[kurgusal ayrılma (fission), birleşme (fusion), çoğalma meselelerinin bireysel süreklilik ve bireysel özdeşlik kurgumuzda yarattığı sarsıntılarla ilgili bir kafa yorma. temelde 'concern' (varlığıyla ilgili endişe) üzerinden tartışılıyor. güzel bir makale. düzgün bir özet çıkarmaya çalıştım:]
bernard williams; the self and the future; in personal identity; ed by raymond martin and john barresi, blackwell publishing, 2005, p75 [from: Bernard Williams, "The Self and the Future” pp. 161-80 from Philosophical Review 79 (1970).]
The Self and the Future
Bernard Williams
[I. body exchange:]
Suppose, through some process [machine], persons, A and B, exchanged bodies. concern about my own future doesn’t have to be conducted over body.
[deney koşulları ve açıklamalar:]
We imagine the following. The process considered above exists; two persons can enter some machine, let us say, and emerge changed in the appropriate ways. If A and B are the persons who enter, let us call the persons who emerge the A-body-person and the B-body-person: the A-body- person is that person (whoever it is) with whom I am confronted when, after the experiment, I am confronted with that body which previously was A's body - that is to say, that person who would naturally be taken for A by someone who just saw this person, was familiar with A's appearance before the experiment, and did not know about the happening of the experiment. A non-question-begging description of the experiment will leave it open which (if either) of the persons A and B the A-body-person is; the description of the experiment as "persons changing bodies" of course implies that the A-body-person is actually B.
[deney:]
persons A and B, one prize, one punishment, shelfish choice
We announce that one of the two resultant persons, the A-body-person and the B-body-person, is going after the experiment to be given $100,000 [prize], while the other is going to be tortured [punishment].
We then ask each A and B to choose which treatment should be dealt out to which of the persons who will emerge from the experiment, the choice to be made (if it can be) on selfish grounds.
[çıkarımlar:]
Suppose that,
1. A chooses that the B-body-person should get the pleasant treatment and the A-body-person the unpleasant treatment;
2. B chooses conversely
3. (this might indicate that they thought that "changing bodies" was indeed a good description of the outcome).
4. The experimenter cannot act in accordance with both these sets of preferences, those expressed by A and those expressed by B.
5. Hence there is one clear sense in which A and B cannot both get what they want: namely, that if the experimenter, before the experiment, announces to A and B that he intends to carry out the alternative (for example), of treating the B-body-person unpleasantly and the A-body-person pleasantly - then A can say rightly, "That's not the outcome I chose to happen," and B can, say rightly, "That's just the outcome I chose to happen."
6. So, evidently, A and B before the experiment can each come to know either that the outcome he chose will be that which will happen, or that the one he chose will not happen, and in that sense they can get or fail to get what they wanted.
7. But is it also true that when the experimenter proceeds after the experiment to act in accordance with one of the preferences and not the other, then one of A and B will have got what he wanted, and the other not?
8. experimenter gives the unpleasant treatment to the B-body-person and the pleasant treatment to the A-body-person.
9. Then the B-body-person will not only complain of the unpleasant treatment as such, but will complain (since he has A's memories) that that was not the outcome he chose, since he chose that the B-body-person should be well treated; and since A made his choice in selfish spirit, he may add that he precisely chose in that way because he did not want the unpleasant things to happen to "him". The A-body-person meanwhile will express satisfaction both at the receipt of the $100,000, and also at the fact that the experimenter has chosen to act in the way that he, B, so wisely chose.
10. These facts make a strong case for saying that the experimenter has brought it about that B did in the outcome get what he wanted and A did not. It is therefore a strong case for saying that, the B-body-person really is A, and the A-body-person really is B
therefore for saying that the process of the experiment really is that of changing bodies. For the same reasons it would seem that A and B in our example really did choose wisely, and that it was A's bad luck that the choice he correctly made was not carried out, B's good luck that the choice he correctly made was carried out.
This seems to show that to care about what happens to me in the future is not necessarily to care about what happens to this body (the one I now have); and this in turn might be taken to show that in some sense of Descartes's obscure phrase, I and my body are "really distinct" (though, of course, nothing in these considerations could support the idea that I could exist without a body at all).
[II. mind engineering, variations of amnesia:]
1. i am going to be tortured
2. this is announced to me sometime before torture
2.a. they also say that right before torture, i will forget that this was announced to me before,
but this doesn’t cheer me up.
(since I know perfectly well that I can forget things, and that there is such a thing as indeed being tortured unexpectedly because I had forgotten or been made to forget a prediction of the torture, that will still be a torture which, so long as I do know about the prediction, I look forward to in fear.)
2.b. i will have forgotten everything about myself at time of the torture.
2.b.1. i will remember myself but differently. i will be remembering as another living person’s past.
2.b.2. when the moment of torture comes, I shall not remember any of the things I am now in a position to remember. [this is variation (i): A is subjected to an operation which produces total amnesia]
This does not cheer me up, either,
(since I can readily conceive of being involved in an accident, for instance, as a result of which I wake up in a completely amnesiac state and also in great pain; that could certainly happen to me, I should not like it to happen to me, nor to know that it was going to happen to me.)
2.b.3. at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. [var. (iii): changes in his character are produced, and at the same time certain illusory "memory" beliefs are induced in him; these are of a quite fictitious kind and do not fit the life of any actual person] [zihin mühendisliği versiyon1: yaratıcı]
I do not think that this would cheer me up, either.
(For I can at least conceive the possibility, if not the concrete reality, of going completely mad, and thinking perhaps that I am George IV or somebody; and being told that something like that was going to happen to me would have no tendency to reduce the terror of being told authoritatively that I was going to be tortured, but would merely compound the horror.)
2.b.4. the impressions of my past with which I shall be equipped on the eve of torture will exactly fit the past of another person now living, and that indeed I shall acquire these impressions by (for instance) information now in his brain being copied into mine. [var. (iv): changes in his character are produced, and at the same time certain illusory "memory" beliefs are induced in him; both the character traits and the "memory" impressions are designed to be appropriate to another actual person, B] [zihin mühendisliği ver. 2: mimetik]
Fear, surely, would still be the proper reaction,
(and not because one did not know what was going to happen, but because in one vital respect at least one did know what was going to happen - torture, which one can indeed expect to happen to oneself, and to be preceded by certain mental derangements as well.)
2.b.5. [variation (v):] changes in his character are produced, and at the same time certain illusory "memory" beliefs are induced in him; the result is produced by putting the information into A from the brain of B, by a method which leaves B the same as he was before [zihin mühendisliği ver. 3: kopyalama]
2.b.6. [var. (vi):] changes in his character are produced, and at the same time certain illusory "memory" beliefs are induced in him; the result is produced by putting the information into A from the brain of B, but B is not left the same, since a similar operation is conducted in the reverse direction. [zihin mühendisliği ver. 4: karşılıklı kopyalama] [i.e: body exchange, or now, mind exchange, or none, special continuity or at the same time interruption]
now, A disappears, but where? where to draw the line? somewhere between iii-iv?
discussion: I can see only one way of relevantly laying great weight on the transition from (v) to (vi); and this involves a considerable difficulty. This is to deny that, as I put it, the transition from (v) to (vi) involves merely the addition of something happening to somebody else; what rather it does it will be said, is to involve the reintroduction of A himself, as the B-body-person; since he has reappeared in this form, it is for this person, and not for the unfortunate A-body-person, that A will have his expectations. This is to reassert, in effect, the viewpoint emphasized in our first presentation of the experiment. But this surely has the consequence that A should not have fears for the A-body-person who appeared in situation (v). For by the present argument, the A-body-person in (vi) is not A; the B-body person is. But the A-body-person in (v) is, in character, history, everything, exactly the same as the A-body-person in (vi); so if the latter is not A, then neither is the former. (It is this point, no doubt, that encourages one to speak of the difference that goes with (vi) as being, on the present view, the reintroduction of A.) But no one else in (v) has any better claim to be A. So in (v), it seems, A just does not exist. This would certainly explain why A should have no fears for the state of things in (v) - though he might well have fears for the path to it. But it rather looked earlier as though he could well have fears for the state of things in (v). Let us grant however, that that was an illusion, and that A really does not exist in (v); then does he exist in (iv), (iii), (ii), or (i)? It seems very difficult to deny it for (i) and (ii); are we perhaps to draw the line between (iii) and (iv)?
Here someone will say: you must not insist on drawing a line -borderline cases are borderline cases, and you must not push our concepts beyond their limits. But this well-known piece of advice, sensible as it is in many cases, seems in the present case to involve an extraordinary difficulty. It may intellectually comfort observers of A's situation; but what is A supposed to make of it? To be told that a future situation is a borderline one for its being myself that is hurt, that it is conceptually undecidable whether it will be me or not, is something which, it seems, I can do nothing with; because, in particular, it seems to have no comprehensible representation in my expectations and the emotions that go with them.
if we deny that the A-body-person in (vi) is A (because the B-body-person is), then we must deny that the A-body-person in (v) is A, since they are exactly the same.
in situation vi, A became B, and vice versa, we are connected to the first experiment.
"There seems to be an obstinate bafflement to mirroring in my expectations a situation in which it is "conceptually undecidable" whether I occur"
the subject's difficulty in thinking either projectively or non-projectively about the situation. For to regard the prospective pain-sufferer just like the transmogrified object of sentiment, and to conceive of my ambivalent distress about his future pain as just like ambivalent distress about some future damage to such an object, is of course to leave him and me clearly distinct from one another, and thus to displace the conceptual shadow from its proper place. I have to get nearer to him than that. But is there any nearer that I can get to him without expecting his pain? If there is, the analogy has not shown us it. We can certainly not get nearer by expecting, as it were, ambivalent pain; there is no place at all for that. There seems to be an obstinate bafflement to mirroring in my expectations a situation in which it is conceptually undecidable whether I occur.
"The bafflement seems, moreover, to turn to plain absurdity if we move from conceptual undecidability to its close friend and neighbor, conventionalist decision:"
The bafflement seems, moreover, to turn to plain absurdity if we move from conceptual undecidability to its close friend and neighbor, conventionalist decision. This comes out if we consider another description, overtly conventionalist, of the series of cases which occasioned the present discussion. This description would reject a point I relied on in an earlier argument - namely, that if we deny that the A-body-person in (vi) is A (because the B-body-person is), then we must deny that the A-body-person in (v) is A, since they are exactly the same. "No," it may be said, "this is just to assume that we say the same in different sorts of situation. No doubt when we have the very good candidate for being A - namely, the B-body-person - we call him A; but this does not mean that we should not call the A-body-person A in that other situation when we have no better candidate around. Different situations call for different descrip¬tions." This line of talk is the sort of thing indeed appropriate to lawyers deciding the ownership of some property which has undergone some bewildering set of transformations; they just have to decide, and in each situation, let us suppose, it has got to go to somebody, on as reasonable grounds as the facts and the law admit. But as a line to deal with a person's fears or expectations about his own future, it seems to have no sense at all. If A's fears can extend to what will happen to the A-body-person in (v), I do not see how they can be rationally diverted from the fate of the exactly similar person in (vi) by his being told that someone would have a reason in the latter situation which he would not have in the former for deciding to call another person A.
[conclusions:]
If this is right, the whole question seems now to be totally mysterious. For what we have just been through is of course merely one side, differently represented, of the transaction which we considered before [body exchange]; and it represents it as a perfectly hateful prospect, while the previous considerations represented it as something one should rationally, perhaps even cheerfully, choose out of the options there presented. It is differently presented, of course, and in two notable respects; but when we look at these two differences of presentation, can we really convince ourselves that the second presentation is wrong or misleading, thus leaving the road open to the first version which at the time seemed so convincing? Surely not.
The apparently decisive arguments of the first presentation [body exchange experiment], which suggested that A should identify himself with the B-body-person, turned on the extreme neatness of the situation in satisfying, if any could, the description of "changing bodies."
[destroy, disperse, discontinue:]
But this neatness is basically artificial; it is the product of the will of the experimenter to produce a situation which would naturally elicit, with minimum hesitation, that description.
By the sorts of methods he employed, he could easily have left off earlier or gone on further. He could have stopped at situation (v), leaving B as he was; or he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories [fission!], as well as one or two with B-like characteristics. If he had done either of those, we should have been in yet greater difficulty about what to say; he just chose to make it as easy as possible for us to find something to say.
Now if we had some model of ghostly persons in bodies, which were in some sense actually moved around by certain procedures, we could regard the neat experiment just as the effective experiment: the one method that really did result in the ghostly person's changing places without being destroyed, dispersed, or whatever. But we cannot seriously use such a model.
The experimenter has not in the sense of that model induced a change of bodies; he has rather produced the one situation out of a range of equally possible situations which we should be most disposed to call a change of bodies.
As against this, the principle that one's fears can extend to future pain whatever psychological changes precede it seems positively straightforward. Perhaps, indeed, it is not; but we need to be shown what is wrong with it.
Until we are shown what is wrong with it, we should perhaps decide that if we were the person A then, if we were to decide selfishly, we should pass the pain to the B-body-person. It would be risky: that there is room for the notion of a risk here is itself a major feature of the problem.
risk and concern: problem through how we perceive the situation
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