea actually is no more radical than non-density. The difference is only verbal between the (apparently modest) statement

(1) one can experience one's own non-density

and the (apparently radical) statement

(2) one can experience one's own non-existence

--oops! that is the incoherent statement; to clean it up, try this:

(3) experiences could be accessible to those taking place right now, e.g. the experience of thinking these words, that provide knowledge of the non-existence of selves

Even that's not very good since "accessible" is obscure (in Parfit's theory one would say "psychologically connected"). My point here is that (1) and (3) amount for practical purposes to the same thing, and if one is careful one can avoid the incoherence of (2).

The not-dense (no self) idea plays a role in the buddhist psychological and moral theories but this role is a consequence of its prior role in experience. I believe Parfit may have tried to get it into theory without it being grounded very deeply in experience. True, Parfit does mention his own experience, but he refers to the effect of his theory on his experience, rather than his theory being grounded in his experience. He says that when he began thinking about people in his reductionist way, he found it

...liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was such a further fact [like a soul or something existing separately from one's experiences], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. 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. (281)

This is a definite and firm statement about his own experience. By the way, I once heard a group of philosophers laugh when heard this passage from Parfit, verifying the taoist answer to the question: what do fools do when they first hear the dharma? (They laugh--but, by the way, a wise person might laugh too --out of joy!) Sorry, I'm digressing. --ok. Parfit's dharmic statement is undercut by a related passage in which he talks about the difficulty he has believing his own views! He asks himself if it is possible to believe his own theory? He says yes, "at the intellectual or reflective level. I am convinced by the arguments in favour of this view" (279)-- but then he adds that he still finds the conclusion difficult to believe. Well, it is difficult to believe!

David Hume had a similar theory about selves, and expresses a similar inability to integrate the theory into real life. Parfit mentions this-- Hume's skepticism about the existence of selves. For Hume the idea of self is a convenient if useful fiction:

After Hume thought hard about his arguments, he was thrown into the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness [this is from Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, 269]. The cure was to dine and play backgammon with his friends. (282)

Hume’s statement can be puzzling to us because our presuppositions are so different from his time, thanks to the influence of writers like Nietzsche, even though it was only some two hundred years ago. Hume’s depression reminds me of a statement by a contemporary of Hume. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote to his brother, Charles, the hymn writer:

If I have any fear, it is not of falling into hell, but of falling into nothing.

This is a startling statement, especially from a guy who definitely believed in hell as a pretty horrible situation. --Wait! Maybe he was simply saying he found it difficult to believe in hell; that certainly would make sense given the type of God in which he believed. I should check the context in which he said it. -- In any case, Parfit is not like Hume and Wesley. He says unlike Hume he does not find the radical conclusions about ourselves to be depressing; rather they are liberating and consoling, for they bring one closer to others and allow one to care less about one's own death. Nonetheless Parfit is similar to Hume insofar as the ideas seem primarily to get left on the intellectual or reflective level.

The Buddha does not seem to vacillate about the role of these ideas in his own experience. Not only can believe it--and do so without getting depressed --he is saying, Yes! I know it better than anything, it informs everything. If you read his sutras every phrase reveals his sense that the glass tunnel was shattered, dissolved. It wasn’t merely a thought or an intellectual theory for him. The story about himself from which the Buddha seems to have operated was one in which he was not dense.

This is where I got started meditating seriously. I did the weeklong insight meditation retreat with Christopher, the guy Ron told me about, and from my experiences that week it began to seem at least possible the Buddha was talking in strictly empirical psychological terms. He is continually inviting one to test the claims for oneself. I wanted to find out about that. And that has been my experiment. As I wrote you some time ago I think I'm getting some positive results. Do I think this, perhaps, because I have invested so much time and energy in it? --Possibly. --Wait. That is not true! that's my lack of confidence again that blocks me, or rather would be blocking me, were I Joe.

Its been great thinking about this again;. Hope it helps though I don't see how it could. with love, Zoe