Abstract
The debate on personal persistence has been characterized by a dichotomy which is due to its still Cartesian framwork: On the one side we find proponents of psychological continuity who connect, in Locke’s tradition, the persistence of the person with the constancy of the first-person perspective in retrospection. On the other side, proponents of a biological approach take diachronic identity to consist in the continuity of the organism as the carrier of personal existence from a third-person-perspective. Thus, what accounts for someone’s persistence over time, is the continuity of his mind on the one hand, and the continuity of his body on the other. In contrast to those views, the paper intends to show that bodily existence represents the basis of selfhood across time, both as the continuity of the experiential self and as the continuity of the autopoietic organism. On the one hand, the lived body conveys a continuity of the self from a first-person perspective, namely a pre-reflective feeling of sameness or a felt constancy of subjectivity. Moreover, an analysis of awakening and sleep shows that there is a continuous transition from full wakefulness to periods of deep sleep which may thus not be regarded as a complete interruption of subjective experience. On the other hand, this constancy converges with the continuity of the organismic life process as conceived from a third-person perspective. Thus, the experiential self of bodily subjectivity and the autopoietic self of the living organism should be regarded as two aspects of one and the same life process. Finally, the lived body also exhibits a specific form of memory that results from the continual embodiment of existence: it consists of all the affinities, capacities and experiences, which a person has acquired throughout his life. Thus, it provides a continuity of self that must not be actively produced through remembering, but rather integrates the person’s entire past in his present being and potentiality.
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Notes
“It seems necessary that the mind actually always thinks; for thinking constitutes its essence” (“Necessarium videtur, ut mens semper actu cogitet; quia cogitatio constituit eius essentiam.”). Descartes, Letter to Arnauld, June 4, 1648 (Descartes 1996, Vol. V, p. 193).
Descartes, Second Meditation, 6 (Descartes 2010a, p. 4).
Descartes, Objections to the Meditations and Descartes’s Replies. 5th Objections (Descartes 2010b, p. 92).
Hesnard, A.-L. M. (1909) Les troubles de la personnalité dans les états d’asthénie psychique. Etude de psychologie clinique. Thèse de médecine. Bordeaux, France: Université de Bordeaux; quoted from Parnas and Handest (2003).
Description given by a female schizophrenic patient of Bin Kimura (In: Psychopathology of self-awareness, Tokyo 1978, p. 18; quoted from Kobayashi 1998, p. 114).
Strawson (2011) has argued extensively for an interpretation according to which Locke in fact presupposes personal identity as being equal to the diachronic unity of consciousness. Its possible extension to the person’s past mainly serves to identify the scope of self-concernment and forensic responsibility which may be attributed to the person (Strawson 2011, p. 10f., 23). Even if this interpretation may be adequate, the problem remains on which basis this unity of consciousness should be grounded. In any case, Locke has outlined the framework for the persistence problem as it is discussed until today.
For example by replacing memory with a new concept, “quasi-memory”, which means a “retro-cognition” without the identity requirement (Shoemaker 1970).
Proponents of narrative identity also go beyond the criterion of memory by embedding episodic recollections in a more or less unitary biographical narrative and a self-concept gained from it (see for example Bruner 2003; Schechtman 1996). The narrative identity thus constructed allows to integrate one’s own former states into an account of the self even when they are no longer directly accessible to memory. However, these theories are usually less interested in criteria of persistence in an ontological sense.
As an example of such a view, I quote neuroscientists Squire and Kandel: “We are not who we are because we think. We are who we are because we can remember what we have thought about (…). Memory is the glue that binds our mental life, the scaffolding that holds our personal history and that makes it possible to grow and change throughout life. When memory is lost, as in Alzheimer’s disease, we lose the ability to recreate our past, and as a result, we lose our connection with ourselves and with others” (Squire and Kandel 1999, p. ix).
A similar stance is taken by Bruner, for whom a loss of narrative identity means loss of selfhood: “Individuals who have lost the ability to construct narratives have lost their selves. The construction of selfhood, it seems, cannot proceed without a capacity to narrate” (Bruner 2003, p. 73).
For utilitarian ethicists like Singer (1979) or McMahan, those in the advanced stages of dementia are therefore no longer persons, or only “post-persons” (McMahan 2003, p. 46ff., 55). Although the notion of the person is not my topic here, it becomes obvious that the rationalistic or psychological concepts of personal identity may have far-reaching ethical consequences one might not be pleased with.
Dainton’s solution to what he calls the “bridge-problem” is to finally attribute the continuity in question to a “Potentially Conscious Self” (PCS) or an “Experience Producer” (EP) capable of activating a conscious self (Dainton 2008; Dainton and Bayne 2005). However, this comes down to give up on experiential self-continuity and to resort to a physiological system such as the brain as “EP” instead – an unsatisfactory move as I will try to show in what follows.
As William James wrote, “even when there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self” (James 1950, p. 237). As James’ subsequent explanation shows, this feeling does not actually mean an ‘as if’, but a self-evident or self-familiar experience: He also describes it by the affective qualities of “warmth and intimacy”, and continues: “whatever past feelings appear with those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a common self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain …” (l.c., p. 239, emphasis added).
The “timelessness of the subjective self” has been suggested by Klein (2014), based on the observation that in severely amnesic patients the sense of self is still situated in the very year of the loss of episodic memory; in a way, they live in a locked and continuous present.
The problem of how we know that we were asleep when awakening is treated in detail by Thompson (2015, 231ff.), referring to Indian Yoga and Vedanta traditions for whom deep and dreamless sleep still remains a mode of consciousness. The somewhat paradoxical conclusion of their considerations is that in awakening I am retentionally aware that I have been unaware before, which means that the state of unawareness was somehow experienced by me during deep sleep (l.c. 244).
On this, cf. also Zahavi (1999, pp. 206–210) as well as Linschoten (1987, p. 110). “This means that we never sleep through and through. But then perhaps ‘complete sleep’ is a mere theoretical construction, a limit-idea. When in my sleep I-in-my-origin have slid back into an almost plantlike mode of existence, then still a last, extremely vague kernel remains ready to unfold itself again into a living center of interests at the slightest signal. In my sleep I have not disappeared; I am sleeping … [and I] am continuously ready to wake up as I-myself … in the passivity of sleeping there is continuously hidden a readiness for the activity of waking-up.” This seems to resemble Descartes’ view (see footnote 2 above), however, with the crucial difference that for him there is no gradation from conscious to unconscious states during sleep, but only a fully conscious mind whose sleeping states we do not remember.
To narrate one’s own story presupposes to be continuously aware of oneself in prereflective first-personal experience in order to know who the story is about (therefore a robot may issue an account of events it was involved in, but it cannot narrate). The distinction is also made by Thompson: “The instant of awakening thus reveals two kinds of self-experience (…) – the bodily self-experience of being alive in the present moment, of being sentient, and the autobiographical self-experience of being a person with a story line (…) Although we may forget many things about ourselves when we first wake up – where we are, how we got there, maybe even our name – we never have to turn around to see who it was who was just asleep and unknowing, if by ‘who’ we mean the subject of present moment experience in contrast to the self as the mentally represented object of autobiographical memory” (Thompson 2015, 236). – On the foundational relation of the basic or minimal self to the narrative self see also Zahavi 2007.
“An autopoietic system – the minimal living organization – is one that continuously produces the components that specify it, while at the same time realizing it (the system) as a concrete unity in space and time, which makes the network of production of components possible” (Varela 1997, p. 75). See also Weber and Varela 2002 and Thompson 2007, pp. 149ff.
It is true that Damasio still conceives the brain-body unity within a representationalist framework, speaking of a „mapping“ or „representation” of the body landscape by higher brain centers. For a more radical embodied concept of affectivity as arising from the interaction between brain and periphery see Rockwell (2005, p. 37–50), Fuchs (2011a).
„Above all, the phenomenal states of the body-as-subject are experienced affectively. Affects do not emanate from the external sense modalities. They are states of the subject. These states are thought to represent the biological value of changing internal conditions (e.g., hunger, sexual arousal). When internal conditions favor survival and reproductive success, they feel ‚good‘; when not, they feel ‚bad’. This is evidently what conscious states are for“ (Solms 2013, p.7).
Cf. Fuchs and Koch 2014 for an embodied account of emotions.
For reasons of space, I won’t discuss the related thought experiments of a “brain in a vat” that is allegedly conscious though separated from the organism, provided it receives the appropriate nutrient supply and sensory stimulation. They too omit the multiple interactions of brain and body necessary for consciousness to emerge. For a critical discussion cf. Cosmelli and Thompson (2011).
Cf. for example Olson 1997: „… the person who ends up with your cerebrum in the Transplant Case is in an important sense psychologically continuous with you. She has inherited your mind“ (p.11). Nevertheless, this „psychological continuity is neither necessary nor sufficient for a human animal to persist through time“ (p.17.).
William James already made the fitting observation: “It is a general principle in psychology that consciousness deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use” (James 1950, p. 496).
Cf. Proust’s famous description of waking up: “… and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness (…) My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness” (Proust 1922, ch. 1). – Proust’s description illustrates the “rudimentary sense of existence” in the first moment of awakening as well as the subsequent unfolding of the ecological self (Neisser 1988), mediated by the spatial body schema and the associated bodily orientations and possibilities of interacting with the environment.
See also the quotations of schizophrenic patients in the introduction. Of course, the psychopathological notion of depersonalization should not be taken to mean that the patients are not the same persons as they were before. After all, the continuity of their organic life is not affected at all (the term “disembodiment” of course refers only to the bodily self-alienation), and even their autobiographical memory is still intact. Nevertheless, as I have argued, the continuity of selfhood depends both on the continuity of organismic life and of the experiential sense of self, and if the latter is missing, selfhood is no longer present in the full sense.
Unlike episodic memory, implicit memory can remain largely intact even in the face of extensive damage to the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures. The basis of implicit memory involves larger and more primitive parts of the brain, located mainly subcortically—structures like the basal ganglia and cerebellum as well as limbic structures such as the amygdala. The location, size and variety of these systems explains the robustness of implicit memory in dementia (see also Fuchs 2010b).
Apart from that, a basic sense of self is certainly preserved even in severely demented patients, as becomes evident by their use of first-person pronouns or indexicals, self-reference through facial expressions and gestures, laying claim on their personal belongings and, last not least, self-related affects such as fear or shame. On this, compare Summa 2014.
Of course, if selfhood or personhood are defined as requiring the capacity to narrate and remember one’s life (for example Bruner 2003, cf. footnote 11). the proponents of such views will not be convinced. As I mentioned at the beginning, the notion of the person is not my topic here. Nevertheless, I argue for a substantial notion of the bodily self and its continuity which is at least suited to question an autobiographical memory-based view of our persistence as persons.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by the EC Initial Training Network “Toward an Embodied Science of Intersubjecitivity” (TESIS, project no. 264828). I am also grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers.
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Fuchs, T. Self across time: the diachronic unity of bodily existence. Phenom Cogn Sci 16, 291–315 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9449-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-015-9449-4