Locke, Personal Identity, and Hegel
Locke and his descendents have spent entire philosophical careers claiming that personhood (or identity over time) is to be identified using S-at-t time-slices. You at 5:30 thursday are the same you at 6:48 Friday because the latter can contain a memory of the former. Locke, Grice, Shoemaker, Perry, all of them are entirely wrong.
The notion of a person at-a-time is incoherent. The notion of a person as a series of discrete "events" is incoherent. As neuroscience digs deeper and deeper into the brain, it is NOT finding a "warehouse" which dutifully records memories of external events. Instead, it is finding a massively complex collection of anticipation and revision, a creation of experiences that does not obey the notion of "a single time". Much of what we experience at "a single time" is a synthesis of future-anticipation and past-revision. Memories are not records of events, but continually revised centres of meaning.
Of the hundreds of facts I could spit out at you to support this point, I might just mention that 70% of the visual process is "feedback" from the lateral-geniculate nucleus. The information that finally gets to the back of visual cortex is so incredibly mangled by this (and other) feedback that it is logically impossible to "reconstruct" a picture of the original retinal stimulus. The world is not talking to the brain (tablua rasa): the brain is talking to itself. It is not determining what is out there so as to record such information, it is taking what it needs from the world and authoring a useful story.
Simply put, Locke got things spectacularly wrong.
These observations have massive repercussions for many fields, including philosophy. When we speak of "persons", we must reject the notion of a being, and embrace the notion of a becoming. There is a continuous authorial presence in the self, one which takes no "breaks" to temporarily enter the realm of "being". As persons, our primary ethical responsibility is to be good authors, to shape the way WE respond to the input we recieve. Which, of course, is virtue ethics, almost verbatim.
Hegel and Aristotle are vindicated! Long live neuroscience!
The notion of a person at-a-time is incoherent. The notion of a person as a series of discrete "events" is incoherent. As neuroscience digs deeper and deeper into the brain, it is NOT finding a "warehouse" which dutifully records memories of external events. Instead, it is finding a massively complex collection of anticipation and revision, a creation of experiences that does not obey the notion of "a single time". Much of what we experience at "a single time" is a synthesis of future-anticipation and past-revision. Memories are not records of events, but continually revised centres of meaning.
Of the hundreds of facts I could spit out at you to support this point, I might just mention that 70% of the visual process is "feedback" from the lateral-geniculate nucleus. The information that finally gets to the back of visual cortex is so incredibly mangled by this (and other) feedback that it is logically impossible to "reconstruct" a picture of the original retinal stimulus. The world is not talking to the brain (tablua rasa): the brain is talking to itself. It is not determining what is out there so as to record such information, it is taking what it needs from the world and authoring a useful story.
Simply put, Locke got things spectacularly wrong.
These observations have massive repercussions for many fields, including philosophy. When we speak of "persons", we must reject the notion of a being, and embrace the notion of a becoming. There is a continuous authorial presence in the self, one which takes no "breaks" to temporarily enter the realm of "being". As persons, our primary ethical responsibility is to be good authors, to shape the way WE respond to the input we recieve. Which, of course, is virtue ethics, almost verbatim.
Hegel and Aristotle are vindicated! Long live neuroscience!