Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [63]
The very nature of the soul is that it’s not something we can experience, either from the inside or the outside. Thus, Locke’s objection works on two levels, and Larry illustrates both nicely. But he also exhibits Locke’s own account of personal identity in much the same way. We already noted that Locke’s objection functions, at least partly, on the evidential level. Locke was primarily worried about how we could know that we have one and only one soul, and that it is specific to us. He was also concerned to point out that our experience of identity is consistent with having infinitely many souls over the course of our lives. As such, he wanted to focus on how we experience our uniqueness, and our persistence over time. As we have noted, Larry, himself, did not experience a change in his own mind when the “soul” that was underlying his experiences changed. He was still unhappy about having to spend time with Gob, as we might all be, despite what he was obliged to say and do. We certainly wouldn’t want to say that Larry became a different person when he was controlled by different people, but, it might be said, this is required on the Cartesian account of personal identity—at least as far as the analogy goes. But, what might we say if Larry were to lose his memory? Well, this hasn’t happened to Larry, but there are others in the show to whom it has happened.
It’s no secret that Gob maintains a ready supply of “forget-me-nows” (roofies). What might Locke say about the “temporary forgettiness” that, for example, Rita feels when Gob feeds her a roofie? If Gob’s audience members learn how a trick is done, or if Buster happens to club a lady-friend of Michael’s, or worse yet, Gob happens across George Sr. and Lucille becoming intimate in a marital trailer, you can bet that Gob will do anything he can to wipe their (or his) memory clean. But in what sense, then, can we say that the same person saw or knew these things? Locke has this to say, “to punish [George Sr.] waking for what sleeping [George] thought, and waking [George] was never conscious of, would be no more right, than to punish one twin for what his brother-twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like that they could not be distinguished . . .”6
So Locke suggests that the very reasons that we must reject the Cartesian picture imply a more plausible account—one where identity is determined not by the physically essential features or by some immaterial and inexperienced soul but, rather, by a connectedness of memory. Oscar cannot be held responsible for the actions of his “brother-twin,” because he had no knowledge or memory of doing those things. Oscar didn’t do them. Similarly, George can’t be held responsible for selling marijuana in Mexico, since his “brother-twin,” you know, “brothero,” had all the memories of doing that, and George didn’t. Gob even recoils in horror at the suggestion that he had seen his parents becoming intimate—“What is wrong with you!? I did no such thing!” This seems to imply that Gob is, himself, a Lockean about personal identity. He didn’t see his parents. He has no memory of it, so it must’ve been somebody else.
Locke’s memory criterion, as philosophers call it, offers us an answer to the evidential problem of personal identity, and offers an intuitive answer to the persistence problem,