I have a list of books that I want to read. I collect recommendations wherever I can. With that being said, sometimes I like to just wander around the library and pick books that sound interesting. It was the case with this book: “A philosophy of person and identity” by M. Meijsing. It starts with a personal story as a quite intriguing hook, but the development of arguments and the conclusion are unsatisfactory.

The book opens with a personal experience of the author being operated on under general anesthesia. The questions that the author asks are: What happened to her when she was there? Was she even there while her body underwent operation? If she was not there, where was she? If she was not there, who was on the table? After posing these questions, the author offers to take a look at some of the philosophical ideas and arguments in previous literature among prominent philosophers as well as at some possible answers.

We start in ancient Greece, where Aristotle (384-322 BC) attempted to reconcile the mind and the brain, or at that moment in history, the soul and the body. Actually, he thought that the soul is “the nature” of the body, or a property of the body that is naturally occurring. Aristotle supposed that feelings (seeing, hearing, etc.) existed in the body, although he was not that certain about intellect. If that is true, then when the author was under general anesthesia, she was still there on the operating table because her body was there.

Fast forward many centuries later in France, René Descartes (1596-1650) claimed that the soul is separate from the body. However, he thought of the soul as both a feeling and a thinking thing. He called it res cogitance, or thinking substance, opposed to res extensa, which is the matter that the body is made of. He also postulated that animals lack res cogitance, and hence are identical with machines. There was much wrong with Descartes position (animals are machines?), but the thinking substance that is separate from the body is still the intuition many people agree with. If that is true, then while the body of the author was under general anesthesia, she was somewhere else.

What Descartes was calling thinking substance may sound like consciousness, but he did not say it explicitly; he only spoke about being conscious of something. John Locke (1632-1704), on the other hand, was the one who pinpointed the concept. He introduced the notion of "person", which is identical to consciousness. According to Locke, "person" encompasses everything of which we are immediately conscious, stretching both in the past and into the future. For him, memory is the glue that holds "person"; it is the reason why we wake up the same person every day after we were unconscious in our sleep. However, a "person" is not a soul, and Locke provided no obvious clues as to where "person" is located. If that is true, then the anesthetized author was there on the operating table, or maybe she was not.

Evidently, none of this is satisfying. The author herself endorses the embodied (and enactive) cognition. From this point of view, she first criticizes the Descartes arguments. In particular, she claims that although a thinking substance, according to Descartes, is non-spatial and non-extended, it is not true for at least one of the senses. While it may be true for vision: it feels like we see images in our head, not in our eyes; it cannot be true for proprioception (the ability to localize the body in space without looking at it). Proprioception is a feeling that is extended to the body, but yet it is a feeling. The author also points out that active movement shapes our thinking, and without a body, movement is not possible. 

For me, this argument sounds shaky. The author describes the case of an individual without proprioception but then concludes that proprioception is the reason why a thinking substance needs a body. Here, I couldn’t understand how that could be that an individual who lost proprioception due to a disease "has" no longer a thinking substance. He certainly can think. And what about paralyzed people? They cannot move, but I’m sure that they (at least, some of them) can think. So, I’m not convinced that proprioception helps with the Cartesian res cogitance.

Second, the author criticizes the Lockean "person". She argues against the idea that memory is the glue for holding the "person" together while consciousness is interrupted. The argument against is based on cases of people who lost their memory. Although it is all very sad and devastating stories, their relatives actually claim that they are still the same person. The author concludes that the memories do not play a role that Locke suggested.

I cannot agree. While those people described most often have lost their hippocampi due to infection or operation (and the hippocampus is an important structure for memory formation), they still have the rest of the brain, where other memories are stored. Some memories do not rely on the hippocampus, but those memories shape an individual just as much as autobiographical memories. Therefore, if some of the memories were left intact, I cannot accept refuting memory as the criterion for being a "person" based on cases of people who lost their memory.

Lastly, the author advocates for her opinion, which is that a "person" is identical with a human organism. As an organism moves in space by itself, it develops a first-person perspective by default. However, there is no point in the evolutionary timeline when the advanced organisms, such as humans, became a distinct type of creature—a "person". The author rejects the metaphysical matter of the term "person", and claims that it is rather a social construct. It is because we are treated as persons by other people that we are persons. So a "person" is a moral or political category, but not an entirely new entity.

I admit that I was lost in terminology and hence could not follow the argument. What is the difference between consciousness, person, soul, identity, and self? Somewhere, the author mentions that only some animals can be treated as a "person". However, I’m inclined to believe that animals have consciousness. So if a "person" is conscious but not every conscious being is a "person", of course, "person" is a social construct and has nothing to do with metaphysical underpinnings. Maybe I misunderstood, but also it seems it is not what Locke intended a "person" to stand for. Maybe I should read Locke to clarify.

Overall, the book gives something to think of. However, I don't know if I would have read it had I known it was about embodied and enactive cognition. It would be nice if each author would approximately label their work in terms of philosophical stance. I can certainly do it with my blog. I am Alina, a brain scientist, but I disagree with physicalists when it comes to consciousness. I gravitate towards property dualism. Let's see if it would change over time.

Favorite quote: “The animal that moves in its environment and uses dead reckoning to find its hidden food store or its nest again, the mouse that doesn't get stuck in its mouse hole, the zebra that uses its own shadow to protect its young from the sun—they all have a first-person perspective, and they are all aware of themselves in their environment.“

December, 2024