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Personal Identity Online

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Abstract

Philosophers concerned with the question of personal identity have typically been asking the so-called re-identification question: what are the conditions under which a person at one point in time is properly re-identified at another point in time? This is a rather technical question. In our everyday interactions, however, we do raise a number of personal identity questions that are quite distinct from it. In order to explore the variety of ways in which the Internet may affect personal identity, I propose in this study to broaden the typical philosophical horizon to other more mundane senses of the question. In Section 2, I describe a number of possible meanings of personal identity observed in everyday contexts and more philosophical ones. With some caveats, I argue that it is the specific context in which the question arises that disambiguates the meaning of the question. Online contexts are novel and peculiar insofar as they afford prolonged disembodied and anonymous interaction with others. In line with our previous conclusion, then, there is reason to suspect that such contexts generate new and sui generis answers to the personal identity question. In Section 3, I examine this question and, contrary to expectations, largely dispel this suspicion. Finally, in Section 4, I discuss the often-heard claim to the effect that disembodiment and anonymity foster the creation of distinct and incompatible online and offline identities.

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Notes

  1. Schechtman (2007, 164)

  2. The connection between attachments, on the one hand, and emotion, cognition, and motivation, on the other, is also explored by Frankfurt (1988), which also draws connections between attachments and identity.

  3. DeGrazia (2005, Ch.2 and 3); Mackenzie (2008, Introduction), and Shoemaker (2008).

  4. Philosophical accounts of personal identity, then, need not be seen as necessarily antagonizing each other. Whether they exclude each other will in the first instance depend on whether they are supposed to address or be answers to the same question. Or, even if they address different questions, whether one account addresses a question that is supposed to be more fundamental than the other. DeGrazia, (2005, 114), for example, thinks that the re-identification question is more fundamental than the characterization question. As he puts it, what matters to us with respect to all of our practical concerns is that we ourselves continue to exist. He also thinks that different philosophical accounts are needed to address both questions.

  5. Schechtman (2007, 166)

  6. See MacIntyre 1984, Ch.15; Taylor 1989, Ch.1 and 3; Schechtman 1996, DeGrazia 2005, Ch.3.

  7. DeGrazia 2005, 89

  8. See Mackenzie 2008, 12–13 for references to the sources of these different versions of the narrative view.

  9. Ricoeur (1983, Ch.2 and 3) calls this structure emplotment or mise en intrigue.

  10. The view sketched here reproduces part of Schechtman’s view (2007, 159 ff.). The qualification of it as “middle-range” is her own and should be understood against the following categorization: narrative theories can be weak, middle-range, and strong in accordance to the way in which they answer these three questions: (1) What counts as a life-narrative? (2) What counts as having a narrative? And (3) What are the practical implications of having (or failing to have) a narrative? Schechtman argues that weak views are too weak or trivial to count as full-bodied narrative views while strong views are implausible. She, hence, favors the middle-range view sketched above.

  11. Taylor 1985, 47.

  12. http://www.facebook.com/ 2010.

  13. This, of course, is not to deny that any context, online or otherwise, may in time develop its own established practice on the basis of the purposes of its users. The question “Who am I?” may receive answers we do not yet know.

  14. This case raises interesting ethical issues explored by Wolfendale (2007).

  15. See, for example, Olson (1997), and DeGrazia (2005, Ch.2).

  16. See, for example, Parfit (1984, Ch.XX).

  17. Parfit (1984, 207)

  18. Though I will not directly engage with either one of these theories on this occasion, let me register a note of skepticism with regard to the physical possibility of maintaining psychological continuity across human bodies let alone non-biological systems. Findings in cognitive and affective science suggest that much of our psychology is embodied. We cannot even begin to feel an emotion without a properly functioning body complete with guts, an autonomic nervous system, and a motor system. Recent work in neuroscience also shows that, without a properly functioning affective system, our decision-making capacity, our social cognition, and the self processes that undergird consciousness would be impaired. From this perspective, the possibility of transferring psychological states from a biological organism to a silicon system seems farfetched. In fact, even the more common brain transplant cases from one human body to another may fail to preserve psychological continuity precisely because the recipient body (complete with guts, etc.) is presumed to be different. Can a different body recollect the same memory?

  19. Olson et al. (2010) sums up this view as follows: “if there is fission in your future, then there are two of you, so to speak, even now. What we think of as you is really two people, who are now exactly similar and located in the same place, doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts.” The view is developed by Lewis (1976); Noonan (2003: 139–42), and Perry (1972) and is typically accompanied by “four-dimensionalism”.

  20. It has another potential consequence for ethics nicely introduced by Hutto (2007, 4–5) and further discussed by Goldie (2007, 80–84).

  21. http://articles.cnn.com/2010-04-21/tech/facebook.changes.f8_1_facebook-friends-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-users?_s=PM:TECH Retrieved on 13 January 2011. My emphasis.

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Correspondence to Raffaele Rodogno.

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Rodogno, R. Personal Identity Online. Philos. Technol. 25, 309–328 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0020-0

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