Personal Identity Through the Ātman — Epoche C1
Derek Parfit asks his reader to imagine stepping into a scanner on Earth which records the exact state of every cell, destroys the body, and transmits the record to Mars, where an identical body is assembled from new matter with every memory, intention and habit intact. The person who walks out on Mars is convinced he is you. Is he? Parfit's answer is that the question has no further answer beyond the physical and psychological facts already given, and that it does not matter as much as we suppose. This note examines that answer from the standpoint of the Vedāntic doctrine of the ātman , the self that the tradition holds to be distinct from body and mind alike, and argues — as the earlier version of this note argued — that Parfit's account overrates psychological links as the ground of selfhood. Establishing that requires stating Parfit's argument in its strong form first, because the case for the ātman looks like mere assertion until one sees exactly what it is answering. What Parfit's view is, and the argument that forces it Parfit calls his position Reductionism : the claim that a person's existence just consists in the existence of a brain and body and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental events, and that these facts can be described without presupposing that they belong to anyone. The competing view, that a person is a further entity over and above these events, he calls Non-Reductionism; the ātman doctrine is a version of it. What holds the series together is what Parfit names Relation R : psychological connectedness and continuity, with any cause. The two components are different and the difference matters. Connectedness is the holding of direct psychological links — remembering an experience one had, carrying out an intention one formed, retaining a belief or a desire one acquired. Connectedness comes in degrees and is not transitive: an old man may have no direct memories of his infancy at all. Continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness, and because it is defined by chains it is transitive: the old man is connected to the young man who is connected to the boy, and that suffices. The phrase "with any cause" records Parfit's view that it makes no difference whether the links are sustained by the ordinary survival of a brain or by a scanner on Mars. The argument that pushes Parfit to his most striking conclusion is the fission case, set out in his paper "Personal Identity" (1971) and developed in Reasons and Persons (1984). Suppose the two hemispheres of my brain are separated and each transplanted into a different body, and suppose — as the medical literature on divided brains makes at least conceivable — that each resulting person wakes with my memories and my character. Now apply a logical fact about identity: identity is an equivalence relation, so if I am identical with the left-hand survivor and identical with the right-hand survivor, then by transitivity those two are identical with each other. They plainly are not; they are in different rooms having different thoughts. So I am not identical with both. By symmetry there is no ground for saying I am identical with one rather than the other. So I am identical with neither, and fission is a case in which I do not survive. And yet, Parfit observes, my relation to each survivor contains everything that ordinary survival contains: memory, continuity of character, the carrying out of my plans. Fission is thus at least as good as ordinary survival, while not being identity. The conclusion is his famous one: identity is not what matters. What matters is Relation R, and Relation R can hold one-to-many where identity cannot. An older version of the same dispute Parfit's position did not arrive without ancestry, and knowing the ancestry shows what the Vedāntin is actually disagreeing with. John Locke, in the chapter on identity added to the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694), separated the identity of a person from that of a man or a substance, and tied it to consciousness: a person is the same person as far back as his consciousness can reach. Thomas Reid, in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), produced the objection that still shapes the field. A boy is flogged for robbing an orchard; the boy becomes a young officer who, taking a standard in battle, remembers the flogging; the officer becomes a general who remembers taking the standard but has entirely forgotten the orchard. On Locke's criterion the general is the officer, and the officer is the boy, but the general is not the boy — which violates the transitivity that identity must have. Parfit's distinction between connectedness and continuity is precisely the repair: continuity is built out of overlapping chains for exactly this reason. What is less often noticed, and what reframes this essay's comparison, is that Parfit knew his view had been held before in India. Reasons and Persons closes with an appendix on the Buddha's view, in which Parfit records his agreement with the Buddhist teaching that there is no self over and above the constituents of experience. That is the crucial orientation. Parfit is not an outsider to the Indian debate about the self; he is on one side of it. The Vedāntic objections this note develops are not novel responses to a foreign theory but the objections the Vedāntins spent centuries pressing against the Buddhists, which is why they engage Parfit's argument so directly. Jonardon Ganeri's study of Indian theories of self (2007) traces that long argument in detail. The ātman, and the texts that specify it The doctrine must now be stated with its terms explained and its grounds given, since the earlier version of this note asserted its content without either. In Vedāntic usage the ātman is the self proper, distinguished from three things that are ordinarily confused with it. Manas is the mind in the narrow sense, the faculty that receives and coordinates