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Who are you?
The question ‘who are you?’ came up in a memetic LJ quiz the other day, and I gave a somewhat flip answer, as did many of the other people who answered it.
As befits a Babylon 5 fan, I have actually given some real thought to this question from time to time, and I do have a more serious answer to it. So I thought I'd muse a little, in my customary armchair-philosophical fashion, on the question and what it means.
The orthodox B5 position is that pretty much all answers to this question are unacceptable; certainly all short answers seem to be. Your name is not a valid response to ‘who are you?’, because it's just what you're called: if your name changed, you'd still be the same person. Your job is just what you do, not who you are; again, you could change it without becoming someone else. To say you're the son or daughter of someone or other isn't something that could change tomorrow, but it is telling the questioner more about your ancestors than about you; it's also dodging the question in some sense, because you've replaced the problem of identifying you with the just-as-difficult problem of identifying somebody else (in fact, two of them, so arguably you've made things worse!). And so on.
‘Who are you?’ sounds as if it's asking for something specific to you: something that makes you special, different, or at the very least distinguishable from the other people around you. Thus, the obvious answers are the simple ones discussed above; names are precisely a means of distinguishing which of a number of people you're talking about, and family and employment have historically been used as fallbacks when the name isn't enough or isn't available. So if they're just externally visible labels and don't themselves constitute a satisfactory identity for you, where to look next?
I think the answer is to flip round the sense of the question. The clue is in the word ‘identity’. In common parlance that word has many connotations in common with ‘individuality’, and (as discussed above) the assumption is that it's talking about what's unique to you. But I have a mathematics background, and in maths the word ‘identity’ is used most often to indicate that two things are exactly the same – its primary usage is as the noun form of the word ‘identical’. So I want to point the question the other way: instead of considering humanity as a uniform homogeneous mass from which I'm trying to isolate a single individual, I want to consider it as a huge mess of very diverse stuff from which I'm trying to piece together a subset corresponding to a single person. The emphasis is on joining, not on separating.
Who am I? I am all of the things stated above, and more. I am called X; I am the son of Y and Z and the grandson of W; I live somewhere; I am presently employed doing stuff for someone. I am also the person who put up this website, wrote that software, and posted on the other newsgroup in 1996; I am a friend of these people, a former pupil of those schools, a graduate of this university, and a regular at that pub and the other nightclub. If any one of those things changed tomorrow, it wouldn't change who I was, because I'd still be the person who had been those things up until today. My identity lies precisely in the fact that all of those diverse items are connected, and all those things were done by the same body with the same continuity of consciousness and memory; it's in the fact that if you once encountered me in any of those capacities, and subsequently encounter me in another of them, the latter person will have memory of the former encounter. (Well, perhaps. In some of those capacities I've encountered rather a lot of people and certainly won't remember them all. But that's not the point.)
If anyone really needed a shorter answer than that, then I think the phrase ‘continuity of consciousness and memory’ would have to be the core of it. Right now I have a name, an address, a job, some friends, some hobbies and some habits. I could, in principle, change all of those things at once if I felt so inclined; and if I did so, what would identify the new me with the old me? It would be the fact that if you traced the movement of my body (and, more importantly, my mind) through space-time, it would do all the old things and then move on to doing all of the new things. It would be the fact that the new me would remember all the things that the old me had done.
Who am I? I am a continuity of consciousness and memory, and in that I am just like any other continuity of consciousness and memory, on this planet or any other. A great many of us inhabit this planet, all exactly the same deep down inside; we distinguish ourselves from one another by the particular sets of things we choose to do, say, want, hope and dream. If you gradually discard everything that differentiates me from the next man because it's not part of who I am, then you will inevitably end up with nothing left that differentiates me from the next man, and it will be your own fault.
Who am I? I am me. If you really want a short answer, that one is the best you're going to get.
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(Oh, you probably know me via
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In philosophic conversation, what does the question mean? Probably "What defines you as opposed to someone else?" to which the sum of experience you describe is a reasonable answer.
However, I sumbit that the question is inadequate in that it fails with some scifi innovations. If I'm teleported I don't have positional continuity, am I me? Most people would say yes. But if I was teleported to two places, most people would say they both couldn't be me. The concept of 'me' breaks down, and needs refining into overlapping concepts.
For some definitions of 'me' I'm the same person as 5 years ago. For others, I'm not. We need to refine the definition before we can asnwer questions about it, else they're limited in meaning.
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To take another analogy from maths: it's quite common to define something with a woolly definition, and prove a theorem that states that the woolly definition actually works out to be rigorous. For example (I'm not sure how strong your maths is), quotient spaces. You divide your source space (say, the integers) into equivalence classes (say, residue classes modulo p), and then you define the (say) addition operation on those classes by saying "the result of adding class A to class B is the equivalence class containing a+b, where a is an element of A and b of B". What's to stop this giving multiple different answers, if the class you get as your result depends on which elements you choose from A and B? Well, it turns out that this doesn't occur, because you can prove a theorem that says the answer is the same no matter which elements you choose - in other words, the apparently woolly definition is fine provided this theorem holds, which it does. It's true that this definition would be a bit useless if you picked a space, or a set of equivalence classes, for which the theorem failed to hold; So Don't Do That, Then.
Similarly, our definition of "identity" is conditional on some properties of the real world such as consciousnesses being indivisible and unforkable; but as long as those properties hold the definition is still valid and still useful. I agree that as soon as one of them stops holding, the definition of identity will begin to stretch or break; at best it will simply become non-transitive (if you and I are teleport-copies of the same original person, then perhaps we can both meaningfully say that we "are" that person, but we would have to agree that we are not one another), and at worst it will fragment into multiple concepts, and questions like "are you Dave Gorman" will tend to have a correct answer of "depends why you want to know".
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Q. Who are you?
A. A series of successively better approximations to the answer under different assumptions.
Q. Good. What about..?
...is a mutual learning experience the way fuzzy questions should be. But
Q. Who are you?
A. A series of successively better approximations to the answer under different assumptions.
Q. Yaaaah! Wrong! *torture with impausible necklace*
...is rather unfair :)
Or, more succintly, what you say at the end. Sometimes the answer is 'it depends'. For the assumptions do start to break down, in that in a normal discussion if you give your answers someone will say "that answer's too long" and someone else will say "but what if..." and then there's no non-contingent answer satisfying both.
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The concept of "me" as "integral of experience over time" seems fairly robust, if rather difficult to express succinctly in any specific case...
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I'm not sure about the name thing and the parentage thing. When I changed my name I felt distinctly more "me" than I had before.
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Egan touches on this (in Permutation city or Quarantine I forget, I read them back to back) idea of confusion of identity when you look at it from an WMI perspective.
And it Hurts My Brain.
Best thing that can be said really is that 'you' are a continuous being only because of your memory, it is your recolection of 'you-yesterday' that makes 'you-yesterday' and 'you-today' the same 'you'.
With apologies to Charles Lutwidge
And then you realize just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Then you either sit around with a beer watching the footy, or you lose yourself in a fever of implementing new games, or, if you really and deeply care about the issue, stuff a 13½ in your hat, and sit down to think over some tea.
Re: With apologies to Charles Lutwidge
10/6. Sigh.
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Is identity discrete or continuous? Is an identifier only meaningful if it can be applied in a binary fashion "It either does or does not match a particular object", or could it be meaningful to say "Well, that sword is still 75% your great grandfather's sword."
I think identity is a continuum, that (quite rightly) gets approximated to a more discrete measure as required by circumstances.
Are you the same person today as you were twenty years ago? Did you think the same, act the same, believe the same? Is your memory perfect, or do you think your memories of that time will have since been shaded? Would you now still bound by a promise you made when you were 6? Do you think it reasonable that you still be judged by the reputation that you had when you were 6?
I am not my body, my name, my activities or my affiliations but all these things affect who I am. I am not identical to my history. I am more than my conscious self - the things that go on in my brain below my awareness are still part of me. One way to look at it would be to say that I am that thing that makes and keeps contracts - I am everything that I identify with sufficiently that I would keep a promise on its behalf. I am not my reputation but rather that whose reputation may be fairly laid at my door and which I own to.
Who am I?
I am an ever mutating swarm the collective decisions of which cast a shadow on the outside world coherent enough to make it useful to refer to on an ongoing basis by a single identifier: Douglas Reay