Personal identity

The Last Psychiatrist has a very good post up at the Partial Objects site.

Here is the point of departure:

 David Eagleman is a neuroscientist.  If you’ve never heard of him, then let me simply say he’s been on/in: Fresh Air, Wired, The New Yorker, and Slate.

Which is to say: he may be an excellent neuroscientist, but the media wants him to be a moral philosopher.

And why do they want him to be a moral philosopher you ask:

To get into The New Yorker, you have to advance a pseudo-philosophical but distinctly atheist explanation of human nature, and dress it up in science even when that science isn’t relevant to the question.

And what Eagleman believes about human beings is this:

1. That there is no self. With the passage of time and experiences, you change. So you are not the person you were ten years ago, not only metaphorically, but literally.
2. But he’s not Sartre: you don’t have the freedom you think you have. The choices you make are affected by the physical design specs of your body– genes, anatomy, etc– which in turn affect qualities like impulse control and empathy. These decisions and behaviors aren’t you (see above) nor do they represent any free will, as defined as the freedom to make any choices.

Now there is a lot I could say here but the thing I really want to note (besides saying again that you really should read what TLP has to say) is that the first move here is a familiar one in philosophy going back to David Hume.

And it is an utterly pointless move too. What would it take to convince yourself that there was no prolonged personal identity—which is to say that the person with your name and driver's license five years ago was as different from you as someone you see across the street from you now—or that your feeling of making free choices was just an illusion? When I see people making this move it always smells of desperation to me. They know they have no legitimate way to reach the conclusions they want so they they pull this one.