Abstract
I begin by comparing the question of what constitutes continuity of Personal Identity Online (PIO), to the traditional question of whether personal identity is constituted by psychological or physical continuity, bringing out the compelling but, I aim to show, ultimately misleading reasons for thinking only psychological continuity has application to PIO. After introducing and defending J.J. Valberg’s horizonal conception of consciousness, I show how it deepens our understanding of psychological and physical continuity accounts of personal identity, while revealing their shortcomings. I then argue that PIO must also be understood against the backdrop of the horizonal conception, that this undermines sharp dichotomies between online and offline identity, and that although online psychological continuity might become necessary for the preservation of our personal identities, we cannot become our PIOs. Finally, I argue that if PIO is understood solely in terms of psychological continuity, any increasing identification with our PIOs assumes the form of a paradigmatic project of bad faith: a technological reduction of our self-consciousness, rather than the enhancement it should be.
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Notes
This is probably the most common issue debated under the heading of ‘personal identity’, although there are many other related issues which fall outside the scope of this paper; as Wittgenstein noted, ‘the term “personality” hasn’t got one legitimate heir only’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 62; see also Schechtman 1996: 1–2).
Tracy Spaight’s ‘Who killed Miss Norway?’ provides an interesting case-study to illustrate this point (Spaight 2006); although a large online community was convinced a former ‘Miss Norway’ had been killed, the rather more mundane reality was (probably) that a Norwegian man decided to withdraw his non-representative PIO from a MMOG.
That offline and online identity might well appear distinct, on the grounds that physical continuity is apparently less relevant to PIO, suggests a hard dichotomy between the online and offline. However, a consensus has now developed that such a dichotomy, routinely presupposed in the 1990s, is not tenable; Charles Ess, for instance, sees it as a recent incarnation of Cartesianism, which was undermined by computer-mediated communication research that ‘extensively and intensively documented the multiple ways in which the offline and online more and more seamlessly interweave with one another rather than stand in sharp, 1990s-style opposition’ (Ess 2011: 23). One of my main aims here is to build on this consensus, by showing that physical continuity has more relevance to PIO than first meets the eye and that online and offline identity are fundamentally intertwined.
Valberg does not motivate the horizonal conception as I am doing here, and never seeks to ‘deny the validity’ of the phenomenal conception, on the grounds that we may legitimately talk of conscious states (Valberg 2007: 99). But if these states present subjective phenomenal properties rather than the world, it is far from clear that the two conceptions are compatible. Moreover, a commitment to the existence of conscious states does not entail that these states are phenomenal; the original 1950s identity theory denies that they are, for instance (cf. Place 1956: 49).
Valberg himself does not make this kind of physicalist claim and says only that the brain causally maintains the horizon of consciousness, although he does argue (in an unpublished manuscript, Reflections on the Nature of Mind) that the horizonal conception is compatible with physicalism. In common with many contemporary philosophers of mind, however, I take the minimal claim of token-identity, which is common currency between the various kinds of reductive and non-reductive physicalist theories, to be the simplest and least problematic explanation of the empirical fact that each person’s state of consciousness systematically covaries with the state of their brain. The dualist alternative of accounting for horizonal continuity in terms of immaterial substance would have to address the substantial evidence for the causal completeness of physics; see Papineau (2000).
This is not to deny that there could be other principled reasons for imposing causal restrictions. Shoemaker, for instance, defends a narrow psychological account which motivates its causal restrictions with a functionalist account of mental states (Shoemaker 1984: 92–101).
This latter claim might be denied on the grounds that a PIO only exists if interpreted as a PIO and that this interpretation can only take place within a horizon; whether this is plausible turns on the wider issue of whether information is consciousness-dependent or consciousness-independent.
Valberg provides an insightful critique of Locke’s conception of continuity of consciousness (Valberg 2007: 376–380), but neglects a crucial feature of this view, namely that it is the psychological content of consciousness that individuates a human being as a person.
This latter point is clearest in the famous footnote to the third Paralogism, where Kant imagines a succession of substances passing on their psychological states from one to another, such that the ‘last substance would then be conscious of all the states of the previously changed substances, as being its own states’ (A364); this kind of psychological continuity is thereby contrasted with the purely formal identity through time required by the transcendental unity of apperception.
It is crucial to note here that non-representative PIO, as set out in “section II,” is the identity of a fictional entity and not the identity of the person or persons contributing to that identity. The two might overlap: the same fictional character (in a MMOG, for instance) might be considered as a representative (if perhaps highly fictionalised) PIO for me, but also as a non-representative PIO, i.e. the character his-/her-/it-self. In the latter sense, I am evidently not my PIO even if I alone maintain it, any more than Charles Dickens is Oliver Twist, however much autobiographical content Dickens put into his character (if this is not immediately obvious, consider the fact that Dickens and Twist have different parents). It is only in the non-representative sense, then, that I am advocating a Lockean account, and this is due to the nature of fiction rather than anything specific to ICT; in the more interesting, representative sense of PIO, however, no sharp distinction between online and offline identity can be drawn.
Escapism can of course be quite innocent: we can thoroughly absorb ourselves in a fantasy, and there is no reason, given the right circumstances, why someone should not, without fear of moral reproach, regard an online fantasy as the most important thing in their life. Escapism need not involve self-deception, however. But even when it does, the moral connotations of bad faith do not imply moral inexcusability; the fault may be very mild. My aim, much like Sartre’s (I think), is not to condemn bad faith morally but intellectually, on the grounds that it reduces our self-consciousness: whether the moral consequences of this, all things considered, are good or bad, the consequences for our understanding are clearly bad.
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Tartaglia, J. Horizons, PIOs, and Bad Faith. Philos. Technol. 25, 345–361 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-012-0068-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-012-0068-5