Why Will the Person Who Wakes Up Tomorrow Be Me?

I prepared this piece for the site; it is not a course assignment. In the introduction I wrote out, one by one, where the texts in this section come from.

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The dentist holds out the card. The appointment is for six months from now: the fourteenth of April, eleven o'clock.

I have never seen the person who will sit in that chair at that hour. I do not know what will be bothering them that day, what work they will have left half done, how they will wake up that morning. Still, I am making a promise on their behalf. And a promise that they will do the thing I like least.

Nobody finds this strange. I do not either. But there is something strange in it somewhere.

Locke plays his card

Locke's answer is memory (1694). If the person who sits in the chair in April can remember putting the card in their pocket today, they are me. What sustains a person is not flesh but the backward reach of consciousness.

The idea is lovely because it does not bring in a substance that nobody can see. It makes a person out of the capacity to hold on to one's own past.

Reid (1785) shattered this loveliness with a single example.

A retired general remembers the day he received the medal. The young officer who received the medal remembers stealing apples from a garden as a boy. The general does not remember the apples.

By Locke's criterion: the general is the same person as the officer, the officer is the same person as the child, and the general is not the same person as the child. Identity does not work that way. If A is B and B is C, then A is C. The criterion does not meet this.

The repair is simple: a chain instead of direct remembering. If the links are connected to one another, so are the ends. Today this is called psychological continuity, and this is the form in which it is debated.

But the second objection hurts more. What makes a memory my memory? That the event happened to me. So while trying to explain identity through memory, we use identity in the definition of memory. To get past this, Shoemaker (1970) proposed a notion called quasi-memory: a remembering that is causally connected in the right way, but whose ownership is not presupposed from the start.

Does it work? In part. But having to invent a new concept in order to rescue a concept shows the fatigue of the theory.

Trying to go by the body

There is a less laborious way: you are a living creature, in April the same organism will sit in that chair, done.

Olson's (1997) animalism defends this, and it has an advantage: in deep sleep, in fainting, in a coma, the person does not disappear. In these cases the psychological criterion strains, while the bodily criterion does not strain at all.

Then the thought experiment arrives, and intuition changes direction. If A's mental contents were transferred into B's body, where would we look for A after the operation? Most people point to where the mind went.

Williams (1970) did something unsettling here. He described the same operation a second time, in other words.

First description: “Your mind will be transferred to another body. Then this body will be tortured.” The unease is low. That body is no longer me.

Second description: “Tomorrow you will be tortured. Don't worry, before that all your memory will be erased, you won't even remember who you are.” The fear does not drop. It rises.

The event is the same event. The sentences are different. The intuition flips.

This is a warning about the ground of the debate. The data of this literature are intuitions, and intuitions are sensitive to the form of the telling. When testing a theory with intuition, the intuition too has to be tested against something.

Two people on the table

Parfit (1984) broke the question.

The two halves of your brain are transplanted into two separate bodies. Both wake up. Both have your memories, both make your jokes, both remember the appointment in April.

Which one is you?

Both: impossible, one person cannot stand in two places. One: which, and why? Both came out of the same material. Neither: then you died on the operating table. But if dying is this, death looks like something better than survival.

All three answers are bad. Parfit's conclusion is that the question is bad.

Identity is a two-valued label. Either it sticks or it does not. But the relation here comes in degrees: remembering, personality, intention, habit. All of these pass to both sides in fission. Only the label cannot pass, because the label has no structure that could be split in two.

Parfit's sentence comes into play here: identity is not what matters.

What matters is that graded bond. And that bond is not lost in fission.

The teleportation table

Parfit's second example is better known. Your body is scanned, destroyed here, rebuilt atom by atom on Mars. The person who wakes up remembers everything and takes themselves to be you.

Is it you?

Most people say no. But beneath that no there are two separate fears, and speaking without separating them leads to the wrong place.

The first fear is material: the link between the two has been broken. If we take this criterion seriously, everyday life also falls into danger; the matter in the body is largely renewed over the years. The difference is one of speed. Then the criterion is not “the same matter” but “gradualness,” and gradualness comes in degrees too and has no sharp boundary.

The second fear is something else. When the scan is finished, the person standing here is destroyed. However similar the man on Mars may be, the flow here is cut off.

Parfit's answer is clean: if what you fear is the cutting off of that flow, what you fear is not identity. It is connectedness. And connectedness is carried over to Mars.

The answer is rational. I am not convinced, and I have to write why I am not, because here something other than argument is speaking.

Every description is given from the outside. Who remembers what, which cell went where, how strong the bond is. All of it is third person. But the question itself is first person: will I be there?

Nagel (1986) accepts this tension as permanent. We can see the world both from the inside and from the outside, and the two views cannot be reduced to one another. Parfit's answer is complete from the outside. From the inside it remains incomplete. Whether this incompleteness points to a gap in the world or to a limit of our viewpoint I do not know, and I have not met anyone who does.

The weight of a promise

This debate does not end in the chair. It does direct work in three places.

Promises. When you make a promise, the one who will keep it is your future self. As the bond weakens, does the promise weaken too? Parfit's framework makes one think so. But social life demands exactly the opposite: the binding force of a promise is needed most where the bond has weakened. You cannot refuse a twenty-year-old debt on the ground that your bond with the person of twenty years ago has weakened.

Punishment. A crime committed forty years ago. If the psychological bond between the person punished today and the person who committed the act has weakened considerably, who is the sentence being imposed on? The law does not ask this question; it establishes identity through the body. Here Parfit's framework collides with the law, and this collision is a real load that tests the framework.

Advance directives. In the case of advanced dementia, the present you decides which treatment will be given. That decision binds someone who has moved very far from you psychologically. Is the present person authorized to decide about that person's interests? Here Parfit's question stops being theoretical and sits down right at the head of a bed.

What Locke observed centuries ago fits exactly here: “person” is a forensic concept. It is used to distribute responsibility and accountability. So its criterion too may change according to what it is distributing.

The narrative proposal and an objection

Schechtman (1996) looks from another place: what sustains a person is a narrative. You build your life as a story, and you go on as the protagonist of that story.

The idea is attractive. But I have an objection, and it is simple.

Constructing a narrative is a skill. This skill is not the same in everyone; trauma, illness, poverty and a scattered mind make it harder. Does someone who cannot turn their life into a tidy story become less of a person? I cannot accept that conclusion. Being a person cannot be tied to being a good narrator.

What remains

Let us return to the appointment in April.

What makes the person who will sit in that chair me is the strength of the bond between us. Remembering, intention, habit, personality. The bond comes in degrees. It is strong between today and April; weaker between today and twenty years from now. There is no sharp boundary, and its absence is not a lack of knowledge but the structure of the concept itself.

When I first heard this, I found it cold. I no longer do, because it has a useful side.

Toward your past self: the person of five years ago is connected to you but is not all of you. To judge their decisions with today's knowledge is like blaming a stranger for something they did not know.

Toward your future self: the bond is not given, it is something you work on. The more vividly you imagine the person in April, the more you do for them today. That is the philosophical counterpart of the exercise I described in the future-imagining article on the site: bringing a distant reward closer is in fact thickening the bond with the future person.

Where the label sticks may remain disputed. That the card is in my pocket is not disputed. On the fourteenth of April someone has to sit in that chair, and that job has fallen to me.