I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [194]
[A few pages later] .…I have now reviewed the main arguments for the Reductionist View. Do I find it impossible to believe this View?
What I find is this. I can believe this view at the intellectual or reflective level. I am convinced by the arguments in favour of this view. But I think it likely that, at some other level, I shall always have doubts.…
I suspect that reviewing my arguments would never wholly remove my doubts. At the reflective or intellectual level, I would remain convinced that the Reductionist View is true. But at some lower level I would still be inclined to believe that there must always be a real difference between some future person’s being me, and his being someone else. Something similar is true when I look through a window at the top of a sky-scraper. I know that I am in no danger. But, looking down from this dizzying height, I am afraid. I would have a similar irrational fear if I was about to press the green button.
….It is hard to be serenely confident in my Reductionist conclusions. It is hard to believe that personal identity is not what matters. If tomorrow someone will be in agony, it is hard to believe that it could be an empty question whether this agony will be felt by me. And it is hard to believe that, if I am about to lose consciousness, there may be no answer to the question “Am I about to die?”
I must say, I find Parfit’s willingness to face and to share his self-doubts with his readers to be extremely rare and wonderfully refreshing.
Morphing Parfit into Bonaparte
In the last paragraph quoted above, Parfit alludes to a thought experiment invented partly by philosopher Bernard Williams and partly by himself (in other words, invented by a Williams–Parfit hybrid who might be called “Bernek Willfits”), in which he is about to undergo a special type of neurosurgery whose exact nature is determined by a numerical parameter — namely, how many switches will be thrown. What do the individual switches do? Each one of them converts one of Parfit’s personality traits into a different personality trait belonging to none other than Napoleon Bonaparte (and I literally mean “none other than”, as I will shortly explain). For example, one switch makes Parfit far more irascible, another switch removes his repugnance at the idea of seeing people killed, and so forth. Note that in the previous sentence I used the proper noun “Parfit” and the pronoun “his”, which presumably is an unambiguous reference to Parfit. However, the whole question here is whether or not such usages are legitimate. If switch after switch were thrown, converting Parfit more and more into Napoleon, at what stage would he — or rather, at what stage would this slowly morphing person — simply be Napoleon?
As I have already made clear, asking exactly where along the line the switchover would take place makes no sense from Parfit’s point of view, for what matters is psychological continuity (i.e., proximity in that quasimathematical space of personalities or brains that I suggested a little while ago), and that is a feature that comes in all shades of gray. It is not a 0/1 matter, not all-or-nothing. A person can be partly Derek Parfit and partly Napoleon Bonaparte, and drifting from the one to the other as the switches are thrown. And this doesn’t merely mean that this person is becoming more and more like Napoleon Bonaparte — it means that this person really is slowly becoming Bonaparte himself.
In Parfit’s view, the Cartesian Ego of Napoleon is not indivisible, nor is that of Derek Parfit. Rather, it is as if there were a slider on a wire, and the two individuals (who are not really “individuals” in the etymological sense, since the word means “undividable”) can be merged or morphed arbitrarily by sliding that slider to any desired position on the wire. The result is a hybrid person, a tenth or a third or halfway or three-quarters of the way between the two ends — whatever proportions one wishes, ranging from Derek Parfit to Deren Parfite to Dereon Parpite to Deleon Parapite to Doleon