My Personal Journey Through the Philosophy of Identity
Eternal Soul
The year 1991 was important to me for two reasons. First, it was the year that the game Civilization was released, which had a major impact on my adolescent development. Second, it was the year I came up with my first theory of self.
My theory went like this: each moment of our existence is forward looking to the next moment. It is like a chain that depends on the viability of every link. If at any point in the future the chain is broken (i.e., we die) not only will all subsequent moments not exist, the immediately previous moment will become pointless because it will be a transition to nothingness. But then by backwards induction, all previous moments will be pointless. By this logic I determined that in order for my life to be meaningful, I must believe in the eternal nature of my soul. So I sat on the sunny countertop of the kitchen in my childhood home explaining the chain of my existence to my mother (who probably wasn’t listening, but was happy to hear me talking as she made lunch for me and my six siblings).
The eternal soul theory is a variant of what you might call a “holistic good” associated with an individual self as described in this relatively short but wonderfully thoughtful article by the philosopher David Shoemaker entitled Utilitarianism and Personal Identity. The basic idea is that some aspects of our identity depend on properties of our self over time, rather than on the nature of isolated moments of consciousness. Like Shoemaker, I used my model of self to conclude that personal identity is special, which for me meant that I had a moral responsibility to look out for my own eternal well-being.
Moderate Reductionism
This model of self satisfied me for about 15 years. But the whole time a tension began to grow within me. Did I rely on the model of an eternal soul because I actually believed it or because I wanted it to be true to protect myself from the fear of death? Ultimately the tension became too great and in a moment of despair I decided that I could no longer maintain status as a believer. I set aside my belief in an eternal soul (and with it, my childhood religion). On a sweaty summer night, walking across an empty golf course in North Carolina, I built a psychological containment facility to hold my fear of death. In place of an eternal soul I adopted a model that corresponds to what philosophers (as in Shoemaker’s article) refer to as “moderate reductionism.”
Moderate reductionism basically says that our identity centers around a particular moment of consciousness, but it extends some ways into the fog of the past and future (via memories and hopes). However, it fades away the further you get so you connection to your distant past and your own distant future eventually becomes as tenuous as your connection to other people.
The philosopher Derek Parfit (perhaps my current favorite?) relied on the breakdown of the identity relation to justify the idea that we should not treat our future self much differently from the way we treat other people. For him, this meant that we should shift somewhat from egoism to utilitarianism (which assumes that our moral duty is based on the aggregate good across individuals, not just on our own eternal soul). Unlike for Parfit, a retreat from hard core individualism did not have this effect on me. Instead, I simply engaged in a moral retreat. You see, for me, the loss of faith in an eternal soul was a purely negative action. It was a loss of a moral justification, not a positive reason to value other people. Why should I value other people more just because I less hope for my own soul? That leap did not make sense to me so I did not make it.
Extreme Reductionism
My fear of death (and my hope for eternal life) stayed in that box for almost ten years. Then one afternoon I was hiking in the hills south of Boulder, Colorado with my wife pregnant with my first child. I opened up my box and realized that my fear of death had been silently growing. Now, it demanded, it was not my fear of death that would live in a box, but my love of life. I would have to further retreat from moderate reductionism to extreme reductionism, which is the belief that we are not even really tied to our future or past selves. The only reality was the consciousness of the moment. The past and the future are illusions that we imagine to create some coherence in a meaningless world.
One of the thoughts that kept driving a wedge into my soul was something I first encountered in the movie Memento. In that movie, the lead character had no long term memory, so he had to write notes to himself. Every day when he woke up he had to read the notes to determine his identity. Some important things he even got tattooed on his body. This was a powerful representation of reductionism for me and despite my attempts to contain it, it eventually infected my soul and destroyed my hope for eternal life.
However, as with the last retreat, I was not able to embrace utilitarianism. I could walk through life observing that each moment was worth living but the destruction of my soul was purely negative. It did not provide me any positive justification for valuing anyone else.
Adiabatic Identity Transfer
My first daughter was born a few months after the complete breakdown of my psyche (which was almost entirely internal and barely observable to anyone else). She did not sleep well as a chile and I was an injured soul, so I took pleasure in simply lying next to her to calm her down as she went to sleep.
At the time I was working on a patent application about the transition of fiber optic signals from cables to logic chips. The patent relied on a fascinating property of fiber-optic cables where if one waveguide is placed near another and tapered off, the signal in the first cable would jump the gap and come to life in the other cable. The process is called an “adiabatic transition”.
As I lay there at night with my infant daughter, thinking about the adiabatic transition of optical signals, I found that I could reach out from my self-imposed protective prison and confront my fear of death. I didn’t know how I would do it, but I was going to find a way to reconstruct a meaningful idea of eternal life that included my daughter. I knew I was a different person than she, but the possibility that identity could be transferred across an air gap to another conscious being gave me hope.
Complex Reductionism
Although I could latch on to the idea of adiabatic identity transfer as an alternative to a model based on an eternal soul, it still didn’t solve my reductionism problem? How could my daughter be a part of my eternal life if my own self two minutes from now was an illusion? In other words, the model might work if I were still a moderate reductionist, but I was not. I could not deny the strength of the logic that our consciousness is experienced at a single moment, and that our past and future were only a part of that conscious experience.
My response was to embrace the extreme reductionism, but use it as a foundation to build on. One oversight in Shoemaker’s article when talking about holistic goods is that he seems to discount the possibility for us to create a model of ourselves over time that exists at a single moment and obtain holistic goods in a moment of consciousness. In other words, the fact consciousness exists at a single moment is not a constraint on the beauty and complexity of that moment. In fact, we can experience eternity in each moment. The fact that I experienced such hope for my daughter made me realize that each moment can extend into the future in a way that allows us to experience eternal life.
Using the word illusions to describe my moments was semantically loaded with negative connotations that the models I was experiencing were somehow not real. But our models can be “real”. And they can be complex. They can have both spatial and temporal extensions in an infinite number of directions.
Another thing I realized is that while there is essentially no limit on the complexity and beauty of our conscious experience at a moment, there do seem to be some constraints. Specifically, our body is designed to help us build and maintain certain psychological models, and we should be thankful for those. It was my deep biological connection to my daughter that gave me positive justification to extend my sense of self beyond myself and reassert my demand for eternal life.
Self-Paradox
Finally I had what I considered a positive justification to extend my moral identity outside of myself. Every moment of myself is a complex model of my world that includes myself, but it also includes others that I am connected to. But still, unlike with Parfit, this did not quite get me to utilitarianism. I didn’t feel comfortable extending my model too far beyond the scope of my biological justification. I felt something in my mind that wanted, nay, needed to extend my model of self beyond a mere moment, and beyond my own flesh to include my family. But to extend my moral sense of identity universally seemed like an incomprehensible illusion.
In the late 18th/early 20th century, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell tried to come up with a grand theory of logic to ground all of mathematics. He failed. Perhaps the most famous problem was his framing of an ancient paradox:
If R is the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves, does R contain itself?
If we assume it does, then it mustn’t and if we assume it doesn’t, then it must! The problem is that the definition of R is self-referential. And, unfortunately, so are complex models of self.
For example, let’s assume that my model of morality is one of preference-maximization (of everyone, or even just me!). That is, to act morally we must do that which will satisfy the preference of the specified one or more people. If I am in the morally relevant group, and I prefer to act morally, the definition of morality refers back to the definition of me, which includes a model of morality...
This paradox becomes even more pernicious if you believe, somehow, that to act morally required me to minimize my own preference-satisfaction. That would mean that to act morally you must not satisfy your desire to act morally.
The reason I bring this up now is that the problem of self-referential paradoxes becomes much more prominent in complex models of consciousness. I believe that my consciousness, is, in an important sense, a model of myself. Since it is self-referential, it cannot be complete.
In the end, Bertrand Russell was forced to conclude that mathematics would never be complete, and so I believe about my soul. Because my model is self-referential and incomplete, it is even more important that it is grounded. That is, my model must be constrained by the environment — and in particular, my biology, to prevent it from becoming an illusion.
Waveguides
Each conscious moment, each complex-reductionist instant, is a sacred genetic and cultural legacy — a model that works. It allows me to believe, honestly, that I will earn money and feed my daughter and teach her and pass on my wisdom like an impossibly intimate waveguide. Strangers cannot possible share in this relation (and those who do are not strangers).
Eventually I have begun to understand the weary cliche that all people must become part of something bigger than themselves. I am part of an egregore — multiple egregores, really — that are necessary for preserving and cultivating all of that holy wisdom that allow me to hold real models of the universe at every moment.
For this reason, I am still not a utilitarian. It is too grandiose, too abstract, too self-referential to be real. To be utilitarian is to be an illusionist. However, to be a little-bit utilitarian is to protect a part of our cultural legacy. All of these wonderful philosophers, including the few I have mentioned here — Shoemaker, Parfit, Russell — they are all part of my cultural heritage and have given me tools that I can use to build up my conscious moments into something that extends further into eternity and serves me in more complex situations.
They are part of my spiritual tribe — the causal bond that includes my genetic and cultural ancestors — because they have contributed greatly to how I perceive the world. And my family is especially important, because they are the ones that allow me to hope for eternal life — an eternal life that exists in each moment and that is made real by hormones and biological necessities. This is my self and the positive justification for extending my sense of self beyond my own body in a messy, constrained way that includes some people more than others.
Now, instead of one big box to hold my fear of death (or to protect my love of life) I am building many boxes and waveguides to contain and to propagate this amazing experience.