Philosophy E-Book

Nicholas Fearn

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 339

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The work of the great philosophers of the past is well known. From Aristotle and Plato to Kant and Wittgenstein, the answers to life's biggest questions have been discussed and debated endlessly. But, as philosophy itself teaches, there is never a final solution to a philosophical problem. In the search for higher meaning, Nicholas Fearn has travelled the globe to interview the world's most distinguished thinkers, from Derek Parfit, David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, to Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty and Bernard-Henri Lévi. Philosophy is a brilliant and compelling guide to the latest answers to the oldest questions, bringing to light what today's philosophers think about what it is to be human.

Leseprobe

Philosophy

Also by Nicholas Fearn

Zeno and the Tortoise: How to Think Like a Philosopher

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2005 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Nicholas Fearn 2005

The moral right of Nicholas Fearn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The author and publishers are grateful to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for permission to reproduce La Trahison des Images by René Magritte on p. 94.

1 84354 066 5 eISBN 978 1 84887 255 4

Design by Lindsay Nash Printed in Great Britain by CPD, Ebbw Vale, Wales

Atlantic Books An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

part onewho am I?

1 The problem of the self

2 Free will and fate

3 Minds and machines

4 Bodies and souls

part twowhat do I know?

5 The problem of knowledge

6 The problem of meaning

7 Innate ideas

8 The language of thought

9 Postmodernism and pragmatism

10 The limits of understanding

part threewhat should I do?

11 Moral luck

12 The expanding circle

13 The meaning of life and death

Notes

Index

acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tim Crane for helping me to plan this book and to Alan Thomas for his scrutiny of the end result. The task would not have been possible without the generosity of the following, whom I would like to thank for their time and advice: Ruth Barcan Marcus, Ned Block, Nick Bostrom, Tyler Burge, Simon Critchley, David Chalmers, Noam Chomsky, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Cian Dorr, Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Alvin Goldman, Christine Korsgaard, Colin McGinn, Hugh Mellor, Ruth Millikan, Martha Nussbaum, David Papineau, Alvin Plantinga, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Thomas Scanlon, John Searle, Peter Singer, Charles Taylor, Peter Van Inwagen, Timothy Williamson. I am also indebted to the late Donald Davidson and Bernard Williams. Thanks finally to my editors Toby Mundy, Alice Hunt and Bonnie Chiang.

preface

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in following three questions: (1) What can I know? (2) What ought I to do? (3) What may I hope?

Immanuel Kant

There is room for words on subjects other than last words. Indeed, the usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. Works of philosophy are written as though their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject.

Robert Nozick

The Great philosophers such as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein achieved their status because they preferred revolution to evolution. They would rather introduce new ideas and systems than work with their predecessors’ materials. The result was that over two and half thousand years of philosophy, successive thinkers covered their subjects’ canvas with so many brushstrokes that no discernible image remained. Only lately has a restoration started to bear results. Layers have been removed and more naive cleanings discarded. Old impressions have been revealed as the ideas of ancient thinkers have gained new purchase, and contemporary inks have refreshed the strongest lines. This has been made possible by new techniques in the analysis of arguments, new ideas to test them on and new raw material provided by the sciences.

Now is an ideal time to take an audit of Western philosophy. This book assesses the current state of the philosophical art, taking a wide view of what has been achieved in recent years in the most hotly contested areas, and examines the latest approaches to problems that were first tackled in the ancient world. In order to complete my audit, I decided to consult a cross section of the main players in the key debates from various parts of the world. My task was made easier in the end by the concentration of most of the finest philosophical minds in a single – if large – place, the United States. It was made harder by the advanced age of the interviewees, several of whom, including Robert Nozick and W.V.O. Quine, died before I could get to see them. Most of those who survived were amenable, though some were more amenable than others. Several, such as David Chalmers, Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn welcomed me into their homes, while others such as Thomas Nagel and Alasdair MacIntyre were so suspicious of journalists that they refused to speak to me. Daniel Dennett and Tyler Burge kindly allowed me second drafts and follow-up questions, while Jacques Derrida telephoned me before sunrise to decline to help when I was in no fit state to argue.

In the end I was able to interview over thirty of the world’s most prominent thinkers. After the first few meetings, I noticed that the conversation usually took the same direction. First they would inform me that, sadly, there had been little progress in philosophical understanding during their lifetime. Then they would begin a long exposition of evidence to the contrary. It seems that the typical modern philosopher is nothing if not modest. Philosophy has always suffered from excessive expectations, but if it is foolhardy to declare a final solution to any philosophical problem, it is equally rash to dismiss anything less as worthless. Over the past fifty years, revolution has gone out of fashion in the philosophical world. Answers have tended to come in a smaller size than those of the past – as, cynics would add, have the thinkers who proffer them. Even cynics, however, would admit that technical ability is at an all-time high. A decent graduate student in the subject today should be able to hold his own in a debate against any illustrious thinker from the ancient world. There are fewer gurus, fewer giants, but a greater division of labour in an increasingly fragmented and specialized field. On the face of it there is little agreement among these disparate schools, but the consensus is often stronger than it seems, for once a field has been more or less wrapped up, the researchers who persist in working in it tend to be the eccentrics. For example, most scientists are satisfied that aliens have not been visiting the Earth in flying saucers recently, yet a survey of the specialist literature on ‘alien abduction’ shows that the vast majority of so-called ‘experts’ are firm believers in UFOs and little green men. This is because most scientists have better things to do than tackle questions that have already been settled within reasonable doubt.

Philosophy has entered a ‘post-heroic’ age. Contemporary philosophers hope to advance our understanding incrementally as they build on a distributed achievement – the work of over twenty-six thousand professionals worldwide according to the Philosophical Documentation Center – informed by the latest work in the rest of the humanities and sciences. The role of the genius has diminished, perhaps because of a dearth of such individuals in recent years, perhaps due to the time it takes to recognize them as such, but more likely because the discipline has learned from its imperialistic mistakes. One of these mistakes is overreach. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Georg Hegel used his philosophical system to predict that there could be only seven planets in the solar system. Today, one hopes, philosophers have a better idea of what can and cannot be achieved by reasoned argument. Neither do philosophers find it necessary to turn their subject on its head in order to solve philosophical problems. There is no need for revolution when constant, steady progress is already being made.

Today’s philosophers look back on at least five great revolutions in ideas. The first was the birth of reason as an instrument for divining truth in the fifth and sixth centuries BC, which comes to us through the surviving works of the Presocratic philosophers and the dialogues of Plato. Building upon the thoughts of his teacher, Socrates, Plato held our views to be correct or mistaken insofar as they corresponded with the otherworldly ‘Forms’ of Beauty, Goodness, Courage and the like. Plato held these templates to be objects in themselves – more real, in fact, than the objects that we find in the physical world, for they were perfect, pure, eternal and unchanging. He maintained that by employing reason properly we could come to see these truths and attain genuine knowledge with which to replace the mere ‘opinion’ with which we are normally satisfied. The only limit was the material we had to work with – for the physical world contains but inferior copies of the eternal truths.

In Königsberg in the eighteenth century, the second great revolution was effected when Immanuel Kant transferred the emphasis to the human subject. Everything we see and hear, everything the mind apprehends must, he thought, be shaped by the senses and the intellect for our comprehension. We can never behold the intrinsic nature of things as Plato dreamed. We can only ever know an anthropic version of God, Virtue and Beauty. In Kant’s formulation, the more familiar we become with the capabilities of our own minds, the closer we approach true knowledge. We can only understand the limits of our world by examining the limits of human thought.

The third great revolution took place at around the same time in Britain. John Locke and David Hume had worked the scientific methodology of their seventeenth-century predecessor Francis Bacon into a philosophical system known as ‘empiricism’. According to the empiricists, we could only know that which was within our experience. Reason alone could unearth nothing new, but merely rearticulate knowledge already furnished by the senses.

In the nineteenth century, a further revolution occurred when the German thinker Georg Hegel initiated the study of what Man may become rather than simply what he is, citing the historical forces that trump reason in the creation of new ideas and modes of living. His ‘dialectic’ traced the clash of opposing movements to chart ‘the progress in the consciousness of liberty’, and defined the state that embodied this development as ‘the march of God through the world’. Where Hegel attacked reason from above, his fellow countryman Friedrich Nietzsche undercut it with an appeal to motive. He argued that values were rendered true by the individual’s ‘Will to Power’ rather than any recourse to evidence and observation. At a stroke, Nietzsche provided the foundation for the anti-philosophy known as ‘postmodernism’ that remains so popular in humanities departments.

By the early twentieth century, the limits were drawn tighter as philosophers such as the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein created a fifth revolution by proposing that the boundaries of thought were delineated by the limits of the language in which it was conducted. The standards for assessing truth resided neither in the heavens nor in the confines of the mind, but in the grammar of public practice. Where philosophers imagined that they were examining the nature of things, all they were really doing, Wittgenstein and his followers argued, were taking words out of their context. The proper objects of study were, for Plato, semi-divine entities and, for Kant, the structures of consciousness. Now, ‘analytic’ philosophers were reduced to analysing the grunts and bodily jerks that human beings use to communicate. For excitement, they could hunt down and extinguish vestiges of metaphysical thinking and pronounce problems ‘dissolved’. For example, the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle argued that the question of where to locate the conscious self was a ‘category mistake’ of the kind made by someone who visits the colleges of Oxford and asks where the ‘university’ is, or watches a procession of battalions and regiments and asks when the ‘army’ will be marching past.

Western thinkers today are informed by all these shifts, but one in particular has captured their imagination in recent years: the empiricist promise of a ‘scientific’ philosophy. Bertrand Russell once compared the branches of human knowledge to a filing cabinet, in which the material discussed by philosophers was found in the compartment marked ‘Don’t Know’. Once we have found out enough about a given subject to approach its questions in a systematic way, the contents are moved into a new compartment with a new title, be it ‘Physics’, ‘Psychology’ or ‘Economics’. This is a fair description of the history of philosophy, which has periodically resulted in new disciplines, new sciences. It also explains the illusion that philosophy never achieves anything. Philosophers never get the credit for their successes, for once real progress has been made on a problem it is taken out of their hands and given to its new custodians. Sir Isaac Newton wrote the Principia and Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations as philosophers, but they are now remembered respectively as a physicist and an economist. The contemporary thinker Noam Chomsky is described as a philosopher as well as the founder of linguistics, but the former half of his title will one day be dropped from encyclopedias.

This fate has led to the recent proposition that, since philosophy seems to succeed where it has spun off new sciences, the whole subject should be made into a science. Such a belief in ‘scientism’ is tantamount to a small boy asking his father why, if the soldiers of the SAS are so deadly, the generals don’t turn the entire army into one big SAS. Neither knowledge nor armies work in this way. Demanding that thought be conducted always and only according to rigorous scientific principles would mean that some subjects – those about which we know least – would never be tackled, and no new disciplines would develop. However, the issue is about more than the best way to nurture ideas, since that assumes that it is the destiny of every useful method of enquiry to become a scientific one. The difference between philosophy and science is often a matter of timing rather than a division of subject matter. Sometimes philosophy terminates in science. Very occasionally, it solves a problem without giving birth to a new discipline and, sometimes, this is because the problem has been dissolved rather than solved. The chapters that follow contain a mixture of these outcomes.

Some contemporary thinkers find the claims of physics and biology an unwelcome trespass on their territory and mock the ‘science envy’ of their colleagues who linger outside laboratory doors, ready to rush into print the philosophical repercussions of the latest discovery. There is a widespread belief that philosophy, alone among the arts and sciences, must be democratic. While few of us entertain personal theories of fluid dynamics or pretend that we can write like Hemingway, it is commonly believed that anyone can grasp philosophical insights. Moreover, it is not just that anyone can be so gifted, but that anyone at any time in the past could have enjoyed the same benefits. The world, which shows so little fairness in everything else, is supposed to be inherently just and equitable when it comes to knowledge and understanding of the most profound truths. It is imagined that answers can be picked by anyone like apples. This has proved to be wishful thinking. Some truths lie within easy reach on the lower boughs, but others have proved unattainable without the invention of ladders. Though it is harsh to imagine the philosophers of past generations – who were often great geniuses – working their entire lives without hope of ever alighting on the truth, this is exactly what many of them were doing. Perhaps these thinkers produced faulty theories and inconclusive arguments because they did not think hard or carefully enough. But the problem is more simple than this: they did not have the right equipment to find what they were looking for, because such equipment did not exist.

This equipment takes many forms: a particular breed of argument or a logical device, a mechanical aid such as a brain scanner or a photograph of the Earth from space. No matter how good our eyesight, we were never going to understand the stars, or work out that those pinpricks of light in the night sky were what we now understand to be stars, by squinting at them. The telescope, on the other hand, enabled even those with relatively poor eyesight to behold the planets. No doubt there are many problems that are insoluble today because we lack the equipment that might become available to our descendants. It is not so much science that is important in discovering the truth, but technology in one form or another. Part of the reason for the past failures of philosophy is the same as that for the failure of early flying machines and efforts to cure diseases: the means were not in place. Though philosophy would seem to float free of matters of empirical facts, much of it is dependent upon them, and not all solutions are equally accessible to all peoples at all times, let alone all individuals. This should be a cause for relief, for it demonstrates that our enquiries concern mind-independent truths as opposed to a navel-gazing study of our own selves.

The hope for a ‘democratic’ philosophy also springs from the Ancient Greek ideal of Truth as mathematical in form. The truths of philosophy were to mimic the truths of number in being derivable from first principles. This was natural for what were assumed to be necessary truths. But it seems that philosophical truths, insofar as we can speak of them, can be accidental, written in the sands rather than the stars. By this yardstick, the history of philosophy has always been a record of disappointment. As the discipline spawns new sciences, these offspring are more comfortable than their parent with the arbitrariness of the laws governing their discoveries. Each leaves a lacuna in a womb that fails to collapse with the birth of the child.

Although a new science may solve the problems that preceded it when philosophers were doing all the work, there has always seemed to be something missing, as if the solution wasn’t quite what was intended, or wasn’t for exactly the problem in mind. Studying the results can be like catching a stage conjurer’s sleight of hand: ‘You’ve hidden the card in your sleeve – that’s not real magic at all!’ One area of philosophy that has been particularly blighted by this thinking is the question of what constitutes moral action. The English philosopher G.E. Moore was led to deem morality an unanalysable property by what he called the ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’. He observed that once we identify a motive for an act – even a supposedly ethical one – it ceases to be moral: ‘You helped her out of pleasure (or charity, or duty, or whatever) – morality had nothing to do with it!’ If these are our expectations, it is not surprising that they get frustrated.

We look for philosophical answers to philosophical problems, but these answers may not match the mood of the question if the aim is to remove a mystery. The sense of drama that attends perplexity usually evaporates upon its resolution. This is a turn-off for those individuals drawn to philosophy for a more adult form of escapism than stories of ghosts, goblins and UFOs. Did alien visitors build the pyramids? No, but computers might be able to think. For some, the works of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Daniel Dennett are a natural progression from Erik Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Those who come to philosophy via disillusionment with religion are liable to find themselves even more disappointed. But should they complain that the solutions provided by their new field lack the security of the old – that, for example, without God there is ultimately no sense in morality – then one is entitled to ask how exactly we were supposed to have morality with God.

Another common route into the subject, shared by Wittgenstein and Gottfried Leibniz among others, has been mathematical studies. Such a background might prepare one better to accept the peculiar rewards of philosophical research and to share the attitude expressed by the physicist Richard Feynman:

I have a friend who’s an artist, and he has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ and I’ll agree. And he says, ‘You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.’ And I think he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. I can appreciate the beauty of a flower, and at the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. It’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimetre: there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure…also the processes. The fact that the colours in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting – it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question – does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Or why is it aesthetic? There are all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.1

Those who do not share Feynman’s attitude are nostalgic not for the explanatory power of discredited religious answers (for often they had no such power), but for a supposed mystical experience that could reduce them to silence. In engaging the public, modern philosophy’s real problem is not an envy of science, but a hunger for magic.

part one

who am I?

1

the problem of the self

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

David Hume

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

You enter the brain through the eye, march up the optic nerve, round and round the cortex, looking behind every neuron, and then, before you know it, you emerge into daylight on the spike of a motor nerve impulse, scratching your head and wondering where the self is.

Daniel Dennett

After his death in 1683, Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony, was buried beneath a young apple tree in his garden, and lay there until one day in 1936 when the local government decided to exhume his remains and place them in a monument to mark the state’s tercentenary. However, when the coffin was opened, what the gravediggers found was not Williams’s body. Some time in the preceding 253 years, a root from the apple tree had penetrated the casket and slowly absorbed the nutrients from the bones, leaving only fragments. In the process, the root had grown into the exact shape of the skeleton – entering through the skull, proceeding down the spine and parting to form two legs. Generations of schoolchildren had eaten fruit from the tree and were said to have become as independently minded as Williams as a result.

This story highlights a problem the Christian God would face should He decide to effect Judgement Day by reassembling the matter that once composed the bodies of the faithful. If He used the original atoms, ownership disputes would arise wherever the same matter had been part of different individuals’ bodies at different times. One might assume that cannibals would lose out to the Christians they consumed, but the Almighty would surely face a tougher decision when considering the claims of unsuspecting Rhode Island schoolchildren after Roger Williams’s remains entered the food chain. Perhaps God could circumvent the problem by creating a substitute for any contested matter so that there would be enough to go around. But then there would be a question of how much cosmic Polyfilla He could use without making someone a different person. There would be no sense in punishing or rewarding someone who was only a simulacrum of the perpetrator.

One does not have to wait for Judgement Day for this question to arise, as the matter from which our bodies are composed is almost completely replenished between birth and death. If the body is to be the seat of the soul, we should be aware that the only parts of it that remain with us throughout our lives are the ova of women and the lenses of the eyes. While eyes may be thought to be the window to the soul, one would hope that the soul is more than a few cubic millimetres of transparent jelly. As for the ova, this would leave us puzzling over where the souls of men reside. However, despite our constantly changing physical make-up, most of us feel that we are the same person as the child in our parents’ photo album, and feel confident that we will retain this identity as the senior citizens we will eventually become. Neither does one have to wait for God to give a moral dimension to the problem of personal identity. The issue of whether the old man is the same person as the younger bears on how deeply we should feel guilt and pride in our youth; it determines how we should think of our memories. It also impinges on how we should behave towards the people we will become, whether giving up smoking is a matter of long-term self-interest or of altruism towards a quite different self. Perhaps, most importantly, our answer to the problem of personal identity determines whether any of us has a future at all, whether after death or even before it.

In 1785, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid wrote: ‘Whatever this self may be, it is something which thinks, and deliberates and resolves, and acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action, I am not feeling; I am something that thinks, and acts, and suffers.’1 This proviso meant that anything within one’s experience – anything in the world that we could come to know or discover – would be disqualified from claiming the title of ‘oneself’. Hence it has been assumed that the self would be an extra-worldly kind of entity, an ego or soul or some unitary object that, if only we could track it, would answer the question of personal identity: ‘Where the ego goes, I go.’ As Reid’s fellow countryman David Hume noted, we cannot observe an ego through introspection. We alight only on our perceptions and emotions, never on the possessor of these qualities. Philosophers have sought to overcome this blind spot by looking sideways at one’s journey through life. What the self is in the present could best be discerned, it was thought, by examining what persists from one year to another across various bodily and psychological changes. Thus a large part of philosophers’ work on the subject has been a kind of ‘intuition mining’, where we imagine changes in our mental and physical make-up and ask whether we would feel that personal identity had been preserved. Intuition is not usually given such a starring role in philosophy, but when it comes to personal identity we have only our own word to go on, since no such thing as a distinct self seems to appear in Nature’s inventory alongside bodies, brains and personalities.

It is tempting to look beyond Nature for something outside our worldly existence, but this cannot solve the problem of personal identity. If there were a soul – a transcendent ego that owned one’s experiences – then we could never know whether it stayed in the same place or wandered, lived or died. Everything that we can be aware of is an experience, and this ego – being the supposed recipient of all one’s experiences – could never appear as one of them. Since our memories are among our experiences, these would be left behind by a departing ego. So one’s ego might have been attached to a different set of experiences yesterday, or to a different body tomorrow, and we would be none the wiser. Two people might even be swapping egos a hundred times a second without ever being aware of it. They would have no way of noticing, because a change of egos is a change of something outside their experiences. To the mystically inclined, a world of untethered egos, each devoid of traits and indistinguishable from the next, might indicate a monism in which all of us are part of one great universal soul. However, it needs to be asked what exactly constitutes ‘us’ here, since it does not include our memories, personalities, bodies, brains or emotions – these mundane characteristics remain as separate from one another as ever, each housed in an individual man or woman. Any universal ego would seem to be a oneness of nothing. The more we wish to gain immortality by divesting ourselves of earthly trappings such as physicality, memories and the like, the more we reduce ourselves to nothing at all – and, to quote the American children’s author Norton Juster, doing nothing is hardly worth the effort.

According to Ancient Greek legend, after the hero Theseus had slain the Minotaur in Crete, his ship was taken on an annual voyage of thanks to the island of Delos. Over the years, the beams of the vessel rotted away one by one and were gradually replaced until, eventually, none of the original timbers remained. The ship still looked like the one Theseus had commanded, but we might wonder whether it was now the very same ship. Since there is continuity from one stage of the ship’s life to the next, we might decide that the later model is indeed the same ship as that which first set sail for Crete. But now suppose that the discarded planks had been collected and used to construct a new vessel to the original design. There would now be two rivals with claims to the identity of the Ship of Theseus, and the puzzle is that we feel unable to give a verdict even though we seem to know everything about the two candidates. Since we know all the relevant facts about the case, our ignorance must pertain instead to the concepts we are applying to it. There seems to be something inconsistent in the notion that identity is some special, further fact outside the ordinary properties of objects. George Washington’s axe is supposedly on display in a museum somewhere in the United States. It is labelled as the very axe that chopped down the famous cherry tree, although the notes for visitors also mention that both the handle and the blade have since been replaced. In the absence of a discrete relation called ‘identity’, any labelling seems arbitrary. However, when it comes to ourselves we are unwilling to accept that identity might be purely a matter of labelling. We are left wondering whether our real identity belongs to the self we now inhabit or whether that identity is more truly represented by the greyed, creaking ghost ship of one’s younger self.

The task of storing the discarded timbers of our lives is performed in our memories. In his 1690 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the English philosopher John Locke proposed that the essential kernel of each human being is their consciousness, their self-awareness. Locke was aware of how counter-intuitive it seemed that something so nebulous – as opposed to a physical body or even an ethereal soul – could persist through time, since it was only marginally a ‘thing’ at all. He argued that self-awareness was not just a consciousness of the present, but also of the past, given to us in memory. To be the same person as your younger self was to be able to remember being that child, with the sequence of memories providing a psychological thread through one’s lifetime.

Memory is imperfect and I may suffer lapses or blanks in my mental record without thereby being a different person at any time. Amnesia is not equivalent to death, we like to think. But perhaps it is quite close to it. Perhaps we have been kept awake at night by the thought that in the morning we will remember neither our final waking thoughts nor the fact that this prospect concerned us. The advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease debilitate the memory so severely that not only can someone forget their keys, they can also forget what keys are for. Sufferers have been known to attack the spouses they do not recognize, believing them to be intruders in their home. When someone has forgotten all their friends and family, their past and even their name, it can seem that they have indeed become a different person – if they can still be called a person. Alzheimer’s disease is a powerful argument against life after death, because if you can be dead when you are alive then you can certainly be dead when you are dead.

In searching for a self we look for something over and above our attributes, but we do not usually think this way about ordinary objects. For example, I believe that my favourite armchair persists through time without imagining it to have a chair-soul or a chair-ego that possesses its traits. It has characteristics such as being three feet high at the seat, padded with foam and covered with green cloth, but there is no chair over and above these characteristics. If we took away the foam and the seat and the cloth and so on, we would not be left with a naked chair, as if objects were ghostly coat hangers upon which traits are hung. Yet this is precisely what we often imagine to be true in the case of persons. Abandoning this delusion draws a sharp difference between our situation and that of Thomas Reid’s day. When an immaterial soul was presumed to exist and there was rarely any doubt that a unitary self existed, personal characteristics were the footprints of the soul – indicators of personal identity, signs that pointed towards the self. Today, on the other hand, one’s traits are taken to be one’s self, as there is nowhere else to find the latter that is recognized by science. The question now is which particular traits are the most significant – and whether they can give us what we are looking for.

The late English philosopher Sir Bernard Williams argued that we identify more closely with our bodies than our minds. I was lucky enough to meet Williams before he died in June 2003, aged seventy-three, following a long struggle against cancer. He held forth on the gamut of philosophical issues in a way that made him the exemplar of the modern thinker. Erudite and candid, Williams moved within the mainstream of his discipline and changed it significantly at several junctures without overturning the intellectual order. He was born in Westcliff, Essex, and was introduced to philosophy as a student at Balliol College, Oxford. He mastered the subject so quickly that some of his fellow undergraduates neglected to turn up for tutorials in order to attend lessons from Williams in the junior common room instead. After finishing his studies he spent what he regarded as the happiest years of his life on national service as a Spitfire pilot in Canada. He was brought into political work by his first wife, the MP Shirley Williams, and for his efforts in moral philosophy he was appointed to government commissions on gambling, drugs and pornography.

To test our intuitions about the self, Williams concocts an imaginary scenario in which we are at the mercy of a mad scientist who has a programme of physical torture scheduled for the following day.2 He asks whether we would feel any less frightened if the scientist promised to wipe our memory clean before setting to work with the red-hot pliers. In a moment of generosity, he offers to replace our old memories with those of a completely different person – say, Napoleon. If memory is where selfhood lies, then we would have nothing to fear from the new day, as it would be ‘Napoleon’ who was going to suffer and not us. However, most of us would find little comfort in the scientist’s sweetener. Indeed, it may even seem worse to suffer the double indignity of torture and amnesia, although the great commander’s iron resolve and forbearance would doubtless come in handy during the ordeal. Neither would it bring any comfort if my persecutor were to take a second victim and replace his memories and the rest of his personality with mine. If I had to decide, on purely selfish grounds, who was to be tortured and who was to be given £10,000 and set free, I would have no trouble in choosing to give the cash to ‘Napoleon’.

However, some futurists not only claim to prefer the opposite, but actually imagine paying good money for such a memory transferral. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil speculates that one day we will be able to download our consciousness into computers, and live in better virtual worlds perhaps, or live forever. This will involve upgrading the ‘hardware’ on which the ‘software’ of your self runs. ‘Today,’ writes Kurzweil, ‘our software cannot grow. It is stuck in a brain of a mere 100 trillion connections and synapses. But when the hardware is trillions of times more capable, there is no reason for our minds to stay so small. They can and will grow.’ As better, faster, more capacious artificial brains come on to the market, the fragile, limited, messy neurons of the biological brains we grew up with will begin to look passé. More and more of us will make the switch to circuitry, and then our immortality will be ‘a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups. If we’re careless about this, we’ll have to load an old backup copy and be doomed to repeat our recent past.’3

We might imagine a punter plugging his brain into a computer, then the husk of his body collapsing in a heap and finally his face appearing on the monitor. However, this is not what would happen. Nothing would jump from his brain into the machine. All that occurs is copying, just as, when you download a file from the Internet, the original file does not get sucked out of its home-server and rehoused in your PC. There is no reason why the process should not leave you as you are – conscious and in the same old body – while creating a confused silicon doppelgänger. And if the original ‘you’ is not left intact, then it would seem that the ‘downloading’ process is fatal. The same flaw is present in the famous ‘transporter’ machines in Star Trek, which supposedly take a traveller apart atom by atom and create them anew in a different location. Captain Kirk commits an elaborate form of suicide every time Scotty beams him up. One is able to think differently only by disregarding common notions of identity.

The Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom is only too eager to rid us of such ideas. His working time is spent exploring what he described to me over the telephone as our ‘trans-human’ future, asking what life will be like when technology has transformed our bodies and minds. He insisted to me that, as long as the technology had been shown to work reliably, he would be happy to be uploaded into a computer while his original physical form was destroyed, if this meant that he would enjoy a better life as an upload. And, as for a process that would leave his original body intact: