Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [62]
Larry (the Surrogate), Forget-Me-Nows, and Locke’s Criticism of Descartes
John Locke (1632–1704) is not just a character from Lost. There was also a John Locke who was a contemporary of Descartes, and on more than one occasion took on Descartes’s views directly. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke not only considers the Cartesian view on personal identity, but he offers a troubling counterexample. The idea is basically this: if Descartes is right that the soul makes you, you, then what if Socrates’s soul “revolved around several human bodies” and what if we met a man who was able to convince you that “his had been the soul of Socrates . . . would any one say that he, being not conscious of Socrates’ actions or thoughts could be the same person as Socrates?”5
This is a simple question, but it gets to the heart of Locke’s objection, and it foreshadows his own account of personal identity. Before we get to what Locke thought makes you you, we should flesh out this objection a bit. It’s a strong objection that hits the Cartesian view on two levels. First, it’s a metaphysical objection. If the soul is immaterial (does not exist in space, time, and so on), then we may end up having to say that you are the same person as many people that have lived before you. This is a startling conclusion, and when we consider how bad we feel for Oscar as he sits in prison, wrongly accused of his brother’s crimes, this might make us uncomfortable. If Oscar has the soul of many others from the past, and the soul makes him who he is, then he may well be responsible for having done something terrible in the past (albeit distinct from the terrible things George Sr. has done). If this is right, we shouldn’t feel so bad about Oscar’s time in prison, even if he doesn’t remember doing any of those terrible things he did.
The second way that this objection hits the Cartesian account is related to the first; it is an evidential objection. Even if Oscar does share a soul with another person from the past, he has no way of knowing this fact. Locke even takes it a step farther, suggesting that, for all we know, we may well have, over the course of our lives, dozens of souls being swapped out. What seems constant, and what seems to be good evidence for our identity isn’t an ethereal soul that, by definition cannot be experienced, but rather the continuity of our memory (or mental states more broadly construed, as contemporary philosophers have argued). Doesn’t it seem, Locke suggests, a flimsy basis for identity to say that what makes us who we are, and who we are over time, is something that we can’t experience, like a soul?
Think of George Sr.’s surrogate, Larry Middleton. He was hired by Bob Loblaw to be George’s eyes and ears when meetings were going on outside of the penthouse where George was under house arrest. During one of these meetings, it becomes clear that somebody (namely, Tobias, or “Mr. F”) has tipped off the Bluth Company’s investors that the family hasn’t yet begun construction on their next phase of development, resulting in the investors coming to inspect the land. Gob comes up with a plan to try to fool the investors by building a model town (complete with a model train) just outside the window of the Bluth model home. Larry inadvertently ends up being controlled by Buster, and notably nothing about Larry’s external appearance changes, nothing about his verbal delivery changes, and nothing about his mind changes, despite the drastic “internal” change in control from George to Buster. What changes is who’s in control of Larry. Most of the time it’s George Sr., but when he gets stuck in the wall trying to find a way to escape his house arrest, Buster takes over and manages to fool Gob into thinking that it’s still his father in control. In this case,