Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [64]
Thomas Reid, Gob, and the Problem of the “Forget-Me-Now”
Thomas Reid (1710–1796) thought that Locke had made a number of mistakes in his assessment of what makes us who we are. Reid thought that the evidential problem of personal identity often results in a confusion—specifically, we confuse the evidence that we have for the belief that we are who we are (and that we exist over time) for what actually makes us who we are (and are over time).7 This is an important point, but it may not be the most important objection that Reid lodged against Locke’s memory criterion.
Reid’s most famous objection can be paraphrased in the following way: Imagine an aged Gob, looking back on his life. No doubt he’ll want to write a memoir about his life, taking himself far more seriously than he should, and despite the fact that it should be called “huge mistakes” it’ll probably not include any mention of such events (“I’ve never admitted to a mistake . . . what would I have made a mistake about?”).
As he looks back on his life in preparation for writing his masterpiece, he remembers the time that he released a seal into the wild after giving it the taste for mammal blood. By Locke’s criterion, this makes the aged Gob the same person as the middle-aged-seal-watching Gob, because they share a memory of this event. At the time that Gob heard about Buster’s hand, he remembered from his childhood one of the elaborate lessons that George Sr. had orchestrated using a one-armed man (J. Walter Weatherman). This makes the middle-aged-seal-watching Gob the same person, by Locke’s memory criterion, as the child, lesson-learning Gob.
But, so the story might go, a lifetime of taking roofies in order to wipe his memory free of having seen his parents becoming intimate, or to forget bonding with his son, has caused some serious damage to the aged Gob’s brain, and as a result, the aged Gob doesn’t remember that elaborate J. Walter Weatherman lesson. By Locke’s criterion then, the aged Gob is not the same person as the child Gob. Reid points out that identity is a transitive relationship (if x is equal to y, and y is equal to z, then it simply must be the case that x is equal to z), and, in light of this logical truth, we have a problem for Locke’s conception of personal identity. Old Gob is identical to middle-aged Gob, and middle-aged Gob is identical to young Gob, and so (by the transitivity of identity), old Gob must be identical to young Gob. But since old Gob does not remember what young Gob did, they cannot be the same person. Since Locke is committed to holding that old Gob both is and is not identical to young Gob, we have a serious problem. This seems especially bad for Gob, since he at least tacitly endorses Locke’s view—Gob is now committed to believing that he both is and is not himself, and while this would not be the only time he’s held obviously false or problematic beliefs, we don’t want to be forced to believe crazy things like this.
Some philosophers have learned a lesson from Gob, and developed more nuanced variations of Locke’s criterion in an attempt to provide answers to the problems Reid raised for Locke, and by association Gob. But Lockean attempts aren’t the only game in town. A revised essentialism is seeing an increase in popularity in some philosophical circles (though it does look quite different from Aristotle’s essentialism).
Even though we haven’t resolved the problems of personal identity, I think that we’ve learned a lot about the problems facing us around every turn. As Michael would say, “that’s enough family stuff for today.”
NOTES
1. Aristotle, Metaphysics Z 3–4.
2. Such characterizations of essences can be dangerous though. For a more full exposition of how dangerous essentialism